This formula [‘process without a Subject’, ‘process without a Subject or Goal(s)’] has everything required to offend against the ‘evidence’ of common sense, that is (Gramsci) of the dominant ideology, and thus without any trouble at all to make some determined enemies.
For example, the objection will be raised that ‘the masses’ and ‘classes’ are, when all is said and done, ‘made up of’ men! And that, if Man (a category which is then simply declared to be… an ‘abstraction’, or, to add weight, a ‘speculative abstraction’) cannot be said to make history, at least men do so – concrete, living men, human subjects. In support of this idea Marx himself will be cited as witness, his testimony being the beginning of a little remark in the Eighteenth Brumaire: ‘Men make their own history…’ With the backing of evidence and quote, the conclusion is quickly drawn: history has ‘subjects’; these subjects are obviously ‘men’; ‘men’ are therefore, if not the Subject of history, at least the subjects of history …
This kind of reasoning unfortunately only stands up at the cost of confusions, sliding meanings and ideological word-games: on Man-men, Subject-subjects, etc.
Let us be careful, therefore, not to play with words, and let us look at the thing a bit closer.
In my opinion: men (plural), in the concrete sense, are necessarily subjects (plural) in history, because they act in history as subjects (plural). But there is no Subject (singular) of history. And I will go even further: ‘men’ are not ‘the subjects’ of history. Let me explain.
To understand these distinctions one must define the nature of the question at issue. The question of the constitution of individuals as historical subjects, active in history, has nothing in principle to do with the question of the ‘Subject of history’, or even with that of the ‘subjects of history’. The first question is of a scientific kind: it concerns historical materialism. The second question is of a philosophical kind: it concerns dialectical materialism.
First question: scientific.
That human, i.e. social individuals are active in history – as agents of the different social practices of the historical process of production and reproduction – that is a fact. But, considered as agents, human individuals are not ‘free’ and ‘constitutive’ subjects in the philosophical sense of these terms. They work in and through the determinations of the forms of historical existence of the social relations of production and reproduction (labour process, division and organization of labour, process of production and reproduction, class struggle, etc.). But that is not all. These agents can only be agents if they are subjects. This I think I showed in my article on ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. [See Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, London NLB, 1971] No human, i.e. social individual can be the agent of a practice if he does not have the form of a subject. The ‘subject-form’ is actually the form of historical existence of every individual, of every agent of social practices: because the social relations of production and reproduction necessarily comprise, as an integral part, what Lenin calls ‘(juridico-) ideological social relations’, which, in order to function, impose the subject-form on each agent-individual. The agent-individuals thus always act in the subject-form, as subjects. But the fact that they are necessarily subjects does not make the agents of social-historical practices into the subject or subjects of history (in the philosophical sense of the term: subject of). The subject-agents are only active in history through the determination of the relations of production and reproduction, and in their forms.
Second question: philosophical.
It is for precise ideological ends that bourgeois philosophy has taken the legal-ideological notion of the subject, made it into a philosophical category, its number one philosophical category, and posed the question of the Subject of knowledge (the ego of the cogito, the Kantian or Husserlian transcendental subject, etc.), of morality, etc., and of the Subject of history. This illusory question does of course have a purpose, but in its position and form it has no sense as far as dialectical materialism is concerned, which purely and simply rejects it, as it rejects (for example) the question of God’s existence. In advancing the Thesis of a ‘process without a Subject or Goal(s)’, I want simply but clearly to say this. To be dialectical-materialist, Marxist philosophy must break with the idealist category of the ‘Subject’ as Origin, Essence and Cause, responsible in its internality for all the determinations of the external ‘Object’,1 of which it is said to be the internal ‘Subject’. For Marxist philosophy there can be no Subject as an Absolute Centre, as a Radical Origin, as a Unique Cause. Nor can one, in order to get out of the problem, rely on a category like that of the ‘ex-Centration of the Essence’ (Lucien Sève), since it is an illusory compromise which – using a fraudulently ‘radical’ term, one whose root is perfectly conformist (ex-centration) – safeguards the umbilical cord between Essence and Centre and therefore remains a prisoner of idealist philosophy: since there is no Centre, every ex-centration is superfluous or a sham. In reality Marxist philosophy thinks in and according to quite different categories: determination in the last instance – which is quite different from the Origin, Essence or Cause unes – determination by Relations (idem), contradiction, process, ‘nodal points’ (Lenin), etc.: in short, in quite a different configuration and according to quite different categories from classical idealist philosophy.
Naturally, these philosophical categories do not only concern history.
