Reply to John Lewis
(Self-Criticism)

I.

I want to thank Marxism Today for having published John Lewis’s article about the books I have written on Marxist philosophy: For Marx and Reading Capital, which appeared in France in 1965. He took care to treat me in a special way, in the way a medical specialist treats a patient. The whole family, as it were, together with his silent colleagues, stood motionless at the bedside, while Dr John Lewis leaned over to examine ‘the Althusser case’.¹ A long wait. Then he made his diagnosis: the patient is suffering from an attack of severe ‘dogmatism’ – a ‘mediaeval’ variety. The prognosis is grave: the patient cannot last long.

It is an honour for this attention to be paid to me. But it is also an opportunity for me to clear up certain matters, twelve years after the event. For my first article [reprinted in For Marx], which was concerned with the question of the ‘young Marx’, actually appeared in 1960, and I am writing in 1972.

A good deal of water has flowed under the bridge of history since 1960. The Workers’ Movement has lived through many important events: the heroic and victorious resistance of the Vietnamese people against the most powerful imperialism in the world; the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (1966-69); the greatest workers’ strike in world history (ten million workers on strike for a month) in May 1968 in France – a strike which was ‘preceded’ and ‘accompanied’ by a deep ideological revolt among French students and petty-bourgeois intellectuals; the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the other countries of the Warsaw Pact; the war in Ireland, etc. The Cultural Revolution, May 1968 and the occupation of Czechoslovakia have had political and ideological repercussions in the whole of the capitalist world.

With hindsight one can judge things better. Lenin used to say: the criterion of practice is only really valid if it bears on a ‘process’ which is of some length. With the help of the ‘practical test’ of the twelve, ten or even seven years which have passed since the original articles were written, one can look back and see more clearly whether one was right or wrong. It is really an excellent opportunity.

Just one small point in this connexion. John Lewis, in his article, never for one moment talks about this political history of the Workers’ Movement. In For Marx – that is, in 1965 – I was already writing about Stalin, about the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and about the split in the International Communist Movement. John Lewis, on the other hand, writes as if Stalin had never existed, as if the Twentieth Congress and the split in the International Communist Movement had never occurred, as if May 1968 had never taken place, nor the occupation of Czechoslovakia, nor the war in Ireland. John Lewis is a pure spirit; he prefers not to talk about such concrete things as politics.

When he talks about philosophy, he talks about philosophy. Just that. Full stop. It has to be said that this is precisely what the majority of so-called philosophy teachers do in our bourgeois society. The last thing they want to talk about is politics! They would rather talk about philosophy. Full stop. That is just why Lenin, quoting Dietzgen, called them ‘graduated flunkies’ of the bourgeois state. What a wretched sight they make! For all the great philosophers in history, since the time of Plato, even the great bourgeois philosophers – not only the materialists but even idealists like Hegel – have talked about politics. They more or less recognized that to do philosophy was to do politics in the field of theory. And they had the courage to do their politics openly, to talk about politics.

Heaven be thanked, John Lewis has changed all that. John Lewis is a Marxist and we are in 1972. He does not feel the need to talk about politics. Let someone work that one out.

But to Marxism Today I must express my thanks for giving an important place to a discussion about philosophy. It is quite correct to give it this important place. The point has been made not only by Engels and of course by Lenin, but by Stalin himself! And, as we know, it has also been made by Gramsci and by Mao: the working class needs philosophy in the class struggle. It needs not only the Marxist science of history (historical materialism), but also Marxist philosophy (dialectical materialism). Why?

I should like to reply by using a formula. I will take the (personal) risk of putting it this way: the reason is that philosophy is, in the last instance,² class struggle in the field of theory.³

All this is, as John Lewis would say, perfectly ‘orthodox’. Engels, whom Lenin quotes on the point in What is to be Done?, wrote in 1874 in his Preface to The Peasant War that there are three forms of the class struggle. The class struggle has not only an economic form and a political form but also a theoretical form. Or, if you prefer: the same class struggle exists and must therefore be fought out by the proletariat in the economic field, in the political field and in the theoretical field, always under the leadership of its party. When it is fought out in the theoretical field, the concentrated class struggle is called philosophy.

Now some people will say that all this is nothing but words. But that is not true. These words are weapons in the class struggle in the field of theory, and since this is part of the class struggle as a whole, and since the highest form of the class struggle is the political class struggle, it follows that these words which are used in philosophy are weapons in the political struggle.

Lenin wrote that ‘politics is economics in a concentrated form’. We can say: philosophy is, in the last instance,⁴ the theoretical concentrate of politics. This is a ‘schematic’ formula. No matter! It expresses its meaning quite well, and briefly.

Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics: in the political class struggle.

We will show in a moment why that is so.

Of course, since I cite Engels and Lenin in support of my point, John Lewis will surely say, once again, that I am talking like ‘the last champion of an orthodoxy in grave difficulties’.⁵ O.K.! I am the defender of orthodoxy, of that ‘orthodoxy’ which is called the theory of Marx and Lenin. Is this orthodoxy in ‘grave difficulties’? Yes, it is and has been since it came to birth. And these grave difficulties are the difficulties posed by the threat of bourgeois ideology. John Lewis will say that I am ‘crying in the wilderness’. Is that so? No, it is not!

For Communists, when they are Marxists, and Marxists when they are Communists, never cry in the wilderness. Even when they are practically alone.

Why? We shall see.

I therefore take my stand on this theoretical basis of Marxism–a basis which is ‘orthodox’ precisely in so far as it is in conformity with the theory of Marx and Lenin. And it is on this basis that I want to take issue both with John Lewis and with my own past errors, on the basis of the need to carry on the class struggle in the field of theory, as Engels and Lenin argued, and on the basis of the definition of philosophy which I am now proposing (in June, 1972): philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.

I will therefore leave aside all the rather imprudent remarks, some of them ‘psychological’, which John Lewis thought it worth making at the end of his article, about Althusser’s ‘whole style of life and writing’. John Lewis is for example very worried, very put out, quite upset – good ‘humanist’ that he is – by the fact that Althusser ‘argues exhaustively and with an extreme dogmatism’, in a way which makes him think not so much of the Scholastics, who were great philosophers of the Middle Ages, but of the schoolmen, commentators of commentators, erudite splitters of philosophical hairs, who could not rise above the level of quotation. Thank you! But really, this kind of argument has no place in a debate between Communists in the journal of a Communist Party. I will not follow John Lewis onto this ground.

I approach John Lewis as a comrade, as a militant of a fraternal party: the Communist Party of Great Britain.

I will try to speak plainly and clearly, in a way that can be understood by all our comrades.

So as not to make my reply too long, I will only take up those theoretical questions which are most important, politically speaking, for us today, in 1972.

II.

To understand my reply, the reader must obviously know what John Lewis, in his ‘radical’ critique of my ‘philosophical writings’, essentially holds against me.

In a few words, we can sum this up as follows. John Lewis holds:

1. that I do not understand Marx’s philosophy;

2. that I do not understand the history of the formation of Marx’s thought.

In short, his reproach is that I do not understand Marxist theory.

That is his right.

I will consider these two points in succession.

III.

First Point: Althusser does not understand Marx’s philosophy.

To demonstrate this point, John Lewis employs a very simple method. First he sets out Marx’s real philosophy, which is Marx as he understands him. Then, beside this, he puts Althusser’s interpretation. You just have to compare them, it seems, to see the difference!

Well, let us follow our guide to Marxist philosophy and see how John Lewis sums up his own view of Marx. He does it in three formulae, which I will call three Theses.⁶

1. Thesis no. 1. ‘It is man who makes history’. John Lewis’s argument: no need of argument, since it is obvious, it is quite evident, everyone knows it. John Lewis’s example: revolution. It is man who makes revolution.

2. Thesis no. 2. ‘Man makes history by remaking existing history, by “transcending”, through the “negation of the negation”, already made history.’

John Lewis’s argument: since it is man who makes history, it follows that in order to make history man must transform the history which he has already made (since it is man who has made history). To transform what one has already made is to ‘transcend’ it, to negate what exists. And since what exists is the history which man has already made, it is already negated history. To make history is therefore ‘to negate the negation’, and so on without end.

