Some decry the sixties generation as hedonistic and blame it for the social laxity that has given us culture wars and increasingly conservative government. I remember it rather for the attempt to create the politics of a new left. That project, I have been arguing in this book, remains on the contemporary agenda. But in order to reclaim it, it is necessary to understand where it went astray and to see whether it can be reconstructed on another foundation. As it happens, this project coincides in many ways with Cornelius Castoriadis’s own political development. To illustrate the overlaps (without denying the differences), a few introductory remarks are useful.
It was clear that the new left had to distinguish itself from the old, but this was not easy in America at a time when its anticommunist crusade (which was not confined to the excesses of McCarthyism) was still part of the recent present, the universities were still oriented to the liberal consensus, and monolinguism prevented access to the various dissident left traditions.1 I had the good fortune to travel in Eastern Europe and become friendly with some young Czech dissidents; that experience inoculated me against the enemy-of-my-enemy arguments that led many in the new left to adopt an anti-anti-communist politics whose consequences were an inability either to discuss foreign policy issues critically (not the least of which concerned the kinds of revolutionary regimes created first in Cuba and then in Vietnam and Cambodia) or to enter into serious debate with an older generation of leftists that warned against a naive populism symbolized by the self-identification of the new left as a “movement” rather than a specific political project. But it is only fair to say that I too felt the need to find a true Marx who, I assumed, had been distorted either by opportunist ruling cliques in the so-called socialist world or oversimplified by transforming dialectics into a banal reduction of politics to economics. It was in this context that I accepted a proposition by Karl Klare to coedit with him The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism since Lenin.2
To discover the authentic Marxist kernel that would be the basis of a radical critique of a society whose flagrant injustice was evident not only in its Vietnam adventure but especially on the home front, where the civil rights movement had already awakened new political engagements, it seemed necessary to find an alternative to Leninism. (We had no idea at the time that there could be a revolutionary tradition that was not indebted to Marx.) The grounds for Lenin’s creation of a unique kind of political party were explained in What Is to Be Done? Lenin argued that the working class on its own could develop only simple, self-interested “trade union consciousness,” whose particularistic limitation had to be overcome in order to create truly revolutionary “political class consciousness.” But the result of Lenin’s emphasis on the party as the consciousness of the class was to destroy the spontaneous self-organizational character of working-class activity. This critique of Leninism had been made before, by Social Democrats, who considered themselves still to be working for socialist goals, and by liberals, who did not. What we wondered was whether it was possible to retain the radical political project of Marx (as we understood it) without accepting the stagnation of Leninism. It was for this reason that I convinced Karl Klare that we needed to include a chapter on the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. Through contacts with the clandestine movement against the war in Vietnam, I was able to meet first Claude Lefort and then, in Lefort’s study, Cornelius Castoriadis.3
I was at this time also involved with the project of Telos, a quarterly publication begun by the graduate philosophy students at Buffalo but quickly joined by others. It can fairly be said that Telos represented, in its first decade, the theoretical self-education of a new left. The journal began from phenomenology; Husserl’s late manuscript The Crisis of European Sciences showed that the lifeworld of human experience was the foundation without which the abstractions of modern science became an end in themselves that could be misused and manipulated. This criticism of the abstractness of modern science became the basis for a broader critique of the alienated, reified, formalized, or one-dimensional world of contemporary capitalism.4 A few issues later, the journal discovered Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, with its Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject-object of history; two issues later came a debate with Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy but also the recognition that this author—whose Hegelian-Marxism had been condemned by the Communist Church, as had Lukács’s work—did not go to Canossa and renounce his own work but adopted an increasingly independent