Tama Weisman
At first glance, Hannah Arendt is a harsh, albeit sometimes reluctant, critic of Karl Marx. However, what is often less understood is how she came to her analysis and, further, the extent that he influenced her thinking.1 We find that she criticizes Marx with one stroke of her pen, while in the next she appropriates his thought without acknowledgment. Given her lack of acknowledgment, and that her most well-known thoughts on Marx are the very troubling and flawed analysis found in chapter three—“Labor”—of The Human Condition, it is often assumed either that she either did not understand Marx’s work or that she was so virulent an anti-communist that she was willing to misrepresent what Marx had in fact written. Neither of these could be further from the truth.
As many commentators have noted, Arendt’s analysis of Marx is for the most part not supported through close readings of Marx’s texts. She primarily comes to her faulty readings of Marx in one of two ways. The first (most commonly found in her analysis of Marxian labor) is to support her claim that Marx reduces human existence to the mode of animal laborans through quoting passages incompletely. In doing this, she is able to make claims that do not stand up when the entire passage is taken into account. The second is that she accepts the mostly discredited orthodoxy of the Second International that conflates the works of Marx and Engels. This is most prominent in her reading of history as it relates to the ideological underpinnings of a deterministic analysis of history that allows for the futural gaze of a messianism that knows its own end. Although this type of analysis is often taken up in various Marxisms, it is clearly one of Marx’s specific targets of critique in his “Theses on Feuerbach.” Indeed most of what Arendt cites as support for the determinist reading of Marx was written by Engels after Marx’s death.
To simply point out the flaws in Arendt’s writings on Marx, however, would do a disservice to understanding how and why Arendt wrote about Marx as she did, and to understanding her more productive insights into Marxism as it manifested in the Soviet Union and totalitarianism in general.2 In order to understand this, we must go back to the period of time between the writing of The Origins of Totalitarianism and that of The Human Condition.
In 1952, Arendt was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a project initially titled “Totalitarian Elements in Marxism.” In this project, she proposed to come to understand how Marx’s thought could be used and abused by a totalitarian regime.3 Unlike totalitarianism in Nazi Germany, Arendt determines that conditions for the possibility of totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union arose through a program of conscious, systematic, and purposive policies intended to bring about specific social conditions. Arendt’s claim is that as perverse and un-Marxian as it may have been, Stalin’s dogma would have been ineffectual without the conditions for it to “seize the masses,” which had been set in place by his predecessors. No matter how it could have turned out differently, had Stalin not perverted what was begun under Lenin, Arendt concludes that the necessary conditions for the possibility of totalitarian domination, most especially loneliness, terror, and ideological thinking, inhere within Marxist thought put into action.
By the end of her first year of work, Arendt revised the focus of the project. Rather than focusing on totalitarian elements in Marxist thought and the rise of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, her attention turned to how and why the tradition of Western political thought had failed so miserably when it encountered the changing conditions of modernity. Why was it that the tradition could not attend to the freedoms of the political revolutions of the eighteenth century joined with changing workforce of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century wherein all who labored were accepted as full citizens? In its revised form, the relationship between philosophy and politics is no longer merely one concern among the many of her original project, but rather became its central focus. In her revised project, now titled “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought,” Arendt proposed to study the writings of Marx, the one thinker of the tradition (in her estimation) who attempted to come to grips with the changing conditions in order to understand the inadequacies of the tradition itself. However, and crucial to understanding Arendt’s published writings on Marx, while her focus shifts to emphasize Marx in relation to the tradition of Western political thought as opposed to Marxism as manifested in the Soviet Union, to a large extent the thoughts, ideas, and conceptual paradigms that Arendt attributes to Marx are driven by that original project—to determine how Marx’s work could have been taken up in ways that fostered the necessary conditions for the possibility of totalitarian domination. Thus, much of her analysis of how one might read Marx in order to attain a specified goal is converted into a reading of Marx himself.
