The Liberal Horizon of Marx’s Thought
It is well known that Karl Marx’s thought originated in a critique of Hegel. Marx’s reversal of Hegel has generally been understood as an inversion intended to place Hegel “on his feet” (as Marx put it). But, at least in the dominant Marxist approaches, the relation between Hegel and Marx has constantly been reduced to a simple opposition between idealism and materialism. It is of course not false to think of the relationship as an inversion. But the full meaning of this inversion only comes into view when one places it in the context of Hegel’s relation to British political economy. In such a framework, Marx’s Aufhebung of Hegel has to be understood as a return to liberalism. Marx brings Adam Smith to bear on Hegel. His whole reading of The Philosophy of Right testifies to this liberal critique of Hegel’s thought. If he does not explicitly present it in this manner, it is only because he treats Smith and Hegel as if they were unrelated. He reads Hegel as a pure philosopher and Smith as a pure economist. Nevertheless, it is significant that in his Contribution to the Critique of the “Philosophy of Right,” Marx concentrates only on Hegel’s chapters on the state, as if this finale of Hegelian political philosophy were not the product of a reflection on civil society. In the same way, Marx is interested only in The Wealth of Nations, and visibly shows little interest in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.1 He thereby masks both the philosophical origins of political economy in Smith and the economic origins of philosophy in Hegel. One can defend him only by noting that some of Hegel’s more fundamental texts (like the Jena Realphilosophie of 1803), in which his engagement with British political economy is clearer, were not yet known in Marx’s time.
If Marx criticizes Adam Smith, it is only on economic matters. One is almost tempted to say that his critique is simply “technical,” as the lengthy arguments of Theories of Surplus Value suggest. It is possible, then, for him to “go beyond” Smith economically, thanks notably to the invention of the concept of surplus value, all the while remaining implicitly on the ground of the same political theory. This association becomes even clearer as soon as one compares his critique of Hegel with the theories of William Godwin, for example, whose chief achievement was to transpose and continue Smith’s philosophy in the political realm.2 Marx’s entire project is in fact shot through with two essential political themes that are equally central to what I have called utopian liberalism: the extinction of politics and the critique of the rights of man. For this reason, Marx’s thought takes on a new meaning when he is placed in this perspective.
The basic critique that Marx addresses to Hegel is to have theorized the distinction between civil society and the state and to have been able to overcome it only through a truly “formalistic state.” For Marx, the division between civil society and the state, which is to be found in the distinction between citizen and bourgeois (i.e., man, in Hegel’s problematic), is the expression of a broken society. For the state represents only an abstract and exterior universal, because it has to be separate from the community. It is thus an illusion and a contradiction, Marx says, to think of realizing the unity of society in political life. Only civil society can be the locus of this unity. He writes, in this sense, in The Holy Family: “Interest … hold[s] the members of bourgeois society together; civil, not political life is their real tie…. Only political superstition still imagines today that civil life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality, on the contrary, the state is held together by civil life” (CW, 4:120).3 All of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” is founded on a similar rehabilitation of civil society against the state. And if Marx offers a radical criticism of bourgeois society, it is insofar as it is not a genuinely realized civil society, as we will soon see.
It is in this sense that he stands Hegel on his feet: in rejoining the liberal vision of the self-sufficiency of civil society. All of Marx’s political philosophy is grounded in this representation. Like Godwin, he conceives of democracy, in his Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” as a social state and not as a form of political government. “In true democracy, the political state is annihilated” (MER, 21). It starts from man in order to view the state as man objectivized rather than, as in Hegel’s thought, starting from the state in order to view man as the state subjectivized. For Marx, real democracy is nothing other than “the actual element which gives to itself its rational form in the state organism as a whole” (CW, 3:116). It is conflated with the natural movement of a true civil society. That is why “the abolition of the bureaucracy is only possible by the general interest actually … becoming the particular interest” (MER, 25). In his eyes, politics can involve alienation and subordination only when it is understood as a separation. In this regard, he does not fear showing a certain admiration for the Middle Ages in which “property, trade, society, and man are political” and “every private sphere has a political character or is a political sphere too” (MER, 22). “When the structure of civil society was still political and the political state was civil society, this separation, this doubling of the significance of the estates, was not present. They did not signify one thing in civil society and something else in the political world. They acquired no significance in the political world but signified themselves” (CW, 3:82). It is wholly logical, then, that he could define the Middle Ages as “the democracy of unfreedom” (MER, 22). True democracy is nothing other for Marx than the reabsorption of the political into the social, and the realization of a society immediate to itself.