radical (“council communist”) orientation. New discoveries continued in Telos—through Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and on to the early Habermas. It was at this time that I proposed translations of Lefort and Castoriadis. The debate over whether to do so went on for more than a year. All the journal’s previous critical adventures had remained within the orbit of Father Marx; now the proposal was to criticize the foundations of his gospel. Castoriadis’s critique was particularly radical and disturbing; it questioned the basic ontology of the master. This challenge to a group of self-professed radical leftists—who were pursuing their education in public but were also (relatively) sophisticated philosophically and reading these new texts in the original (and publishing them in often awkward translations!)—was a threat. Still, the translations finally appeared.5
In the next quarter century, Castoriadis’s work appeared with growing frequency in English translation, and he lectured increasingly at American venues. He no longer stands as a critic of Marxism; as it should, his critique developed into a positive philosophical system, with applications to the natural and social sciences as well as to psychoanalysis. Has he been understood? It’s hard to say. He wanted recognition from his equals. A final anecdote is telling in that regard. At the time that I wrote the introductions to Castoriadis and Lefort for Telos, I found myself at a dinner party in Paris with some American academics, as well as Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, the editor of the very chic and very avant-garde (and at the time very Maoist) journal Tel Quel. I objected to some of their political stances, invoking arguments from both Castoriadis and Lefort. Kristeva and Sollers had heard the names but didn’t know the work. Could he read my introductions? asked Sollers. “Certainly” was my response. Some two days later came an offer to translate and publish my essays. When I told this to both Castoriadis and Lefort, their replies were identical: not in the journal of those crapules! Recognition of that fashionable kind was no more desired than recognition was accepted as a good in itself. Castoriadis was, I think, inspired by the same motivation that drove the new left: the leitmotiv of his systematic philosophical work was the critique of heteronomy in order to realize the autonomy and the creativity that make humans the inventors of their own history.
FROM MARX TO “REVOLUTIONARY THEORY”
The title of this section alludes to the fact that, in spite of his devastating critiques of Marx and Marxism, Castoriadis constantly returned to Marx. On a first reading of “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory,” the 1964–1965 essay that elaborated polemically the consequences of his twenty years of critical engagement with Marx seems to conclude with a definitive rejection of what the author calls Marx’s “metaphysics.” But a closer look at the arguments suggests that Castoriadis’s title should have read: “Marxism or Revolutionary Theory?” In effect, Castoriadis abandoned the former in order to remain faithful to the latter (and thus to Marx’s project). But this leaves unexamined the question of what makes a theory revolutionary? And by implication it poses the question, did Marx have a correct intuition, even if he followed it badly? If that is the case, can we remain Marxists? How?
The Marx whom Castoriadis rejected claimed to be a “revolutionary theorist.” This meant that his theory was intimately bound up with “the standpoint of the proletariat” (Lukács), which incarnated the conditions for the practical overcoming of the contradictory circumstances of its own birth. The proletariat was understood as the product of past historical progress that could, by becoming self-conscious and aware of its own blocked potentiality, overcome the limits on its creativity imposed by class society. In another of Lukács’s phrases, the proletariat was the “subject-object of history.” Marx was able to discover the radical essence of the proletariat because he rejected what Lukács called the “contemplative” and external stance of philosophy. Merleau-Ponty nicely labeled this philosophical attitude a pensée de survol, flying above and gazing down on its object, whereas revolutionary praxis must adopt an immanent critical-historical engagement whose results cannot be separated from its theoretical premise. This engaged position is not without risk. Castoriadis takes Marx at his word; he accepts Marx’s wager on history—and accepts history’s verdict. There is no more use in claiming constantly “conditions are not yet ripe” than in blaming betrayal or human weakness for the failure to win Marx’s revolutionary wager. Marx bet on history, and he lost. To continue to hope for a future revolution would be to read Marx as merely a contemplative philosopher; it would be, Castoriadis implies, necessarily to misread him.
