If we could agree on what “Marxism” is—or was—then the task of evaluating its possible future in the post–cold war world would be relatively simple and noncontroversial. But there is no agreed definition of Marxism. There used to be something more or less official called Marxism-Leninism, and, as opposed to it, there was something called Western Marxism, which had its roots in the Hegelian and Weberian rereading of Marx that was initiated by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923), developed by the Frankfurt School’s program of critical theory, and thematized in Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). There was also a related debate that peaked in the 1960s concerning the priority of the orientations of the young and the mature Marx, the humanist philosopher as opposed to the historical-materialist political economist. Although other distinctions and debates within the family could be introduced—for example, Austro-Marxism with its stress on the nationality question or Gramsci and his concern with culture and hegemony—it is best to begin from a simple dichotomy: on the one hand, there is the reading of Marx that can be generally put under the notion of historical materialism, and, on the other, there is a more philosophical and dialectical interpretation. Since 1989 the first form of Marxism has been rendered obsolete by the demise of Communism; it wagered on history, and it lost its bet. But where does this leave the other variant of Marxism? Can it, or must it be able to, provide the historical orientation that began as the strength but was ultimately the weakness of the deterministic model offered by historical materialism?
Philosophical-dialectical Marxism can be characterized by two interconnected methodological assumptions. The first is the notion of immanent critique. Many commentators have noted that nearly everything Marx wrote, at all periods of his life, was titled or subtitled “a critique.” For example, Marx discovered the revolutionary potential of the proletariat in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Later, Capital did not propose a theory of socialism—that misreading may have been a factor in the ill-advised practice of those who came to power claiming to introduce socialism by applying categories used in Marx’s critique of capitalism to build what they hoped would be a different future1—instead, Capital presents a critique of capitalist political economy whose radical implications were drawn by means of an immanent critique showing the rich potential created but not realized within that mode of production. This idea of immanent critique leads to the second methodological assumption. I just referred to capitalism as a “mode of production.” That, however, is the language of historical materialism. It would be more true to the philosophical-dialectical Marx to speak of forms of social relations. That is why Capital does not begin with an analysis of the process of production but with an analysis of the commodity form and its metamorphoses. I will return to Capital later. For the moment, I want to stress Marx’s method. Social relations are interpreted as the expression of practical relations among human beings. Although they don’t do it as they please, notes Marx in The 18th Brumaire, men do make their own history. The potential that the immanent critique uncovers is not of merely theoretical interest; it has practical applications and makes possible social change. This, rather than a politics of will or a voluntarism that ignores material constraints, is the implication of Marx’s demand, in the famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, that philosophers not restrict themselves to contemplating the world but seek instead to change it.
I propose to address the question of the place of Marxism in the postcommunist world in three steps. First, I consider some of the temptations that have arisen in the West, where many creative left-oriented thinkers have attempted to find alternative variants of Marxism, all of them more or less adopting the orientation developed by Western Marxism that I have called here philosophical-dialectical. I title this first section “Replacing Marxism … with Marxism” because all these attempts fail to develop the kind of practical-historical orientation that was at least attempted by the now discredited historical-materialist kind of Marxism. The extreme implications of this approach come with Adorno’s negative dialectics and Marcuse’s existential Great Refusal in One-Dimensional Man.2 Second, I propose a reconstruction of Marx’s work that takes into account the problems addressed by historical materialism. I call this section “Realizing Marxism … as Philosophy.” The Marx who emerges from this second step in the argument is a fascinating philosopher, but he remains a philosopher who, however self-critical, is unable to go beyond the mode of immanent critique to invest his philosophy in the historical world in which we live. Third, I attempt to sketch briefly a New Political Manifesto, suggesting that the “specter” haunting Marx’s Europe—and our own—was not the proletarian revolution that would finally put an end to a history of class struggle but the advent of democracy. If this intuition is plausible, it will suggest a way to reread Marx so that his contribution can be made fruitful in the contemporary world. The basic insight of the philosophical Marx was seen correctly by Lukács: Marx replaced the Hegelian idea of Spirit with the material proletariat understood as the subject-object of history—as a product of historical development that, because it is a subject and capable of autonomous action, can become the author of its own history. What I call the political, or democratic, Marx is neither so ambitious nor so Hegelian. To put it perhaps paradoxically, the political Marx seeks to maintain the conditions that make possible the immanent critique and practical engagement that characterized the philosophical Marx sketched in the second part of this discussion. Pace Leo Strauss, democracy is the condition of possibility of philosophy.