In the first draft of the Marx project, Arendt highlights what she conceives as the three central claims or pillars of Marxian thought: (1) Labor is the creator of man, (2) violence is the midwife of history, and (3) none are free when others are enslaved. In the second draft, we see her shift of focus away from totalitarian elem ents in Marx per se and toward the larger topic of the relationship between philosophy and politics through an extremely significant change. Arendt retains her first two pillars; the third, however, she changes. Recognizing that freedom is a central category that runs throughout her analysis, and therefore cannot be separated out from the other categories along with her shift of attention to the tradition of political thought itself, Arendt turns specifically to the philosopher’s relationship to politics by substituting Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have interpreted the world differently, the time has come to change it,” for the pillar of freedom. The problems of labor, history with its relationship to politics and violence, and philosophy’s relationship to politics become the trinity through which Arendt comes to interpret Marx.
Arendt’s Three Pillars of Marxian Thought
Arendt’s first pillar, “Labor is the creator of man,” is the most central to all that she will write about Marx as it is the one place where she claims that he radically leaves the tradition. First and foremost, this pillar is Arendt’s interpretation of Marx’s answer to the question “What does it mean to be human?” While Marx himself answers this question with the concept of “species being” (Gattungswesen) in the 1844 Paris manuscripts or, in his later works, “socialized mankind” (gesellschaftliche Menschheit), Arendt’s own conclusion is that Marx defines human beings as animal laborans. No longer defined through rationality or political capacities, humans are now defined in and through animal necessity. The implications of this claim can only be understood through what has come to be one of Arendt’s most well-known distinctions—one that is first thematized in her study of Marx—the distinction between labor and work as it is fundamental to her claim that there are totalitarian elements in Marxism. Arendt asks why a totalitarian regime developed out of the thinking of Marx and not Plato, Luther, Hegel, or Nietzsche, all of whom were accused of being progenitors of Nazism. To her mind, the reason is grounded in Marx’s importation of an almost ontological loneliness into the world through the reduction of humans to animal laborans. Humans defined as animal laborans implicate Marx in a radical ontology that gives rise to the loneliness necessary for the possibility of mass society, a precondition for the possibility of totalitarian domination.
Arendt’s omission of any comprehensive discussion of Marx’s own answer to the question “What does it mean to be human?” is indicative of her initial focus on Stalin’s appropriation of Marxist ideas in his quest for total domination. Instead of “What does it mean to be human?” Arendt’s question could more accurately be placed in this narrow context as “What type of human is subject to succumbing to a mass movement?” According to Arendt, the answer is one who is entrenched in loneliness. Since all are now the lonely animal laborans, loneliness, a condition that was radically foreign to any variation of politics within the tradition, was now located at its very core.
Yet, it is clear from within the context of her initial project that Arendt is not simply wrong or willfully misleading in her reading of Marx on labor. Rather, she reads Marx as she believes Lenin and Stalin read him, and with what to her mind was more than adequate justification—that which can be found in a reading of The Manifesto of the Communist Party that might be called “In Praise of Capital.” If The Manifesto is read with its praise of capital taken seriously, then it would seem that the necessary preconditions for the possibility of communism would be precisely the conditions attributed to capitalism in Capital, and Marx’s description of human existence within a capitalist system is very much akin to Arendt’s animal laborans. In other words, the methods of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, no matter how alien to human flourishing they may have been in the historical moment—are not only those that must be taken in the most direct path to communism but also those that are praised by Marx for how successful they are in the development of human capacities. If this is the case, then it would seem that the means, that is, the reduction of individuals to animal laborans, may well have been justified by the ends foreseen in the revolutionary plan.
For Arendt’s second pillar, “violence is the midwife of history,” she is first and foremost making the claim that Marx understands all history and thus also all political action, including speech, in terms of fabrication.4 Since making is always itself violent, it follows that in one way or another all political action will either be violent or be interpreted from within the context of violence. In other words, the political process proceeds in one of two ways: through fabrication or through the explicit violence of revolution.
