The Georg Lukacs Internet Archive

Marxist Writers: Georg Lukacs

Georg Lukacs Archive

1885-1971Mental confusion is not always chaos. It may strengthen the internal contradictions forthe time being but in the long run it will lead to their resolution. Thus my ethics tendedin the direction of praxis, action and hence towards politics. And this led in turn toeconomics, and the need for a theoretical grounding there finally brought me to thephilosophy of Marxism. ... Only the Russian Revolution really opened a window to thefuture; the fall of Czarism brought a glimpse of it, and with the collapse of capitalismit appeared in full view. At the time our knowledge of the facts and the principlesunderlying them was of the slightest and very unreliable. Despite this we saw at last! atlast! a way for mankind to escape from war and capitalism.”.1967 Preface

Biography

from History & Class Consciousness

What is Orthodox Marxism? (March 1919)Class Consciousness (March 1920)Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat(1923)I: The Phenomenon of ReificationII: Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought Subject & Object In HegelIII: The Standpoint of the Proletariat

from The Young Hegel (1938)

Hegel's Economics, Frankfurt periodHegel's Economics, Jena period

from 1967

Preface to History & Class Consciousness

Further reading:

Marx on his relation to HegelEngels on Thing-in-ItselfLenin on Thing-in-Itself

The Georg Lukacs Internet Archive

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/index.htm (1 of 2) [11/06/2002 17:33:38]

ABC of Communism, Bukharin & Preobrazhensky, 1919Marxism & Philosophy, Karl Korsch, 1923What is Proletarian Culture?, Trotsky, 1923Dialectical & Historical Materialism, Stalin, 1938Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1960Marx's Theory of Alienation, Istvan Meszaros, 1970A Philosophical ‘Discussion’, Cyril Smith, 1998

Philosophy | Reference Writers

The Georg Lukacs Internet Archive

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/index.htm (2 of 2) [11/06/2002 17:33:38]

Georg Lukacsfrom History & Class Consciousness

Written: 1967Source: History & Class Consciousness.Publisher: Merlin Press, 1967Transcribed: Andy BlundenHTML Markup: Andy Blunden

Preface to the New Edition, 1967

IN an old autobiographical sketch (of 1933) I called the story of my early development My Road toMarx. The writings collected in this volume encompass my years of apprenticeship in Marxism. Inpublishing again the most important documents of this period (1918-1930) my intention is to emphasisetheir experimental nature and on no account to suggest that they have any topical importance in thecurrent controversies about the true nature of Marxism, In view of the great uncertainty prevailing withregard to its essential content and its methodological validity, it is necessary to state this quite firmly inthe interests of intellectual integrity. On the other hand, if both they and the contemporary situation arescrutinised critically these essays will still be found to have a certain documentary value in the presentdebates. Hence the writings assembled here do more than simply illuminate the stages of my personaldevelopment; they also show the path taken by intellectual events generally and as long as they areviewed critically they will not be lacking in significance for an understanding of the present situation.

Of course, I cannot possibly describe my attitude towards Marxism around 1918 without brieflymentioning my earlier development. As I emphasised in the sketch I have just referred to, I first readMarx while I was still at school. Later, around 1908 I made a study of Capital in order to lay asociological foundation for my monograph on modern drama. At the time, then, it was Marx the'sociologist' that attracted me and I saw him through spectacles tinged by Simmel and Max Weber. Iresumed my studies of Marx during World War I, but this time I was led to do so by my generalphilosophical interests and under the influence of Hegel rather than any contemporary thinkers. Ofcourse, even Hegel's effect upon me was highly ambiguous. For, on the one hand, Kierkegaard hadplayed a significant role in my early development and in the immediate pre-war years in Heidelberg Ieven planned an essay on his criticism of Hegel. On the other hand, the contradictions in my social andcritical views brought me intellectually into contact with Syndicalism and above all with the philosophyof Georges Sorel. I strove to go beyond bourgeois radicalism but found myself repelled bysocial-democratic theory (and especially Kautsky's version of it). My interest in Sorel was aroused byErvin Szabó, the spiritual mentor of the Hungarian left-wing opposition in Social Democracy. During thewar years I became acquainted with the works of Rosa Luxemburg. All this produced a highlycontradictory amalgam of theories that was decisive for my thought during the war and the first fewyears after it.

Preface to the New Edition of History and Class Consciousness

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs67.htm (1 of 18) [11/06/2002 17:33:40]

mailto:[email protected]


I think that I would be departing from the truth if I were to attempt to iron out the glaring contradictionsof that period by artificially constructing an organic development and fitting it into the correctpigeon-hole in the 'history of ideas'. If Faust could have two souls within his breast, why should not anormal person unite conflicting intellectual trends within himself when he finds himself changing fromone class to another in the middle of a world crisis ? In so far as I am able to recall those years, I, at least,find that my ideas hovered between the acquisition of Marxism and political activism on the one hand,and the constant intensification of my purely idealistic ethical preoccupations on the other.

I find this confirmed when I read the articles I wrote at the time. When I recall my none too numerousand none too important literary essays from that period I find that their aggressive and paradoxicalidealism often outdoes that of my earlier works. At the same time the process of assimilating Marxismwent on apace. If I now regard this disharmonious dualism as characteristic of my ideas at that period itis not my intention to paint it in black and white, as if the dynamics of the situation could be confinedwithin the limits of a struggle between revolutionary good and the vestigial evil of bourgeois thought.The transition from one class to the class directly opposed to it is a much more complex business thanthat. Looking back at it now I see that, for all its romantic anti-capitalistic overtones, the ethical idealismI took from Hegel made a number of real contributions to the picture of the world that emerged after thiscrisis. Of course, they had to be dislodged from their position of supremacy (or even equality) andmodified fundamentally before they could become part of a new, homogeneous outlook. Indeed, this isperhaps the moment to point out that even my intimate knowledge of capitalism became to a certainextent a positive element in the new synthesis. I have never succumbed to the error that I have oftennoticed in workers and petty-bourgeois intellectuals who despite everything could never free themselvesentirely from their awe of the capitalist world. The hatred and contempt I had felt for life undercapitalism ever since my childhood preserved me from this.

Mental confusion is not always chaos. It may strengthen the internal contradictions for the time being butin the long run it will lead to their resolution. Thus my ethics tended in the direction of praxis, action andhence towards politics. And this led in turn to economics, and the need for a theoretical grounding therefinally brought me to the philosophy of Marxism. Of course, all these developments took place slowlyand unevenly. But the direction I was taking began to become clear even during the war after theoutbreak of the Russian Revolution. The Theory of the Novel was written at a time when I was still in ageneral state of despair (see my Preface to the New Edition). It is no wonder, then, that the presentappeared in it as a Fichtean condition of total degradation and that any hopes of a way out seemed to be autopian mirage. Only the Russian Revolution really opened a window to the future; the fall of Czarismbrought a glimpse of it, and with the collapse of capitalism it appeared in full view. At the time ourknowledge of the facts and the principles underlying them was of the slightest and very unreliable.Despite this we saw at last! at last! a way for mankind to escape from war and capitalism. Of course,even when we recall this enthusiasm we must take care not to idealise the past. I myself — and I canspeak here only for myself — experienced a brief transitional phase: my last hesitations before makingmy final, irrevocable choice, were marked by a misguided attempt at an apologia fortified with abstractand Philistine arguments. But the final decision could not be resisted for ever. The little essay Tacticsand Ethics reveals its inner human motivations.

It is not necessary to waste many words on the few essays that were written at the time of the HungarianSoviet Republic and the period leading up to it. Intellectually we were unprepared and I was perhaps lessprepared than anyone — to come to grips with the tasks that confronted us. Our enthusiasm was a verymakeshift substitute for knowledge and experience. I need mention only one fact by way of illustration:



we knew hardly anything of Lenin's theory of revolution and of the vital advances he had made in thatarea of Marxism. Only a few articles and pamphlets had been translated and made available at that time,and of those who had taken part in the Russian Revolution some (like Szamuely) had little talent fortheory and others (like Bela Kun) were strongly influenced by the Russian left-wing opposition. It wasnot until my emigration to Vienna that I was able to make a thorough study of Lenin's theory. The resultwas that my thought of this period, too, contained an unresolved dualism. It was partly that I was unableto find the correct solution in principle to the quite catastrophic mistakes committed by the opportunists,such as their solution to the agrarian problem which went along purely social-democratic lines. Andpartly that my own intellectual predilections went in the direction of an abstract utopianism in the realmof cultural politics. Today, after an interval of nearly half a century, I am astounded to find how fruitfulour activities were, relatively speaking. (Remaining on the theoretical level I should point out that thefirst version of the two essays, What is Orthodox Marxism ? and The Changing Function of HistoricalMaterialism, date from this period. They were revised for History and Class Consciousness but theirbasic orientation remains the same.)

My emigration to Vienna was the start of a period of study. And, in the first instance, this meantfurthering my acquaintance with the works of Lenin. Needless to say, this study was not divorced fromrevolutionary activity for a single moment. What was needed above all was to breathe new life into therevolutionary workers' movement in Hungary and to maintain continuity: new slogans and policies hadto be found that would enable it to survive and expand during the White Terror. The slanders of thedictatorship — whether purely reactionary or social-democratic was immaterial — had to be refuted. Atthe same time it was necessary to begin the process of Marxist self-criticism of the proletariandictatorship. In addition we in Vienna found ourselves swept along by the current of the internationalrevolutionary movement. The Hungarian emigration was perhaps the most numerous and the mostdivided at the time, but it was by no means the only one. There were many emigres from Poland and theBalkans living in Vienna either temporarily or permanently. Moreover, Vienna was an internationaltransit point, so that we were in continuous contact with German, French, Italian and other Communists.In such circumstances it is not surprising that a magazine called Communism was founded which for atime became a focal point for the ultra-left currents in the Third International. Together with AustrianCommunists, Hungarian and Polish emigrants, who provided the inner core and the permanentmembership, there were also sympathisers from the Italian ultra-left, like Bordiga and Terracini, andDutch Communists like Pannekoek and Roland Holst.

In these circumstances it was natural that the dualism of my attitudes should not only have reached aclimax but should also have crystallised out into a curious new practical and theoretical form. As amember of the inner collective of Communism I was active in helping to work out a new 'left-wing'political and theoretical line. It was based on the belief, very much alive at the time, that the greatrevolutionary wave that would soon sweep the whole world, or Europe at the very least, to socialism, hadin no way been broken by the setbacks in Finland, Hungary and Munich. Events like the Kapp Putsch,the occupation of the factories in Italy, the Polish-Soviet War and even the March Action, strengthenedour belief in the imminence of world revolution and the total transformation of the civilised world. Ofcourse, in discussing this sectarianism of the early twenties we must not imagine anything like thesectarianism seen in Stalinist praxis. This aimed at protecting the given power relations against allreforms; its objectives were conservative and its methods bureaucratic. The sectarianism of the twentieshad messianic, utopian aspirations and its methods were violently opposed to bureaucracy. The twotrends have only the name in common and inwardly they represent two hostile extremes. (Of course, it is



true that even in the Third International Zinoviev and his disciples introduced bureaucratic methods, justas it is true that Lenin's last years, at a time when he was already burdened by ill-health, were filled withanxiety about the problem of fighting the growing, spontaneously generated bureaucratisation of theSoviet Republic on the basis of proletarian democracy. But even here we perceive the distinctionbetween the sectarians of then and now. My essay on questions of organisation in the Hungarian Party isdirected against the theory and practice of Zinoviev's disciple, Bela Kun.)

Our magazine strove to propagate a messianic sectarianism by working out the most radical methods onevery issue, and by proclaiming a total break with every institution and mode of life stemming from thebourgeois world. This would help to foster an undistorted class consciousness in the vanguard, in theCommunist parties and in the Communist youth organisations. My polemical essay attacking the idea ofparticipation in bourgeois parliaments is a good example of this tendency. Its fate — criticism at thehands of Lenin — enabled me to take my first step away from sectarianism. Lenin pointed to the vitaldistinction, indeed, to the paradox, that an institution may be obsolete from the standpoint of worldhistory — as e.g. the Soviets had rendered parliaments obsolete — but that this need not precludeparticipation in it for tactical reasons; on the contrary. I at once saw the force of this criticism and itcompelled me to revise my historical perspectives and to adjust them more subtly and less directly to theexigencies of day-to-day tactics. In this respect it was the beginning of a change in my views.Nevertheless this change took place within the framework of an essentially sectarian outlook. Thisbecame evident a year later when, uncritically, and in the spirit of sectarianism, I gave my approval to theMarch Action as a whole, even though I was critical of a number of tactical errors.

It is at this point that the objective internal contradictions in my political and philosophical views comeinto the open. On the international scene I was able to indulge all my intellectual passion forrevolutionary messianism unhindered. But in Hungary, with the gradual emergence of an organisedCommunist movement, I found myself increasingly having to face decisions whose general and personal,long-term and immediate consequences, I could not ignore and which I had to make the basis of yetfurther decisions. This had already been my position in the Soviet Republic in Hungary. There the needto consider other than messianic perspectives had often forced me into realistic decisions both in thePeople's Commissariat for Education and in the division where I was in charge politically. Now,however, the confrontation with the facts, the compulsion to search for what Lenin called 'the next link inthe chain' became incomparably more urgent and intensive than ever before in my life. Precisely becausethe actual substance of such decisions seemed so empirical it had far-reaching consequences for mytheoretical position. For this had now to be adjusted to objective situations and tendencies. If I wished toarrive at a decision that was correct in principle I could never be content just to consider the immediatestate of affairs. I would have to seek out those often-concealed mediations that had produced the situationand above all I would have to strive to anticipate the factors that would probably result from them andinfluence future praxis. I found myself adopting an intellectual attitude dictated, by life-itself, thatconflicted sharply with the idealism and utopianism of my revolutionary messianism.

My dilemma was made even more acute by the fact that opposed to me within the leadership of theHungarian Party was the group led by Zinoviev's disciple, Bela Kun, who subscribed to a sectarianism ofa modern bureaucratic type. In theory it would have been possible to repudiate his views as those of apseudo-leftist. In practice, however, his proposals could only be combated by an appeal to the highlyprosaic realities of ordinary life that were but distantly related to the larger perspectives of the worldrevolution. At this point in my life, as so often, I had a stroke of luck: the opposition to Bela Kun washeaded by Eugen Landler. He was notable not only for his great and above all practical intelligence but



also for his understanding of theoretical problems so long as they were linked, however indirectly, withthe praxis of revolution. He was a man whose most deeply rooted attitudes were determined by hisintimate involvement in the life of the masses. His protest against Kun's bureaucratic and adventuristprojects convinced me at once, and when it came to an open breach I was always on his side. It is notpossible to go into even the most important details of these inner party struggles here, although there aresome matters of theoretical interest. As far as I was concerned the breach meant that the methodologicalcleavage in my thought now developed into a division between theory and practice. While I continued tosupport ultra-left tendencies on the great international problems of revolution, as a member of theleadership of the Hungarian Party I became the most bitter enemy of Kun's sectarianism. This becameparticularly obvious early in 1921. On the Hungarian front I followed Landler in advocating an energeticanti-sectarian line while simultaneously at the international level I gave theoretical support to the MarchAction. With this the tension between the conflicting tendencies reached a climax. As the divisions in theHungarian Party became more acute, as the movement of the radical workers in Hungary began to grow,my ideas were increasingly influenced by the theoretical tendencies brought into being by these events.However, they did not yet gain the upper hand at this stage despite the fact that Lenin's criticism hadundermined my analysis of the March Action.

History and Class Consciousness was born in the midst of the crises of this transitional period. It waswritten in 1922. It consisted in part of earlier texts in a revised form; in addition to those alreadymentioned there was the essay on Class Consciousness of 1920. The two essays on Rosa Luxemburg andLegality and Illegality were included in the new collection without significant alterations. Only twostudies, the most important ones, were wholly new: Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariatand Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation. (The latter was based on OrganisationalProblems of the Revolutionary Movement, an essay that had appeared in the magazine The Internationalin 1921 immediately after the March Action.) History and Class Consciousness is, then, the finalsynthesis of the period of my development that began with the last years of the war. However, it is also inpart the start of a transitional stage leading to a greater clarity, even though these tendencies could notmature properly.

This unresolved conflict between opposed intellectual trends which cannot always be easily labelledvictorious or defeated makes it difficult even now to give a coherent critique of the book. However, theattempt must be made to isolate at least the dominant motifs. The book's most striking feature is that,contrary to the subjective intentions of its author, objectively it falls in with a tendency in the history ofMarxism that has taken many different forms. All of them have one thing in common, whether they likeit or not and irrespective of their philosophical origins or their political effects: they strike at the veryroots of Marxian ontology. I refer to the tendency to view Marxism exclusively as a theory of society, associal philosophy, and hence to ignore or repudiate it as a theory of nature. Even before World War IMarxists as far apart as Max Adler and Lunacharsky defended views of this kind. In our day we findthem emerging once more, above all in French Existentialism and its intellectual ambience — probablydue in part to the influence of History and Class Consciousness. My book takes up a very definite standon this issue. I argue in a number of places that nature is a societal category and the whole drift of thebook tends to show that only a knowledge of society and the men who live in it is of relevance tophilosophy. The very names of the representatives of this tendency indicate that it is not a clearlydefinable trend. I myself knew of Lunacharsky only by name and I always rejected Max Adler as aKantian and a Social Democrat. Despite this a close examination reveals that they have a number offeatures in common. On the one hand, it is demonstrable that it is the materialist view of nature that



brings about the really radical separation of the bourgeois and socialist outlooks. The failure to grasp thisblurs philosophical debate and e.g. prevents the clear elaboration of the Marxist concept of praxis. On theother hand, this apparent methodological upgrading of societal categories distorts their trueepistemological functions. Their specific Marxist quality is weakened, and their real advance onbourgeois thought is often retracted unconsciously.

I must confine myself here to a critique of History and Class Consciousness but this is not to imply thatthis deviation from Marxism was less pronounced in the case of other writers with a similar outlook. Inmy book this deviation has immediate consequences for the view of economics I give there andfundamental confusions result, as in the nature of the case economics must be crucial. It is true that theattempt is made to explain all ideological phenomena by reference to their basis in economics but,despite this, the purview of economics is narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labour asthe mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing. Given my basicapproach, such a consequence is quite natural. It means that the most important real pillars of the Marxistview of the world disappear and the attempt to deduce the ultimate revolutionary implications ofMarxism in as radical a fashion as possible is deprived of a genuinely economic foundation. It isself-evident that this means the disappearance of the ontological objectivity of nature upon which thisprocess of change is based. But it also means the disappearance of the interaction between labour as seenfrom a genuinely materialist standpoint and the evolution of the men who labour. Marx's great insightthat “even production for the sake of production means nothing more than the development of theproductive energies of man, and hence the development of the wealth of human nature as an end initself” lies outside the terrain which History and Class Consciousness is able to explore. Capitalistexploitation thus loses its objective revolutionary aspect and there is a failure to grasp the fact that“although this evolution of the species Man is accomplished at first at the expense of the majority ofindividual human beings and of certain human classes, it finally overcomes this antagonism andcoincides with the evolution of the particular individual. Thus the higher development of individuality isonly purchased by a historical process in which individuals are sacrificed. In consequence, my account ofthe contradictions of capitalism as well as of the revolutionisation of the proletariat is unintentionallycoloured by an overriding subjectivism.

This has a narrowing and distorting effect on the book's central concept of praxis. With regard to thisproblem, too, my intention was to base myself on Marx and to free his concepts from every subsequentbourgeois distortion and to adapt them to the requirements of the great revolutionary upsurge of thepresent. (Above all I was absolutely convinced of one thing: that the purely contemplative nature ofbourgeois thought had to be radically overcome. As a result the conception of revolutionary praxis in thisbook takes on extravagant overtones that are more in keeping with the current messianic utopianism ofthe Communist left than with authentic Marxist doctrine. Comprehensibly enough in the context of theperiod, I attacked the bourgeois and opportunistic currents in the workers' movement that glorified aconception of knowledge which was ostensibly objective but was in fact isolated from any sort of praxis;with considerable justice I directed my polemics against the over-extension and over-valuation ofcontemplation. Marx's critique of Feuerbach only reinforced my convictions. What I failed to realise,however, was that in the absence of a basis in real praxis, in labour as its original form and model, theover-extension of the concept of praxis would lead to its opposite: a relapse into idealistic contemplation.My intention, then, was to chart the correct and authentic class consciousness of the proletariat,distinguishing it from 'public opinion surveys' (a term not yet in currency) and to confer upon it anindisputably practical objectivity. I was unable, however, to progress beyond the notion of an 'imputed'



class consciousness. By this I meant the same thing as Lenin in What is to be done? when he maintainedthat socialist class consciousness would differ from the spontaneously emerging trade-unionconsciousness in that it would be implanted in the workers 'from outside', i.e. “from outside the economicstruggle and the sphere of the relations between workers and employers”. Hence, what I had intendedsubjectively, and what Lenin had arrived at as the result of an authentic Marxist analysis of a practicalmovement, was transformed in my account into a purely intellectual result and thus into somethingcontemplative. In my presentation it would indeed be a miracle if this 'imputed', consciousness could turninto revolutionary praxis.

This transformation into its opposite of what was in itself a correct intention follows from the abstractand idealistic conception of praxis already referred to. This is seen clearly in the — once again notwholly misguided — polemic against Engels who had looked to experiment and industry for the typicalcases in which praxis proves to be a criterion of theory. I have since come to realise that Engels' thesis istheoretically incomplete in that it overlooks the fact that the terrain of praxis while remaining unchangedin its basic structure has become much more extensive, more complex and more mediated than in thecase of work. For this reason the mere act of producing an object may indeed become the foundation ofthe immediately correct realisation of a theoretical assumption. To this extent it can serve as a criterion ofits truth or falsity. However, the task that Engels imposes here on immediate praxis of putting an end tothe Kantian theory of the 'intangible thing-in-itself' is far from being solved. For work itself can easilyremain a matter of pure manipulation, spontaneously or consciously by-passing the solution to theproblem of the thing-in-itself and ignoring it either wholly or in part. History supplies us with instanceswhere the correct action has been taken on the basis of false theories and in Engels' sense these casesimply a failure to understand the thing-in-itself. Indeed the Kantian theory itself in no way denies thatexperiments of this kind are objective and provide valuable knowledge. He only relegates them to therealm of mere appearances in which things-in-themselves remain unknown. And the neo-positivism ofour own day aims at removing every question about reality (the thing-in-itself) from the purview ofscience, it rejects every question about the thing-in-itself as 'unscientific' and at the same time itacknowledges the validity of all the conclusions of technology and science. If praxis is to fulfil thefunction Engels rightly assigned to it, it must go beyond this immediacy while remaining praxis anddeveloping into a comprehensive praxis.

My objections to Engels' solution were not without foundation. All the more mistaken was my chain ofargument. It was quite wrong to maintain that 'experiment is pure contemplation'. My own accountrefutes this. For the creation of a situation in which the natural forces under investigation can function'purely', i.e. without outside interference or subjective error, is quite comparable to the case of work inthat it too implies the creation of a teleological system, admittedly of a special kind. In its essence it istherefore pure praxis. It was no less a mistake to deny that industry is praxis and to see in it “in ahistorical and, dialectical sense only the object and not the subject of the 'natural' laws of society”. Thehalf-truth contained in this sentence — and it is no more than a half-truth at best — applies only to theeconomic totality of capitalist production. But it is by no means contradicted by the fact that every singleact in industrial production not only represents a synthesis of teleological acts of work but is also itself ateleological, i.e. practical, act in this very synthesis. It is in line with such philosophical misconceptionsthat History and Class Consciousness began its analysis of economic phenomena not with aconsideration of work but only of the complicated structures of a developed commodity economy. Thismeans that all prospects of advancing to decisive questions like the relation of theory to practice andsubject to object are frustrated from the outset.



In these and similarly problematical premises we see the result of a failure to subject the Hegelianheritage to a thoroughgoing materialist reinterpretation and hence to transcend and preserve it. I wouldonce again cite a central problem of principle. It is undoubtedly one of the great achievements of Historyand Class Consciousness to have reinstated the category of totality in the central position it had occupiedthroughout Marx's works and from which it had been ousted by the 'scientism' of the social- democraticopportunists. I did not know at the time that Lenin was moving in a similar direction. (The philosophicalfragments were published nine years after the appearance of History and Class Consciousness.) Butwhereas Lenin really brought about a renewal of the Marxian method my efforts resulted in a Hegeliandistortion, in which I put the totality in the centre of the system, overriding the priority of economics! “Itis not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive differencebetween Marxism and bourgeois science, but the point of view of totality.'' This methodological paradoxwas intensified further by the fact that the totality was seen as the conceptual embodiment of therevolutionary principle in science. “The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of therevolutionary principle in science.”

There is no doubt that such paradoxes of method played a not unimportant and in many ways veryprogressive role in the impact of History and Class Consciousness on later thought. For the revival ofHegel's dialectics struck a hard blow at the revisionist tradition. Already Bernstein had wished todominate everything reminiscent of Hegel's dialectics in the name of 'science'. And nothing was furtherfrom the mind of his philosophical opponents, and above all Kautsky, than the wish to undertake thedefence of this tradition. For anyone wishing to return to the revolutionary traditions of Marxism therevival of the Hegelian traditions was obligatory. History and Class Consciousness represents what wasperhaps the most radical attempt to restore the revolutionary nature of Marx's theories by renovating andextending Hegel's dialectics and method. The task was made even more important by the fact thatbourgeois philosophy at the time showed signs of a growing interest in Hegel. Of course they neversucceeded in making Hegel's breach with Kant the foundation of their analysis and, on the other hand,they were influenced by Dilthey's attempts to construct theoretical bridges between Hegelian dialecticsand modern irrationalism. A little while after the appearance of History and Class Consciousness Kronerdescribed Hegel as the greatest irrationalist of all time and in Lowith's later studies Marx andKierkegaard were to emerge as parallel phenomena out of the dissolution of Hegelianism. It is bycontrast with all these developments that we can best see the relevance of History and ClassConsciousness. Another fact contributing to its importance to the ideology of the radical workers'movement was that whereas Plekhanov and others had vastly overestimated Feuerbach's role as anintermediary between Hegel and Marx, this was relegated to the background here. Anticipating thepublication of Lenin's later philosophical studies by some years, it was nevertheless only somewhat later,in the essay on Moses Hess, that I explicitly argued that Marx followed directly from Hegel. However,this position is contained implicitly in many of the discussions in History and Class Consciousness.

In a necessarily brief summary it is not possible to undertake a concrete criticism of all the issues raisedby the book, and to show how far the interpretation of Hegel it contained was a source of confusion andhow far it pointed towards the future. The contemporary reader who is qualified to criticise will certainlyfind evidence of both tendencies. To assess the impact of the book at that time, and also its relevancetoday, we must consider one problem that surpasses in its importance all questions of detail. This is thequestion of alienation, which, for the first time since Marx, is treated as central to the revolutionarycritique of capitalism and which has its theoretical and methodological roots in the Hegelian dialectic. Ofcourse the problem was in the air at the time. Some years later, following the publication of Heidegger's



Being and Time (1927), it moved into the centre of philosophical debate. Even today it has not lost thisposition, largely because of the influence of Sartre, his followers and his opponents. The philosophicalproblem raised above all by Lucien Goldmann when he interpreted Heidegger's work in part as apolemical reply to mine — which however was not mentioned explicitly — can be left on one side here.The statement that the problem was in the air is perfectly adequate, particularly as it is not possible todiscuss the reasons for this here and to lay bare the mixture of Marxist and Existentialist ideas that wereso influential after World War II, especially in France. The question of who was first and who influencedwhom is not particularly interesting here. What is important is that the alienation of man is a crucialproblem of the age in which we live and is recognised as such by both bourgeois and proletarian thinkers,by commentators on both right and left. Hence History and Class Consciousness had a profound impactin youthful intellectual circles; I know of a whole host of good Communists who were won over to themovement by this very fact. Without a doubt the fact that this Marxist and Hegelian question was takenup by a Communist was one reason why the impact of the book went far beyond the limits of the party.

As to the way in which the problem was actually dealt with, it is not hard to see today that it was treatedin purely Hegelian terms. In particular its ultimate philosophical foundation is the identical subject-objectthat realises itself in the historical process. Of course, in Hegel it arises in a purely logical andphilosophical form when the highest stage of absolute spirit is attained in philosophy by abolishingalienation and by the return of self-consciousness to itself, thus realising the identical subject-object. InHistory and Class Consciousness, however, this process is socio-historical and it culminates when theproletariat reaches this stage in its class consciousness, thus becoming the identical subject-object ofhistory. This does indeed appear to 'stand Hegel on his feet'; it appears as if the logico-metaphysicalconstruction of the Phenomenology of Mind had found its authentic realisation in the existence and theconsciousness of the proletariat. And this appears in turn to provide a philosophical foundation for theproletariat's efforts to form a classless society through revolution and to conclude the 'prehistory' ofmankind. But is the identical subject-object here anything more in truth than a purely metaphysicalconstruct ? Can a genuinely identical subject-object be created by self-knowledge, however adequate,and however truly based on an adequate knowledge of society, i.e. however perfect that self-knowledgeis? We need only formulate the question precisely to see that it must be answered in the negative. Foreven when the content of knowledge is referred back to the knowing subject, this does not mean that theact of cognition is thereby freed of its alienated nature. In the Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel rightlydismisses the notion of a mystical and irrationalistic realisation of the identical subject-object, ofSchelling's 'intellectual intuition', calling instead for a philosophical and rational solution to the problem.His healthy sense of reality induced him to leave the matter at this juncture; his very general system doesindeed culminate in the vision of such a realisation but he never shows in concrete terms how it might beachieved. Thus the proletariat seen as the identical subject-object of the real history of mankind is nomaterialist consummation that overcomes the constructions of idealism. It is rather an attempt toout-Hegel Hegel, it is an edifice boldly erected above every possible reality and thus attempts objectivelyto surpass the Master himself.

Hegel's reluctance to commit himself on this point is the product of the wrong-headedness of his basicconcept. For it is in Hegel that we first encounter alienation as the fundamental problem of the place ofman in the world and vis-á-vis the world. However, in the term alienation he includes every type ofobjectification Thus 'alienation' when taken to its logical conclusion is identical with objectification.Therefore, when the identical subject-object transcends alienation it must also transcend objectification atthe same time. But as, according to Hegel, the object, the thing exists only as an alienation from



self-consciousness, to take it back into the subject would mean the end of objective reality and thus ofany reality at all. History and Class Consciousness follows Hegel in that it too equates alienation withobjectification (to use the term employed by Marx in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts). Thisfundamental and crude error has certainly contributed greatly to the success enjoyed by History andClass Consciousness. The unmasking of alienation by philosophy was in the air, as we have remarked,and it soon became a central problem in the type of cultural criticism that undertook to scrutinise thecondition of man in contemporary capitalism. In the philosophical, cultural criticism of the bourgeoisie(and we need look no further than Heidegger), it was natural to sublimate a critique of society into apurely philosophical problem, i.e. to convert an essentially social alienation into an eternal 'conditionhumaine', to use a term not coined until somewhat later. It is evident that History and ClassConsciousness met such attitudes half-way, even though its intentions had been different and indeedopposed to them. For when I identified alienation with objectification I meant this as a societal category— socialism would after all abolish alienation — but its irreducible presence in class society and aboveall its basis in philosophy brought it into the vicinity of the 'condition humaine'.

This follows from the frequently stressed false identification of opposed fundamental categories. Forobjectification is indeed a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated from human life in society. If we bearin mind that every externalisation of an object in practice (and hence, too, in work) is an objectificationthat every human expression including speech objectifies human thoughts and feelings, then it is clearthat we are dealing with a universal mode of commerce between men. And in so far as this is the case,objectification is a natural phenomenon; the true is as much an objectification as the false, liberation asmuch as enslavement. Only when the objectified forms in society acquire functions that bring the essenceof man into conflict with his existence, only when man's nature is subjugated, deformed and crippled canwe speak of an objective societal condition of alienation and, as an inexorable consequence, of all thesubjective marks of an internal alienation. This duality was not acknowledged in History and ClassConsciousness. And this is why it is so wide of the mark in its basic view of the history of philosophy.(We note in passing that the phenomenon of reification is closely related to that of alienation but isneither socially nor conceptually identical with it; here the two words were used synonymously.) Thiscritique of the basic concepts cannot hope to be comprehensive. But even in an account as brief as thismention must be made of my rejection of the view that knowledge is reflection. This had two sources.The first was my deep abhorrence of the mechanistic fatalism which was the normal concomitant ofreflection theory in mechanistic materialism. Against this my messianic utopianism, the predominance ofpraxis in my thought rebelled in passionate protest — a protest that, once again, was not whollymisguided. In the second place I recognised the way in which praxis had its origins and its roots in work.The most primitive kind of work, such as the quarrying of stones by primeval man, implies a correctreflection of the reality he is concerned with. For no purposive activity can be carried out in the absenceof an image, however crude, of the practical reality involved. Practice can only be a fulfilment and acriterion of theory when it is based on what is held to be a correct reflection of reality. It would beunrewarding at this point to detail the arguments that justify rejecting the analogy with photographywhich is so prevalent in the current debate on reflection theories.

It is, I believe, no contradiction that I should have spoken here so exclusively of the negative aspects ofHistory and Class Consciousness while asserting that nevertheless the book was not without importancein its day. The very fact that all the errors listed here have their source not so much in the idiosyncrasiesof the author as in the prevalent, if often mistaken, tendencies of the age gives the book a certain claim tobe regarded as representative. A momentous, world-historical change was struggling to find a theoretical



expression. Even if a theory was unable to do justice to the objective nature of the great crisis, it mightyet formulate a typical view and thus achieve a certain historical validity. This was the case, as I believetoday, with History and Class Consciousness.

However, it is by no means my intention to pretend that all the ideas contained in the book are mistakenwithout exception. The introductory comments in the first essay, for example, give a definition oforthodoxy in Marxism which I now think not only objectively correct but also capable of exerting aconsiderable influence even today when we are on the eve of a Marxist renaissance. I refer to thispassage : “Let us assume that recent research had proved once and for all that every one of Marx'sindividual theses was false. Even if this were to be proved every serious 'orthodox' Marxist would still beable to accept all such modern conclusions without reservation and hence dismiss every single one ofMarx's theses — without being compelled for a single minute to renounce his orthodoxy. OrthodoxMarxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It isnot the 'belief' in this or that thesis, not the exegesis of a 'sacred' book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refersexclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical Marxism is the road to truth and thatits methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. Itis the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or 'improve' it have led and must lead tooversimplification, triviality and eclecticism.”

And without feeling myself to be excessively immodest, I believe that a number of equally true ideas canbe found in the book. I need only refer to the fact that I included the early works of Marx in the overallpicture of his world-view. I did this at a time when most Marxists were unwilling to see in them morethan historical documents that were important only for his personal development. Moreover, History andClass Consciousness cannot be blamed if, decades later, the relationship was reversed so that the earlyworks were seen as the products of the true Marxist philosophy, while the later works were neglected.Rightly or wrongly, I had always treated Marx's works as having an essential unity.

Nor do I wish to deny that in a number of places the attempt is made to depict the real nature and themovement of the dialectical categories. This points forward to a genuine Marxist ontology of existence insociety. For example, the category of mediation is represented in this way: “Thus the category ofmediation is a lever with which to overcome the mere immediacy of the empirical world and as such it isnot anything (subjective) that has been foisted on to the objects from outside; it is no value judgement or'Ought' as opposed to their 'Is'. It is rather the manifestation of their authentic objective structure.” Andclosely related to this is the discussion of the connection between genesis and history: “That genesis andhistory should coincide or, more exactly, that they should be different aspects of the same process, canonly happen if two conditions are fulfilled. On the one hand, all the categories in which human existenceis constructed must appear as the determinants of that existence itself (and not merely of the descriptionof that existence). On the other hand their sequence, their coherence and their interconnections mustappear as aspects of the historical process itself, as the structural physiognomy of the present. Thus thesequence and the inner coherence of the categories is neither purely logical, nor is it merely organised inconformity with the historical facts as they happen to be given. This line of reasoning concludes, as isonly logical, with a quotation from Marx's famous study of method, made in the fifties. Passages like thisone which anticipate a genuine materialistic and dialectical reinterpretation of Marx are not infrequent.

If I have concentrated on my errors, there have been mainly practical reasons for it. It is a fact thatHistory and Class Consciousness had a powerful effect on many readers and continues to do so eventoday. If it is the true arguments that achieve this impact, then all is well and the author's reaction is



wholly uninteresting and irrelevant. Unfortunately I know it to be the case that, owing to the way societyhas developed and to the political theories this development has produced, it is precisely those parts ofthe book that I regard as theoretically false that have been most influential. For this reason I see it as myduty on the occasion of a reprint after more than 40 years to pronounce upon the book's negativetendencies and to warn my readers against errors that were hard to avoid then, perhaps, but which havelong ceased to be so.

I have already said that History and Class Consciousness was in quite a definite sense the summation andconclusion of a period of development beginning in 1918-19. The years that followed showed this evenmore clearly. Above all my messianic utopianism lost (and was even seen to lose) its real grip on me.Lenin died in 1924. The party struggles that followed his death were concentrated increasingly on thedebate about whether socialism could survive in one country. That it was possible in theory Lenin hadaffirmed long before. But the seemingly near prospect of world revolution made it appear particularlytheoretical and abstract. The fact that it was now taken seriously proved that a world revolution could notbe held to be imminent in these years. (Only with the slump in 1929 did it re-emerge from time to time asa possibility.) Moreover, after 1924 the Third International correctly defined the position of the capitalistworld as one of 'relative stability'. These facts meant that I had to re-think my theoretical position. In thedebates of the Russian Party I agreed with Stalin about the necessity for socialism in one country and thisshows very clearly the start of a new epoch in my thought.

More immediately, this was brought about mainly by my experience in working for the Hungarian Party.The correct policy of the Landler faction began to bear fruit. The Party, working in conditions of strictillegality, steadily increased its influence on the left wing of the Social Democrats so that in 1924-25 itcame to a split and the founding of a Workers' Party that would be radical and yet legal. This party wasled illegally by Communists and for its strategic objective it had chosen the task of establishingdemocracy in Hungary. While the efforts of this party culminated in the call for a republic theCommunist Party continued to pursue the aim of a dictatorship of the proletariat. At the time I was inagreement with this tactical policy but was increasingly tormented by a whole complex of unresolvedproblems concerning the theoretical justification of such a position.

These considerations began to undermine the bases of the ideas I had formed during the period 1917 —24. A contributory factor was that the very obvious slowing-down of the tempo of theworld-revolutionary ferment inevitably led to co-operation among the various left-wing movements so asto combat the increasingly strong growth of a reactionary movement. In the Hungary of Horthy this wasan obvious necessity for any legal and left-wing radical workers' party. But even in the internationalmovement there were similar tendencies. In 1922 the march on Rome had taken place and in Germany,too, the next few years brought a growth in National Socialism, an increasing concentration of all theforces of reaction. This put the problems of a United Front and a Popular Front on the agenda and thesehad to be discussed on the plane of theory as well as strategy and tactics. Moreover, few initiatives couldbe expected from the Third International which was being influenced more and more strongly byStalinist tactics. Tactically it swung back and forth between right and left. Stalin himself intervened inthe midst of this uncertainty with disastrous consequences when, around 1928, he described the SocialDemocrats as the 'twin brothers' of the Fascists. This put an end to all prospects of a United Front on theleft. Although I was on Stalin's side on the central issue of Russia, I was deeply repelled by his attitudehere. However, it did nothing to retard my gradual disenchantment with the ultra-left tendencies of myearly revolutionary years as most of the left-wing groupings in the European parties were Trotskyite — aposition which I always rejected. Of course, if I was against Ruth Fischer and Maslow in their attitude to



German problems — and it was these with which I was always most concerned — this does not meanthat I was in sympathy with Brandler and Thalheimer. To clear my own mind and to achieve a politicaland theoretical self-understanding I was engaged at the time on a search for a 'genuine' left-wingprogramme that would provide a third alternative to the opposing factions in Germany. But the idea ofsuch a theoretical and political solution to the contradictions in, the period of transition was doomed toremain a dream. I never succeeded in solving it to my own satisfaction and so I did not publish anytheoretical or political contribution on the international level during this period.

The situation was different in the Hungarian movement. Landler died in 1928 and in 1929 the partyprepared for its Second Congress. I was given the task of drafting the political theses for the Congress.This brought me face to face with my old problem in the Hungarian question: can a party optsimultaneously for two different strategic objectives (legally for a republic, illegally for a soviet republic)? Or looked at from another angle: can the party's attitude towards the form of the state be a matter ofpurely tactical expediency (i.e. with the illegal Communist movement as the genuine objective while thelegal party is no more than a tactical manoeuvre) ? A thorough analysis of the social and economicsituation in Hungary convinced me more and more that Landler with his strategic policy in favour of arepublic had instinctively touched on the central issue of a correct revolutionary plan for Hungary: evenif the Horthy regime had undergone such a profound crisis as to create the objective conditions for athorough-going revolution, Hungary would still be unable to make the transition directly to a sovietrepublic. Therefore, the legal policy of working for a republic had to be concretised to mean what Leninmeant in 1905 by a democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants. It is hard for most people toimagine how paradoxical this sounded then. Although the Sixth Congress of the Third International didmention this as a possibility, it was generally thought to be historically impossible to take such aretrograde step, as Hungary had already been a soviet republic in 1919.

This is not the place to discuss all these different views. Particularly as the text of the theses can scarcelybe held to have any great value as a theoretical document today, even though for me personally theychanged the whole direction of my later development. But my analysis was inadequate both on the levelof principle and of concrete detail. This was due in part to the fact that in order to make the chief mattersof substance more acceptable I had treated the issues too generally and did not give sufficient force toparticulars. Even so they caused a great scandal in the Hungarian Party. The Kun group saw the theses asthe purest opportunism; support for me from my own party was lukewarm. When I heard from a reliablesource that Bela Kun was planning to expel me from the Party as a 'Liquidator', I gave up the struggle, asI was well aware of Kun's prestige in the International, and I published a 'Self-criticism'. I was indeedfirmly convinced that I was in the right but I knew also — e.g. from the fate that had befallen KarlKorsch — that to be expelled from the Party meant that it would no longer be possible to participateactively in the struggle against Fascism. I wrote my self-criticism as an 'entry ticket' to such activity as Ineither could nor wished to continue to work in the Hungarian movement in the circumstances.

How little this self-criticism was to be taken seriously can be gauged from the fact that the basic changein my outlook underlying the Blum Theses (which failed, however, to express it in an even remotelysatisfactory fashion) determined from now on all my theoretical and practical activities. Needless to say,this is not the place to give even a brief account of these. As evidence that my claim is objectivelyverifiable and not merely the product of a wish-fulfilment, I may cite the comments made (in 1950) byJoszef Revai, the chief ideologist of the Party, with reference to the Blum Theses. He regards the literaryviews I held at the time as flowing directly from the Blum Theses. “Everyone familiar with the history ofthe Hungarian Communist Party knows that the literary views held by Comrade Lukacs between 1945



and 1949 belong together with political views that he had formulated much earlier, in the context ofpolitical trends in Hungary and of the strategy of the Communist Party at the end of the twenties.”

This question has another, and for me a more important aspect, one which gives the change recorded herea much sharper definition. As the reader of these essays knows, my decision to take an active part in theCommunist movement was influenced profoundly by ethical considerations. When I took this decision Idid not suspect that I would be a politician for the next decade. However, circumstances would have itso. When, in February 1919, the Central Committee was arrested, I once again thought it my duty toaccept the post offered to me in the semi-illegal committee set up to replace it. There then followed ininevitable sequence posts in the People's Commissariat for Education in the Soviet Republic and politicalPeople's Commissariat in the Red Army, illegal activity in Budapest, internal party conflict in Viennaand so on. Only then was I placed before a real alternative. My internal, private self-criticism came to theconclusion that if I was so clearly in the right, as I believed, and could still not avoid such a sensationaldefeat, then there must be grave defects in my practical political abilities. Therefore, I felt able towithdraw from my political career with a good conscience and concentrate once more on theoreticalmatters. I have never regretted this decision. (Nor is there any inconsistency in the fact that in 1956 I hadonce again to take on a ministerial post. I declared before accepting it that it was only for the interim, theperiod of acute crisis, and that as soon as the situation became more settled I would immediately resign.)

In pursuing the analysis of my theoretical activities in the narrow sense I have by-passed half a decadeand can only now return to a more detailed discussion of the essays subsequent to History and ClassConsciousness. This divergence from the correct chronological sequence is justified by the fact that,without my suspecting it in the least, the theoretical content of the Blum Theses formed the secretterminus ad quem of my development. The years of my apprenticeship in Marxism could only be held tohave reached a conclusion when I really began to overcome the contradictory dualism that hadcharacterised my thought since the last years of the war by confronting a particular question ofimportance involving the most diverse problems. I can now outline the course of this development up tothe Blum Theses by pointing to my theoretical works dating from that period. I think that by establishingbeforehand the terminal point of that development it becomes easier to give such an account. This isparticularly obvious when it is remembered that I devoted all my energy at this time to the practicalproblems of the Hungarian movement so that my contributions to theory consisted chiefly of occasionalpieces.

The first and longest of these, an attempt to provide an intellectual portrait of Lenin, is literally anoccasional piece. Immediately after Lenin's death my publisher asked me for a brief monograph abouthim; I complied and the little essay was completed within a few weeks. It represents an advance onHistory and Class Consciousness inasmuch as the need to concentrate on my great model helped me toput the concept of praxis into a clearer, more authentic, more natural and dialectical relationship withtheory. Needless to say, my view of the world revolution was that of the twenties. However, partlybecause of my experience of the brief intervening period and partly because of the need to concentrate onLenin's intellectual personality the most obviously sectarian features of History and Class Consciousnessbegan to fade and were succeeded by others closer to reality. In a Postscript that I recently wrote for aseparate reissue of this little study I tried to show in somewhat greater detail than in the original what Istill believe to be the healthy and relevant features of its basic argument. Above all I tried to see in Leninneither a man who simply and straightforwardly followed in the footsteps of Marx and Engels, nor apragmatic 'Realpolitiker' of genius. My aim was to clarify the authentic quality of his mind. Briefly thisimage of Lenin can be formulated as follows: his strength in theory is derived from the fact that however



abstract a concept may be, he always considers its implications for human praxis. Likewise in the case ofevery action which, as always with him, is based on the concrete analysis of the relevant situation, healways makes sure that his analysis can be connected organically and dialectically with the principles ofMarxism. Thus he is neither a theoretician nor a practitioner in the strict sense of the word. He is aprofound philosopher of praxis, a man who passionately transforms theory. into practice, a man whosesharp attention is always focused on the nodal points where theory becomes practice, practice becomestheory. The fact that my old study still bears the marks of the twenties produces false emphases in myintellectual portrait of Lenin, especially as his critique of the present probed much deeper in his lastperiod than that of his biographer. However, the main features are essentially correct as Lenin'stheoretical and practical life's work is objectively inseparable from the preparations of 1917 and theirnecessary consequences. Illumined by the spotlight of the twenties, this attempt to do justice to thespecific nature of such a great man makes him appear slightly unfamiliar but not wholly unrecognisable.

Everything else that I wrote in the years that followed is not only outwardly adventitious (it consistslargely of book reviews), but also inwardly. I was spontaneously searching for a new orientation and Itried to clarify my future direction by demarcating it off from the views of others. As far as substance isconcerned the review of Bukharin is perhaps the most weighty of these works. (I would observe inpassing for the benefit of the modern reader that in 1925 Bukharin was, after Stalin, the most importantfigure in the leadership of the Russian Party; the breach between them did not take place for anotherthree years.) The most positive feature of this review is the way my views on economics becomeconcretised. This can be seen above all in my polemic against an idea that had a wide currency amongboth vulgar-materialist Communists and bourgeois positivists. This was the notion that technology wasthe principle that objectively governed progress in the development of the forces of production: Thisevidently leads to historical fatalism, to the elimination of man and of social activity; it leads to the idealthat technology functions like a societal 'natural force' obedient to 'natural laws'. My criticism not onlymoved on a more concrete historical level than had been the case for most of History and ClassConsciousness, but also I made less use of voluntaristic ideological counter-weights to oppose to thismechanistic fatalism. I tried to demonstrate that economic forces determined the course of society andhence of technology too. The same applies to my review of Wittfogel's book. Both analyses suffer fromthe same theoretical defect in that they both treat mechanistic vulgar-materialism and positivism as asingle undifferentiated trend, and indeed the latter is for the most part assimilated into the former.

Of greater importance are the much more detailed discussions of the new editions of Lassalles's lettersand the works of Moses Hess. Both reviews are dominated by the tendency to ground social criticism andthe evolution of society more concretely in economics than I had ever been able to do in History andClass Consciousness. At the same time I tried to make use of the critique of idealism, of the continuationof the Hegelian dialectic for enlarging our knowledge of the insights thus acquired. That is to say, I tookup again the criticism that the young Marx had levelled in The Holy Family at the idealist thinkers whohad allegedly refuted Hegel. Marx's criticism was that such thinkers believed subjectively that they weremaking an advance on Hegel, while objectively they simply represented a revival of Fichte's subjectiveidealism. Thus it is characteristic of the conservative aspects of Hegel's thought that his history ofphilosophy does not go beyond proving the necessity of the present. Subjectively, therefore, there wascertainly something revolutionary about the impulses that lay behind Fichte's philosophy of history withits definition of the present as the 'age of total degradation' poised between the past and a future of whichit claimed to have philosophical knowledge. Already in the review of Lassalle it is shown that thisradicalism is purely imaginary and that as far as knowledge of the real movement of history is concerned



Hegel's philosophy moves on an objectively higher plane than Fichte's. This is because the dynamics ofHegel's system of the social and historical mediating factors that produce the present is more real and lessof an abstract intellectual construct than Fichte's manner of pointing towards the future. Lassalle'ssympathy for such tendencies is anchored in the pure idealism of his overall view of the world; it refusesto concern itself with the worldliness that results from a view of history based on economics. In order togive full force to the distance separating Marx and Lassalle, I quoted in the review a statement made byLassalle in the course of a conversation with Marx: “If you do not believe in the immortality of thecategories, then you must believe in God.” This sharp delineation of the retrograde features of Lassalle'sthought was at the same time part of a theoretical polemic against currents in Social Democracy. For incontrast to the criticism Marx levelled at Lassalle, there was a tendency among the Social Democrats tomake of Lassalle a co-founder of the socialist view of the world, on a par with Marx. I did not refer tothem explicitly but I attacked the tendency as a bourgeois deviation. This helped to bring me closer to thereal Marx on a number of issues than had been possible in History and Class Consciousness.

The discussion of Moses Hess had no such immediate political relevance. But having once taken up theideas of the early Marx I felt a strong need to define my position against that of his contemporaries, theleft wing that emerged from the ruins of Hegelian philosophy and the True Socialists who were oftenclosely associated with it. This also helped me to bring the philosophical definition of economicproblems more forcefully into the foreground. My uncritical attitude towards Hegel had still not beenovercome; my criticism of Hess, like History and Class Consciousness, is based on the supposedequation of objectification and alienation. The advance on my earlier position assumes a somewhatparadoxical form. On the one hand, I make use of those tendencies in Hegel which emphasise the pointthat economic categories are societal realities as a stick with which to beat Lassalle and the radicalYoung Hegelians. On the other hand, I launch a sharp attack on Feuerbach for his undialectical critiqueof Hegel. This last point leads to the position already affirmed: that Marx takes up the thread whereHegel left off; while the first leads to the attempt to define the relationship between economics anddialectics more closely. To take one example relating to the Phenomenology, emphasis is placed onHegel's worldliness in his economic and social dialectics as opposed to the transcendentalism of everytype of subjective idealism. In the same way alienation is regarded neither as “a mental construct nor as a'reprehensible' reality” but “as the immediately given form in which the present exists on the way toovercoming itself in the historical process”. This forms a link with an objective line of developmentstemming from History and Class Consciousness concerning mediation and immediacy in the evolutionof society. The most important aspect of such ideas is that they culminate in the demand for a new kindof critique which is already searching explicitly for a direct link-up with Marx's Critique of PoliticalEconomy. Once I had gained a definite and fundamental insight into what was wrong with my wholeapproach in History and Class Consciousness this search became a plan to investigate the philosophicalconnections between economics and dialectics. My first attempt to put this plan into practice came earlyin the thirties, in Moscow and Berlin, with the first draft of my book on the young Hegel (which was notcompleted until autumn 1937). Only now, thirty years later, am I attempting to discover a real solution tothis whole problem in the ontology of social existence, on which I am currently engaged.