REPLACING MARXISM… WITH MARXISM
Marxism in the postcommunist world could be thought of as a theory happily rescued from the weight of a failed experiment. Many Western leftists found themselves caught in contortions, attempting to put the blame on Stalin—often less for Stalinism and its totalitarian domestic misdeeds than for its abandonment of world revolution in favor of creating Socialism in One Country. That approach made it possible to remain an anticapitalist, to accept something like the historical vision of The Communist Manifesto (and perhaps even the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) while jettisoning the baggage of the determinist breakdown theory attributed to Capital. Happy tomorrows could still be hoped for, while the exploitation of today could be condemned not for what it actually is but from a broader theoretical and historical perspective. It is, after all, quite satisfying to couch one’s criticism in an all-encompassing theoretical system. From this point of view, one can predict that since capitalism, its crises, its inequalities, its exploitation and alienation remain with us, Marxism in the postcommunist world—at least in the West, which had no experience of what was euphemistically called really existing socialism—may find itself on a far more solid terrain than was the case in the years following if not the invasion of Hungary in 1956 at least those following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the Brezhnev years of stagnation.
But the attempt to claim that the “essence” of Marxism was betrayed by its “appearing form” (to use the Hegelian language of Marx) does not explain why, 150 years after The Communist Manifesto, the revolution Marx was waiting for has not appeared. The essence of an essence is to appear, and if appearance betrays the essence, perhaps one has misunderstood the nature of that essence. It is no doubt true that the cold war was not so much won by capitalism as it was lost by the existing form of socialism.3 Meanwhile, capitalist crises recur, inequality increases glaringly, the third world remains marginalized. Capitalism has few grounds for satisfaction. And it is easy to find passages, chapters, articles, and books from Marx and Marxists to explain the miseries of the present. But what does that prove? If I appeal, for example, to “Wage Labor and Capital,” while you turn to the “Anti-Dühring” and someone else invokes Lenin’s “Imperialism,” while her friend prefers Hilferding’s “Finance Capital,” what has been gained? We have each adverted to holy text, but none of this explains the dynamics of the present. Each of our claims remains static, structural, and in the last resort antipolitical because it leaves no room for active intervention and no justification for action. At best, this kind of interpretation gives subjective satisfaction, encouraging the belief that one is on the right side of history, which, as Fidel Castro famously said at his 1953 trial after a failed revolt, eventually will absolve us and forgive our trespasses. Despite those who interpreted Marx as predicting a breakdown of capitalism (via the “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” in volume 3 of Capital), Marx was concerned with the dynamics of capitalism as a new type of social relations. For The Communist Manifesto, all history, after all, is a history of class struggle.
Still, there will be those who will hold on to their Marx. The first among them will be (or will remain) the Trotskyists.4 Despite the greatness of Trotsky’s phenomenology of the Russian Revolution, he remained a structural dogmatist.5 In a memorable phrase, he asserted that when the artillery man misses his target, he doesn’t blame the laws of physics. But is Marxism a theory like those of the natural sciences? Was the basically good and justifiable revolution of 1917 deformed, isolated, and forced into a Stalinist Thermidor? Doesn’t Trotsky violate his own Marxist dogma when he blames the person of Stalin for the debacle of Soviet Marxism? Nonetheless, there is something comforting in the Trotskyist position, which will continue to find adherents after 1989 because it unites the reassuring claims of a structural account of capitalism with a criticism of the supposed Stalinist deformation of the promise of 1917.
The problem with attempts to save Marxism from the demise of “really existing socialism” is that they cannot reply to the objection from Karl Popper: that it is nonfalsifiable. It remains as a horizon, a framework or narrative that can internalize contradictions as simply stages in a presumably necessary historical development. This is the case even of Rosa Luxemburg, the spontaneist, who insisted that “only the working class can make the word flesh.” This most militant of activists was content to have refuted Eduard Bernstein when she showed that his reformist socialism contradicted the text of Marx. Rosa Luxemburg, the theorist of the Mass Strike, whose final article from the ruins of a failed revolution affirmed that “revolution is the only kind of war in which the final victory can be built only on a series of defeats,” could be perhaps even more than Trotsky the model of a post-1989 Marxist. Defeat in the class struggle was for her only a stage in the learning process that would necessarily lead to the final goal. How can she be proven wrong?6
The criticism of nonfalsifiability leads to another critique of Marxism, represented in the West by the often impressive textual accounts of Robert Tucker and many others: that it is a new religion. In the hands of a critical historian such as Jacob Talmon, this becomes the reproach that Marx belongs to a long millenarian tradition. At its best, this becomes a positive philosophical claim in Ernst Bloch’s Prinzip Hoffnung, a kind of wager that humanity cannot but constantly seek reconciliation with itself and with nature. It is not always clear what is Marxist in this honest and admirable utopian position. Marx, after all, claimed not to be a utopian (and his historical-materialist heirs took him literally). In the remarkable, and often neglected, third part of The Communist Manifesto, Marx tried to reconstruct the history of socialist utopias to show how they were logically and historically aufgehoben, united and made whole in his own position. If it is to be more than a pious wish, this kind of religious-utopian position—which, as such, will certainly remain present after 1989—has to show how the utopias that have come and gone over the 150 years since the Manifesto are part of a historical logic of the type that Marx presented in 1848. In this way, it would avoid the nonfalsifiability of the Luxemburgian “defeat as the basis of victory.” But then it becomes open to the reproach of being a totalizing historical metaphysics similar to the Young Hegelian theories whose overcoming—in The Holy Family and The German Ideology of 1845/6—led Marx to formulate his “science.”