It is from this perspective that one must understand Marx’s critique of Hegel’s conception of a constitution as a “system of mediation.” Representative democracy in his eyes, whether it is social states or undifferentiated and equal citizens that are represented, is a contradiction in terms. The representation of civil society is its separation or division. In his assumption that the common interest cannot be represented, he returns to Rousseau, for whom the common will cannot be represented. On this point his critique of Hegel is practically a reprise of Smith: “The transition of the particular interest into the general is likewise not a conscious law of the state, but is mediated by accident, proceeds against consciousness, and Hegel wants everywhere in the state the realization of free will!” (CW, 3: 56). It turns out to be the theory of the invisible hand and the natural harmony of interests that serves as the instrument of his criticism of the Hegelian theory of the realization of the universal will in the state. But if democracy as a form of representative government is unacceptable, it could nonetheless lead to real democracy through a process of the universalization of elections. Universal suffrage, once liberated from all the restrictions in which it is imprisoned, anticipates from the very interior of the political sphere as a separate domain the importance of that sphere’s dissolution: it points to the coincidence of civil and political society. “In this situation, the significance of the legislative power as representative power completely disappears. The legislative power is representation here in the sense in which every function is representative…. He is here representative not because of something else which represents but because of what he is and does” (CW, 3: 119).
At the limit, then, universal suffrage points toward the suppression of politics; it is identified with the market. The text is remarkably illuminating. It shows in a limpid way the liberal horizon of Marx’s thinking that sees in the realization of market society the figure of real democracy. To say that everyone is my representative to the extent that his function fulfills a social need is in effect to make the distribution of social tasks the sufficient foundation of the social bond: it is to understand the market as the principle of social organization. It is in this sense that one can understand Marx’s reversal of Hegel as a return to Smith: it is the negation of Hegel’s negation of Smith.
In this perspective, Marx’s goal is to theorize the withering away of politics. The question of the withering of the state is, in fact, only secondary in his view, and is simply a consequence. But he does not confuse the question of politics with that of government. He wholly believes, on the contrary, that the withering away of the state, the expression of social division (which for him means class division), allows governmental functions to remain. But they are no longer really political functions, and are transformed into “simple administrative tasks.” One discovers in this optimism the liberal theme of political simplicity: politics becomes simple because its only purpose is administration, and is no longer, in this sense, really political. It is this fact that allows one to understand that the withering away of the state in Marx’s thought, as only the form that a deeper extinction the political takes, is not contradicted by the survival of simple functions of social administration.
At the same time, the modern state is criticized as a political form expressing the division of society into classes (this is the theme of the extinction of the political) and as a complicated bureaucratic apparatus (this is the theme of political simplicity). These two themes are only superficially joined together by Marx, who offers a rather fragile connection between the development of bureaucratic parasitism and the bourgeoisie’s interest in occupying well-paid administrative posts.4 But beyond this question of the withering away of the state, it seems to me essential to emphasize that Marx does not simply denounce the class-based state and the bureaucratic state, for it is equally the state as rule of law that he puts in his sights. Like Godwin and most of the utilitarians of the end of the eighteenth century, Marx in fact criticizes the very concept of the rights of man.
For Marx, to speak of the rights of man is to collude in the renunciation of the universal. In his eyes, the whole theme of the rights of man comes down in the end to a repetition and consolidation of the separation of state and civil society and the mutilation of man and citizen. He regards the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1791 as the fulfilled expression of this separation, which he analyzes at length in his 1843 response to Bruno Bauer’s On the Jewish Question. The rights of man add up to the attempt to pose the liberty of each person without harming anyone else; in this sense, “liberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man. It is the right of such separation. The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself” (MER, 42). They are thus simply the complement of political abstraction. To defend the rights of man is therefore nothing more than defending “emancipated slavery” (CW, 4:122). It confuses the emancipation of humanity with their transformation into bourgeois, since bourgeois society is precisely the expression of the division between worker and citizen; it is to make the reduction of civil society to bourgeois civil society more palatable, a reduction that requires the corollary of the creation of a separate political society.
In contrast, in a true civil society (we will see in a moment what Marx understands in this regard), “individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, … has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power” (MER, 46). That is why he can say in The Holy Family that the modern state and bourgeois society are what the rights of man imply. The rights of man are to modern society what slavery was to the ancient world. The struggle for the rights of man is thus an illusory one. “None of the supposed rights of man,” he writes in On the Jewish Question, “go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of bourgeois society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice” (MER, 43). One recognizes in these lines an approach still quite close to Godwin’s, with the difference that unlike Godwin (who is ambiguous on the point), Marx refuses to take bourgeois society as a true figure of civil society. In his Contribution to the Critique of the Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” however, Marx uses terms quite close to Godwin’s when he makes the principle of a government of reason the condition of the true abolition of the sphere of law. “The will of a people can no more escape the laws of reason than can the will of an individual…. The legislature does not make the law, it only discovers and formulates it”(CW, 3: 58, emphasis added). The extinction of the political and the withering away of law are thus as logically entailed in Marx as they were in Godwin.