John Lewis’s example: revolution. To make revolution, man ‘transcends’ (‘negates’) existing history, itself the ‘negation’ of the history which preceded it, etc.

3. Thesis no. 3. ‘Man only knows what he himself does.’ John Lewis’s argument. no argument, probably because of lack of space. So let us work one out for him. He could have taken the case of science and said that the scientist ‘only knows what he himself does’ because he is the one who has to work out his proof, either by experment or by demonstration (mathematics).

John Lewis’s example: no example. So let us provide one. John Lewis could have taken history as an example: man’s knowledge of history comes from the fact that he is the one who makes it. This is like the Thesis of Giambattista Vico: verum factum.⁷

These then are the three Theses which sum up John Lewis’s idea of Marx’s philosophy:

Thesis no. 1: It is man who makes history.

Thesis no. 2: Man makes history by transcending history.

Thesis no. 3: Man only knows what he himself does.

This is all very simple. Everyone ‘understands’ the words involved: man, make, history, know. There is only one word which is a bit complicated, a ‘philosopher’s’ word: ‘transcendence’, or ‘negation of the negation’. But if he wanted to, John Lewis could say the same thing more simply. Instead of saying: man makes history, in transcending it, by the ‘negation of the negation’, he could say that man makes history by ‘transforming’ it, etc. Wouldn’t that be more simple?

But a little difficulty still remains. When John Lewis says that it is man who makes history, everyone understands. Or rather, everyone thinks he understands. But when it is a question of going a bit further in the explanation, when John Lewis honestly asks himself the question: ‘what is it that man does when he makes history?’, then you realize that a nasty problem appears just when everything seemed simple, that there is a nasty obscurity just in the place where everything seemed clear.

What was obscure? The little word make, in the Thesis that ‘it is man who makes history’. What can this little word make possibly mean, when we are talking about history? Because when you say: ‘I made a mistake’ or ‘I made a trip around the world’, or when a carpenter says: ‘I made a table’, etc., everyone knows what the term ‘make’ means. The sense of the word changes according to the expression, but in each case we can easily explain what it means.

For example, when a carpenter ‘makes’ a table, that means he constructs it. But to make history? What can that mean? And the man who makes history, do you know that individual, that ‘species of individual’, as Hegel used to say?

So John Lewis sets to work. He does not try to avoid the problem: he confronts it. And he explains the thing. He tells us: to ‘make’, in the case of history, that means to ‘transcend’ (negation of the negation), that means to transform the raw material of existing history by going beyond it. So far, so good.

But the carpenter who ‘makes’ a table, he has a piece of ‘raw material’ in front of him too: the wood. And he transforms the wood into a table. But John Lewis would never say that the carpenter ‘transcends’ the wood in order to ‘make’ a table out of it. And he is right. For if he said that, the first carpenter who came along, and all the other carpenters and all the other working people in the world would send him packing with his ‘transcendence’. John Lewis uses the term ‘transcendence’ (negation of the negation) only for history. Why? We have to work out the answer, for John Lewis himself does not provide any explanation.

In my opinion, John Lewis holds on to his ‘transcendence’ for the following reason: because the raw material of history is already history. The carpenter’s raw material is wood. But the carpenter who ‘makes’ the table would never say that he was the one who ‘made’ the wood, because he knows very well that it is nature which produces the wood. Before a tree can be cut up and sold as planks, it first has to have grown somewhere in the forest, whether in the same country or thousands of miles away on the other side of the equator.

Now, for John Lewis it is man who has made the history with which he makes history. In history man produces everything: the result, the product of his ‘labour’, is history: but so is the raw material that he transforms. Aristotle said that man is a two-legged, reasoning, speaking, political animal. Franklin, quoted by Marx in Capital, said that man is a ‘tool-making’ animal. John Lewis says that man is not only a tool-making animal, but an animal which makes history, in the strong sense, because he makes everything. He ‘makes’ the raw material. He makes the instruments of production. (John Lewis says nothing about these – and for good reason! Because otherwise he would have to talk about the class struggle, and his ‘man who makes history’ would disappear in one flash, together with his whole system.) And he makes the final product: history.

Do you know of any being under the sun endowed with such a power? Yes – there does exist such a being in the tradition of human culture: God. Only God ‘makes’ the raw material with which he ‘makes’ the world. But there is a very important difference. John Lewis’s God is not outside of the world: the man-god who creates history is not outside of history – he is inside. This is something infinitely more complicated! And it is just because John Lewis’s little human god – man – is inside history (‘en situation’, as Jean-Paul Sartre used to say) that Lewis does not endow him with a power of absolute creation (when ones creates everything it is relatively easy: there are no limitations!) but with something even more stupefying – the power of ‘transcendence’, of being able to progress by indefinitely negating-superseding the constraints of the history in which he lives, the power to transcend history by human liberty.⁸

John Lewis’s man is a little lay god. Like every living being he is ‘up to his neck’ in reality, but endowed with the prodigious power of being able at any moment to step outside of that reality, of being able to change its character. A little Sartrian god, always ‘en situation’ in history, endowed with the amazing power of ‘transcending’ every situation, of resolving all the difficulties which history presents, and of going forward towards the golden future of the human, socialist revolution: man is an essentially revolutionary animal because he is a free animal.

Please excuse all this if you are not a philosopher. We philosophers are well acquainted with this kind of argument. And we Communist philosophers know that this old tune in philosophy has always had its politicla consequences.

The first people who talked about ‘transcendence’ in philosophy were the idealist-religious philosophers of Plato’s school: the Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophers. They had an urgent need of the category of ‘transcendence’ in order to be able to construct their philosophical or religious theology, and this theology was then the official philosophy of the slave state. Later, in the Middle Ages, the Augustinian and Thomist theologians took up the same category again and used it in systems whose function was to serve the interests of the Church and feudal state. (The Church is a State Apparatus, and the number one Ideological State Apparatus of the feudal state.) Is there any need to say more?

Much later, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the notion of ‘transcendence’ received, in Hegelian philosophy, a new function: the same category, but ‘wrapped’ in the veil of the ‘negation of the negation’. This time is served the bourgeois state. It was quite simply the philosophical name for bourgeois liberty. It was then revolutionary in relation to the philosophical systems of feudal ‘transcendence’. But it was one hundred per cent bourgeois, and it stays that way.

Since that time, Jean-Paul Sartre has taken up the same idea once more, in his theory of man ‘en situation’: the petty-bourgeois version of bourgeois liberty. And this is to cite only one example, for Sartre is not alone – ‘transcendence’, in its authoritarian or eschatological form, is still flourishing today among large numbers of theologians, some reactionary, some very progressive, from Germany and Holland to Spain and Latin America. The bourgeois no longer has the same need to believe – and anyway has for the thirty years since 1940 no longer been able to believe – that his liberty is all-embracing. But the petty-bourgeois intellectual: he is quite a different kind of animal! The more his liberty is crushed and denied by the development of imperialist capitalism, the more he exalts the power of that liberty (‘tanscendence’, ‘negation of the negation’). An isolated petty-bourgeois can protest: he does not get very far. When the petty-bourgeois masses revolt, however, they get much further. But their revolt is still limited by the objective conditions of the class struggle, whether it is helped or hindered by them. It is here that petty-bourgeois liberty meets necessity.

John Lewis now, in 1972, takes up the old arguments in his turn, in the theoretical journal of the British Communist Party. He can, if I may say so, rest assured: he is not ‘crying in the wilderness’! He is not the only person to take up this theme. He is in the company of many Communists. Everyone knows that. But why should it be that since the nineteen-sixties many Communists have been resurrecting this worn-out philosophy of petty-bourgeois liberty, while still claiming to be Marxists?

We shall see.

IV.

But first, I shall follow the procedure used by John Lewis. I shall compare his ‘Marxist’ Theses with the Theses of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. And everyone will be able to compare and judge for himself.

I will go over the points in John Lewis’s order. That way things will be clearer. I am making an enormous concession to him by taking his order, because his order is idealist. But we will do him the favour.