I am not in a position to document the extent to which these tendencies gained ground in the three yearsthat separate the Hess essay from the Blum Theses. I just think it extremely unlikely that my practicalwork for the party, with its constant demands, for concrete economic analysis, should have had no effecton my theoretical views on economics. At any rate, the great change in my views that is embodied in theBlum Theses took place in 1929 and it was with these new attitudes that I took up a research post at the



Marx-Engels Institute at Moscow in 1930. Here I had two unexpected strokes of good luck: the text ofthe Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts had just been completely deciphered and I was able to read it.At the same time I made the acquaintance of Mikhail Lifschitz, and this proved to be the beginning of alife-long friendship. In the process of reading the Marx manuscript all the idealist prejudices of Historyand Class Consciousness were swept to one side. It is undoubtedly true that I could have found ideassimilar to those which now had such an overwhelming effect on me in the works of Marx that I had readpreviously. But the fact is that this did not happen, evidently because I read Marx in the light of my ownHegelian interpretation. Hence only a completely new text could have such a shock effect. (Of course, anadditional factor was that I had already undermined the sociopolitical foundations of that idealism in theBlum Theses.) However that may be, I can still remember even today the overwhelming effect producedin me by Marx's statement that objectivity was the primary material attribute of all things and relations.This links up with the idea already mentioned the objectification is a natural means by which manmasters the world and as such it can be either a positive or a negative fact. By contrast, alienation is aspecial variant of that activity that becomes operative in definite social conditions. This completelyshattered the theoretical foundations of what had been the particular achievement of History and ClassConsciousness. The book became wholly alien to me just as my earlier writings had become by 1918 —19. It suddenly became clear to me that if I wished to give body to these new theoretical insights I wouldhave to start again from scratch.

It was my intention at the time to publish a statement of my new position. My attempt to do so proved afailure (the manuscript has since been lost). I was not much concerned about it then as I was intoxicatedwith the prospect of a new start. But I also realised that extensive research and many detours would beneeded before I could hope to be inwardly in a position to correct the errors of History and ClassConsciousness and to provide a scientific, Marxist account of the matters treated there. I have alreadymentioned one such detour: it lead from the study of Hegel via the projected work on economics anddialectics to my present attempt to work out an ontology of social being.

Parallel with this the desire arose in me to make use of my knowledge of literature, art and their theory toconstruct a Marxist aesthetics. This was the beginning of my collaboration with Mikhail Lifschitz. In thecourse of many discussions it became clear to us that even the best and most capable Marxists, likePlekhanov and Mehring, had not had a sufficiently profound grasp of the universal nature of Marxism.They failed, therefore, to understand that Marx confronts us with the necessity of erecting a systematicaesthetics on the foundations of dialectical materialism. This is not the place to describe Lifschitz' greatachievements in the spheres of philosophy and philology. As far as I myself am concerned, I wrote anessay on the Sickingen debate between marx/Engels and Lassalle. In so doing the outlines of such asystem became clearly visible, though naturally they were limited to a particular problem. After stubborninitial resistance, especially from the vulgar sociologists, this view has meanwhile gained widespreadacceptance in Marxist circles. But it is not important to pursue the matter here any further. I would onlypoint out that the general shift in my philosophical outlook that I have described became clearly apparentin my activities as a critic in Berlin from 1931 to 1933. For it was not just the problem of mimesis thatoccupied the forefront of my attention, but also the application of dialectics to the theory of reflection.This involved me in a critique of naturalistic tendencies. For all naturalism is based on the idea of the'photographic' reflection of reality. The emphasis on the antithesis between realism and naturalism isabsent from both bourgeois and vulgar-Marxist theories but is central to the dialectical theory ofreflection and, hence also to an aesthetics in the spirit of Marx.

Although these remarks do not belong here, strictly speaking, they were necessary to indicate the



direction and the implications of the change brought about by my realisation that History and ClassConsciousness was based on mistaken assumptions. It is these implications that give me the right to saythat this was the point where my apprenticeship in Marxism and hence my whole youthful developmentcame to an end. All that remains is for me to offer some comments on my notorious self-criticism ofHistory and Class Consciousness. I must begin by confessing that having once discarded any of myworks I remain indifferent to them for the whole of my life. A year after the publication of The Soul andthe Forms, for example, I wrote a letter of thanks to Margarethe Susmann for her review of the book. Init I observed that “both the book and its form had become quite alien to me”. It had been the same withthe Theory of the Novel and it was the same now in the case of History and Class Consciousness. Ireturned to the Soviet Union in 1933 with every prospect of fruitful activity: the oppositional role of themagazine Literaturni Kritik on questions of literary theory in the years 1935 — 39 is well known.Tactically it was, however, necessary to distance myself publicly from History and Class Consciousnessso that the real partisan warfare against official and semi-official theories of literature would not beimpeded by counter-attacks in which my opponents would have been objectively in the right in my view,however narrow-minded they might otherwise be. Of course, in order to publish a self-criticism it wasnecessary to adopt the current official jargon. This is the only conformist element in the declaration Imade at this time. It too was an entry-ticket to all further partisan warfare; the difference between thisdeclaration and my earlier retraction of the Blum Theses is 'merely' that I sincerely did believe thatHistory and Class Consciousness was mistaken and I think that to this day. When, later on, the errorsenshrined in the book were converted into fashionable notions, I resisted the attempt to identify thesewith my own ideas and in this too I believe I was in the right. The four decades that have elapsed sincethe appearance of History and Class Consciousness, the changed situation in the struggle for a trueMarxist method, my own production during this period, all these factors may perhaps justify my taking aless one-sided view now. It is not, of course, my task to establish how far particular, rightly-conceivedtendencies in History and Class Consciousness really produced fruitful results in my own later activitiesand perhaps in those of others. That would be to raise a whole complex of questions whose resolution Imay be allowed to leave to the judgement of history.

Budapest, March 1967.

Further reading:

ABC of Communism, Bukharin & Preobrazhensky, 1919Marxism & Philosophy, Karl Korsch, 1923What is Proletarian Culture?, Trotsky, 1923Dialectical & Historical Materialism, Stalin, 1938Cyril Smith, 1998Marx's Theory of Alienation, Istvan Meszaros, 1970

Georg Lukacs Internet Archive



MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of People

Lu

Lukács, Georg (1885-1971)

Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who influenced the mainstream ofEuropean Communist thought during the first half of the 20th century. His majorcontributions include the formulation of a Marxist system of aesthetics that opposedpolitical control of artists and defended humanism and an elaboration of Marx's theory ofalienation within industrial society. His What is Orthodox Marxism ? and The ChangingFunction of Historical Materialism, demonstrated his creative and independent approach toMarxist theory.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family, Lukács had read Marx while at school, but was moreinfluenced by Kierkegaard and Weber. He was unimpressed with the majority of thetheoretical leaders of the Second International such as Karl Kautsky, but had been impressedby Rosa Luxemburg. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lukács joined the HungarianCommunist Party in 1918. After the overthrow of Béla Kun's short-lived HungarianCommunist regime in 1919, in which Lukács served as Commissar for Culture andEducation, the Hungarian white terror brutally persecuted former government members.

Fleeing the White Terror, Lukacs moved to Vienna, where he remained for 10 years. Heedited the review Kommunismus, which for a time became a focal point for the ultra-leftcurrents in the Third International and and was a member of the Hungarian undergroundmovement. In his book History and Class Consciousness (1923), he developed these ideasand laid the basis for his critical literary tenets by linking the development of form in artwith the history of the class struggle. He came under sharp criticism from the Comintern,and facing expulsion from the Party and consequent exclusion from the struggle againstfascism, he recanted.

Lukács was in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, save for a short period in 1930-31, at which timehe attended the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. In 1933 he left Berlin and returned to

Glossary of People: L

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/l/u.htm (1 of 6) [11/06/2002 17:33:43]

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/k/i.htm#kierkegaard-soren

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/w/e.htm#weber-max

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/k/a.htm#kautsky-karl

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/k/u.htm#kun-bela

Moscow to attend the Institute of Philosophy. He moved back to Hungary in 1945 andbecame a member of parliament and a professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of cultureat the University of Budapest. In 1956 he was a major figure in the Hungarian uprising,serving as minister of culture during the revolt. He was arrested and deported to Romaniabut was allowed to return to Budapest in 1957, where, stripped of his former power andstatus, he devoted himself to a steady output of critical and philosophical works.

In later years, Lukács repudiated many of the positions put in his early works which hadformed the starting point for such writers as Adorno and Fromm, and other tendencies whichnot only rejected the Stalinised version of Marxism, but departed from Marx's centralprinciples. He frequently clashed with Jean-Paul Sartre and others who combined Marxismwith psychoanalysis, structuralism and other philosophical currents inherently incompatiblewith Marxism.

Lukács wrote more than 30 books and hundreds of essays and lectures. Among his otherworks are Soul and Form (1911), a collection of essays that established his reputation as acritic; The Historical Novel (1955); and books on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hegel,Lenin, Marxism, and aesthetics. In his Destruction of Reason, he launched a furious attackon Heidegger's accommodation with Nazism and the whole current of irrationalism whichwas dominant in the pre-war years.

Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilyevich (1875-1933)

First People's Commissar for Education in the Soviet government. [...]

See the Lunacharsky Internet Archive

Lupus

Nickname for Marx and Engels' friend Wilhelm Wolff

Luria, Alexander Romanovich (1902-1977)

Alexander Romanovich Luria (1902-1977) was born in Kazan, an old Russian universitycity east of Moscow. He entered Kazan University at the age of 16 and obtained his degreein 1921 at the age of 19. While still a student, he established the Kazan PsychoanalyticAssociation and planned on a career in psychology. His earliest research sought to establishobjective methods of assessing Freudian ideas about abnormalities of thought and the effectsof fatigue on mental processes.

In the early 1930s Alexander Luria undertook a pioneering study in Soviet Central Asia tograsp the historical transformation of human psychological functions under the influence ofchanging psychological tools. Luria (1976) showed that implementation of written languageand logico-mathematical operations, typically connected to formal schooling, had significant



http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/a/d.htm#adorno-theodor

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/f/r.htm#fromm-erich

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/s/a.htm#sartre-jean-paul

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/h/e.htm#heidegger-martin

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/s/o.htm#soviet-government

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lunachar/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/w/o.htm#wolff-wilhelm

influence on how people categorized objects of the environment.

Luria made advances in many areas, including cognitive psychology, the processes oflearning and forgetting, and mental retardation. One of Luria’s most important studiescharted the way in which damage to specific areas of the brain affect behavior. Today, Luriais honored as the father of neuropsychology.

After writing several books in the 1970’s, Alexander Luria died of heart failure at the age of75. Alexander Romanovich Luria autobiography, The Making of Mind, was published in1979 which outlines his most important contributions to developing a Cultural-HistoricalPsychology.

Works By A. R. Luria:

Luria, A. R. (1932). The Nature of Human Conflicts. New York: Liveright.Luria, A. R. and F. A. Yudovich. (1959). Speech and the Development of Mental Processes.London: Staples Press.Luria, A. R. (1960). The Role of Speech in the Regulation of Normal and AbnormalBehavior. New York: Irvington.Luria, A. R. (1966). Higher Cortical Functions in Man. New York: Basic Books.Luria, A. R. (1970). Traumatic Aphasia: Its Syndromes, Psychology, and Treatment. TheHague: Mouton.Luria, A. R. (1968). The Mind of Mnemonist. New York: Basic Books.Luria, A. R. (1972). The Man with a Shattered World. New York: Basic Books.Luria, A. R. (1973). The Working Brain. New York: Basic Books.Luria, A. R. (1979). The Making of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

See the Alexander Luria Archive.

Luxemburg, Rosa (1871-1919)

Born on March 5th, 1871 in Zamoshc of Congress Poland, Rosa Luxemburg was born into aJewish family, the youngest of five children. In 1889, at 18 years old, Luxemburg'srevolutionary agitation forced her to move to Zürich, Switzerland, to escape imprisonment.While in Zürich, Luxemburg continued her revolutionary activities from abroad, whilestudying political economy and law; receiving her doctrate in 1898. She met with manyRussian Social Democrats (at a time before the R.S.D.L.P. split); among them the leading



http://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/places/c/o.htm#congress-poland

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/r/u.htm#rsdlp

members of the party: Georgy Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod. It was not long beforeLuxemburg voiced sharp theoretical differences with the Russian party, primarily over theissue of Polish self-determination: Luxemburg believed that self-determination weakenedthe international Socialist movement, and helped only the bourgeoisie to strengthen theirrule over newly independent nations. Luxemburg split with both the Russian and PolishSocialist Party over this issue, who believed in the rights of Russian national mintorities toself-determination. In opposition, Luxemburg helped create the Polish Social DemocraticParty.

During this time Luxemburg met her life-long companion Leo Jogiches, who was head ofthe Polish Socialist Party. While Luxemburg was the speaker and theoretician of the party,Jogiches complimented her as the organiser of the party. The two developed an intensepersonal and political relationship throughout the rest of their lives.

Luxemburg left Zürich for Berlin in 1898, and joined the German Social DemocracticLabour Party. Quickly after joining the party, Luxemburg's most vibrant revolutionaryagitation and writings began to form. Expressing the central issues of debate in the GermanSocial Democracy at the time, she wrote Reform or Revolution in 1900; against EduardBernstein's revisionism of Marxist theory. Luxemburg explained:

"His theory tends to counsel us to renounce the social transformation, the final goal ofSocial-Democracy and, inversely, to make of social reforms, the means of the class struggle,its aim. Bernstein himself has very clearly and characteristically formulated this viewpointwhen he wrote: "The Final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement iseverything." "

While Luxemburg supported reformist activity (as the means of class struggle), the aim ofthese reforms was a complete revolution. She stressed that endless reforms wouldcontinually support the ruling bourgeois, long past the time a proletarian revolution couldhave begun to build a Socialist society. Luxemburg, along with Karl Kautsky, helped toprevent this revisionism of Marxist theory in the German Socialist party. (Further Reading:1904: Social Democracy and Parliamentarism)

By the 1905 Revolution in Russia, Luxemburg refocused her attention to the Socialistmovement in the Russian Empire, explaining the great movement the Russian proletariathad begun:

"For on this day the Russian proletariat burst on the political stage as a class for the firsttime; for the first time the only power which historically is qualified and able to castTsarism into the dustbin and to raise the banner of civilization in Russia and everywhere hasappeared on the scene of action."

Revolution in Russia

Luxemburg stood by the Marxist theory of the Russian proletariat leading a Socialistrevolution; in opposition to the Russian Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties, butin support of the Bolshevik party. Luxemburg moved to Warsaw to aid the Russian



http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/p/l.htm#plekhanov

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/a/x.htm#axelrod-pavel

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/g/e.htm#gsdlp

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/g/e.htm#gsdlp

http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/works/1900/ref-rev/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/k/a.htm#kautsky

http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/works/1904/06_05.htm


http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/m/e.htm#menshevik

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/s/o.htm#srs

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/b/o.htm#bolshevik

revolutionary uprising, and was imprisoned for her activities.

In 1906, Luxemburg began to strongly advocate her theory of The Mass Strike as the mostimportant revolutionary weapon of the proletariat. This continual drive became a majorpoint of contention in the German Social Democratic party, primarily opposed by AugustBebel and Karl Kautsky. For such passionate and relentless agitation, Luxemburg earned thenickname "Bloody Rosa".

Before the first World War, Luxemburg wrote The Accumulation of Capital in 1913; a workexplaining the capitalist movement towards imperialism. With the begining of World War I,Luxemburg stood ardently against the German Social-Democratic Parties'social-chauvinistic stand; supporting German aggression and annexations of other nations.Allied with Karl Liebknecht, Luxemburg left the Social Democractic party, and helped formthe Internationale Group, which soon became the Spartacus League, in opposition ofSocialist national chauvinism, agitating instead that German soldiers turn their weaponsagainst their own government and overthrow it.

For this revolutionary agitation, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested and imprisoned.While in prison, Luxemburg wrote the Junius Pamphlet, which became the theoreticalfoundation of the Spartacus League. Also while in prison, Luxemburg wrote on the RussianRevolution, most famously in her book: The Russian Revolution, where she warns of thedictatorial powers of the Bolshevik party. Here Luxemburg explains her views on the theoryof the dictatorship of the proletariat:

"Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, notin its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights andeconomic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannotbe accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a littleleading minority in the name of the class -- that is, it must proceed step by step out of theactive participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to thecontrol of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of themass of the people.

While Luxemburg attacked the Soviet government being dominated by the strong hand ofthe Bolshevik party, she recognised the Civil War that was raging through Russia and thepresent need for such a government:

"It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we shouldexpect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finestdemocracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialisteconomy. By their determined revolutionary stand, their exemplary strength in action, andtheir unbreakable loyalty to international socialism, they have contributed whatever couldpossibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions. The danger begins only whenthey make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all thetactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to theinternational proletariat as a model of socialist tactics."



http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/works/1906/mass-str/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/b/e.htm#bebel

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/b/e.htm#bebel

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/l/i.htm#liebknecht-karl

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/i/n.htm#internationale-group

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/s/p.htm#spartacus-league

http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/works/1915/04.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/works/1918/rus-rev/index.htm

Luxemburg later opposed the newly formed Soviet government's efforts to come to Peaceon all fronts, by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. (Further reading: TheRussian Tragedy)

In November, 1918, the German government reluctantly released Luxemburg from prision,whereupon she immediately began again revolutionary agitation. A month later, Luxemburgand Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party, while armed conflicts were raging inthe streets of Berlin in support of the Spartacus League.

On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Wilhelm Pieck; the leaders ofthe German Communist Party, were arrested and taken in for questioning at the Adlon Hotelin Berlin. While happened is not known, save for the last sentence, one account is that theywere told they were to be relocated; German soldiers escorted Luxemburg and Liebknechtout of the building, knocking them unconscious as they left. Pieck managed to escape, whilethe unconscious bodies of Luxemburg and Liebknecht were quietly driven away in aGerman military jeep. They were shot, and thrown into a river.

With the finest leaders of the German Communist movement murdered, the gates of risingGerman facism opened unhindered.

Further Reading: Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive

Index of the Letter L | Encyclopedia of Marxism



http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/b/r.htm#brest-litovsk-treaty



http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/l.htm

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/index.htm

Georg LukacsHistory & Class Consciousness

What is Orthodox Marxism?

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.Marx: Theses on Feuerbach.

THIS question, simple as it is, has been the focus of much discussion in both proletarian and bourgeoiscircles. But among intellectuals it has gradually become fashionable to greet any profession of faith inMarxism with ironical disdain. Great disunity has prevailed even in the ‘socialist’ camp as to whatconstitutes the essence of Marxism, and which theses it is ‘permissible’ to criticise and even rejectwithout forfeiting the right to the title of ‘Marxist’. In consequence it came to be thought increasingly‘unscientific’ to make scholastic exegeses of old texts with a quasi-Biblical status, instead of fostering an‘impartial’ study of the ‘facts’. These texts, it was argued, had long been ‘superseded’ by moderncriticism and they should no longer be regarded as the sole fount of truth.

If the question were really to be formulated in terms of such a crude antithesis it would deserve at best apitying smile. But in fact it is not (and never has been) quite so straightforward. Let us assume for thesake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individualtheses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept allsuch modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto — withouthaving to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply theuncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, northe exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is thescientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can bedeveloped, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction,moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it have led and must lead to over-simplification,triviality and eclecticism.

1

Materialist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic. This definition is so important and altogether so crucialfor an understanding of its nature that if the problem is to be approached in the right way this must befully grasped before we venture upon a discussion of the dialectical method itself. The issue turns on thequestion of theory and practice. And this not merely in the sense given it by Marx when he says in hisfirst critique of Hegel that “theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses”. [1] Even more tothe point is the need to discover those features and definitions both of the theory and the ways ofgripping the masses which convert the theory, the dialectical method, into a vehicle of revolution. Wemust extract the practical essence of the theory from the method and its relation to its object. If this is notdone that ‘gripping the masses’ could well turn out to be a will o’ the wisp. It might turn out that themasses were in the grip of quite different forces, that they were in pursuit of quite different ends. In thatevent, there would be no necessary connection between the theory and their activity, it would be a formthat enables the masses to become conscious of their socially necessary or fortuitous actions, withoutensuring a genuine and necessary bond between consciousness and action.

What is Orthodox Marxism? by Georg Lukacs

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm (1 of 18) [11/06/2002 17:33:45]

In the same essay [2] Marx clearly defined the conditions in which a relation between theory and practicebecomes possible. “It is not enough that thought should seek to realise itself; reality must also strivetowards thought.” Or, as he expresses it in an earlier work: [3] “It will then be realised that the world haslong since possessed something in the form of a dream which it need only take possession ofconsciously, in order to possess it in reality.” Only when consciousness stands in such a relation to realitycan theory and practice be united. But for this to happen the emergence of consciousness must becomethe decisive step which the historical process must take towards its proper end (an end constituted by thewills of men, but neither dependent on human whim, nor the product of human invention). The historicalfunction of theory is to make this step a practical possibility. Only when a historical situation has arisenin which a class must understand society if it is to assert itself; only when the fact that a class understandsitself means that it understands society as a whole and when, in consequence, the class becomes both thesubject and the object of knowledge; in short, only when these conditions are all satisfied will the unityof theory and practice, the precondition of the revolutionary function of the theory, become possible.

Such a situation has in fact arisen with the entry of the proletariat into history. “When the proletariatproclaims the dissolution of the existing social order,” Marx declares, “it does no more than disclose thesecret of its own existence, for it is the effective dissolution of that order.” [4] The links between thetheory that affirms this and the revolution are not just arbitrary, nor are they particularly tortuous or opento misunderstanding. On the contrary, the theory is essentially the intellectual expression of therevolutionary process itself. In it every stage of the process becomes fixed so that it may be generalised,communicated, utilised and developed. Because the theory does nothing but arrest and make consciouseach necessary step, it becomes at the same time the necessary premise of the following one.

To be clear about the function of theory is also to understand its own basis, i.e. dialectical method. Thispoint is absolutely crucial, and because it has been overlooked much confusion has been introduced intodiscussions of dialectics. Engels’ arguments in the Anti-Dühring decisively influenced the later life of thetheory. However we regard them, whether we grant them classical status or whether we criticise them,deem them to be incomplete or even flawed, we must still agree that this aspect is nowhere treated inthem. That is to say, he contrasts the ways in which concepts are formed in dialectics as opposed to‘metaphysics’; he stresses the fact that in dialectics the definite contours of concepts (and the objects theyrepresent) are dissolved. Dialectics, he argues, is a continuous process of transition from one definitioninto the other. In consequence a one-sided and rigid causality must be replaced by interaction. But hedoes not even mention the most vital interaction, namely the dialectical relation between subject andobject in the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves. Yet without this factordialectics ceases to be revolutionary, despite attempts (illusory in the last analysis) to retain ‘fluid’concepts. For it implies a failure to recognise that in all metaphysics the object remains untouched andunaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialecticalmethod the central problem is to change really.

If this central function of the theory is disregarded, the virtues of forming ‘fluid’ concepts becomealtogether problematic: a purely ‘scientific’ matter. The theory might then be accepted or rejected inaccordance with the prevailing state of science without any modification at all to one’s basic attitudes, tothe question of whether or not reality can be changed. Indeed, as the so-called Machists among Marx’ssupporters have demonstrated it even reinforces the view that reality with its ‘obedience to laws , in thesense used by bourgeois, contemplative materialism and the classical economics with which it is soclosely bound up, is impenetrable, fatalistic and immutable. That Machism can also give birth to an



equally bourgeois voluntarism does not contradict this. Fatalism and voluntarism are only mutuallycontradictory to an undialectical and unhistorical mind. In the dialectical view of history they prove to benecessarily complementary opposites, intellectual reflexes clearly expressing the antagonisms ofcapitalist society and the intractability of its problems when conceived in its own terms.

For this reason all attempts to deepen the dialectical method with the aid of ‘criticism’ inevitably lead toa more superficial view. For ‘criticism’ always starts with just this separation between method andreality, between thought and being. And it is just this separation that it holds to be an improvementdeserving of every praise for its introduction of true scientific rigour into the crude, uncriticalmaterialism of the Marxian method. Of course, no one denies the right of ‘criticism’ to do this. But if itdoes so we must insist that it will be moving counter to the essential spirit of dialectics.

The statements of Marx and Engels on this point could hardly be more explicit. “Dialectics therebyreduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion — both in the external world and in thethought of man — two sets of laws which are identical in substance” (Engels). [5] Marx formulated iteven more precisely. “In the study of economic categories, as in the case of every historical and socialscience, it must be borne in mind that ... the categories are therefore but forms of being, conditions ofexistence ...”. [6] If this meaning of dialectical method is obscured, dialectics must inevitably begin tolook like a superfluous additive, a mere ornament of Marxist ‘sociology’ or ‘economics’. Even worse, itwill appear as an obstacle to the ‘sober’, ‘impartial’ study of the ‘facts’, as an empty construct in whosename Marxism does violence to the facts.

This objection to dialectical method has been voiced most clearly and cogently by Bernstein, thanks inpart to a ‘freedom from bias’ unclouded by any philosophical knowledge. However, the very realpolitical and economic conclusions he deduces from this desire to liberate method from the ‘dialecticalsnares’ of Hegelianism, show clearly where this course leads. They show that it is precisely the dialecticthat must be removed if one wishes to found a thorough-going opportunistic theory, a theory of‘evolution’ without revolution and of ‘natural development’ into Socialism without any conflict.

2

We are now faced with the question of the methodological implications of these so-called facts that areidolised throughout the whole of Revisionist literature. To what extent may we look to them to provideguide-lines for the actions of the revolutionary proletariat? It goes without saying that all knowledgestarts from the facts. The only question is: which of the data of life are relevant to knowledge and in thecontext of which method?

The blinkered empiricist will of course deny that facts can only become facts within the framework of asystem — which will vary with the knowledge desired. He believes that every piece of data fromeconomic life, every statistic, every raw event already constitutes an important fact. In so doing heforgets that however simple an enumeration of ‘facts’ may be, however lacking in commentary, italready implies an ‘interpretation’. Already at this stage the facts have been comprehended by a theory, amethod; they have been wrenched from their living context and fitted into a theory.

More sophisticated opportunists would readily grant this despite their profound and instinctive dislike ofall theory. They seek refuge in the methods of natural science, in the way in which science distills ‘pure’facts and places them in the relevant contexts by means of observation, abstraction and experiment. They



then oppose this ideal model of knowledge to the forced constructions of the dialectical method.

If such methods seem plausible at first this is because capitalism tends to produce a social structure thatin great measure encourages such views. But for that very reason we need the dialectical method topuncture the social illusion so produced and help us to glimpse the reality underlying it. The ‘pure’ factsof the natural sciences arise when a phenomenon of the real world is placed (in thought or in reality) intoan environment where its laws can be inspected without outside interference. This process is reinforcedby reducing the phenomena to their purely quantitative essence. to their expression in numbers andnumerical relations. Opportunists always fail to recognise that it is in the nature of capitalism to processphenomena in this way. Marx gives an incisive account [7] of such a ‘process of abstraction’ in the caseof labour, but he does not omit to point out with equal vigour that he is dealing with a historicalpeculiarity of capitalist society.

“Thus the most general abstractions commonly appear where there is the highest concrete development,where one feature appears to be shared by many, and to be common to all. Then it cannot be thought ofany longer in one particular form."

But this tendency in capitalism goes even further. The fetishistic character of economic forms, thereification of all human relations, the constant expansion and extension of the division of labour whichsubjects the process of production to an abstract, rational analysis, without regard to the humanpotentialities and abilities of the immediate producers, all these things transform the phenomena ofsociety and with them the way in which they are perceived. In this way arise the ‘isolated’ facts,‘isolated’ complexes of facts, separate, specialist disciplines (economics, law, etc.) whose veryappearance seems to have done much to pave the way for such scientific methods. It thus appearsextraordinarily ‘scientific’ to think out the tendencies implicit in the facts themselves and to promote thisactivity to the status of science.

By contrast, in the teeth of all these isolated and isolating facts and partial systems, dialectics insists onthe concrete unity of the whole. Yet although it exposes these appearances for the illusions they are —albeit illusions necessarily engendered by capitalism — in this ‘scientific’ atmosphere it still gives theimpression of being an arbitrary construction.

The unscientific nature of this seemingly so scientific method consists, then, in its failure to see and takeaccount of the historical character of the facts on which it is based. This is the source of more than oneerror (constantly overlooked by the practitioners of the method) to which Engels has explicitly drawnattention. [8] The nature of this source of error is that statistics and the ‘exact’ economic theory basedupon them always lag behind actual developments.

“For this reason, it is only too often necessary in current history, to treat this, the most decisive factor, asconstant, and the economic situation existing at the beginning of the period concerned as given andunalterable for the whole period, or else to take notice of only those changes in the situation as arise outof the patently manifest events themselves and are therefore, likewise, patently manifest."

Thus we perceive that there is something highly problematic in the fact that capitalist society ispredisposed to harmonise with scientific method, to constitute indeed the social premises of its exactness.If the internal structure of the ‘facts’ of their interconnections is essentially historical, if, that is to say,they are caught up in a process of continuous transformation, then we may indeed question when thegreater scientific inaccuracy occurs. It is when I conceive of the ‘facts’ as existing in a form and as



subject to laws concerning which I have a methodological certainty (or at least probability) that they nolonger apply to these facts? Or is it when I consciously take this situation into account, cast a critical eyeat the ‘exactitude’ attainable by such a method and concentrate instead on those points where thishistorical aspect, this decisive fact of change really manifests itself ?

The historical character of the ‘facts’ which science seems to have grasped with such ‘purity’ makesitself felt in an even more devastating manner. As the products of historical evolution they are involvedin continuous change. But in addition they are also precisely in their objective structure the products of adefinite historical epoch, namely capitalism. Thus when ‘science’ maintains that the manner in whichdata immediately present themselves is an adequate foundation of scientific conceptualisation and thatthe actual form of these data is the appropriate starting-point for the formation of scientific concepts, itthereby takes its stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of capitalist society. It uncritically acceptsthe nature of the object as it is given and the laws of that society as the unalterable foundation of‘science’.

In order to progress from these ‘facts’ to facts in the true meaning of the word it is necessary to perceivetheir historical conditioning as such and to abandon the point of view that would see them asimmediately given: they must themselves be subjected to a historical and dialectical examination. For asMarx says: [9]

“The finished pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface in their real existence andconsequently in the ideas with which the agents and bearers of these relations seek to understand them, isvery different from, and indeed quite the reverse of and antagonistic to their inner. essential butconcealed core and the concepts corresponding to it."

If the facts are to be understood, this distinction between their real existence and their inner core must begrasped clearly and precisely. This distinction is the first premise of a truly scientific study which inMarx’s words, “would be superfluous if the outward appearance of things coincided with their essence”.[10] Thus we must detach the phenomena from the form in which they are immediately given anddiscover the intervening links which connect them to their core, their essence. In so doing, we shall arriveat an understanding of their apparent form and see it as the form in which the inner core necessarilyappears. It is necessary because of the historical character of the facts, because they have grown in thesoil of capitalist society. This twofold character, the simultaneous recognition and transcendence ofimmediate appearances is precisely the dialectical nexus.

In this respect, superficial readers imprisoned in the modes of thought created by capitalism, experiencedthe gravest difficulties in comprehending the structure of thought in Capital. For on the one hand, Marx’saccount pushes the capitalist nature of all economic forms to their furthest limits, he creates anintellectual milieu where they can exist in their purest form by positing a society ‘corresponding to thetheory’, i.e. capitalist through and through, consisting of none but capitalists and proletarians. Butconversely, no sooner does this strategy produce results, no sooner does this world of phenomena seemto be on the point of crystallising out into theory than it dissolves into a mere illusion, a distortedsituation appears as in a distorting mirror which is, however, “only the conscious expression of an.imaginary movement”.

Only in this context which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process andintegrates them in a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality. Thisknowledge starts from the simple (and to the capitalist world), pure, immediate, natural determinants



described above. It progresses from them to the knowledge of the concrete totality, i.e. to the conceptualreproduction of reality. This concrete totality is by no means an unmediated datum for thought.

“The concrete is concrete,” Marx says,[11] “because it is a synthesis of many particular determinants, i.e.a unity of diverse elements."

Idealism succumbs here to the delusion of confusing the intellectual reproduction of reality with theactual structure of reality itself. For “in thought, reality appears as the process of synthesis, not asstarting-point, but as outcome, although it is the real starting-point and hence the starting-point forperception and ideas."

Conversely, the vulgar materialists, even in the modern guise donned by Bernstein and others, do not gobeyond the reproduction of the immediate, simple determinants of social life. They imagine that they arebeing quite extraordinarily ‘exact’ when they simply take over these determinants without eitheranalysing them further or welding them into a concrete totality. They take the facts in abstract isolation,explaining them only in terms of abstract laws unrelated to the concrete totality. As Marx observes:

“Crudeness and conceptual nullity consist in the tendency to forge arbitrary unmediated connectionsbetween things that belong together in an organic union.” [12]

The crudeness and conceptual nullity of such thought lies primarily in the fact that it obscures thehistorical, transitory nature of capitalist society. Its determinants take on the appearance of timeless,eternal categories valid for all social formations. This could be seen at its crassest in the vulgar bourgeoiseconomists, but the vulgar Marxists soon followed in their footsteps. The dialectical method wasoverthrown and with it the methodological supremacy of the totality over the individual aspects; the partswere prevented from finding their definition within the whole and, instead, the whole was dismissed asunscientific or else it degenerated into the mere ‘idea’ or ‘sum’ of the parts. With the totality out of theway, the fetishistic relations of the isolated parts appeared as a timeless law valid for every humansociety.

Marx’s dictum: “The relations of production of every society form a whole” [13] is the methodologicalpoint of departure and the key to the historical understanding of social relations. All the isolated partialcategories can be thought of and treated — in isolation — as something that is always present in everysociety. (If it cannot be found in a given society this is put down to ‘chance’ as the exception that provesthe rule.) But the changes to which these individual aspects are subject give no clear and unambiguouspicture of the real differences in the various stages of the evolution of society. These can really only bediscerned in the context of the total historical process of their relation to society as a whole.

3

This dialectical conception of totality seems to have put a great distance between itself and reality, itappears to construct reality very ‘unscientifically’. But it is the only method capable of understandingand reproducing reality. Concrete totality is, therefore, the category that governs reality. [14] Therightness of this view only emerges with complete clarity when we direct our attention to the real,material substratum of our method, viz. capitalist society with its internal antagonism between the forcesand the relations of production. The methodology of the natural sciences which forms the methodologicalideal of every fetishistic science and every kind of Revisionism rejects the idea of contradiction andantagonism in its subject matter. If, despite this, contradictions do spring up between particular theories,



this only proves that our knowledge is as yet imperfect. Contradictions between theories show that thesetheories have reached their natural limits; they must therefore be transformed and subsumed under evenwider theories in which the contradictions finally disappear.

But we maintain that in the case of social reality these contradictions are not a sign of the imperfectunderstanding of society; on the contrary, they belong to the nature of reality itself and to the nature ofcapitalism. When the totality is known they will not be transcended and cease to be contradictions. Quitethe reverse. they will be seen to be necessary contradictions arising out of the antagonisms of this systemof production. When theory (as the knowledge of the whole) opens up the way to resolving thesecontradictions it does so by revealing the real tendencies of social evolution. For these are destined toeffect a real resolution of the contradictions that have emerged in the course of history.

From this angle we see that the conflict between the dialectical method and that of ‘criticism’ (or vulgarmaterialism, Machism, etc.) is a social problem. When the ideal of scientific knowledge is applied tonature it simply furthers the progress of science. But when it is applied to society it turns out to be anideological weapon of the bourgeoisie. For the latter it is a matter of life and death to understand its ownsystem of production in terms of eternally valid categories: it must think of capitalism as beingpredestined to eternal survival by the eternal laws of nature and reason. Conversely, contradictions thatcannot be ignored must be shown to be purely surface phenomena, unrelated to this mode of production.

The method of classical economics was a product of this ideological need. But also its limitations as ascience are a consequence of the structure of capitalist reality and the antagonistic character of capitalistproduction. When, for example, a thinker of Ricardo’s stature can deny the “necessity of expanding themarket along with the expansion of production and the growth of capital”, he does so (unconsciously ofcourse), to avoid the necessity of admitting that crises are inevitable. For crises are the most strikingillustration of the antagonisms in capitalist production and it is evident that “the bourgeois mode ofproduction implies a limitation to the free development of the forces of production”. [15] What was goodfaith in Ricardo became a consciously misleading apologia of bourgeois society in the writings of thevulgar economists. The vulgar Marxists arrived at the same results by seeking either the thorough-goingelimination of dialectics from proletarian science, or at best its ‘critical’ refinement.

To give a grotesque illustration, Max Adler wished to make a critical distinction between dialectics asmethod, as the movement of thought on the one hand and the dialectics of being, as metaphysics on theother. His ‘criticism’ culminates in the sharp separation of dialectics from both and he describes it as a“piece of positive science” which “is. what is chiefly meant by talk of real dialectics in Marxism”. Thisdialectic might more aptly be called ‘antagonism’, for it simply “asserts that an opposition exists betweenthe self-interest of an individual and the social forms in which he is confined”. [16] By this stroke theobjective economic antagonism as expressed in the class struggle evaporates, leaving only a conflictbetween the individual and society. This means that neither the emergence of internal problems, nor thecollapse of capitalist society, can be seen to be necessary. The end-product, whether he likes it or not, is aKantian philosophy of history’ Moreover, the structure of bourgeois society is established as theuniversal form of society in general. For the central problem Max Adler tackles, of the real “dialectics or,better, antagonism” is nothing but one of the typical ideological forms of the capitalist social order. Butwhether capitalism is rendered immortal on economic or on ideological grounds, whether with naivenonchalance, or with critical refinement is of little importance.

Thus with the rejection or blurring of the dialectical method history becomes unknowable. This does not



imply that a more or less exact account of particular people or epochs cannot be given without the aid ofdialectics. But it does put paid to attempts to understand history as a unified process. (This can be seen inthe sociologically abstract, historical constructs of the type of Spencer and Comte whose innercontradictions have been convincingly exposed by modern bourgeois historians, most incisively byRickert. But it also shows itself in the demand for a ‘philosophy of history’ which then turns out to havea quite inscrutable relationship to historical reality.) The opposition between the description of an aspectof history and the description of history as a unified process is not just a problem of scope, as in thedistinction between particular and universal history. It is rather a conflict of method, of approach.Whatever the epoch or special topic of study, the question of a unified approach to the process of historyis inescapable. It is here that the crucial importance of the dialectical view of totality reveals itself. For itis perfectly possible for someone to describe the essentials of an historical event and yet be in the darkabout the real nature of that event and of its function in the historical totality, i.e. without understandingit as part of a unified historical process.

A typical example of this can be seen in Sismondi’s treatment of the question of crisis. [17] Heunderstood the immanent tendencies in the processes of production and distribution. But ultimately hefailed because, for all his incisive criticism of capitalism, he remained imprisoned in capitalist notions ofthe objective and so necessarily thought of production and distribution as two independent processes,“not realising that the relations of distribution are only the relations of production sub alia species”. Hethus succumbs to the same fate that overtook Proudhon’s false dialectics; “he converts the various limbsof society into so many independent societies”. [18]

We repeat: the category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity,to identity. The apparent independence and autonomy which they possess in the capitalist system ofproduction is an illusion only in so far as they are involved in a dynamic dialectical relationship with oneanother and can be thought of as the dynamic dialectical aspects of an equally dynamic and dialecticalwhole. “The result we arrive at,” says Marx, “is not that production, distribution, exchange andconsumption are identical, but that they are all members of one totality, different aspects of a unit. . . .Thus a definite form of production determines definite forms of consumption, distribution and exchangeas well as definite relations between these different elements.... A mutual interaction takes place betweenthese various elements. This is the case with every organic body.” [19] But even the category ofinteraction requires inspection. If by interaction we mean just the reciprocal causal impact of twootherwise unchangeable objects on each other, we shall not have come an inch nearer to anunderstanding of society. This is the case with the vulgar materialists with their one-way causalsequences (or the Machists with their functional relations). After all, there is e.g. an interaction when astationary billiard ball is struck by a moving one: the first one moves, the second one is deflected from itsoriginal path. The interaction we have in mind must be more than the interaction of otherwiseunchanging objects. It must go further in its relation to the whole: for this relation determines theobjective form of every object of cognition. Every substantial change that is of concern to knowledgemanifests itself as a change in relation to the whole and through this as a change in the form ofobjectivity itself. [20] Marx has formulated this idea in countless places. I shall cite only one of thebest-known passages: [21]

“A negro is a negro. He only becomes a slave in certain circumstances. A cotton-spinning jenny is amachine for spinning cotton. Only in certain circumstances does it become capital. Torn from thosecircumstances it is no more capital than gold is money or sugar the price of sugar."



Thus the objective forms of all social phenomena change constantly in the course of their ceaselessdialectical interactions with each other. The intelligibility of objects develops in proportion as we grasptheir function in the totality to which they belong. This is why only the dialectical conception of totalitycan enable us to understand reality as a social process. For only this conception dissolves the fetishisticforms necessarily produced by the capitalist mode of production and enables us to see them as mereillusions which are not less illusory for being seen to be necessary. These unmediated concepts, these‘laws’ sprout just as inevitably from the soil of capitalism and veil the real relations between objects.

They can all be seen as ideas necessarily held by the agents of the capitalist system of production. Theyare, therefore, objects of knowledge, but the object which is known through them is not the capitalistsystem of production itself, but the ideology of its ruling class.

Only when this veil is torn aside does historical knowledge become possible. For the function of theseunmediated concepts that have been derived from the fetishistic forms of objectivity is to make thephenomena of capitalist society appear as supra-historical essences. The knowledge of the real, objectivenature of a phenomenon, the knowledge of its historical character and the knowledge of its actualfunction in the totality of society form, therefore, a single, undivided act of cognition. This unity isshattered by the pseudo-scientific method. Thus only through the dialectical method could the distinctionbetween constant and variable capital, crucial to economics, be understood. Classical economics wasunable to go beyond the distinction between fixed and circulating capital. This was not accidental. For“variable capital is only a particular historical manifestation of the fund for providing the necessaries oflife, or the labour-fund which the labourer requires for the maintenance of himself and his family, andwhich whatever be the system of social production, he must himself produce and reproduce. If thelabour-fund constantly flows to him in the form of money that pays for his labour, it is because theproduct he has created moves constantly away from him in the form of capital.... The transaction isveiled by the fact that the product appears as a commodity and the commodity as money.” [22]

The fetishistic illusions enveloping all phenomena in capitalist society succeed in concealing reality, butmore is concealed than the historical, i.e. transitory, ephemeral nature of phenomena. This concealmentis made possible by the fact that in capitalist society man’s environment, and especially the categories ofeconomics, appear to him immediately and necessarily in forms of objectivity which conceal the fact thatthey are the categories of the relations of men with each other. Instead they appear as things and therelations of things with each other. Therefore, when the dialectical method destroys the fiction of theimmortality of the categories it also destroys their reified character and clears the way to a knowledge ofreality. According to Engels in his discussion of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, “economics doesnot treat of things, but of the relations between persons and, in the last analysis, between classes;however, these relations are always bound to things and appear as things.” [23]

It is by virtue of this insight that the dialectical method and its concept of totality can be seen to providereal knowledge of what goes on in society. It might appear as if the dialectic relations between parts andwhole were no more than a construct of thought as remote from the true categories of social reality as theunmediated formulae of bourgeois economics. If so, the superiority of dialectics would be purelymethodological. The real difference, however, is deeper and more fundamental.

At every stage of social evolution each economic category reveals a definite relation between men. Thisrelation becomes conscious and is conceptualised. Because of this the inner logic of the movement ofhuman society can be understood at once as the product of men themselves and of forces that arise from



their relations with each other and which have escaped their control. Thus the economic categoriesbecome dynamic and dialectical in a double sense. As ‘pure’ economic categories they are involved inconstant interaction with each other, and that enables us to understand any given historical cross-sectionthrough the evolution of society. But since they have arisen out of human relations and since theyfunction in the process of the transformation of human relations, the actual process of social evolutionbecomes visible in their reciprocal relationship with the reality underlying their activity. That is to say,the production and reproduction of a particular economic totality, which science hopes to understand, isnecessarily transformed into the process of production and reproduction of a particular social totality; inthe course of this transformation, ‘pure’ economics are naturally transcended, though this does not meanthat we must appeal to any transcendental forces. Marx often insisted upon this aspect of dialectics. Forinstance: [24]

“Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process or as a process ofreproduction produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproducesthe capitalist relation itself, on the one hand the capitalist and on the other, the labourer."

4

To posit oneself, to produce and reproduce oneself — that is reality. Hegel clearly perceived this andexpressed it in a way closely similar to that of Marx, albeit cloaked in abstraction and misunderstandingitself and thus opening the way to further misunderstanding. “What is actual is necessary in itself,” hesays in the Philosophy of Right. “Necessity consists in this that the whole is sundered into the differentconcepts and that this divided whole yields a fixed and permanent determinacy. However, this is not afossilised determinacy but one which permanently recreates itself in its dissolution.” [25] The deepaffinities between historical materialism and Hegel’s philosophy are clearly manifested here, for bothconceive of theory as the self-knowledge of reality. Nevertheless, we must briefly point to the crucialdifference between them. This is likewise located in the problem of reality and of the unity of thehistorical process.

Marx reproached Hegel (and, in even stronger terms, Hegel’s successors who had reverted to Kant andFichte) with his failure to overcome the duality of thought and being, of theory and practice, of subjectand object. He maintained that Hegel’s dialectic, which purported to be an inner, real dialectic of thehistorical process, was a mere illusion: in the crucial point he failed to go beyond Kant. His knowledge isno more than knowledge about an essentially alien material. It was not the case that this material, humansociety, came to now itself. As he remarks in the decisive sentences of his critique, [26]

“Already with Hegel, the absolute spirit of history has its material in the masses, but only finds adequateexpression in philosophy. But the philosopher appears merely as the instrument by which absolute spirit,which makes history, arrives at self-consciousness after the historical movement has been completed.The philosopher’s role in history is thus limited to this subsequent consciousness, for the real movementis executed unconsciously by the absolute spirit. Thus the philosopher arrives post festum.”

Hegel, then, permits

“absolute spirit qua absolute spirit to make history only in appearance. ... For, as absolute spirit does notappear in the mind of the philosopher in the shape of the creative world-spirit until after the event, itfollows that it makes history only in the consciousness, the opinions and the ideas of the philosophers,



only in the speculative imagination.”

Hegel’s conceptual mythology has been definitively eliminated by the critical activity of the youngMarx.

It is, however, not accidental that Marx achieved ‘self-understanding’ in the course of opposing areactionary Hegelian movement reverting back to Kant. This movement exploited Hegel’s obscuritiesand inner uncertainties in order to eradicate the revolutionary elements from his method. It strove toharmonise the reactionary content, the reactionary conceptual mythology, the vestiges of thecontemplative dualism of thought and existence with the consistently reactionary philosophy whichprevailed in the Germany of the day.

By adopting the progressive part of the Hegelian method, namely the dialectic, Marx not only cut himselfoff from Hegel’s successors; he also split Hegel’s philosophy in two. He took the historical tendency inHegel to its logical extreme: he radically transformed all the phenomena both of society and of socialisedman into historical problems: he concretely revealed the real substratum of historical evolution anddeveloped a seminal method in the process. He measured Hegel’s philosophy by the yardstick he hadhimself discovered and systematically elaborated, and he found it wanting. The mythologising remnantsof the ‘eternal values’ which Marx eliminated from the dialectic belong basically on the same level as thephilosophy of reflection which Hegel had fought his whole life long with such energy and bitterness andagainst which he had pitted his entire philosophical method, with its ideas of process and concretetotality, dialectics and history. In this sense Marx’s critique of Hegel is the direct continuation andextension of the criticism that Hegel himself levelled at Kant and Fichte. [27] So it came about thatMarx’s dialectical method continued what Hegel had striven for but had failed to achieve in a concreteform. And, on the other hand, the corpse of the written system remained for the scavenging philologistsand system-makers to feast upon.

It is at reality itself that Hegel and Marx part company. Hegel was unable to penetrate to the real drivingforces of history. Partly because these forces were not yet fully visible when he created his system. Inconsequence he was forced to regard the peoples and their consciousness as the true bearers of historicalevolution. (But he did not discern their real nature because of the .heterogeneous composition of thatconsciousness. So he mythologised it into the ‘spirit of the people’.) But in part he remained imprisonedin the Platonic and Kantian outlook, in the duality of thought and being, of form and matter,notwithstanding his very energetic efforts to break out. Even though he was the first to discover themeaning of concrete totality, and even though his thought was constantly bent upon overcoming everykind of abstraction, matter still remained tainted for him with the ’stain of the specific’ (and here he wasvery much the Platonist). These contradictory and conflicting tendencies could not be clarified within hissystem. They are often juxtaposed, unmediated, contradictory and unreconciled. In consequence, theultimate (apparent) synthesis had perforce to turn to the past rather than the future. [28] It is no wonderthat from very early on bourgeois science chose to dwell on these aspects of Hegel. As a result therevolutionary core of his thought became almost totally obscure even for Marxists.

A conceptual mythology always points to the failure to understand a fundamental condition of humanexistence, one whose effects cannot be warded off. This failure to penetrate the object is expressedintellectually in terms of transcendental forces which construct and shape reality, the relations betweenobjects, our relations with them and their transformations in the course of history in a mythologicalfashion. By recognising that “the production and reproduction of real life (is) in the last resort the



decisive factor in history”, [29] Marx and Engels gained a vantage-point from which they could settleaccounts with all mythologies. Hegel’s absolute spirit was the last of these grandiose mythologicalschemes. It already contained the totality and its movement, even though it was unaware of its realcharacter. Thus in historical materialism reason “which has always existed though not always in arational form”, [30] achieved that ‘rational’ form by discovering its real substratum, the basis from whichhuman life will really be able to become conscious of itself. This completed the programme of Hegel’sphilosophy of history, even though at the cost of the destruction of his system. In contrast to nature inwhich, as Hegel emphasises, [31] “change goes in a circle, repeating the same thing”, change in historytakes place “in the concept as well as on the surface. It is the concept itself which is corrected.”

5

The premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: “It is not men’s consciousness that determines theirexistence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Only in thecontext sketched above can this premise point beyond mere theory and become a question of praxis.Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product,albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity. This activity will be seen in its turn as theelement crucial for the transformation of existence. Man finds himself confronted by purely naturalrelations or social forms mystified into natural relations. They appear to be fixed, complete andimmutable entities which can be manipulated and even comprehended, but never overthrown. But alsothis situation creates the possibility of praxis in the individual consciousness. Praxis becomes the form ofaction appropriate to the isolated individual, it becomes his ethics. Feuerbach’s attempt to supersedeHegel foundered on this reef: like the German idealists, and to a much greater extent than Hegel, hestopped short at the isolated individual of ‘civil society’.

Marx urged us to understand ‘the sensuous world’, the object, reality, as human sensuous activity. [32]This means that man must become conscious of himself as a social being, as simultaneously the subjectand object of the socio-historical process. In feudal society man could not yet see himself as a socialbeing because his social relations were still mainly natural. Society was far too unorganised and had fartoo little control over the totality of relations between men for it to appear to consciousness as the realityof man. (The question of the structure and unity of feudal society cannot be considered in any detailhere.) Bourgeois society carried out the process of socialising society. Capitalism destroyed both thespatio-temporal barriers between different lands and territories and also the legal partitions between thedifferent ‘estates’ (Stande). In its universe there is a formal equality for all men; the economic relationsthat directly determined the metabolic exchange between men and nature progressively disappear. Manbecomes, in the true sense of the word, a social being. Society. becomes the reality for man.

Thus the recognition that society is reality becomes possible only under capitalism, in bourgeois society.But the class which carried out this revolution did so without consciousness of its function; the socialforces it unleashed, the very forces that carried it to supremacy seemed to be opposed to it like a secondnature, but a more soulless, impenetrable nature than feudalism ever was. [33] It was necessary for theproletariat to be born for social reality to become fully conscious. The reason for this is that the discoveryof the class-outlook of the proletariat provided a vantage point from which to survey the whole ofsociety. With the emergence of historical materialism there arose the theory of the “conditions for theliberation of the proletariat” and the doctrine of reality understood as the total process of social evolution.This was only possible because for the proletariat the total knowledge of its class-situation was a vital



necessity, a matter of life and death; because its class situation becomes comprehensible only if thewhole of society can be understood; and because this understanding is the inescapable precondition of itsactions. Thus the unity of theory and practice is only the reverse side of the social and historical positionof the proletariat. From its own point of view self-knowledge coincides with knowledge of the whole sothat the proletariat is at one and the same time the subject and object of its own knowledge.

The mission of raising humanity to a higher level is based, as Hegel rightly observed [34] (although hewas still concerned with nations), on the fact that these “stages of evolution exist as immediate, natural,principles” and it devolves upon every nation (i.e. class) “endowed with such a natural principle to put itinto practice”. Marx concretises this idea with great clarity by applying it to social development: [35]

“If socialist writers attribute this world-historical role to the proletariat it is not because they believe ...that the proletariat are gods. Far from it. The proletariat can and must liberate itself because when theproletariat is fully developed, its humanity and even the appearance of its humanity has become totallyabstract; because in the conditions of its life all the conditions of life of contemporary society find theirmost inhuman consummation; because in the proletariat man is lost to himself but at the same time hehas acquired a theoretical consciousness of this loss, and is driven by the absolutely imperious dictates ofhis misery — the practical expression of this necessity — which can no longer be ignored orwhitewashed, to rebel against this inhumanity. However, the proletariat cannot liberate itself withoutdestroying the conditions of its own life. But it cannot do that without destroying all the inhumanconditions of life in contemporary society which exist in the proletariat in a concentrated form."