The classic Marxist distinction between formal rights and real rights has to be understood in this way. It is not a matter of opposing true and complete rights to limited and contradictory ones, rights for all men to rights that are useful principally to the bourgeoisie (freedom of enterprise for instance). Marx shows, on the contrary, that one cannot select among rights. The demand for “real” rights actually means the suppression of the rights of man tout court. True emancipation is inseparable from the extinction of law. This conception is not simply that of “the young Marx,” since it is to be found throughout his works. His Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) is especially significant in this regard. Marx shows there at length that law, which only exists among equals, is bourgeois law in its very principle. It is commercial society, governed by the system of exchange value, that is in reality “the system of equality and freedom” (CW, 28: 180), since exchange always poses value against value.5 In this context, the law of equals actually means unequal reward for unequal labor. Marx goes into detail on this point so that he can show German socialists that their demand for an “equal share of the product,” far from going beyond the bourgeois logic, is wholly enmeshed in it. He does not disagree that this step is necessary in a period of transition, since from capitalism’s perfection will necessarily follow socialism’s rise; but he concedes this point only on condition that everyone is clear that the struggle for equality is a bourgeois campaign. For Marx, of course, it is necessary to go beyond and surpass this cramped bourgeois horizon in a later communist phase of history, an event that will realize the genuinely new principle “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.”
It is on the basis of this theory of the extinction of the political and the withering away of law that the whole of Marxist philosophy is erected. It is in this sense that politicized liberalism of Godwin’s type amounts to its unsurpassable horizon. It is hardly possible, if this view is correct, to make distinctions among Marx’s works. For it is in all of them that one finds this philosophy, which is “strategically introduced” simply depending on whether the texts are devoted to pure theory or practical intervention. But in all cases, even if he develops arguments that appear contradictory, Marx remains faithful to this liberal foundation. When he substitutes the practical necessity of the proletariat’s seizure of political power for the theory of society’s “real movement” his objective remains the same: that of the withering away of the political sphere. At best he simply places a moment of reinforcement of the political (with the dictatorship of the proletariat and the ratification of the state) before the final moment of the withering away of the political. No wonder his epigones, Lenin first of all, erected the dialectic, reduced to the possibility of affirming contradictory things, into the great principle justifying all of their shifts in tactics!
If one had to locate a break in Marx’s thought, it is not between the works of his youth and those of his so-called maturity, but rather within those of his youth.6 The sole and fundamental break in Marx’s thought can therefore only be found at the very beginning of the 1840s. For it is in this period that Marx passed from a conception of democracy founded on the rights of man to a conception of the extinction of the political. It was between his 1842 article on “Lumber Theft,” in which he demands an enlargement of rights for the poor,7 and his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” that the rupture took place, if there is a need to posit one at all.
Marx’s Individualism
All of modern philosophy can be understood as a philosophy of the subject. It came about through contrast to the traditional organic conception of society that understood it as a whole of which each individual counted as a part without autonomy. To this extent the distinction between holism and individualism captures quite well the distinction between traditional and modern societies, as the latter progressively distinguished themselves beginning in the seventeenth century. What is the relation of Marx to this distinction? The response to this question is decisive because it provides the key for the analysis of Marx’s relation to modernity, at least if one accepts, as a first approximation, the pertinence of the distinction between holism and individualism. In the conventional wisdom, most Marxists and anti-Marxists are agreed, probably without difficulty, that Marx is no individualist, certainly not in the common meaning of the term, that his thought is on the contrary directed at the object of society as a whole or the collective as the point of analysis. I agree with Louis Dumont and Michel Henry that such a view is a complete mistake.8
All of Marx’s philosophy can in fact be understood as an attempt to deepen modern individualism. His critique of capitalism and bourgeois society takes on all of its meaning only when placed in this perspective. He shows in Capital, in fact at length, how capitalism’s specificity is in making society, considered globally and abstractly, progress even as it makes men regress individually. “Indeed,” he writes, “it is only by dint of the most extravagant waste of individual development that the development of the human race is at all safeguarded and advanced” (CW, 37: 92). Capital swells with examples illustrating this contradiction; Marx never stops gathering precise references to relations and citing reports on the workers’ condition that illustrate the contrast between the overall wealth of society and the penury of the majority of those who constitute it. Michel Henry has justly written, accordingly, that Capital is the memorial and martyrology of the individuals of his time. The concept of the class struggle itself has no meaning except in the framework of an individualist representation of society. In a traditional society, in contrast, it would have no meaning. Social differences are understood in that case as part of a globally organic representation, one impossible to overturn, of social orders that are distinct but complementary; each individual can search for more just treatment, but never dream of emancipating himself from the place to which he is assigned. The class struggle, however, implies the possibility of a disruption of assigned places, and presupposes the possibility of classlessness, an undifferentiated and fluid society. The class struggle is unthinkable outside of the representation of society as a market.
Nevertheless, Marx does not accept the concept of the individual as it appears in eighteenth-century philosophy. Just as he repudiates the Hegelian idea of a universal will, he devotes long pages to the critique of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, which exalts the role of the individual will. Marx’s individualism occurs as part of a critical movement in which one can distinguish three stages.