To understand what follows, note that in the case of each Thesis (1,2,3) I begin by repeating Lewis’s Thesis and then state the Marxist-Leninist Thesis.

1. THESIS NO. 1

John Lewis: ‘It is man who makes history’.

Marxism-Leninism: ‘It is the masses which make history’.

What is this ‘man’ who ‘makes’ history? A mystery.⁹

What are the ‘masses’ which make history? In a class society they are the exploited masses, that is, the exploited social classes, social strata and social categories, grouped around the exploited class capable of uniting them in a movement against the dominant classes which hold state power.

The exploited class capable of doing this is not always the most exploited class, or the most wretched social ‘stratum’.

In Antiquity, for example, it was not the slaves (except in a few periods – Spartacus) who ‘made’ history in the strong, political sense of the term, but the most exploited classes among the ‘free’ men (at Rome, the urban or rural ‘plebs’).¹⁰

In the same way, under capitalism the ‘lumpenproletariat’, as Marx called it, groups together the most wretched of men, the ‘lazarus-layers of the working class’.¹¹ But it is around the proletariat (the class which is exploited in capitalist production) that you will find grouped the masses which ‘make history’, which are going to ‘make history’ – that is, who are going to make the revolution which will break out in the ‘weakest link’ of the world imperialist chain.

Against John Lewis’s Thesis – it is man who makes history – Marxism-Leninism has always opposed the Thesis: it is the masses which make history. The masses can be defined. In capitalism, the masses does not mean ‘the mass’ of aristocrats of the ‘intelligentsia’, or of the ideologists of fascism; it means the set of exploited classes, strata and categories grouped around the class which is exploited in large scale production, the only class which is capable of uniting them and directing their action against the bourgeois state: the proletariat. Compare this with Lewis’s Thesis.

2. THESIS NO. 2

John Lewis: ‘Man makes history by “transcending” history’. Marxism-Leninism: ‘The class struggle is the motor of history’ (Thesis of the Communist Manifesto, 1847).

Here things become extremely interesting. Because Marxism-Leninism blows up John Lewis’s whole philosophical system. How?

John Lewis said: it is man who makes history. To which Marxism-Leninism replied: it is the masses.

But if we said no more, if we went no further, we would give the impression that Marxism-Leninism gives a different reply to the same question. That question being: who makes history? This question therefore supposes that history is the result of the action of (what is done by) a subject (who)? For John Lewis, the subject is ‘man’. Does Marxism-Leninism propose a different subject, the masses?

Yes and no. When we started to sketch out a definition of the masses, when we talked about this idea of the masses, we saw that the whole thing was rather complicated. The masses are actually several social classes, social strata and social categories, grouped together in a way which is both complex and changing (the positions of the different classes and strata, and of the fractions of classes within classes, change in the course of the revolutionary process itself). And we are dealing with huge numbers: in France or Britain, for example, with tens of millions of people, in China with hundreds of millions! Let us do no more here than ask the simple question: can we still talk about a ‘subject’, identifiable by the unity of its ‘personality’? Compared with John Lewis’s subject, ‘man’, as simple and neat as you can imagine, the masses, considered as a subject, pose very exacting problems of identity and identification. You cannot hold such a ‘subject’ in your hand, you cannot point to it. A subject is a being about which we can say: ‘that’s it!’. How do we do that when the masses are supposed to be the ‘subject’; how can we say: ‘that’s it’?

It is precisely the Thesis of the Communist Manifesto – ‘the class struggle is the motor of history’ – that displaces the question, that brings the problem into the open, that shows us how to pose it properly and therefore how to solve it. It is the masses which ‘make’ history, but ‘it is the class struggle which is the motor of history’. To John Lewis’s question: ‘how does man make history?’, Marxism-Leninism replies by replacing his idealist philosophical categories with categories of a quite different kind.

The question is no longer posed in terms of ‘man’. That much we know. But in the proposition that ‘the class struggle is the motor of history’, the question of ‘making’ history is also eliminated. It is no longer a question of who makes history.

Marxism-Leninism tells us something quite different: that it is the class struggle (new concept) which is the motor (new concept) of history, it is the class struggle which moves history, which advances it: and brings about revolutions. This Thesis is of very great importance, because it puts the class struggle in the front rank.

In the preceding Thesis: ‘it is the masses which make history’, the accent was put (1) on the exploited classes grouped around the class capable of uniting them, and (2) on their power to carry through a revolutionary transformation of history. It was therefore the masses which were put in the front rank.

In the Thesis taken from the Communist Manifesto, what is put in the front rank is no longer the exploited classes, etc., but the class struggle. This Thesis must be recognized as decisive for Marxism-Leninism. It draws a radical demarcation line between revolutionaries and reformists. Here I have to simplfy things very much, but I do not think that I am betraying the essential point.

For reformists (even if they call themselves Marxists) it is not the class struggle which is in the front rank: it is simply the classes. Let us take a simple example, and suppose that we are dealing with just two classes. For reformists these classes exist before the class struggle, a bit like two football teams exist, separately, before the match. Each class exists in its own camp, lives according to its particular conditions of existence. One class may be exploiting another, but for reformism that is not the same thing as class struggle. One day the two classes come up against one another and come into conflict. It is only then that the class struggle begins. They begin a hand-to-hand battle, the battle becomes acute, and finally the exploited class defeats its enemy (that is revolution), or loses (that is counter-revolution). However you turn the thing around, you will always find the same idea here: the classes exist before the class struggle, independently of the class struggle. The class struggle only exists afterwards.¹²

Revolutionaries, on the other hand, consider that it is impossible to separate the classes from class struggle. The class struggle and the existence of classes are one and the same thing. In order for there to be classes in a ‘society’, the society has to be divided into classes: this division does not come later in the story; it is the exploitation of one class by another, it is therefore the class struggle, which constitutes the division into classes. For exploitation is already class struggle. You must therefore begin with the class struggle if you want to understand class division, the existence and nature of classes. The class struggle must be put in the front rank.

But that means that our Thesis 1 (it is the masses which make history) must be subordinated to Thesis 2 (the class struggle is the motor of history). That means that the revolutionary power of the masses comes precisely from the class struggle. And that means that it is not enough, if you want to understand what is happening in the world, just to look at the exploited classes. You also have to look at the exploiting classes. Better, you have to go beyond the football match idea, the idea of two antagonistic groups of classes, to examine the basis of the existence not only of classes but also of the antagonism between classes: that is, the class struggle. Absolute primacy of the class struggle (Marx, Lenin). Never forget the class struggle (Mao).

But beware of idealism! The class struggle does not go on in the air, or on something like a football pitch. It is rooted in the mode of production and exploitation in a given class society. You therefore have to consider the material basis of the class struggle, that is, the material existence of the class struggle. This, in the last instance, is the unity of the relations of production and the productive forces under the relations of production of a given mode of production, in a concrete historical social formation. This materiality, in the last instance, is at the same time the ‘base’ (Basis: Marx) of the class struggle, and its material existence; because exploitation takes place in production, and it is exploitation which is at the root of the antagonism between the classes and of the class struggle. It is this profound truth which Marxism-Leninism expresses in the well-known Thesis of class struggle in the infrastructure, in the ‘economy’, in class exploitation – and in the Thesis that all the forms of the class struggle are rooted in economic class struggle. It is on this condition that the revolutionary thesis of the primacy of the class struggle is a materialist one.

When that is clear, the question of the ‘subject’ of history disappears. History is an immense natural-human system in movement, and the motor of history is class struggle. History is a process, and a process without a subject.¹³ The question about how ‘man makes history’ disappears altogether. Marxist theory rejects it once and for all; it sends it back to its birthplace: bourgeois ideology.

And with it disappears the ‘necessity’ of the concept of ‘transcendence’ and of its subject, man.

That does not mean that Marxism-Leninism loses sight for one moment of real men. Quite the contrary! It is precisely in order to see them as they are and to free them from class exploitation that Marxism-Leninism brings about this revolution, getting rid of the bourgeois ideology of ‘man’ as the subject of history, getting rid of the fetishism of ‘man’.