In this case, however, the renewed Marxism has to refute the objections of Habermas: that it is economist and determinist in its orientation and neglects the other domains of human social interaction. Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) showed clearly that the materialist philosophy of history that expects social (and human) transformation to follow directly from the material-technical advances of capitalism is one-sided. It is guided by a type of cognitive interest that stresses technological progress and necessarily neglects the spheres of social interaction and human self-liberation. Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (1981) takes his argument beyond the model of the individual social actor to integrate the linguistic turn that points to the primacy of dialogical relations in the development of social rationality. But the upshot of Habermas’s theory is that the Marxian project is simply the completion of the project of the Enlightenment. Thus, for example, his first attempt to deal with soviet-type societies, in the wake of 1989, was entitled The Catch-up Revolution.7 Perhaps this saves the Marxist baby, but it subsumes it under a historical or idealist project that Marx explicitly claimed to overcome.
Marx’s advance over Enlightenment theories was his insistence on class struggle and his recognition (e.g., in his critique of Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy [1847]) that history advances through contradictions and by means of negations. Marx’s theory of the revolutionary proletariat was certainly the key to this theoretical insight. But today it is hard to recognize Marx’s proletariat in our new world order. The polarization of two classes has not occurred (and Marx seemed to have recognized this in the incomplete chapter “Classes” that concludes the third volume of Capital). Even before 1989 many in the West sought to reconstitute the proletariat by other means. In France, Serge Mallet and André Gorz talked about a “new working class,” while Italian theorists sought to reconstitute the “total worker” to whom the third volume of Capital refers somewhat vaguely. In the United States, attempts were made first to rediscover a “history of class struggle” that had been supposedly suppressed by the reigning ideological consensus among historians and social scientists. The idea was that if one could show that there had been constant struggles of workers against bosses, perhaps a defeated working class would gain self-confidence and undertake new struggles. Other Americans sought to broaden the notion of the proletariat, including in it blacks, minorities, women, homosexuals. When it became unclear how these strata (or status groups) could ally with one another, the turn to cultural studies was made: a cultural unity would replace the working class as the new proletariat.8 Somewhere, somehow, there needed to be an opposition, a negation to negate the negation. Alas, it remains to be discovered.
There are no doubt other strategies that could be invoked in the attempt to redeem Marxism by a better Marxism. So-called analytic philosophers have attempted to justify one or another aspect of the Marxian corpus, while the deconstructionists take a leaf from Jacques Derrida’s rehabilitation of the (hard to recognize) “specter” of Marx. Others continue to hope that the struggle against globalization will produce the new agent of revolution. What is lacking in all these approaches is serious consideration of the philosophical theory by which Marx was led to his practical insights. It is this philosophical project that permitted him to make the empirical and analytical discoveries that lost their critical thrust as they came to be part of the Marxist vulgate. Separated from the philosophical endeavor, these insights lose their immanent dynamic as well as their utopian horizon; they are reduced to mere criticism or to naive utopianism. The proletariat becomes merely labor-power, exploited by capitalists as the source of surplus-value; the philosophical critique becomes a positive statement to be studied for its own sake. Yet the philosophical Marx saw that this proletariat had achieved a certain measure of freedom (compared with the serf, for example); this liberty, however, is alienated and can become aware of itself only as economically exploited. If only the second part of this claim is stressed, the immanent historical dynamic of Marx’s theory is replaced by static complaints of victimization, and the practical result is self-righteous commiseration. In the end, this leads to the replacement of autonomous praxis by the conscious intervention of the political party, completing the cycle that began with the rejection of Leninism by Western Marxism. To avoid this (unhappy) conclusion, Marx’s philosophical project needs to be rethought.