Restoring Marx’s original historical project permits Castoriadis to lay the foundations of his own revolutionary theory. This explains why he reprinted “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” as the first part of The Imaginary Institution of Society, which was published a decade later (1975). But what is revolutionary about Castoriadis’s own theory? Does he too, like Marx, bet on history? How do the two parts of his book fit together? He had suggested that Marx’s intention to go beyond a contemplative or metaphysical account of a real history guided by the logic of an immanent telos was correct but that the Marxism that emerged was unfaithful to Marx’s radical intention. But Castoriadis refuses to simplify: really existing Marxism cannot be rejected as a (conscious or unintended) betrayal of Marx. Subjective factors explain nothing of any significance. One can only conclude that there must have been a problem with Marx’s understanding of the revolutionary project itself. It is necessary to return to the original question to seek a better way to pose it—or to find the question that made possible that first question.
An essay published not coincidentally in the same year (1975) that saw the appearance of The Imaginary Institution took up the challenge of defining what counts as revolutionary under the title “Valeur, égalité, justice, politique: De Marx à Aristote et d’Aristote à nous” (Value, equality, justice, politics: From Marx to Aristotle and from Aristotle to Us).6 This return to the Greeks7 makes clear Castoriadis’s recognition of the need to create a non-Marxist understanding of revolutionary theory. The essay begins with a long citation from Marx’s analysis of commodity exchange in volume 1 of Capital. Marx praises Aristotle’s “genius” that permitted him to grasp the paradoxical foundation of the exchange relation by means of a notion of “value” as that which represents or stands for “a common substance” that accounts for (or even constitutes) the equality of the otherwise unequal things exchanged (for if the things were equal, why would they be exchanged?). But, adds Marx, Aristotle could not go further in his analysis; he could not understand that this value represents “abstract human labor” because “Greek society was based on the work of slaves.” This invocation of a historical fact implies that History (understood as progress toward complete social self-understanding) only makes possible the revelation of the secret of exchange to the residents of a capitalist society that has developed completely its economic basis. Castoriadis criticizes this claim as Marx’s “metaphysics”; it transforms capitalism, a particular historical society, into the incarnation of a telos that makes possible a correct reading of all past History. The result of Marx’s misguided assumption is that not only does the present lose its uniqueness; the past also loses its autonomy and indeterminacy. The implication of Castoriadis’s critique is that for a theory to be revolutionary, both its relation to history and the nature of the historical world must become explicit. The teleological assumption that history can come to an end, that (class) contradictions can be overcome, and that society can know itself fully and completely, leaving no space for indetermination, must be abandoned. What can be put in its place? Is revolutionary theory simply the critique of a metaphysical understanding of history?
While Castoriadis never abandoned the critical engagement with Marx that drove him (starting in the second part of The Imaginary Institution) to make explicit his own conception of revolutionary theory, the growing preoccupation with the Greeks inaugurated by “Valeur, égalité, justice, politique” suggests what the internal evidence of his own theory (and the political history of our times, from which—like Marx—he never separated his thought) amply confirms: that for Castoriadis revolutionary theory came increasingly to be identified with democracy. This suggests that the kind of criticism Castoriadis addressed to Marx would not be different from the kind of criticism he would address to democracy. Democracy too can become a metaphysics. It too can take itself as representing the telos of History, the self-transparency of society to itself, and the end of contradiction and opposition. Rather than solving the riddle of history, both democracy and Marxism pose more new problems than they resolve older ones. Neither the democrat nor the Marxist can eliminate indeterminacy from history; neither can do away with the need for political judgment, which must always assume the possibility of error and the need to take responsibility for its claims. Like Marx’s theory, democracy can fall victim to hubris and refuse to recognize the need to set limits on itself (for such self-set limits are not the denial but rather the affirmation of autonomy). This danger becomes clear when one turns again to Castoriadis’ critique of Marx.