Some people will be annoyed that I dare to speak about the fetishism of ‘man’. I mean those people who interpret Marx’s chapter in Capital on ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’ in a particular way, drawing two necessarily complementary idealist conclusions: the condemnation of ‘reification’¹⁴ and the exaltation of the person. (But the pair of notions person/thing is at the root of every bourgeois ideology! Social relations are however not, except for the law and for bourgeois legal ideology, ‘relations between persons’!). Yet it is the same mechanism of social illusion which is at work – when you start to think that a social relation is the natural quality, the natural attribute of a substance or a subject. Value is one example: this social relation ‘appears’ in bourgeois ideology as the natural quality, the natural attribute of the commodity or of money. The class struggle is another example: this social relation ‘appears’ in bourgeois ideology as the natural quality, the natural attribute of ‘man’ (liberty, transcendence). In both cases, the social relation is ‘conjured away’: the commodity or gold have natural value; ‘man’ is by nature free, by nature he makes history.

If John Lewis’s ‘man’ disappears, that does not mean that real men disappear. It simply means that, for Marxism-Leninism, they are something quite different from copies (multiplied at will) of the original bourgeois image of ‘man’, a free subject by nature. Have the warnings of Marx been heeded? ‘My analytical method does not start from man, but from the economically given social period’ (Notes on Adolph Wagner’s ‘Textbook’). ‘Society is not composed of individuals’ (Grundrisse).

One thing is certain: one cannot begin with man, because that would be to begin with a bourgeois idea of ‘man’, and because the idea of beginning with man, in other words the idea of an absolute point of departure (= of an ‘essence’) belongs to bourgeois philosophy. This idea of ‘man’ as a starting-point, an absolute point of departure, is the basis of all bourgeois ideology; it is the soul of the great Classical Political Economy itself. ‘Man’ is a myth¹⁵ of bourgeois ideology: Marxism-Leninism cannot start from ‘man’. It starts ‘from the economically given social period’; and, at the end of its analysis, when it ‘arrives’, it may find real men. These men are thus the point of arrival of an analysis which starts from the social relations of the existing mode of production, from class relations, and from the class struggle. These men are quite different men from the ‘man’ of bourgeois ideology.

‘Society is not composed of individuals’, says Marx. He is right: society is not a ‘combination’, an ‘addition’ of individuals. What constitutes society is the system of its social relations in which its individuals live, work and struggle. He is right: society is not made up of individuals in general, in the abstract, just so many copies of ‘man’. Because each society has its own individuals, historically and socially determined. The slave-individual is not the serf-individual nor the proletarian-individual, and the same goes for the individual of each corresponding ruling class. In the same way, we must say that even a class is not ‘composed’ of individuals in general: each class has its own individuals, fashioned in their individuality by their conditions of life, of work, of exploitation and of struggle – by the relations of the class struggle. In their mass, real men are what class conditions make of them. These conditions do not depend on bourgeois ‘human nature’: liberty. On the contrary: the liberties of men, including the forms and limits of these liberties, and including their will to struggle, depend on these conditions.

If the question of ‘man’ as ‘subject of history’ disappears, that does not mean that the question of political action disappears. Quite the contrary! This political action is actually given its strength by the critique of the bourgeois fetishism of ‘man’: it is forced to follow the conditions of the class struggle. For class struggle is not an individual struggle, but an organized mass struggle for the conquest and revolutionary transformation of state power and social relations. Nor does it mean that the question of the revolutionary party disappears – because without it the conquest of state power by the exploited masses, led by the proletariat, is impossible. But it does mean that the ‘role of the individual in history’, the existence, the nature, the practice and the objectives of the revolutionary party are not determined by the omnipotence of ‘transcendence’, that is, the liberty of ‘man’, but by quite different conditions: by the state of the class struggle, by the state of the labour movement, by the ideology of the labour movement (petty-bourgeois or proletarian), and by its relation to Marxist theory, by its mass line and by its mass work.

3. THESIS NO. 3

John Lewis: ‘Man only knows what he himself does’. Marxism-Leninism: ‘One can only know what exists’ (ce qui est).

I am deliberately putting these propositions into such direct opposition: so that everyone can see the difference.

For John Lewis, ‘man’ only knows what he ‘does’. For dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, one can only know what exists. This is the fundamental Thesis of materialism: ‘the primacy of being over thought!’.

This Thesis is at one and the same time a Thesis about existence, about materiality and about objectivity. It says that one can only know what exists; that the principle of all existence is materiality; and that all existence is objective, that is, ‘prior’ to the ‘subjectivity’ which knows it, and independent of that subjectivity.

One can only know what exists. This Thesis, difficult to understand, and easy to misrepresent, is the basis of all Marxist Theses about knowledge. Marx and Lenin never denied the ‘activity’ of thought, the work of scientific experiment, from the natural sciences to the science of history, whose ‘laboratory’ is the class struggle. Indeed, they insisted on this activity. They even, now and again, said and repeated that certain idealist philosophers (Hegel, for example) had understood this ‘activity’ better, though in ‘mystified’ forms, than certain non-dialectical materialist philosophers. This is where we get to the dialectical Theses of Marxist philosophy, But – and this is where it differs fundamentally from John Lewis – Marxism-Leninism has always subordinated the dialectical Theses to the materialist Theses. Take the famous Thesis of the primacy of practice over theory: it has no sense unless it is subordinated to the Thesis of the primacy of being over thought. Otherwise it falls into subjectivism, pragmatism and historicism. It is certainly thanks to practice (of which scientific practice is the most developed form) that one can know what exists: primacy of practice over theory. But in practice one only ever knows what exists: primacy of being over thought.

‘One can only know what exists.’ As far as nature is concerned, there ought not to be much problem: who could claim that ‘man’ had ‘made’ the natural world which he knows? Only idealists, or rather only that crazy species of idealists who attribute God’s omnipotence to man. Even idealists are not normally so stupid.

But what about history? We know that the Thesis: ‘it is man who makes history’ has, literally, no sense. Yet a trace of the illusion still remains in the idea that history is easier to understand than nature because it is completely ‘human’. That is Giambattista Vico’s idea.

Well, Marxism-Leninism is categorical on this point: history is as difficult to understand as nature. Or, rather, it is even more difficult to understand. Why? Because ‘the masses’ do not have the same direct practical relation with history as they have with nature (in productive work), because they are always separated from history by the illusion that they understand it. Each ruling exploiting class offers them ‘its own’ explanation of history, in the form of its ideology, which is dominant, which serves its class interests, cements its unity, and maintains the masses under its exploitation.

Look at the Middle Ages: the Church and its ideologists offered all its flock – that is to say, primarily the exploited masses, but also the feudal class and itself – a very simple and clear explanation of history. History is made by God, and obeys the laws, that is, the ends, of Providence. An explanation for the ‘masses’.

Look at the eighteenth century in France. The situation is different: the bourgeoisie is not yet in power, it is critical and revolutionary. And it offers everyone (without distinction of class! not only to the bourgeoisie and its allies, but also to the masses it exploits) a ‘clear’ explanation of history: history is moved by Reason, and it obeys the laws or follows the ends of Truth, Reason and Liberty, An explanation for the ‘masses’.

If history is difficult to explain scientifically, it is because between real history and men there is always a screen, a separation: a class ideology of history in which the human masses ‘spontaneously’ believe: because this ideology is pumped into them by the ruling or ascending class, and serves it in its exploitation. In the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie is already an exploiting class.

To succeed in piercing this ideological and idealist ‘smokescreen’ of the ruling classes, the special circumstances of the first half of the nineteenth century were required: the experience of the class struggles following the French Revolution (1789, 1830) and the first proletarian class struggles, plus English political economy, plus French socialism. The result of the conjuncture of all these circumstances was Marx’s discovery. He was the first to open up the ‘Continent of History’ to scientific knowledge.

But in history, as in nature, one can only know what exists. The fact that, in order to get to know what really does exist, an enormous amount of scientific work and gigantic practical struggles were necessary, does not disprove the point. One can only know what exists, even if this is changing, under the effect of the material dialectic of the class struggle, even if what exists is only known on condition that it is transformed.