Thus the essence of the method of historical materialism is inseparable from the ‘practical and critical’activity of the proletariat: both are aspects of the same process of social evolution. So, too, theknowledge of reality provided by the dialectical method is likewise inseparable from the class standpointof the proletariat. The question raised by the Austrian Marxists of the methodological separation of the‘pure’ science of Marxism from socialism is a pseudo-problem. [36] For, the Marxist method, thedialectical materialist knowledge of reality, can arise only from the point of view of a class, from thepoint of view of the struggle of the proletariat. To abandon this point of view is to move away fromhistorical materialism, just as to adopt it leads directly into the thick of the struggle of the proletariat.

Historical materialism grows out of the “immediate, natural” life-principle of the proletariat; it means theacquisition of total knowledge of reality from this one point of view. But it does not follow from this thatthis knowledge or this methodological attitude is the inherent or natural possession of the proletariat as aclass (let alone of proletarian individuals). On the contrary. It is true that the proletariat is the conscioussubject of total social reality. But the conscious subject is not defined here as in Kant, where ‘subject’ isdefined as that which can never be an object. The ‘subject’ here is not a detached spectator of theprocess. The proletariat is more than just the active and passive part of this process: the rise andevolution of its knowledge and its actual rise and evolution in the course of history are just the twodifferent sides of the same real process. It is not simply the case that the working class arose in the courseof spontaneous, unconscious actions born of immediate, direct despair (the Luddite destruction ofmachines can serve as a primitive illustration of this), and then advanced gradually through incessantsocial struggle to the point where it “formed itself into a class”. But it is no less true that proletarianconsciousness of social reality, of its own class situation, of its own historical vocation and thematerialist view of history are all products of this self-same process of evolution which historicalmaterialism understands adequately and for what it really is for the first time in history.



Thus the Marxist method is equally as much the product of class warfare as any other political oreconomic product. In the same way, the evolution of the proletariat reflects the inner structure of thesociety which it was the first to understand. “Its result, therefore, appears just as constantly presupposedby it as its presuppositions appear as its results.” [37] The idea of totality which we have come torecognise as the presupposition necessary to comprehend reality is the product of history in a doublesense.

First, historical materialism became a formal, objective possibility only because economic factors createdthe proletariat, because the proletariat did emerge (i.e. at a particular stage of historical development),and because the subject and object of the knowledge of social reality were transformed. Second, thisformal possibility became a real one only in the course of the evolution of the proletariat. If the meaningof history is to be found in the process of history itself and not, as formerly, in a transcendental,mythological or ethical meaning foisted on to recalcitrant material, this presupposes a proletariat with arelatively advanced awareness of its own position, i.e. a relatively advanced proletariat, and, therefore, along preceding period of evolution. The path taken by this evolution leads from utopia to the knowledgeof reality; from transcendental goals fixed by the first great leaders of the workers’ movement to the clearperception by the Commune of 1871 that the working-class has “no ideals to realise”, but wishes only “toliberate the elements of the new society”. It is the path leading from the “class opposed to capitalism” tothe class “for itself”.

Seen in this light the revisionist separation of movement and ultimate goal represents a regression to themost primitive stage of the working-class movement. For the ultimate goal is not a ‘state of the future’awaiting the proletariat somewhere independent of the movement and the path leading up to it. It is not acondition which can be happily forgotten in the stress of daily life and recalled only in Sunday sermonsas a stirring contrast to workaday cares. Nor is it a ‘duty’, an ‘idea’ designed to regulate the ‘real’process. The ultimate goal is rather that relation to the totality (to the whole of society seen as a process),through which every aspect of the struggle acquires its revolutionary significance. This relation informsevery aspect in its simple and sober ordinariness, but only consciousness makes it real and so confersreality on the day-to-day struggle by manifesting its relation to the whole. Thus it elevates mere existenceto reality. Do not let us forget either that every attempt to rescue the ‘ultimate goal’ or the ‘essence’ ofthe proletariat from every impure contact with — capitalist- existence leads ultimately to the sameremoteness from reality, from ‘practical, critical activity’ and to the same relapse into the utopiandualism of subject and object, of theory and practice to which Revisionism has succumbed. [38]

The practical danger of every such dualism shows itself in the loss of any directive for action. As soon asyou abandon the ground of reality that has been conquered and reconquered by dialectical materialism, assoon as you decide to remain on the ‘natural’ ground of existence, of the empirical in its stark, nakedbrutality, you create a gulf between the subject of an action and the milieu of the ‘facts’ in which theaction unfolds so that they stand opposed to each other as harsh, irreconcilable principles. It thenbecomes impossible to impose the subjective will, wish or decision upon the facts or to discover in themany directive for action. A situation in which the ‘facts’ speak out unmistakably for or against a definitecourse of action has never existed, and neither can or will exist. The more conscientiously the facts areexplored — in their isolation, i.e. in their unmediated relations — the less compellingly will they point inany one direction. It is self-evident that a merely subjective decision will be shattered by the pressure ofuncomprehended facts acting automatically ‘according to laws’.

Thus dialectical materialism is seen to offer the only approach to reality which can give action a



direction. The self-knowledge, both subjective and objective, of the proletariat at a given point in itsevolution is at the same time knowledge of the stage of development achieved by the whole society. Thefacts no longer appear strange when they are comprehended in their coherent reality, in the relation of allpartial aspects to their inherent, but hitherto unelucidated roots in the whole: we then perceive thetendencies which strive towards the centre of reality, to what we are wont to call the ultimate goal. Thisultimate goal is not an abstract ideal opposed to the process, but an aspect of truth and reality. It is theconcrete meaning of each stage reached and an integral part of the concrete moment. Because of this, tocomprehend it is to recognise the direction taken (unconsciously) by events and tendencies towards thetotality. It is to know the direction that determines concretely the correct course of action at any givenmoment — in terms of the interest of the total process, viz. the emancipation of the proletariat. However,the evolution of society constantly heightens the tension between the partial aspects and the whole. justbecause the inherent meaning of reality shines forth With an ever more resplendent light, the meaning ofthe process is embedded ever more deeply in day-to-day events, and totality permeates thespatio-temporal character of phenomena. The path to consciousness throughout the course of history doesnot become smoother but on the contrary ever more arduous and exacting. For this reason the task oforthodox Marxism, its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and forall, of false tendencies. It is an ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideologyon the thought of the proletariat. Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilantprophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of thehistorical process. Hence the words of the Communist Manifesto on the tasks of orthodoxy and of itsrepresentatives, the Communists, have lost neither their relevance nor their value:

“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the nationalstruggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the commoninterests of the entire proletariat, independent of nationality. 2. In the various stages of developmentwhich the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always andeverywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”

March 1919.

next section


NOTES

1 Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , p. 52.

2 Ibid., p. 54.

3 Nachlass I, pp. 382-3. [Correspondence of 1843].

4 Ibid., p. 398. See also the essay on Class Consciousness.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm#32

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm#37

5 Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.

6 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, (my italics). It is of the first importance to realisethat the method is limited here to the realms of history and society. The misunderstandings that arisefrom Engels’ account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels — followingHegel’s mistaken lead — extended the method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial determinantsof dialectics — the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historicalchanges in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc. — are absentfrom our knowledge of nature. Unfortunately it is not possible to undertake a detailed analysis of thesequestions here.

7 Ibid., pp. 298-9.

8 Introduction to The Class Struggles in France . But it must be borne in mind that ‘scientific exactitude’presupposes that the elements remain ‘constant’. This had been postulated as far back as Galileo.

9 Capital III, p. 205. Similarly also pp. 47-8 and 307. The distinction between existence (which isdivided into appearance, phenomenon and essence) and reality derives from Hegel’s Logic. It isunfortunately not possible here to discuss the degree to which the conceptual framework of Capital isbased on these distinctions. Similarly, the distinction between idea (Vorstellung) and concept (Begriff) isalso to be found in Hegel.

10 Capital III, p. 797.

11 A Contribution to Political Economy, p. 293.

12 Ibid., p. 273. The category of reflective connection also derives from Hegel’s Logic. [See ExplanatoryNotes for this concept].

13 The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 123.

14 We would draw the attention of readers with a greater interest in questions of methodology to the factthat in Hegel’s logic, too, the relation of the parts to the whole forms the dialectical transition fromexistence to reality. It must be noted in this context that the question of the relation of internal andexternal also treated there is likewise concerned with the problem of totality. Hegel, Werke IV, pp. 156ff.

15 Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, Stuttgart, 1905, II, II, pp. 305-9.

16 Marxistische Probleme, p. 77.

17 Theorien über den Mehrvert, III, pp. 55 and 93-4.

18 The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 123-4.

19 A Contribution to Political Economy, pp. 291-2.

20 The very subtle nature of Cunow’s opportunism can be observed by the way in which — despite histhorough knowledge of Marx’s works — he substitutes the word ‘sum’ for the concept of the whole(totality) thus eliminating every dialectical relation. Cf. Die Marxsche Geschichts- Gesellschafts- und



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch04.htm#003

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm#205


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slconten.htm




http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm#s1

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm#s3


Staatstheorie, Berlin, 1929, II, pp. 155-7.

21 Wage Labour and Capital.

22 Capital I, p. 568.

23 Cf. the essay on Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.


25 Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1942, p. 283.

26 Nachlass II, p. 187. [The Holy Family, Chapter 6]

27 It comes as no surprise that at the very point where Marx radically departs from Hegel, Cunow shouldattempt to correct Marx by appealing to Hegel as seen through Kantian spectacles. To Marx’s purelyhistorical view of the state he opposes the Hegelian state as ‘an eternal value’. Its ‘errors’ are to be setaside as nothing more than ‘historical matters’ which do not ‘determine the nature, the fate and theobjectives of the state’. For Cunow, Marx is inferior to Hegel on this point because he ‘regards thequestion politically and not from the standpoint of the sociologist’. Cunow, op. cit. p. 308. It is evidentthat all Marx’s efforts to overcome Hegelian philosophy might never have existed in the eyes of theopportunists. If they do not return to vulgar materialism or to Kant they use the reactionary elements ofHegel’s philosophy of the state to erase revolutionary dialectics from Marxism, so as to provide anintellectual immortalisation of bourgeois society.

28 Hegel’s attitude towards national economy is highly significant in this context. (Philosophy of Right,§ 189.) He clearly sees that the problem of chance and necessity is fundamental to it methodologically(very like Engels: Origin of the Family S.W. II, p. 293 and Feuerbach, etc. S.W. II, p. 354). But he isunable to see the crucial importance of the material reality underlying the economy, viz. the relation ofmen to each other; it remains for him no more than an ‘arbitrary chaos’ and its laws are thought to be‘similar to those of the planetary system’. Ibid. §. 189.

29 Engels, Letter to J. Bloch, 21 September 1890.

30 Nachlass I, p. 381. [Correspondence with Ruge (1843)].

31 The Philosophy of History.

32 Theses on Feuerbach.

33 See the essay Class Consciousness for an explanation of this situation.

34 The Philosophy of Right, § 346-7.

35 Nachlass II, p. 133. [The Holy Family, Chapter 4].

36 Hilferding, Finanzkapital, pp. VIII-IX.

37 Capital III.

38 Cf. Zinoviev’s polemics against Guesde and his attitude to the war in Stuttgart. Gegen den Strom, pp.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch05.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch23.htm


http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prstate.htm#PRa270

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prcivils.htm#PR189

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/engels/90_09_21-ab.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpintrob.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prstate.htm#PR346

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm


470-1. Likewise Lenin’s book, “Left-Wing” Communism — an Infantile Disorder.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/lwc/index.htm


Written: 1920Source: History & Class ConsciousnessTranslator: Rodney LivingstonePublisher: Merlin Press, 1967Transcription and HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden

Class Consciousness

The question is not what goal is envisaged for the time being by this or that member of the proletariat, oreven by the proletariat as a whole. The question is what is the proletariat and what course of action willit be forced historically to take in conformity with its own nature.Marx: The Holy Family.

MARX’S chief work breaks off just as he is about to embark on the definition of class. This omissionwas to have serious consequences both for the theory and the practice of the proletariat. For on this vitalpoint the later movement was forced to base itself on interpretations, on the collation of occasionalutterances by Marx and Engels and on the independent extrapolation and application of their method. InMarxism the division of society into classes is determined by position within the process of production.But what, then, is the meaning of class consciousness? The question at once branches out into a series ofclosely interrelated problems. First of all, how are we to understand class consciousness (in theory)?Second, what is the (practical) function of class consciousness, so understood, in the context of the classstruggle? This leads to the further question: is the problem of class consciousness a ‘general’ sociologicalproblem or does it mean one thing for the proletariat and another for every other class to have emergedhitherto? And lastly, is class consciousness homogeneous in nature and function or can we discerndifferent gradations and levels in it? And if so, what are their practical implications for the class struggleof the proletariat?

1

In his celebrated account of historical materialism [1] Engels proceeds from the assumption that althoughthe essence of history consists in the fact that “nothing happens without a conscious purpose or anintended aim”, to understand history it is necessary to go further than this. For on the one hand, “themany individual wills active in history for the most part produce results quite other than thoseintended-often quite the opposite; their motives, therefore, in relation to the total result are likewise ofonly secondary importance. On the other hand, the further question arises: what driving forces in turnstand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into thesemotives in the brain of the actors?” He goes on to argue that these driving forces ought themselves to bedetermined in particular those which “set in motion great masses, whole peoples and again whole classes

Class Consciousness by Georg Lukacs 1920



of the people; and which create. a lasting action resulting in a great transformation.” The essence ofscientific Marxism consists, then, in the realisation that the real motor forces of history are independentof man’s (psychological) consciousness of them.

At a more primitive stage of knowledge this independence takes the form of the belief that these forcesbelong, as it were, to nature and that in them and in their causal interactions it is possible to discern the‘eternal’ laws of nature. As Marx says of bourgeois thought: “Man’s reflections on the forms of sociallife and consequently also his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that oftheir actual historical development. He begins post festum with the results of the process of developmentready to hand before him. The characters ... have already acquired the stability of natural self-understoodforms of social life, before man seeks to decipher not their historical character (for in his eyes they areimmutable) but their meaning.” [2]

This is a dogma whose most important spokesmen can be found in the political theory of classicalGerman philosophy and in the economic theory of Adam Smith and Ricardo. Marx opposes to them acritical philosophy, a theory of theory and a consciousness of consciousness. This critical philosophyimplies above all historical criticism. It dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of socialinstitutions; it reveals their historical origins and shows therefore that they are subject to history in every-respect including historical decline. Consequently history does not merely unfold within the terrainmapped out by these institutions. It does not resolve itself into the evolution of contents, of men andsituations, etc., while the principles of society remain eternally valid. Nor are these institutions the goalto which all history aspires, such that when they are realised history will have fulfilled her mission andwill then be at an end. On the contrary, history is precisely the history of these institutions, of the changesthey undergo as institutions which bring men together in societies. Such institutions start by controllingeconomic relations between men and go on to permeate all human relations (and hence also man’srelations with himself and with nature, etc.).

At this point bourgeois thought must come up against an insuperable obstacle, for its starting-point andits goal are always, if not always consciously, an apologia for the existing order of things or at least theproof of their immutability. [3] “Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any,” [4] Marxobserves with reference to bourgeois economics, a dictum which applies with equal force to all attemptsby bourgeois thinkers to understand the process of history. (It has often been pointed out that this is alsoone of the defects of Hegel’s philosophy of history.) As a result, while bourgeois thought is indeed ableto conceive of history as a problem, it remains an intractable problem. Either it is forced to abolish theprocess of history and regard the institutions of the present as eternal laws of nature which for‘mysterious’ reasons and in a manner wholly at odds with the principles of a rational science were held tohave failed to establish themselves firmly, or indeed at all, in the past. (This is characteristic of bourgeoissociology.) Or else, everything meaningful or purposive is banished from history. It then becomesimpossible to advance beyond the mere ‘individuality’ of the various epochs and their social and humanrepresentatives. History must then insist with Ranke that every age is “equally close to God”, i.e. hasattained an equal degree of perfection and that-for quite different reasons-there is no such thing ashistorical development.

In the first case it ceases to be possible to understand the origin of social institutions. [5] The objects ofhistory appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature. History becomes fossilised in aformalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that theyconsist of relations between men. On the contrary, men become estranged from this, the true source of



historical understanding and cut off from it by an unbridgeable gulf. As Marx points out, [6] people failto realise “that these definite social relations are just as much the products of men as linen. flax, etc.”.

In the second case, history is transformed into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied atbest in the ‘spirit of the people’ or in ‘great men’. It can therefore only be described pragmatically but itcannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organisation would be aesthetic, as if it were a work ofart. Or else, as in the philosophy of history of the Kantians, it must be seen as the instrument, senseless initself, by means of which timeless, supra-historical, ethical principles are realised.

Marx resolves this dilemma by exposing it as an illusion. The dilemma means only that thecontradictions of the capitalist system of production are reflected in these mutually incompatibleaccounts of the same object. For in this historiography with its search for ‘sociological’ laws or itsformalistic rationale, we find the reflection of man’s plight in bourgeois society and of his helplessenslavement by the forces of production. “To them, their own social action”, Marx remarks, [7] “takesthe form of the action of objects which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them”. This law wasexpressed most clearly and coherently in the purely natural and rational laws of classical economics.Marx retorted with the demand for a historical critique of economics which resolves the totality of thereified objectivities of social and economic life into relations between men. Capital and with it everyform in which the national economy objectives itself is, according to Marx, “not a thing but a socialrelation between persons mediated through things”. [8]

However, by reducing the objectivity of the social institutions so hostile to man to relations betweenmen, Marx also does away with the false implications of the irrationalist and individualist principle, i.e.the other side of the dilemma. For to eliminate the objectivity attributed both to social institutionsinimical to man and to their historical evolution means the restoration of this objectivity to theirunderlying basis, to the relations between men; it does not involve the elimination of laws and objectivityindependent of the will of man and in particular the wills and thoughts of individual men. It simplymeans that this objectivity is the self-objectification of human society at a particular stage in itsdevelopment; its laws hold good only within the framework of the historical context which producedthem and which is in turn determined by them.

It might look as though by dissolving the dilemma in this manner we were denying consciousness anydecisive role in the process of history. It is true that the conscious reflexes of the different stages ofeconomic growth remain historical facts of great importance; it is true that while dialectical materialismis itself the product of this process, it does not deny that men perform their historical deeds themselvesand that they do so consciously. But as Engels emphasises in a letter to Mehring, [9] this consciousness isfalse. However, the dialectical method does not permit us simply to proclaim the ‘falseness’ of thisconsciousness and to persist in an inflexible confrontation of true and false. On the contrary, it requiresus to investigate this ‘false consciousness’ concretely as an aspect of the historical totality and as a stagein the historical process.

Of course bourgeois historians also attempt such concrete analyses; indeed they reproach historicalmaterialists with violating the concrete uniqueness of historical events. Where they go wrong is in theirbelief that the concrete can be located in the empirical individual of history (’individual’ here can refer toan individual man, class or people) and in his empirically given (and hence psychological ormass-psychological) consciousness. And just when they imagine that they have discovered the mostconcrete thing of all: society as a concrete totality, the system of production at a given point in history



and the resulting division of society into classes-they are in fact at the furthest remove from it. In missingthe mark they mistake something wholly abstract for the concrete. “These relations,” Marx states, “arenot those between one individual and another, but between worker and capitalist, tenant and landlord,etc. Eliminate these relations and you abolish the whole of society; your Prometheus will then be nothingmore than a spectre without arms or legs. ...” [10]

Concrete analysis means then: the relation to society as a whole. For only when this relation isestablished does the consciousness of their existence that men have at any given time emerge in all itsessential characteristics. It appears, on the one hand, as something which is subjectively justified in thesocial and historical situation, as something which can and should be understood, i.e. as ‘right’. At thesame time, objectively, it by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it andexpress it adequately. That is to say, objectively, it appears as a ‘false consciousness’. On the other hand,we may see the same consciousness as something which fails subjectively to reach its self-appointedgoals, while furthering and realising the objective aims of society of which it is ignorant and which it didnot choose.

This twofold dialectical determination of ‘false consciousness’ constitutes an analysis far removed fromthe naive description of what men in fact thought, felt and wanted at any moment in history and from anygiven point in the class structure. I do not wish to deny the great importance of this, but it remains afterall merely the material of genuine historical analysis. The relation with concrete totality and thedialectical determinants arising from it transcend pure description and yield the category of objectivepossibility. By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughtsand feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and theinterests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That isto say, it would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective situation. Thenumber of such situations is not unlimited in any society. However much detailed researches are able torefine social typologies there will always be a number of clearly distinguished basic types whosecharacteristics are determined by the types of position available in the process of production. Now classconsciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ [zugerechnet] to aparticular typical position in the process of production.[11] This consciousness is, therefore, neither thesum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class. And yetthe historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by thisconsciousness and not by the thought of the individual — and these actions can be understood only byreference to this consciousness.

This analysis establishes right from the start the distance that separates class consciousness from theempirically given, and from the psychologically describable and explicable ideas which men form abouttheir situation in life. But it is not enough just to state that this distance exists or even to define itsimplications in a formal and general way. We must discover, firstly, whether it is a phenomenon thatdiffers according to the manner in which the various classes are related to society as a whole and whetherthe differences are so great as to produce qualitative distinctions. And we must discover, secondly, thepractical significance of these different possible relations between the objective economic totality, theimputed class consciousness and the real, psychological thoughts of men about their lives. We mustdiscover, in short, the practical, historical function of class consciousness.

Only after such preparatory formulations can we begin to exploit the category of objective possibilitysystematically. The first question we must ask is how far is it intact possible to discern the whole



economy of a society from inside it? It is essential to transcend the limitations of particular individualscaught up in their own narrow prejudices. But it is no less vital not to overstep the frontier fixed for themby the economic structure of society and establishing their position in it. [12] Regarded abstractly andformally, then, class consciousness implies a class-conditioned unconsciousness of ones ownsocio-historical and economic condition. [13] This condition is given as a definite structural relation, adefinite formal nexus which appears to govern the whole of life. The ‘falseness’, the illusion implicit inthis situation is in no sense arbitrary; it is simply the intellectual reflex of the objective economicstructure. Thus, for example, “the value or price of labour-power takes on the appearance of the price orvalue of labour itself ...” and “the illusion is created that the totality is paid labour.... In contrast to that,under slavery even that portion of labour which is paid for appears unpaid for.” [14] Now it requires themost painstaking historical analysis to use the category of objective possibility so as to isolate theconditions in which this illusion can be exposed and a real connection with the totality established. For iffrom the vantage point of a particular class the totality of existing society is not visible; if a class thinksthe thoughts imputable to it and which bear upon its interests right through to their logical conclusion andyet fails to strike at the heart of that totality, then such a class is doomed to play only a subordinate role.It can never influence the course of history in either a conservative or progressive direction. Such classesare normally condemned to passivity, to an unstable oscillation between the ruling and the revolutionaryclasses, and if perchance they do erupt then such explosions are purely elemental and aimless. They maywin a few battles but they are doomed to ultimate defeat.

For a class to be ripe for hegemony means that its interests and consciousness enable it to organise thewhole of society in accordance with those interests. The crucial question in every class struggle is this:which class possesses this capacity and this consciousness at the decisive moment ? This does notpreclude the use of force. It does not mean that the class-interests destined to prevail and thus to upholdthe interests of society as a whole can be guaranteed an automatic victory. On the contrary, such atransfer of power can often only be brought about by the most ruthless use of force (as e.g. the primitiveaccumulation of capital). But it often turns out that questions of class consciousness prove to be decisivein just those situations where force is unavoidable and where classes are locked in alife-and-death-struggle. Thus the noted Hungarian Marxist Erwin Szabo is mistaken in criticising Engelsfor maintaining that the Great Peasant War (of 1525) was essentially a reactionary movement. Szaboargues that the peasants’ revolt was suppressed only by the ruthless use of force and that its defeat wasnot grounded in socioeconomic factors and in the class consciousness of the peasants. He overlooks thefact that the deepest reason for the weakness of the peasantry and the superior strength of the princes is tobe sought in class consciousness. Even the most cursory student of the military aspects of the Peasants’War can easily convince himself of this.

It must not be thought, however, that all classes ripe for hegemony have a class consciousness with thesame inner structure. Everything hinges on the extent to which they can become conscious of the actionsthey need to perform in order to obtain and organise power. The question then becomes: how far does theclass concerned perform the actions history has imposed on it ‘consciously’ or ‘unconsciously’? And isthat consciousness ‘true’ or ‘false’. These distinctions are by no means academic. Quite apart fromproblems of culture where such fissures and dissonances are crucial, in all practical matters too the fateof a class depends on its ability to elucidate and solve the problems with which history confronts it. Andhere it becomes transparently obvious that class consciousness is concerned neither with the thoughts ofindividuals, however advanced, nor with the state of scientific knowledge. For example, it is quite clearthat ancient society was broken economically by the limitations of a system built on slavery. But it is



equally clear that neither the ruling classes nor the classes that rebelled against them in the name ofrevolution or reform could perceive this. In consequence the practical emergence of these problemsmeant that the society was necessarily and irremediably doomed.

The situation. is even clearer in the case of the modern bourgeoisie, which, armed with its knowledge ofthe workings of economics, clashed with feudal and absolutist society. For the bourgeoisie was quiteunable to perfect its fundamental science, its own science of classes: the reef on which it foundered wasits failure to discover even a theoretical solution to the problem of crises. The fact that a scientificallyacceptable solution does exist is of no avail. For to accept that solution, even in theory, would betantamount to observing society from a class standpoint other than that of the bourgeoisie. And no classcan do that-unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely. Thus the barrier which converts the classconsciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself. It isthe objective result of the economic set-up, and is neither arbitrary, subjective nor psychological. Theclass consciousness of the bourgeoisie may well be able to reflect all the problems of organisationentailed by its hegemony and by the capitalist transformation and penetration of total production. But itbecomes obscured as soon as it is called upon to face problems that remain within its jurisdiction butwhich point beyond the limits of capitalism. The discovery of the (natural laws’ of economics is purelight in comparison with medieval feudalism or even the mercantilism of the transitional period, but byan internal dialectical twist they became “natural laws based on the unconsciousness of those who areinvolved in them”. [15]

It would be beyond the scope of these pages to advance further and attempt to construct a historical andsystematic typology of the possible degrees of class consciousness. That would require — in the firstinstance — an exact study of the point in the total process of production at which the interests of thevarious classes are most immediately and vitally involved. Secondly, we would have to show how far itwould be in the interest of any given class to go beyond this immediacy, to annul and transcend itsimmediate interest by seeing it as a factor within a totality. And lastly, what is the nature of the totalitythat is then achieved? How far does it really embrace the true totality of production? It is quite evidentthat the quality and structure of class consciousness must be very different if, e.g. it remains stationary atthe separation of consumption from production (as with the Roman Lumpenproletariat) or if it representsthe formation of the interests of circulation (as with merchant capital). Although we cannot embark on asystematic typology of the various points of view it can be seen from the foregoing that these specimensof ‘false’ consciousness differ from each other both qualitatively, structurally and in a manner that iscrucial for the activity of the classes in society.

2

It follows from the above that for pre-capitalist epochs and for the behaviour of many strata withincapitalism whose economic roots lie in pre-capitalism, class consciousness is unable to achieve completeclarity and to influence the course of history consciously.

This is true above all because class interests in pre-capitalist society never achieve full (economic)articulation. Hence the structuring of society into castes and estates means that economic elements areinextricably joined to political and religious factors. In contrast to this, the rule of the bourgeoisie meansthe abolition of the estates-system and this leads to the organisation of society along class lines. (In manycountries vestiges of the feudal system still survive, but this does not detract from the validity of thisobservation.)



This situation has its roots in the profound difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist economics.The most striking distinction, and the one that directly concerns us, is that pre-capitalist societies aremuch less cohesive than capitalism. The various parts are much more self-sufficient and less closelyinterrelated than in capitalism. Commerce plays a smaller role in society, the various sectors were moreautonomous (as in the case of village communes) or else plays no part at all in the economic life of thecommunity and in the process of production (as was true of large numbers of citizens in Greece andRome). In such circumstances the state, i.e. the organised unity, remains insecurely anchored in the reallife of society. One sector of society simply lives out its ‘natural’ existence in what amounts to a totalindependence of the fate of the state. “The simplicity of the organisation for production in theseself-sufficient communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and whenaccidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name-this simplicity supplies thekey to the secret of the immutability of Asiatic societies, an immutability in such striking contrast withthe constant dissolution and resounding of Asiatic states, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. Thestructure of the economic elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the politicalsky.” [16]

Yet another sector of society is-economically-completely parasitic. For this sector the state with itspower apparatus is not, as it is for the ruling classes under capitalism, a means whereby to put intopractice the principles of its economic power-if need be with the aid of force. Nor is it the instrument ituses to create the conditions for its economic dominance (as with modern colonialism). That is to say, thestate is not a mediation of the economic control of society: it is that unmediated dominance itself. This istrue not merely in cases of the straightforward theft of land or slaves, but also in so-called peacefuleconomic relations. Thus in connection with labour-rent Marx says: “Under such circumstances thesurplus labour can be extorted from them for the benefit of the nominal landowner only by other thaneconomic pressure.” In Asia “rent and taxes coincide, or rather there is no tax other than this form ofground-rent”. [17]

Even commerce is not able, in the forms it assumes in pre-capitalist societies, to make decisive inroadson the basic structure of society. Its impact remains superficial and the process of production above all inrelation to labour, remains beyond its control. “A merchant could buy every commodity, but labour as acommodity he could not buy. He existed only on sufferance, as a dealer in the products of thehandicrafts.” [18]

Despite all this, every such society constitutes an economic unity. The only question that arises iswhether this unity enables the individual sectors of society to relate to society as a whole in such a waythat their imputed consciousness can assume an economic form. Marx emphasises [19] that in Greeceand Rome the class struggle “chiefly took the form of a conflict between debtors and creditors”. But healso makes the further, very valid point: “Nevertheless, the money-relationship — and the relationship ofcreditor to debtor is one of money-reflects only the deeper-lying antagonism between the economicconditions of existence.” Historical materialism showed that this reflection was no more than a reflection,but we must go on to ask: was it at all possible — objectively — for the classes in such a society tobecome conscious of the economic basis of these conflicts and of the economic problems with which thesociety was afflicted? Was it not inevitable that these conflicts and problems should assume eithernatural ‘ religious forms’ [20] or else political and legal ones, depending on circumstances ?

The division of society into estates or castes means in effect that conceptually and organisationally these



‘natural’ forms are established without their economic basis ever becoming conscious. It means that thereis no mediation between the pure traditionalism of natural growth and the legal institutions it assumes.[21] In accordance with the looser economic structure of society, the political and legal institutions (herethe division into estates, privileges, etc.), have different functions objectively and subjectively from thoseexercised under capitalism. In capitalism these institutions merely imply the stabilisation of purelyeconomic forces so that — as Karner has ably demonstrated [22] — they frequently adapt themselves tochanged economic structures without changing themselves in form or content. By contrast, inpre-capitalist societies legal institutions intervene substantively in the interplay of economic forces. Infact there are no purely economic categories to appear or to be given legal form (and according to Marx,economic categories are “forms of existence, determinations of life”). [23] Economic and legalcategories are objectively and substantively so interwoven as to be inseparable. (Consider here theinstances cited earlier of labour-rent, and taxes, of slavery, etc.) In Hegel’s parlance the economy has noteven objectively reached the stage of being-for-itself. There is therefore no possible position within sucha society from which the economic basis of all social relations could be made conscious.

This is not of course to deny the objective economic foundations of social institutions. On the contrary,the history of [feudal] estates shows very clearly that what in origin had been a ‘natural’ economicexistence cast into stable forms begins gradually to disintegrate as a result of subterranean, ‘unconscious’economic development. That is to say, it ceases to be a real unity. Their economic content destroys theunity of their juridical form. (Ample proof of this is furnished both by Engels in his analysis of the classstruggles of the Reformation. period and by Cunow in his discussion of the French Revolution.)However, despite this conflict between juridical form and economic content, the juridical(privilege-creating) forms retain a great and often absolutely crucial importance for the consciousness ofestates in the process of disintegration. For the form of the estates conceals the connection betweenthe-real but ‘unconscious’-economic existence of the estate and the economic totality of society. Itfixates consciousness directly on its privileges (as in the case of the knights during the Reformation) orelse — no less directly — on the particular element of society from which the privileges emanated (as inthe case of the guilds).

Even when an estate has disintegrated, even when its members have been absorbed economically into anumber of different classes, it still retains this (objectively unreal) ideological coherence. For the relationto the whole created by the consciousness of one’s status is not directed to the real, living economic unitybut to a past state of society as constituted by the privileges accorded to the estates.Status-consciousness-a real historical factor masks class consciousness; in fact it prevents it fromemerging at all. A like phenomenon can be observed under capitalism in the case of all ‘privileged’groups whose class situation lacks any immediate economic base. The ability of such a class to adaptitself to the real economic development can be measured by the extent to which it succeeds in‘capitalising’ itself, i.e. transforming its privileges into economic and capitalist forms of control (as wasthe case with the great landowners).

Thus class consciousness has quite a different relation to history in pre-capitalist and capitalist periods. Inthe former case the classes could only be deduced from the immediately given historical reality by themethods of historical materialism. In capitalism they themselves constitute this immediately givenhistorical reality. It is therefore no accident that (as Engels too has pointed out) this knowledge of historyonly became possible with the advent of capitalism. Not only — as Engels believed — because of thegreater simplicity of capitalism in contrast to the ‘complex and concealed relations’ of earlier ages. But



primarily because only with capitalism does economic class interest emerge in all its starkness as themotor of history. In pre-capitalist periods man could never become conscious (not even by virtue of an‘imputed’ consciousness) of the “true driving forces which stand behind the motives of human actions inhistory”. They remained hidden behind motives and were in truth the blind forces of history. Ideologicalfactors do not merely ‘mask’ economic interests, they are not merely the banners and slogans: they arethe parts, the components of which the real struggle is made. Of course, if historical materialism isdeployed to discover the sociological meaning of these struggles, economic interests will doubtless berevealed as the decisive factors in any explanation.

But there is still an unbridgeable gulf between this and capitalism where economic factors are notconcealed ‘behind’ consciousness but are present in consciousness itself (albeit unconsciously orrepressed). With capitalism, with the abolition of the feudal estates and with the creation of a societywith a purely economic articulation, class consciousness arrived at the point where it could becomeconscious. From then on social conflict was reflected in an ideological struggle for consciousness and forthe veiling or the exposure of the class character of society. But the fact that this conflict became possiblepoints forward to the dialectical contradictions and the internal dissolution of pure class society. InHegel’s words, “When philosophy paints its gloomy picture a form of life has grown old. It cannot berejuvenated by the gloomy picture, but only understood. Only when dusk starts to fall does the owl ofMinerva spread its wings and fly."

3

Bourgeoisie and proletariat are the only pure classes in bourgeois society. They are the only classeswhose existence and development are entirely dependent on the course taken by the modern evolution ofproduction and only from the vantage point of these classes can a plan for the total organisation ofsociety even be imagined. The outlook of the other classes (petty bourgeois or peasants) is ambiguous orsterile because their existence is not based exclusively on their role in the capitalist system of productionbut is indissolubly linked with the vestiges of feudal society. Their aim, therefore, is not to advancecapitalism or to transcend it, but to reverse its action or at least to prevent it from developing fully. Theirclass interest concentrates on symptoms of development and not on development itself, and on elementsof society rather than on the construction of society as a whole.

The question of consciousness may make its appearance in terms of the objectives chosen or in terms ofaction, as for instance in the case of the petty bourgeoisie. This class lives at least in part in the capitalistbig city and every aspect of its existence is directly exposed to the influence of capitalism. Hence itcannot possibly remain wholly unaffected by the fact of class conflict between bourgeoisie andproletariat. But as a “transitional class in which the interests of two other classes become simultaneouslyblunted ...” it will imagine itself “to be above all class antagonisms”. [24] Accordingly it will search forways whereby it will “not indeed eliminate the two extremes of capital and wage labour, but will weakentheir antagonism and transform it into harmony”. [25] In all decisions crucial for society its actions willbe irrelevant and it will be forced to fight for both sides in turn but always without consciousness. In sodoing its own objectives -which exist exclusively in its own consciousness-must become progressivelyweakened and increasingly divorced from social action. Ultimately they will assume purely ‘ideological’forms The petty bourgeoisie will only be able to play an active role in history as long as these objectiveshappen to coincide with the real economic interests of capitalism. This was the case with the abolition ofthe feudal estates during the French Revolution. With the fulfilment of this mission its utterances, which



for the most part remain unchanged in form, become more and more remote from real events and turnfinally into mere caricatures (this was true, e.g. of the Jacobinism of the Montagne 1848-51).

This isolation from society as a whole has its repercussions on the internal structure of the class and itsorganisational potential. This can be seen most clearly in the development of the peasantry. Marx says onthis point: [26] “The small-holding peasants form a vast mass whose members live in similar conditionsbut without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates themfrom one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse.... Every single peasant family ... thusacquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society.... In so faras millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, theirinterests and their culture from those of other classes and place them in opposition to them, theyconstitute a class. In so far as there is only a local connection between the smallholding peasants, and theidentity of their interests begets no community, no national unity and no political organisation, they donot constitute a class.” Hence external upheavals, such as war, revolution in the towns, etc. are neededbefore these, masses can coalesce in a unified movement, and even then they are incapable of organisingit and supplying it with slogans and a positive direction corresponding to their own interests.

Whether these movements will be progressive (as in the French Revolution of 1789 or the RussianRevolution of 1917), or reactionary (as with Napoleon’s coup d’état) will depend on the position of theother classes involved in the conflict, and on the level of consciousness of the parties that lead them. Forthis reason, too, the ideological form taken by the class consciousness of the peasants changes its contentmore frequently than that of other classes: this is because it is always borrowed from elsewhere.

Hence parties that base themselves wholly or in part on this class consciousness always lack really firmand secure support in critical situations (as was true of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1917 and 1918).This explains why it is possible for peasant conflicts to be fought out under opposing flags. Thus it ishighly characteristic of both Anarchism and the ‘class consciousness of the peasantry that a number ofcounter-revolutionary rebellions and uprisings of the middle and upper strata of the peasantry in Russiashould have found the anarchist view of society to be a satisfying ideology. We cannot really speak ofclass consciousness in the case of these classes (if, indeed, we can, even speak of them as classes in thestrict Marxist sense of the term): for a full consciousness of their situation would reveal to them thehopelessness of their particularise strivings in the face of the inevitable course of events. Consciousnessand self-interest then are mutually incompatible in this instance. And as class consciousness was definedin terms of the problems of imputing class interests the failure of their class consciousness to develop inthe immediately given historical reality becomes comprehensible philosophically.

With the bourgeoisie, also, class consciousness stands in opposition to class interest. But here theantagonism is not contradictory but dialectical.

The distinction between the two modes of contradiction may be briefly described in this way: in the caseof the other classes, a class consciousness is prevented from emerging by their position within theprocess of production and the interests this generates. In the case of the bourgeoisie, however, thesefactors combine to produce a class consciousness but one which is cursed by its very nature with thetragic fate of developing an insoluble contradiction at the very zenith of its powers. As a result of thiscontradiction it must annihilate itself.

The tragedy of the bourgeoisie is reflected historically in the fact that even before it had defeated itspredecessor, feudalism, its new enemy, the proletariat, had appeared on the scene. Politically, it became



evident when, at the moment of victory, the ‘freedom’ in whose name the bourgeoisie had joined battlewit i feudalism, was transformed into a new repressiveness. Sociologically, the bourgeoisie dideverything in its power to eradicate the fact of class conflict from the consciousness of society, eventhough class conflict had only emerged in its purity and became established as an historical fact with theadvent of capitalism. Ideologically, we see the same contradiction in the fact that the bourgeoisieendowed the individual with an unprecedented importance, but at the same time that same individualitywas annihilated by the economic conditions to which it was subjected, by the reification created bycommodity production.

All these contradictions, and the list might be extended indefinitely, are only the reflection of the deepestcontradictions in capitalism itself as they appear in the consciousness of the bourgeoisie in accordancewith their position in the total system of production. For this reason they appear as dialecticalcontradictions in the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. They do not merely reflect the inability ofthe bourgeoisie to grasp the contradictions inherent in its own social order. For, on the one hand,capitalism is the first system of production able to achieve a total economic penetration of society, [27]and this implies that in theory the bourgeoisie should be able to progress from this central point to thepossession of an (imputed) class consciousness of the whole system of production. On the other hand, theposition held by the capitalist class and the interests which determine its actions ensure that it will beunable to control its own system of production even in theory.

There are many reasons for this. In the first place, it only seems to be true that for capitalism productionoccupies the centre of class consciousness and hence provides the theoretical starting-point for analysis.With reference to Ricardo “who had been reproached with an exclusive concern with production”, Marxemphasised [28] that he “defined distribution as the sole subject of economics”. And the detailed analysisof the process by which capital is concretely realised shows in every single instance that the interest ofthe capitalist (who produces not goods but commodities) is necessarily confined to matters that must beperipheral in terms of production. Moreover, the capitalist, enmeshed in what is for him the decisiveprocess of the expansion of capital must have a standpoint from which the most important problemsbecome quite invisible. [29]

The discrepancies that result are further exacerbated by the fact that there is an insoluble contradictionrunning through the internal structure of capitalism between the social and the individual principle, i.e.between the function of capital as private property and its objective economic function. As theCommunist Manifesto states: “Capital is a social force and not a personal one.” But it is a social forcewhose movements are determined by the individual interests of the owners of capital-who cannot see andwho are necessarily indifferent to a t e social implications of their activities. Hence the social principleand the social function implicit in capital can only prevail unbeknown to them and, as it were, againsttheir will and behind their backs. Because of this conflict between the individual and the social, Marxrightly characterised the stock companies as the “negation, of the capitalist mode of production itself”.[30] Of course, it is true that stock companies differ only in inessentials from individual capitalists andeven the so-called abolition of the anarchy in production through cartels and trusts only shifts thecontradiction elsewhere, without, however, eliminating it. This situation forms one of the decisive factorsgoverning the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. It is true that the bourgeoisie acts as a class in theobjective evolution of society. But it understands the process (which it is itself instigating) as somethingexternal which is subject to objective laws which it can only experience passively.

Bourgeois thought observes economic life consistently and necessarily from the standpoint of the



individual capitalist and this naturally produces a sharp confrontation between the individual and theoverpowering supra-personal ‘law of nature’ which propels all social phenomena. [31] This leads both tothe antagonism between individual and class interests in the event of conflict (which, it is true, rarelybecomes as acute among the. ruling classes as in the bourgeoisie), and also to the logical impossibility ofdiscovering theoretical and practical solutions to the problems created by the capitalist system ofproduction.

"This sudden reversion from a system of credit to a system of hard cash heaps theoretical fright on top ofpractical panic; and the dealers by whose agency circulation is effected shudder before the impenetrablemystery in which their own economic relations are shrouded.” [32] This terror is not unfounded,. that isto say, it is much more than the bafflement felt by the individual capitalist when confronted by his ownindividual fate. The facts and the situations which induce this panic force something into theconsciousness of the bourgeoisie which is too much of a brute fact for its existence to be wholly deniedor repressed. But equally it is something that the bourgeoisie can never fully understand. For therecognisable background to this situation is the fact that “the real barrier of capitalist production iscapital itself”. [33] And if this insight were to become conscious it would indeed entail the self-negationof the capitalist class.

In this way the objective limits of capitalist production become the limits of the class consciousness ofthe bourgeoisie. The older ‘natural’ and ‘conservative’ forms of domination had left unmolested [34] theforms of production of whole sections of the people they ruled and therefore exerted by and large atraditional and unrevolutionary influence. Capitalism, by contrast, is a revolutionary form par excellence.The fact that it must necessarily remain in ignorance of the objective economic limitations of its ownsystem expresses itself as an internal, dialectical contradiction in its class consciousness

This means that formally the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie is geared to economic consciousness.And indeed the highest degree of unconsciousness, the crassest, form of ‘false consciousness’ alwaysmanifests itself when the conscious mastery of economic phenomena appears to be at its greatest. Fromthe point of view of the relation of consciousness to society this contradiction is expressed as theirreconcilable antagonism between ideology and economic base. Its dialectics are grounded in theirreconcilable antagonism between the (capitalist) individual, i.e. the stereotyped individual ofcapitalism, and the ‘natural’ and inevitable process of development, i.e. the process not subject toconsciousness. In consequence theory and practice are brought into irreconcilable opposition to eachother. But the resulting dualism is anything but stable; in fact it constantly strives to harmonise principlesthat have been wrenched apart and thenceforth oscillate between a new ‘false’ synthesis and itssubsequent cataclysmic disruption.

This internal dialectical contradiction in the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie is further aggravatedby the fact that the objective limits of capitalism do not remain purely negative. That is to say thatcapitalism does not merely set ‘natural’ laws in motion that provoke crises which it cannot comprehend.On the contrary, those limits acquire a historical embodiment with its own consciousness and its ownactions: the proletariat.

Most ‘normal’ shifts of perspective produced by the capitalist point of view in the image of the economicstructure of society tend to “obscure and mystify the true origin of surplus value”. [35] In the ‘normal’,purely theoretical view this mystification only attaches to the organic composition of capital, viz. to theplace of the employer in the productive system and the economic function of interest etc., i.e. it does no



more than highlight the failure of observers to perceive the true driving forces that lie beneath thesurface. But when it comes to practice this mystification touches upon the central fact of capitalistsociety: the class struggle.

In the class struggle we witness the emergence of all the hidden forces that usually lie concealed behindthe façade of economic life, at which the capitalists and their apologists gaze as though transfixed. Theseforces appear in such a way that they cannot possibly be ignored. So much so that even when capitalismwas in the ascendant and the proletariat could only give vent to its protests in the form of vehementspontaneous explosions, even the ideological exponents of the rising bourgeoisie acknowledged the classstruggle as a basic fact of history. (For example, Marat and later historians such as Mignet.) But inproportion as the theory and practice of the proletariat made society conscious of this unconscious,revolutionary principle inherent in capitalism, the bourgeoisie was thrown back increasingly on to aconscious defensive. The dialectical contradiction in the ‘false’ consciousness of the bourgeoisie becamemore and more acute: the ‘false’ consciousness was converted into a mendacious consciousness. Whathad been at first an objective contradiction now became subjective also: the theoretical problem turnedinto a moral posture which decisively influenced every practical class attitude in every situation and onevery issue.

Thus the situation in which the bourgeoisie finds itself determines the function of its class consciousnessin its struggle to achieve control of society. The hegemony of the bourgeoisie really does embrace thewhole of society; it really does attempt to organise the whole of society in its own interests (and in this ithas had some success). To achieve this it’ was forced both to develop a coherent theory of economics,politics and society (which in itself presupposes and amounts to a ‘Weltanschauung’), and also to makeconscious and sustain its faith in its own mission to control and organise society. The tragic dialectics ofthe bourgeoisie can be seen in the fact that it is not only desirable but essential for it to clarify its ownclass interests on every particular issue, while at the same time such a clear awareness becomes fatalwhen it is extended to the question of the totality. The chief reason for this is that the rule of thebourgeoisie can only be the rule of a minority. Its hegemony is exercised not merely by a minority but inthe interest of that minority, so the need to deceive the other classes and to ensure that their classconsciousness remains amorphous is inescapable for a bourgeois regime. (Consider here the theory of thestate that stands ‘above’ class antagonisms, or the notion of an ‘impartial’ system of justice.)

But the veil drawn over the nature of bourgeois society is indispensable to the bourgeoisie itself. For theinsoluble internal contradictions of the system become revealed with, increasing starkness and soconfront its supporters with a choice. Either they must consciously ignore insights which becomeincreasingly urgent or else they must suppress their own moral instincts in order to be able to supportwith a good conscience an economic system that serves only their own interests. . Withoutoverestimating the efficacy of such ideological factors it must be agreed that the fighting power of a classgrows with its ability to carry out its own mission with a good conscience and to adapt all phenomena toits own interests with unbroken confidence in itself. If we consider Sismondi’s criticism of classicaleconomics, German criticisms of natural law and the youthful critiques of, Carlyle it becomes evidentthat from a very early stage the ideological history of the bourgeoisie was nothing but a desperateresistance to every insight into the true nature of the society it had created and thus to a realunderstanding of its class situation. When the Communist Manifesto makes the point that the bourgeoisieproduces its own grave-diggers this is valid ideologically as well as economically. The whole ofbourgeois thought in the nineteenth century made- the most strenuous efforts to mask the realfoundations of bourgeois society; everything was tried: from the greatest falsifications of fact to the



‘sublime’ theories about the ‘essence’ of history and the state. But in vain: with the end of the century theissue was resolved by the advances of science and their corresponding effects on the consciousness of thecapitalist elite.

This can be seen very clearly in the bourgeoisie’s greater readiness to accept the idea of consciousorganisation. A greater measure of concentration was achieved first in the stock companies and in thecartels and trusts. This process revealed the social’ character of capital more and more clearly withoutaffecting the general anarchy in production. What it did was to confer near-monopoly status on a numberof giant individual capitalists. Objectively, then, the social character of capital was brought into play withgreat energy but in such a manner as to keep its nature concealed from the capitalist class. Indeed thisillusory elimination of economic anarchy successfully diverted their attention from the true situation.With the crises of the War and the post-war period this tendency has advanced still further: the idea of a‘planned’ economy has gained ground at least among the more progressive elements of the bourgeoisie.Admittedly this applies only within quite harrow strata of the bourgeoisie and even there it is thought ofmore as a theoretical experiment than as a practical way out of the impasse brought about by the crises.

When capitalism was still expanding it rejected every sort of social organisation on the grounds that itwas “an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and unrestricted play for theinitiative of the individual capitalist.” [36] If we compare that with current attempts to harmonise a‘planned’ economy with the class interests of the bourgeoisie, we are forced to admit that what we arewitnessing is the capitulation of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie before that of the proletariat.Of course the section of the bourgeoisie that accepts the notion of a ‘planned’ economy does not mean byit the same as does the proletariat: it, regards it as a last attempt to save capitalism by driving its internalcontradictions to breaking-point. Nevertheless this means jettisoning the last theoretical line of defence.(As a strange counterpart to this we may note that at just this point in time certain sectors of theproletariat capitulate before the bourgeoisie and adopt this, the most problematic form of bourgeoisorganisation.)

With this the whole existence of the bourgeoisie and its culture is plunged into the most terrible crisis.On the one hand, we find the utter sterility of an ideology divorced from life, of a more or less consciousattempt at forgery. On the other hand, a cynicism no less terribly jejune lives on in the world-historicalirrelevances and nullities of its own existence and concerns itself only with the defence of that existenceand with its own naked self-interest. This ideological crisis is an unfailing sign of decay. The bourgeoisiehas already been thrown on the defensive; however aggressive its weapons may be, it is fighting forself-preservation. Its power to dominate has vanished beyond recall.

4

In this struggle for consciousness historical materialism plays a crucial role. Ideologically no less thaneconomically, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are mutually interdependent. The same process that thebourgeoisie experiences as a permanent crisis and gradual dissolution appears to the proletariat, likewisein crisis-form, as the gathering of strength and the springboard to victory. Ideologically this means thatthe same growth of insight into the nature of society, which reflects the protracted death struggle of thebourgeoisie, entails a steady growth in the strength of the proletariat. For the proletariat the truth is aweapon that brings victory; and the more ruthless, the greater the victory. This makes morecomprehensible the desperate fury with which bourgeois science assails historical materialism: for assoon as the bourgeoisie is forced to take up its stand on this terrain, it is lost. And, at the same time, this



explains why the proletariat and only the proletariat can discern in the correct understanding of the natureof soccer a power-factor of the first, and perhaps decisive importance.

The unique function of consciousness in the class struggle of the proletariat has consistently beenoverlooked by the vulgar Marxists who have substituted a petty ‘Realpolitik’ for the great battle ofprinciple which reaches back to the ultimate problems of the objective economic process. Naturally wedo not wish to deny that the proletariat must proceed from the facts of a given situation. But it is to bedistinguished from other classes by the fact that it goes beyond the contingencies of history; far frombeing driven forward by them, it is itself their driving force and impinges centrally upon the process ofsocial change. When the vulgar Marxists detach themselves from this central point of view, i.e. from thepoint where a proletarian class consciousness arises, they thereby place themselves on the level ofconsciousness of the bourgeoisie. And that the bourgeoisie fighting on its own ground will prove superiorto the proletariat both economically and ideologically can come as a surprise only to a vulgar Marxist.Moreover only a vulgar Marxist would infer from this fact, which after all derives exclusively from hisown attitude, that the bourgeoisie generally occupies the stronger position. For quite apart from the veryreal force at its disposal, it is self-evident that the bourgeoisie fighting on its own ground will be bothmore experienced and more expert. Nor will it come as a surprise if the bourgeoisie automatically obtainsthe upper hand when its opponents abandon their own position for that of the bourgeoisie.

As the bourgeoisie has the intellectual, organisational and every other advantage, the superiority of theproletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the centre as a coherent whole. Thismeans that it is able to act in such a way as to change reality; in the class consciousness of the proletariattheory and practice coincide and so it can consciously throw the weight of its actions onto the scales ofhistory-and this is the deciding factor. When the vulgar Marxists destroy this unity they cut the nerve thatbinds proletarian theory to proletarian action. They reduce theory to the ‘scientific’ treatment of thesymptoms of social change and as for practice they are themselves reduced to being buffeted aboutaimlessly and uncontrollably by the various elements of the process they had hoped to master.