ELEMENTS OF THE CRITIQUE OF MARXISM
At a first level, Castoriadis demonstrates the internal contradictions of Marx’s claim to have gone beyond philosophy to establish a new science. Perhaps the most telling illustration of this point is his critique of Marx’s claim to demonstrate the necessary breakdown of capitalism as the result of the so-called law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Because surplus-value can only be produced by labor-power, whose value (as “variable capital”) decreases relative to the value of the constant capital invested in large-scale modern industry, Marx demonstrates that the rate of profit must sink (on the basis of complicated calculations of the transformation of value into price, whose determination depends on the average profit of each capital remaining equal, since Marx makes the neoclassical assumption that markets are free and open and money is fungible). Even if the so-called scientific validity of the labor theory of value is accepted (in spite of the metaphysics involved in the transmutation of concrete labor into something like an abstract substance parceled out among commodities to be exchanged), this law assumes that the value of constant capital invested in machines and raw materials remains fixed, and it makes the same assumption about labor-power. In so doing, it neglects in both cases the social and historical (and human) factors that enter into the relations of production. It does not consider the possibility of the discovery of new raw materials or resources or the invention of new machines making older ones obsolete (regardless of the value they still incorporate).
More important for Marx’s basic claim is Castoriadis’s demonstration that the labor theory of value itself abstracts from what was otherwise the basis of Marx’s entire historical theory: the class struggle that, presumably, can have the effect of raising or lowering the value of labor-power and therefore that of its materialized product when one or the other class is in the ascendant. Despite these criticisms that aim at the heart of Marx’s economic claims, Castoriadis treats Marx with the same respect that Marx reserved for Smith and Ricardo: he doesn’t denounce these internal contradictions as the product of an apologetic ideology said to reflect a personal bias but tries to understand the real historical root of the inconsistency of an innovative thinker. The supposed logic of class struggle is based on a theory of history that assumes, as in Marx’s critique of Aristotle, that capitalism represents the complete (but still alienated) development of society’s human capacities. As such, it eliminates the indeterminacy of the past; it assumes that humans only can know what they truly are when the economy (of which they are the producers) becomes socially dominant. But this implies that capitalism is not a particular, historically specific social formation; instead it is understood as the actualization of what was only potential in all previous social formations. As such, its particular logic is identified with logic tout court; its notion of science is not understood as specific to particular, historically given social relations but is generalized through its identification with technology to become the proper way for humans to relate to, and to understand, the natural world. The quantitative relations of equivalence exchange impress their mark throughout the society and are taken as the proper model for all social relations. And so it is, finally, that Marx’s quest for a scientific theory appeals to the existence of a “substance” called value that would be at once historically specific and yet general and present in all societies, that is concrete and yet abstract, the individual output of the worker that is only made possible by social conditions. Why assume that such a substance, which Castoriadis calls “metaphysical,” actually exists? Why make Homo economicus the truth of Homo sapiens?
This critique of Marx’s metaphysics had already been developed in “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory”; the contrast to Aristotle now makes clear that it had political consequences that went beyond the negative conclusions concerning Marx and Marxism. Aristotle was not trying to discover a scientific theory of economics; he wanted to understand the political foundation holding together a society composed of heterogeneous and thus unequal actors. Not only does Marx neglect the distinction between the realm of necessity that governs the household (oikos), which is populated by women and slaves, and the domain of freedom that is the city (polis); he also fails to recall Aristotle’s concern not to confuse the logic of production, which must obey external necessity, with the freedom of action, which is governed by a type of political reason. That Marx misunderstood Aristotle’s philosophical intention is evident not only in the inconsistencies of his labor theory of value; his political misunderstanding also becomes apparent when he returns to Aristotle in the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, which was a direct intervention in the practical political choices of the German Socialist Party. When it comes to the question of the kind of equality to be sought under socialism, Marx’s analysis proceeds as if the value that is to be distributed equally were somehow knowable in advance, as if it were fixed and given as a natural product, transcendent and immune to historical change. But the famous solution promised by communism—“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”—presupposes not only a society of abundance, whose existence would not so much solve as dissolve the problem of equality; it also assumes that what each gives and receives is in some way commensurable, without ever explaining (or even recognizing the need to explain) how this commensurability (which Aristotle discussed as “proportional equality”) is attained. More important still, the resolution of the problem of equality by the production of physical abundance seems to suppose the transcendence of “bourgeois” law (as it exists in the stage of formal equality that characterizes the “first phase” of socialism). This could have the dangerous implication that Marx’s goal is the transcendence of law and, with it, of politics.