REALIZING MARXISM … AS PHILOSOPHY
If Western Marxism seems to find itself driven to adopt political conclusions that clash with its original intentions, a consideration of Marx’s own attempt to overcome the immanent limits of philosophy reveals a similar paradox. Marx was essentially a philosopher; this was his strength but also explains his political weakness. His entire work can be seen as the attempt to realize the task proposed in a note to his doctoral dissertation, which his editors have titled “The Becoming Philosophical of the World as the Becoming Worldly of Philosophy.”9 Put simply—as it was for Marx at this point—the idea is that Hegel had elaborated a rational system that explained that the actual is rational and the rational is actual (as Hegel put it in the introduction to his Philosophy of Right) but that the actual German world of Marx’s time was miserable, chaotic, and impoverished. It was necessary to show two things: that philosophy had to occupy itself with the world in order to realize itself (to actualize itself, in Hegelian language) and that the world had to become philosophical, that is, rational, if this realization of philosophy were to occur. We can reconstruct briefly the steps in Marx’s evolution in terms of this two-sided problem (whose two sides, philosophy and the world, themselves turned out to be dual by the time of Marx’s “solution” to his dilemma in the economic critique in the Grundrisse).
There is first the critique of Bruno Bauer’s proposed solution to the “Jewish question.” Mere political emancipation does not suffice because, as seen in the contrast between the French and American Declarations of Rights and their reality, these rights become defenses of what has come since to be called possessive individualism. The reason for this inadequacy is that the societies that proclaimed these universal rights were still burdened by the legacy of feudalism; hence the universal rights in fact universalized a society based on inequality.10 There needed to be a change in the social relations in civil society. As a result, Marx’s “Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” after showing how philosophy had to become worldly—coining now well known phrases such as “the critique of the weapons becomes the weapon of critique”—went on to discover the proletariat as “the nothing that can become everything,” the “class that is not a class,” which is thus the material basis of the world’s becoming philosophical. (The proletariat is what Lukács and Western Marxism called the subject-object of history.) Two features of Marx’s account need to be stressed. He insists that the proletariat is an “artificial formation” that differs from simply the poor or the oppressed, implying again that his immanent critique is concerned with dynamics, not statics. And he adds that there needs be a “lightning of thought” that strikes in this “naive soil of the people” to awaken its emancipatory possibilities. The first of these points suggests to Marx the need to turn to political economy; the second refers to what was later called class consciousness, which Marx analyzed first under the Hegelian category of “alienation.”
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 can be seen as the development of these two insights. The first manuscript is Marx’s initial attempt at understanding political economy. He wants to show how this “artificial formation” (the proletariat) comes into being and acquires legitimacy. Alienated labor is shown to be the basis of private property, which is in its turn the source of social division. The account is supplemented by the third manuscript, which develops what Marx calls “the greatness of Hegel’s Phenomenology,” namely, its insight into the creative role of labor. It thus appears that it is the labor process that produces in the proletariat the capacity to realize its own destiny—the equivalent of the “lightning of thought.” The broader philosophical project is evident throughout the text, for example, in the discussions of “generic being” and in the insistence that “the science of nature becomes the science of man while the science of man becomes the science of nature.” All these famous aphorisms are variants on the theme of alienation and its philosophical overcoming that will make the world philosophical. But this philosophical project now leads Marx beyond the realm of philosophy; he now has to do philosophy by other means.
Marx was not satisfied with the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which remained unpublished. He and Engels then wrote The German Ideology (again unpublished). That massive tome develops, on the one hand, the philosophical-historical reasons that would explain the emergence and transcendence of capitalism. The problem with this theory, which is based on the primacy of material labor, is that the lightning of thought is replaced by a materialist assertion of historical necessity (which Marx would reaffirm in the preface to the 1859 Toward a Critique of Political Economy, a text that became canonical in the Leninist-Stalinist vulgate). On the other hand, The German Ideology contains other, more fruitful insights, for example, into the dialectic by which labor creates new needs that in turn create new types of labor on a progression that concretizes what Marx had called in 1844 “the greatness of Hegel’s Phenomenology.” But these insights disappear in the next canonical text: “Wage Labor and Capital” (1849), Marx’s first major economic analysis.
Before Marx could work out his own dogmatic philosophy of history, history intervened. Class Struggles in France (1850) attempts to explain the 1848 revolution and its failure. However remarkable some of Marx’s insights, what is striking is his attribution to the proletariat of a historical wisdom that prevents it—after the June days—from falsely intervening at the wrong historical moment. The proletariat remains present in the drama like the “specter” that Marx invoked at the outset of The Communist Manifesto. This is another case of Marx’s nonfalsifiable historical vision. He applied the insight from “On the Jewish Question” according to which a mere political revolution was insufficient in order to make sense of the unexpected revolution that broke out in 1848, but he could not predict what would become the subject for analysis in his next major essay: the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte in 1851, which put a final end to the hopes awakened in 1848. If Class Struggles in France denounced the illusion of politics, The 18th Brumaire (1852) was an account of the politics of illusion. Beneath the memorable rhetoric encapsulated in such phrases as “the first time is tragedy, the second time is farce” and “men make their history but they do not make it as they please” lay Marx’s assumption of a historical necessity that would impose itself come what may. The statue of Napoleon would fall with the next economic crisis, concluded Marx optimistically. The politics of illusion and the illusion of politics would be dissipated by sober reality of the kind Marx had depicted in The Communist Manifesto as dissolving “all that is holy” and leaving the proletariat at a (Hegelian) hic rhodus, hic salta that would finally make the world philosophical as philosophy become worldly.