The class consciousness that springs from this position must exhibit the same internal structure as that ofthe bourgeoisie. But when the logic of events drives the same dialectical contradictions to the surface ofconsciousness the consequences for the proletariat are even more disastrous than for the bourgeoisie. Fordespite all the dialectical contradictions, despite all its objective falseness, the self-deceiving ‘false’consciousness that we find in the bourgeoisie is at least in accord with its class situation. It cannot savethe bourgeoisie from the constant exacerbation of these contradictions and so from destruction, but it canenable it to continue the struggle and even engineer victories, albeit of short duration.

But in the case of the proletariat such a consciousness not only has to overcome these internal(bourgeois) contradictions, but it also conflicts with the course of action to which the economic situationnecessarily commits the proletariat (regardless of its own thoughts on the subject). The proletariat mustact in a proletarian manner, but its own vulgar Marxist theory blocks its vision of the right course toadopt. The dialectical contradiction between necessary proletarian action and vulgar Marxist (bourgeois)theory becomes more and more acute. As the decisive battle in the class struggle approaches, the powerof a true or false theory to accelerate or retard progress grows in proportion. The ‘realm of freedom’, theend of the ‘pre-history of mankind’ means precisely that the power of the objectified, reified relationsbetween men begins to revert to man. The closer this process comes to it 1 s goal the more urgent itbecomes for the proletariat to understand its own historical mission and the more vigorously and directlyproletarian class consciousness will determine each of its actions. For the blind power of the forces at



work will only advance ‘automatically’ to their goal of self-annihilation as long as that goal is not withinreach. When the moment of transition to the ‘realm of freedom’ arrives this will become apparent justbecause the blind forces really will hurtle blindly towards the abyss, and only the conscious will of theproletariat will be able to save mankind from the impending catastrophe. In other words, when the finaleconomic crisis of capitalism develops, the fate of the revolution (and with it the fate of mankind) willdepend on the ideological maturity of the proletariat, i.e. on its class consciousness.

We have now determined the unique function of the class consciousness of the proletariat in contrast tothat of other classes. The proletariat cannot liberate itself as a class without simultaneously abolishingclass society as such. For that reason its consciousness, the last class consciousness in the history ofmankind, must both lay bare the nature of society and achieve an increasingly inward fusion of theoryand practice. ‘Ideology’ for the proletariat is no banner to follow into battle, nor is it a cover for its trueobjectives: it is the objective and the weapon itself. Every non-principled or unprincipled use of tacticson the part of the proletariat debases historical materialism to the level of mere ‘ideology’ and forces theproletariat to use bourgeois (or petty bourgeois) tactics. It thereby robs it of its greatest strength byforcing class consciousness into the secondary or inhibiting role of a bourgeois consciousness, instead ofthe active role of a proletarian consciousness.

The relationship between class consciousness and class situation is really very simple in the case of theproletariat, but the obstacles which prevent its consciousness being realised in practice arecorrespondingly greater. In the first place this consciousness is divided within itself. It is true that societyas such is highly unified and that it evolves in a unified manner. But in a world where the reifiedrelations of capitalism have the appearance of a natural environment it looks as if there is not a unity buta diversity of mutually independent objects and forces. The most striking division in proletarian classconsciousness and the one most fraught with consequences is the separation of the economic strugglefrom the political one. Marx repeatedly exposed [37] the fallacy of this split and demonstrated that it is inthe nature of every economic struggle to develop into a political one (and vice versa). Nevertheless it hasnot proved possible to eradicate this heresy from the theory of the proletariat. The cause of this aberrationis to be found in the dialectical separation of immediate objectives and ultimate goal and, hence, in thedialectical division within the proletarian revolution itself.

Classes that successfully carried out revolutions in earlier societies had their task made easier subjectiveby this very fact of the discrepancy between their own class consciousness and the objective economicset-up, i.e. by their very unawareness of their own function in the process of change. They had only touse the power at their disposal to enforce their immediate interests while the social import of their actionswas hidden from them and left to the ‘ruse of reason’ of the course of events.

But as the proletariat has been entrusted by history with the task of transforming social consciously, itsclass consciousness must develop a dialectical contradiction between its immediate interests and itslong-term objectives, and between the discrete factors and the whole. For the discrete factor, the concretesituation with its concrete demands is by its very nature an integral part of the existing capitalist society;it is governed by the laws of that society and is subject to its economic structure. Only when theimmediate interests are integrated into a total view and related to the final goal of the process do theybecome revolutionary, pointing concretely and consciously beyond the confines of capitalist society.

This means that subjectively, i.e. for the class consciousness of the proletariat, the dialectical relationshipbetween immediate interests and objective impact on the whole of society is loc in the consciousness of



the proletariat itself. It does not work itself out as a purely objective process quite apart from all(imputed) consciousness-as was the case with all classes hitherto. Thus the revolutionary victory of theproletariat does not imply, as with former classes, the immediate realisation of the socially givenexistence of the class, but, as the young Marx clearly saw and defined, its self-annihilation. TheCommunist Manifesto formulates this distinction in this way: “All the preceding classes that got theupper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to theirconditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of societyexcept by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby every other previous modeof appropriation.” (my italics.)

This inner dialectic makes it hard for the proletariat to develop its class consciousness in opposition tothat of the bourgeoisie which by cultivating the crudest and most abstract kind of empiricism was able tomake do with a superficial view of the world. Whereas even when the development of the proletariat wasstill at a very primitive stage it discovered that one of the elementary rules of class warfare was toadvance beyond what was immediately given. (Marx emphasises this as early as his observations on theWeavers’ Uprising in Silesia.) [38] For because of its situation this contradiction is introduced directlyinto the consciousness of the proletariat, whereas the bourgeoisie, from its situation, saw thecontradictions confronting it as the outer limits of its consciousness.

Conversely, this contradiction means that ‘false’ consciousness is something very different for theproletariat than for every preceding class. Even correct statements about particular situations or aspectsof the development of bourgeois class consciousness reveal, when related to the whole of society, thelimits of that consciousness and unmask its ‘falseness’. Whereas the proletariat always aspires towardsthe truth even in its ‘false’ consciousness and in its substantive errors. It is sufficient here to recall thesocial criticism of the Utopians or the proletarian and revolutionary extension of Ricardo’s theory.Concerning the latter, Engels places great emphasis on the fact that it is “formally incorrecteconomically”, but he adds at once: “What is false from a formal economic point of view can be true inthe perspective of world history.... Behind the formal economic error may lie concealed a very trueeconomic content.” [39]

Only with the aid of this distinction can there be any resolution of the contradiction in the classconsciousness of the proletariat; only with its aid can that contradiction become a conscious f actor inhistory. For the objective aspiration towards truth which is immanent even in the ‘false’ consciousness ofthe proletariat does not at all imply that this aspiration can come to light without the active interventionof the proletariat. On the contrary, the mere aspiration towards truth can only strip off the veils offalseness and mature into historically significant and socially revolutionary knowledge by thepotentiating of consciousness, by conscious action and conscious self-criticism. Such knowledge wouldof course be unattainable were it not for the objective aspiration, and here we find confirmation ofMarx’s dictum that mankind only ever sets itself tasks which it can accomplish”. [40] But the aspirationonly yields the possibility. The accomplishment can only be the fruit of the conscious deeds of theproletariat.

The dialectical cleavage in the consciousness of the proletariat is a product of the same structure thatmakes the historical mission of the proletariat possible by pointing forward and beyond the existingsocial order. In the case of the other classes we found an antagonism between the class’s self-interest andthat of society, between individual deed and social consequences. This antagonism set an external limitto consciousness. Here, in the centre of proletarian class consciousness we discover an antagonism



between momentary interest and ultimate goal. The outward victory of the proletariat can only beachieved if this antagonism is inwardly overcome.

As we stressed in the motto to this essay the existence of this conflict enables us to perceive that classconsciousness is identical with neither the psychological consciousness of individual members of theproletariat, nor with the (mass-psychological) consciousness of the proletariat as a whole; but it is, on thecontrary, the sense, become conscious, of the historical role of the class. This sense will objectify itself inparticular interests of the moment and it may only be ignored at the price of allowing the proletarian classstruggle to slip back into the most primitive Utopianism. Every momentary interest may have either oftwo functions: either it will be a step towards the ultimate goal or else it will conceal it. Which of the twoit will be depends entirely upon the class consciousness of the proletariat and not on victory or defeat inisolated skirmishes. Marx drew attention very early on [41] to this danger, which is particularly acute onthe economic ‘trade-union’ front: “At the same time the working class ought not to exaggerate tothemselves the ultimate consequence s of these struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fightingwith effects, but not with the causes of those effects. . . , that they are applying palliatives, not curing themalady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights . . .instead of simultaneously trying to cure it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the finalemancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system."

We see here the source of every kind of opportunism which begins always with effects and not causes,parts and not the whole, symptoms and not the thing itself. It does not regard the particular interest andthe struggle to achieve it as a means of education for the final battle whose outcome depends on closingthe gap between the psychological consciousness and the imputed one. Instead it regards the particular asa valuable achievement in itself or at least as a step along the path towards the ultimate goal. In a word,opportunism mistakes the actual, psychological state 0 consciousness of proletarians for the classconsciousness of the proletariat.

The practical damage resulting from this confusion can be seen in the great loss of unity andcohesiveness in proletarian praxis when compared to the unity of the objective economic tendencies. Thesuperior strength of true, practical class consciousness lies in the ability to look beyond the divisivesymptoms of the economic process to the unity of the total social system underlying it. In the age ofcapitalism it is not possible for the total system to become directly visible in external phenomena. Forinstance, the economic basis of a world crisis is undoubtedly unified and its coherence can beunderstood. But its actual appearance in time and space will take the form of a disparate succession ofevents in different countries at different times and even in different branches of industry in a number ofcountries.

When bourgeois thought “transforms the different limbs Of society into so many separate societies” [42]it certainly commits a grave theoretical error. But the immediate practical consequences are neverthelessin harmony with the interests of capitalism. The bourgeoisie is unable in theory to understand more thanthe details and the symptoms of economic processes (a failure which will ultimately prove its undoing).In the short term, however, it is concerned above all to impose its mode of life upon the day-todayactions of the proletariat. In this respect (and in this respect alone) its superiority in organisation isclearly visible, while the wholly different organisation of the proletariat, its capacity for being organisedas a class, cannot become effective.

The further the economic crisis of capitalism advances the more clearly this unity in the economic



process becomes comprehensible in practice. It was there, of course, in so-called periods of normality,too, and was therefore visible from the class standpoint of the proletariat, but the gap between appearanceand ultimate reality was too great for that unity to have any practical consequences for proletarian action.

In periods of crisis the position is quite different. The unity of the economic process now moves withinreach. So much so that even capitalist theory cannot remain wholly untouched by it, though it can neverfully adjust to it. In this situation the fate of the proletariat, and hence of the whole future of humanity,hangs on -whether or not it will take the step that has now become objectively possible. For even if theparticular symptoms of crisis appear separately (according to country, branch of industry, in the form of‘economic’ or ‘political’ crisis, etc.), and even if in consequence the reflex of the crisis is fragmented inthe immediate psychological consciousness of the workers, it is still possible and necessary to advancebeyond this consciousness. And this is instinctively felt to be a necessity by larger and larger sections ofthe proletariat.

Opportunism had — as it seemed — merely served to inhibit the objective tendency until the crisisbecame acute. Now, however, it adopts a course directly opposed to it. Its aim now is to scotch thedevelopment of proletarian class consciousness in its progress from that which is merely given to thatwhich conforms to the objective total process; even more, it hopes to reduce the class consciousness ofthe proletariat to the level of the psychologically given and thus to divert into the opposite direction whathad hitherto been the purely instinctive tendency. As long as the unification of proletarian classconsciousness was not a practical possibility this theory could-with some charity-be regarded as a mereerror. But in this situation it takes on the character of a conscious deception .(regardless of whether itsadvocates are psychologically conscious of this or not). In contrast with the right instincts of theproletariat it plays the same role as that played hitherto by Capitalist theory: it denounces the correctview of the overall economic situation and the correct class consciousness of the proletariat together withits organised form, the Communist Party, as something unreal and inimical to the ‘true’ interests of theworkers (i.e. their immediate, national or professional interests) and as something alien to their ‘genuine’class consciousness (i.e. that which is psychologically given).

To say that class consciousness has no psychological reality does not imply that it is a mere fiction. Itsreality is vouched for by its ability to explain the infinitely painful path of the proletarian revolution, withits many reverses, its constant return to its starting-point and the incessant self-criticism of which Marxspeaks in the celebrated passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire.

Only the consciousness of the proletariat can point to the way that leads out of the impasse of capitalism.As long as this consciousness is lacking, the crisis remains permanent, it goes back to its starting-point,repeats the cycle until after infinite sufferings and terrible detours the school of history completes theeducation of the proletariat and confers upon it the leadership of mankind. But the proletariat is not givenany choice. As Marx says, it must become a class not only “as against capital” but also “for itself”; [43]that is to say, the class struggle must be raised from the level of economic necessity to the level ofconscious aim and effective class consciousness. The pacifists and humanitarians of the class strugglewhose efforts tend whether they will or no to retard this lengthy, painful and crisis-ridden process wouldbe horrified if they could but see what sufferings they inflict on the proletariat by extending this course ofeducation. But the proletariat cannot abdicate its mission. The only question at issue is how much it hasto suffer before it achieves ideological maturity, before it acquires a true understanding of its classsituation and a true class consciousness.



Of course this uncertainty and lack of clarity are themselves the symptoms of the crisis in bourgeoissociety. As the product of capitalism the proletariat must necessarily be subject to the modes of existenceof its creator. This mode of existence is inhumanity and reification. No doubt the very existence of theproletariat implies criticism and the negation of this form of life. But until the objective crisis ofcapitalism has matured and until the proletariat has achieved true class consciousness, and the ability tounderstand the crisis fully, it cannot go beyond the criticism of reification and so it is only negativelysuperior to its antagonist. Indeed, if it can do no more than negate some aspects of capitalism, if it cannotat least aspire to a critique of the whole, then it will not even achieve a negative superiority. This appliesto the petty-bourgeois attitudes of most trade unionists. Such criticism from the standpoint of capitalismcan be seen most strikingly in the separation of the various theatres of war. The bare fact of separationitself indicates that the consciousness of the proletariat is still fettered by reification. And if theproletariat finds the economic inhumanity to which it is subjected easier to understand than the political,and the political easier than the cultural, then all these separations point to the extent of the stillunconquered power of capitalist forms of life in the proletariat itself.

The reified consciousness must also remain hopelessly trapped in the two extremes of crude empiricismand abstract utopianism. In the one case, consciousness becomes either a completely passive observermoving in obedience to laws which it can never control. In the other it regards itself as a power which isable of its own -subjective-volition to master the essentially meaningless motion of objects. We havealready identified the crude empiricism of the opportunists in its relation to proletarian classconsciousness. We must now go on to see utopianism as characteristic of the internal divisions withinclass consciousness. (The separation of empiricism from utopianism undertaken here for purelymethodological reasons should not be taken as an admission that the two cannot occur together inparticular trends and even individuals. On the contrary, they are frequently found together and are joinedby an internal bond.)

The philosophical efforts of the young Marx were largely directed towards the refutation of the variousfalse theories of consciousness (including both the ‘idealism’ of the Hegelian School and the‘materialism’ of Feuerbach) and towards the discovery of a correct view of the role of consciousness inhistory. As early as the Correspondence of 1843 [with Ruge] he conceives of consciousness as immanentin history. Consciousness does not lie outside the real process of history. It does not have to beintroduced into the world by philosophers; therefore to gaze down arrogantly upon the petty struggles ofthe world and to despise them is indefensible. “We only show it [the world] what its struggles are aboutand consciousness is a thing that it must needs acquire whether it will or not.” What is needed then isonly “to explain its own actions to it”. [44] The great polemic against Hegel in The Holy Familyconcentrates mainly on this point. [45], Hegel’s inadequacy is that he only seems to allow the absolutespirit to make history. The resulting otherworldliness of consciousness vis-d-vis the real events of historybecomes, in the hands of Hegel’s disciples, an arrogant-and reactionary confrontation of ‘spirit’ and‘mass’. Marx mercilessly exposes the flaws and absurdities and the reversions to a pre-Hegelian stageimplicit in this approach.

Complementing this is his-aphoristic — critique of Feuerbach. The materialists had elaborated a view ofconsciousness as of something appertaining to this world. Marx sees it as merely one stage in theprocess, the stage of ‘bourgeois society’. He opposes to it the notion of consciousness as ‘practicalcritical activity’ with the task of ‘changing the world’.

This provides us with the philosophical foundation we need to settle accounts with the utopians. For their



thought contains this very duality of social process and the consciousness of it. Consciousnessapproaches society from another world and leads it from. the false path it has followed back to the rightone. The utopians are prevented by the undeveloped nature of the proletarian movement from seeing thetrue bearer of historical movement in history itself, in the way the proletariat organises itself as a-classand, hence, in the class consciousness of the proletariat. They are not yet able to “take note of what ishappening before their very eyes and to become its mouthpiece”. [46]

It would be foolish to believe that this criticism and the recognition that a post-utopian attitude to historyhas become objectively possible means that utopianism can be dismissed as a factor in the proletariat’sstruggle for freedom. This is true only for those stages of class consciousness that have really achievedthe unity of theory and practice described by Marx, the real and practical intervention of classconsciousness in the course of history and hence the practical understanding of reification. And this didnot all happen at a single stroke and in a coherent manner. For there are not merely national and ‘social’stages involved but there are also gradations within the class consciousness of workers in the same strata.The separation of economics from politics is the most revealing and also the most important instance ofthis. It appears that some sections of the proletariat have quite the right instincts as far as the economicstruggle goes and can even raise them to the level of class consciousness. At the same time, ‘however,when it comes to political questions they manage to persist in a completely utopian point of view. It doesnot need to be emphasised that there is no question here of a mechanical duality. The utopian view of thefunction of politics must impinge dialectically on their views about economics and, in particular, on theirnotions about the economy as a totality (as, for example, in the Syndicalist theory of revolution). In theabsence of a real understanding of the interaction between politics and economics a war against thewhole economic system, to say nothing of its reorganisation, is quite out of the question.

The influence enjoyed even today by such completely utopian theories as those of Ballod or ofguild-socialism shows the extent to which utopian thought is still prevalent, even at a level where thedirect life-interests of the proletariat are most nearly concerned and where the present crisis makes itpossible to read off from history the correct course of action to be followed.

This syndrome must make its appearance even more blatantly where it is not yet possible to see society;is a whole. This can be seen at its clearest in purely ideological questions, in questions of culture. Thesequestions occupy an almost wholly isolated position in the consciousness of the proletariat; the organicbonds connecting these issues with the immediate life-interests of the proletariat as well as with societyas a whole have not even begun to penetrate its consciousness. The achievement in this area hardly evergoes beyond the self-criticism of capitalism-carried out here by the proletariat. What is positive here intheory and practice is almost entirely utopian.

These gradations are, then, on the one hand, objective historical necessities, nuances in the objectivepossibilities of consciousness (such as the relative cohesiveness of politics and economics in comparisonto cultural questions). On the other hand, where consciousness already exists as an objective possibility,they indicate degrees of distance between the psychological class consciousness and the adequateunderstanding of the total situation. These gradations, however, can no longer be referred back tosocioeconomic causes. The objective theory of class consciousness is the theory of its objectivepossibility. The stratification of the problems and economic interests within the proletariat is,unfortunately, almost wholly unexplored, but research would undoubtedly lead to discoveries of the veryfirst importance. But however useful it would be to produce a typology of the various strata, we wouldstill be confronted at every turn with the problem of whether it is actually possible to make the objective



possibility of class consciousness into a reality. Hitherto this question could only occur to extraordinaryindividuals (consider Marx’s completely non-utopian prescience with regard to the problems ofdictatorship). Today it has become a real and relevant question for a whole class: the question of theinner transformation of the proletariat, of its development to the stage of its own objective historicalmission. It is an ideological crisis which must be solved before a practical solution to the world’seconomic crisis can be found.

In view of the great distance that the proletariat has to travel ideologically it would be disastrous to fosterany illusions. But it would be no less disastrous to overlook the forces at work within the proletariatwhich are tending towards the ideological defeat of capitalism. Every proletarian revolution has createdworkers’ councils in an increasingly radical and conscious manner. When this weapon increases in powerto the point where it becomes the organ of state, this is a sign that the class consciousness of theproletariat is on the verge of overcoming the bourgeois outlook of its leaders.

The revolutionary workers’ council (not to be confused with its opportunist caricatures) is one of theforms which the consciousness of the proletariat has striven to create ever since its inception. The factthat it exists and is constantly developing shows that the proletariat already stands on the threshold of itsown consciousness and hence on the threshold of victory. The workers’ council spells the political andeconomic defeat of reification. In the period following the dictatorship it will eliminate the bourgeoisseparation of the legislature, administration and judiciary. During the struggle for control its mission istwofold. On the one hand, it must overcome the fragmentation of the proletariat in time and space, andon the other, it has to bring economics and politics together into the true synthesis of proletarian praxis.In this way it will help to reconcile the dialectical conflict between immediate interests and ultimate goal.

Thus we must never overlook the distance that separates the consciousness of even the mostrevolutionary worker from the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat. But even this situation canbe explained on the basis of the Marxist theory of class struggle and class consciousness. The proletariatonly perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through thesuccessful conclusion of its own class struggle. The struggle for this society, in which the dictatorship ofthe proletariat is merely a phase, is not just a battle waged against an external enemy, the bourgeoisie. Itis equally the struggle of the proletariat against itself. against the devastating and degrading effects of thecapitalist system upon its class consciousness. The proletariat will only have won the real victory when ithas overcome these effects within itself. The separation of the areas that should be united, the diversestages of consciousness which the proletariat has reached in the various spheres of activity are a preciseindex of what has been achieved and what remains to be done. The proletariat must not shy away fromself-criticism, for victory can only be gained by the truth and self-criticism must, therefore, be its naturalelement.

March 1920.


NOTES

1. Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.

2. Capital I.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#211

3. And also of the ’pessimism’ which perpetuates the present state of affairs and represents it as theuttermost limit of human development just as much as does ’optimism’. In this respect (and in thisrespect alone) Hegel and Schopenhauer are on a par with each other.

4. The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 135.

5. Ibid., p. 117.

6. Ibid., p. 122.

7. Capital I, p. 75 (my italics). Cf. also Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,S.W. 11, pp. 292-3.

8. Capital 1, p. 766. Cf. also Wage Labour and Capital, S.W. II, p. 83; on machines see The Poverty ofPhilosophy, p. 149; on money, ibid., p. 89, etc.

9. Dokumente des Sozialismus II, p. 76.

10. The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 112.

11. In this context it is unfortunately not possible to discuss in greater detail some of the ramifications ofthese ideas in Marxism, e.g. the very important category of the ’economic persona’. Even less can wepause to glance at the relation of historical materialism to comparable trends in bourgeois thought (suchas Max Weber’s ideal types).

12. This is the point from which to gain an historical understanding of the great utopians such as Plato orSir Thomas More. Cf. also Marx on Aristotle, Capital I, pp. 59-60.

13. "But although ignorant of this, yet he says it," Marx says of Franklin, Capital I, p. 51. And similarly:"They know not what they do, but they do it." Ibid., p. 74.

14. Wages, Price and Profit.

15. Engels, Umriss zu einer Kritik der Nationaloekonomie, Nachlass I, p. 449.

16. Capital I, p. 358.

17. Capital III, p. 770 (my italics).

18. Capital I, pp. 358-9. This probably explains the politically reactionary role played by merchants’capital as opposed to industrial capital in the beginnings of capitalism. Cf. Capital III, p. 322.

19. Capital I, pp. 135-6.

20. Marx and Engels repeatedly emphasise the naturalness of these social formations, Capital I, pp. 339,351, etc. The whole structure of evolution in Engels’ Origin of the Family is based on this idea. I cannotenter here into the controversies on this issue — controversies involving Marxists too; I should just liketo stress that here also I consider the views of Marx and Engels to be more profound and historicallymore correct than those of their ’improvers’.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/index.htm








http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm







21. Cf. Capital I, p. 339.

22. Die soziale Funktion der Rechtsinstitute, Marx-Studien, Vol. I.

23. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 302.

24. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, S.W. I. p. 252.

25. Ibid., p. 249.

26. Ibid., pp. 302-3.

27. But no more than the tendency. It is Rosa Luxemburg’s great achievement to have shown that this isnot just a passing phase but that capitalism can only survive-economically-while it moves society in thedirection of capitalism but has not yet fully penetrated it. This economic self-contradiction of any purelycapitalist society is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the contradictions in the class consciousness ofthe bourgeoisie.


29. Capital III, pp. 136, 307-8, 318, etc. It is self-evident that the different groups of capitalists, such asindustrialists and merchants, etc., are differently placed; but the distinctions are not relevant in thiscontext.

30. Ibid., p. 428.

31. On this point cf. the essay The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg.


33. Capital III, pp. 245 and also 252.

34. This applies also to e.g. primitive forms of hoarding (see Capital I, p. 131) and even to certainexpressions of (what is relatively) ’pre-capitalist’ merchants’ capital. Cf Capital III, p. 329.

35. Capital III, pp. 165 and also 151, 373-6, 383, etc.

36. Capital I, p. 356.

37. The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 197. Letters and extracts from letters to F. A. Sorge and others, p. 42,etc.

38. Nachlass II, P. 54. [Kritische Randglossen zu dem Artikel: Der König von Preussen und dieSozialreform.]

39. Preface to The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 197.


41. Wages, Price and Profit.




http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm














http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm

42. The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 123-4.

43. Ibid., p. 195.

44. Nachlass I, p. 382. [Correspondence with Ruge 1843.]

45. Cf. the essay What is Orthodox Marxism?

46. The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 140. Cf. also the Communist Manifesto.






http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm


Written: 1923Source: History & Class Consciousness.Publisher: Merlin Press, 1967Transcribed: Andy BlundenHTML Markup: Andy Blunden

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat

To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.Marx: Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

IT is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two greatworks of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare itsfundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does notultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to theriddle of commodity-structure. Of course the problem can only be discussed with this degree ofgenerality if it achieves the depth and breadth to be found in Marx's own analyses. That is to say, theproblem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem ineconomics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this casecan the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeoissociety together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.

I: The Phenomenon of Reification1

The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation betweenpeople takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a 'phantom objectivity', an autonomy thatseems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: therelation between people. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the central importance of thisproblem for economics itself. Nor shall we consider its implications for the economic doctrines of thevulgar Marxists which follow from their abandonment of this starting-point.

Our intention here is to base ourselves on Marx's economic analyses and to proceed from there to adiscussion of the problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective formand also as a subjective stance corresponding to it. Only by understanding this can we obtain a clearinsight into the ideological problems of capitalism and its downfall.

Before tackling the problem itself we must be quite clear in our minds that commodity fetishism is aspecific problem of our age, the age of modern capitalism. Commodity exchange an t e corresponding

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat by Georg Lukacs

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm (1 of 20) [11/06/2002 17:33:52]



subjective and objective commodity relations existed, as we know, when society was still very primitive.What is at issue here, however, is the question: how far is commodity exchange together with itsstructural consequences able to influence the total outer and inner life of society? Thus the extent towhich such exchange is the dominant form of metabolic change in a society cannot simply be treated inquantitative terms--as would harmonise with the modern modes of thought already eroded by the reifyingeffects of the dominant commodity form. The distinction between a society where this form is dominant,permeating every expression of life, and a society where it only makes an episodic appearance isessentially one of quality. For depending on which is the case, all the subjective phenomena in thesocieties concerned are objectified in qualitatively different ways.

Marx lays great stress on the essentially episodic appearance of the commodity form in primitivesocieties: "Direct barter, the original natural form of exchange, represents rather the beginning of thetransformation of use-values into commodities, than that of commodities into money. Exchange valuehas as yet no form of its own, but is still directly bound up with use-value. This is manifested in twoways. Production, in its entire organisation, aims at the creation of use-values and not of exchangevalues, and it is only when their supply exceeds the measure of consumption that use-values cease to beuse-values, and become means of exchange, i.e. commodities. At the same time, they becomecommodities only within the limits of being direct use-values distributed at opposite poles, so that thecommodities to be exchanged by their possessors must be use-values to both - each commodity to itsnon-possessor. As a matter of fact, the exchange of commodities originates not within the primitivecommunities, but where they end, on their borders at the few points where they come in contact withother communities. That is where barter begins, and from here it strikes back into the interior of thecommunity, decomposing it." [1] We note that the observation about the disintegrating effect of acommodity exchange directed in upon itself clearly shows the qualitative change engendered by thedominance of commodities.

However, even when commodities have this impact on the internal structure of a society, this does notsuffice to make them constitutive of that society. To achieve that it would be necessary - as weemphasised above - for the commodity structure to penetrate society in all its aspects and to remould it inits own image. It is not enough merely to establish an external link with independent processes concernedwith the production of exchange values. The qualitative difference between the commodity as one formamong many regulating the metabolism of human society and the commodity as the universal structuringprinciple has effects over and above the fact that the commodity relation as ail isolate phenomenon exertsa negative influence at best on the structure and organisation of society. The distinction also hasrepercussions upon the nature and validity of the category itself. Where the commodity is universal itmanifests itself differently from the commodity as a particular, isolated, non-dominant phenomenon.

The fact that the boundaries lack sharp definition must not be allowed to blur the qualitative nature of thedecisive distinction. The situation where commodity exchange is not dominant has been defined by Marxas follows: "The quantitative ratio in which products are exchanged is at first quite arbitrary. Theyassume the form of commodities inasmuch as they are exchangeables, i.e. expressions of one and thesame third. Continued exchange and more regular reproduction for exchange reduces this arbitrarinessmore and more. But at first not for the producer and consumer, but for their go-between, the merchant,who compares money-prices and pockets the difference. It is through his own movements that heestablishes equivalence. Merchant's capital is originally merely the intervening movement betweenextremes which it does not control and between premises which it does not create." [2]



And this development of the commodity to the point where it becomes the dominant form in society didnot take place until the advent of modern capitalism. Hence it is not to be wondered at that the personalnature of economic relations was still understood clearly on occasion at the start of capitalistdevelopment, but that as the process advanced and forms became more complex and less direct, itbecame increasingly difficult and rare to find anyone penetrating the veil of reification. Marx sees thematter in this way: "In preceding forms of society this economic mystification arose principally withrespect to money and interest-bearing capital. In the nature of things it is excluded, in the first place,where production for the use-value, for immediate personal requirements, predominates; and secondly,where slavery or serfdom form the broad foundation of social production, as in antiquity and during theMiddle Ages. Here, the domination of the producers by the conditions of production is concealed by therelations of dominion and servitude which appear and are evident as the direct motive power of theprocess of production." [3]

The commodity can only he understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal categoryof society as a whole. Only in this context does the reificiation produced by commodity relations assumedecisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by mentowards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men's consciousness tothe forms in which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or torebel against its disastrous effects and liberate th e, from servitude to the 'second nature' so created.

Marx describes the basic phenomenon of reification as follows:

"A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labourappears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation ofthe producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation existing notbetween themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason the products of labourbecome commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible bythe senses ... It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantasticform of a relation between things." [4]

What is of central importance here is that because of this situation a man's own activity, his own labourbecomes something objective and independent of him. something that controls him by virtue of anautonomy alien to man. There is both an objective and a subjective side to this phenomenon. Objectivelya world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and theirmovements on the market). The laws governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by man,but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power. The individual can usehis knowledge of these laws to his own advantage, but he is not able to modify the process by his ownactivity. Subjectively - where the market economy has been fully developed - a man's activity becomesestranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of thenatural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article. "Whatis characteristic of the capitalist age," says Marx, "is that in the eyes of the labourer himself labour-powerassumes the form of a commodity belonging to him. On the other hand it is only at this moment that thecommodity form of the products o labour becomes general." [5]

Thus the universality of the commodity form is responsible both objectively and subjectively for theabstraction of the human labour incorporated in commodities. (On the other hand, this universalitybecomes historically possible because this process o abstraction has been completed.) Objectively, in so



far as the commodity form facilitates the equal exchange of qualitatively different objects, it can onlyexist if that formal equality is in fact recognised-at any rate in. this relation, which indeed confers uponthem their commodity nature. Subjectively, this formal equality of human labour in the abstract is notonly the common factor to which the various commodities are reduced; it also becomes the real principlegoverning the actual production o commodities.

Clearly, it cannot be our aim here to describe even in outline the growth of the modern process of labour,of the isolated, 'free' labourer and of the division of labour. Here we need only establish that labour,abstract, equal. comparable labour, measurable with increasing precision according to the time sociallynecessary for its accomplishment, the labour of the capitalist division o labour existing both as thepresupposition and the product o capitalist production, is born only in the course of the development ofthe capitalist system. Only then does it become a category of society influencing decisively the objectiveform of things and people in the society thus emerging, their relation to nature and the possible relationsof men to each other. [6]

If we follow the path taken by labour in its development from the handicrafts via cooperation andmanufacture to machine industry we can see a continuous trend towards greater rationalisation, theprogressive elimination of the qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker. On the onehand, the process of labour is progressively broken down into abstract, rational, specialised operations sothat the worker loses contact with the finished product and his work is reduced to the mechanicalrepetition of a specialised set of actions. On the other hand, the period of time necessary for work to beaccomplished (which forms the basis of rational calculation) is converted, as mechanisation andrationalisation are intensified, from a merely empirical average figure to an objectively calculablework-stint that confronts the worker as a fixed and established reality. With the modern 'psychological'analysis of the work-process (in Taylorism) this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker'sCsoul': even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in oppositionto it so as to facilitate their integration into specialised rational systems and their reduction to statisticallyviable concepts. [7]

We are concerned above all with the principle at work here: the principle of rationalisation based onwhat is and can be calculated. The chief changes undergone by the subject and object of the economicprocess are as follows: (1) in the first place, the mathematical analysis of work-processes denotes a breakwith the organic, irrational and qualitatively determined unity of the product. Rationalisation in the senseof being able to predict with ever greater precision all the results to be achieved is only to be acquired bythe exact breakdown of every complex into its elements and by the study of the special laws governingproduction. Accordingly it must declare war on the organic manufacture o whole products based on thetraditional amalgam of empirical experiences of work: rationalisation is unthinkable withoutspecialisation. [8]

The finished article ceases to be the object of the work-process. The latter turns into the objectivesynthesis of rationalised special systems whose unity is determined by pure calculation and which musttherefore seem to be arbitrarily connected with each other.

This destroys the organic necessity with which inter-related special operations are unified in theend-product. The unity of a product as a commodity no longer coincides with its unity as a use-value: associety becomes more radically capitalistic the increasing technical autonomy of the special operationsinvolved in production is expressed also, as an economic autonomy, as the growing relativisation of the



commodity character of a product at the various stages of production. [9] It is thus possible to separateforcibly the production of a use-value in time and space. This goes hand in hand with the union in timeand space of special operations that are related to a set of heterogeneous use-values.

(2) In the second place, this fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails thefragmentation of its subject. In consequence of- the rationalisation of the work-process the humanqualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrastedwith these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor inhis relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is amechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing andself-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it ornot. [10] As labour is -progressively rationalised and mechanised his lack of will is reinforced by the wayin which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative. [11] Thecontemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enactedindependently of man's consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closedsystem, must likewise transform the basic categories of man's immediate attitude to the world: it reducesspace and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space.

Marx puts it thus:

"Through the subordination of man to the machine the situation arises in which men are effaced by theirlabour; in which the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity oftwo workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man's hour isworth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another manduring an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most the incarnation of time. Quality nolonger matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day .... " [12]

Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiablecontinuum filled with quantifiable 'things' (the reified, mechanically objectified 'performance' of theworker, wholly separated from his total short, it becomes space. [13] In this environment where time istransformed into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space, an environment at once the cause andeffect of the scientifically and mechanically fragmented and specialised production of the object oflabour, the subjects of labour must likewise be rationally fragmented. On the one hand, theobjectification of their labour-power into something opposed to their total personality (a process alreadyaccomplished with the sale of that labour-power as a commodity) is now made into the permanentineluctable reality of their daily life. Here, too, the personality can do no more than look on helplesslywhile its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system. On the other hand,the mechanical disintegration of the process o production into its components also destroys those bondsthat had bound individuals to a community in the days when production was still 'organic'. In this respect,too, makes them isolated abstract atoms whose work no longer brings them together directly andorganically; it becomes mediated to an increasing extent exclusively by the abstract laws of themechanism which imprisons them.

The internal organisation of a factory could not possibly have such an effect - even within the factoryitself-were it not for the fact that it contained in concentrated form the whole structure of capitalistsociety. Oppression and an exploitation that knows no bounds and scorns every human dignity wereknown even to pre-capitalist ages. So too was mass production with mechanical, standardised labour, as



we can see, for instance, with canal construction in Egypt and Asia Minor and the mines in Rome. [14]But mass projects of this type could never be rationally mechanised; they remained isolated phenomenawithin a community that organised its production on a different ('natural') basis and which therefore liveda different life. The slaves subjected to this exploitation, therefore, stood outside what was thought of as'human' society and even the greatest and noblest thinkers of the time were unable to consider their fateas that of human beings.

As the commodity becomes universally dominant, this situation changes radically and qualitatively. Thefate of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole; indeed, this fate must become universal asotherwise industrialisation could not develop in this direction. For it depends on the emergence of the'free' worker who is freely able to take his labour-power to market and offer it for sale as a commodity'belonging' to him, a thing that he 'possesses'.

While this process is still incomplete the methods used to extract surplus labour are, it is true, moreobviously brutal than in the later, more highly developed phase, but the process o reification of work andhence also of the consciousness of the worker is much less advanced. Reification requires that a societyshould learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange. The separation of the producer fromhis means o production, the dissolution and destruction of all 'natural' production units, etc., and all thesocial and economic conditions necessary for the emergence of modern capitalism tend to replace'natural' relations which exhibit human relations more plainly by rationally reified relations. "The socialrelations between individuals in the performance of their labour," Marx observes with reference topre-capitalist societies, "appear at all events as their own personal relations, and are not disguised underthe shape of social relations between the products of labour." [15]

But this implies that the principle of rational mechanisation and calculability must embrace every aspectof life. Consumer articles no longer appear as the products of an organic process within a community (asfor example in a village community). They now appear, on the one hand, as abstract members of aspecies identical by definition with its other members and, on the other hand, as isolated objects thepossession or non-possession of which depends on rational calculations. Only when the whole life ofsociety is thus fragmented into the isolated acts of commodity exchange can the 'free' worker come intobeing; at the same time his fate becomes the typical fate of the whole society.

Of course, this isolation and fragmentation is only apparent. The movement of commodities on themarket, the birth of their value, in a word, the real framework of every rational calculation is not merelysubject to strict laws but also presupposes the strict ordering of all that happens. The atomisation of theindividual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the 'natural laws' of capitalistproduction have been extended to cover every the first time in history - the whole of society is subjected,or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society isdetermined by unified laws. (By contrast, the organic unities of pre-capitalist societies organised theirmetabolism largely in independence of each other).

However, if this atomisation is only an illusion it is a necessary one. That is to say, the immediate,practical as well as intellectual confrontation of the individual with society, the immediate productionand reproduction of life-in which for the individual the commodity structure of all 'things' and theirobedience to 'natural laws' is found to exist already in a finished form, as something immutablygiven-could only take place in the form of rational and isolated acts of exchange between isolatedcommodity owners. As emphasised above, the worker, too, must present himself as the 'owner' of his



labour-power, as if it were a commodity. His specific situation is defined by the fact that hislabour-power is his only possession. His fate is typical of society as a whole in that thisself-objectification, this transformation of a human function into a commodity reveals in all its starknessthe dehumanised and dehumanising function of the commodity relation.

2

This rational objectification conceals above all the immediate - qualitative and material - character ofthings as things. When use-values appear universally as commodities they acquire a new objectivity, anew substantiality which they did not possess in an age of episodic exchange and which destroys theiroriginal and authentic substantiality. As Marx observes:

"Private property alienates not only the individuality of men, but also of things. The ground and the earthhave nothing to do with ground-rent, machines have nothing to do with profit. For the landowner groundand earth mean nothing but ground-rent; he lets his land to tenants and receives the rent-a quality whichthe ground can lose without losing any of its inherent qualities such as its fertility; it is a quality whosemagnitude and indeed existence depends on social relations that are created and abolished without anyintervention by the landowner. Likewise with the machine." [16]

Thus even the individual object which man confronts directly, either as producer or consumer, isdistorted in its objectivity by its commodity character. If that can happen then it is evident that thisprocess will be intensified in proportion as the relations which man establishes with objects as objects ofthe life process are mediated in the course of his social activity. It is obviously not possible here to givean analysis of the whole economic structure of capitalism. It must suffice to point out that moderncapitalism does not content itself with transforming the relations of production in accordance with itsown needs. It also integrates into its own system those forms of primitive capitalism that led an isolatedexistence in pre-capitalist times, divorced from production; it converts them into members of thehenceforth unified process of radical capitalism. (CL merchant capital, the role of money as a hoard or asfinance capital, etc.)

These forms of capital are objectively subordinated, it is true, to the real life-process of capitalism, theextraction of surplus value in the course of production. They are, therefore, only to be explained in termsof the nature of industrial capitalism itself. But in the minds of people in bourgeois society theyconstitute the pure, authentic, unadulterated forms of capital. In them the relations between men that liehidden in the immediate commodity relation, as well as the relations between men and the objects thatshould really gratify their needs, have faded to the point where they can be neither recognised nor evenperceived.

For that very reason the reified mind has come to regard them as the true representatives of his societalexistence. The commodity character of the commodity, the abstract, quantitative mode of calculabilityshows itself here in its purest form: the reified mind necessarily sees it as the form in which its ownauthentic immediacy becomes manifest and-as reified consciousness-does not even attempt to transcendit. On the contrary, it is concerned to make it permanent by 'scientifically deepening' the laws at work.Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher andhigher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and moredefinitively into the consciousness of man. Marx often describes this potentiation of reification inincisive fashion. One example must suffice here:



"In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generatingmoney is brought out in its pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birth-marks of its origin. Thesocial relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself. Instead of the actualtransformation of money into capital, we see here only form without content. . . . It becomes a propertyof money to generate value and yield interest, much as it is an attribute of pear trees to bear pears. Andthe money-lender sells his money as just such an interest-bearing thing. But that is not all. The actuallyfunctioning capital, as we have seen, presents itself in such a light that it seems to yield interest not asfunctioning capital, but as capital in itself, as money-capital. This, too, becomes distorted. While interestis only a portion of the profit, i.e. of the surplus value, which the functioning capitalist squeezes out ofthe labourer, it appears now, on the contrary, as though interest were the typical product of capital, theprimary matter, and profit, in the shape of profit of enterprise, were a mere accessory and by-product ofthe process of reproduction. Thus we get a fetish form of capital, and the conception of fetish capital. InM-M' we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion and objectification of production relationsin their highest degree, the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it antecedes its ownprocess of reproduction. It is the capacity of money, or of a commodity, to expand its own valueindependently of reproduction-which is a mystification of capital in its most flagrant form. For vulgarpolitical economy, which seeks to represent capital as an independent source of value, of value creation,this form is naturally a veritable find. a form in which the source of profit is no longer discernible, and inwhich the result of the capitalist process of production - divorced from the process - acquires anindependent existence." [17]

Just as the economic theory of capitalism remains stuck fast in its self-created immediacy, the same thinghappens to bourgeois attempts to comprehend the ideological phenomenon of reification. Even thinkerswho have no desire to deny or obscure its existence and who are more or less clear in their own mindsabout its humanly destructive consequences remain on the surface and make no attempt to advancebeyond its objectively most derivative forms, the forms furthest from the real life-process of capitalism,,i.e. the most external and vacuous forms, to the basic phenomenon of reification itself.

Indeed, they divorce these empty manifestations from their real capitalist foundation and make themindependent and permanent by regarding them as the timeless model of human relations in general. (Thiscan be seen most clearly in Simmel's book The Philosophy of Money, a very interesting and perceptivework in matters of detail.) They offer no more than a description of this "enchanted, perverted,topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur Le Capital and Madame La Terre do their ghost-walking as socialcharacters and at the same time as mere things." [18] But they do not go further than a description andtheir 'deepening' of the problem runs in circles around the eternal manifestations o reification.

The divorce of the phenomena of reification from their economic bases and from the vantage point fromwhich alone they can be understood, is facilitated by the fact that the [capitalist] process oftransformation must embrace every manifestation o the life of society if the preconditions for thecomplete self-realisation of capitalist production are to be fulfilled.

Thus capitalism has created a form for the state and a system of law corresponding to its needs andharmonising with its own structure. The structural similarity is so great that no truly perceptive historianof modern capitalism could fail to notice it. Max Weber, for instance, gives this description of the basiclines of this development: "Both are, rather, quite similar in their fundamental nature. Viewedsociologically, a 'business-concern' is the modern state; the same holds good for a factory: and this,precisely, is what is specific to it historically. And, likewise, the power relations in a business are also of



the same kind. The relative independence of the artisan (or cottage craftsman), of the landowningpeasant, the owner of a benefice, the knight and vassal was based on the fact that he himself owned thetools, supplies, financial resources or weapons with the aid of which he fulfilled his economic, politicalor military function and from which he lived while this duty was being discharged. Similarly, thehierarchic dependence of the worker, the clerk, the technical assistant,, the assistant in an academicinstitute and the civil servant and. soldier has a comparable basis: namely that the tools, supplies andfinancial resources essential both for the business-concern and for economic survival are in the hands. inthe one case, of the entrepreneur and, in the other case, of the political master." [19]

He rounds off this account-very pertinently-with an analysis of the cause and the social implications ofthis phenomenon:

"The moder based inwardly above all on calculation. It system of justice and an administration whoseworkings can be rationally calculated, at least in principle, according to fixed general laws, just as theprobable performance of a machine can be calculated. It is as little able to tolerate the dispensing ofjustice according to the judge's sense of fair play in individual cases or any other irrational means orprinciples of administering the law ... as it is able to endure a patriarchal administration that obeys thedictates of its own caprice, or sense of mercy and, for the rest, proceeds in accordance with an inviolableand sacrosanct, but irrational tradition. ... What is specific to modern capitalism as distinct from theage-old capitalist forms of acquisition is that the strictly rational organisation of work on the basis ofrational technology did not come into being anywhere within such irrationally constituted politicalsystems nor could it have done so. For these modern businesses with their fixed capital and their exactcalculations are much too sensitive to legal and administrative irrationalities. They could only come intobeing in the bureaucratic state with its rational laws where ... the judge is more or less an automaticstatute-dispensing machine in which you insert the files together with the necessary costs and dues at thetop, whereupon he will eject the judgment together with the more or less cogent reasons for it at thebottom: that is to say, where the judge's behaviour is on the whole predictable."

The process we see here is closely related both in its motivation and in its effects to the economic processoutlined above. Here, too, there is a breach with the empirical and irrational methods of administrationand dispensing justice based on traditions tailored, subjectively, to the requirements of men in action,and, objectively, to those of the concrete matter in hand. There arises a rational systematisation of allstatutes regulating life, which represents, or at least tends towards a closed system applicable to allpossible and imaginable cases. Whether this system is arrived at in a purely logical manner, as anexercise in pure legal dogma or interpretation of the law, or whether the judge is given the task of fillingthe 'gaps' left in the laws, is immaterial for our attempt to understand the structure of modern legalreality. In either case the legal system is formally capable of being generalised so as to relate to everypossible situation in life and it is susceptible to prediction and calculation. Even Roman Law, whichcomes closest to these developments while remaining, in modern terms, within the framework ofpre-capitalist legal patterns, does not in this respect go beyond the empirical, the concrete and thetraditional. The purely systematic categories which were necessary before a judicial system couldbecome universally applicable arose only in modern times .[20]

It requires no further explanation to realise that the need to systematise and to abandon empiricism,tradition and material dependence was the need for exact calculations However, this same need requiresthat the legal system should confront the individual events of social existence as something permanentlyestablished and exactly defined, i.e. as a rigid system. Of course, this produces an uninterrupted series of



conflicts between the unceasingly revolutionary forces of the capitalist economy and the rigid legalsystem. But this only results in new codifications; and despite these the new system is forced to preservethe fixed, change-resistant structure of the old system.

This is the source of the - apparently - paradoxical situation whereby the 'law' of primitive societies,which has scarcely altered in hundreds or sometimes even thousands of years, can be flexible andirrational in character, renewing itself with every new legal decision, while modern law, caught up in thecontinuous turmoil of change, should appear rigid, static and fixed. But the paradox dissolves when werealise that it arises only because the same situation has been regarded from two different points of view:on the one hand, from that of the historian (who stands 'outside' the actual process) and, on the other,from that of someone who experiences the effects of the social order in question upoii his consciousness.

With the aid of this insight we can see clearly how the antagonism between the traditional and empiricalcraftsmanship and the scientific and rational factory is repeated in another sphere of activity. At everysingle stage of its development, the ceaselessly revolutionary techniques of modern production turn arigid and immobile face towards the individual producer. Whereas the objectively relatively stable,traditional craft production preserves in the minds of its individual practitioners the appearance ofsomething flexible, something constantly renewing itself, something produced by the producers.

In the process we witness, illuminatingly, how here, too, the contemplative nature of man undercapitalism makes its appearance. For the essence of rational calculation is based ultimately upon therecognition and the inclusion in one's calculations of the inevitable chain of cause and effect in certainevents-independently of individual 'caprice'. In consequence, man's activity does not go beyond thecorrect calculation of the possible outcome of the sequence of events (the 'laws' of which he finds'ready-made'), and beyond the adroit evasion of disruptive 'accidents' by means of protective devices andpreventive measures (which are based in their turn on the recognition and application of similar laws).Very often it will confine itself to working out the probable effects of such 'laws' without making theattempt to intervene in the process by bringing other 'laws' to bear. (As in insurance schemes, etc.)

The more closely we scrutinise this situation and the better we are able to close our minds to thebourgeois legends of the 'creativity' of the exponents of the capitalist age, the more obvious it becomesthat we are witnessing in all behaviour of this sort the structural analogue to the behaviour of the workervis-d-vis the machine he serves and observes, and whose functions he controls while he contemplates it.The 'creative' element can be seen to depend at best on whether these 'laws' are applied ina-relatively-independent way or in a wholly subservient one. That is to say, it depends on the degree towhich the contemplative stance is repudiated. The distinction between a worker faced with a particularmachine, the entrepreneur faced with a given type of mechanical development, the technologist facedwith the state of science and the profitability of its application to technology, is purely quantitative; itdoes not directly entail any qualitative difference in the structure of consciousness.

Only in this context can the problem of modern bureaucracy be properly understood. Bureaucracyimplies the adjustment of one's way of life, mode of work and hence of consciousness. to the generalsocioeconomic premises of the capitalist economy, similar to that which we have observed in the case ofthe worker in particular business concerns. The formal standardisation of justice, the state, the civilservice, etc., signifies objectively and factually a comparable reduction of all social functions to theirelements, a comparable search for the rational formal laws of these carefully segregated partial systems.Subjectively, the divorce between work and the individual capacities and needs of the worker produces



comparable effects upon consciousness. This results in an inhuman, standardised division of labouranalogous to that which we have found in industry on the technological and mechanical plane. [22]

It is not only a question of the completely mechanical, 'mindless' work of the lower echelons of thebureaucracy which bears such an extraordinarily close resemblance to operating a machine and whichindeed often surpasses it in sterility and uniformity. It is also a question, on the one hand, of the way inwhich objectively all issues are subjected to an increasingly formal and standardised treatment and inwhich there is an ever-increasing remoteness from the qualitative and material essence of the 'things' towhich bureaucratic activity pertains. On the other hand, there is an even more monstrous intensificationof the one-sided specialisation which represents such a violation of man's humanity. Marx's comment onfactory work that "the individual, himself divided, is transformed into the automatic mechanism of apartial labour" and is thus "crippled to the point of abnormality" is relevant here too. And it becomes allthe more clear, the more elevated, advanced and 'intellectual' is the attainment exacted by the division oflabour.

The split between the worker's labour-power and his personality, its metamorphosis into a thing, anobject that he sells on the market is repeated here too. But with the difference that not every mentalfaculty is suppressed by mechanisation; only one faculty (or complex of faculties) is detached from thewhole personality and placed in opposition to it, becoming a thing, a commodity. But the basicphenomenon remains the same even' though both the means by -which society instills such abilities andtheir material and 'moral' exchange value are fundamentally different from labour-power (not forgetting,of course, the many connecting links and nuances).