1. In a first stage, Marx denounces the fiction of the isolated individual on which a large number of social contract theories were grounded, theories according to which (as in Rousseau’s thought) naturally independent individuals freely decide to join together to form a society. On this point, he wholly parallels Hume’s analyses or the histories of the Scottish school, which upended existing conceptions of the institution of society in showing that it was need rather than an abstract desire for society that brought men together. Marx shows at length in The Holy Family that this atomistic representation of man is nonsense. It is worth citing him at length:
The egoistic individual in civil society may in his non-sensuous imagination and lifeless abstraction inflate himself into an atom, i.e. into an unrelated, self-sufficient, wantless, absolutely full, blessed being. Unblessed sensuous reality does not bother about his imagination, each of his senses compels him to believe in the existence of the world and of individuals outside him…. Every activity and property of his being, every one of his vital urges, becomes a need, a necessity, which his self-seeking transforms into seeing for other things and human beings outside him. (CW, 4:120)
It is thus the economic logic of interest, rather than the state, that creates the social bond. That is why “they are atoms only in imagination in the heaven of their fancy” (CW, 4:121).
2. In a second stage, Marx shows how this representation of the individual is simply a historical product of specific circumstances. “This individual [is] the product on the one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the 16th century” (Grundrisse, in MER, 222). The isolated individual, Homo economicus, free of any determination, has never existed from Marx’s point of view, and “only in the eighteenth century, in bourgeois society, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity” (MER, 223). For Marx, it has always been a matter “from the beginning of individuals producing in society.” The conception of the individual as it arises in the eighteenth century is thus simply a historical representation; it is simply an ideology that makes appear as an eternal truth what is in fact the product of a specific mode of social existence.
Marx’s argument on this point is, however, not completely coherent. If this representation of the individual appears only in the eighteenth century, with bourgeois society, how then to explain that the fundamentals of the representation of the individual at the basis of all social contract theory have existed since the end of the sixteenth century? To resolve this contradiction, Marx is logically constrained to answer that they are “anticipations of bourgeois society” (MER, 11). But he thereby obscures the process of emancipation of politics from religion (which began in the thirteenth century) and the process of the autonomization of the economy from politics (effectively achieved in the eighteenth century). Capitalism, bourgeois society, and modern society are all the same thing for him. While the “Robinsonades” were only the effect in the economic realm of the modern political representation of the individual, Marx implicitly considers them to be the foundation of this representation.9 But there are no Robinsonades in Smith. When he speaks of the isolated fisherman and hunter, it is only with an illustrative goal, and these abstractions are constructed for a pedagogical end, to facilitate the reader’s understanding of certain arguments. It is a methodological shorthand, and not a philosophical position. For Smith, in fact, it is exchange that comes first, and it is thanks to it that one must understand the origins of the division of labor. Not the reverse. Without exchange, fishermen would have to do their own hunting.
In spite of these contradictions, it is still possible to understand the sense of Marx’s critique: it is not the notion of the individual in itself that he rejects, but only the abstraction of Homo economicus as it developed in the eighteenth century. In fact, he denounces this abstraction only in order to give back to the individual its complete meaning. The paradox of bourgeois society resides in the fact that the recognition of the individual occurs in the very movement that produces his alienation. It is the category of interest, then, that Marx most wants to challenge.
3. In a third stage, Marx therefore proceeds to a radical critique of the concept of interest on which the bourgeois representation of the individual is based. For him, interest is simply the result of a separation between the individual and life: “Under the guise of interest the reflecting bourgeois always inserts a third thing between himself and his mode of action” (The German Ideology, CW, 5: 213). It is a destructive mediation, and erects the individual only at the price of making him a stranger to himself. The category of interest, in fact, leads to the reduction of the diversity of needs and aspirations. As he will argue at length in Capital and in the Grundrisse, the individual’s work is condemned to take on “the abstract form of generality,” possible to apprehend only through reference to a general equivalent. Bourgeois society thus amounts to an obstacle to the universality of needs, in making them all homogenous and equivalent. Wealth is hence understood in a limited way if it is understood only in these terms: this is the whole meaning of the distinction Marx draws between use and exchange value. In reducing the individual to his economic interests, social activity is “petrified,” transformed into an objective power that then dominates individuals and over which they have no control. Property itself reinforces this alienation. Far from enlarging the existence of the individual, it only accentuates his interior division: it forces everyone to be bourgeois, as individuals whose existence is restricted to the sphere of interests alone (cf. The German Ideology, CW, 5: 228–32). That is why the sole revolutionary objective can be to abolish rather than enlarge property.
The critique of interest therefore amounts to a critique of commercial society in which relations of individuals are fixed in things. Social life is reduced to “relations of exchange become the basis of all other relations,” relations between persons presenting themselves in inverted form as a social relationship between things. All of these elements of Marx’s analysis are sufficiently well known and are unnecessary to review at length. It is useful to emphasize, however, that Marx did not consider it possible to surpass this state of things, thanks to a generalization of the concept of interest. The point is not, he thinks, to substitute common for private interest. Agnes Heller has helpfully shown that the concept of class interest is not found in Marx’s thought.10 The general interest cannot be simply the sum of egoistic interests. To rely on the category of interest, even that of general or class interest, is necessarily for Marx to remain inside the capitalist world. The notion of interest therefore has to be suppressed, rather than enlarged, so that it is no longer the basis of individual or social action.