But we must go further. You will notice that I said that the Marxist-Leninist Thesis is not ‘man can only know what exists’, but: ‘one can only know what exists’.¹⁶ Here too the term ‘man’ has disappeared. We are forced to say in this connexion that scientific history, like all history, is a process without a subject, and that scientific knowledge (even when it is the work of a particular individual scientist, etc.) is actually the historical result of a process which has no real subject or goal(s). That is how it is with Marxist science. It was Marx who ‘discovered’ it, but as the result of a dialectical process, combining German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism, the whole thing based on the struggles between the bourgeoisie and the working class. All Communists know that.

Scientists, in general, do not know it. But if they are prepared to, and if they have enough knowledge of the history of the sciences, Communists can help scientists (including natural scientists and mathematicians) to understand its truth. Because all scientific knowledge, in every field, really is the result of a process without any subject or goal(s). A startling Thesis, one which is doubtless difficult to understand. But it can give us ‘insights’ of a certain importance, not only into scientific work, but also into the political struggle.

V.

For all these philosophical Theses, these philosophical positions (Thesis = position) produce effects in the social practices. Among them, effects in political practice and scientific practice.

But we have to generalise: it is not only the philosophical Thesis which we have already discussed that produce these effects, but all philosophical Theses. Because if there is one idea which is popular today – even among some Marxists – it is the idea of philosophy as pure contemplation, pure disinterested speculation. Now this dominant idea is actually the very self-interested representation of idealism created by idealism itself. It is a mystification of idealism, necessary to idealism, to represent philosophy as purely speculative, as a pure revelation of Being, Origin and Meaning. Even speculative ideologies, even philosophies which content themselves with ‘interpreting the world’, are in fact active and practical: their (hidden) goal is to act on the world, on all the social practices, on their domains and their ‘hierarchy’ – even if only in order to ‘place them under a spell’, to sanctify or modify them, in order to preserve or reform ‘the existing state of things’ against social, political and ideological revolutions or the ideological repercussions of the great scientific discoveries. ‘Speculative’ philosophies have a political interest in making believe that they are disinterested or that they are only ‘moral’, and not really practical and political: this in order to gain their practical ends, in the shadow of the ruling power which they support with their arguments. Whether this strategy is ‘conscious’ and deliberate or ‘unconscious’ means little: we know that it is not consciousness which is the motor of history, even in philosophy.

You will remember the definition of philosophy which I proposed above. We can apply this definition to every philosophy: philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.

In philosophy is class struggle in theory, if it depends in the last instance on politics, then – as philosophy – it has political effects: in political practice, in the way in which ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ is made, in which ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ is made, in which the mass line is defined, and in which mass work is carried out. But if it is class struggle in the field of theory, then it has theoretical effects: in the sciences, and also within the field of the ideologies. If it is class struggle in the field of theory, it has effects on the union of theory and practice: on the way in which that union is conceived and realized. It therefore has effects, of course, not only in political practice and scientific practice, but also in every social practice,¹⁷ from the ‘struggle for production’ (Mao) to art, etc.¹⁸

But I cannot deal with everything here. I will just say that philosophy, as class struggle in the field of theory, has two main effects: in politics and in the sciences, in political practice and in scientific practice. Every Communist knows that, or ought to know it, because Marxism-Leninism has never ceased to repeat it and argue for it.

So let us now set out our schematic ‘proof’, by comparing John Lewis’s Theses with the Theses of Marxism-Leninism. That will allow us to show a little more clearly how philosophy ‘functions’.

John Lewis’s Thesis: ‘It is man who makes history’.

Thesis of Marxism-Leninism: ‘It is the masses which make history; the class struggle is the motor of history’.

Let us look at the effects of these Theses.

1. EFFECTS IN THE FIELD OF SCIENCE

When someone, in 1972, defends the idealist Thesis that ‘it is man who makes history’, what effect does that have as far as the science of history is concerned? More precisely: can one make use of it to produce scientific discoveries?

It is a very regrettable fact, no doubt, but it is in fact no use at all from this point of view. John Lewis himself does not get anything out of it which might help us to see how the class struggle works. You might say that he didn’t have the space in a single article. That is perhaps true. So let us turn to his (unavowed) Master, Jean-Paul Sartre, to the philosopher of ‘human liberty’, of man-projecting-himself-into-the-future (John Lewis’s transcendence), of man ‘en situation’ who ‘transcends’ his place in the world by the liberty of the ‘project’. This philosopher (who deserves the praise given by Marx to Rousseau: that he never compromised with the powers-that-be) has written two enormous books – Being and Nothingness (1939), and the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the latter devoted to proposing a philosophy for Marxism. More than two thousand pages. Now, what did Sartre get out of the Thesis: ‘it is man who makes history’?¹⁹ What did it contribute to the science of history? Did the ingenious developments of the Sartrian positions finally permit the production of a few pieces of scientific knowledge about the economy, the class struggle, the state, the proletariat, ideologies, etc. – knowledge which might help us to understand history, to act in history? We have, unfortunately, reason to doubt it.

But then someone is going to say: here is an example which proves just the opposite of your Thesis about the effects of philosophy, because, as you recognize, this ‘humanist’ philosophy has no effect at all on scientific knowledge. Sorry! I claim that Theses like those defended by John Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre really do have such an effect, even though it is a negative one: because they ‘prevent’ the development of existing scientific knowledge. Lenin said the same of the idealist philosophies of his own time. These Theses are an obstacle to the development of knowledge. Instead of helping it to progress, they hold it back. More precisely, they drag knowledge back to the state it was in before the scientific discoveries made by Marx and Lenin. They take us back to a pre-scientific ‘philosophy of history’.

It is not the first time that this has happened in the history of humanity. For example, half a century after Galileo – that is, half a century after physics had been founded as a science – there were still philosophers who defended Aristotelian ‘physics’! They attacked Galileo’s discoveries and wanted to drag knowledge of the natural world back to its pre-scientific Aristotelian state. There are no longer any Aristotelian ‘physicists’; but the same process can be observed in other fields. For example: there are anti-Freudian ‘psychologists’. And there are anti-Marxist philosophers of history, who carry on as if Marx had never existed, or had never founded a science. They may be personally honest. They may even, like Sartre, want to ‘help’ Marxism and psychoanalysis. But it is not their intentions that count. What count are the real effects of their philosphies in these sciences. The fact is that although he comes after Marx and Freud, Sartre is, paradoxically, in many respects a pre-Marxist and pre-Freudian ideologian from the philosophical point of view. Instead of helping to build on the scientific discoveries of Marx and Freud, he makes a spectacular appearance in the ranks of those whose work does more to hinder Marxist research than to help it.

That is how, in the end, philosophy ‘works’ in the sciences. Either it helps them to produce new scientific knowledge, or it tries to wipe out these advances and drag humanity back to a time when the sciences did not exist. Philosophy therefore works in the sciences in a progressive or retrogressive way. Strictly speaking, we should say that it tends to act in one way or another – for every philosophy is always contradictory.²⁰

You can see what is at stake. It is not enough to say that what John Lewis or Sartre says does not help us to produce any scientific knowledge of history. It is not even enough to argue that what they say represents an ‘epistemological obstacle’ (to use Bachelard’s term). We are forced to say that their Thesis produces or can produce effects which are extremely harmful to scientific knowledge, retrogressive effects, because instead of helping us, in 1972, to understand the great scientific treasure that we possess in the knowledge given us by Marx, and to develop it,²¹ it goes back to zero. It takes us back to the good old days of Descartes, or Kant and Fichte, of Hegel and Feuerbach, to the time before Marx’s discovery, before his ‘epistemological break’. This idealist Thesis mixes everything up, and thus it paralyses revolutionary philosophers, theoreticians and militants. It disarms them, because in effect it deprives them of an irreplaceable weapon: the objective knowledge of the conditions, mechanisms and forms of the class struggle.