The specific type of bureaucratic 'conscientiousness' and impartiality, the individual bureaucrat'sinevitable total subjection to a system of relations between the things to which he is exposed, the ideathat it is precisely his 'honour' and his 'sense of responsibility' that exact this total submission [23] all thispoints to the fact that the division of labour which in the case of Taylorism invaded the psyche, hereinvades the realm of ethics. Far from weakening the reified structure of consciousness, this actuallystrengthens it. For as long as the fate of the worker still appears to be an individual fate (as in the case ofthe slave in antiquity), the life of the ruling classes is still free to assume quite different until the rise ofcapitalism was a unified economic hence a -formally - unified structure of consciousness that embracedthe whole society, brought into being. This unity expressed itself in the fact that the problems ofconsciousness arising from wage-labour were repeated in the ruling class in a refined and spiritualised,but, for that very reason, more intensified form. The specialised 'virtuoso', the vendor of his objectifiedand reified faculties does not just become the [passive] observer of society; he also lapses into acontemplative attitude vis-d-vis the workings of his own objectified and reified faculties. (It is notpossible here even to outline the way in which modern administration and law assume the characteristicsof the factory as we noted above rather than those of the handicrafts.) This phenomenon can be seen at itsmost grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powersof expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced bothfrom the personality of their 'owner' and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter inhand. The journalist's 'lack of convictions', the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs iscomprehensible only as the of capitalist reification. [24]

The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of 'ghostly objectivity' cannot there ore contentitself with the reduction of all objects for the gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps itsimprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities an abilities are no longer an organic par of his



personality, they are things which he can 'own' or 'dispose of' like the various objects of the externalworld. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man canbring his physical and psychic 'qualities' into play without their being subjected increasingly to thisreifying process. We need only think of marriage, and without troubling to point to the developments ofthe nineteenth century we can remind ourselves of the way in which Kant, for example, described thesituation with the naively cynical frankness peculiar to great thinkers.

"Sexual community", he says, "is the reciprocal use made by one person of the sexual organs andfaculties of another . . . marriage ... is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to themutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for' the duration of their lives." [25]

This rationalisation of the world appears to be complete, it seems to penetrate the very depths of man'sphysical and psychic nature. It is limited, however, by its own formalism. That is to say, therationalisation of isolated aspects of life results in the creation of-formal-laws. All these things do jointogether into what seems to the superficial observer to constitute a unified system of general 'laws'. Butthe disregard of the concrete aspects of the subject matter of these laws, upon which disregard theirauthority as laws is based, makes itself felt in the incoherence of the system in fact. This incoherencebecomes particularly egregious in periods of crisis. At such times we can see how the immediatecontinuity between two partial systems is disrupted and their independence from and adventitiousconnection with each other is suddenly forced into the consciousness of everyone. It is for this reasonthat Engels is able to define the 'natural laws' of capitalist society as the laws of chance. [26]

On closer examination the structure of a crisis is seen to be no more than a heightening of the degree andintensity of the daily life of bourgeois society. In its unthinking, mundane reality that life seems firmlyheld together by 'natural laws'; yet it can experience a sudden dislocation because the bonds uniting itsvarious elements and partial systems are a chance affair even at their most normal. So that the pretencethat society is regulated by 'eternal, iron' laws which branch off into the different special laws applying toparticular areas is finally revealed for what it is: a pretence. The true structure of society appears rather inthe independent, rationalised and formal partial laws whose links with each other are of necessity purelyformal (i.e. their formal interdependence can be formally systematised), while as far as concrete realitiesare concerned they can only establish fortuitous connections.

On closer inspection this kind of connection can be discovered even in purely economic phenomena.Thus Marx points out - and the cases referred to here are intended only as an indication of themethodological factors involved, not as a substantive treatment of the problems themselves-that "theconditions o direct exploitation [of the labourer], and those of realising surplus-value, are not identical.They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically." [27] Thus there exists "an accidental ratherthan a necessary connection between the total amount of social labour applied to a social article" and "thevolume whereby society seeks to satisfy the want gratified by the article in question." [28]

These are no more than random instances. It is evident that the whole structure of capitalist productionrests on the interaction between a necessity subject to strict laws in all isolated phenomena and therelative irrationality of the total process. "Division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputedauthority of the capitalist over men, who are but parts of a mechanism that belongs to him. The divisionof labour within society brings into contact independent commodity-producers who acknowledge noother authority than that of competition, of the coercion exerted pressure of their mutual interests." [29]



The capitalist process of rationalisation based on private economic calculation requires that everymanifestation of life shall exhibit this very interaction between details which are subject to laws and atotality ruled by chance. It presupposes a society so structured. It produces and reproduces this structurein so far as it takes possession of society. This has its foundation already in the nature of speculativecalculation, i.e. the economic practice of commodity owners at the stage where the exchange ofcommodities has become universal. Competition between the different owners of commodities would notbe feasible if there were an exact, rational, systematic mode of functioning for the whole of society tocorrespond to the rationality of isolated phenomena. If a rational calculation is to be possible thecommodity owner must be in possession of the laws regulating every detail of his production. Thechances of exploitation, the laws of the 'market' must likewise be rational in the sense that they must becalculable according to the laws of probability. But they must not be governed by a law in the sense inwhich 'laws' govern individual phenomena; they must not under any circumstances be rationallyorganised through and through. This does not mean, of course, that there can be no 'law' governing thewhole. But such a 'law' would have to be the 'unconscious' product of the activity of the differentcommodity owners acting independently of one another, i.e. a law of mutually interacting 'coincidences'rather than one of truly rational organisation. Furthermore, such a law must not merely impose itselfdespite the wishes of individuals, it may not even be fully and adequately knowable. For the completeknowledge of the whole would vouchsafe the knower a monopoly that would amount to the virtualabolition of the capitalist economy.

This irrationality - this highly problematic - 'systematisation' ,of the whole which diverges, qualitativelyand in principle from the laws regulating the parts, is more than just a postulate, a presuppositionessential to the workings of a capitalist economy. It is at the same time the product of the capitalistdivision of labour. It has already been pointed out that the division of labour disrupts every organicallyunified process of work and life and breaks it down into its components. This enables the artificiallyisolated partial functions to be performed in the most rational manner by 'specialists' who are speciallyadapted mentally and physically for the purpose. This has the effect of making these partial functionsautonomous and so they tend to develop through their own momentum and in accordance with their ownspecial laws independently of the other partial functions of society (or that part of the society to whichthey belong.

As the division of labour becomes more pronounced and more rational, this tendency naturally increasesin proportion. For the more highly developed it is, the more powerful become the claims to status and theprofessional interests of the 'specialists' who are the living embodiments of such tendencies. And thiscentrifugal movement is not confined to aspects of a particular sector. It is even more in evidence whenwe consider the great spheres of activity created by the division of labour. Engels describes this processwith regard to the relation between economics and laws: "Similarly with law. As soon as the newdivision of labour which creates professional lawyers becomes necessary, another new and independentsphere is opened up which, for all its essential dependence on production and trade, still has also aspecial capacity for reacting upon these spheres. In a modern state, law must not only correspond to'thegeneral economic condition and be its expression, but must also be an internally coherent expressionwhich does not, owing to inner contradictions, reduce itself to nought. And in order to. achieve this, thefaithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly......... [30] It is hardly necessary tosupplement this with examples of the inbreeding and the interdepartmental conflicts of the civil service(consider the independence of the military apparatus from the civil administration), or of the academicfaculties, etc.



3

The specialisation of skills leads to the destruction of every image of the whole. And as, despite this, theneed to grasp the whole-at least cognitively-cannot die out, we find that science, which is likewise basedon specialisation and thus caught up in the same immediacy, is criticised for having torn the real worldinto shreds and having lost its vision of the whole. In reply to allegations that "the various factors are nottreated as a whole" Marx retorts that this criticism is levelled "as though it were the text-books thatimpress this separation upon life and not life upon the text-books". [31] Even though this criticismdeserves refutation in its naive form it becomes comprehensible when we look for a moment from theoutside, i.e. from a vantage point other than that of a reified consciousness, at the activity of modernscience which is bot sociologically and methodologically necessary and for that reason 'comprehensible'.Such a look will reveal (without constituting a 'criticism') that the more intricate a modern sciencebecomes and the better it understands itself methodologically, the more resolutely it will turn its back onthe ontological problems of its own sphere of influence and eliminate them from the realm, where it hasachieved some insight. The more highly developed it becomes and the more scientific, the more it willbecome a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find that the world lying beyond itsconfines, and in particular the material base which it is its task to understand, its own concrete underlyingreality lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp.

Marx acutely summed up this situation with reference to economics when he declared that "use-value assuch lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy". [32] It would be a mistake to supposethat certain analytical devices - such as find in the 'Theory of Marginal Utility'-might show the way outof this impasse. It is possible to set aside objective laws governing the production and movement ofcommodities which regulate the market and 'subjective' modes of behaviour on it and to make theattempt to start from 'subjective' behaviour on the market. But this simply shifts the question from themain issue to more and more derivative and reified stages without ,,negating the formalism of the methodand the elimination from the outset of the concrete material underlying it. The formal act of exchangewhich constitutes the basic fact for the theory of marginal utility likewise suppresses use-value asuse-value and establishes a relation of concrete equality between concretely unequal and indeedincomparable objects. It is this that creates impasse.

Thus the subject of the exchange is just as abstract, formal and reified as its object. The limits of thisabstract and formal method are revealed in the fact that its chosen goal is an abstract system o 'laws' thatfocuses on the theory of marginal utility just as much as classical economics had done. But the formalabstraction o these 'laws' transforms economics into a closed partial system. And this in turn is unable topenetrate its own material substratum, nor can it advance from there to an understanding of society in itsentirety and so it is compelled to view that substratum as an immutable, eternal 'datum'. Science isthereby debarred from comprehending the development and the demise, the social character of its ownmaterial base, no less than the range of possible attitudes towards it and the nature of its own formalsystem.

Here, once again, we can clearly observe. the close interaction between a class and the scientific methodthat arises from the attempt to conceptualise the social character of that class together with its laws andneeds. It has often been pointed out-in these pages and elsewhere-that the problem that forms theultimate barrier to the economic thought of the bourgeoisie is the crisis. If now-in the full awareness ofour own one-sidedness-consider this question from a purely methodological point of view, we see that it



is the very success with which the economy is totally rationalised and transformed into an abstract andmathematically orientated system of formal 'laws' that creates the methodological barrier tounderstanding the phenomenon of crisis. In moments of crisis the qualitative existence of the 'things' thatlead their lives beyond the purview of economics as misunderstood and neglected things-in-themselves,as use-values, suddenly becomes the decisive factor. (Suddenly, that is, for reified, rational thought.) Orrather: these 'laws' fail to function and the reified mind is unable to perceive a pattern in this 'chaos'.

This failure is characteristic not merely of classical economics (which regarded crises as 'passing','accidental' disturbances), but of bourgeois economics in toto. The incomprehensibility and irrationalityof crises is indeed a consequence of the class situation and interests of the bourgeoisie but it followsequally from their approach to economics. (There is no need to spell out the fact that for us these are bothmerely aspects of the same dialectical unity). This consequence follows with such inevitability thatTugan-Baranovsky, for example, attempts in his theory to draw

the necessary conclusions from a century of crises by excluding consumption from economics entirelyand founding a 'pure' economics based only on production. The source of crises (whose existence cannotbe denied) is then found to lie in incongruities between the various elements of production, i.e. in purelyquantitative factors. Hilferding puts his finger on the fallacy underlying all such explanations:

"They operate only with economic concepts such as capital, profit, accumulation, etc., and believe thatthey possess the solution to the problem when they have discovered the quantitative relations on the basisof which either simple and expanded reproduction is possible, or else there are disturbances. Theyoverlook the fact that there are qualitative conditions attached to these quantitative relations, that it is notmerely a question of units of value which can easily be compared with each other but also use-values of adefinite kind which must fulfil a definite function in production and consumption. Further, they areoblivious of the fact that in the analysis of the process of reproduction more is involved than just aspectsof capital in general, so that it is not enough to say that an excess or a deficit of industrial capital can be'balanced' by an appropriate amount of money-capital. Nor is it a matter of fixed or circulating capital,but rather of machines, raw materials, labour-power of a quite definite (technically defined) sort, ifdisruptions are to be avoided." [33]

Marx has often demonstrated convincingly how inadequate the claws' of bourgeois economics are to thetask of explaining the true movement of economic activity in toto. He has made it clear that Ilthislimitation lies in the-methodologically inevitable-failure to comprehend use-value and real consumption.

"Within certain limits, the process of reproduction may take place on the same or on an increased scaleeven when the commodities expelled from it have not really entered individual or productiveconsumption. The consumption of commodities is not included in the cycle of the capital from whichthey originated. For instance, as soon as the yarn is sold the cycle of the capital-value represented by theyarn may begin anew, regardless of what may next become of the sold yarn. So long as the product issold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer. The cycle ofthe capital-value he is identified with is not interrupted. And if this process is expanded-which includesincreased productive consumption of the means of production-this reproduction of capital may beaccompanied by increased individual consumption (hence demand) on the part of the labourers, since thisprocess is initiated and effected by productive consumption. Thus the production of surplus-value, andwith it the individual consumption of the capitalist, may increase, the entire process of reproduction maybe in a flourishing condition, and yet a large part of the commodities may have entered into consumption



only in appearance, while in reality they may still remain unsold in the hands of dealers, may in fact stillbe lying in the market." [34]

It must be emphasised that this inability to penetrate to the real material substratum of science is not thefault of individuals. It is rather something that becomes all the more apparent the more science hasadvanced and the more consistently it functions from the point of view of its own premises. It is thereforeno accident, as Rosa Luxemburg has convincingly shown, [35] that the great, if also often primitive,faulty and inexact synoptic view of economic life to be found in Quesnay's "Tableau Economique",disappears progressively as the - formal - process of conceptualisation becomes increasingly exact in thecourse of its development from Adam Smith to Ricardo. For Ricardo the process of the total reproductionof capital (where this problem cannot be avoided) is no longer a central issue.

In jurisprudence this situation emerges with even greater clarity and simplicity - because there is a moreconscious reification at work. If only because the question of whether the qualitative content can beunderstood by means of a rational, calculating approach is no longer seen in terms of a rivalry betweentwo principles within the same sphere (as was the case with use-value and exchange value in economics),but rather, right from the start, as a question of form versus content. The conflict revolving aroundnatural law, and the whole revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie was based on the assumption that theformal equality and universality of the law (and hence its rationality) was able at the same time todetermine its content. This was expressed in the assault on the varied and picturesque medley ofprivileges dating back to the Middle Ages and also in the attack on the Divine Right of Kings. Therevolutionary bourgeois class refused to admit that a legal relationship had a valid foundation merelybecause it existed in fact. "Burn your laws and make new ones!" Voltaire counselled; "Whence can newlaws be obtained? From Reason!" [36]

The war waged against the revolutionary bourgeoisie, say, at the time of the French Revolution, wasdominated to such an extent by this idea that it was inevitable that the natural law of the bourgeoisiecould only be opposed by yet another natural law (see Burke and also Stahl). Only after the bourgeoisiehad gained at least a partial victory did a 'critical' and a 'historical' view begin to emerge in both camps.Its essence can be summarised as the belief that the content of law is something purely factual and hencenot to be comprehended by the formal categories of jurisprudence. Of the tenets of natural law the onlyone to survive was the idea of the unbroken continuity of the formal system of law; significantly,Bergbohm uses an image borrowed from physics, that of a 'juridical vacuum', to describe everything notregulated by law. [37]

Nevertheless, the cohesion of these laws is purely formal: what they express, "the content of legalinstitutions is never of a legal character, but always political and economic". [38] With this the primitive,cynically sceptical campaign against natural law that was launched by the 'Kantian' Hugo at the end ofthe eighteenth century, acquired 'scientific' status. Hugo established the juridical basis of slavery, amongother things, by arguing that it "had been the law of the land for thousands of years and wasacknowledged by millions of cultivated people". [39] In this naively cynical frankness the pattern whichis to become increasingly characteristic of law in bourgeois society stands clearly revealed. WhenJellinek describes the contents of law as meta-juristic, when 'critical' jurists locate the study of thecontents of law in history, sociology and politics what they are doing is, in the last analysis, just whatHugo had demanded: they are systematically abandoning the attempt to ground law in reason and to giveit a rational content; law is henceforth to be regarded as a formal calculus with the aid of which the legal



consequences of particular actions (rebus sic stantibus) can be determined as exactly as possible.

However, this view transforms the process by which law comes into being and passes away intosomething as incomprehensible to the jurist as crises had been to the political economist. With regard tothe origins of law the perceptive 'critical' jurist Kelsen observes: "It is the great mystery of law and of thestate that is consummated with the enactment of laws and for this reason it may be permissible to employinadequate images in elucidating its nature." [40] Or in other words: "It is symptomatic of the nature oflaw that a norm may be legitimate even if its origins are iniquitous. That is another way of saying that thelegitimate origin of a law cannot be written into the concept of law as one of its conditions." [41] Thisepistemological clarification could also be a factual one and could thereby lead to an advance inknowledge. To achieve this, however, the other disciplines into which the problem of the origins of lawhad been diverted would really have to propose a genuine solution to it. But also it would be essentialreally to penetrate the nature of a legal system which serves purely as a means of calculating the effectsof actions and of rationally imposing modes of action relevant to a particular class. In that event the real,material substratum of the law would at one stroke become visible and comprehensible. But neithercondition can be fulfilled. The law maintains its close relationship with the 'eternal values'. This givesbirth, in the shape of a philosophy of law to an impoverished and formalistic re-edition of natural law(Stammler). Meanwhile, the real basis for the development of law, a change in the power relationsbetween the classes, becomes hazy and vanishes into the sciences that study it, sciences which-inconformity with the modes of thought current in bourgeois society-generate the same problems oftranscending their material substratum as we have seen in jurisprudence and economics.

The manner in which this transcendence is conceived shows how vain was the hope that a comprehensivediscipline, like philosophy, might yet achieve that overall knowledge which the particular sciences haveso conspicuously renounced by turning away from the material substratum of their conceptual apparatus.Such a synthesis would only be possible if philosophy were able to change its approach radically andconcentrate on the concrete material totality of what can and should be known. Only then would it beable to break through the barriers erected by a formalism that has degenerated into a state of completefragmentation. But this would presuppose an awareness of the causes, the genesis and the necessity ofthis formalism; moreover, it would not be enough to unite the special sciences mechanically: they wouldhave to be transformed inwardly by an inwardly synthesising philosophical method. It is evident that thephilosophy of bourgeois society is incapable of this. Not that the desire for synthesis is absent; nor can itbe maintained that the best people have welcomed with open arms a mechanical existence hostile to lifeand a scientific formalism alien to it. But a radical change in outlook is not feasible on the soil ofbourgeois society. Philosophy can attempt to assemble the whole of knowledge encyclopaedically (seeWundt). Or it may radically question the value of formal knowledge for a 'living life' (see irrationalistphilosophies from Hamann to Bergson). But these episodic trends lie to one side of the mainphilosophical tradition. The latter acknowledges as given and necessary the results and achievements ofthe special sciences and assigns to philosophy the task of exhibiting and justifying the grounds forregarding as valid the concepts so constructed.

Thus philosophy stands in the same relation to the special sciences as they do with respect to empiricalreality. The formalistic conceptualisation of the special sciences become for philosophy an immutablygiven substratum and this signals the final and despairing renunciation of every attempt to cast light onthe reification that lies at the root of this formalism. The reified world appears henceforth quitedefinitively-and in philosophy, under the spotlight of 'criticism' it is potentiated still further-as the only



possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world vouchsafed to us humans.Whether this gives rise to ecstasy, resignation or despair, whether we search for a path leading to 'life' viairrational mystical experience, this will do absolutely nothing to modify the situation as it is in fact.

By confining itself to the study of the 'possible conditions' of the validity of the forms in which itsunderlying existence is manifested, modern bourgeois thought bars its own way to a clear view of theproblems bearing on the birth and death of these forms, and on their real essence and substratum. Itsperspicacity finds itself increasingly in the situation of that legendary 'critic' in India who was confrontedwith the ancient story according to which the world rests upon an elephant. He unleashed the 'critical'question: upon what does the elephant rest? On receiving the answer that the elephant stands on a tortoise'criticism' declared itself satisfied. It is obvious that even if he had continued to press apparently (critical'questions, he could only have elicited a third miraculous animal. He would not have been able todiscover the solution to the real question.

next section


NOTES ON SECTION I

1 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 53.

2 Capital Ill, p. 324.


4 Capital I, p. 72. On this antagonism cf. the purely economic distinction between the exchange of goodsin terms of their value and the exchange in terms of their cost of production. Capital III, p. 174.


6 Cf. Capital 1, pp. 322, 345.

7 This whole process is described systematically and historically in Capital I. The facts themselves canalso be found in the writings of bourgeois economists like Bücher, Sombart, A. Weber and Gottl amongothers - although for the most part they are not seen in connection with the problem of reification.


9 Capital I, p. 355 (note).

10 That this should appear so is fully justified from the point of view of the individual consciousness. Asfar as class is concerned we would point out that this subjugation is the product of a lengthy strugglewhich enters upon a new stage with the organisation of the proletariat into a class. but on a higher planeand with different weapons.



11 Capital 1, pp. 374-6, 423-4, 460, etc. It goes without saying that this 'contemplation' can be moredemanding and demoralising than 'active' labour. But we cannot discuss this further here.



14 CL Gottl: Wirtschaft und Technik, Grundrisse der Sozialökonomik II, 234 et seq.


16 This refers above all to capitalist private property. Der heilige Max. Dokumente des Sozialismus 1II,363. Marx goes on to make a number of very fine observations about the effects of reification uponlanguage. A philological study from the standpoint of historical materialism could profitably begin here.

17 Capital III, pp. 384-5.

18 Ibid., p. 809.

19 Gesammelte politische Schriften, Munich, 1921, pp. 140-2. Weber's reference to the development ofEnglish law has no bearing on our problem. On the gradual ascendancy of the principle of economiccalculation, see also A. Weber, Standort der Industrien, especially p. 216.

20 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 491.

21 Ibid., p. 129.

22 If we do not emphasise the class character of the state in this context, this is because our aim is tounderstand reification as a general phenomenon constitutive of the whole of bourgeois society. But forthis the question of class would have to begin with the machine. On this point see Section Ill.

23 Cf. Max Weber, Politische Schriften, p. 154.

24 Cf. the essay by A. Fogarasi in Kommunismus, jg. II, No. 25126.

25 Die Metaphysik der Sitten, Pt. I, § 24.

26 The Origin of the Family, in S. W. II, p. 293.


28 Ibid., p. 183.


30 Letter to Conrad Schmidt in S.W. II, pp. 447-8.


32 Ibid., p. 2 1.

33 Finanzkapital, 2nd edition, pp. 378-9.

34 Capital II, pp. 75-6.



35 Die Akkumulation des Kapitals, Ist edition, pp. 78-9. It would be a fascinating task to work out thelinks between this process and the development of the great rationalist systems.

36 Quoted by Bergbohm, Jurisprudenz und Rechtsphilosphie, p. 170.

37 Ibid., p. 375.

38 Preuss, Zur Methode der juristischen Begriffsbildung. In Schmollers jahrbuch, 1900, p. 370.

39 Lehrbuch des Naturrechts, Berlin, 1799, § 141. Marx's polemic against Hugo (Nachlass 1, pp. 268 etseq.) is still on Hegelian lines.

40 Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre, p. 411 (my italics).

41 F. Somlo, juristiche Grundlehre, p. 117.




II: The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought

Modern critical philosophy springs from the reified structure of consciousness. The specific problems ofthis philosophy are distinguishable from the problematics of previous philosophies by the fact that theyare rooted in this structure. Greek philosophy constitutes something of an exception to this. This is notmerely accidental, for reification did play a part in Greek society in its maturity. But as the problems andsolutions of the philosophy of the Ancients were embedded in a wholly different society it is only naturalthat they should be qualitatively different from those of modern philosophy. Hence, from the standpointof any adequate interpretation it is as idle to imagine that we can find in Plato a precursor of Kant (asdoes Natorp), as it is to undertake the task of erecting a philosophy on Aristotle (as does ThomasAquinas) . If these two ventures have proved feasible — even though arbitrary and inadequate — this canbe accounted for in part by the use to which later ages are wont to put the philosophical heritage, bendingit to their own purposes. But also further explanation lies in the fact that Greek philosophy was nostranger to certain aspects of reification, without having experienced them, however, as universal formsof existence; it had one foot in the world of reification while the other remained in a ‘natural’ society.Hence its problems can be applied to the two later traditions, although only with the aid of energeticre-interpretations.

1.

Where, then, does the fundamental distinction lie? Kant has formulated the matter succinctly in thePreface to the Critique of Pure Reason with his well-known allusion to the “Copernican Revolution”, arevolution which must be carried out in the realm of the problem of knowledge: “Hitherto, it has beenassumed that all our knowledge must conform to the objects.... Therefore let us for once attempt to seewhether we cannot reach a solution to the tasks of metaphysics by assuming that the objects mustconform to our knowledge. ...”[1] In other words, modern philosophy sets itself the following problem: itrefuses to accept the world as something that has arisen (or e.g. has been created by God) independentlyof the knowing subject, and prefers to conceive of it instead as its own product.

This revolution which consists in viewing rational knowledge as the product of mind does not originatewith Kant. He only developed its implications more radically than his predecessors had done. Marx hasrecalled, in a quite different context, Vico’s remark to the effect that “the history of man is to bedistinguished from the history of nature by the fact that we have made the one but not the other”. [2] Inways diverging from that of Vico who in many respects was not understood and who became influentialonly much later, the whole of modern philosophy has been preoccupied with this problem. Fromsystematic doubt and the Cogito ergo sum of Descartes, to Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz there is a directline of development whose central strand, rich in variations, is the idea that the object of cognition can beknown by us for the reason that, and to the degree in which, it has been created by ourselves. [3] Andwith this, the methods of mathematics and geometry (the means whereby objects are constructed, created

The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought


out of the formal presuppositions of objectivity in general) and, later, the methods of mathematicalphysics become the guide and the touchstone of philosophy, the knowledge of the world as a totality.

The question why and with what justification human reason should elect to regard just these systems asconstitutive of its own essence (as opposed to the ‘given’, alien, unknowable nature of the content ofthose systems) never arises. It is assumed to be self-evident. Whether this assumption is expressed (as inthe case of Berkeley and Hume) as scepticism, as doubt in the ability of ‘our’ knowledge to achieveuniversally valid results, or whether (as with Spinoza and Leibniz) it becomes an unlimited confidence inthe ability of these formal systems to comprehend the ‘true’ essence of all things, is of secondaryimportance in this context. For we are not concerned to present a history of modern philosophy, not evenin crude outline. We wish only to sketch the connection between the fundamental problems of thisphilosophy and the basis in existence from which these problems spring and to which they strive toreturn by the road of the understanding. However, the character of this existence is revealed at least asclearly by what philosophy does not find problematic as by what it does. At any rate it is advisable toconsider the interaction between these two aspects. And if we do put the question in this way we thenperceive that the salient characteristic of the whole epoch is the equation which appears naïve anddogmatic even in the most ‘critical’ philosophers, of formal, mathematical, rational knowledge both withknowledge in general and also with ‘our’ knowledge.

Even the most superficial glance at the history of human thought will persuade us that neither of the twoequations is self-evidently true under all circumstances. This is most obviously apparent in the origins ofmodern thought where it was necessary to wage prolonged intellectual wars with the quite differentlybased thought of the Middle Ages before the new method and the new view of the nature of thoughtcould finally prevail. This struggle, too, can obviously not be portrayed here. A familiarity with itsdominant motifs can be assumed. These were the continuity of all phenomena (in contrast to themedieval distinction between the world ‘beneath’ the moon and the world ‘above’ it); the demand forimmanent causal connections in contrast to views which sought to explain and connect phenomena fromsome transcendental point (astronomy versus astrology); the demand that mathematical and rationalcategories should be applied to all phenomena (in contrast to the qualitative approach of naturephilosophy which experienced a new impetus in the Renaissance — Böhme, Fludd, etc. — and evenformed the basis of Bacon’s method. It can similarly be taken as read that the whole evolution ofphilosophy went hand in hand with the development of the exact sciences. These in turn interactedfruitfully with a technology that was becoming increasingly more rationalised, and with developments inproduction. [4]

These considerations are of crucial importance for our analysis. For rationalism has existed at widelydifferent times and in the most diverse forms, in the sense of a formal system whose unity derives fromits orientation towards that aspect of the phenomena that can be grasped by the understanding, that iscreated by the understanding and hence also subject to the control, the predictions and the calculations ofthe understanding. But there are fundamental distinctions to be made, depending on the material onwhich this rationalism is brought to bear and on the role assigned to it in the comprehensive system ofhuman knowledge and human objectives. What is novel about modern rationalism is its increasinglyinsistent claim that it has discovered the principle which connects up all phenomena which in nature andsociety are found to confront mankind. Compared with this, every previous type of rationalism is nomore than a partial system.

In such systems the ‘ultimate’ problems of human existence persist in an irrationality incommensurable



with human understanding. The closer the system comes to these ‘ultimate’ questions the more strikinglyits partial, auxiliary nature and its inability to grasp the ‘essentials’ are revealed. An example of this isfound in the highly rationalised techniques of Hindu asceticism [5], with its ability to predict exactly allof its results. Its whole ‘rationality’ resides in the direct and immediate bond, related as means to ends,with an entirely supra-rational experience of the essence of the world.

Thus, here too, it will not do to regard ‘rationalism’ as something abstract and formal and so to turn itinto a suprahistorical principle inherent in the nature of human thought. We perceive rather that thequestion of whether a form is to be treated as a universal category or merely as a way of organisingprecisely delimited partial systems is essentially a qualitative problem. Nevertheless even the purelyformal delimitation of this type of thought throws light on the necessary correlation of the rational andthe irrational, i.e. on the inevitability with which every rational system will strike a frontier or barrier ofirrationality. However, when — as in the case of Hindu asceticism — the rational system is conceived ofas a partial system from the outset, when the irrational world which surrounds and delimits it — (in thiscase the irrational world comprises both the earthly existence of man which is unworthy ofrationalisation and also the next world, that of salvation, which human, rational concepts cannot grasp)— is represented as independent of it, as unconditionally inferior or superior to it, this creates notechnical problem for the rational system itself. It is simply the means to a-non-rational-end. Thesituation is quite different when rationalism claims to be the universal method by which to obtainknowledge of the whole of existence. In that event the necessary correlation with the principle ofirrationality becomes crucial: it erodes and dissolves the whole system. This is the case with modern(bourgeois) rationalism.

The dilemma can be seen most clearly in the strange significance for Kant’s system of his concept of thething-in-itself, with its many iridescent connotations. The attempt has often been made to prove that thething-in-itself has a number of quite disparate functions within Kant’s system. What they all have incommon is the fact that they each represent a limit, a barrier, to the abstract, formal, rationalistic,‘human’ faculty of cognition. However, these limits and barriers seem to be so very different from eachother that it is only meaningful to unify them by means of the admittedly abstract and negative-conceptof the thing-in-itself if it is clear that, despite the great variety of effects, there is a unified explanation forthese frontiers. To put it briefly, these problems can be reduced to two great, seemingly unconnected andeven opposed complexes. There is, firstly, the problem of matter (in the logical, technical sense), theproblem of the content of those forms with the aid of which ‘we’ know and are able to know the worldbecause we have created it ourselves. And, secondly, there is the problem of the whole and of theultimate substance of knowledge, the problem of those ‘ultimate’ objects of knowledge which are neededto round off the partial systems into a totality, a system of the perfectly understood world.

We know that in the Critique of Pure Reason it is emphatically denied that the second group of questionscan be answered. Indeed, in the section on the Transcendental Dialectic the attempt is made to condemnthem as questions falsely put, and to eliminate them from science. [6] But there is no need to enlarge onthe fact that the question of totality is the constant centre of the transcendental dialectic. God, the soul,etc., are nothing but mythological expressions to denote the unified subject or, alternatively, the unifiedobject of the totality of the objects of knowledge considered as perfect (and wholly known). Thetranscendental dialectic with its sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena repudiates allattempts by ‘our’ reason to obtain knowledge of the second group of objects. They are regarded asthings-in-themselves as opposed to the phenomena that can be known.



It now appears as if the first complex of questions, that concerning the content of the forms, had nothingto do with these issues. Above all in the form sometimes given to it by Kant, according to which: “thesensuous faculty of intuition (which furnishes the forms of understanding with content) is in reality onlya receptive quality, a capacity for being affected in a certain way by ideas.... The non-sensuous cause ofthese ideas is wholly unknown to us and we are therefore unable to intuit it as an object.... However, wecan call the merely intelligible cause of phenomena in general the transcendental object, simply so that‘we’ should have something which corresponds to sensuousness as receptivity.”

He goes on to say of this object “that it is a datum in itself, antecedent to all experience”. [7] But theproblem of content goes much further than that of sensuousness, though unlike some particularly‘critical’ and supercilious Kantians we cannot deny that the two are closely connected. For irrationality,the impossibility of reducing contents to their rational elements (which we shall discover again as ageneral problem in modern logic) can be seen at its crudest in the question of relating the sensuouscontent to the rational form. While the irrationality of other kinds of content is local and relative, theexistence and the mode of being of sensuous contents remain absolutely irreducible. [8] But when theproblem of irrationality resolves itself into the impossibility of penetrating any datum with the aid ofrational concepts or of deriving them from such concepts, the question of the thing-in-itself, which at firstseemed to involve the metaphysical dilemma of the relation between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ now assumes acompletely different aspect which is crucial both for methodology and for systematic theory. [9] Thequestion then becomes: are the empirical facts — (it is immaterial whether they are purely ‘sensuous’ orwhether their sensuousness is only the ultimate material substratum of their ‘factual’ essence) — to betaken as ‘given’ or can this ‘givenness’ be dissolved further into rational forms, i.e. can it be conceivedas the product of ‘our’ reason? With this the problem becomes crucial for the possibility of the system ingeneral.

Kant himself had already turned the problem explicitly in this direction. He repeatedly emphasises thatpure reason is unable to make the least leap towards the synthesis and the definition of an object and soits principles cannot be deduced “directly from concepts but only indirectly by relating these concepts tosomething wholly contingent, namely possible experience” [10]; in the Critique of Judgment this notionof ‘intelligible contingency’ both of the elements of possible experience and of all laws regulating andrelating to it is made the central problem of systematisation. When Kant does this we see, on the onehand, that the two quite distinct delimiting functions of the thing-in-itself (viz. the impossibility ofapprehending the whole with the aid of the conceptual framework of the rational partial systems and theirrationality of the contents of the individual concepts) are but two sides of the one problem. On the otherhand, we see that this problem is in fact of central importance for any mode of thought that undertakes toconfer universal significance on rational categories.

Thus the attempt to universalise rationalism necessarily issues in the demand for a system but, at thesame time, as soon as one reflects upon the conditions in which a universal system is possible, i.e. assoon as the question of the system is consciously posed, it is seen that such a demand is incapable offulfilment. [11] For a system in the sense given to it by rationalism — and any other system would beself-contradictory — can bear no meaning other than that of a co-ordination, or rather a supra- andsubordination of the various partial systems of forms (and within these, of the individual forms). Theconnections between them must always be thought of as ‘necessary’, i.e. as visible in or ‘created ‘by theforms themselves, or at least by the principle according to which forms are constructed. That is to say,the correct positing of a principle implies — at least in its general tendency — the positing of the whole



system determined by it; the consequences are contained in the principle, they can be deduced from it,they are predictable and calculable. The real evolution of the totality of postulates may appear as an‘infinite process’, but this limitation means only that we cannot survey the whole system at once; it doesnot detract from the principle of systematisation in the least. [12] This notion of system makes it clearwhy pure and applied mathematics have constantly been held up as the methodological model and guidefor modern philosophy. For the way in which their axioms are related to the partial systems and resultsdeduced from them corresponds exactly to the postulate that systematic rationalism sets itself, thepostulate, namely, that every given aspect of the system should be capable of being deduced from itsbasic principle, that it should be exactly predictable and calculable.

It is evident that the principle of systematisation is not reconcilable with the recognition of any‘facticity’, of a ‘content’ which in principle cannot be deduced from the principle of form and which,therefore, has simply to be accepted as actuality. The greatness, the paradox and the tragedy of classicalGerman philosophy lie in the fact that — unlike Spinoza — it no longer dismisses every given [donné] asnon-existent, causing it to vanish behind the monumental architecture of the rational forms produced bythe understanding. Instead, while grasping and holding on to the irrational character of the actualcontents of the concepts it strives to go beyond this, to overcome it and to erect a system. But from whathas already been said it is clear what the problem of the actually given means for rationalism: viz. that itcannot be left to its own being and existence, for in that case it would remain ineluctably ‘contingent’.Instead it must be wholly absorbed into the rational system of the concepts of the understanding.

At first sight we seem to be faced by an insoluble dilemma. For either the ‘irrational’ content is to bewholly integrated into the conceptual system, i.e. this is to be so constructed that it can be coherentlyapplied to everything just as if there were no irrational content or actuality (if there is, it exists at best as aproblem in the sense suggested above). In this event thought regresses to the level of a naïve, dogmaticrationalism: somehow it regards the mere actuality of the irrational contents of the concepts asnonexistent. (This metaphysics may also conceal its real nature behind the formula that these contents are‘irrelevant’ to knowledge.) Alternatively we are forced to concede that actuality, content, matter reachesright into the form, the structures of the forms and their interrelations and thus into the structure of thesystem itself. [13] In that case the system must be abandoned as a system. For then it will be no morethan a register, an account, as well ordered as possible, of facts which are no longer linked rationally andso can no longer be made systematic even though the forms of their components are themselves rational.[14]

It would be superficial to be baffled by this abstract dilemma and the classical philosophers did nothesitate for a moment. They took the logical opposition of form and content, the point at which all theantitheses of philosophy meet, and drove it to extremes. This enabled them to make a real advance ontheir predecessors and lay the foundations of the dialectical method. They persisted in their attempts toconstruct a rational system in the face of their clear acknowledgment of and stubborn adherence to theirrational nature of the contents of their concepts (of the given world).

This system went in the direction of a dynamic relativisation of these antitheses. Here too, of course,modern mathematics provided them with a model. The systems it influenced (in particular that ofLeibniz) view the irrationality of the given world as a challenge. And in fact, for mathematics theirrationality of a given content only serves as a stimulus to modify and reinterpret the formal system withwhose aid correlations had been established hitherto, so that what had at first sight appeared as a ‘given’content, now appeared to have been ‘created’. Thus actuality was resolved into necessity. This view of



reality does indeed represent a great advance on the dogmatic period (of ‘holy mathematics’).

But it must not be overlooked that mathematics was working with a concept of the irrational speciallyadapted to its own needs and homogeneous with them (and mediated by this concept it employed asimilarly adapted notion of actuality, of existence). Certainly, the local irrationality of the conceptualcontent is to be found here too: but from the outset it is designed — by the method chosen and the natureof its axioms — to spring from as pure a position as possible and hence to be capable of beingrelativised. [15]

But this implies the discovery of a methodological model and not of the method itself. It is evident thatthe irrationality of existence (both as a totality and as the ‘ultimate’ material substratum underlying theforms), the irrationality of matter is qualitatively different from the irrationality of what we can call withMaimon, intelligible matter. Naturally this could not prevent philosophers from following themathematical method (of construction, production) and trying to press even this matter into its forms. Butit must never be forgotten that the uninterrupted ‘creation’ of content has a quite different meaning inreference to the material base of existence from what it involves in the world of mathematics which is awholly constructed world. For the philosophers ‘creation’ means only the possibility of rationallycomprehending the facts, whereas for mathematics ‘creation’ and the possibility of comprehension areidentical. Of all the representatives of classical philosophy it was Fichte in his middle period who sawthis problem most clearly and gave it the most satisfactory formulation. What is at issue, he says, is “theabsolute projection of an object of the origin of which no account can be given with the result that thespace between projection and thing projected is dark and void; I expressed it somewhat scholasticallybut, as I believe, very appropriately, as the projectio per hiatum irrationalem”. [16]

Only with this problematic does it become possible to comprehend the parting of the ways in modernphilosophy and with it the chief stages in its evolution. This doctrine of the irrational leaves behind it theera of philosophical ‘dogmatism’ or — to put it in terms of social history — the age in which thebourgeois class naïvely equated its own forms of thought, the forms in which it saw the world inaccordance with its own existence in society, with reality and with existence as such.

The unconditional recognition of this problem, the renouncing of attempts to solve it leads directly to thevarious theories centring on the notion of fiction. It leads to the rejection of every ‘metaphysics’ (in thesense of ontology) and also to positing as the aim of philosophy the understanding of the phenomena ofisolated, highly specialised areas by means of abstract rational special systems, perfectly adapted to themand without making the attempt to achieve a unified mastery of the whole realm of the knowable. (Indeedany such attempt is dismissed as ‘unscientific’) Some schools make this renunciation explicitly (e.g.Mach Avenarius, Poincare, Vaihinger, etc.) while in many others it is disguised. But it must not beforgotten that — as was demonstrated at the end of Section I — the origin of the special sciences withtheir complete independence of one another both in method and subject matter entails the recognitionthat this problem is insoluble. And the fact that these sciences are ‘exact’ is due precisely to thiscircumstance. Their underlying material base is permitted to dwell inviolate and undisturbed in itsirrationality (‘non-createdness’, ‘givenness’) so that it becomes possible to operate with unproblematic,rational categories in the resulting methodically purified world. These categories are then applied not tothe real material substratum (even that of the particular science) but to an ‘intelligible’ subject matter.

Philosophy — consciously — refrains from interfering with the work of the special sciences. It evenregards this renunciation as a critical advance. In consequence its role is confined to the investigation of



the formal presuppositions of the special sciences which it neither corrects nor interferes with. And theproblem which they by-pass philosophy cannot solve either, nor even pose, for that matter. Wherephilosophy has recourse to the structural assumptions lying behind the form-content relationship it eitherexalts the ‘mathematicising’ method of the special sciences, elevating it into the method proper tophilosophy (as in the Marburg School) [17], or else it establishes the irrationality of matter, as logically,the ‘ultimate’ fact (as do Windelband, Rickert and Lask). But in both cases, as soon as the attempt atsystematisation is made, the unsolved problem of the irrational reappears in the problem of totality. Thehorizon that delimits the totality that has been and can be created here is, at best, culture (i.e. the cultureof bourgeois society). This culture cannot be derived from anything else and has simply to be acceptedon its own terms as ‘facticity’ in the sense given to it by the classical philosophers. [18]

To give a detailed analysis of the various forms taken by the refusal to understand reality as a whole andas existence, would be to go well beyond the framework of this study. Our aim here was to locate thepoint at which there appears in the thought of bourgeois society the double tendency characteristic of itsevolution. On the one hand, it acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence,subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand, it loses — likewise progressively — the possibility ofgaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualifications forleadership.

Classical German philosophy marks a unique transitional stage in this process. It arises at a point ofdevelopment where matters have progressed so far that these problems can be raised to the level ofconsciousness. At the same time this takes place in a milieu where the problems can only appear on anintellectual and philosophical plane. This has the drawback that the concrete problems of society and theconcrete solutions to them cannot be seen. Nevertheless, classical philosophy is able to think the deepestand most fundamental problems of the development of bourgeois society through to the very end — onthe plane of philosophy. It is able — in thought — to complete the evolution of class. And — in thought— it is able to take all the paradoxes of its position to the point where the necessity of going beyond thishistorical stage in mankind’s development can at least be seen as a problem.

2.

Classical philosophy is indebted for its wealth, its depth and its boldness no less than its fertility forfuture thinkers to the fact that it narrowed the problem down, confining it within the realm of purethought. At the same time it remains an insuperable obstacle even within the realm of thought itself. Thatis to say, classical philosophy mercilessly tore to shreds all the metaphysical illusions of the precedingera, but was forced to be as uncritical and as dogmatically metaphysical with regard to some of its ownpremises as its predecessors had been towards theirs. We have already made a passing reference to thispoint: it is the — dogmatic — assumption that the rational and formalistic mode of cognition is the onlypossible way of apprehending reality (or to put it in its most critical form: the only possible way for ‘us’),in contrast to the facts which are simply given and alien to ‘us’. As we have shown, the grandioseconception that thought can only grasp what it has itself created strove to master the world as a whole byseeing it as self-created. However, it then came up against the insuperable obstacle of the given, of thething-in-itself. If it was not to renounce its understanding of the whole it had to take the road that leadsinwards. It had to strive to find the subject of thought which could be thought of as producing existencewithout any hiatus irrationalis or transcendental thing-in-itself. The dogmatism alluded to above waspartly a true guide and partly a source of confusion in this enterprise. It was a true guide inasmuch as



thought was led beyond the mere acceptance of reality as it was given, beyond mere reflection and theconditions necessary for thinking about reality, to orientate itself beyond mere contemplation and mereintuition. It was a source of confusion since it prevented the same dogmatism from discovering its trueantidote, the principle that would enable contemplation to be overcome, namely the practical. (The factthat precisely for this reason the given constantly re-emerges as untranscended in its irrationality will bedemonstrated in the course of the following account.)

In his last important logical work [19] Fichte formulates the philosophical starting-point for this situationas follows: “We have seen all actual knowledge as being necessary, except for the form of ‘is’, on theassumption that there is one phenomenon that must doubtless remain as an absolute assumption forthought and concerning which doubt can only be resolved by an actual intuition. But with the distinctionthat we can perceive the definite and qualitative law in the content of one part of this fact, namely theego-principle. Whereas for the actual content of this intuition of self we can merely perceive the fact thatone must exist but cannot legislate for the existence of this one in particular. At the same time we noteclearly that there can be no such law and that therefore, the qualitative law required for this definition isprecisely the absence of law itself Now, if the necessary is also that which is known a priori we have inthis sense perceived all facticity a priori, not excluding the empirical since this we have deduced to benon-deducible.”

What is relevant to our problem here is the statement that the subject of knowledge, the ego-principle, isknown as to its content and, hence, can be taken as a starting-point and as a guide to method. In the mostgeneral terms we see here the origin of the philosophical tendency to press forward to a conception of thesubject which can be thought of as the creator of the totality of content. And likewise in general, purelyprogrammatic terms we see the origin of the search for a level of objectivity, a positing of the objects,where the duality of subject and object (the duality of thought and being is only a special case of this), istranscended, i.e. where subject and object coincide, where they are identical.

Obviously the great classical philosophers were much too perceptive and critical to overlook theempirically existing duality of subject and object. Indeed, they saw the basic structure of empirical dataprecisely in this split. But their demand, their programme was much more concerned with finding thenodal point, from which they could ‘create’, deduce and make comprehensible the duality of subject andobject on the empirical plane, i.e. in its objective form. In contrast to the dogmatic acceptance of amerely given reality — divorced from the subject — they required that every datum should beunderstood as the product of the identical subject-object, and every duality should be seen as a specialcase derived from this pristine unity.

But this unity is activity. Kant had attempted in the Critique of Practical Reason (which has been muchmisunderstood and often falsely opposed to the Critique of Pure Reason) to show that the barriers thatcould not be overcome by theory (contemplation) were amenable to practical solutions. Fichte wentbeyond this and put the practical, action and activity in the centre of his unifying philosophical system.“For this reason,” he says, “it is not such a trivial matter as it appears to some people, whetherphilosophy should begin from a fact or from an action (i.e. from pure activity which presupposes noobject but itself creates it, so that action immediately becomes deed). For if it starts with the fact it placesitself inside the world of existence and of finitude and will find it hard to discover the way that leadsfrom there to the infinite and the suprasensual; if it begins from action it will stand at the point where thetwo worlds meet and from which they can both be seen at a glance.” [20]



Fichte’s task, therefore, is to exhibit the subject of the ‘action’ and, assuming its identity with the object,to comprehend every dual subject-object form as derived from it, as its product. But here, on aphilosophically higher plane, we find repeated the same failure to resolve the questions raised byclassical German philosophy. The moment that we enquire after the concrete nature of this identicalsubject-object, we are confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand, this configuration of consciousnesscan only be found really and concretely in the ethical act, in the relation of the ethically acting(individual) subject to itself. On the other hand, for the ethical consciousness of the acting individual thesplit between the self-generated, but wholly inwardly turning form (of the ethical imperative in Kant) andof the reality, the given, the empirical alien both to the senses and the understanding must become evenmore definitive than for the contemplative subject of knowledge.

It is well known that Kant did not go beyond the critical interpretation of ethical facts in the individualconsciousness. This had a number of consequences. In the first place, these facts were therebytransformed into something merely there and could not be conceived of as having been ‘created’. [21]

Secondly, this intensifies the ‘intelligible contingency’ of an ‘external world’ subject to the laws ofnature. In the absence of a real, concrete solution the dilemma of freedom and necessity, of voluntarismand fatalism is simply shunted into a siding. That is to say, in nature and in the ‘external world’ laws stilloperate with inexorable necessity [22], while freedom and the autonomy that is supposed to result fromthe discovery of the ethical world are reduced to a mere point of view from which to judge internalevents. These events, however, are seen as being subject in all their motives and effects and even in theirpsychological elements to a fatalistically regarded objective necessity. [23]

Thirdly, this ensures that the hiatus between appearance and essence (which in Kant coincides with thatbetween necessity and freedom) is not bridged and does not, therefore, give way to a manufactured unitywith which to establish the unity of the world. Even worse than that: the duality is itself introduced intothe subject. Even the subject is split into phenomenon and noumenon and the unresolved, insoluble andhenceforth permanent conflict between freedom and necessity now invades its innermost structure.

Fourthly, in consequence of this, the resulting ethic becomes purely formal and lacking in content. Asevery content which is given to us belongs to the world of nature and is thus unconditionally subject tothe objective laws of the phenomenal world, practical norms can only have bearing on the inward formsof action. The moment this ethic attempts to make itself concrete, i.e. to test its strength on concreteproblems, it is forced to borrow the elements of content of these particular actions from the world ofphenomena and from the conceptual systems that assimilate them and absorb their ‘contingency’. Theprinciple of creation collapses as soon as the first concrete content is to be created. And Kant’s ethicscannot evade such an attempt. It does try, it is true, to find the formal principle which will both determineand preserve content — at least negatively — and to locate it in the principle of non-contradiction.According to this, every action contravening ethical norms contains a self-contradiction. For example, anessential quality of a deposit is that it should not be embezzled, etc. But as Hegel has pointed out quiterightly: “What if there were no deposit, where is the contradiction in that? For there to be no depositwould contradict yet other necessarily determined facts; just as the fact that a deposit is possible, isconnected with other necessary facts and so it itself becomes necessary. But it is not permissible toinvolve other purposes and other material grounds; only the immediate form of the concept may decidewhich of the two assumptions is correct. But each of the opposed facts is as immaterial to the form as theother; either can be acceptable as a quality and this acceptance can be expressed as a law.” [24]



Thus Kant’s ethical analysis leads us back to the unsolved methodological problem of the thing-in-itself.We have already defined the philosophically significant side of this problem, its methodological aspect,as the relation between form and content, as the problem of the irreducibility of the factual, and theirrationality of matter. Kant’s formalistic ethics, adapted to the consciousness of the individual, is indeedable to open up the possibility of a metaphysical solution to the problem of the thing-in-itself by enablingthe concepts of a world seen as a totality, which had been destroyed by the transcendental dialectic, toreappear on the horizon as the postulates of practical reason. But from the point of view of method thissubjective and practical solution remains imprisoned within the same barriers that proved sooverwhelming to the objective and contemplative analysis in the Critique of Pure Reason.

This sheds light on a new and significant structural aspect of the whole complex of problems: in order toovercome the irrationality of the question of the thing-in-itself it is not enough that the attempt should bemade to transcend the contemplative attitude. When the question is formulated more concretely it turnsout that the essence of praxis consists in annulling that indifference of form towards content that wefound in the problem of the thing-in-itself Thus praxis can only be really established as a philosophicalprinciple if, at the same time, a conception of form can be found whose basis and validity no longer reston that pure rationality and that freedom from every definition of content. In so far as the principle ofpraxis is the prescription for changing reality, it must be tailored to the concrete material substratum ofaction if it is to impinge upon it to any effect.

Only this approach to the problem makes possible the clear dichotomy between praxis and thetheoretical, contemplative and intuitive attitude. But also we can now understand the connection betweenthe two attitudes and see how, with the aid of the principle of praxis, the attempt could be made toresolve the antinomies of contemplation. Theory and praxis in fact refer to the same objects, for everyobject exists as an immediate inseparable complex of form and content. However, the diversity ofsubjective attitudes orientates praxis towards what is qualitatively unique, towards the content and thematerial substratum of the object concerned. As we have tried to show, theoretical contemplation leads tothe neglect of this very factor. For, theoretical clarification and theoretical analysis of the object reachtheir highest point just when they reveal at their starkest the formal factors liberated from all content(from all ‘contingent facticity’). As long as thought proceeds ‘naïvely’, i.e. as long as it fails to reflectupon its activity and as long as it imagines it can derive the content from the forms themselves, thusascribing active, metaphysical functions to them, or else regards as metaphysical and non-existent anymaterial alien to form, this problem does not present itself. Praxis then appears to be consistentlysubordinated to the theory of contemplation. [25] But the very moment when this situation, i.e. when theindissoluble links that bind the contemplative attitude of the subject to the purely formal character of theobject of knowledge become conscious, it is inevitable either that the attempt to find a solution to theproblem of irrationality (the question of content, of the given, etc.) should be abandoned or that it shouldbe sought in praxis.

It is once again in Kant that this tendency finds its clearest expression. When for Kant “existence isevidently not a real predicate, i.e. the concept of something that could be added to the concept of a thing”[26], we see this tendency with all its consequences at its most extreme. It is in fact so extreme that he iscompelled to propose the dialectics of concepts in movement as the only alternative to his own theory ofthe structure of concepts. “For otherwise it would not be exactly the same thing that exists, but somethingmore than I had thought in the concept and I would not be. able to say that it is precisely the object of myconcept that exists.” It has escaped the notice of both Kant and the critics of his critique of the



ontological argument that here — admittedly in a negative and distorted form arising from his purelycontemplative viewpoint — Kant has hit upon the structure of true praxis as a way of overcoming theantinomies of the concept of existence. We have already shown how, despite all his efforts, his ethicsleads back to the limits of abstract contemplation.