Marx’s project, all things considered, is very clearly devoted to the enlargement and transcendence of the traditional representation of the individual. He turns out to be the theorist of a kind of integral individualism, founded on the search for a development of the ensemble of potentialities and possibilities that each individual richly possesses. But he does not understand these potentials as having an independent existence, for society in his view is the condition of individuality: man is “not merely a gregarious animal, but one that can individuate itself only in the midst of society” (Grundrisse, in MER, 223). It is a conception that is, in the end, quite close to Adam Smith’s, since for the latter it is the propensity to exchange that grounds the division of labor and hence the ability to exist at once as a singular being and as one indispensable to others. Marx’s conception is absolutely not essentialist; it is relational: “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations” (Theses on Feuerbach, MER, 145).
The full realization of the individual requires a society with fully realized and transparent interaction. Society has to involve pure commerce between individuals without the intermediation of merchandise. It is worth dwelling on this point. For it is significant that Marx often uses the words Verkehr and Verkehrs-form [exchange and form of exchange] in order to describe social relations. These terms have in German a very clear commercial meaning. It is striking that Marx used them, as if he were himself wholly immersed in the commercial representation of society, as if commerce were the archetype of all communication (one should recall the double meaning—economic and social—of the word commerce since the eighteenth century).11 His perspective is in the end that of the realization of a genuine civil society, a menschliche Gesellschaft that will no longer be simply a bürgerliche Gesellschaft.12 Bourgeois society is simply a caricature, a travesty of civil society understood as pure commerce among men. It is in communism that man will realize himself individually and socially at once; communism is in fact nothing other than “the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, MER, 84), and the condition of “the free development and movement of individuals” (The German Ideology, MER, 198).
The Extinction of the Economy
If communism is to surpass bourgeois society, the mediation of interest in the social relationships on which it is based must be suppressed. Only on this condition can the relation between men be transformed into pure commerce. In this sense communism implies the extinction of the economy. The point is often neglected in the analysis of Marx’s thought. But it is essential, for it is one of the keystones of his whole system. Marx does not hope simply to control or reorient the economy, so that it will fulfill needs and no longer simply allow profit. His philosophical analysis is far more radical: he rejects the very principle of market exchange. Indeed, it is the economic sphere as such that to his mind is the source of the alienation of individuals. He explicitly assimilates capitalism to market society and, even further, to the economy tout court.13
The ensemble of Marx’s work is incomprehensible absent this assimilation, which constitutes the logical connection that unites his philosophy with his critique of bourgeois economy. This is the reason that communism is supposed to be equivalent to a society of abundance. It is only in such a society that the economy is abolished, because there is no more scarcity. If not, he writes in The German Ideology, “want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced” (MER, 161). In Capital, he returns several times to this central thread: it is only beyond production that the spread of human riches will begin. The world of complete wealth radically contrasts with the world of limited wealth (the economy). This belief is fundamental for Marx and is there as of his first writings. It is at once the product of his analysis of alienation, which remains imprisoned in the liberal representation of the economy, and the result of his fascination for capitalism. It is worth dwelling on these two points in turn.
1. As of the moment that he defines alienation as separation, Marx is led to criticize all forms of the separation of the individual from himself. This is the meaning of the critique of the political insofar as it is based on the distinction between man and citizen. It was only logical that Marx should have been led to restate this critique on economic terrain, too. The divorce between man and producer can be surmounted thanks only to a radical critique of political economy, for the very fact that it is a separate and autonomous branch of knowledge, a separation that is only a reflection in the realm of theory of what really happens in society (as the Marxist theory of ideology would dictate). Communism is at once the extinction of politics and of the economy. It is only on condition of this double extinction that “universal relations” among the human race can be established. The divorce between man and producer, which is given in the contradiction of the present historical stage between productive forces and social relations, can be surpassed only if the productive forces become pure praxis, wholly identifiable with human activity in its wealth and diversity. Productive forces and social relations would overlap exactly: “Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life…. The transformation of labor into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the earlier limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such” (German Ideology, MER, 192).
The suppression of separation as alienation takes place through an interior universalization of society by each individual; the activity of each individual takes on a universal bearing, and there is no more “separate sphere of activity.” It is “possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (German Ideology, MER, 160). In such conditions exchange becomes simply free; it is no longer based on necessity and dependence and is converted to gift and generosity. Individuals no longer exchange merchandise but share their realized individuality. In fact, human labor, which is the measure of value, is only an interchangeable value for the individual whose labor it is. It is only in the individual that qualitatively different acts of labor could be the same thing since they then become simply this individual himself. Market exchange, in contrast, is based on the acceptance of the separation of the individual with himself, since it necessarily transforms his own particularity into an abstract and commensurable generality (measured by labor hours).