But if we restrict ourselves to history (which is what concerns us here), the philosophical question presents itself in the following terms. There is no question of contesting the gains of historical materialism, which says that individuals are agent-subjects in history under the determination of the forms of existence of the relations of production and reproduction. It is a question of something quite different: of knowing whether history can be thought philosophically, in its modes of determination, according to the idealist category of the Subject. The position of dialectical materialism on this question seems quite clear to me. One cannot seize (begreifen: conceive), that is to say, think real history (the process of the reproduction of social formations and their revolutionary transformation) as if it could be reduced to an Origin, an Essence, or a Cause (even Man), which would be its Subject – a Subject, a ‘being’ or ‘essence’, held to be identifiable, that is to say existing in the form of the unity of an internality, and (theoretically and practically responsible identity, internality and responsibility are constitutive, among other things, of every subject), thus accountable, thus capable of accounting for the whole of the ‘phenomena’ of history.
The matter is quite clear when we are confronted with classical idealism, which, within the openly stated category of liberty, takes Man (= the Human Race = Humanity) to be the Subject and the Goal of history; cf the Enlightenment, and Kant, the ‘purest’ philosopher of bourgeois ideology. The matter is also clear when we are confronted with the philosophical petty-bourgeois communitarian anthropology of Feuerbach (still respected by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts), in which the Essence of Man is the Origin, Cause and Goal of history.
But the same position evidently takes on a more deceptive air in the post-Husserlian and pre-Kantian (Cartesian) phenomenological interpretations, like those of Sartre, where the Kantian Theses of the Transcendental Subject, unique because one, and of the Liberty of Humanity, are mixed up and ‘squashed together’, and where the Subject is multiplied within a theory of the originating Liberty of an infinity of ‘concrete’ transcendental subjects (Tran Duc Thao said, explaining Husserl: ‘We are all, you and I, each one of us, ‘transcendental egos’ and ‘transcendental equals’ [“egos” and “egaux”]’, which brings us back to the Thesis that ‘men’ (the concrete individuals) are the subjects (transcendental, constitutive) of history). This is the basis of Sartre’s special interest in a ‘little phrase’ from the Eighteenth Brumaire, and a similar phrase from Engels, which fit him like a glove. Now this position – which brings the Kantian categories down to the level, no longer of an anthropological philosophy (Feuerbach), but of a vulgar philosophical psycho-sociology – not only has nothing to do with Marxism, but actually constitutes a quite dubious theoretical position which it is practically impossible to conceive and to defend. You just have to read the Critique of Dialectical Reason, which announces an Ethics that never appeared, to be convinced of this point.
In proposing the category of the ‘process without a Subject or Goal(s)’, we thus draw a ‘demarcation line’ (Lenin) between dialectical-materialist positions and bourgeois or petty-bourgeois idealist positions. Naturally, one cannot expect everything from a first intervention. This ‘demarcation line’ must be ‘worked on’. But, as Lenin said for his part, a demarcation line – if it is correct – is in principle sufficient, just as it is, to defend us from idealism and to mark out the way forward.
These philosophical positions are of course not without their consequences. Not only, for example, do they imply that Marxism has nothing to do with the ‘anthropological question’ (‘What is man?’), or with a theory of the realization-objectification-alienation-disalienation of the Human Essence (as in Feuerbach and his heirs: theoreticians of philosophical reification and fetishism), or even with the theory of the ‘excentration of the Human Essence’, which only criticizes the idealism of the Subject from within the limits of the idealism of the Subject, dressed up with the attributes of the ‘ensemble of social relations’ of the sixth Thesis on Feuerbach – but they also allow us to understand the sense of Marx’s famous ‘little phrase’ in the Eighteenth Brumaire.
This comment, in its complete form, reads as follows: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it out of freely chosen elements (aus freien Stücken), under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances (Umstände) directly encountered (vorgefundene), given by and transmitted from the past.’ And – as if he had foreseen the exploitation of these first five words, and even these ‘circumstances’ from which Sartre draws out such dazzling effects of the ‘practico-inert’, that is, of liberty – Marx, in the Preface to the Eighteenth Brumaire, written seventeen years later (in 1869, two years after Capital), set down the following lines: ‘I show something quite different (different from the ideology of Hugo and of Proudhon, who both hold the individual Napoleon III to be the [detestable or glorious] cause ‘responsible’ for the coup d’état), namely how the class struggle (Marx’s emphasis) in France created the circumstances (Umstände) and the relations (Verhältnisse) which allowed (ermöglicht) a person (a subject) so mediocre and grotesque to play the role of a hero’.
One must read one’s authors closely. History really is a ‘process without a Subject or Goal(s)’, where the given circumstances in which ‘men’ act as subjects under the determination of social relations are the product of the class struggle. History therefore does not have a Subject, in the philosophical sense of the term, but a motor: that very class struggle.