Hegel uncovers the methodological basis of this theory in his criticism of this passage. [27] “For thiscontent regarded in isolation it is indeed a matter of indifference whether it exists or does not exist; thereis no inherent distinction between existence and nonexistence; this distinction does not concern it at all....More generally, the abstractions existence and non-existence both cease to be abstract when they acquirea definite content; existence then becomes reality . . .” That is to say, the goal that Kant here sets forknowledge is shown to be the description of that structure of cognition that systematically isolates ‘purelaws’ and treats them in a systematically isolated and artificially homogeneous milieu. (Thus in thephysical hypothesis of the vibrations of the ether the ‘existence’ of the ether would in fact add nothing tothe concept.) But the moment that the object is seen as part of a concrete totality, the moment that itbecomes clear that alongside the formal, delimiting concept of existence acknowledged by this purecontemplation other gradations of reality are possible and necessary to thought (being [Dasein], existence[Existenz], reality [Realitat], etc. in Hegel), Kant’s proof collapses: it survives only as the demarcationline of purely formal thought.

In his doctoral thesis Marx, more concrete and logical than Hegel, effected the transition from thequestion of existence and its hierarchy of meanings to the plane of historical reality and concrete praxis.“Didn’t the Moloch of the Ancients hold sway? Wasn’t the Delphic Apollo a real power in the life of theGreeks? In this context Kant’s criticism is meaningless.” [28] Unfortunately Marx did not develop thisidea to its logical conclusion although in his mature works his method always operates with concepts ofexistence graduated according to the various levels of praxis.

The more conscious this Kantian tendency becomes the less avoidable is the dilemma. For, the ideal ofknowledge represented by the purely distilled formal conception of the object of knowledge, themathematical organisation and the ideal of necessary natural laws all transform knowledge more andmore into the systematic and conscious contemplation of those purely formal connections, those ‘laws’which function in-objective-reality without the intervention of the subject. But the attempt to eliminateevery element of content and of the irrational affects not only the object but also, and to an increasingextent, the subject. The critical elucidation of contemplation puts more and more energy into its efforts toweed out ruthlessly from its own outlook every subjective and irrational element and everyanthropomorphic tendency; it strives with ever increasing vigour to drive a wedge between the subject ofknowledge and ‘man’, and to transform the knower into a pure and purely formal subject.

It might seem as if this characterisation of contemplation might be thought to contradict our earlieraccount of the problem of knowledge as the knowledge of what ‘we’ have created. This is in fact thecase. But this very contradiction is eminently suited to illuminate the difficulty of the question and thepossible solutions to it. For the contradiction does not lie in the inability of the philosophers to give adefinitive analysis of the available facts. It is rather the intellectual expression of the objective situationitself which it is their task to comprehend. That is to say, the contradiction that appears here betweensubjectivity and objectivity in modern rationalist formal systems, the entanglements and equivocationshidden in their concepts of subject and object, the conflict between their nature as systems created by ‘us’and their fatalistic necessity distant from and alien to man is nothing but the logical and systematicformulation of the modern state of society. For, on the one hand, men are constantly smashing, replacing



and leaving behind them the ‘natural’, irrational and actually existing bonds, while, on the other hand,they erect around themselves in the reality they have created and ‘made’, a kind of second nature whichevolves with exactly the same inexorable necessity as was the case earlier on with irrational forces ofnature (more exactly: the social relations which appear in this form). “To them, their own social action”,says Marx, “takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled bythem.”

1.

From this it follows that the powers that are beyond man’s control assume quite a different character.Hitherto it had been that of the blind power of a — fundamentally — irrational fate, the point where thepossibility of human knowledge ceased and where absolute transcendence and the realm of faith began.[29] Now, however, it appears as the ineluctable consequence of known, knowable, rational systems oflaws, as a necessity which cannot ultimately and wholly be grasped, as was indeed recognised by thecritical philosophers, unlike their dogmatic predecessors. In its parts, however — within the radius inwhich men live — it can increasingly be penetrated, calculated and predicted. It is anything but a merechance that at the very beginning of the development of modern philosophy the ideal of knowledge tookthe form of universal mathematics: it was an attempt to establish a rational system of relations whichcomprehends the totality of the formal possibilities, proportions and relations of a rationalised existencewith the aid of which every phenomenon-independently of its real and material distinctiveness — couldbe subjected to an exact calculus. [30]

This is the modern ideal of knowledge at its most uncompromising and therefore at its mostcharacteristic, and in it the contradiction alluded to above emerges clearly. For, on the one hand, the basisof this universal calculus can be nothing other than the certainty that only a reality cocooned by suchconcepts can truly be controlled by us. On the other hand, it appears that even if we may suppose thisuniversal mathematics to be entirely and consistently realised, ‘control’ of reality can be nothing morethan the objectively correct contemplation of what is yielded — necessarily and without our intervention— by the abstract combinations of these relations and proportions. In this sense contemplation does seemto come close to the universal philosophical ideal of knowledge (as in Greece and India). What ispeculiar to modern philosophy only becomes fully revealed when we critically examine the assumptionthat this universal system of combinations can be put into practice.

For it is only with the discovery of the ‘intelligible contingency’ of these laws that there arises thepossibility of a ‘free’ movement within the field of action of such overlapping or not fully comprehendedlaws. It is important to realise that if we take action in the sense indicated above to mean changingreality, an orientation towards the qualitatively essential and the material substratum of action, then theattitude under discussion will appear much more contemplative than, for instance, the ideal of knowledgeheld by Greek philosophers. [31] For this ‘action’ consists in predicting, in calculating as far as possiblethe probable effects of those laws and the subject of the ‘action’ takes up a position in which these effectscan be exploited to the best advantage of his own purposes. It is therefore evident that, on the one hand,the more the whole of reality is rationalised and the more its manifestations can be integrated into thesystem of laws, the more such prediction becomes feasible. On the other hand, it is no less evident thatthe more reality and the attitude of the subject ‘in action’ approximate to this type, the more the subjectwill be transformed into a receptive organ ready to pounce on opportunities created by the system of lawsand his ‘activity’ will narrow itself down to the adoption of a vantage point from which these laws



function in his best interests (and this without any intervention on his part). The attitude of the subjectthen becomes purely contemplative in the philosophical sense.

2.

But here we can see that this results in the assimilation of all human relations to the level of natural lawsso conceived. It has often been pointed out in these pages that nature is a social category. Of course, tomodern man who proceeds immediately from ready-made ideological forms and from their effects whichdazzle his eye and exercise such a profound effect on his whole intellectual development, it must look asif the point of view which we have just outlined consisted simply in applying to society an intellectualframework derived from the natural sciences. In his youthful polemic against Fichte, Hegel had alreadypointed out that his state was “a machine”, its substratum “an atomistic . . . multitude whose elements are. . . a quantity of points. This absolute substantiality of the points founds an atomistic system in practicalphilosophy in which, as in the atomism of nature, a mind alien to the atoms becomes law.” [32]

This way of describing modern society is so familiar and the attempts to analyse it recur so frequently inthe course of later developments that it would be supererogatory to furnish further proof of it. What is ofgreater importance is the fact that the converse of this insight has not escaped notice either. After Hegelhad clearly recognised the bourgeois character of the ‘laws of nature’ [33], Marx pointed out [34] that“Descartes with his definition of animals as mere machines saw with the eyes of the manufacturingperiod, while in the eyes of the Middle Ages, animals were man’s assistants”; and he adds severalsuggestions towards explaining the intellectual history of such connections. Tonnies notes the sameconnection even more bluntly and categorically: “A special case of abstract reason is scientific reasonand its subject is the man who is objective, and who recognises relations, i.e. thinks in concepts. Inconsequence, scientific concepts which by their ordinary origin and their real properties are judgementsby means of which complexes of feeling are given names, behave within science like commodities insociety. They gather together within the system like commodities on the market. The supreme scientificconcept which is no longer the name of anything real is like money. E.g. the concept of an atom, or ofenergy.” [35]

It cannot be our task to investigate the question of priority or the historical and causal order of successionbetween the ‘laws of nature’ and capitalism. (The author of these lines has, however, no wish to concealhis view that the development of capitalist economics takes precedence.) What is important is torecognise clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasinglythe objective forms of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of theabstract substrata of the laws of nature. And also, the subject of this ‘action’ likewise assumesincreasingly the attitude of the pure observe of these — artificially abstract — processes, the attitude ofthe experimenter.

Further reading:

Marxism & Philosophy, Karl Korsch, 1923Marx’s Theory of Alienation, Istvan Meszaros 1970A Philosophical ‘Discussion’, Cyril Smith, 1998



next section


NOTES

1 Reclam, p. 17.

2 Capital I, p. 372 (note).

3 Cf. Tönnies, Hobbes' Leben und Lehre and especially Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in derPhilosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit. We shall return to the conclusions of this book which areof value for us because they have been arrived at from a completely different point of view and yetdescribe the same process, showing the impact of the rationalism of mathematics and the 'exact' sciencesupon the origins of modern thought.

4 Capital I, p. 486. See also Gottl, op. cit., pp. 238-45. for the contrast with antiquity. For this reason theconcept of 'rationalism' must not be employed as an unhistorical abstraction, but it is always necessaryprecisely to determine the object (or sphere of life) to which it is to be related, and above all to define theobjects to which it is not related.

5 Max Weber, Gesammelle Aufsdtze zur Religionssoziologie II, pp. 165-70. A like structure can be foundin the development of all the 'special' sciences in India: a highly advanced technology in particularbranches without reference to a rational totality and without any attempt to rationalise the whole and toconfer universal validity upon the rational categories. Cf. also Ibid., pp. 146-7, 166-7. The situation issimilar with regard to the 'rationalism' of Confucianism. Op. cit. I, p. 527.

6 In this respect Kant is the culmination of the philosophy of the eighteenth century. Both the line fromLocke to Berkeley. and Hume and also the tradition of French materialism move in this direction. Itwould be beyond the scope of this inquiry to outline the different stages of this development with itsvarious divergent strands.

7 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 403-4. Cf. also pp. 330 et seq.

8 Feuerbach also connected the problem of the absolute transcendence of sensuousness (by theunderstanding) with a contradiction in the existence of God. "The proof of the existence of God goesbeyond the bounds of reason; true enough; but in the same sense in which seeing, hearing, smelling gobeyond the bounds of reason." Das Wesen des Christentums, Reclam., p. 303. See Cassirer, op. cit. II, p.608, for similar arguments in Hume and Kant.

9 This problem is stated most clearly by Lask: "For subjectivity" (i.e. for the logically subjective status ofjudgement), "it is by no means self-evident, but on the contrary it is the whole task of the philosopher toascertain the categories into which logical form divides when applied to a particular subject-matter or, toput it differently, to discover which subjects form the particular province of the various categories." DieLehre vom Urteil, p. 162.

10 Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 564.



11 This is not the place to show that neither Greek philosophy (with the possible exception of quite latethinkers, such as Proclus) nor medieval philosophy were acquainted with the idea of a 'system' in oursense. The problem of systems originates in modern times, with Descartes and Spinoza and from Leibnizand Kant onwards it becomes an increasingly conscious methodological postulate.

12 The idea of "infinite understanding", of intellectual intuition, etc., is partly designed as anepistemological solution to this difficulty. However, Kant had already perceived quite clearly that thisproblem leads on to the one we are about to discuss.

13 Once again it is Lask who perceives this most clearly and uncompromisingly. Cf. Die Logik derPhilosophie, pp. 60-2. But he does not draw all the consequences of his line of reasoning, in particularthat of the impossibility of a rational system in principle.

14 We may point for example to Husserl's phenomenological method in which the whole terrain of logicis ultimately transformed into a 'system of facts' of a higher order. Husserl himself regards this method aspurely descriptive. Cf. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie in Vol. I of his jahrbuch, p. 113.

15 This fundamental tendency of Leibniz's thought attains maturity in the philosophy of Maimon whereit appears in the form of the dissolution of the problem of the thing-in-itself and of "intelligible chance";from here a path leads directly to Fichte and through him to later developments. The problem of theirrationality of mathematics is analysed incisively in an essay by Rickert, "Das Eine, die Einheit und dasEins," in Logos II, p. 1.

16 Die Wissenschaftslehre of 1804, Lecture XV, Werke (Neue Ausgabe) IV, p. 288. My italics. Theproblem is put similarly - though with varying degrees of clarity - by later 'critical' philosophers. Mostclearly of all by Windelband when he defines existence as "content independent of form". In my opinionhis critics have only obscured his paradox without providing a solution to the problem it contains.

17 This is not the place to offer a critique of particular philosophical schools. By way of proof of thecorrectness of this sketch I would only point to the relapse into natural law (which methodologicallybelongs to the pre-critical period) observable - in substance, though not in terminology - in the works ofCohen and also of Stammler whose thought is related to that of the Marburg School.

18 Rickert, one of the most consistent representatives of this school of thought, ascribes no more than aformal character to the cultural values underlying historiography, and it is precisely this fact thathighlights the whole situation. On this point see Section III.

19 Transcendentale Logik, Lecture XXIII, Werke VI, p. 335. Readers unfamiliar with the terminology ofclassical philosophy are reminded that Fichte's concept of the ego has nothing to do with the empiricalego.

20 Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre, Werke III, p. 52. Although Fichte's terminologychanges from one work to the next, this should not blind us to the fact that he is always concerned withthe same problem.

21 Cf. Die Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Philosophische Bibliothek, p. 72.

22 "Now nature is in the common view the existence of things subject to laws." Ibid., p. 57.

23 Ibid., pp. 125-6.



24 Ober die wissenschaftliche Behandlungsarien des Naturrechts, Werke 1, pp. 352-3. Cf. ibid., p. 351."For it is the absolute abstraction from every subject-matter of the will; every content posits aheteronomy of the free will." Or, with even greater clarity, in the Phenomenology of Mind: "For pureduty is . . . absolutely indifferent towards every content and is compatible with every content." Werke II,p. 485.

25 This is quite clear in the case of the Greeks. But the same structure can be seen in the great systems atthe beginning of the modern age, above all in Spinoza.

26 Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 472-3.

27 Hegel, Werke III, pp. 78 et seq.

28 Nachlass I, p. 117. [Fragments on The Difference between the Democritean and Epicureanphilosophies of nature].

29 From this ontological situation it becomes possible to understand the point of departure for the belief,so alien to modern thought, in 'natural' states, e.g. the "credo ut intellegam" of Anselm of Canterbury, orthe attitude of Indian thought ("Only by him whom he chooses will he be understood," it has been said ofAtman). Descartes' systematic scepticism, which was the starting-point of exact thought, is no more thanthe sharpest formulation of this antagonism that was very consciously felt at the birth of the modern age.It can be seen again in every important thinker from Galileo to Bacon.

30 For the history of this universal mathematics, see Cassirer, op. cit. I, pp. 446, 563; II, 138, 156 et seq.For the connection between this mathematicisation of reality and the bourgeois 'praxis' of calculating theanticipated results of the 'laws', see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (Reclam) I, pp. 321-32 onHobbes, Descartes and Bacon.

31 For the Platonic theory of ideas was indissolubly linked - with what right need not be discussed here -both with the totality and the qualitative existence of the given world. Contemplation means at the veryleast the bursting of the bonds that hold the 'soul' imprisoned within the limitations of the empirical. TheStoic ideal of ataraxy is a much better instance of this quite pure contemplation, but it is of course devoidof the paradoxical union with a feverish and uninterrupted 'activity'.

32 Die Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems, Werke I, p. 242. Every such 'atomic'theory of society only represents the ideological reflection of the purely bourgeois point of view; this wasshown conclusively by Marx in his critique of Bruno Bauer, Nachlass II, p. 227. But this is not to denythe 'objectivity' of such views: they are in fact the necessary forms of consciousness that reified man hasof his attitude towards society.

33 Hegel, Werke IX, p. 528.

34 Capital I, 390 (footnote).

35 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 3rd edition, p. 38.




II: The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought, continued

I may be permitted to devote a few words — as a sort of excursus — to the views expressed by FriedrichEngels on the problem of the thing-in-itself. In a sense they are of no immediate concern to us, but theyhave exercised such a great influence on the meaning given to the term by many Marxists that to omit tocorrect this might easily give rise to a misunderstanding. He says: [36] “The most telling refutation ofthis as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice, namely, experiment and industry. If we are able toprove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into beingout of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to theungraspable Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants andanimals remained such ‘things-in-themselves’ until organic chemistry began to produce them one afteranother, whereupon the ‘thing in-itself’ became a thing for us, as, for instance, alizarin, the colouringmatter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but producemuch more cheaply and simply from coal tar.”

Above all we must correct a terminological confusion that is almost incomprehensible in such aconnoisseur of Hegel as was Engels. For Hegel the terms ‘in itself’ and ‘for us’ are by no meansopposites; in fact they are necessary correlatives. That something exists merely ‘in itself’ means forHegel that it merely exists ‘for us’. The antithesis of ‘for us or in itself’ [37] is rather ‘for itself’, namelythat mode of being posited where the fact that an object is thought of implies at the same time that theobject is conscious of itself. [38] In that case, it is a complete misinterpretation of Kant’s epistemology toimagine that the problem of the thing-in-itself could be a barrier to the possible concrete expansion of ourknowledge. On the contrary, Kant who sets out from the most advanced natural science of the day,namely from Newton’s astronomy, tailored his theory of knowledge precisely to this science and to itsfuture potential. For this reason he necessarily assumes that the method was capable of limitlessexpansion. His ‘critique’ refers merely to the fact that even the complete knowledge of all phenomenawould be no more than a knowledge of phenomena (as opposed to the things-in-themselves). Moreover,even the complete knowledge of the phenomena could never overcome the structural limits of thisknowledge, i.e. in our terms, the antinomies of totality and of content. Kant has himself dealt sufficientlyclearly with the question of agnosticism and of the relation to Hume (and to Berkeley who is not namedbut whom Kant has particularly in mind) in the section entitled ‘The Refutation of Idealism’. [39]

But Engels’ deepest misunderstanding consists in his belief that the behaviour of industry and scientificexperiment constitutes praxis in the dialectical, philosophical sense. In fact, scientific experiment iscontemplation at its purest. The experimenter creates an artificial, abstract milieu in order to be able toobserve undisturbed the untrammelled workings of the laws under examination, eliminating all irrationalfactors both of the subject and the object. He strives as far as possible to reduce the material substratumof his observation to the purely rational ‘product’, to the ‘intelligible matter’ of mathematics. And whenEngels speaks, in the context of industry, of the “product” which is made to serve “our purposes”, he



seems to have forgotten for a moment the fundamental structure of capitalist society which he himselfhad once formulated so supremely well in his brilliant early essay. There he had pointed out thatcapitalist society is based on “a natural law that is founded on the unconsciousness of those involved init”. [40] Inasmuch as industry sets itself ‘objectives’ — it is in the decisive, i.e. historical, dialecticalmeaning of the word, only the object, not the subject of the natural laws governing society.

Marx repeatedly emphasised that the capitalist (and when we speak of ‘industry’ in the past or present wecan only mean the capitalist) is nothing but a puppet. And when, for example, he compares his instinct toenrich himself with that of the miser, he stresses the fact that “what in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy,is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels. Moreover,the development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount ofthe capital invested in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws ofcapitalist production to be felt as external coercive laws by each individual capitalist.” [41] The fact,therefore, that ‘industry’, i.e. the capitalist as the incarnation of economic and technical progress, doesnot act but is acted upon and that his ‘activity’ goes no further than the correct observation andcalculation of the objective working out of the natural laws of society, is a truism for Marxism and iselsewhere interpreted in this way by Engels also.

3.

To return to our main argument, it is evident from all this that the attempt at a solution represented by theturn taken by critical philosophy towards the practical, does not succeed in resolving the antinomies wehave noted. On the contrary it fixes them for eternity. [42] For just as objective necessity, despite therationality and regularity of its manifestations, yet persists in a state of immutable contingency becauseits material substratum remains transcendental, so too the freedom of the subject which this device isdesigned to rescue, is unable, being an empty freedom, to evade the abyss of fatalism. “Thoughts withoutcontent are empty,” says Kant programmatically at the beginning of the ‘Transcendental Logic’,“Intuitions without concepts are blind.” [43] But the Critique which here propounds the necessity of aninterpretation of form and content can do no more than offer it as a methodological programme, i.e. foreach of the discrete areas it can indicate the point where the real synthesis should begin, and where itwould begin if its formal rationality could allow it to do more than predict formal possibilities in terms offormal calculations.

The freedom (of the subject) is neither able to overcome the sensuous necessity of the system ofknowledge and the soullessness of the fatalistically conceived laws of nature, nor is it able to give themany meaning. And likewise the contents produced by reason, and the world acknowledged by reason arejust as little able to fill the purely formal determinants of freedom with a truly living life. Theimpossibility of comprehending and ‘creating’ the union of form and content concretely instead of as thebasis for a purely formal calculus leads to the insoluble dilemma of freedom and necessity, ofvoluntarism and fatalism. The ‘eternal, iron’ regularity of the processes of nature and the purely inwardfreedom of individual moral practice appear at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason as whollyirreconcilable and at the same time as the unalterable foundations of human existence. [44] Kant’sgreatness as a philosopher lies in the fact that in both instances he made no attempt to conceal theintractability of the problem by means of an arbitrary dogmatic resolution of any sort, but that he bluntlyelaborated the contradiction and presented it in an undiluted form.



3.

As everywhere in classical philosophy it would be a mistake to think that these discussions are no morethan the problems of intellectuals and the squabbles of pedants. This can be seen most clearly if we turnback a page in the growth of this problem and examine it at a stage in its development when it had beenless worked over intellectually, when it was closer to its social background and accordingly moreconcrete. Plekhanov strongly emphasises the intellectual barrier that the bourgeois materialism of theeighteenth century came up against and he puts it into perspective by means of the following antinomy:on the one hand, man appears as the product of his social milieu, whereas, on the other hand, “the socialmilieu is produced by ‘public opinion’, i.e. by man”. [45] This throws light on the social realityunderlying the antinomy which we encountered in the — seemingly — purely epistemological problemof production, in the systematic question of the subject of an ‘action’, of the ‘creator’ of a unified reality.Plekhanov’s account shows no less clearly that the duality of the contemplative and the (individual)practical principles which we saw as the first achievement and as the starting-point for the laterdevelopment of classical philosophy, leads towards this antinomy.

However, the naïver and more primitive analysis of Holbach and Helvetius permits a clearer insight intothe life that forms the true basis of this antinomy. We observe, firstly, that following on the developmentof bourgeois society all social problems cease to transcend man and appear as the products of humanactivity in contrast to the view of society held by the Middle Ages and the early modern period (e.g.Luther). Secondly, it becomes evident that the man who now emerges must be the individual, egoisticbourgeois isolated artificially by capitalism and that his consciousness, the source of his activity andknowledge, is an individual isolated consciousness a la Robinson Crusoe. [46] But, thirdly, it is this thatrobs social action of its character as action. At first this looks like the after-effects of the sensualistepistemology of the French materialists (and Locke, etc.) where it is the case, on the one hand, that “hisbrain is nothing but wax to receive the imprint of every impression made in it” (Holbach according toPlekhanov, op. cit.) and where, on the other hand, only conscious action can count as activity. Butexamined more closely this turns out to be the simple effect of the situation of bourgeois man in thecapitalist production process.

We have already described the characteristic features of this situation several times: man in capitalistsociety confronts a reality ‘made’ by himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a naturalphenomenon alien to himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its ‘laws’, his activity is confined to theexploitation of the inexorable fulfilment of certain individual laws for his own (egoistic) interests. Buteven while ‘acting’ he remains, in the nature of the case, the object and not the subject of events. Thefield of his activity thus becomes wholly internalised: it consists on the one hand of the awareness of thelaws which he uses and, on the other, of his awareness of his inner reactions to the course taken byevents.

This situation generates very important and unavoidable problem-complexes and conceptualambivalences which are decisive for the way in which bourgeois man understands himself in his relationto the world. Thus the word ‘nature’ becomes highly ambiguous. We have already drawn attention to theidea, formulated most lucidly by Kant but essentially unchanged since Kepler and Galileo, of nature asthe “aggregate of systems of the laws” governing what happens. Parallel to this conception whosedevelopment out of the economic structures of capitalism has been shown repeatedly, there is anotherconception of nature, a value concept, wholly different from the first one and embracing a whollydifferent cluster of meanings.



A glance at the history of natural law shows the extent to which these two conceptions have becomeinextricably interwoven with each other. For here we can see that ‘nature’ has been heavily marked bythe revolutionary struggle of the bourgeoisie: the ‘ordered’, calculable, formal and abstract character ofthe approaching bourgeois society appears natural by the side of the artifice, the caprice and the disorderof feudalism and absolutism. At the same time if one thinks of Rousseau, there are echoes of a quitedifferent meaning wholly incompatible with this one. It concentrates increasingly on the feeling thatsocial institutions (reification) strip man of his human essence and that the more culture and civilisation(i.e. capitalism and reification) take possession of him, the less able he is to be a human being. And witha reversal of meanings that never becomes apparent, nature becomes the repository of all these innertendencies opposing the growth of mechanisation, dehumanisation and reification.

Nature thereby acquires the meaning of what has grown organically, what was not created by man, incontrast to the artificial structures of human civilisation. [47] But, at the same time, it can be understoodas that aspect of human inwardness which has remained natural, or at least tends or longs to becomenatural once more. “They are what we once were,” says Schiller of the forms of nature, “they are whatwe should once more become.” But here, unexpectedly and indissolubly bound up with the othermeanings, we discover a third conception of nature, one in which we can clearly discern the ideal and thetendency to overcome the problems of a reified existence. ‘Nature’ here refers to authentic humanity, thetrue essence of man liberated from the false, mechanising forms of society: man as a perfected wholewho has inwardly overcome, or is in the process of overcoming, the dichotomies of theory and practice,reason and the senses, form and content; man whose tendency to create his own forms does not imply anabstract rationalism which ignores concrete content; man for whom freedom and necessity are identical.

With this we find that we have unexpectedly discovered what we had been searching for when we wereheld up by the irreducible duality of pure and practical reason, by the question of the subject of an‘action’, of the ‘creation’ of reality as a totality. All the more as we are dealing with an attitude (whoseambivalence we recognise as being necessary but which we shall not probe any further) which need notbe sought in some mythologising transcendent construct; it does not only exist as a ‘fact of the soul’, as anostalgia inhabiting the consciousness, but it also possesses a very real and concrete field of activitywhere it may be brought to fruition, namely art. This is not the place to investigate the ever-increasingimportance of aesthetics and the theory of art within the total world-picture of the eighteenth century. Aseverywhere in this study, we are concerned solely to throw light on the social and historical backgroundwhich threw up these problems and conferred upon aesthetics and upon consciousness of artphilosophical importance that art was unable to lay claim to in previous ages. This does not mean that artitself was experiencing an unprecedented golden age. On the contrary, with a very few exceptions theactual artistic production during this period cannot remotely be compared to that of past golden ages.What is crucial here is the theoretical and philosophical importance which the principle of art acquires inthis period.

This principle is the creation of a concrete totality that springs from a conception of form orientatedtowards the concrete content of its material substratum. In this view form is therefore able to demolishthe ‘contingent’ relation of the parts to the whole and to resolve the merely apparent opposition betweenchance and necessity. It is well known that Kant in the Critique of Judgment assigned to this principle therole of mediator between the otherwise irreconcilable opposites, i.e. the function of perfecting thesystem. But even at this early stage this attempt at a solution could not limit itself to the explanation andinterpretation of the phenomenon of art. If only because, as has been shown, the principle thusdiscovered was, from its inception, indissolubly bound up with the various conceptions of nature so that



its most obvious and appropriate function seemed to provide a principle for the solution of all insolubleproblems both of contemplative theory and ethical practice. Fichte did indeed provide a succinctprogrammatic account of the use to which this principle was to be put: art “transforms the transcendentalpoint of view into the common one”, [48] that is to say, what was for transcendental philosophy a highlyproblematic postulate with which to explain the world, becomes in art perfect achievement: it proves thatthis postulate of the transcendental philosophers is necessarily anchored in the structure of humanconsciousness.

However, this proof involves a vital issue of methodology for classical philosophy which — as we haveseen — was forced to undertake the task of discovering the subject of ‘action’ which could be seen to bethe maker of reality in its concrete totality. For only if it can be shown that such a subjectivity can befound in the consciousness and that there can be a principle of form which is not affected by the problemof indifference vis-a-vis content and the resulting difficulties concerning the thing-in-itself, ‘intelligiblecontingency’, etc., only then is it methodologically possible to advance concretely beyond formalrationalism. Only then can a logical solution to the problem of irrationality (i.e. the relation of form tocontent) become at all feasible. Only then will it be possible to posit the world as conceived by thoughtas a perfected, concrete, meaningful system ‘created’ by us and attaining in us the stage ofself-awareness. For this reason, together with the discovery of the principle of art, there arises also theproblem of the ‘intuitive understanding’ whose content is not given but ‘created’. This understanding is,in Kant’s words [49] , spontaneous (i.e. active) and not receptive (i.e. contemplative) both as regardsknowledge and intuitive perception. If, in the case of Kant himself, this only indicates the point fromwhich it would be possible to complete and perfect the system, in the works of his successors thisprinciple and the postulate of an intuitive understanding and an intellectual intuition becomes thecornerstone of systematic philosophy.

But it is in Schiller’s aesthetic and theoretical works that we can see, even more clearly than in thesystems of the philosophers (where for the superficial observer the pure edifice of thought sometimesobscures the living heart from which these problems arise), the need which has provided the impetus forthese analyses as well as the function to be performed by the solutions offered. Schiller defines theaesthetic principle as the play-instinct (in contrast to the form-instinct and the content-instinct) and hisanalysis of this contains very valuable insights into the question of reification, as is indeed true of all hisaesthetic writings) . He formulates it as follows: “For it must be said once and for all that man only playswhen he is a man in the full meaning of the word, and he is fully human only when he plays.” [50] Byextending the aesthetic principle far beyond the confines of aesthetics, by seeing it as the key to thesolution of the question of the meaning of man’s existence in society, Schiller brings us back to the basicissue of classical philosophy. On the one hand, he recognises that social life has destroyed man as man.On the other hand, he points to the principle whereby man having been socially destroyed, fragmentedand divided between different partial systems is to be made whole again in thought. If we can nowobtain a clear view of classical philosophy we see both the magnitude of its enterprise and the fecundityof the perspectives it opens up for the future, but we see no less clearly the inevitability of its failure. Forwhile earlier thinkers remained naïvely entangled in the modes of thought of reification, or at best (as inthe cases cited by Plekhanov) were driven into objective contradictions, here the problematic nature ofsocial life for capitalist man becomes fully conscious.

“When the power of synthesis”, Hegel remarks, “vanishes from the lives of men and when the antitheseshave lost their vital relation and their power of interaction and gain independence, it is then that



philosophy becomes a felt need.” [51] At the same time, however, we can see the limitations of thisundertaking. Objectively, since question and answer are confined from the very start to the realm of purethought. These limitations are objective in so far as they derive from the dogmatism of criticalphilosophy. Even where its method has forced it beyond the limits of the formal, rational and discursiveunderstanding enabling it to become critical of thinkers like Leibniz and Spinoza its fundamentalsystematic posture still remains rationalistic. The dogma of rationality remains unimpaired and is by nomeans superseded. [52] The limitations are subjective since the principle so discovered reveals when itbecomes conscious of itself the narrow confines of its own validity. For if man is fully human “onlywhen he plays”, we are indeed enabled to comprehend all the contents of life from this vantage point.And in the aesthetic mode, conceived as broadly as possible, they may be salvaged from the deadeningeffects of the mechanism of reification. But only in so far as these contents become aesthetic. That is tosay, either the world must be aestheticised, which is an evasion of the real problem and is just anotherway in which to make the subject purely contemplative and to annihilate ‘action’. Or else, the aestheticprinciple must be elevated into the principle by which objective reality is shaped: but that would be tomythologise the discovery of intuitive understanding.

From Fichte onwards it became increasingly necessary to make the mythologising of the process of‘creation’ into a central issue, a question of life and death for classical philosophy; all the more so as thecritical point of view was constrained, parallel with the antinomies which it discovered in the givenworld and our relationship with it, to treat the subject in like fashion and to tear it to pieces (i.e. itsfragmentation in objective reality had to be reproduced in thought, accelerating the process as it did so).Hegel pours scorn in a number of places on Kant’s ‘soul-sack’ in which the different ‘faculties’(theoretical, practical, etc.) are lying and from which they have to be ‘pulled out’. But there is no way forHegel to overcome this fragmentation of the subject into independent parts whose empirical reality andeven necessity is likewise undeniable, other than by creating this fragmentation, this disintegration out ofa concrete, total subject. On this point art shows us, as we have seen, the two faces of Janus, and with thediscovery of art it becomes possible either to provide yet another domain for the fragmented subject or toleave behind the safe territory of the concrete evocation of totality and (using art at most by way ofillustration) tackle the problem of ‘creation’ from the side of the subject. The problem is then no longer— as it was for Spinoza — to create an objective system of reality on the model of geometry. It is ratherthis creation which is at once philosophy’s premise and its task. This creation is undoubtedly given(“There are synthetic judgements a priori — how are they possible ?” Kant had once asked). But the taskis to deduce the unity — which is not given — of this disintegrating creation and to prove that it is theproduct of a creating subject. In the final analysis then: to create the subject of the ‘creator’.

4.

This extends the discussions to the point where it goes beyond pure epistemology. The latter had aimedat investigating only the ‘possible conditions’ of those forms of thought and action which are given in‘our’ reality. Its cultural and philosophical tendency, namely the impulse to overcome the reifieddisintegration of the subject and the — likewise reified — rigidity and impenetrability of its objects,emerges here with unmistakable clarity. After describing the influence Hamann had exercised upon hisown development, Goethe gives a clear formulation to this aspiration: “Everything which manundertakes to perform, whether by word or deed, must be the product of all his abilities acting in concert;everything isolated is reprehensible.” [54] But with the shift to a fragmented humanity in need ofreconstruction (a shift already indicated by the importance of the problem of art), the different meanings



assumed by the subjective ‘we’ at the different stages of development can no longer remain concealed.The fact that the problematics have become more conscious, that it is harder to indulge confusions andequivocations than was the case with the concept of nature only makes matters more difficult. Thereconstitution of the unity of the subject, the intellectual restoration of man has consciously to take itspath through the realm of disintegration and fragmentation. The different forms of fragmentation are somany necessary phases on the road towards a reconstituted man but they dissolve into nothing when theycome into a true relation with a grasped totality, i.e. when they become dialectical.

“The antitheses,” Hegel observes, “which used to be expressed in terms of mind and matter, body andsoul, faith and reason, freedom and necessity, etc., and were also prominent in a number of morerestricted spheres and concentrated all human interests in themselves, became transformed as cultureadvanced into contrasts between reason and the senses, intelligence and nature and, in its most generalform, between absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity. To transcend such ossified antitheses is thesole concern of reason. This concern does not imply hostility to opposites and restrictions in general; forthe necessary course of evolution is one factor of life which advances by opposites: and the totality of lifeat its most intense is only possible as a new synthesis out of the most absolute separation.” [55] Thegenesis, the creation of the creator of knowledge, the dissolution of the irrationality of the thing-in-itself,the resurrection of man from his grave, all these issues become concentrated henceforth on the questionof dialectical method. For in this method the call for an intuitive understanding (for method to supersedethe rationalistic principle of knowledge) is clearly, objectively and scientifically stated. Of course, thehistory of the dialectical method reaches back deep into the history of rationalistic thought. But the turn itnow takes distinguishes it qualitatively from all earlier approaches. (Hegel himself underestimates theimportance of this distinction, e.g. in his treatment of Plato.) In all earlier attempts to use dialectics inorder to break out of the limits imposed by rationalism there was a failure to connect the dissolution ofrigid concepts clearly and firmly to the problem of the logic of the content, to the problem ofirrationality.

Hegel in his Phenomenology and Logic was the first to set about the task of consciously recasting allproblems of logic by grounding them in the qualitative material nature of their content, in matter in thelogical and philosophical sense of the word. [56] This resulted in the establishment of a completely newlogic of the concrete concept, the logic of totality — admittedly in a very problematic form which wasnot seriously continued after him.

Even more original is the fact that the subject is neither the unchanged observer of the objective dialecticof being and concept (as was true of the Eleatic philosophers and even of Plato), nor the practicalmanipulator of its purely mental possibilities (as with the Greek sophists): the dialectical process, theending of a rigid confrontation of rigid forms, is enacted essentially between the subject and the object.No doubt, a few isolated earlier dialecticians were not wholly unaware of the different levels ofsubjectivity that arise in the dialectical process (consider for example the distinction between ‘ratio’ and‘intellectus’ in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa). But this relativising process only refers to the possibilityof different subject-object relations existing simultaneously or with one subordinated to the other, or atbest developing dialectically from each other; they do not involve the relativising or the interpenetrationof the subject and the object themselves. But only if that were the case, only if “the true [wereunderstood] not only as substance but also as subject”, only if the subject (consciousness, thought) wereboth producer and product of the dialectical process, only if, as a result the subject moved in aself-created world of which it is the conscious form and only if the world imposed itself upon it in full



objectivity, only then can the problem of dialectics, and with it the abolition of the antitheses of subjectand object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to be solved. It might look as if thiswould take philosophy back to the great system-builders of the beginning of the modern age. Theidentity, proclaimed by Spinoza, of the order to be found in the realm of ideas with the order obtaining inthe realm of things seems to come very close to this point of view. The parallel is all the more plausible(and made a strong impression on the system of the young Schelling) as Spinoza, too, found the basis ofthis identity in the object, in the substance. Geometric construction is a creative principle that can createonly because it represents the factor of self-consciousness in objective reality. But here [in Hegel’sargument] objectivity tends in every respect in the opposite direction to that given it by Spinoza forwhom every subjectivity, every particular content and every movement vanishes into nothing before therigid purity and unity of this substance. If, therefore, it is true that philosophy is searching for an identicalorder in the realms of ideas and things and that the ground of existence is held to be the first principle,and if it is true also that this identity should serve as an explanation of concreteness and movement, thenit is evident that the meaning of substance and order in the realm of things must have undergone afundamental change.

Classical philosophy did indeed advance to the point of this change in meaning and succeeded inidentifying the substance, now appearing for the first time, in which philosophically the underlying orderand the connections between things were to be found, namely history. The arguments which go to showthat here and here alone is the concrete basis for genesis are extraordinarily diverse and to list themwould require almost a complete recapitulation of our analysis up to this point. For in the case of almostevery insoluble problem we perceive that the search for a solution leads us to history. On the other hand,we must discuss some of these factors at least briefly for even classical philosophy was not fullyconscious of the logical necessity of the link between genesis and history and for social and historicalreasons to be spelled out later, it could not become fully conscious of it.

The materialists of the eighteenth century were aware that history is an insuperable barrier to a rationalisttheory of knowledge. [57] But in accordance with their own rationalistic dogma they interpreted this asan eternal and indestructible limit to human reason in general. The logical and methodological side ofthis fallacy can easily be grasped when we reflect that rationalist thought by concerning itself with theformal calculability of the contents of forms made abstract, must define these contents as immutable —within the system of relations obtaining at any given time. The evolution of the real contents, i.e. theproblem of history, can only be accommodated by this mode of thought by means of a system of lawswhich strives to do justice to every foreseeable possibility.

How far this is practicable need not detain us here; what we find significant is the fact that thanks to thisconclusion the method itself blocks the way to an understanding both of the quality and the concretenessof the contents and also of their evolution, i.e. of history: it is of the essence of such a law that within itsjurisdiction nothing new can happen by definition and a system of such laws which is held to be perfectcan indeed reduce the need to correct individual laws but cannot calculate what is novel. (The concept ofthe ‘source of error’ is just a makeshift to cover up for the fact that for rational knowledge process andnovelty have the [unknowable] quality of things-in-themselves.) But if genesis, in the sense given to it inclassical philosophy, is to be attained it is necessary to create a basis for it in a logic of contents whichchange. It is only in history, in the historical process, in the uninterrupted outpouring o f what isqualitatively new that the requisite paradigmatic order can be found in the realm of things. [58]

For as long as this process and this novelty appear merely as an obstacle and not as the simultaneous



result, goal and substratum of the method, the concepts — like the objects of reality as it is experienced— must preserve their encapsulated rigidity which only appears to be eliminated by the juxtaposition ofother concepts. Only the historical process truly eliminates the-actual-autonomy of the objects and theconcepts of objects with their resulting rigidity As Hegel remarks with reference to the relation betweenbody and soul: “Indeed, if both are presumed to be absolutely independent of each other they are asimpenetrable for each other as any material is for any other and the presence of one can be granted onlyin the non-being, in the pores of the other; just as Epicurus assigned to the gods a dwelling place in thepores but was logical enough not to impose upon them any community with the world.” [59] Buthistorical evolution annuls the autonomy of the individual factors. By compelling the knowledge whichostensibly does these factors justice to construct its conceptual system upon content and upon what isqualitatively unique and new in the phenomena, it forces it at the same time to refuse to allow any ofthese elements to remain at the level of mere concrete uniqueness. Instead, the concrete totality of thehistorical world, the concrete and total historical process is the only point of view from whichunderstanding becomes possible.

With this point of view the two main strands of the irrationality of the thing-in-itself and the concretenessof the individual content and of totality are given a positive turn and appear as a unity. This signals achange in the relation between theory and practice and between freedom and necessity. The idea that wehave made reality loses its more or less fictitious character: we have — in the prophetic words of Vicoalready cited — made our own history and if we are able to regard the whole of reality as history (i.e. asour history, for there is no other), we shall have raised ourselves in fact to the position from which realitycan be understood as our ‘action’. The dilemma of the materialists will have lost its meaning for it standsrevealed as a rationalistic prejudice, as a dogma of the formalistic understanding. This had recognised asdeeds only those actions which were consciously performed whereas the historical environment we havecreated, the product of the historical process was regarded as a reality which influences us by virtue oflaws alien to us.

Here in our newly-won knowledge where, as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology, “the true becomes aBacchantic orgy in which no one escapes being drunk”, reason seems to have lifted the veil concealingthe sacred mystery at Saïs and discovers, as in the parable of Novalis, that it is itself the solution to theriddle. But here, we find once again, quite concretely this time, the decisive problem of this line ofthought: the problem of the subject of the action, the subject of the genesis. For the unity of subject andobject, of thought and existence which the ‘action’ undertook to prove and to exhibit finds both itsfulfilment and its substratum in the unity of the genesis of the determinants of thought and of the historyof the evolution of reality. But to comprehend this unity it is necessary both to discover the site fromwhich to resolve all these problems and also to exhibit concretely the ‘we’ which is the subject ofhistory, that ‘we’ whose action is in fact history.

However, at this point classical philosophy turned back and lost itself in the endless labyrinth ofconceptual mythology. It will be our task in the next section to explain why it was unable to discover thisconcrete subject of genesis, the methodologically indispensable subject-object. At this stage it is onlynecessary to indicate what obstacle it encountered as a result of this aberrancy.

Hegel, who is in every respect the pinnacle of this development, also made the most strenuous search forthis subject. The ‘we’ that he was able to find is, as is well known, the World Spirit, or rather, itsconcrete incarnations, the spirits of the individual peoples. Even if we — provisionally — ignore themythologising and hence abstract character of this subject, it must still not be overlooked that, even if we



accept all of Hegel’s assumptions without demur, this subject remains incapable of fulfilling themethodological and systematic function assigned to it, even from Hegel’s own point of view. Even forHegel, the spirit of a people can be no more than a ‘natural’ determinant of the World Spirit, i.e. one“which strips off its limitation only at a higher moment, namely at the moment when it becomesconscious of its own essence and it possesses its absolute truth only in this recognition and notimmediately in its existence.” [60]

From this follows above all that the spirit of a people only seems to be the subject of history, the doer ofits deeds: for in fact it is the World Spirit that makes use of that ‘natural character’ of a people whichcorresponds to the actual requirements and to the idea of the World Spirit and accomplishes its deeds bymeans of and in spite of the spirit of the people. [61] But in this way the deed becomes somethingtranscendent for the doer himself and the freedom that seems to have been won is transformed unnoticedinto that specious freedom to reflect upon laws which themselves govern man, a freedom which inSpinoza a thrown stone would possess if it had consciousness. It is doubtless true that Hegel whoserealistic genius neither could nor would disguise the truth about the nature of history as he found it didnevertheless seek to provide an explanation of it in terms of “the ruse of reason”. But it must not beforgotten that “the ruse of reason” can only claim to be more than a myth if authentic reason can bediscovered and demonstrated in a truly concrete manner. In that case it becomes a brilliant explanationfor stages in history that have not yet become conscious. But these can only be understood and evaluatedas stages from a standpoint already achieved by a reason that has discovered itself. At this point Hegel’sphilosophy is driven inexorably into the arms of mythology. Having failed to discover the identicalsubject-object in history it was forced to go out beyond history and, there, to establish the empire ofreason which has discovered itself. From that vantage point it became possible to understand history as amere stage and its evolution in terms of “the ruse of reason”. History is not able to form the living bodyof the total system: it becomes a part, an aspect of the totality that culminates in the ‘absolute spirit’, inart, religion and philosophy.

But history is much too much the natural, and indeed the uniquely possible life-element of the dialecticalmethod for such an enterprise to succeed. On the one hand, history now intrudes, illogically butinescapably into the structure of those very spheres which according to the system were supposed to liebeyond its range. [62] On the other hand, this inappropriate and inconsistent approach to history depriveshistory itself of that essence which is so important precisely within the Hegelian system.

For, in the first place, its relation to reason will now appear to be accidental. “When, where and in whatform such self-reproductions of reason make their appearance as philosophy is accidental,” Hegelobserves in the passage cited earlier concerning the “needs of philosophy”. [63] But in the absence ofnecessity history relapses into the irrational dependence on the ‘given’ which it had just overcome. Andif its relation to the reason that comprehends it is nothing more than that of an irrational content to a moregeneral form for which the concrete hic et nunc, place, time and concrete content are contingent, thenreason itself will succumb to all the antinomies of the thing-in-itself characteristic of pre-dialecticalmethods.

In the second place, the unclarified relation between absolute spirit and history forces Hegel to theassumption, scarcely comprehensible in view of this method, that history has an end and that in his ownday and in his own system of philosophy the consummation and the truth of all his predecessors are to befound. This necessarily means that even in the more mundane and properly historical spheres, historymust find its fulfilment in the restored Prussian state.



In the third place, genesis, detached from history, passes through its own development from logicthrough nature to spirit. But as the historicity of all categories and their movements intrudes decisivelyinto the dialectical method and as dialectical genesis and history necessarily belong together objectivelyand only go their separate ways because classical philosophy was unable to complete its programme, thisprocess which had been designed to be suprahistorical, inevitably exhibits a historical structure at everypoint. And since the method, having become abstract and contemplative, now as a result falsifies anddoes violence to history, it follows that history will gain its revenge and violate the method which hasfailed to integrate it, tearing it to pieces. (Consider in this context the transition from the logic to thephilosophy of nature.)

In consequence, as Marx has emphasised in his criticism of Hegel, the demiurgic role of the ‘spirit’ andthe ‘idea’ enters the realm of conceptual mythology.” [64] Once again — and from the standpoint ofHegel’s philosophy itself — it must be stated that the demiurge only seems to make history. But thissemblance is enough to dissipate wholly the attempt of the classical philosophers to break out of thelimits imposed on formal and rationalistic (bourgeois, reified) thought and thereby to restore a humanitydestroyed by that reification. Thought relapses into the contemplative duality of subject and object. [65]

Classical philosophy did, it is true, take all the antinomies of its life-basis to the furthest extreme it wascapable of in thought; it conferred on them the highest possible intellectual expression. But even for thisphilosophy they remain unsolved and insoluble. Thus classical philosophy finds itself historically in theparadoxical position that it was concerned to find a philosophy that would mean the end of bourgeoissociety, and to resurrect in thought a humanity destroyed in that society and by it. In the upshot, however,it did not manage to do more than provide a complete intellectual copy and the a priori deduction ofbourgeois society. It is only the manner of this deduction, namely the dialectical method that pointsbeyond bourgeois society. And even in classical philosophy this is only expressed in the form of anunsolved and insoluble antinomy. This antinomy is admittedly the most profound and the mostmagnificent intellectual expression of those antinomies which lie at the roots of bourgeois society andwhich are unceasingly produced and reproduced by it — albeit in confused and inferior forms. Henceclassical philosophy had nothing but these unresolved antinomies to bequeath to succeeding (bourgeois)generations. The continuation of that course which at least in method started to point the way beyondthese limits, namely the dialectical method as the true historical method was reserved for the class whichwas able to discover within itself on the basis of its life-experience the identical subject-object, thesubject of action; the ‘we’ of the genesis: namely the proletariat.

next section


NOTES

36 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy in S.W. II, p. 336.

37 E.g. the Phenomenology of Mind, Preface, Werke II, p. 20; and also ibid., pp. 67-8, 451, etc.



38 Marx employs this terminology in the important, oft-quoted passage about the proletariat (it is to befound in these pages too). The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 195. For this whole question, see also therelevant passages in the Logik, especially in Vol. III, pp. 127 et. seq., 166 et seq., and Vol. IV, pp. 120 etseq., and see also the critique of Kant in a number of places.

39 Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 208 et seq.

40 Nachlass I, p. 449. [An Outline of a Critique of National Economy].

41 Capital I, p. 592, etc. Cf. also the essay on "Class Consciousness" for the question of the 'falseconsciousness' of the bourgeoisie.

42 It is this that provokes repeated attacks from Hegel. But in addition Goethe's rejection of the Kantianethic points in the same direction although Goethe's motives and hence his terminology are different.That Kant's ethics is faced with the task of solving the problem of the thing-in-itself can be seen ininnumerable places, e.g. the Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitien, Philosophische Bibliothek, p. 87;Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, p. 123.

43 Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 77.

44 Cf. also the essay "The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg" on the question of the methodologicalinterrelatedness of these two principles.

45 Beiträge zur Geschichte des Materialismus, pp. 54 et seq., 122 et seq. How near Holbach andHelvetius came to the problem of the thing-in-itself - admittedly in a more naive form - can likewise beseen there on pp. 9, 51, etc.

46 The history of the stories 5 la Robinson cannot be undertaken here. I refer the reader to Marx'scomments (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, pp. 266 et seq., and to Cassirer's subtleremarks about the role of Robinson Crusoe in Hobbes' epistemology. Op. cit. II, pp. 61 et seq.

47 On this point cf. especially Die Kritik der Urteilskraft § 42. Via Schiller the illustration of the real andthe imitated nightingale strongly influenced later thinkers. It would be of absorbing interest to followthrough the historical development leading from German Romanticism via the historical school of law,Carlyle, Ruskin, etc., in the course of which the concept of 'organic growth' was converted from a protestagainst reification into an increasingly reactionary slogan. To do so, however, would be outside the scopeof this work. Here it is only the structure of the objects that need concern us: namely the fact that whatwould seem to be the highpoint of the interiorisation of nature really implies the abandonment of any trueunderstanding of it. To make moods [Stimmung] into the content presupposes the existence ofunpenetrated and impenetrable objects (things-in-themselves) just as much as do the laws of nature.

48 Das System der Sittenlehre, 3. Hauptstück, § 31, Werke II, p. 747. It would be both interesting andrewarding to show how the so rarely understood Nature philosophy of the classical epoch necessarilysprings from this state of affairs. It is not by chance that Goethe's Nature philosophy arose in the courseof a conflict with Newton's 'violation' of nature. Nor was it an accident that it set the pattern for all laterdevelopments. But both phenomena can only be understood in terms of the relation between man, natureand art. This also explains the methodological return to the qualitative Nature philosophy of theRenaissance as being the first assault upon a mathematical conception of nature.

49 Die Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 77.



50 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 15th Letter.

51 Die Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems, Werke I, p. 174.

52 It is in his opposition to this that we can locate the substantive core in Schelling's later philosophy.However, his mythologising approach now became wholly reactionary. Hegel represents - as we shallshow - the absolute consummation of rationalism, but this means that he can be superseded only by aninterrelation of thought and existence that has ceased to be contemplative, by the concrete demonstrationof the identical subject-object. Schelling made the absurd attempt to achieve this by going in the reversedirection and so to reach a purely intellectual solution. He thus ended up, like all the epigones of classicalphilosophy, in a reactionary mythology that glorified an empty irrationality.

53 It is not possible to examine the question in detail here, but I should like to point out that this is thepoint at which to begin an analysis of the problematics of Romanticism. Familiar, but seldom understoodconcepts, such as 'irony' spring from this situation. In particular the incisive questions posed by Solgerwho has wrongly been allowed to slide into oblivion, place him together with Friedrich Schlegel as apioneer of the dialectical method between Schelling and Hegel, a position in some ways comparable tothat occupied by Maimon in between Kant and Fichte. The role of mythology in Schelling's aestheticsbecomes clearer with this in mind. There is an obvious connection between such problems and theconception of nature as a mood. The truly critical, metaphysically non-hypostatised, artistic view of theworld leads to an even greater fragmentation of the unity of the subject and thus to an increase in thesymptoms of alienation; this has been borne out by the later evolution of consistently modern views ofart (Flaubert, Konrad Fiedler, etc.) On this point cf. my essay, Die Subjekt-Objekt-Beziehung in derAsthetik, Logos, jahrgang iv.