The critique of Marx that emerges from this contrast to Aristotle results in two related claims. First, Aristotle’s philosophical theory has political consequences because it takes into account the social-historical character and resulting lack of univocal determination implicit in the Greek distinctions between nomos and physis, doxa and aletheia, being and appearance. As a result, Aristotle seeks not a science but a theory of judgment, a phroneisis that makes possible the kind of political intervention that Marx’s “revolutionary theory” sought in vain because its claim to necessity and universality made it a metaphysics that had no room for the freedom of action needed for politics. Second, the basic “values” that bind together a society—that is, the justice and equality that are joined to value and politics in the title of the 1975 essay—are posited politically through what Castoriadis calls the “foundational enigma,” whose basis is the apparently contradictory fact that a society can only exist as such on the basis of some commensurable values but at the same time these foundational values must be continually posited by the same society whose existence they ensure. In the one case, the shared values appear to be nomoi; in the other, they tend toward the material necessity that defines the pole of physis. While no society can imagine itself to be totally arbitrary, none can exist if its being is determined simply and completely by nature. Confrontation with this “enigma”—a term favored by both the young and the mature Marx—is a fundamental condition of the possibility of “revolutionary theory.”
REHABILITATING MARX AS A PHILOSOPHER
While one might speculate as to whether the demise of communism coincides with the triumph of liberal capitalism, giving a final proof that history has (or has not) refuted the author of The Communist Manifesto, it is certain that the new world order that has put democracy at the top of the global agenda has also increased the actuality of the revolutionary theory of democracy sought by Castoriadis. It has done so, however, by focusing attention not so much on Marx the revolutionary as on Marx the philosopher, who now must be read in a new light, much as Castoriadis reads Aristotle and the Greeks against the background of the enigma of Greek democracy. For example, instead of denouncing the scientistic illusion presented by the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, one should ask why Marx’s demonstration of that particular law is followed by nearly five hundred pages of text analyzing the problems of interest and rent on land before the argument finally collapses entirely in the (incomplete) chapter on classes. Marx’s demonstration of the absurdity of capitalist social relations in his account of interest as the solipsistic appearance of “money producing money” and his critical analysis of how the apparently self-evident explanation of the sources and distribution of income within capitalist society by the “Trinity Formula” (land, labor, capital) breaks down in the face of the actual divisions of capitalist society in fact recall more the careful analysis of Aristotle than they do the certainties proclaimed by the Marx Castoriadis convincingly criticized. Despite their scientific pretense, these analyses recall the young Marx’s notion of an “immanent critique” that, he wrote in 1843, “would make these petrified relations dance by singing before them their own melody.” But the young Marx too was in search of a revolutionary theory and should not be separated so neatly from the mature theorist he would become. The artificial distinction of the two phases does serve, however, to recall the need to read Marx’s work as that of a philosopher.
The philosophical Marx, like the young Marx, remains a Hegelian. He is concerned constantly to join together a “phenomenology” of appearing relations with a “logic” that demonstrates the categorical relations that unite these appearances.8 Even his “scientific” theory of capitalist economics reproduces the basic structure of Hegel’s dialectical logic: volume 1 of Capital presents “the immediate process of production,” volume 2 analyzes “the process of circulation of capital,” and then volume 3 unites them in “the process of capitalist production as a whole.” This Hegelian revolutionary, moreover, claims to show the necessary demise of capitalism in an inspired passage from the unfinished manuscript known as the Grundrisse that demonstrates how and why advanced capitalism overcomes (aufheben) its own economic premises doubly, both on the side of labor and on the side of capital. In this way, Marx is suggesting that economic development does not take place autonomously within its own sphere. His argument suggests the need to rediscover the place for political intervention that was covered over by the apparent domination of the economy in capitalist society—a domination that proves only the self-alienation of the citizens of that society.