While not attributing terror, the second necessary condition for the possibility of totalitarian domination, as a foregone or necessary conclusion to Marx, the violent and ends-driven historically determinate process of Marxian politics leaves the door open for terror as a means to accomplish the end. Just as the fabricator of a shoe or desk can determine the process through which the goal is reached, political fabricators choose their tools and processes. Not only can the historical act be completed, since it is part of historical necessity, it must eventually be completed. For this reason, Arendt concludes, overt violence and even terror become acceptable tools of the makers of history since they are quite certain that they know what they are doing. The makers of history are not bound by what might be considered “usual” standards of acceptable action. “In Praise of Capital” returns to the scene.
Once again we see Arendt falling into a reading of Marx that is more rightly a reading of particular Marxisms. She clearly understood Marx to be far more nuanced on issues of violence than her most common assertions. We find her more precise reading of Marx in such places as On Revolution when she utilizes Marx’s understanding that violence was sometimes necessary, but always was to be a temporary solution to a specific problem. In other words, Arendt recognizes that violence was not at the center of Marx’s politics.
In Arendt’s third pillar, Feurbach’s eleventh thesis, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, however, to change it,” Arendt brings the first two pillars into relationship with philosophy. Arendt’s primary concern is the question of what happens when the philosopher brings philosophical idealism into the world as a guide for action. Denying Marx’s claims of having transformed Hegelian idealism into a materialism, she claims that Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s idealism is but another turning or reversal from within the tradition—one that we can find as far back as Plato when the philosopher turns his head in the cave and makes his way into the light of the sun. If this is what he had actually done, there would be no problem. However, rather than having turned Hegel on his head, Arendt reads Marx as having transformed Hegel’s backward-looking gaze into the past into a forward-looking gaze into the future. In so doing, Marx, says Arendt, claims to unlock the secrets of the future. In his move to a “material ideality,” that is, in taking his idea from worldly experience, he is able to assert that he can discover the very laws of the dialectic as it moves forward into the future. The result, for Arendt, is a determinate messianism wherein the future can be made in the predetermined image of the dialectical outcome.
In this third pillar, the one that is most aligned with her study of the tradition of Western political thought, Arendt gives us a glimpse into how and why her predominate reading of Marx was done in terms of how his work was able to be used by a totalitarian regime. As Arendt works through the progression of the tradition of Western political thought beginning with Plato’s retreat from the realm of worldly affairs and ending with Marx bringing philosophy back into that world, she reads Marx, with his scientific understanding of history and politics, as trying to establish certainty in an uncertain world. We might think of it in this way: When Plato retreated from the world, he took thaumazein, the awe and wonder that is tied to that which is unknown, with him. When Marx returned, he left that thaumazein behind and replaced it with a scientific method for certainty in knowledge. Arendt wants us to be very clear on the fact that certainty, that is to say truth, cannot be imported into the human world without facing the danger that truth will become the weapon of true believers. It is no coincidence that in Arendt’s next project she develops some of her most significant contributions to political and philosophical thought: the analyses of plurality and natality.
Notes
1 I do not take up Marx’s influence on Arendt’s thinking in this chapter as much conjecture is needed due to her lack of attribution. However, it is clear that Marx influenced Arendt’s analyses of such things as superfluous persons and ideology in The Origins of Totalitarianism as well as alienation in The Human Condition, to name just several themes important to her work.
2 “Ideology and Terror” was written during the first year of Arendt’s work on Marx and added to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism.
3 Never completed as a project unto itself, substantial portions of Arendt’s writings on Marx generated during this time were published in the form of freestanding essays (e.g., “Tradition and the Modern Age”), appended to other works (“Ideology and Terror” was added to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism), or are found as sections of larger projects (e.g., sections of On Revolution).
4 Note here how Arendt falls into a contradiction of claiming on the one hand that Marx reduces all of humanity to animal laborans, and on the other hand also claims that he defines humans as homo faber. In chapter four of The Human Condition, “Work,” we also find that Arendt implicates capitalism rather than Marx in reducing humans to animal laborans. Statements such as these support the idea that Arendt’s reading of Marx and animal laborans is not merely due to misunderstanding, but is rather a strategic reading of Marx.