54 Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 12. The subterranean influence of Hamann is much greater than isusually supposed.

55 Werke I, pp. 173-4. The Phenomenology is an attempt - unsurpassed hitherto, even by Hegel - todevelop such a method.

56 Lask, the most ingenious and logical of the modern Neo-Kantians, clearly perceives this developmentin Hegel's Logic. "In this respect, too, the critic must admit that Hegel is in the right: irrationality can beovercome if and only if dialectically changing concepts are acceptable." Fichtes Idealismus und dieGeschichte, p. 67.

57 Cf. Plekhanov, op. cit., pp. 9, 51, etc. But methodologically only formalistic rationalism is confrontedby an insoluble problem at this point. Setting aside the substantive scientific value of medieval solutionsto these questions, it is indubitable that the Middle Ages did not see any problem here, let alone aninsoluble one. We may compare Holbach's statement, quoted by Plekhanov, that we cannot know"whether the chicken preceded the egg, or the egg the chicken" with e.g. the statement of MasterEckhard, "Nature makes the man from the child and the chicken from the egg; God makes the manbefore the child and the chicken before the egg" (Sermon of the noble man). Needless to say, we are hereconcerned exclusively with the contrast in methodology. On the basis of this methodological limitation asthe result of which history is made to appear as a thing-in-itself, Plekhanov has rightly judged thesematerialists to be naive idealists in their approach to history. Zu Hegels 60. Todestag, Neue Zeit X. 1.273.

58 Here too we can do no more than refer in passing to the history of this problem. The opposed



positions were clearly established very early on. I would point to e.g. Friedrich Schlegel's critique ofCondorcet's attempt (1 795) to provide a rationalist explanation of history (as it were, of the type ofComte or Spencer). " The enduring qualities of man are the subject of pure science, but the changingaspects of man, both as an individual and in the mass, are the subject of a scientific history of mankind."Prosaische jugendschriften, Vienna, 1906. Vol. II, p. 52.

59 Die Encyclopädie, § 309. For us, of course, only the methodological aspect has any significance.Nevertheless, we must emphasise that all formal, rationalist concepts exhibit this same reifiedimpenetrability. The modern substitution of functions for things does not alter this situation in the least,as concepts of function do not at all differ from thing-concepts in the only area that matters, i.e. theform-content relationship. On the contrary, they take their formal, rationalist structure to its extremelogical conclusion.

60 Hegel, Werke II, p. 267.

61 Die Philosophie des Rechts, § 345-7. Encyclopädie, § 548-52.

62 In the last versions of the system history represents the transition from the philosophy of right to theabsolute spirit. (In the Phenomenology the relation is more complex but methodologically just asambiguous and undefined.) 'Absolute spirit' is the truth of the preceding moment, of history andtherefore, in accordance with Hegel's logic, it would have to have annulled and preserved history withinitself. However, in the dialectical method history cannot be so transcended and this is the message at theend of Hegel's Philosophy of History where at the climax of the system, at the moment where the'absolute spirit' realises itself, history makes its reappearance and points beyond philosophy in its turn:"That the determinants of thought had this importance is a further insight that does not belong within thehistory of philosophy. These concepts are the simplest revelation of the spirit of the world: this in itsmost concrete form is history." Werke XV, p. 618.

63 Werke 1, p. 174. Needless to say, Fichte places an even heavier emphasis on chance.

64 Cf. the essay "What is orthodox Marxism?"

65 With this the Logic itself becomes problematic. Hegel's postulate that the concept is "reconstitutedbeing" (Werke V, 30) is only possible on the assumption of the real creation of the identicalsubject-object. A failure at this point means that the concept acquires a Kantian, idealistic emphasiswhich is in conflict with its dialectical function. To show this in detail would be well beyond the scope ofthis study.




III: The Standpoint of the Proletariat

In his early Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx gave a lapidary account of the special positionof the proletariat in society and in history, and the standpoint from which it can function as the identicalsubject-object of the social and historical processes of evolution. "When the proletariat proclaims thedissolution of the previous world-order it does no more than reveal the secret of its own existence, for itrepresents the effective dissolution of that world-order." The self-understanding of the proletariat istherefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariatfurthers its own class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realisation of the - objective - aimsof society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for thisconscious intervention. [1]

What change has been brought about, then, socially by this point of view and even by the possibility oftaking up a point of view at all towards society? 'In the first instance' nothing at all. For the proletariatmakes its appearance as the product of the capitalist social order. The forms in which it exists are - as wedemonstrated in Section I - the repositories of reification in its acutest and direst form and they issue inthe most extreme dehumanisation. Thus the proletariat shares with the bourgeoisie the reification ofevery aspect of its life. Marx observes:

"The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation. Butthe former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognises alienation asits own instrument and in it it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itselfdestroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence." [2]

1

It would appear , then, that - even for Marxism - nothing has changed in the objective situation. Only the'vantage point from which it is judged' has altered, only 'the value placed on it' has acquired a differentemphasis. This view does in fact contain a very essential grain of truth, one which must constantly beborne in mind if true insight is not to degenerate into its opposite.

To put it more concretely: the objective reality of social existence is in its immediacy 'the same' for bothproletariat and bourgeoisie. But this does not prevent the specific categories of mediation by means ofwhich both classes raise this immediacy to the level of consciousness, by means of which the merelyimmediate reality becomes for both the authentically objective reality, from being fundamentallydifferent, thanks to the different position occupied by the two classes within the 'same' economic process.It is evident that once again we are approaching - this time from another angle - the fundamental problemof bourgeois thought, the problem of the thing-in-itself. The belief that the transformation of theimmediately given into a truly understood (and not merely an immediately perceived) and for that reasonreally objective reality, i.e. the belief that the impact of the category of mediation upon the picture of theworld is merely 'subjective', i.e. is no more than an 'evaluation' of a reality that 'remains unchanged', allthis is as much as to say that objective reality has the character of a thing-in-itself.

The Standpoint of the Proletariat

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc07_1.htm (1 of 17) [11/06/2002 17:34:00]

It is true that the kind of knowledge which regards this 'evaluation' as merely 'subjective', as somethingwhich does not go to the heart of the facts, nevertheless claims to penetrate the essence of actuality. Thesource of its self-deception is to be found in its uncritical attitude to the fact that its own standpoint isconditioned (and above all that it is conditioned by the society underlying it). Thus - to take this view ofhistory at its most developed and most highly articulated - we may consider Rickert's arguments withregard to the historian who studies "his own cultural environment". He claims that: "If the historianforms his concepts with an eye on the values of the community to which he himself belongs, theobjectivity of his presentation will depend entirely on the accuracy of his factual material, and thequestion of whether this or that event in the past is crucial will not even arise. He will be immune fromthe charge of arbitrariness, as long as he relates, e.g. the history of art to the aesthetic values of hisculture and the history of the state to its political values and, so long as he refrains from makingunhistorical value-judgements, he will create a mode of historical narrative that is valid for all whoregard political or aesthetic values as normative for the members of his community." [3]

By positing the materially unknown and only formally valid 'cultural values' as the founders of a'value-related' historical objectivity, the subjectivity of the historian is, to all appearances, eliminated.However, this does no more than enthrone as the measure and the index of objectivity, the "culturalvalues" actually "prevailing in his community" (i.e. in his class). The arbitrariness and subjectivity aretransformed from the material of the particular facts and from judgements on these into the criterionitself, into the "prevailing cultural values". And to judge or even investigate the validity of these values isnot possible within that framework; for the historian the 'cultural values' become the thing-in-itself; astructural process analogous to those we observed in economics and jurisprudence in Section I.

Even more important, however, is the other side of the question, viz. that the thing-in-itself character ofthe form-content relation necessarily opens up the problem of totality. Here, too, we must be grateful toRickert for the clarity with which he formulates his view. Having stressed the methodological. need for asubstantive theory of value for the philosophy of history, he continues: "Indeed, universal or worldhistory, too, can only be written in a unified manner with the aid of a system of cultural values and tothat extent it presupposes a substantive philosophy of history. For the rest, however, knowledge of avalue system is irrelevant to the question of the scientific objectivity of purely empirical narrative." [4]

We must ask, however: is the distinction between historical monograph and universal history purely oneof scope or does it also involve method? Of course, even in the former case history according to Rickert'sepistemological ideal would be extremely problematic. For the 'facts' of history must remain -notwithstanding their 'value-attributes' - in a state of crude, uncomprehended facticity as every path to, orreal understanding of them, of their real meaning, their real function in the historical process has beenblocked systematically by methodically abandoning any claim to a knowledge of the totality. But, as wehave shown,', the question of universal history is a problem of methodology that necessarily emerges inevery account of even the smallest segment of history. For history as a totality (universal history) isneither the mechanical aggregate of individual historical events, nor is it a transcendent heuristicprinciple opposed to the events of history, a principle that could only become effective with the aid of aspecial discipline, the philosophy of history. The totality of history is itself a real historical power - eventhough one that has not hitherto become conscious and has therefore gone unrecognised - a power whichis not to be separated from the reality (and hence the knowledge) of the individual facts without at thesame time annulling their reality and their factual existence. It is the real, ultimate ground of their realityand their factual existence and hence also of their knowability even as individual facts.



In the essay referred to above we used Sismondi's theory of crisis to illustrate how the real understandingof a particular phenomenon can be thwarted by the misapplication of the category of totality, even whenall the details have been correctly grasped. We saw there, too, that integration in the totality (which restson the assumption that it is precisely the whole of the historical process that constitutes the authentichistorical reality) does not merely affect our judgement of individual phenomena decisively. But also, asa result, the objective structure, the actual content of the individual phenomenona - as individualphenomenon - is changed fundamentally. The difference between this method which treats individualhistorical phenomena in isolation and one which regards them from a totalising point of view becomeseven more apparent if we compare the function of the machine in the view of bourgeois economics andof Marx:

"The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from the capitalist employment of machinery, do notexist, they say, since they do not arise out of machinery, as such, but out of its capitalist employment!Since therefore machinery, considered alone shortens the hours of labour, but, when in the service ofcapital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital, heightens theintensity of labour; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands ofcapital, makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but inthe hands of capital, makes them paupers - for all these reasons and others besides, says the bourgeoiseconomist without more ado, it is clear as noonday that all these contradictions are a mere semblance ofthe reality, and that, as a matter of fact, they have neither an actual nor a theoretical existence." [6]

Ignoring for the moment the aspect of bourgeois economics that constitutes an apologia on class lines, letus examine the distinction solely from the point of view of method. We then observe that the bourgeoismethod is to consider the machine as an isolated unique thing and to view it simply as an existing'individual' (for as a phenomenon of the process of economic development the machine as a class ratherthan the particular appliance constitutes the historical individual in Rickert's sense). We see further thatto view the machine thus is to distort its true objective nature by representing its function in the capitalistproduction process as its 'eternal' essence, as the indissoluble component of its 'individuality'. Seenmethodologically, this approach makes of every historical object a variable monad which is denied anyinteraction with other - similarly viewed - monads and which possesses characteristics that appear to beabsolutely immutable essences. It does indeed retain an individual uniqueness but this is only theuniqueness of mere facticity, of being-just-so. The 'value-relation' does not at all affect this structure, forit does no more than make it possible to select from the infinite mass of such facticities. just as theseindividual historical monads are only related to each other in superficial manner, one which attempts nomore than a simple factual description, so too their relation to the guiding value principle remains purelyfactual and contingent.

And yet, as the really important historians of the nineteenth century such as Riegl, Dilthey and Dvorakcould not fail to notice, the essence of history lies precisely in the changes undergone by those structuralforms which are the focal points of man's interaction with environment at any given moment and whichdetermine the objective nature of both his inner and his outer life. But this only becomes objectivelypossible (and hence can only be adequately comprehended) when the individuality, the uniqueness of anepoch or an historical figure, etc., is grounded in the character of these structural forms, when it isdiscovered and exhibited in them and through them.

However, neither the people who experience it nor the historian have direct access to immediate realityin these, its true structural forms. It is first necessary to search for them and to find them - and the path to



their discovery is the path to a knowledge of the historical process in its totality. At first sight d anyonewho insists upon immediacy may never go beyond this 'first sight' his whole life long - it may look as ifthe next stages implied a purely intellectual exercise, a mere process of abstraction. But this is an illusionwhich is itself the product of the habits of thought and feeling of mere immediacy where the immediatelygiven form of the objects, the fact of their existing here and now and in this particular way appears to beprimary, real and objective, whereas their 'relations' seem to be secondary and subjective. For anyonewho sees things in such immediacy every true change must seem incomprehensible. The undeniable factof change must then appear to be a catastrophe, a sudden, unexpected turn of events that comes fromoutside and eliminates all mediations. [7] If change is to be understood at all it is necessary to abandonthe view that objects are rigidly opposed to each other, it is necessary to elevate their interrelatedness andthe interaction between these 'relations' and the 'objects' to the same plane of reality. The greater thedistance from pure immediacy the larger the net encompassing the 'relations', and the more complete theintegration of the 'objects' within the system of relations the sooner change will cease to be impenetrableand catastrophic, the sooner it will become comprehensible'

But this will only be true if the road beyond immediacy leads in the direction of a greater concreteness, ifthe system of mediating concepts so constructed represents the "totality of the empirical" - to employLassalle's felicitous description of the philosophy of Hegel. We have already noted the methodologicallimits of formal, rational and abstract conceptual systems. In this context it is important only to hold onto the fact that it is not possible to use them to surpass the purely factual nature of historical facts. (Thecritical efforts of Rickert and of modern historiography also focus on this point and they too havesuccessfully proved this.) The very most that can be achieved in this way is to set up a formal typologyof the manifestations of history and society using historical facts as illustrations. This means that only achance connection links the theoretical system to the objective historical reality that the theory isintended to comprehend. This may take the form of a naïve 'sociology' in search of 'laws' (of theComte/Spencer variety) in which the insolubility of the task is reflected in the absurdity of the results. Orelse the methodological intractability may be a matter of critical awareness from the beginning (as withMax Weber) and, instead, an auxiliary science of history is brought into being. But in either case theupshot is the same: the problem of facticity is pushed back into history once again and the purelyhistorical standpoint remains unable to transcend its immediacy regardless of whether this is desired ornot.

We have described the stance adopted by the historian in Rickert's sense (i.e. critically the mostconscious type in the bourgeois tradition) as a prolongation of the state of pure immediacy. This appearsto contradict the obvious fact that historical reality can only be achieved, understood and described in thecourse of a complicated process of mediation. However, it should not be forgotten that immediacy andmediation are themselves aspects of a dialectical process and that every stage of existence (and of themind that would understand it) has its own immediacy in the sense given to it in the Phenomenology inwhich, when confronted by an immediately given object, "we should respond just as immediately orreceptively, and therefore make no alteration to it, leaving it just as it presents itself ".8 To go beyondthis immediacy can only mean the genesis, the 'creation' of the object. But this assumes that the forms ofmediation in and through which it becomes possible to go beyond the immediate existence of objects asthey are given, can be shown to be the structural principles and the real tendencies of the objectsthemselves.

In other words, intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis. We havefollowed the course of the history of ideas which, as bourgeois thought has developed, has tended more



and more to wrench these two principles apart. We were able to show that as a result of this duality inmethod, reality disintegrates into a multitude of irrational facts and over these a network of purely-formal 'laws' emptied of content is then cast. And by devising an 'epistemology' that can go beyond theabstract form of the immediately given world (and its conceivability) the structure is made permanentand acquires a justification - not inconsistently - as being the necessary 'precondition of the possibility' ofthis world view. But unable to turn this 'critical' movement in the direction of a true creation of the object- in this case of the thinking subject - and indeed by taking the very opposite direction, this 'critical'attempt to bring the analysis of reality to its logical conclusion ends by returning to the same immediacythat faces the ordinary man of bourgeois soccer in his everyday life. It has been conceptualised, but onlyimmediately.

Immediacy and mediation are therefore not only related and mutually complementary ways of dealingwith the objects of reality. But corresponding to the dialectical nature of reality and the dialecticalcharacter of our efforts to come to terms with it, they are related dialectically. That is to say that everymediation must necessarily yield a standpoint from which the objectivity it creates assumes the form ofimmediacy. Now this is the relation of bourgeois thought to the social and historical reality of bourgeoissociety - illuminated and made transparent as it has been by a multiplicity of mediations. Unable todiscover further mediations, unable to comprehend the reality and the origin of bourgeois society as theproduct of the same subject that has 'created' the comprehended totality of knowledge, its ultimate pointof view, decisive for the whole of its thought, will be that of immediacy. For, in Hegel's words: "themediating factor would have to be something in which both sides were one, in which consciousnesswould discern each aspect in the next, its purpose and activity in its fate, its fate its purpose and activity,its own essence in this necessity".[9]

It may be hoped that our arguments up to this point have demonstrated with sufficient clarity that thisparticular mediation was absent and could not be otherwise than absent from bourgeois thought. In thecontext of economics this has been proved by Marx time and time again. [10] And he explicitly attributedthe mistaken ideas of bourgeois economists concerning the economic processes of capitalism to theabsence of mediation, to the systematic avoidance of the categories of mediation, to the immediateacceptance of secondary forms of objectivity, to the inability to progress beyond the stage of merelyimmediate cognition. In Section II we were able to point out as emphatically as possible the variousintellectual implications flowing from the character of bourgeois society and the systematic limitations ofits thought. We drew attention there to the antinomies (between subject and object, freedom andnecessity, individual and society, form and content, etc.) to which such thought necessarily led. It isimportant to realise at this point that although bourgeois thought only landed in these antinomies after thevery greatest mental exertions., it yet accepted their existential basis as self-evident, as a simplyunquestionable reality. Which is to say: bourgeois thought entered into an unmediated relationship withreality as it was given.

Thus Simmel has this to say about the ideological structure of reification in consciousness: "Andtherefore now that these counter-tendencies have come into existence, they should at least strive towardsan ideal of absolutely pure separation: every material content of life should become more and morematerial and impersonal so that the non-reifiable remnant may become all the more personal and all themore indisputably the property of the person."" In this way the very thing that should be understood anddeduced with the aid of mediation becomes the accepted principle by which to explain all phenomenaand is even elevated to the status of a value: namely the unexplained and inexplicable facticity of



bourgeois existence as it is here and now acquires the patina of an eternal law of nature or a culturalvalue enduring for all time.

At the same time this means that history must abolish itself. [12] As Marx says of bourgeois economics.."Thus history existed once upon a time, but it does not exist any more." And even if this antinomyassumes increasingly refined forms in later times, so that it even makes its appearance in the shape ofhistoricism, of historical relativism, this does not affect the basic problem, the abolition of history, in theslightest.

We see the unhistorical and anti-historical character of bourgeois thought most strikingly when weconsider the problem of the present as a historical problem. It is unnecessary to give examples here. Eversince the World War and the World Revolution the total inability of every bourgeois thinker andhistorian to see the world-historical events of the present as universal history must remain one of themost terrible memories of every sober observer. This complete failure has reduced otherwise meritorioushistorians and subtle thinkers to the pitiable or contemptible mental level of the worst kind of provincialjournalism. But it cannot always be explained simply as the result of external pressures (censorship,conformity to 'national' class interests, etc.). It is grounded also in a theoretical approach based uponunmediated contemplation which opens up an irrational chasm between the subject and object ofknowledge, the same "dark and empty" chasm that Fichte described. This murky void was also present inour knowledge of the past, though this was obscured by the distance created by time, space and historicalmediation. Here, however, it must appear fully exposed.

A fine illustration borrowed from Ernst Bloch will perhaps make this theoretical limitation clearer than adetailed analysis which in any case would not be possible here. When nature becomes landscape - e.g. incontrast to the peasant's unconscious living within nature - the artist's unmediated experience of thelandscape (which has of course only achieved this immediacy after undergoing a whole series ofmediations) presupposes a distance (spatial in this case) between the observer and the landscape. Theobserver stands outside the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature tobecome a landscape at all. If he were to attempt to integrate himself and the nature immediatelysurrounding him in space within 'nature-seen-as-landscape', without modifying his aestheticcontemplative immediacy, it would then at once become apparent that landscape only starts to becomelandscape at a definite (though of course variable) distance from the observer and that only as anobserver set apart in space can he relate to nature in terms of landscape at all.

This illustration is only intended to throw light on the theoretical situation, for it is only in art that therelation to landscape is expressed in an appropriate and unproblematic way, although it must not beforgotten that even in art we find the same unbridgeable gap opening up between subject and object thatwe find confronting us everywhere in modern life, and that art can do no more than shape thisproblematic without however finding a real solution to it. But as soon as history is forced into the present- and this is inevitable as our interest in history is determined in the last analysis by our desire tounderstand the present - this "pernicious chasm" (to use Bloch's expression) opens up.

As a result of its incapacity to understand history, the contemplative attitude of the bourgeoisie becamepolarised into two extremes: on the one hand, there were the 'great individuals' viewed as the autocraticmakers of history, on the other hand, there were the 'natural laws' of the historical environment. Theyboth turn out to be equally impotent - whether they are separated or working together - when challengedto produce an interpretation of the present in all its radical novelty. [13] The inner perfection of the work



of art can hide this gaping abyss because in its perfected immediacy it does not allow any furtherquestions to arise about a mediation no longer available to the point of view of contemplation. However,the present is a problem of history, a problem that refuses to be ignored and one which imperiouslydemands such mediation. It must be attempted. But in the course of these attempts we discover the truthof Hegel's remarks about one of the stages of self-consciousness that follow the definition o mediationalready cited: ','Therefore consciousness has become an enigma to itself as a result of the very experiencewhich was to reveal its truth to itself; it does not regard the effects of its deeds as its own deeds: whathappens to it is not the same experience for it as it is in itself; the transition is not merely a formal changeof the same content and essence seen on the one hand as the content and essence of consciousness and onthe other hand as the object or intuited essence of itself. Abstract necessity, therefore passes for themerely negative, uncomprehended power of the universal by which individuality is destroyed".

2

The historical knowledge of the proletariat begins with knowledge of the present, with theself-knowledge of its own social situation and with the elucidation of its necessity (i.e. its genesis). Thatgenesis and history should coincide or, more exactly, that they should be different aspects of the sameprocess, can only happen if two conditions are fulfilled. On the one hand, all the categories in whichhuman existence is constructed must appear as the determinants of that existence itself (and not merely ofthe description of that existence). On the other hand, their succession, their coherence and theirconnections must appear as aspects of the historical process itself, as the structural components of thepresent. Thus the succession and internal order of the categories constitute neither a purely logicalsequence, nor are they organised merely in accordance with the facts of history. "Their sequence is ratherdetermined by the relation which they bear to one another in modern bourgeois society, and which is theexact opposite of what seems to be their natural order or the order of their historical developmental

This in turn assumes that the world which confronts man in theory and in practice exhibits a kind ofobjectivity which - if properly thought out and understood - need never stick fast in an immediacy similarto that of forms found earlier on. This objectivity must accordingly be comprehensible as a constantfactor mediating between past and future and it must be possible to demonstrate that it is everywhere theproduct of man and of the development of society. To pose the question thus is to bring up the issue ofthe 'economic structure' of society. For, as Marx points out in his attack on Proudhon'spseudo-Hegelianism and vulgar Kantianism for its erroneous separation of principle (i.e. category) fromhistory: "When we ask ourselves why a particular principle was manifested in the eleventh or in theeighteenth century rather than in any other, we are necessarily forced to examine minutely what menwere like in the eleventh century, what they were like in the eighteenth, what were their respective needs,their productive forces, their mode of production and their raw materials - in short, what were therelations between man and man which resulted from all these conditions of existence. To get to thebottom of all these questions - what is this but to draw up the real, profane history of men in everycentury and to present these men as both the authors and the actors of their own drama? But the momentwe present men as the actors and authors of their own history, we arrive - by a detour - at the realstarting-point, because we have abandoned those eternal principles of which we spoke at the outset." [14]

It would, however, be an error - an error which marks the point of departure of all vulgar Marxism - tobelieve that to adopt this standpoint is simply to accept the immediately given (i.e. the empirical) socialstructure. Moreover, the refusal to be content with this empirical reality, this going beyond the bounds of



what is immediately given by no means signifies a straightforward dissatisfaction with it and astraightforward - abstract - desire to alter it. Such a desire, such an evaluation of empirical reality wouldindeed be no more than subjective. it would be a 'value-judgement', a wish, a utopia. And even though toaspire to a utopia is to affirm the will in what is philosophically the more objective and distilled form ofan 'ought' (Sollen) it does not imply that the tendency to accept empirical reality has been overcome. Thisapplies, too, to the subjectivism of the impulse to initiate change which admittedly appears here in aphilosophically sophisticated form.

For precisely in the pure, classical expression it received in the philosophy of Kant it remains true thatthe 'ought' presupposes an existing reality to which the category of 'ought' remains inapplicable inprinciple. Whenever the refusal of the subject simply to accept his empirically given existence takes theform of an 'ought', this means that the immediately given empirical reality receives affirmation andconsecration at the hands of philosophy: it is philosophically immortalised. "Nothing in the world ofphenomena can be explained by the concept of freedom," Kant states, "the guiding thread in that spheremust always be the mechanics of nature." [16]

Thus every theory of the 'ought' is left with a dilemma: either it must allow the - meaningless - existenceof empirical reality to survive unchanged with its meaninglessness forming the basis of the 'ought' - for ina meaningful existence the problem of an 'ought' could not arise. This gives the 'ought' a purelysubjective character. Or else, theory must presuppose a principle that transcends the concept of both what'is' and what 'ought to be' so as to be able to explain the real impact of the 'ought' upon what 'is'. For thepopular solution of an infinite progression [towards virtue, holiness], which Kant himself had alreadyproposed, merely conceals the fact that the problem is insoluble. Philosophically it is not important todetermine the time needed by the 'ought' in order to reorganise what 'is'. The task is to discover theprinciples by means of which it becomes possible in the first place for an 'ought' to modify existence.And it is just this that the theory rules out from the start by establishing the mechanics of nature as anunchangeable fact of existence, by setting up a strict dualism of 'ought' and 'is', and by creating therigidity with which 'is' and 'ought' confront each other - a rigidity which this point of view can nevereliminate. However, if a thing is theoretically impossible it cannot be first reduced to infinitesimalproportions and spread over an infinite process and then suddenly be made to reappear as a reality.

It is., however, no mere chance that in its attempt to find a way out of the contradictions created by thefact that history is simply given, bourgeois thought should have taken up the idea of an infiniteprogression. For, according to Hegel, this progression makes its appearance "everywhere where relativedeterminants are driven to the point where they become antithetical so that they are united inseparablywhilst an independent existence is attributed to each vis-à-vis the other. This progression is, therefore, thecontradiction that is never resolved but is always held to be simply present." [17] And Hegel has alsoshown that the methodological device that forms the logical first link in the infinite progression consistsin establishing a purely quantitative relationship between elements that are and remain qualitativelyincommensurable but in such a way that "each is held to be indifferent to this change". [18]

With this we find ourselves once more in the old antinomy of the thing-in-itself but in a new form: on theone hand 'is' and 'ought' remain rigidly and irreducibly antithetical; on the other hand, by forging a linkbetween them an extern . al, illusory link that leaves their irrationality and facticity untouched, an area ofapparent Becoming is created thanks to which growth and decay, the authentic theme of history, is reallyand truly thrust out into the darkness of incomprehensibility. For the reduction to quantitative terms mustaffect not only the basic elements of the process but also its individual stages, and the fact that this



procedure makes it appear as if a gradual transition were taking place, goes unobserved. "But thisgradualness only applies to the externals of change, not to their quality; the preceding quantitativesituation, infinitely close to the succeeding one yet possesses a different existence qualitatively.... Onewould like to employ gradual transitions in order to make a change comprehensible to oneself; but thegradual change is precisely the trivial one, it is the reverse of the true qualitative change. In thegradualness the connection between the two realities is abolished - this is true whether they are conceivedof as states or as independent objects - ; it is assumed that ... one is simply external to the other; in thisway the very thing necessary to comprehension is removed. . . . With this growth and decay arealtogether abolished, or else the In Itself, the inner state of a thing prior to its existence is transformedinto a small amount of external existence and the essential or conceptual distinction is changed into asimple, external difference of magnitude." [19]

The desire to leave behind the immediacy of empirical reality and its no less immediate rationalistreflections must not be allowed to become an attempt to abandon, immanent (social) reality. The price ofsuch a false process of transcendence would be the reinstating and perpetuating of empirical reality withall its insoluble questions, but this time in a philosophically sublimated way. But in fact, to leaveempirical reality behind can only mean that the objects of the empirical world are to be understood asaspects of a totality, i.e. as the aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of historicalchange. Thus the category of mediation is a lever with which to overcome the mere immediacy of theempirical world and as such it is not something (subjective) foisted on to the objects from outside, it is novalue-judgement or 'ought' opposed to their 'is'. It is rather the manifestation of their authentic objectivestructure. This can only become apparent in the visible objects of consciousness when the false attitudeof bourgeois thought to objective reality has been abandoned. Mediation would not be possible were itnot for the fact that the empirical existence of objects is itself mediated and only appears to beunmediated in so far as the awareness of mediation is lacking so that the objects are torn from thecomplex of their true determinants and placed in artificial isolation. [20]

Moreover, it must be borne in mind that the process by which the objects are isolated is not the productof chance or caprice. When true knowledge does away with the false separation of objects (and the evenfalser connections established by unmediated abstractions) it does much more than merely correct a falseor inadequate scientific method or substitute a superior hypothesis for a defective one. It is just ascharacteristic of the social reality of the present that its objective form should be subjected to this kind ofintellectual treatment as it is that the objective starting-point of such treatment should have been chosen.If, then, the standpoint of the proletariat is opposed to that of the bourgeoisie, it is nonetheless true thatproletarian thought does not require a tabula rasa, a new start to the task of comprehending reality andone without any preconceptions. In this it is unlike the thought of the bourgeoisie with regard to themedieval forms of feudalism - at least in its basic tendencies. just because its practical goal is thefundamental transformation of the whole of society it conceives of bourgeois society together with itsintellectual and artistic productions as the point of departure for its own method.

The methodological function of the categories of mediation consists in the fact that with their aid thoseimmanent meanings that necessarily inhere, in the objects of bourgeois society but which are absent fromthe immediate manifestation of those objects as well as from their mental reflection in bourgeois thought,now become objectively effective and can therefore enter the consciousness of the proletariat. That is tosay, if the bourgeoisie is held fast in the mire of immediacy from which the proletariat is able to extricateitself, this is neither purely accidental nor a purely theoretical scientific problem. The distance between



these two theoretical positions is an expression of the differences between the social existence of the twoclasses.

Of course, the knowledge yielded by the standpoint of the proletariat stands on a higher scientific planeobjectively; it does after all apply a method that makes possible the solution of problems which thegreatest thinkers of the bourgeois era have vainly struggled to find and in its substance, it provides theadequate historical analysis of capitalism which must remain beyond the grasp of bourgeois thinkers.However, this attempt to grade the methods objectively in terms of their value to knowledge is itself asocial and historical problem, an inevitable result of the types of society represented by the two classesand their place in history. It implies that the 'falseness' and the 'one-sidedness' of the bourgeois view ofhistory must be seen as a necessary factor in the systematic acquisition of knowledge about society." [21]

But also, it appears that every method is necessarily implicated in the existence of the relevant class. Forthe bourgeoisie, method arises directly from its social existence and this means that mere immediacyadheres to its thought, constituting its outermost barrier., one that can not be crossed. In contrast to thisthe proletariat is confronted by the need to break through this barrier, to overcome it inwardly from thevery start by adopting its own point of view. And as it is the nature of the dialectical method constantlyto produce and reproduce its own essential aspects, as its very being constitutes the denial of any smooth,linear development of ideas, the proletariat finds itself repeatedly confronted with the problem of its ownpoint of departure both in its efforts to increase its theoretical grasp of reality and to initiate practicalhistorical measures. For the proletariat the barrier imposed by immediacy has become an inward barrier.With this the problem becomes clear; by putting the problem in this way the road to a possible answer isopened up. [22]

But it is no more than a possible answer. The proposition with which we began, viz. that in capitalistsociety reality is - immediately - the same for both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, remains unaltered.But we may now add that this same reality employs the motor of class interests to keep the bourgeoisieimprisoned within this immediacy while forcing the proletariat to go beyond it. For the social existenceof the proletariat is far more powerfully affected by the dialectical character of the historical process inwhich the mediated character of every factor receives the imprint of truth and authentic objectivity onlyin the mediated totality. For the proletariat to become aware of the dialectical nature of its existence is amatter of life and death, whereas the bourgeoisie uses the abstract categories of reflection, such asquantity and infinite progression, to conceal the dialectical structure of the historical process in daily lifeonly to be confronted by unmediated catastrophes when the pattern is reversed. This is based - as wehave shown - on the fact that the bourgeoisie always perceives the subject and object of the historicalprocess and of social reality in a double form: in terms of his consciousness the single individual is aperceiving subject confronting the overwhelming objective necessities imposed by society of which onlyminute fragments can be comprehended. But in reality it is precisely the conscious activity of theindividual that is to be found on the object-side of the process, while the subject (the class) cannot beawakened into consciousness and this activity must always remain beyond the consciousness of the -apparent - subject, the individual.

Thus we find the subject and object of the social process coexisting in a state of dialectical interaction.But as they always appear to exist in a rigidly twofold form, each external to the other, the dialecticsremain unconscious and the objects retain their twofold and hence rigid character. This rigidity can onlybe broken by catastrophe and it then makes way for an equally rigid structure. This unconscious dialecticwhich is for that very reason unmanageable



"breaks forth in their confession of naive surprise, when what they have just thought to have defined withgreat difficulty as a thing suddenly appears as a social relation and then reappears to tease them again asa thing, before they have barely managed to define it as a social relation." [23]

For the proletariat social reality does not exist in this double form. It appears in the first instance as thepure object of societal events. In every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagineshimself to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacyof his existence. This forces upon him the knowledge that the most elementary gratification of his needs,"his own individual consumption, whether it proceed within the workshop or outside it, whether it be partof the process of reproduction or not, forms therefore an aspect of the production and the reproduction ofcapital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it isstanding idle". [24] The quantification of objects, their subordination to abstract mental categories makesits appearance in the life of the worker immediately as a process of abstraction of which he is the victim,and which cuts him off from his labour-power, forcing him to sell it on the market as a commodity,belonging to him. And by selling this, his only commodity, he integrates it (and himself: for hiscommodity is inseparable from his physical existence) into a specialised process that has beenrationalised and mechanised, a process that he discovers already existing, complete and able to functionwithout him and in which he is no more than a cipher reduced to an abstract quantity, a mechanised andrationalised tool.

Thus for the worker the reified character of the immediate manifestations of capitalist society receivesthe most extreme definition possible. It is true: for the capitalist also there is the same doubling ofpersonality, the same splitting up of man into an element of the movement of commodities and an(objective and impotent) observer of that movement. [25] But for his consciousness it necessarily appearsas an activity (albeit this activity is objectively an illusion), in which effects emanate from himself. Thisillusion blinds him to the true state of affairs, whereas the worker, who is denied the scope for suchillusory activity, perceives the split in his being preserved in the brutal form of what is in its wholetendency a slavery without limits. He is therefore forced into becoming the object of the process bywhich he is turned into a commodity and reduced to a mere quantity.

But this very fact forces him to surpass the immediacy of his condition. For as Marx says, "Time is theplace of human development". [26] The quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to thecapitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to theworker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence. Thetransformation of quantity into quality is not only a particular aspect of the dialectical process ofdevelopment, ' as Hegel represents it in his philosophy of nature and, following him, Engels in theAnti-Dühring. But going beyond that, as we have just shown with the aid of Hegel's Logic, it means theemergence of the truly objective form of existence and the destruction of those confusing categories ofreflection which had deformed true objectivity into a posture of merely immediate, passive,contemplation.

Above all, as far as labour-time is concerned, it becomes abundantly clear that quantification is a reifiedand reifying cloak spread over the true essence of the objects and can only be regarded as an objectiveform of reality inasmuch as the subject is uninterested in the essence of the object to which it stands in acontemplative or (seemingly) practical relationship. When Engels illustrates the transformation ofquantity into quality by pointing to the example of water changing into solid or gaseous form [27] he is



in the right so far as these points of transition are concerned. But this ignores the fact that when the pointof view is changed even the transitions that had seemed to be purely quantitative now becomequalitative. (To. give an extremely trivial example, consider what happens when water is drunk; there is.here a point at which 'quantitative' changes take on a qualitative nature.) The position is even clearerwhen we consider the example Engels gives from Capital. The point under discussion is the amountneeded at a particular stage of production to transform a given sum into capital; Marx observes that it isat this point that quantity is changed into quality. [28]

Let us now compare these two series (the growth or reduction in the sum of money and the increase ordecrease in labour-time) and examine their possible quantitative changes and their transformation intoquality. We note that in the first case we are in fact confronted only by what Hegel calls a "nodal line ofmeasure relations". Whereas in the second case every change is one of quality in its innermost nature and'although its quantitative appearance is forced on to the worker by his social environment, its essence forhim lies in its qualitative implications. This second aspect of the change obviously has its origin in thefact that for the worker labour-time is not merely the objective form of the commodity he has sold, i.e.his labour-power (for in that form the problem for him, too, is one of the exchange of equivalents, i.e. aquantitative matter). But in addition it is the determining form of his existence as subject, as humanbeing.

This does not mean that immediacy together with its consequences for theory, namely the rigidopposition of subject and object, can be regarded as having been wholly overcome. It is true that in theproblem of labour-time, just because it shows reification at its zenith, we can see how proletarian thoughtis necessarily driven to surpass this immediacy. For, on the one hand, in his social existence the worker isimmediately placed wholly on the side of the object: he appears to himself immediately as an object andnot as the active part of the social process of labour. On the other hand, however, the role of object is nolonger purely immediate. That is to say, it is true that the worker is objectively transformed into a mereobject of the process of production by the methods of capitalist production (in contrast to those of slaveryand servitude) i.e. by the fact that the worker is forced to objectify his labour-power over against his totalpersonality and to sell it as a commodity. But because of the split between subjectivity and objectivityinduced in man by the compulsion to objectify himself as a commodity, the situation becomes one thatcan be made conscious. In earlier, more organic forms of society, work is defined "as the direct functionof a member of the social organism": [29] in slavery and servitude the ruling powers appear as the"immediate mainsprings of the production process" and this prevents labourers enmeshed in such asituation with their personalities undivided from achieving clarity about their social position. By contrast,"work which is represented as exchange value has for its premise the work of the isolated individual. Itbecomes social by assuming the form of its immediate antithesis, the form of abstract universality."

We can already see here more clearly and concretely the factors that create a dialectic between the socialexistence of the worker and the forms of his consciousness and force them out of their pure immediacy.Above all the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware ofhimself as a commodity. As we have seen, his immediate existence integrates him as a pure, naked objectinto the production process. Once this immediacy turns out to be the consequence of a multiplicity ofmediations, once it becomes evident how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of thecommodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognises himself and his ownrelations with capital. Inasmuch as he is incapable in practice of raising himself above the role of objecthis consciousness is the self-consciousness of the commodity; or in other words it is the self-knowledge,



the self-revelation of the capitalist society founded upon the production and exchange of commodities.

By adding self-consciousness to the commodity structure a new element is introduced, one that isdifferent in principle and in quality from what is normally described as consciousness 'of' an object. Notjust because it is a matter of self-consciousness. For, as in the science of psychology, this might very wellbe consciousness 'of 'an object, one which without modifying the way in which consciousness and objectare related and thus without changing the knowledge so attained, might still 'accidentally' choose itselffor an object. From this it would follow that knowledge acquired in this way must have the sametruth-criteria as in the case of knowledge of 'other' objects. Even when in antiquity a slave, aninstrumentum vocale, becomes conscious of himself as a slave this is not self-knowledge in the sense wemean here: for he can only attain to knowledge of an object which happens 'accidentally' to be himself.Between a 'thinking' slave and an 'unconscious' slave there is no real distinction to be drawn in anobjective social sense. No more than there is between the possibility of a slave's becoming conscious ofhis own social situation and that of a 'free' man's achieving an understanding of slavery. The rigidepistemological doubling of subject and object remains unaffected and hence the perceiving subject failsto impinge upon the structure of the object despite his adequate understanding of it.

In contrast with this, when the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is practical. That isto say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge. In thisconsciousness and through it the special objective character of labour as a commodity, its 'use-value' (i.e.its ability to yield surplus produce) which like every use-value is submerged without a trace in thequantitative exchange categories of capitalism, now awakens and becomes social really. The specialnature of labour as a commodity which in the absence of this consciousness acts as an unacknowledgeddriving wheel in the economic process now objectives itself by means of this consciousness. The specificnature of this kind of commodity had consisted in the fact that beneath the cloak of the thing lay arelation between men, that beneath the quantifying crust. there was a qualitative, living core. Now thatthis core is revealed it becomes possible to recognise the fetish character of every commodity based onthe commodity character of labour power: in every case we find its core, the relation between men,entering into the evolution of society.

Of course, all of this is only contained implicitly in the dialectical antithesis of quantity and quality as wemeet it in the question of labour-time. That is to say, this antithesis with all its implications is only thebeginning of the complex process of mediation whose goal is the knowledge of society as a historicaltotality. The dialectical method is distinguished from bourgeois thought not only by the fact that it alonecan lead to a knowledge of totality; it is also significant that such knowledge is only attainable becausethe relationship between parts and whole has become fundamentally different from what it is in thoughtbased on the categories of reflection. In brief, from this point of view, the essence of the dialecticalmethod lies in the fact that in every aspect correctly grasped by the dialectic the whole totality iscomprehended and that the whole method can be unravelled from every single aspect. [30] It has oftenbeen claimed - and not without a certain justification - that the famous chapter in Hegel's Logic treatingof Being, Non-Being and Becoming contains the whole of his philosophy. It might be claimed withperhaps equal justification that the chapter dealing with the fetish character of the commodity containswithin itself the whole of historical materialism and the whole self-knowledge of the proletariat seen asthe knowledge of capitalist society (and of the societies that preceded it). [Capital I, Chapter 1, Section4].

Obviously, this should not be taken to mean that the whole of history with its teeming abundance should



be thought of as being superfluous. Quite the reverse. Hegel's programme: to see the absolute, the goal ofhis philosophy, as a result remains valid for Marxism with its very different objects of knowledge, and iseven of greater concern to it, as the dialectical process is seen to be identical with the course of history.The theoretical point we are anxious to emphasise here is merely the structural fact that the single aspectis not a segment of a mechanical totality that could be put together out of such segments, for this wouldlead us to see knowledge as an infinite progression. It must be seen instead as containing the possibilityof unravelling the whole abundance of the totality from within itself. But this in turn can only be done ifthe aspect is seen as aspect, i.e. as a point of transition to the totality; if every movement beyond theimmediacy that had made the aspect an aspect of the dialectical process (whereas before it had beennothing more than the evident contradiction of two categories of thought) is not to freeze once more in anew rigidity and a new immediacy.

This reflection leads us back to our concrete point of departure. In the Marxist analysis of labour undercapitalism that we have sketched above, we encountered the antithesis between the isolated individualand the abstract generality within which he finds mediated the relation between his work and society.And once again it is important to emphasise, that as in every immediate and abstract form of existence asit is simply given, here, too, we find bourgeoisie and proletariat placed in an immediately similarsituation. But, here too, it appears that while the bourgeoisie remains enmeshed in its immediacy byvirtue of its class role, the proletariat is driven by the specific dialectics of its class situation to abandonit. The transformation of all objects into commodities, their quantification into fetishisticexchange-values is more than an intensive process affecting the form of every aspect of life in this way(as we were able to establish in the case of labour-time). But also and inseparably bound up with this wefind the extensive expansion of these forms to embrace the whole of society. For the capitalist this side ofthe process means an increase in the quantity of objects for him to deal with in his calculations andspeculations. In so far as this process does acquire the semblance of a qualitative character, this goes nofurther than an aspiration towards the increased rationalisation, mechanisation and quantification of theworld confronting him. (See the distinction between the dominance of merchant's capital and that ofindustrial capital, the capitalisation of agriculture, etc.) Interrupted abruptly now and again by 'irrational'catastrophes, the way is opened up for an infinite progression leading to the thorough-going capitalistrationalisation of society as a whole.

For the proletariat, however, the 'same' process means its own emergence as a class. In both cases atransformation from quantity to quality is involved. We need only consider the line of developmentleading from the medieval craft via simple cooperation and manufacture to the modern factory and weshall see the extent to which even for the bourgeoisie the qualitative changes stand out as milestones onthe road. The class meaning of these changes lies precisely in the fact that the bourgeoisie regularlytransforms each new qualitative gain back on to the quantitative level of yet another rational calculation.Whereas for the proletariat the 'same' development has a different class meaning: it means the abolitionof the isolated individual, it means that workers can become conscious of the social character of labour, itmeans that the abstract, universal form of the societal principle as it is manifested can be increasinglyconcretised and overcome.

This enables us to understand why it is only in the proletariat that the process by which a man'sachievement is split off from his total personality and becomes a commodity leads to a revolutionaryconsciousness. It is true, as we demonstrated in Section I, that the basic structure of reification can befound in all the social forms of modern capitalism (e.g. bureaucracy.) But this structure can only be madefully conscious in the work-situation of the proletarian. For his work as he experiences it directly



possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity, while in other forms of work this is hiddenbehind the façade of 'mental labour', of 'responsibility', etc. (and sometimes it even lies concealed behind'patriarchal' forms). The more deeply reification penetrates into the soul of the man who sells hisachievement as a commodity the more deceptive appearances are (as in the case of journalism).Corresponding to the objective concealment of the commodity form, there is the subjective element. Thisis the fact that while the process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehumaniseshim and cripples and atrophies his 'soul' - as long as he does not consciously rebel against it - it remainstrue that precisely his humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities. He is able therefore toobjectify himself completely against his existence while the man reified in the bureaucracy, for instance,is turned into a commodity, mechanised and reified in the only faculties that might enable him to rebelagainst reification. Even his thoughts and feelings become reified. As Hegel says: "It is much harder tobring movement into fixed ideas than into sensuous existence." [31]

In the end this corruption assumes objective forms also. The worker experiences his place in theproduction process as ultimate but at the same time it has all the characteristics of the commodity (theuncertainties of day-to-day movements of the market). This stands in contrast to other groups which haveboth the appearance of stability (the routine of duty, pension, etc.) and also the - abstract - possibility ofan individual's elevating himself into the ruling class. By such means a 'status-consciousness' is createdthat is calculated to inhibit effectively the growth of a class consciousness. Thus the purely abstractnegativity in the life of the worker is objectively the most typical manifestation of reification, it is theconstitutive type of capitalist socialisation. But for this very reason it is also subjectively the point atwhich this structure is raised to consciousness and where it can be breached in practice. As Marx says:"Labour ... is no longer grown together with the individual into one particular determination" [32] oncethe false manifestations of this unmediated existence are abolished, the true existence of the proletariat asa class will begin.

next section


NOTES

1 Cf. "What is orthodox Marxism?", "Class Consciousness" and "The Changing Function of HistoricalMaterialism". In view of the fact that the themes in these essays are so closely interrelated it hasregrettably not always been possible to avoid repetition.

2 Nachlass II, p. 132. [The Holy Family, Chapter 4.]

3 Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begrifsbildung, 2nd ed., p. 562.

4 Ibid., pp. 606-7.

5 Cf. "What is orthodox Marxism?"



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc07_3.htm


7 For eighteenth century materialism, see Plekhanov, op. cit., p. 51. In Section I we have shown how thisbelief underlies the bourgeois theory of crisis, the theory of the origin of law, etc. In history itself anyonecan easily understand that an approach that is not world-historical and that does not relate to the overalldevelopment must necessarily interpret the most important turning-points of history as senselesscataclysms as their causes lie outside its scheme. This can be seen, e.g. in the Germanic Migrations, inthe downward trend of German history from the Renaissance on, etc.

8 Hegel's Werke II, p. 73.

9 Ibid., p. 275.

10 Cf. e.g. Capital Ill, pp. 336, 349-50, 370-1, 374-6, 383-4.

11 Die Philosophie des Geldes, p. 531.

12 The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 135.

13 I would refer the reader once again to Plekhanov's statement of the dilemma confronting older formsof materialism. As Marx showed in his critique of Bruno Bauer (Nachlass II, pp. 178 et seq.) everybourgeois view of history logically ends up by mechanising the 'masses' and irrationalising the hero.However, exactly the same dualism can be found in such thinkers as Carlyle or Nietzsche. Even acautious thinker like Rickert, (despite some reservations, e.g. op. cit., p. 380) is inclined to regard 'milieu'and the 'movements of masses' as subject to natural laws and to see only the isolated personality as ahistorical individual. Op. cit., pp. 444, 460-1.



16 Die Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, pp. 38-9, Cf. ibid., pp. 24, 123; Die Grundlegung der Metaphysikder Sitten, pp. 4, 38. Cf. also Hegel's critique, Werke III, pp. 133 et seq.

17 Werke III, p. 147.

18 Ibid., p. 262.

19 Ibid., pp. 432-5. Plekhanov deserves the credit for having pointed to the importance of this side ofHegel's Logic for the distinction between evolution and revolution as early as 1891 (Neue Zeit X/I, pp.280 et seq.). Regrettably his insight was neglected by later theorists.

20 On the methodological side of this question, see above all the first part of Hegel's Philosophy ofReligion. In particular, Werke XI, pp. 158-9. "There is no immediate knowledge. Immediate knowledgeis where we have no consciousness of mediation; but it is mediated for all that." Similarly in the Prefaceto the Phenomenology: "The true is not an original unity as such or an immediate one, but only thisreconstituting equality or reflection in otherness in itself." Werke II, p. 15.

21 Engels in fact accepted the Hegelian theory of the false (which has its finest definition in the Prefaceto the Phenomenology, Werke II, p. 30 et seq.). Cf. his analysis of the role of 'evil' in history, Feuerbachand the End of Classical German Philosophy, in S.W. II, p. 345 et seq. This refers, of course, only to the



truly original representatives of bourgeois thought. Epigones, eclectics and simple partisans of theinterests of a declining class belong in quite a different category.

22 On this distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, see the essay on "ClassConsciousness".



25 All so-called theories of abstinence are based on this. We may mention especially the importanceattributed by Max Weber to 'inner worldly asceticism' in the origins of the 'spirit' of capitalism. Marx,too, confirms this fact when he points out that for the capitalist "his own private consumption is arobbery perpetrated on accumulation, just as in book-keeping by double entry, the private expenditure ofthe capitalist is placed on the debtor side of his account against his capital". Capital 1, p. 592.

26 Wages, Price and Profit in S.W. I, p. 398.

27 Anti-Dühring, p. 141.



30 Thus Marx writes to Engels: "These gentry, the economists have hitherto overlooked the extremelysimple point that the form: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat is only the undeveloped basis of 20 yards of linen =f.2, and that therefore the simplest form of a commodity, in which its value is not yet expressed as arelation to all other commodities but only as something differentiated from the commodity in its naturalform, contains the whole secret of the money-form and with it, in embryo, of all the bourgeois form of theproduct of labour. (22 June, 1867). Selected Correspondence, Moscow, n.d., p. 228. On this point seealso the magisterial analysis of the distinction between exchange value and price in A Contribution to theCritique of Political Economy where it is shown that in this distinction "all the tempests that threaten thecommodity in the real process of circulation are concentrated", p. 80.

31 Werke 11, p. 27.




Georg LukacsFrom The Young Hegel, 1938

Written: 1938Source: The Young Hegel.Publisher: Merlin Press, 1975Translator: Rodney LivingstoneTranscribed: Andy BlundenHTML Markup: Andy Blunden

2.5 The first studies in economics

HERE, at the decisive point in Hegel’s intellectual biography, where we might have hoped to clarify theconcrete relations between his dialectics and his study of economics we find ourselves baulked by theutter failure of our sources and we are compelled to rely almost entirely on hypo theses. We may thinkourselves fortunate that Rosenkranz has at least preserved the bare fact of the date when Hegel first tookup economics.

All the material that Rosenkranz possessed in toto has since been lost. It is certainly no accident that thissection of Hegel’s papers has vanished without trace. of-his immediate pupils there was not a single onewho had even the slightest comprehension of economic problems, let alone of their importance in theevolution of Hegel’s system and methodology. They did not even notice the obvious evidence of suchstudies in the published works (the Phenomenology, Philosophy of Right, etc.)

The backwardness of German society was such that even in the case of Germany’s greatest philosophicalgenius, Hegel himself, the intellectual reflection of social antagonisms appear, in an inverted, idealisticform.

In the case of his pupils, whose formative years fell, for the most part, in the period of the Restoration,there is an utter failure to comprehend the problems of economics and their significance for anunderstanding of the problems of society. And this blind spot is as much in evidence on the reactionaryright-wing of the Hegelians as in the liberal centre and on the left. The timidity with which the Liberalsof the 1830s tackled the great social issues of the time is reflected also in their utter blankness in the faceof economic problems. Not until the early 1840s did the intensification of the class struggle awaken acertain interest in economic issues in the ranks of the Hegelians, and even then we find a lack ofknowledge and serious study that compares very unfavourably with Hegel. The philosophicalarrangement of the economic categories of both the classics and the utopians at the hands of theHegelians among the ‘True Socialists’ and also by Lassalle scarcely advanced beyond a superficialformalism.