It is for this reason, no doubt, that Marx speaks so often of the development of art in communist society: art represents the incommensurable par excellence, what can only be given or received but never exchanged in the strict sense of the term, i.e. reduced to an abstract and interchangeable quantity of work. To this extent, communism is indissociable from the extinction of the economy, and the word henceforth reverts to its original meaning of saving. The economy no longer exists as a sphere of separate activity, but becomes nothing but individual and collective action with a view toward saving up the product of work hours in order to expand free time. Economy changes its meaning, becoming the means of the development of individuality for whom the material conditions of life are now transparent: Economized time “can be considered as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself” (Grundrisse, in CW, 29: 97). Free time now becomes the true measure of wealth, in place of labor hours, since free time is not exchangeable.
For this reason, it seems absurd to speak of a communist political economy. Economics as the science of limited wealth simply disappears along with its object. In its economic action, society has no need now for anything other than simple methods for administering social production. It will suffice to know how to count in order to economize work. It is in fact a return to political arithmetic, though Marx would have said social arithmetic.14 Political simplicity and economic simplicity will suffice to govern communistic societies. Because they become immediately accessible to themselves, such societies have no need to generate knowledge about their own practices. Lenin in politics and Trotsky in economics had adopted this premise sufficiently to be surprised at the brutal resistance that the facts put up against this idyllic vision of a simple society!
Upon discovering this conception of the extinction of the economy, one might wonder if Marx’s relationship with his object of study—capitalism—is its source. For he ends up making classical political economy the theoretical apparatus exactly appropriate to the real nature of capitalist society. The manner in which he attacks Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy (1841) is particularly illuminating in this regard.15 List reproached the classical economists for having conceived of the human race as a great international and cosmopolitan community in which there might reign an integrated harmony of individual interest. He responded with a theory of national economy prizing productive forces and criticized the theory of exchange value. In effect, List targeted the representation in classical economics of international economic life, suggesting that it ignored the concrete impact of various political conflicts. Marx ferociously takes him to task on this very point. “It can never occur to him that the political economists have only given this social state of affairs a corresponding theoretical expression…. Nowhere does he criticize real society, but like a true German, he criticizes the theoretical expression of this society and reproaches it for expressing the real thing and not an imaginary notion of the real thing” (Critique of National Economy, CW, 4: 276–77). Marx is the prisoner of his own theory of ideology. In taking the theoretical presentation of political economy as if it were the truth of the capitalist system, he excludes the possibility that it might be a false or inexact representation. He finishes, then, by mistaking this depiction for reality.
Marx’s critique of certain French socialists fits in the same context. He attacks them for having tried to show that socialism amounted to the realization of the bourgeois ideas of the French revolution. For Marx, such an attempt is vain, involving as it did “the superfluous task of changing the ideal expression itself back into reality, whereas it is in fact merely the photographic image of this reality” (CW, 28:180). He believes, in contrast, that the system of exchange value, i.e., capitalism, is “the system of equality and freedom” (CW, 28:180). Following this critique, Marx proceeds to reproach the American economist Henry Carey for calling on the state to reestablish the harmony of economic interest; for Marx, after all, it is the intervention of the state in the economy from the outside that is the cause of the disruption of “natural harmony” (CW, 28:7). Marx thus turns out to be a dogged partisan of the most hallowed liberal representations of society. He does not share them, of course, but he presupposes that they are accurate. And his whole theory and his critique of alienation incorporates the simplifications and the illusions of this starting point. His radical critique of bourgeois society is thus in large part a critique of bourgeois society’s liberal self-representation, which leads him to situate the conditions for the transcendence of this society in a highly abstract realm. The communist hope for the extinction of the economy thus can be understood in this sense as the effect of the incorporation of the illusions of economic liberalism into Marxism’s heart.
2. But Marx is not only a prisoner of his own general theory of ideology. He is simultaneously the captive of liberal representations of the economy and fascinated by the capitalism developing before his eyes. He is the witness, at once horrified and admiring, of the capitalist revolution transforming the face of the world. It seems to me that this aspect of Marx’s thought is not emphasized often enough, but it plays an essential function in pushing his analyses toward their radicalism. Marx considers the power of capitalism to be irresistible, and its further development is ineluctable. One could cite many pages of Capital or other writings that testify to this sentiment, one combining violent repulsion with ambiguous attraction. The brutality of his denunciation of the limitations of worker action is one sign, as if he sometimes felt that capitalism historically deserved its victory. He sees in such action ineffective skirmishes, entirely incapable of taming the redoubtable power of capital, even unintentionally reinforcing it. (His Value, Price, and Profit [1865] is an example.) Capital cannot be surpassed except through and on condition of its absolute triumph: this profound conviction is everywhere evident in Marx’s thought.