If you now look at the Marxist-Leninist Theses – ‘it is the masses which make history’, ‘the class struggle is the motor of history’ – the contrast is striking. These Theses do not paralyse research: they are on the side of a scientific understanding of history. They do not wipe out the science of history founded by Marx – for these two philosophical Theses are at the same time proven propositions of the science of history, of historical materialism.²²

These Theses, then, take account of the existence of the science of history. But at the same time they help the working out of new concepts, of new scientific discoveries. For example, they lead us to define the masses which make history – in class terms. For example, they lead us to define the form of union between the classes which make up the masses. As far as the class struggle under capitalism is concerned, they put the question of taking state power, the long transition (to communism) and the proletariat in the forefront. For example, they cause us to conceive the unity of the class struggle and of class division, and all their consequences, in the material forms of exploitation and of the division and organization of labour, and therefore to study and come to understand these forms. For example, they lead us to define the proletariat as a class whose conditions of exploitation render it capable of directing the struggle of all the oppressed and exploited classes, and to understand the proletarian class struggle as a form of class struggle without precedent in history, inaugurating a ‘new practice of politics’,²³ which is the secret of many still enigmatic or evaded questions.

The theoretical consequences of these questions are obvious. They force us above all to break with the bourgeois – that is, the economist conception – of political economy (‘criticized’ as such by Marx in Capital), with the bourgeois conception of the state, of politics, of ideology, of culture, etc. They prepare the ground for new research and new discoveries, some of which might cause a few surprises.

On the one side, then, we have idealist philosophical Theses which have theoretically retrograde effects on the science of history. On the other side we have materialist philosophical Theses which have theoretically progressive effects in the existing fields of the Marxist science of history, and which can have revolutionary effects in those fields which have not yet been really grappled with by the science of history (for example in the history of the sciences, of art, of philosophy, etc.).

This is what is at stake as far as the class struggle in the theoretical field is concerned.

2. POLITICAL EFFECTS

I think that, as far as political effects are concerned, things are rather clear.

How could one carry on the class struggle on the basis of the philosophical Thesis: ‘it is man who makes history’? It might be said that this Thesis is useful in fighting against a certain conception of ‘History’: history in submission to the decisions of a Deity or to the Ends of Providence. But, speaking seriously, that is no longer the problem!

It might be said that this Thesis serves everyone, without distinction, whether he be a capitalist, a petty-bourgeois or a worker, because these are all ‘men’. But that is not true. It serves those whose interest it is to talk about ‘man’ and not about the masses, about ‘man’ and not about classes and the class struggle. It serves the bourgeoisie, above all; and it also serves the petty-bourgeoisie. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx wrote: ‘The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to [human] labour’.²⁴ Why? Because by making ‘men’ think that ‘labour is the source of all wealth and all culture’, the bourgeoisie can keep quiet about the power of ‘nature’, about the decisive importance of the natural, material conditions of human labour. And why does the bourgeoisie want to keep quiet about the natural-material conditions of labour? Because it controls them. The bourgeoisie knows what it is doing.

If the workers are told that ‘it is men who make history’, you do not have to be a great thinker to see that, sooner or later, that helps to disorient or disarm them. It tends to make them think that they are all-powerful as men, whereas in fact they are disarmed as workers in the face of the power which is really in command: that of the bourgeoisie, which controls the material conditions (the means of production) and the political conditions (the state) determining history. The humanist line turns the workers away from the class struggle, prevents them from making use of the only power they possess: that of their organization as a class and their class organizations (the trade unions, the party), by which they wage their class struggle.

On the one hand, therefore, we have a philosophical Thesis which, directly or indirectly, serves the political interests of the bourgeoisie, even inside the labour movement (that is called reformism), and even within ‘Marxist’ theory (that is called revisionism), with all the consequent political effects.

On the other hand we have Theses which directly help the working class to understand its role, its conditions of existence, of exploitation and of struggle, which help it to create organizations which will lead the struggle of all exploited people to seize state power from the bourgeoisie.

Need I say more?

None of this is affected by the fact that these bourgeois or petty-bourgeois Theses are defended, in 1972, by a militant of a Communist Party. Read chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto. You will see that in 1847 Marx distinguished three kinds of socialism: reactionary (feudal, petty-bourgeois, humanist²⁵) socialism, conservative or bourgeois socialism, and critical-utopian socialism and communism. You have the choice! Read the great polemical writings of Engels and Lenin about the influence of bourgeois ideology in the workers’ parties (reformism, revisionism). You have the choice!

What we want to know now is how, after so many solemn warnings and so many testing experiences, it is possible for a Communist – John Lewis – to present his ‘Theses’ as Marxist.

We shall see.

VI.

So as not to hold things up, I will be brief in dealing with John Lewis’s second reproach: that ‘Althusser’ does not understand anything of the history of the formation of Marx’s thought.

Here I must make my self-criticism, and give way to John Lewis on one precise point.

In my first essays, I suggested that after the ‘epistemological break’ of 1845 (after the discovery by which Marx founded the science of history) the philosophical categories of alienation and the negation of the negation (among others) disappear. John Lewis replies that this is not true. And he is right. You certainly do find these concepts (directly or indirectly) in the German Ideology, in the Grundrisse (two texts which Marx never published) and also, though more rarely (alienation) or much more rarely (negation of the negation: only one explicit appearance) in Capital.

On the other hand John Lewis would have a hard job finding these concepts in the Communist Manifesto, in the Poverty of Philosophy, in Wage Labour and Capital, in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme or in the Notes on Wagner’s Textbook. And this is to cite only some of Marx’s texts. As far as the political texts are concerned – and this of course is equally true of the texts of Lenin,²⁶ Gramsci or Mao – well, he can always try!

But in any case, formally speaking John Lewis is right. And so, even if his argument in fact depends on leaving aside all the texts which could bother him, I must reply.

Here, in a few words, is my reply.

1. If you look at the whole of Marx’s work, there is no doubt that there does exist a ‘break’ of some kind in 1845. Marx says so himself. But of course no one should be believed simply on his word, not even Marx. You have to judge on the evidence. Nevertheless, the whole work of Marx shows him to be right on this point. In 1845 Marx began to lay down the foundations of a science which did not exist before he came along: the science of history. And in order to do that he set out a number of new concepts which cannot be found anywhere in his humanist works of youth: mode of production, productive forces, relations of production, infrastructure-superstructure, ideologies, etc. No one can deny that.

If John Lewis still doubts the reality of this ‘break’, or rather – since the ‘break’ is only the effect – of this irruption of a new science in a still ‘ideological’ or pre-scientific universe, he should compare two judgements made by Marx on Feuerbach and Proudhon.

Feuerbach is described in the 1844 Manuscripts as a philosopher who has made extraordinary discoveries, who has discovered both the basis and the principle of the critique of political economy! But a year later, in the Theses on Feuerbach, and in the German Ideology, he is object of an all-out attack. After that he simply disappears.

Proudhon is described in the Holy Family (end of 1844) as someone who ‘does not simply write in the interest of the proletariat, but is himself a proletarian, a worker. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat.’²⁷ But in 1847, in the Poverty of Philosophy, he gets a hiding from which he will never recover. After that he simply disappears.

If, as John Lewis says, nothing really happened in 1845, and if everything that I have said about the ‘epistemological break’ is ‘a complete myth’, then I’ll be hung for it.

2. So something irreversible really does start in 1845: the ‘epistemological break’ is apoint of no return. Something begins which will have no end.²⁸ A ‘continuing break’, I wrote, the beginning of a long period of work, as in every other science. And although the way ahead is open, it is difficult and sometimes even dramatic, marked by events – theoretical events (additions, rectifications, corrections) – which concern the scientific knowledge of a particular object: the conditions, the mechanisms and the forms of the class struggle. In simpler terms, the science of history.

We can say, then, that this science does not emerge, ready-made, from Marx’s head. It merely has its beginning in 1845, and has not yet got rid of all its past – of all the ideological and philosophical prehistory out of which it has emerged. There is nothing astonishing in the fact that for some time it continues to contain ideological notions or philosophical categories which it will later get rid of.