The way in which the philosophical Marx makes room for the autonomy of politics can be seen in an incomplete manuscript, published in 1933 but widely available only in the mid-1960s under the title “The Results of the Immediate Production Process.” This manuscript presents a chapter the was to have formed the transition from volume 1 to volume 2 of Capital. Its contribution can be summed up simply: Marx recognizes that the commodities that enter into the circulation process are no longer “immediately” given physical products but now have been transformed into commodities containing something that has been socially created—what he calls surplus-value (but which need not be understood as a substance). This means that not only does capitalist society constantly transform itself (and thus open itself to further transformation) but—as Aristotle had insisted—economic processes have to be understood within the context of social reproduction. This more philosophical vision of the place and nature of economic relations suggests that the status of Marx’s “scientific” economic theory is not that of a science and still less that of a “revolutionary theory”; its relevance rests with its contribution to political theory. Its implication, from this perspective, is the denunciation of a society that denies its own political foundation, treating its shared values as if they were naturally given, physei, and therefore eternally and unquestionably valid. Marx the philosopher meets here with Castoriadis the “revolutionary theorist.”
These philosophical reflections on Marx’s economic masterwork lead to a further query: why is Capital subtitled A Critique of Political Economy? What does Marx mean by “critique”? The usual interpretation, since Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, points to the notion of “immanent critique” that Marx called for in his 1843 essay. Castoriadis doesn’t stress this concept—perhaps because he tends to identify Marx’s scientism with a materialist Hegelianism that assumes that beneath appearances there exist realities just waiting to be liberated by the weapon of materialist science. But when it is applied to the philosopher Marx, immanent critique could develop some of Castoriadis’s own insights. It rejects the metaphysical assumption that false appearances must give way to true realities, recognizing both that the appearing world is always open to question and that the ability and need to pose questions open the individual to the possibility of error. This means that the immanent critique is founded on the primacy of judgment and the responsibility that each of us must assume for our judgments. It follows that politics is the domain not of truth but of its representation, and this problem of representation is yet another formulation of Castoriadis’s insistence on the “foundational enigma” that poses the values that account for what a society accepts as relations of equality and justice. And, as we have seen, political theory seeks to understand the existence and reproduction of these values, and—we can now add—political practice is what makes possible the reproduction (or transformation) of those values.
MARX AND THE IMMANENT CRITIQUE OF DEMOCRACY
Marx the philosopher is not incompatible with Castoriadis the revolutionary theorist. Marx’s treatment of “capitalist production as a whole” in volume 3 denounces the illusory self-representation of capitalism (for example, in the phenomenon of competition, which is the true analytic contribution made by the demonstration of the so-called law of the falling rate of profit). It criticizes the hubris that admits no limits to the “production of money by money” in the form of (self-referential or solipsistic) interest-bearing capital. It is not the mechanistic economic breakdown theory that is crucial to Marx’s critique of capitalism; Marx’s utopian vision is found in the double movement of self-overcoming portrayed in the Grundrisse, where the internal self-contradiction of capitalist social relations is shown to destroy their presuppositions, making possible (although not necessary) the emergence of new forms. When these insights are put into the context of the need for capitalist society to ensure its own social reproduction, the usurpation of the properly political institutional function by the mechanics of the economy becomes evident. At this point, the path to immanent critique is opened. But this does not yet delimit the spheres to which that critique can be applied (and those where it cannot be applied, since self-limitation is essential to autonomy).
Although The Critique of the Gotha Program posed the question of the nature of the shared values that at once constitute and are instituted by society, Marx’s solution to the problem of equal sharing of these values avoided the institutional—the political—problem by assuming that in communist society the “springs” of wealth flow freely. But at another point in his critique, when he refutes Lassalle’s “iron law of wages” that is supposed to bring about revolution because the workers can never share fully in the growing wealth they create, Marx is less materialist. He sees the role and place of autonomy, even though he never uses the term. “It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete notions were to inscribe on the programme of the rebellion: Slavery must be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low minimum!” Castoriadis could not have said it better. But more can be said.