He can only regard communism, therefore, as the conclusion of the historical process of which capitalism is the motor: the impoverishment of the mass of humanity will progress in tandem with a development of productive forces permitting complete abundance. Marx finally and explicitly sees the possibility of the abolition of capitalism as depending on its complete economic success. Thanks to this condition, he can contemplate the achievement of communism and the simultaneous extinction of the economy as a sphere of activity. If capitalism fails to play its historical role, if it does not bring humanity to the gates of abundance, nothing will. Capitalism will become impossible. Marx is wholly consistent on this point. Since the economy is determining, it can only be either all or nothing. It is impossible, in his perspective, to subordinate the economy to politics, as Hegel suggested (in any case, such subordination would simply replace one form of alienation by another); but it is also impossible to reduce the importance of economics in society, as Godwin recommended. In summary, Marx’s critique of alienation and his fascination before capitalism’s power converge to encourage him to think of communism as the extinction of the economy.
From the Natural Harmony of Interests to the Natural Harmony of Men
The movement of Marx’s thought goes through two stages. First, he returns to the liberal economic representation of society in order to criticize politics as a useless and alienating mediation. This representation is in his eyes, in fact, the exact translation of the reality of bourgeois society. Second, he offers a philosophical critique of bourgeois society as such, and not simply its representation, through denouncing the alienation that the mediation of economic interest engenders. He follows through logically to see communism as the double extinction of politics and the economy, i.e., as a society that is no longer separated and in which no exterior mediation orders the relations among men. It turns out that bourgeois society surpasses political mediation by itself and communism, finally achieving abundance, allows for the suppression of economic mediation.
As a result, Marx defends a conception of the natural harmony of men that transcends the bourgeois limits of the natural harmony of interests. The latter is in effect a representation that corresponds only to a historically determined and temporary reality, even if it represented progress in its time. Marx says of utilitarianism, for example, that it is “a historically justified philosophical illusion” (German Ideology, CW, 5: 410). Marx in the end followed a path that is exactly the opposite of the one followed by Smith. The great turning-point of The Theory of Moral Sentiments consisted in its passage from harmony through sympathy—which Smith came to consider precarious—to harmony through interests. For Smith, interest or utility amounts to a guarantee of harmony, the concrete terrain on which the social bond can continue to be forged even if no reciprocal benevolence among men is assumed. In his critique of bourgeois society and the mediation of interest, Marx does nothing else than return to the classical theories of the eighteenth century of sympathy and the natural harmony of men. He does not surpass Smith except at the price of a veritable regression; this regression in a sense compounds the regression operated by Smith and modernity as a whole in relation to Machiavelli’s thought.16
This is why Marx feels comfortable with all of the “materialists” of the eighteenth century, not hesitating to describe Bernard Mandeville as “typical of the socialist tendencies of materialism” (The Holy Family, in CW, 4:131). This “materialism” is for Marx the true naturalism. And one should recall that, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, he defined communism precisely as realized naturalism. For Marx, it is the fault of bourgeois society that the individual is corrupted, for having reduced him to living in society only through the manifestation of his economic interest. In another context than bourgeois society, however, the arithmetic of the passions could produce spontaneous harmony, and would no longer need the crutch of interest in order to produce it. Marx considers himself, accordingly, Helvétius’s heir. He implicitly thinks of the natural functioning of society in the terms Helvétius believed society worked in general.17 Communism thus becomes the place in which the most classic philosophy of the eighteenth century is realized. He returns even to La Rochefoucauld. Marx in fact lays out this genealogy quite expressly in The Holy Family: “There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of the environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism” (CW, 4: 130). While Smith conceived of the economy as the realization of the philosophy of the eighteenth century, Marx believed this realization would take place through the economy’s suppression, which is to say he thinks of it in itself.
How to make sense of what one is forced to call a regression? It seems to me that it had two sorts of causes. Marx first of all began from a very simplified vision of the movement of modernity. He does not distinguish the moment of the emancipation of politics from religion from the movement of the emancipation of the economic in relation to the political. But it is clear that the birth of political economy is unintelligible unless one places it back in this double movement of modernity confronted by the wholesale redefinition of the institution and regulation of the social. For Marx, the question of emancipation from religion amounts to modernity, all by itself. Communism is nothing other than integral atheism. It is religion that expresses most fundamentally all of man’s alienations. He writes, quite significantly, in Capital: “The religious reflex of the real world can … only then finally vanish, when the practical conditions of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow-men and to nature” (MER, 327). Society produces evil effect only to the extent that it remains alienated, religion being the symbol of alienation understood as separation. Marx thus fully consummates the modern illusion of social transparency, Smith’s liberalism having in some sense compensated for his political idealism thanks to a certain economic cynicism. It is Marx’s critique of religion that masks from him the reality of division, fundamental and internal to man and society; it allowed him to mistake this division as purely historical and exterior. He remained, on this point too, the prisoner of his theory of ideology. Since, a priori, religion can be suppressed and surpassed, the division and alienation of man for which religion stands can be too. His whole “utopia” depends logically on this hypothesis of the possibility of transcending religion; he never poses the question of whether, in his terms, religion expresses a genuine distress that is man’s ontological fate. He only conceives it as historical and transitory.