We can also say: look at Marx’s texts, look at the birth and development of his scientific concepts, and – since John Lewis insists on talking about them – you will at the same time see the gradual disappearance of these two philosophical categories inherited from the past and still subsisting as remnants, known as alienation and the negation of the negation. Now in fact, the more we advance in time, the more these categories disappear. Capital speaks only once of the negation of the negation in explicit terms. It is true that Marx several times uses the term ‘alienation’. But all that disappears in Marx’s later texts and in Lenin. Completely.²⁹ We could therefore simply say: what is important is the tendency: and Marx’s scientific work does tend to get rid of these philosophical categories.

3. But this is not sufficient. And here is my self-criticism.

I was not attentive enough to the fact which John Lewis points out, that is, to the fact of the continuing presence of the said philosophical categories after the ‘epistemological break’. And that was because I identified the ‘epistemological (= scientific) break’ with Marx’s philosophical revolution. More precisely, I did not separate Marx’s philosophical revolution from the ‘epistemological break’, and I therefore talked about philosophy as if it were science, and quite logically wrote that in 1845 made a double break, scientific and philosophical.

That was a mistake. It is an example of the theoreticist (= rationalist-speculative) deviation which I denounced in the brief self-criticism contained in the Preface to the Italian edition of Reading Capital (1967), reproduced in the English edition.³⁰ Very schematically, this mistake consists in thinking that philosophy is a science, and that, like every science, it has: (1) an object; (2) a beginning (the ‘epistemological break’ occurs at the moment when it looms up in the pre-scientific, ideological cultural universe); and (3) a history (comparable to the history of a science). This theoreticist error found its clearest and purest expression in my formula: Philosophy is ‘Theory of theoretical practice’.³¹

Since that time, I have begun to ‘put things right’. In a philosophy course for scientists, dating from 1967, and then in Lenin and Philosophy (February 1968), I put forward other propositions:

1. Philosophy is not (a) science.

2. Philosophy has no object, in the sense in which a science has an object.

3. Philosophy has no history, in the sense in which a science has a history.

4. Philosophy is politics in the field of theory.

What are the consequences.?

1. It is impossible to reduce philosophy to science, and it is impossible to reduce Marx’s philosophical revolution to the ‘epistemological break’.

2. Marx’s philosophical revolution preceded Marx’s ‘epistemological break’. It made the break possible.

One can of course put forward serious arguments to the effect that there is a sense in which philosophy, as Hegel said, and as I repeated in Lenin and Philosophy, always ‘lags behind’ science or the sciences. But from another point of view, which is important here, one has to say the opposite, and argue that in the history of Marx’s thought the scientific breakthrough is based on the philosophical revolution, which gives the breakthrough its form: that of a revolutionary science.

In the case of other sciences, we often lack evidence and proof of what happened. But in the case of Marx, we are able to say that while both the philosophical revolution and the epistemological break take place ‘at the same time’, the scientific break is based on the philosophical revolution.

In practical terms, that means the following. The young Marx, born of a good bourgeois family in the Rhineland, entered public life as editor of a liberal newspaper of the same land. That was in 1841. A young and brilliant intellectual, he was, within three or four years, to undergo an astonishing evolution in politics. He was to pass from radical bourgeois liberalism (1841-42) to petty-bourgeois communism (1843-44), then to proletarian communism (1844-45). These are incontestable facts. But parallel to this political evolution you can observe an evolution in philosophy. In philosophy, over the same period, the young Marx was to pass from a position of subjective neo-Hegelianism (of a Kant-Fichte type) to theoretical humanism (Feuerbach), before rejecting this to pass over to a philosophy which would no longer merely ‘interpret’ the world: a completely new, materialist-revolutionary philosophy.

If you now compare Marx’s political evolution with his philosophical evolution, you will see:

1. that his philosophical evolution is based on his political evolution; and

2. that his scientific discovery (the ‘break’) is based on his philosophical evolution.

That means, in practice, that it is because the young Marx had ‘settled accounts’ with his previous philosophical consciousness (1845), because he had finally abandoned his bourgeois liberal and petty-bourgeois revolutionary positions to adopt (even if only in principle, at a moment when he was letting go the ropes) new revolutionary-proletarian class positions in theory, it was because of all this that he was able to lay down the foundations of the scientific theory of history as history of the class struggle. In principle: because the process of recognizing and occupying these new positions in theory needed time. Time, in a ceaseless struggle to contain the pressure of bourgeois philosophy.

4. On the basis of these points it should be possible to account for the intermittent survival of categories like those of alienation and of the negation of the negation. Note that I talk about intermittent survival. For alongside their tendency to disappear in Marx’s work, considered as a whole, there is a strange phenomenon which must be accounted for: their total disappearance in certain works, then their subsequent reappearance. For example, the two categories in question are absent from the Communist Manifesto as well as from the Poverty of Philosophy (published by Marx in 1847). They seem to be hidden in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (which he published in 1859). But there are many references to alienation in the Grundrisse (preparatory notes made by Marx in the years 1857-58, and which he did not publish). We know because of a letter sent to Engels, that Marx had ‘by chance’ re-read Hegel’s Logic in 1858 and had been fascinated by it. In Capital (1867) alienation comes up again, but much more rarely, and the negation of the negation appears just once. And so on.³²

However that might be, and without anticipating other studies which must be made if the contradictory dialectic of Marx’s development and the elaboration of his work is to be understood, one fact is clear. The Marxist science of history did not progress in a simple straight line, according to the classic rationalist scheme, without problems or internal conflicts, and under its own power, from the moment of the ‘point of no return’ – the ‘epistemological break’. There certainly is a ‘point of no return’, but in order not to be forced to retreat, it is necessary to advance – and to advance, how many difficulties and struggles there are! For if it is true that Marx had to pass over to proletarian class positions in theory in order to found the science of history, he did not make that leap all at once, once and for all, for ever. It was necessary to work out these positions, to take them up over and against the enemy. The philosophical battle continued within Marx himself, in his work: around the principles and concepts of the new revolutionary science, which was one of the stakes of the battle. Marxist science only gained its ground little by little, in theoretical struggle (class struggle in theory), in close and constant relation to the class struggle in the wider sense. This struggle lasted all of Marx’s life. It continued after his death, in the labour movement, and it is still going on today. A struggle without an end.

It is therefore possible to understand, at least in principle, the partial disappearance and reappearance of certain categories in Marx’s work as indicative of survivals of old ideas or attempts to work out new ones, of advances and retreats in the long dual struggle to take up class positions in theoretical work and to found the science of history.

When I said that it was the ‘epistemological break’ which was primary, and when I said that it was at the same time a philosophical ‘break’, I therefore made two mistakes. In the case of Marx it is the philosophical revolution which is primary – and this revolution is not a ‘break’. The theoretical terminology itself is important here: if one can legitimately keep the term ‘break’ to denote the beginning of the science of history, the clear effect of its irruption in the cultural universe, the point of no return, one cannot employ the same term in talking about philosophy. In the history of philosophy, as in very long periods of the class struggle, one cannot really talk about a point of no return. So I shall use the term: philosophical ‘revolution’ (in the strong sense in Marx’s case). This expression is more correct: for – to evoke once again the experiences and terms of the class struggle – we all know that a revolution is always open to attacks, to retreats and reverses, and even to the risk of counter-revolution.

Nothing in philosophy is radically new, for the old Theses, taken up again in new form, survive and return in a new philosophy. Nor is anything ever settled definitively: there is always the struggle of antagonistic tendencies, there are always ‘come-backs’, and the oldest philosophies are always ready to mount an offensive disguised in modern – even the most revolutionary – trappings. Why?

Because philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory. Because the revolutionary classes are always opposed by the old conservative and reactionary ruling classes, who will never give up their ambition for revenge, even when they no longer hold state power. According to the state of affairs, these classes will either defend their power or, if they have lost power, they will try to regain it, using among other things the arguments of such-and-such a philosophy: that which serves them best politically and ideologically, even if it comes out of the depths of history. It only has to be done up a bit and given a modern coat of paint. Philosophical Theses, in the end, have ‘no age’. That is the sense in which I took up Marx’s comment in the German Ideology that ‘philosophy has no history’.