The political conclusion that Marx seems to have drawn from these historical events was to intensify the economic study that gave rise to the Grundrisse and Capital. But before integrating these economic analyses into the philosophical account, the third of Marx’s historical essays on French politics should be mentioned. The Paris Commune is often seen by Marxists as the “finally discovered form” in which the class struggle can be brought to its conclusion. But Marx’s argument is more ambiguous. It seems to be a praise of direct democracy. Yet Marx calls the Commune the “form” in which the class struggle can be fought out openly. This form—like that of the commodity that is analyzed at the outset of Capital, as I will suggest in a moment—could be interpreted from the perspective of a democratic politics. For Marx and the Marxists, however, it appeared to be a solution, not the condition of the possibility of a solution, because it seemed to represent the unity of philosophy and politics, reason and the world.
The same ambiguous relation between economic and political analyses is seen in Marx’s account of the second stage of mature communism described in the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program: Marx makes things too easy for himself when he claims that when the “springs” of wealth flow freely, the inequalities of bourgeois society will be overcome. He should have remembered his own account of the continual dialectical development of new needs in The German Ideology. Indeed, Marx ought to have known better since in this same Critique he denounced Lassalle’s so-called iron law of wages by comparing its political claims to those of a slave who, when his fellows have finally rebelled, writes that “slavery must be abolished because the provisioning of slaves in the slave system cannot exceed a certain low minimum.” This reflection suggests the need to look more closely at what can be called the idealism of Marx, for it seems to be a denial of the causal primacy of material economic conditions.
When one looks at the status of Marx’s mature economic theory, it turns out to be not really economic at all. The labor theory of value makes sense only from a sociological standpoint—guided, however, by a philosophical quest. Why does volume 1 of Capital begin with the commodity form? After all, it was production that was central to the historical-materialist vision of The German Ideology and the work that followed it. The chapter in Capital that makes the transition from the analysis of the commodity form to an analysis of production contains the surprising comment that the exploitation of labor-power is not unjust (nor is it just: a class struggle will decide). This suggests that Marx is still operating in terms of immanent critique rather than seeking to formulate a positive science. Capitalist development is part of the process by which the world becomes more rational. As in The German Ideology, the proletarian selling his labor-power is freer than the serf. But how can he use that freedom? After extensive criticism of the capitalist abuse of the length and intensity of the working day to increase production of absolute surplus-value, Marx returns to the method of immanent critique in his explanation of what he calls relative surplus-value. He shows how cooperation, manufacture, and modern industry are increasingly productive stages of a mystifying alienation that gives the impression that capital’s contribution justifies the benefits it draws from this advance in capitalist rationality. This inversion is simply a material form of the theological mystification that the young Marx had criticized in Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. But the mystification here is real: capital is not just an alienating projection of the powers of man or an imagined deity; it is the reality of human alienation. The worker is reduced to a cog in a machine that, guided by the capitalist and applying science, increases productivity—in the words of the Manifesto—to “heights hitherto un-envisioned.” Will there follow a dialectical Aufhebung through which the proletariat will reclaim the fruits of its increasingly rationalized labor? Where will it come from? Volume 1 of Capital (which I have just summarized) gives no answer; it concludes with a criticism of “so-called primitive accumulation.” But why conclude with what, historically, was the starting point of capitalism? What happened to immanent critique? Why the discussion of the commodity form? Neither positive science nor historical analysis, Capital is Marx’s attempt to do philosophy by other means.
The transition from volume 1, whose subtitle is The Immediate Production Process of Capital, to volume 2’s account of the circulation of capital is explained in an unpublished manuscript entitled The Results of the Immediate Production Process. This missing link makes clear that Marx did not intend to explain economic production for its own sake; his concern is with the process of social reproduction. Marx’s theory is not reducible to economics as a science of production.11 The commodity that emerges from the capitalist production process is formally different from the commodities that entered it: it is a social—and capitalist—commodity; it must circulate and find its buyer. How this occurs is traced in the (quite boring) second volume of Capital. More interesting is its consequence in the third volume, which treats the process as a whole, including competition among capitalists. Here, after some 375 pages, we find the infamous “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” But the presentation of this “law” is followed by another 500 pages that meander through landed and financial (or money) capital. What role do these play? Why does the third volume conclude with the incomplete chapter on classes? Why didn’t Marx simply stop with the falling rate of profit? What is revolutionary about Capital? The answer to the last question, which is the key to the others, is quite simply that it is philosophy that, for Marx, is revolutionary. This conclusion is suggested as well in the well-known pages of the Grundrisse that still seem to be prophetic today.