Castoriadis also criticized Marx’s materialist recourse to flowing “springs” of wealth for avoiding the political problem of the institution of society. The locus classicus of this critique is Marx’s vision of the Paris Commune as a direct democracy that is the “finally discovered secret” to the riddle of history he had sought since his youthful critique of Hegel’s theory of the state in 1843. In fact, however, Marx described the Commune more precisely as “the finally discovered form” (my emphasis) in which the class struggle could be played out. Class struggle, however, is not an elemental, material fact (despite Marx’s coquetry with Darwin). When Marx writes, in The German Ideology, that the first form of this opposition is in the relation of man to woman, he is adopting a crude positivism. Groups may coexist while ignoring one another’s existence and remaining quite indifferent to what a later analyst might see as opposition between them. Like society itself, the existence of class struggle depends on a shared value, a political framework through which the classes are able to represent to themselves their own position in relation to other classes. Such a framework is provided by democratic institutions that permit the flowering of difference within a universe of shared values. It is this creation of shared values that would be the achievement of the Commune that permits what Marx thought would be the final phase of the class struggle. But Marx’s vision of democracy is not developed further; he treats its appearance in the Commune just as he treated it in the 1843 critique of Hegel: as a solution that puts an end to what he and Castoriadis have called the “enigma” of history.
These two illustrations of the way in which the philosophical Marx and the “revolutionary theory” of Castoriadis begin to dovetail explain the move proposed by my title “From Marx to Castoriadis, and from Castoriadis to Us.” By rereading Castoriadis’s critique of Marx we are brought back to the question of Marx’s relevance to our contemporary situation. That is why I have suggested that the “specter” Marx thought was haunting Europe is not the reality of a communism that is materially overcoming the class struggles that shaped the course of history. Rather, the “specter” represents democracy. As a specter, it is a representation of itself and of the shared values that society gives itself in order to become what it is. When “all that is solid melts into air” (Manifesto) as capitalist economic relations begin to take hold, society needs to represent to itself such shared values in order to make sense of the diverse social relations that constitute it. Such values can be purely economic, masking their properly political institution under the guise of naturalness. But they can also be posited politically, as nomoi, whose character, however, is not simply arbitrary. The legitimation of such democratic political values is the domain to which immanent critique properly belongs. The idea of an immanent critique of the natural world (or of economic relations that are considered to be natural) makes no sense. The task of immanent critique is to avoid the reification of the political by making clear the philosophical choice that lies at what Castoriadis called its “enigmatic foundation.”
The immanent critique of Marx has thus provided the foundations for a critical evaluation of democracy, and it is not surprising that Castoriadis returns repeatedly to both of them. Capitalist economic relations and democracy are related, but they are hardly identical. When he reflects on the relation of theory to the revolutionary project, at the end of “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory,” Castoriadis returns to the institutional dimension of political thought. He compares it to our relation to language, which at first appears as something external and alien. But in fact our relation to language is more intimate and more paradoxical. Language permits us to say everything or anything at all; it determines what can be said while providing at the same time the possibility of free speech. “Alienation,” he concludes, “appears in this relation but alienation is not [identical to] this relation—just as error or delerium are only possible in language but are not [identical to] language.”9 By the same token, capitalist economic relations can appear within democracy, but the two are neither identical nor related by any necessary causal or logical chain. Just this is, in the last resort, also the claim of the philosophical Marx whose achievements we can appreciate today because of Castoriadis’s devastating critique of that Marx’s revolutionary pretensions. The revolutionary critique of the revolutionary philosopher makes clear the relation of philosophy to the political quest for autonomy. Democracy constantly activates that quest by undermining all attempts to give it a fixed and univocal definition that would assimilate it to the world of physis rather than admit that its dependence on representation binds it unalterably to the appearing world of the nomoi where political judgment cannot be replaced by the appeal to scientific determinism.