In practice, when the state of the class struggle enables it to put on enough pressure, bourgeois ideology can penetrate Marxism itself. The class struggle in the field of theory is not just a phrase: it is a reality, a terrible reality. Without understanding that, it is impossible to understand either the dramatic history of the formation of Marx’s thought or the ‘grave difficulties’ which even today, in 1972, weigh on the ‘orthodoxy’ defended by a certain number of Communists.

The dramatic history of Marx and of his thought can be reduced, if we follow John Lewis, to a peaceful and problem-free university career! A certain Marx appears on the literary and philosophical scene. Quite naturally, he begins to talk about politics in the Communist Manifesto, then about economics in Capital. He founds and directs the First International, opposes the insurrection in Paris, then in the space of two months, takes a firm stand on the side of the Paris Commune. He wages a battle to the death against the anarchists and followers of Proudhon, etc., etc. All this without the hint of a problem, of a drama, aside from all the assaults of the struggle, with no regard to the difficulties, the questions, all the torments of the search for ‘truth’ in that struggle itself. Like a good bourgeois intellectual, as well installed in his thought as he is in the comfort of his existence, Marx, in this view, always thought the same thing, without any revolution or ‘break’ in his thinking: he always taught that ‘man makes history’, by the ‘negation of the negation’, etc. I think I am justified in saying here that only someone who has no experience of the class struggle, including class struggle in the field of theory – or even simply of the way in which scientific research is done – could argue such nonsense, and thus insult the life and sufferings not only of Marx himself but of all Communists (and also of all those scientists who succeed in finding something out). Now, not only did Marx ‘find something out’ (and at what risk, and of what importance!), but he was also a leader of the labour movement for thirty-five years. He always did his thinking and his ‘investigating’ in and through the struggle.

The whole history of the labour movement is marked by endless crises, dramas and struggles. There is no need for me to go over them here. But as far as philosophy is concerned, we ought at least to mention the great struggles of Engels and Lenin against the intervention of the idealism of Dühring and of Bernstein, both of them declared neo-Kantians and humanists, whose theoretical revisionism covered their political reformism and political revisionism.

John Lewis would do well to re-read the first pages of What is to be Done? In this text a petty-bourgeois intellectual named Lenin is defending Marx’s ‘orthodoxy’, which is ‘in grave difficulties’. With ‘extreme dogmatism’ (I use Lewis’s terms). Yes, Lenin declared himself proud to be attacked as a ‘dogmatist’ by the international coalition of ‘critical’ revisionists, with the ‘English Fabians’ and ‘French Ministerialists’ at their head! (I am quoting Lenin.) Yes, Lenin declared himself proud to defend this old problem-ridden ‘orthodoxy’, the orthodoxy of Marx’s teaching. Yes, he thought it was ‘in grave difficulties’. The cause: reformism and revisionism!

Some Communists today, are thinking and doing the same. There certainly are not too many of them.

That is how things are. Why? We shall see.

VII.

We have to answer two questions.

1. Why are there Communists like John Lewis (and there are quite a lot of them) who, in 1972, can openly argue in Communist journals for a philosophy which they call Marxist, but which is in fact simply a variant of bourgeois idealism?

2. Why are the Communist philosophers who defend Marx’s philosophy so few in number?

To answer these two questions, which are really one and the same, we must – all apologies to John Lewis – briefly enter the field of political history.

I have made the basic points in For Marx. But John Lewis does not seem to have read the political pages of For Marx. John Lewis is a pure spirit.

And yet I was rather clear in explaining that the articles collected in For Marx had to be considered as a philosophical intervention in a political and ideological conjuncture dominated by the Twentieth Congress and the ‘split’ in the International Communist Movement.³³ The fact that I was able to make such an intervention is a consequence of the Twentieth Congress.

Before the Twentieth Congress it was actually not possible for a Communist philosopher, certainly in France, to publish texts which would be (at least to some extent!) relevant to politics, which would be something other than a pragmatist commentary on consecrated formulae. That is the good side of the Twentieth Congress, for which we must be grateful. From that time on it was possible to publish such texts. The French Party, to take only one example, explicitly recognized (at the Argenteuil Central Committee meeting in 1966) the right of party members to carry out and publish their philosophical research.

But the ‘criticism of Stalin’s errors’ was formulated at the Twentieth Congress in terms such that there inevitably followed what we must call an unleashing of bourgeois ideological and philosophical themes within the Communist Parties themselves. This was the case above all among Communist intellectuals, but it also touched certain leaders and even certain leaderships. Why?

Because the ‘criticism of Stalin’s errors’ (some of which – and rather a lot – turned out to be crimes) was made in a non-Marxist way.

The Twentieth Congress criticized and denounced the ‘cult of personality’ (the cult in general, personality in general…) and summed up Stalin’s ‘errors’ in the concept of ‘violation of Socialist legality’. The Twentieth Congress therefore limited itself to denouncing certain facts about what went on in the legal superstructure, without relating them – as every Marxist analysis must do – firstly, to the rest of the Soviet superstructure (above all, the state and party), and secondly, to the infrastructure, namely the relations of production, class relations and the forms of the class struggle in the USSR.³⁴

Instead of relating the ‘violations of socialist legality’ to: 1. the state, plus the party, and: 2. the class struggle, the Twentieth Congress instead related them to … the ‘cult of personality’. That is, it related them to a concept which, as I pointed out in For Marx, cannot be ‘found’ in Marxist theory. I now venture to say that it can perfectly well be ‘found’ elsewhere: in bourgeois philosophy and psycho-sociological ideology.

If you take Communist philosophers and other Communist ‘intellectuals’ and set them officially on a bourgeois ideological and philosophical line, in order to ‘criticize’ a regime under which they (among others) have suffered deeply, you must not be surprised when the same Communist philosophers and intellectuals quite naturally take the road of bourgeois philosophy. It has been opened up right in front of them! You must not be surprised when they make up their own little bourgeois Marxist philosophy of the Rights of Man, exalting Man and his Rights, the first of which is liberty, whose reverse is alienation. It is quite natural for them to lean on Marx’s early works – that is what they are there for – and then on humanism in all its forms! Shall it be Garaudy’s socialist humanism, the pure humanism of John Lewis, the ‘true’ or ‘real’ socialism of others, or even (why not?) ‘scientific’ humanism itself? Between these different varieties of the philosophy of human liberty, each philosopher can of course freely take his choice! All that is perfectly normal.

Having said that, we must add that it is important not to mix things up which, politically speaking, ought not to be confused, things which are quite different from one another. The humanist reactions of western Communist theoreticians, and even of some from eastern Europe, are one thing. It would however be an extremely serious political mistake, for example, to claim to judge and condemn – on account of an adjective (‘human’) – something like the slogan ‘socialism with a human face’, a slogan under which the Czech masses let everyone know – even if the form was sometimes confused – about their class and national grievances and aspirations. It would be an extremely serious political mistake to confuse this national mass movement, this important historical fact, with the humanist pedantry of our western, sometimes Communist philosophers (or of such-and-such a philosopher of eastern Europe). There were intellectuals in the Czech national mass movement, but it was not a ‘movement of intellectuals’. What the Czech people wanted was socialism, and not humanism. It wanted a socialism whose face (not the body: the body does not figure in the formula) would not be disfigured by practices unworthy both of itself (the Czech people: a people of a high political culture) and of socialism. A socialism with a human face. The adjective is in the right place. The national mass movement of the Czech people, even if it is no longer to be heard of (and the struggle is nevertheless still going on) merits the respect and support of all Communists. Exactly as the ‘humanist’ philosophies of western intellectuals (at ease in their academic chairs or wherever), the philosphies of ‘Marxist humanism’, whether they are called ‘true’ or ‘scientific’, merit the criticism of all Communists.

It is for all the reasons outlined above, then, that there are cases like John Lewis in the western Communist Parties – and that there are rather a lot of them.

It is for the same reasons that, in these parties, there exists a certain number of Communist philosophers who are fighting against a certain current – and that there are rather few of them.

And it is for these reasons – directly political reasons – that I want to repeat my thanks to Marxism Today, journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, for accepting to publish my reply.

Paris, July 4 1972