To make a long story as short as possible:12 Marx predicts that the growth of the forces of production will reach a point at which production based on exchange-value breaks down of its own accord (because of the huge increases in productivity resulting from the application of science that make the contribution of human labor, which is the basis of exchange-value, minimal). At that point, the reduction of necessary labor time will make possible the free development of the individual. The measure of wealth will no longer be labor time but disposable time. What is more, at this stage of productive development the product ceases to appear as the product of an individual worker; its social character becomes evident. And at that point the individual recognizes that the free time he now has available to him in the new capitalism is not his own but that which comes to him as a member of the collective social workforce. To put it in rigorous Hegelian-Marxist terms: Two commodities face one another, capital and labor. Each of them is in turn dual: each has a use-value and an exchange-value, and these come into contradiction with themselves. Capital can no longer function in terms of exchange-values, nor can it properly develop the use-value of the great productive forces it has created (since to do so would be to break out of the capitalist mode of production based on the constant increase of exchange-value). Labor on its side is no longer necessary as exchange-value, and yet as use-value, in the new and clearly socially interdependent forms of scientific production, its role is reduced asymptotically. There are thus contradictions on both sides, and so, as the English version of Capital has it, the “integument must be burst asunder”—or, in a more Germanic formulation, Aufgehoben.
For the philosopher, these pages are sheer pleasure. For the political thinker, either they describe one of those utopias whose eternal attractiveness—and ineffectiveness—I sketched earlier, or they are a sign that the visionary who could foretell trends of capitalist social (and not simply economic) development was at a loss as to what to do about these trends. Indeed, at another point in the Grundrisse, Marx criticizes Adam Smith for not understanding that labor must be made attractive at the same time that it cannot be “mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier … conceives it.”
But enough of Marx philology. There is no need to discuss the harried question of whether Marx thought, ultimately, that freedom was to be found in work or beyond work: he thought both and couldn’t make up his mind, even in the space of a single text. Let this stand as the final demonstration that Marx was and remained a philosopher and that this is indeed his virtue, so long as one doesn’t try to make his philosophy into what it cannot be (despite the pleas of Adorno and the Frankfurt School): a politics.
POLITICIZING MARXISM
Marx was too good a philosopher. After 1989 he needs to be turned into a political thinker. This could start, as I suggested previously, from his analysis of the Paris Commune as the “finally discovered form in which the class struggle could be pursued to its end.” The first draft of The Civil War in France also contains the significant observation that all previous revolutions had only strengthened the state,13 although the published text concludes from this only the need to destroy the old state. This neglects the possibility that the state could be reused for other ends, as suggested by Marx’s claim that the Commune was the “form” in which class struggle could be fully developed. But rather than engage in more Marx philology, I want to propose a different approach to the question addressed here, beginning from the program developed in The Communist Manifesto.
At the time of the collapse of communism, I proposed that we had found ourselves finally freed from “two hundred years of error.”14 The year 1789 marked the advent of democracy as a political problem posed by the new social conditions created (or, in Marx’s eyes, consecrated) by the French Revolution. The institutionalization of the rights of man presupposed the destruction of the traditional cosmos in which each person had his and her place, in which society was conceived of as a structured organism, and where politics were not society’s concern (which is why Marx’s unpublished 1843 critique of Hegel’s theory of the state could mock the old regime as a “democracy of unfreedom” based on a “zoology”). Society did not then have the means to act on itself. The French Revolution inaugurated modern politics by creating the conditions for the possibility of democracy: the rights of the autonomous individual had to be coordinated with his coexistence with other individuals in a society that is able to determine for itself its vision of what political theory since Aristotle has called the “good life in the city.” But democracy is not a solution; it is a problem, inseparably philosophical and political. After 1989, when its reified opposition to communism no longer made it into an unquestionable value, its problematic nature could and should again become manifest.
In this context, I am struck by the absence of “communism” from the central arguments that constitute the first, and most substantive, part of the Manifesto. Marx praises the revolutionary nature of capitalism—its revolutionizing of traditional society and constant revolutionizing of itself—and he stresses that it is at the same time producing its own grave diggers. The picture painted is similar to that in Capital, which of course is subtitled A Critique of Political Economy rather than something like “A Handbook for the Communist Future.” But this poses the questions: What then is the famous “specter” invoked in the prefatory remarks to the Manifesto? How will it become flesh? What are its politics? Or does it simply obey structural necessities in becoming what it must become?