It is thanks to this last point, however, that one could analyze the second cause of what I have called Marx’s regression. It is his conception of history that turns out to be problematic: he over- and underestimates the significance of history at once. He overestimates it insofar as it seems to him the forum in which the true nature of man can be idealized, in allowing social division to be cast as a historical product. History is then overloaded with the task of explaining everything lacking in transparency in human life, in individual man and in the relations among men. But in parallel, Marx is logically constrained to end history with the appearance of communism since it is the agent that brings transparency about. History thus exists only as the history of alienation: and it thus has to pass, itself, into history.
But there is a last conundrum, a central one in Marx’s thought: that of the relation between the future communist society understood as achieved transparency—an association of realized freedom among men—and earlier historical forms of communal life. I have already noted that Marx often appealed to the latter in order to criticize bourgeois society, going so far as to depict the Middle Ages as “the democracy of unfreedom.” In Capital, he insists at length that in medieval society social relations appear as what they are, relations between persons, with the natural form of work existing in its particularity and not, as in commercial society, as an abstract generality. “Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded … on the immature development of man individually” (MER, 327). Does this mean that communism is simply the old social organisms plus the maturation and generalization of individuality?
Marx is, in fact, not far from this position. It is the reason he interested himself in the Russian peasant commune, in which he thought immediate association took place, and in the same spirit he could make admiring reference to the rustic and patriarchal industry of a family of peasants who provide for themselves. The famous drafts of his letter to Vera Zasulich are especially interesting from this point of view. He suggests that the peasant commune is the point of departure of Russian social regeneration, but that it can be preserved only through revolution, since it conflicts with the ambient capitalism of its day that will never stop eroding it otherwise: “To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed” (CW, 24:357). In fact there runs through Marx’s works a subterranean nostalgia for Gemeinschaft; and it is this term, actually, that he uses to describe communist society as a community both immediate and transparent to itself. In a significant passage, Marx vilifies Henry Sumner Maine, author of the famous Ancient Law (1861), for distinguishing between community and society and claiming that the transition from the status of the one to the contract of the other represented immense social progress. Marx sees in this distinction nothing more than an apology for capitalism (CW, 24:359).
As Louis Dumont has well shown in From Mandeville to Marx, communism looks to be the reappropriation of primitive or medieval communitarianism within the framework of the widespread generalization of the modern individual, liberated from the limitations even of bourgeois society. But this thesis begs a question. For how really to reconcile the principle of community and the principle of individuality which are contradictory by definition? Marx did not possess the theoretical materials to respond to this question, since his conception of capitalist development led him, going against the grain of his heartfelt nostalgia, to insist on the continuity of the development of society’s productive forces (capitalism germinating as of the development of cities and the renaissance of commerce). And it even led him to obscure the elements of cultural break in the origins of modernity in order to insist on this continuity even more. So once again it is a failure to understand the movement of modernity that turns out to be the culprit, and it led him not to grasp the nature of the contradiction he developed, longing for an unavailable communal past through a radicalized individualism in the future.
But it seems to me that one must go further. In defining communism as the immediate and transparent society, Marx ended up conceiving of a wholly abstract society, in which each individual is an aspect of universality, and society is structured only by a pure commerce among men. Communism, taking the revival of liberalism to its last consequences, ends up imagining the possibility of a social bond relying on nothing other than the “sweetness of sympathy,” in Smith’s expression, expelling all political or economic mediation from the relations among men.18 Marx perceived this difficulty and addressed it explicitly in the Grundrisse, as if he became conscious, if only for a moment, of the utopian character of the vision of a society without mediation. “Mediation has, of course, to take place,” he writes.
In the first case [i.e., commercial society (PR)], which starts from the independent production of individuals—however much these independent productions may be determined and modified post festum by their interrelations—the mediation takes place through the exchange of commodities, through exchange value, money, which are all expressions of one and the same relationship. In the second case [i.e., communist society (PR)], the presupposition itself is mediated; i.e., a communal production, community as the basis of production, is assumed. The labor of the individual is taken from the outset as social labor. (Grundrisse, CW, 28:108, first emphasis added)
The text is decisive. It is the presupposition of society as a totality that grounds the possibility of the social bond. Put differently, the abolition of political or economic mediation is redeemed by the identification of all individuals as part of one fused body. Communism as a purified market, as a society of pure commerce among men, fulfills the liberal utopia, if at the price of the contradiction of a total social organism. The partial alienations are replaced by a single and unique but global alienation: man is forced into a universality to be realized only through a power external to him, and even more difficult to identify since it presents itself as if it were nothing other than himself. Totalitarianism is therefore the last word of the utopia of social transparency.