The “communist” as a political actor enters the argument only in the second part of the Manifesto. He is said “to have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole” and not to form “a separate party opposed to other working class parties.” And of course communists, who represent universal justice, are also said not to “set up any [particular] sectarian principles of their own.” What distinguishes the communist is that he is an internationalist and—more important—he represents “the interests of the movement as a whole.” The ability to do this is not the result of “ideas or principles” but “merely express[es], in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle.” This claim is politically seductive because of its philosophical sophistication.
This philosophical argument seems to me to be dangerous. It would be reformulated later, in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, as the idea of “ascribed class consciousness,” which became the basis of the “substitutionism” that justified Leninism and Stalinism (which claimed to act in the name of the “true” interests of the class, even when they acted against its immediate or conscious interests). Claude Lefort sees this communist militant as a new gestalt in political theory (although one might see him as a return of the idea of the “selfless servant” of Plato’s philosopher-king). The hubris of the communist is breathtaking. He becomes a kind of materialist version of the Hegelian Secretary to the World Spirit. What is troubling here is not the claim that theory can pierce beneath appearances to get to their structural foundations; that is the presupposition of any theoretical argument. I am bothered more by the fact that the resulting communist politics is based on a denial of itself as political, of its responsibility for its theoretical claims and practical aims. There is no autonomous place for politics in this world historical theory; its goal is to transcend any particular politics … and to realize a philosophical project over the heads (or behind the backs) of the participants. Its justification lies in its claim to transcend their (alienated) self-consciousness in the name of the really real truth. It is politics as antipolitics.
The foundation of Marx’s antipolitical politics had been laid already in the essay “On the Jewish Question,” particularly in its critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The achievements of the French Revolution were devalued by being placed under under the rubric “bourgeois”; the political problems posed by the advent of the individual as a bearer of rights (which could be expanded, since these rights now had no transcendent foundation as they did in the old order) were translated to the economic sphere, which quickly replaced the never further defined “civil society” that Marx thought for a moment he could take over and adapt from Hegel’s earlier analysis of it. The path to historical materialism was opened.
But Marx’s argument can be said, paradoxically, to be itself bourgeois, typical of two hundred years of bourgeois domination. After all, it is the capitalists (or bourgeois) who stress the primacy of the economy and for whom labor is the source of value. No Greek or Christian could have said such a thing. Moreover, the bourgeoisie has never been unequivocally democratic; all institutional advances in democracy have come as it makes forced concessions to social movements. What characterizes bourgeois politics is rather its constant attempt to deny the autonomy of politics—an autonomy that is the precondition of democracy. Thus the invisible hand of classical liberal economics is based on a structure identical to that of Marx’s philosophical antipolitics. The free market is supposed to do in its unconscious way what the planned communist society will do consciously. Does the difference make a difference? In both cases, politics is rejected, and responsibility and judgment are subordinated to supposed impersonal necessity.15
Rereading The Communist Manifesto, one wonders why Marx didn’t notice this. The reason is suggested in its often-neglected third part, which reconstructs and denounces the antipolitical implications of the various utopian socialisms current at the time. Although Marx reconstructs their appearance and the progress that each represents—as stages leading to his own synthesis—he doesn’t reflect on their antipolitical character. This neglect provides the occasion for reflecting on the issues that might be proposed by a New Political Manifesto that has become necessary now that 1989 has consigned Marx’s philosophical vision to the world of utopia.
The first part of the Manifesto presented the self-revolutionizing, globally corrosive, yet creatively self-destructive capitalist production process and the forms of social relations that it at once produced and destroyed. But the Manifesto began with the promise to explain the “specter” that was threatening the established order in Europe. The philosophical-materialist interpretation of this claim implied that it was capitalism-as-dialectical, capitalism-as-pregnant-with-communism—rather than the particular or arbitrary political action of “the communists”—that is the self-negating principle of modern society. The problem with this interpretation is that it leaves no place for politics or political responsibility; it is antipolitical. “The” revolution is the antithesis of politics. Its supposed necessity is explained structurally, leaving no room for autonomous political agency.
Could one, however, accept Marx’s philosophical insight into the need to make use of both critique and science without seeking their dialectical unity as he did? Instead of identifying the “specter” with capitalism-as-dialectical-self-overcoming-leading-to-the-communist-synthesis-of-the-world-as-philosophical-and-philosophy-asworldly, why not analyze the social relations and political problems of democracy as what was—and is still—haunting Europe? The self-revolutionary nature of capitalism would be replaced by the emergence and—with Hannah Arendt—constant (possibility of the) reemergence of democratic demands.16 Unlike capitalism-as-dialectical, such a democracy is not a thing or subject that moves history, like Hegel’s Spirit or Reason, according to an immanent logic particular to it. As I have noted, the rights that make democracy possible have no external guarantee or foundation; their existence cannot be justified philosophically. They depend on politics, which, as democratic and autonomous, both presupposes these rights and must reaffirm them constantly. This paradoxical circularity—as opposed to the dialectical unity sought by Marx’s philosophy—means that members of even an incomplete democratic society do have something to lose beside “their chains.”17
The paradoxical political structure of democracy, whose forward march—but whose defeats and disappointments—would be cataloged in the first part of a New Political Manifesto, has implications for the style in which it would be written. This would affect the second stage of the argument. It would be self-critical and dialogical because it cannot repeat Marx’s appeal to historical necessity but must accept responsibility for its judgments as its own.18 Hence the equivalent of Marx’s “communist”—who never identifies himself as the author of the Manifesto but who seems rather to be a secretary taking dictation from History—would be the political critic who self-consciously assumes that most philosophical of rights: the right to be wrong, which is the precondition for thinking at all. This right to be wrong is of course not an invitation to error and categorically not a justification of error. But it does imply a certain caution about truth claims. Joining Marx’s insight into the commodity form with Max Weber’s more general analysis of the antinomic structure of modern rationality,19 the democratic critic cannot operate with the goal of producing a unified society in which the particularity of politics and personal interest is forever made impossible. That is the lesson of the revolutions of 1989. But what then is the foundation for a democratic critique?
The third part of a New Political Manifesto would part company with Marx’s attempt to show that all previous doctrines lead toward and are contained in his theory. Instead, it would analyze the history of two hundred years of error—that is, of antipolitics—in the form of free markets, planned economies, nationalist identity politics or social-democratic technocracies, and legalistic codifications or appeals to judicial intervention to overcome political impasses. This analysis would not interpret these antipolitical choices as determined by an economic mode of production. It would follow, for example, suggestions from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation but also numerous hints in Marx’s Grundrisse to show how the different forms of antipolitics are in reality the results of implicit political choices, of actions (or omissions) that may not fall into the domain formally called “politics” but affect the relations of individuals to one another and to society as a whole.20 This implies that political critique of social injustice—rather than economic criticism of exploitation—is the foundation of democratic politics. It does not mean that politics (even democratic politics) is an end in itself. A New Political Manifesto would praise democracy as Tocqueville praised it, “not for what it is but for what it leads people to do [ce qu’elle fait faire].”21 In this way, political critique is not restricted to the sphere that political science defines as politics. Rather, it is concerned with the foundation of social relations themselves.22
The New Political Manifesto would reject Marx’s goal of finally realizing the conquests inaugurated by the French Revolution by adding a social dimension to the merely formal political rights won in 1789. Democracy is not a set of formal institutions that must acquire a social content in order to be realized; that was Marx’s initial error when he first criticized democracy in “On the Jewish Question.” That path leads to the creation of what the former Soviet empire labeled “democratic republics.” The lesson of 1989 is that such democratic republics—as well as the dream of direct democracy—are simply another manifestation of the antipolitical attempt to avoid facing up to the challenge of modern democracy. Based on the protection of individual rights while seeking at the same time and for just that reason the common good, democracy is a problem, and democratic politics consists in maintaining that problem, not in solving it once and for all. Only under such conditions can the struggle against forms of injustice—which are not limited to the economic sphere—have hopes for success. Capitalism from this perspective is just another antipolitical form of politics; criticism of it is based not on the “chains” it imposes but rather on the responsible freedom it denies as its logic imposes itself.23 But is such denunciation sufficient to delineate a politics, which was, after all, the achievement of the historical materialism deduced from The Communist Manifesto? It is that achievement, however, that is put into question by the revolutions of 1989.
Marx’s political philosophy was based on the immanent philosophical-dialectical critique of capitalist social relations. After the end of the totalitarian claim to realize democracy, it is an immanent critique of democracy, not of capitalism, that is now on the agenda. But that critique cannot make the philosophical-dialectical claim that Lukács, correctly, attributed to Marx, because the challenge of democracy is not based on the emergence of a new subject of world history. Democratic citizens must assume responsibility for their political choices, including the choice not to seek to make a revolution and—what comes down to the same thing—the choice not to seek to realize democracy because that is, paradoxically, the only way in which democracy can be preserved. By abandoning the kind of totalizing philosophy that motivated Marx, the New Political Manifesto could salvage a part of the Marxian legacy by showing the need to make the transition from philosophy to politics and, from there, to rediscover the challenge of political philosophy.