Not until the early works of the founders of dialectical materialism, of Marx and Engels, do we discovernot merely a profound and thorough-going investigation of the problems of political economy, but also

Hegel’s economics during the Jena period

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/youngheg/lukacs25.htm (1 of 9) [11/06/2002 17:34:01]



the conscious realisation that this was the realm in which the great problems of dialectics were to bestudied, that here was the great task of taking the material accumulated, but not worked out dialectically,by the classics of bourgeois political economy and by the utopians, of discovering its underlying lawsand principles, and advancing from there to an analysis of the dialectical laws of movement in society.As early as Engels’ brilliant writings in the Deutsch-französiche jahrbücher, the connection betweeneconomics and dialectics- stands clearly in the foreground. Shortly after that Marx himself devotes hisfull attention to the problem in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, the last section of whichcontains his critique of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind. In this Marx, notwithstanding his incisiveand crucial criticism of Hegel’s idealism, uncovers the important and positive role of economics in theformation of the Hegelian dialectic, in particular his use of the category of labour in which he follows inthe footsteps of the English classics. This work is then succeeded by a series of important polemicalwritings against Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, Proudhon, etc, which contain a large number of profound andilluminating observations on these issues.

It is typical of the opportunism of the Second International that a large proportion of these writingsgathered dust in the archives, their value recognised by no-one. The development of opportunismcoincided with the disappearance — of any understanding of dialectics and the rampant growth ofmetaphysical shallowness then created an atmosphere in which it was easy to twist and distort the clearlyformulated propositions of Marxist economics.

Only the Bolsheviks consistently fought against this opportunism on all fronts. Lenin, despite thedisadvantage of not having access to a large part of Marx’s work on this topic, was the only one to havegrasped their full importance.

‘It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without havingthoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later noneof the Marxists understood Marx!

Rosenkranz, a moderate liberal and an adherent of the so-called Hegelian centre at the time of thebreak-up of the school, naturally had no idea of the importance of Hegel’s economic studies. To give thereader an idea of the thoroughness with which the documents have been mislaid we propose to quoteeverything that Rosenkranz has to say on the topic in his biography; later biographers have merely copiedfrom Rosenkranz. The discovery of Hegel’s manuscripts in recent decades has greatly increased ourknowledge of Hegel’s study of economics in Jena, but about the years in Frankfurt we are as much in thedark as ever.

Rosenkranz states that Hegel’s interest in economic questions began in Frankfurt, and that it wasprimarily conditions in England that excited his curiosity. He regularly read the newspapers and madedetailed notes from them (which have of course been lost). In Rosenkranz’s words:

‘At the same time he moved closer to the immediate arena of political events and found his interest in itgreatly increased. Above all he was fascinated by the relations of commerce and property especially in Eland, partly no doubt in accordance with the general admiration which the previous century felt for theEnglish constitution which was regarded by many as an ideal, and partly perhaps because no othercountry of Europe could boast such a variety of the forms of commerce and property as England, andnowhere else was there such a great variety of personal relationships as a result. As h is excerpts fromEnglish newspapers show, Hegel followed with great excitement the parliamentary debates on the PoorLaw, the alms by means of which the nobility and the aristocracy of wealth attempted to appease the rage



of indigent masses.

This passage is followed by a much more detailed account of Hegel’s interest in the Prussian prisonsystem.

Unfortunately Rosenkranz mentions no dates. This is highly regrettable, especially as the reader of thisbook can see that he has misinterpreted Hegel’s attitude to England. We do not possess a single remarkby Hegel that would lend support to Rosenkranz’s view that Hegel was ever a great admirer of theEnglish constitution or that he regarded it as a model. Understandably enough he did not concern himselfclosely with England. On the contrary, the annotated translation of Cart which was written shortly afterhis arrival in Frankfurt and its sharp criticism of the reactionary policies of England seems to have arisenas an echo of the French Revolution. Thus Hegel’s interest in England seems to have grown inconnection with his research into the nature and laws of bourgeois society during his stay in Frankfurt. Itwould be both important and interesting to discover the precise moment at which Hegel took up thesestudies since, in view of the relatively swift changes in Hegel’s views during the years of crisis inFrankfurt, a knowledge of the exact dates is very necessary.

But Hegel’s interest was not confined to the English economy; he also took up the study of economictheory. With reference to this Rosenkranz states:

‘All of Hegel’s ideas about the nature of civil society, about need and labour, about the division of labourand the wealth of the estates, about poverty, the police, taxation, etc, are finally concentrated in acommentary on the German translation of Steuart’s book on political economy which he wrote between.19 February and 16 May 1799, and which has survived intact. It contains a number of magnificentinsights into politics and history and many subtle observations.

Steuart was a supporter of the mercantilist system. With noble passion and a host of interestingillustrations, Hegel attacked the deadness of this system and sought to preserve man’s soul (das Gemüt)in the midst of competition, the mechanisation of labour and of commerce.’

We need not waste words on these jejune, uncomprehending remarks. But even from this meagresummary we can see what an important document we have lost. It is perfectly obvious that Hegelapproached the problems of economics from the point of view of his critique of dead positivity and wewould have a much clearer picture of his early attitudes to bourgeois society if only we still possessedthese first investigations into economic theory.

Another factor here is that Rosenkranz’s account poses an insoluble problem. In the last sentenceRosenkranz claims that Hegel sought to save man’s soul amidst the mechanism of capitalist society. Thiswould suggest that Hegel’s thoughts were running on similar lines to those of the reactionary Romantics.In view of Hegel’s later development and the general character of what we have seen of his philosophicaland social attitudes, this sounds highly improbable. It is true enough that it was only later on that Hegelmade his famous remark that the rational is real and the real is rational- but in a general sense it may besaid to constitute the unconscious leitmotiv of all his thought from Frankfurt onwards. In the course ofour examination of Hegel’s economic notes in Jena we shall have occasion to remark on his closeness tothe ‘cynical’, the ruthlessly truthful views of the English classical economists who were perfectly willingto expose all the horrors and scandals of capitalist society, while asserting that capitalism was essentiallyprogressive. For this reason we believe that Rosenkranz simply misunderstood Hegel. However, since wecan offer no irrefutable proof of our assertion, and since it is an abstract possibility that Hegel aid for a



short time incline towards Romantic economics, we can only regard our rejection of Rosenkranz’sinterpretation as a hypothesis. Nevertheless, we believe that the reader who has followed the entiredevelopment of Hegel’s thought will agree that our hypothesis is correct,

It is not really possible to estimate the influence of Steuart’s particular economic principles on Hegel.Not only because the commentary has been lost and we cannot know which sections impressed Hegel,which he agreed with and which he rejected, but also because his reading of Steuart did not lead to anyimmediate attempt to apply the newly acquired economic principles to bourgeois society. What we havesaid earlier on about the discontinuities of the Frankfurt period applies with particular force here. Havingspent three months on the problems of economics Hegel simply turned to his chief work in Frankfurt,The Spirit of Christianity. Of course, as we shall see, this essay does not neglect the problems of society,but its immediate theme is different and the change in his socioeconomic views only makes itself felt in afew places and even then in the most general philosophical terms. Not until the period in Jena do wecome across manuscripts which directly concern themselves with social problems and among whicheconomics are given an explicit and prominent position. Nor can we know with any certainty just howimportant economic problems were in Hegel’s last work in Frankfurt, the Fragment of a System of 1800,since as we shall see, only two small fragments of this work have survived. But in the Jena manuscriptsthere is evidence that in addition to Steuart Hegel had read the works of Adam Smith. And given thegreat abstractness of Hegel’s statements about economics, his exclusive interest in the great, universalproblems, it is hard to show the impact of details.

All the same, it is highly probable that the study of Adam Smith was a turning-point in Hegel’sevolution. The problem which reveals the striking parallel between Hegel’s thought and the classicalEnglish economists is the problem of work as the central mode of human activity, as the chief method bywhich the identity of the subject-object (to use Hegel’s terminology at this time) can be achieved, as theactivity which annuls the deadness of objectivity, as the driving force of the process which turns mankindinto the product of its own activity. And it is highly probable that this problem emerges for the first timein the course of reading Adam Smith, since neither a study of the German economy which was sobackward in the context of the development of capitalism, nor a reading of Steuart could really providethe necessary stimulus.

However, this is another issue which finds us reduced to hypotheses and guesswork, and we give ourview in the full awareness that it is no more than a hypothesis. The first documentary evidence that Hegelhad read Smith is contained in the manuscripts of some lectures given in Jena in 1803/4 and which werepublished not long ago. Hegel refers here to Adam Smith’s statements about developing the forces ofproduction through the division of labour in the factory and he wrote the name of Smith in the margin.But as early as 1802, in the System of Ethics, a similar, if, as we shall see, a less well-developed attitudetowards work, the division of labour etc., occupies a central position. It is therefore almost certain thatHegel was acquainted with Adam Smith right from the beginning of his period in Jena and that he hadtherefore overcome, at least in part, some of the limitations and defects of Steuart’s theories.

Now it is our belief that Hegel’s interest in classical English economics actually dates from an earlierperiod, namely from the time when he was already working on the Fragment of a System. It is perfectlytrue that that work gives us no help at all, at any rate not directly, since the surviving fragments containonly very meagre references to economic problems and we have no idea how Hegel had thought of thestructure of the whole essay, nor indeed how far it was from completion. But in the course of some veryobscure reflections on the philosophy of religion there is a very remarkable passage which may help to



throw light on an extremely dark section of Hegel’s intellectual evolution.

In this fragment Hegel deals with the place of religion in man’s life, with the annulment of objectivity, ofdead positivity in relation to men and things. The social and philosophical problems that this discussionprovokes must be postponed for our detailed analysis of the entire fragment. We wish here to emphasiseonly one moment. Hegel writes:

‘But it is necessary that he [man] should also put himself into a permanent relation with objects and thusmaintain their objectivity to the point of completely destroying them’.

In the Frankfurt manner already familiar to us, Hegel analyses man’s relation to property and hence tothe dialectics of positivity and life. in this fragment he finds a solution in a very curious and highlymystical theory of sacrifice. He continues:

Man would still be unable to unite himself with the infinite life because he would have kept somethingfor himself, he would still be in a state of mastering things or caught in a dependence upon them. This isthe reason why he gives up only part of his property as a sacrifice, for it is his fate to possess property,and this fate is necessary and can never be discarded.... Only through this useless destruction, throughthis destruction for the sake of destruction, does he make good the destruction which he causes for hisown particular purposes. At the same time he has consummated the objectivity of the objects by adestruction unrelated to his own purposes, by that complete negation of relations which is called death.This aimless destruction for destruction’s sake sometimes happens, even if the necessity of a purposedestruction of objects remains, and it proves to be the only religious relation to absolute objects.’

At first sight this passage is certainly obscure enough. Sacrifice is thought of as a religious way out of thenecessary ‘fate’ of the world of property, of bourgeois society. What is of interest to us is the distinctionbetween sacrifice which is viewed as ‘useless destruction ‘destruction for destruction’s sake ‘ and aconcept of ‘purposive destruction’ which remains utterly unexplained in this context. The fragment fromwhich we are quoting is the last sheet, i.e. the conclusion of Hegel’s manuscript. If Hegel falls even tohint at what he means by what is obviously an important concept, this can only be explained 6v arguingthat it must have been elucidated in the earlier parts of the essay, now lost. But enough has been said toindicate that ‘purposive destruction’ refers to the normal, everyday relation of man to the world ofobjects. The point of the sacrifice is precisely to raise man beyond that realm.

We must postpone for the time being our discussion of the meaning of sacrifice for Hegel. Oursubsequent analyses, especially of his Jena theory of society, will show that the concept is not a religiousor mystical one but that it is intimately connected with the Illusions Hegel cherished at this time aboutthe possibility of resolving the contradictions of bourgeois society. What interests us here is rather theconcept with which it is contrasted, viz. the ‘purposive destruction’ of the objects. In order to decipherthis apparently no less obscure notion we must have recourse to the System of Ethics written two yearslater in Jena. It is evident that the idea is connected with work. Hegel defines work in the System ofEthics in language reminiscent of Schelling’s, as is much in the first part of his in stay in Jena, as the‘destruction of the object’, and indeed as its purposive destruction. The first dialectical triad from whichhis thought proceeds is: need, work, enjoyment. Work is then defined as follows:

‘The destruction of the object, or of intuition (Anschuauung), but as a moment (i.e. not finally andabsolutely) so that this destruction is replaced by another intuition or object; or else it establishes the pureidentity, activity of the act of destruction; ... it does not destroy the object as object in general, but in such



a way that another is put in its place ... this destruction, however, is work.

Admittedly, this definition does not contain the word ‘purposive’, but if we follow Hegel’s line ofthought carefully here and see how he moves from work to the tools of work and from tools to machines,it is evident that the idea is present and only the word is missing, and the word is only missing because itis supererogatory in this context. The connection between work and purposiveness remains henceforth abasic fact of Hegel’s thought. Even in his treatment of theology in the Logic work continues to play anextraordinarily important part, as Lenin has expressly pointed out in various notes.

We believe, therefore, that the conception of work which is so essential a category in the Jena System ofEthics was already present in the lost parts of the Frankfurt Fragment of a System. And this makes itextremely probable that Hegel studied Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as a preliminary to the latterwork. (We must add in passing that the works of both Steuart and Smith were available in Germany atthis time in various translations.)

In the circumstances it is exceptionally difficult to isolate the influence of particular English economistson particular ideas of Hegel’s. However, we may draw attention to a number of elements in Steuartwhich undoubtedly had a lasting effect. Above all, Steuart was, as Marx shows, the real historian ofeconomics among the classics; he was more interested in the social origins of capitalism than its innerworkings which he grasps less well than his successors.’ And at this stage in Hegel’s career, when he wasconcerned to establish the historical necessity of bourgeois society, the sheer volume of information inSteuart’s work and the constant comparisons between ancient and modern economics must have made adeep impression on him.

Beyond that, however, it can be argued that Hegel may have found it much easier to accept certainretrograde elements in Steuart, which had been superseded by Smith’s much clearer and more radicalinsights. No doubt, Hegel fought dead positivity wherever he found it and this would have led him tosympathise with Smith’s efforts to eliminate certain obsolete elements of the old economics, with itswholesale fetishisations. But such outmoded views may have deep roots in the economies of backwardnations. The relation between the economy and the state, for example, could only be analysedconsistently in England ‘ in the works of Smith and Ricardo. Marx has frequently shown how Frencheconomists of the Napoleonic era clung to all sorts of outmoded attitudes on that very question. This waseven truer of Germany, and the very much slower growth of economics in Germany meant thatmisconceptions about the economic role of the state lasted well beyond Hegel’s day. (One need thinkonly of Lassalle and Rodbertus.) When in addition we remind ourselves that Hegel in his Jena periodentertained many false hopes about the possibilities of resolving the antinomies of bourgeois societyalong Napoleonic lines, t is only too easy to understand why Hegel should have leant more towardsSteuart that Smith on this issue.

But there is one further respect in which Hegel never departs from a view held by Steuart, and neverreaches the point of understanding the great advances made by Adam Smith and Ricardo in formulatingthe laws underlying capitalist economics. We refer to the problem of surplus labour and surplus value.Marx, in his critique of Steuart’s economics, makes the point that Steuart remained imprisoned within theold theory of making a ‘profit upon alienation’. It is true that Steuart does distinguish between positiveand relative profit. The latter is profit upon alienation. Marx says of the former:

‘Positive profit arises from "augmentation of labour, industry and ingenuity". How it arises from thisSteuart makes no attempt to explain. The further statement that the effect of this profit is to augment and



swell "the public good" seems to indicate that Steuart means by it nothing but the greater mass ofuse-values produced in consequence of the development of the productive powers of labour, and that hethinks of this positive profit as quite distinct from capitalists’ profit-which always presupposes anincrease of exchange value.’

When we come to consider Hegel’s economic views in Jena we shall see how deeply entangled he is inideas of this sort which were so retrograde by English standards. The more progressive ideas that he hadgained from a study of Adam Smith and a greater awareness of the facts of the English economy doindeed enable him to perceive certain economic contradictions in capitalism, particular antagonismsbetween capital and labour and he is able to discuss these frankly. But he never succeeds in unveiling themystery of real capitalist exploitation, indeed he never approaches as close to it as the English bourgeoiseconomists. This is a barrier he will never surmount and the reason is not far to seek: his knowledge ofthe conflict between capital and labour only comes to him from reading about international economicrelations, not from his own experience, from a real insight into capitalism in ordinary life. That is to say,the barrier here is an intellectual mirror of the primitive economy of Germany.

Naturally, the size of the barrier is even further increased by Hegel’s own idealism, in particular by hisinversion of the relationship between law and the state on the one hand and economics on the other. But,as we have shown, his idealism is itself rooted in the same soil. Thus the economic backwardness ofGermany does not have any single direct influence on Hegel, nor does it directly distort many of his mostbrilliant insights into bourgeois society. Its effects are various, complex and often impinge on his thoughtin unexpected ways.

We shall discuss Hegel’s economic views in detail when we come to analyse his attempts to systematisethem in Jena. For the present it is enough if we briefly indicate the immediate effects of Hegel’s study ofeconomics and the nature of his approach to the problems of bourgeois society. The decisive moment iscontained in the long passage from the Fragment of a System already quoted: from this point onwardsHegel regards economics, the economic life of men, their determination by their economic relation toeach other and to things as an inexorable ‘fate’. (The Hegelian concept of fate will be analysed fully inthe next chapter.) We have already seen the seeds of this view in the first notes of the Frankfurt periodwhen Hegel made a number of complex observations on the possibility of harmonising property relationswith love.

But the idea was only treated sporadically there; here it becomes a crucial issue. Earlier on it was just oneof the problems of subjective love, here we find it defined as fate and opposed to the highestrepresentative of religion, Jesus. Part of Hegel’s conception of fate in Frankfurt is the idea that tostruggle against a hostile power has the same consequences as to evade it; this is in fact the expression ofthe inevitability of fate.’ However mystical many of Hegel’s utterances sound on this point, they yetcontain a much more realistic core of truth about history and society than is to be found in the otherGerman philosophers of this time: namely his rejection of the very common idea, still prevalent amongintellectuals, that a man can stand above his age and his society, that he can take up a theoretical orpractical position from a standpoint ‘external’ to his society.

In this sense property is treated in the Spirit of Christianity as an ineluctable fate. Since in that essayHegel’s reflections concentrate on the possibility of realising the teaching of Jesus in society, it is naturalthat he should keep returning to the passage in the New Testament about the rich young man whom Jesusadvised to dispose of his property to gain salvation. We may remember that Hegel had already referred to



this passage in Berne (p. 63), but there he had confined himself to the observation that it illustrated hisargument that Christianity is concerned exclusively with ‘private individuals’. At that stage he was notinterested in the economic implications.

Only now does he focus on the latter, but he does so with a vengeance. in the plan for The Spirit ofChristianity he is only concerned with Jesus’ escape from economics. Since property and possessionscannot constitute ‘a beautiful condition of life’ Jesus turns away from them. The next step in Hegel’sdevelopment is that he tacitly dismisses the various subjective compromises with which he hadexperimented. He says:

‘The kingdom of God is a condition in which God rules, and all determinations and rights are annulled;hence his words to the young man: go, sell that thou hast-it is hard for a rich man to enter into thekingdom of God;-hence, tool Christ’s renunciation of all possessions and all honour-these relations withfather, family, property cannot become beautiful, therefore they should not exist at all, so that at least theopposite state of affairs might not exist either.

No further consequences are deduced in the plan.

But the corresponding passage in the text of the full manuscript speaks a very different language. Weshall see that Hegel has a much closer, more approving attitude towards Jesus in this work than he everhad in Berne. Despite this the Berne writings never contained such scathing comments on Jesus’ teachingas this one. (In Berne Hegel’s satire had been aimed more at Christianity than at the church.) Hegelreverts to the parable of the rich young man and says:

‘About the command which follows to cast aside care for one’s life and to despise riches, as also aboutMatthew XIX, 23: "How hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven", there is nothing to besaid; it is a litany pardonable only in sermons and rhymes, for such a command is without truth for us.The fate of property has become too powerful for us to tolerate reflections on it, to find its abolitionthinkable. But this at least is to be noticed, that the possession of riches, with all the rights as well as allthe cares connected with it, brings into human life definitive details whose restrictedness prescribeslimits to the virtues, imposes conditions on them, and makes them dependent on circumstances. Withinthese limitations, there is room for duties and virtues, but they allow of no whole, of no complete life,because if life is bound up with objects, it is conditioned by something outside itself, since in that eventsomething is tacked on to life as its own which vet cannot be its property. Wealth at once betrays itsopposition to love, to the whole, because it is a right caught in a context of multiple rights, and thismeans that both its immediately appropriate virtue, honesty, and also the other virtues possibly within itssphere, are of necessity linked with exclusion, and every act of virtue is in itself one of a pair ofopposites. A syncretism, a service of two masters, is unthinkable because the indeterminate and thedeterminate cannot retain their form and still be bound together.’

We can see here that Hegel has gone far towards recognising the necessity of bourgeois society, eventhough his insight is still clothed in the mystical terminology of his view of fate. We see also, harkingback to the last chapter, that his attack on Kantian ethics, his assertion that a conflict of duties isinevitable is closely bound up with the conception of society now slowly crystallising. We shall now see,in the course of our analysis of the longest manuscript of the Frankfurt period, that on the basis of thisconception the tragic conflict of values now reaches right into Hegel’s view of religion and affects hisattitude towards Jesus himself, even though it was Jesus Hegel had looked to, in Frankfurt above all, toresolve all these conflicts. We shall also see that we are dealing with a contradiction which runs through



Hegel’s entire idealist dialectic, one which he will later attempt to resolve at a much higher level, butwithout any greater success.

Further reading:

Hegel’s First System, Herbert Marcuse, 1941Marx’s Theory of Alienation, Istvan Meszaros, 1970Hegel Theory of the Modern State, Shlomo Avineri, 1972

next section ...




http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/reason/marcuse1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/avineri5.htm

Georg LukacsFrom The Young Hegel, 1938

Written: 1938Source: The Young Hegel.Publisher: Merlin Press, 1975

3.5 Hegel’s economics during the Jena period

THE Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts contain a crucial criticism of The Phenomenology of Mindin the course of which Marx gives a precise account of the achievement and the failing of Hegel’s viewson economics.

‘Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence of man-asman’s essence in the act of proving itself. he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour.Labour is man’s coming to be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man’.

The present analysis of Hegel’s economic views will confirm the accuracy of Marx’s observations, bothin their positive and in their negative aspects. Hegel did not produce a system of economics within hisgeneral philosophy, his ideas were always an integral part of his general social philosophy. This is in facttheir merit. He was not concerned to produce original research within economics itself (for this was notpossible in Germany at the time), but instead he concentrated on how to integrate the discoveries of themost advanced system of economics into a science of social problems in general. Moreover-and this iswhere we find the specifically Hegelian approach-he was concerned to discover the general dialecticalcategories concealed in those social problems.

Needless to say, Hegel was not the first to attempt a synthesis of economics, sociology, history andphilosophy. The isolation of economics from other areas of the social sciences is a feature of thebourgeoisie in its decline. The leading thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rangedthrough the whole territory of the social sciences and even the works of the outstanding economists suchas Petty, Steuart and Smith constantly ventured forth beyond the frontiers of economics in the narrowersense. The real originality of Hegel’s exploitation of economic discoveries would only be determinablein the context of a history which sets out to explore the interplay between philosophy and economics inmodern times (and even in Plato and Aristotle). Unfortunately Marxist historiography has entirely failedto make such a study, so that almost all the necessary groundwork still remains to be done. The pointersto such work in the writings of the classics of Marxism-Leninism have been largely ignored.

Nevertheless, something can be said about Hegel’s originality here with relative accuracy. For thephilosophy of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, mathematics, geometry and the burgeoningnatural sciences and especially physics were the decisive models. The outstanding thinkers of the dayconsciously based their method on that of the natural sciences, even when their own subject-matter wasdrawn from the social sciences. (Of course for that very reason, it would be interesting and important to



discover whether and to what extent the study of economics had had any influence, on their generalmethodology.) Not until the advent of classical German idealism can any other methodological model befound. Naturally, this model also had its antecedents, I need refer only to Vico whose great achievementin this area has likewise been consigned to oblivion by the scholars of subsequent ages.

The shift in methodology is a product of the new em phasis on the ‘active side’ in philosophy, anemphasis to be found more clearly in Fichte than in Kant. But subjective idealism necessarily held a fartoo constricted and abstract view of human praxis. In subjective idealism all interest is concentrated onthat aspect of human praxis that can be included under the heading of ‘morality’. For this reason theeconomic views of Kant and Fichte had little bearing on their general method. Since Fichte viewedsociety, as well as nature ‘ as a merely abstract back drop for the activities of moral man, for ‘homonoumenon’, and since that backdrop confronted morality as an abstract negative, rigidly indifferent to themoral activity of man, it naturally did not occur to him to investigate the particular laws governing it. HisClosed Commercial State shows that he had made a study of the Physiocrats. However, the main ideas ofthe work are not influenced by the knowledge he had acquired. It is a dogmatic attempt to apply themoral principles of his philosophy to the various spheres of society and represents a Jacobin dictatorship‘of morality over the whole of human society

Kant’s thought is in some respects more flexible and less narrow than Fichte’s but he too does not getbeyond the point of applying general abstract principles to society. Kant had indeed read the works ofAdam Smith and gleaned from them an insight into the nature of modern bourgeois society. But when heattempts to put this knowledge in the service of a philosophy of history he arrives at quite abstractformulae. This is what happens in his interesting little essay Idea for a Universal History with aCosmopolitan Purpose, where he attempts to make a philosophical study of the principles of progress inthe development of society. He comes to the conclusion that Nature has furnished man with an ‘unsocialsociability’ as a result of which man is propelled through the various passions towards progress.

‘Man desires harmony; but Nature understands better what will profit his species; it desires conflict.’

The influence of English thinkers is clear enough. All that has happened is that the discussions havebecome more abstract without gaining any philosophical substance. For the end-product is nothing butthe bad infinity of the concept of infinite progress.

When considering Hegel’s critique of the ethics of subjective idealism, we saw how unremittingly hostilehe was to this moralistic narrowmindedness, this unyielding contrast between the subjective andobjective sides of social activity. We may infer from this that his view of economics differedfundamentally from that of Kant and Fichte. It was for him the most immediate, primitive and palpablemanifestation of man’s social activity. The study of economics should be the easiest and most direct wayto distil the fundamental categories of that activity. In our discussion of the Frankfurt period we pointedout in a rather different context that Hegel was decisively influenced by Adam Smith’s conception oflabour as the central category of political economy. Hegel’s extension of the idea and systematicexposition of the principles underlying it in The Plienomenology of mind have been fully defined byMarx in the work previously referred to

‘The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology ... is thus first that Hegel conceives theself-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and astranscendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objectiveman-true, because real man-as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to



himself as a species being, or his manifestation as a real species being (i.e. as a human being), is onlypossible by the utilisation of all the powers he has in himself and which are’ his as belonging to thespecies-something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all mankind, as theresult of history-is only possible by man’s treating these generic powers as objects: and this, to beginwith, is again only possible in the form of estrangement.’

Our examination of Hegel’s historical attitudes has shown us that he was guided in his ideas by an imageof modern bourgeois society, but that this image was not simply a reproduction of the retrogradeconditions of Germany in his age (even though this did sometimes colour his view of the world muchagainst his will). What he had in mind was rather a picture of bourgeois society in its most developedform as the product of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in Eng land. With this imagein his mind and with his insight into the role of human activity in society Hegel attempted to overcomethe Kantian and Fichtean dualism of subjectivity and objectivity, inner and outer, morality and legality.His aim was to comprehend socialised man whole and undivided as he really is within the concretetotality of his activity in society.

His efforts were directed at the ultimate questions of philosophy. Kant had greatly advanced the ‘activeside’ of philosophy, but the price he had paid was to tear philosophy into two parts, a theoretical and apractical philosophy which were only tenuously connected. In particular, Kant’s idealist sublimation ofmorality barred the way to an explanation of the concrete interplay between man’s knowledge and hispraxis. Fichte’s radicalism only deepened the gulf still further. Schelling’s objectivity did indeed take astep towards reconciling the two extremes but he was not sufficiently interested in the social sciences andhis knowledge of them was too slight to make any real difference here. Moreover, he was far toouncritical of the premises of Kant and Fichte.

It was left to Hegel to introduce the decisive change here and what enabled him to do so was thepossibility of exploiting the conception of labour derived from Adam Smith. We shall show later or that,given his own philosophical premises, it was not possible for Hegel to explore the economic, social andphilosophical implications of this idea to their fullest extent. But for the present the important thing is toemphasise that his approach to the problem was determined by his complete awareness of its crucialsignificance for the whole system.

To clarify the interrelations between knowledge and praxis it is essential to make the concept of praxis asbroad in thought as it is in reality, i.e. it is vital to go beyond the narrow confines of the subjective andmoralistic approach of Kant and Fichte. We have looked at the polemical aspect of this problem in somedetail. If we now move on to Hegel’s own views on economics in Jena we notice at once that he thinks ofhuman labour, economic activity as the starting-point of practical philosophy. in the System of EthicsHegel introduces his discussion of economics with these words:

‘In the potency of this sphere ... we find the very beginning of a thoroughgoing ideality, and the truepowers of practical intelligence.’

In the Lectures of 1805 this idea has gained in profundity. in a discussion of tools Hegel remarks:

‘Man makes tools because he is rational and this is the first expression of his will. This will is stillabstract will- the pride people take in their tools.

As is well known the ‘pure will’ is the central category of the ethics of Kant and Fichte. If Hegel nowsees tools as the first expression of the human will it is evident that he is employing the term in a way



directly opposed to theirs: for him it implies a conception of the concrete totality of man’s activity in theactual world. And if he describes this will as abstract this just means that he intends to proceed fromthere to the more complex and comprehensive problems of society, to the division of labour etc., i.e. thatone can only talk concretely Of these human activities by talking of them as a whole.

In economics Hegel was an adherent of Adam Smith. This is not to say that his understanding of all theimportant problems of economics was as profound as that of Smith. It is quite clear that he did not havethe sort of insight into the complex dialectic of the ‘esoteric’ economic issues that Marx reveals in theTheories of Surplus Value. The contradictions in the basic categories of capitalist economics that Marxunveils there never became apparent to Hegel. But what Hegel does succeed in doing is to clarify anumber of categories objectively implied by Smith’s economics to a degree that goes far beyond Smithhimself.

Hegel’s views on economics are put forward first in the System of Ethics. This work represents the highpoint of his experiments with Schelling’s conceptual system. In consequence the whole argument in thiswork is tortuous, over-complicated and over-elaborate. Moreover, the static mode of presentation oftenimpedes the dialectical movement implicit in the ideas themselves. Much more mature and characteristicof Hegel himself are the essays on Natural Law and the economic arguments. contained in the Lecturesof 1803-4 and especially those of 1805-6. The latter contain the most developed statement of hiseconomic views in jena before the Phenomenology and embody an attempt to trace a systematicdialectical progression from the simplest categories of labour right up to the problems of religion andphilosophy. Wherever possible we shall refer to this latest stage of his development. It goes withoutsaving that the Phenomenoloqy is a much more advanced stage even than this. But the particular methodused in that work has such profound implications for his general approach that it is very hard to selectextracts from it for discussion for our present purposes, although we shall of course return to it later on.

Since the literature on Hegel has with very few exceptions simply ignored his preoccupation witheconomics, and since even those bourgeois writers who were not unaware that it did form an importantpart of his work were nevertheless quite unable to assess its significance, it is absolutely essential in ourview to begin by stating just what his views were. Marx has shown both the importance and thelimitations of Hegel’s ideas in the passages we have quoted. But he presupposes a knowledge of thoseideas; it is obvious, then, that we must begin with exposition if we wish to be able to appreciate therightness of Marx’s assessment. We can reserve our own criticisms for a later stage.

It is very striking that even in his earliest attempts to systematise economic categories Hegel not onlyuses the triadic form out also that the various categories are grouped together by means of Hegel’s verycharacteristic mode of deduction. Thus in the System of Ethics he begins his discussion with the triad:need, labour and enjoyment and he advances from there to the other, higher triad: appropriation, theactivity of labour itself and possession of the product.’ We have already spoken of Hegel’s definition oflabour as a purposive annihilation of the object as man originally finds it and we have quoted Hegel’sown statements about this, In the Lectures of 1805 we find the whole matter treated much more clearly,both the content (the relations of man to the object in the work-process) and the form (the dialectics ofdeduction as the dialects of reality itself. Hegel writes:

‘Determination [dialectic] of the object. it is, therefore, content, distinction- distinction of the deductiveprocess, of the syllogism, moreover: singularity, universality and their mediations. But (a) it is existent,immediate; its mean is thinghood, dead universality, otherness, and (b) its extremes are particularity,



determinacy and individuality.

In so far as it is other ‘ its activity is the self’s-since it has none of its own; that extreme is beyond it. Asthinghood it is passivity, communication of [the self’s] activity, but as something fluid, it contains thatactivity within itself as an alien thing. Its other extreme is the antithesis (the particularity) of this itsexistence and of activity. It is passive; it is for another, it [merely] touches that other-it exists only to bedissolved (like an acid). This is its being, but at the same time, active shape against it, communication ofthe other.

‘Conversely, [dialectic of the subject]: in one sense, activity is only something communicated and it [theobject] is in fact the communication; activity is then pure recipient. in another sense, activity is activityvis-a-vis an other.

‘(The gratified impulse is the annulled labour of the self, this is the object that labours in its stead.Labour means to make oneself immanently [diesseitig] into a thing. The division of the impulsive self isthis very process of making oneself into an object. ( (Desire [by contrast] must always start again fromthe beginning, it does not reach the point of separating labour from itself.) ) The impulse, however, is theunity of the self as made into a thing.)

‘Mere activity is pure mediation, movement; the mere gratification of desire is the pure annihilation ofthe object.

The dialectical movement that Hegel attempts to demonstrate here has two aspects. on the one hand, theobject of labour, which only becomes a real object for man in and through labour, retains the characterwhich it possesses in itself. in the Hegelian view of labour one of the crucial dialectical moments is thatthe active principle (in German idealism; the idea, concept) must learn to respect reality just as it is. Inthe object of labour immutable laws are at work, labour can only be fruitful if these are known andrecognised. Oil the other hand, the object becomes another through labour. in Hegel’s terminology theform of its thinghood is annihilated and labour furnishes it with a new one. This formal transformation isthe result of labour acting )ii material alien to it vet existing by its own laws. At the same time thistransformation call only take place if it corresponds to the laws immanent in the object.

A dialectic of the subject corresponds to this dialectic in the object. In labour man alienates himself. AsHegel says, ‘he makes himself into a thing’ This gives expression to the objective laws of labour which.Is independent of the wishes and inclination of the individual. Through labour something universal arisesill man. At the same time, labour signifies the departure from immediacy, a break with the merelynatural, instinctual life of man. The immediate gratification of one’s needs signifies, on the one hand, thesimple annihilation of the object and not its transformation. On the other hand, thanks to its immediacy italways starts up again in the same place: it does not develop. Only if man places labour between hisdesire and its fulfilment, only if he breaks with the instinctual immediacy of natural man will he becomefully human.

The humanisation of man is a theme treated at length in the Lectures of 1805. Hegel’s idealist prejudicesmake themselves felt in his belief that man’s spiritual awakening, his transition from the world of dream,from the ‘night’ of nature to the first act of conceptualisation of naming, his first use of language, cantake place independently of labour. In tune with this he puts labour on a higher plane altogether, onewhere man’s powers are already developed. However, isolated remarks indicate that he did have someglimpses of the dialectic at work here. Thus in his discussion of the origins of language he shows how in



the process both object and the self come into being. In a marginal note, however, he observes:

‘How does this necessity or stability come about so that the self becomes its existence, or rather, that theself, that is its essence, becomes its existence? For existence is stable, thing-like; the self is the form ofpure unrest, movement or the night in which all is devoured. Or: the self is present, (universally)immediate in the name; now through mediation it must become itself through itself. Its unrest mustbecome stabilisation: the movement which annuls it as Unrest, as pure movement. This [movement] islabour. Its unrest becomes object, stabilised plurality, order. Unrest becomes order by becoming object.

The decisive importance of labour in the process of humanisation is shown most vividly when Hegelwrites his ‘Robinsonade’: his story of the transition to civilisation proper. His attitude to the so-calledstare of nature is quite free of the value judgement, whether positive or negative, which the state ofnature so frequently invited in the literature of the Enlightenment. His view is closest to that of Hobbesand is expressed most trenchantly in a paradoxical thesis which he defended at his doctoral examination:

‘The state of nature is not unjust, and for that very reason we must leave it behind us.’

The development of this idea leads Hegel as early as The System of Ethics to formulate his‘Robinsonade’ of ‘master and servant’. This theme is taken up again in The Phenomenology of Mind andremains an integral part of his philosophy ever after.

Let us now consider this, Hegel’s most mature statement of the transition from a state of nature ofcivilisation, as we find it set out in The Phenomenology of Mind. The starting-point is Hobbes’ bellumomnium contra omnes, the internecine wars of man in his natural condition which Hegel describes asannihilation without preservation. The subjugation of some people by others gives rise to the condition ofmastery and servitude. There is nothing novel or interesting in this. What is important is Hegel’s analysisof the relations between master and servant and between them and the world of things.

‘The master, however, is the power controlling this state of existence, for he has shown in the strugglethat he holds it to be merely something negative. Since he is the power dominating existence, while thisexistence again is the power controlling the other (the servant), the master holds, par conséquence, thisother in subordination. In the same way the master relates himself to the thing mediately through theservant. The servant being a self-consciousness in the 1 broad sense, also takes up a negative attitude tothings and annuls them; but the thing is, at the same time, independent for him, and, in consequence, hecannot, with all his negating get so far as to annihilate it outright and be done with it; that is to say, hemerely works on it. To the master, on the other hand, by means of this mediating process, belongs theimmediate relation, in the sense of the pure negation of it, in other words he gets the enjoyment. Whatmere desire did not attain, he now succeeds in attaining, viz. to have done with the thing, and findsatisfaction in enjoyment. Desire alone did not get the length of this because of the independence of thething. The master, however. who has interposed the servant between it and himself, thereby relateshimself merely to the dependence of the thing, and enjoys it without reserve. The aspect of itsindependence he leaves to the servant, who labours upon it.’

It is just this unconfined dominion, this wholly one-sided and unequal relationship that precipitates itsown reversal and makes of the master a purely ephemeral episode in the history of the spirit while theseminal moments in the development of man spring from the consciousness of the servant.

‘The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the servant.... Throughwork this consciousness comes to itself. In the moment which corresponds to desire in the case of the



master’s consciousness, the aspect of the non-essential relation to the thing seemed to fall to the lot of theservant, since the thing there retained its independence. Desire has reserved to itself the pure negating ofthe object and thereby unalloyed feeling of self. This satisfaction, however, is purely ephemeral, for itlacks objectivity or subsistence. Labour, on the other hand, is desire restrained and checked, it is theephemeral postponed; in other words labour shapes and fashions the thing. The negative relation to theobject passes into the form of the object, into something that is permanent and remains; because it is justfor the labourer that the object has independence. This negative mediating agency, this activity givingshape and form, is at the same time the individual existence, the pure self-existence of thatconsciousness, which now in the work it does is externalised and passes into the condition ofpermanence. The consciousness that toils and serves accordingly attains by this means the directapprehension of that independent being as its self.’

We know from Hegel’s philosophy of history that individuality is the principle that elevates the modernworld to a higher plane than that reached by antiquity. In his youth Hegel had completely overlooked thepresence of slavery in Greek civilisation and directed ‘his attention exclusively towards thenon-labouring freeman of the city-states. Here, however, the dialectics of work leads him to therealisation that the high-road of human development, the humanisation of man, the socialisation of naturecan only be traversed through work. Man becomes human only through work, only through the activityin which the independent laws governing objects become manifest, ‘forcing men to acknowledge themi.e. to extend the organs of their own knowledge, if they would ward off destruction. Unalloyedenjoyment condemns to sterility the master who interposes the labour of the servant between himself andthe objects and it raises the consciousness of the servant above that of his master in the dialectics ofworld-history. In the Phenomenology, Hegel sees quite clearly that the labour of man is sheer drudgerywith all the drawbacks that slavery entails for the development of consciousness.

But despite all that the advance of consciousness goes through the mind of the servant and not that of hismaster. in the dialectics of labour real self-consciousness is brought into being, the phenomenologicalagent that dissolves antiquity. The ‘configurations of consciousness’ which arise in the course of thisdissolution: scepticism, stoicism and the unhappy consciousness (primitive Christianity) withoutexception the products of the dialectics of servile consciousness.

Hegel’s discussion of work has already shown that the mere fact of work indicates that man hasexchanged the immediacy of nature for a universal mode of existence. As he investigates thedeterminations of work he uncovers a dialectic in which technology and society interact to the benefit ofboth. On the one hand, Hegel shows how tools arise out of the dialectics of labour. Starting with the man,who by using tools, exploits the laws of nature operative in work, he passes through various transitionsuntil he reaches the nodal point where the concept of the machine emerges. On the other hand, thoughinseparably from the first process, Hegel shows how the universal, i.e. the socially determined aspects ofwork lead to the increasing specialisation of particular types of labour, to a widening gulf between thelabour of the individual and the satisfaction of the needs of the individual. As we have emphasised, thesetwo processes are intimately connected. As a disciple of Adam Smith Hegel knows perfectly well that ahigh degree of technical competence presupposes a highly advanced division of labour. By the sametoken he is no less aware that the perfection of tools and the development of machinery itself contributesto the extension of the division of labour.

Descriptions of this process can be found in all of Hegel’s writings on economics. We shall quote hismost mature statement of the theme in the Lectures of 180 5-6:



‘The existence and scope of natural wants is, in the context of existence as a whole, vast in number; thethings that serve to satisfy them are processed, their universal inner possibility is posited as somethingexternal, as form. This processing is itself manifold; it is consciousness transforming itself into things.But since it is universal it becomes abstract labour. The wants are many; to absorb this quantity into theself, to work ‘ involves the abstraction of the universal images, but it is also a self-propelling formativeprocess. The self that exists for self is abstract; it does indeed labour, but its labour too is abstract. Needsare broken down into their various aspects; what is abstract in them is their self-existence, activity,labour. Because work is only performed for an abstract self-existence need the work performed is alsoabstract. This is the concept, the truth of the desire we have here. And the work matches the concept.There is no satisfaction of all the desires of the individual as he becomes an object for himself in the lifehe has brought forth. Universal labour, then, is division of labour, saving of labour. Ten men can make asmany pins as a hundred. Each individual, because he is an individual labours for one need. The contentof his labour goes beyond his own need; he labours for the needs of many, and so does everyone. Eachperson, then satisfies the needs of many and the satisfaction of his many particular needs is the labour ofmany others.’

Hegel also deduced technical progress from this dialectic of the increasing universality of labour.Naturally, his arguments relating to tools and machines were determined down to the very last detail byAdam Smith. Germany as it then was, and especially those parts known personally to Hegel, could notprovide him with the direct experience of the sort of economic realities that might yield such knowledge.on such matters he had to rely almost exclusively on what he had read about England and the Englisheconomy. His own contribution was to raise the dialectic immanent in economic processes to a consciousphilosophical level. The double movement which takes place in man and in the objects and instrumentsof work is on the one hand the increasing division of labour with its consequent abstraction. On the otherhand, there is a growing understanding of the laws of nature, of how to induce nature to work for man.Hegel always emphasises the connection between the division of labour (together with the human labourtransformed by it) and re 1 clinical progress. For example he demonstrates the necessity for machines inthe following passage:

‘His [i.e. man’s] labour itself becomes quite mechanical or belongs to a quite simple order of things. Butthe more abstract it is, the more he becomes pure abstract activity, and this enables him to withdraw fromthe work-process altogether and to replace his own labour with the activity of external nature. Herequires only movement and this he finds in external nature, or in other words, pure movement is just arelationship of the abstract forms of space and time-abstract external activity, machines.’

But Hegel is the disciple of Adam Smith (and his teacher Bergson) not only as an economist, but also asa critical humanist. That is to say, he is concerned to describe a process, to explain its subjective andobjective dialectic as fully as possible and to show that it is not just an abstract necessity but also thenecessary mode of human progress. But he does not close his eyes to the destructive effects of thecapitalist division of labour and of the introduction of machinery into human labour. And unlike theRomantic economists he does not present these features as the unfortunate side of capitalism which hasto be improved or eliminated so as to achieve a capitalism without blemish. On the contrary, he canclearly discern the necessary dialectical connections between these aspects of capitalism and itsprogressive implications for both economics and society.

In the Lectures of 1803-4, too, Hegel speaks of the movement towards universality as a result of thedivision of labour and the use of tools and machinery. He begins by illustrating the dialectical process, by



showing how the inventiveness of an individual may lead to a general improvement, a higher level ofuniversality:

‘Faced with the general level of skill the individual sets himself up as a particular, sets himself off fromthe generality and makes himself even more skilful than others, invents more efficient tools. But thereally universal element in his particular skill is his invention of something universal; and the othersacquire it from him thereby annulling his particularity and it becomes the common immediate possessionof all.’

Thus through the use of tools the activity of man becomes formal and universal, but it remains ‘hisactivity’. Not until the arrival of the machine is there any qualitative change. He goes on to describe theimpact of machinery on human labour.

‘With the advent of machines man himself annuls his own formal activity and makes the machineperform all his work for him. But this deception which he practises against nature and with the aid ofwhich he remains fixed within the particularity of nature, does not go unavenged. For the more he profitsfrom the machine, the more he subjugates nature, then the more degraded he himself becomes. He doesnot eliminate the need to work himself by causing nature to be worked on by machines, he onlypostpones that 1 necessity and detaches his labour from nature. His labour is no longer that of a livingbeing directed at living things, but evades this negative living activity. Whatever remains becomes moremechanical. Man only reduces labour for society as a whole, not for the individual; on the contrary, beincreases it since the more mechanical the work is the less valuable it is and so the more labour he mustperform to make good the deficiency.’

When one considers the time when these remarks were written, and especially the fact that they werewritten in Germany they clearly represent a quite remarkable insight into the nature of capitalism. Hecannot be reproached for thinking of capitalism as the only possible form of society and for regarding thefunction of machines in capitalism as their only possible function. On the contrary, it must be emphasisedthat Hegel displays the same refreshing lack of prejudice and narrowmindedness that we find in theclassical economists Smith and Ricardo: he can see the general progress in the development of the forcesof production thanks to capitalism and the capitalist division of labour while at the same time he isanything but blind to the dehumanisation of the workers that this progress entails. He regards this asinevitable and wastes no time in Romantic lamentations about it. At the same time he is much too seriousand honest a thinker to suppress or gloss over unpalatable truths.

This can be seen particularly clearly when he proceeds to argue that the division of labour in capitalismand the increase in the forces of production leads necessarily to the pauperisation of great masses ofpeople. The economic causes of this have already been indicated in the remarks just quoted. in theLectures of i 805-6 he describes the process even more vividly:

‘But by the same token the abstraction of labour makes man more mechanical and dulls his mind and hissenses. Mental vitality, a fully aware, fulfilled life degenerates into empty activity. The strength of theself manifests itself in a rich, comprehensive grasp of life; this is now lost. He can hand over some workto the machine; but his own actions become correspondingly more formal. His dull labour limits him to asingle point and the work becomes more and more perfect as it becomes more and more one-sided.... Noless incessant is the frenetic search -for new methods of simplifying work, new machines etc. Theindividual’s skill ‘s his method of preserving his own existence. The latter is subject to the web of chancewhich enmeshes the whole. Thus a vast number of people are condemned to utterly brutalising,



unhealthy and unreliable labour in workshops, factories and mines, labour which narrows and reducestheir skill. Whole branches of industry which maintain a large class of people can suddenly wither awayat the dictates of fashion, or a fall in prices following new inventions ‘n other countries, etc. And thisentire class is thrown into the depths of poverty where it can no longer help itself. We see the emergenceof great wealth and great poverty, poverty which finds it impossible to produce anything for itself.’

Hegel elsewhere presents this insight in summary, almost epigrammatic form:

‘Manufacturers and workshops found their existence on the misery of a class.’

Hegel here describes social realities with the same ruthless integrity and the same habit of plain speakingthat we find in the great classical economists. The insight is almost incredible by German standards ofthe time and it is not ‘n the least diminished by certain misconceptions that make their appearance fromtime to time, such as the illusion that the ills he describes could be remedied by the intervention of thestate or the government. For such idealistic illusions are always accompanied by a sober assessment ofthe limits imposed on state intervention. Moreover, as we know, he consistently opposes all theories thatadvocate what he regards as excessive government control of economics and society. Hegel does indeedcherish the belief that the state and the government have it in their power to reduce the glaring contrast ofwealth and poverty, and above all the notion that bourgeois society as a whole can be kept in a state of‘health’ despite the gulf between rich and poor. We can obtain a clear picture of Hegel’s illusions in thisrespect if we quote one of his remarks from the System of ethics:

‘The government should do all in its power to combat this inequality and the destruction it brings in itswake. it may achieve this immediately by making it harder to make great profits. If it does indeedsacrifice a part of a class to mechanical and factory labour, abandoning it to a condition of brutalisation,it must nevertheless preserve the whole in as healthy a state as is possible. The necessary or ratherimmediate way to achieve this is through a proper constitution of the class concerned.’

This amalgam of profound insight into the contradictions of capital’ ism and naive illusions about thepossible panaceas to be applied by the state marks the whole of Hegel’s thought from this time on. In ThePhilosophy of Right Hegel formulates his view in essentially the same terms but on a higher level ofabstraction. And we see that his illusions are largely unchanged except that he now regards emigrationand colonisation as possible methods of ensuring the continued health of capitalist society. He says there:

‘It hence becomes apparent that despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough, i.e. its ownresources are insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble.’

Thus in Hegel’s eyes capitalism becomes an objective totality moving in accordance with its ownimmanent laws. In the System of Ethics he gives the following description of the nature of its economicsystem (or as he calls it: the system of needs):

‘In this system the ruling factor appears to be the unconscious, blind totality of needs and the methods ofsatisfying them.... It is not the case that this totality lies beyond the frontiers of knowledge in great masscomplexes.... Nature itself ensures that a correct balance is maintained, partly by insignificant regulatingmovements, partly by greater movements when external factors threaten to disrupt the whole.

Thus, like Adam Smith, Hegel sees the capitalist economy as an autonomous self-regulating system. It isself-evident that in 1801 he could only think of disruptions as caused by external factors and not as crisesbrought about by contradictions within the system itself.



In the context of this self-propelling system of human activities, of objects which generate this activityand are activated by it, Hegel’s concept of alienation receives a new, more concrete definition. In theLectures of 1803-4 Hegel describes this system as follows:

‘These manifold exertions of needs as things must realise their concept, their abstraction. Their generalconcept must be a thing like them, but one which as an abstraction can represent them all. Money is thatmaterially existing concept, the unitary form or the’ possibility of all objects of need. By elevating needand work to this level of generality a vast system of common interest and mutual dependence is formedamong a great people, a self-propelling life of the dead, which moves hither and thither, blind andelemental and, like a wild animal, it stands in constant need of being tamed and kept under control.

This ‘self-propelling life of the dead’ ‘s the new form that ‘positivity’ assumes in Hegel’s thought:‘externalisation’. Work not only makes men human according to Hegel, it not only causes the vast andcomplex array of social processes to come into being, it also makes the world of man into an ‘alienated’,‘externalised’ world. Here, where we can see the concept embedded in its original, economic context, itsdual character becomes particularly obvious. The old concept of ‘positivity’ had placed a one-sidedemphasis on the dead, alien aspect of social institutions. In the concept of ‘externalisation’, however, wefind enshrined Hegel’s conviction that the world of economics which dominates man and which utterlycontrols the life of the individual, is nevertheless the product of man himself. It is in this duality that thetruly seminal nature of ‘externalisation’ is to be found. Thanks to it the concept could become thefoundation and the central pillar of the highest form of dialectics developed by bourgeois thought.

At the same time this duality points to the limitations of Hegel’s thought, the dangers implicit in hisidealism. His great sense of reality leads him to emphasise this duality in his analysis of bourgeoissociety and its development erecting its contradict ions into a conscious dialectic. Despite the sporadicappearance of illusions he is much too realistic even to play with the idea that ‘externalisation’ could beovercome within capitalist society itself. But, for that very reason, as our discussion of ThePhenomenology of Mind will show, he extends the concept of externalisation’ to the point where it can beannulled and reintegrated n the subject. Socially, Hegel cannot see beyond the horizon of capitalism.Accordingly, his theory of society is not utopian. But the idealist dialectic transforms the entire history ofman into a great philosophical utopia: into the philosophical dream that ‘externalisation’ can beovercome in the subject, that substance can be transformed into subject.

In the Lectures of 1805-6 Hegel gives a very simple and succinct definition of the process of‘externalisation’

‘(a) In the course of work 1 make myself into a thing, to a form which exists. (b) I thus externalise thismy existence, make it into something alien and maintain myself in it.

These latter remarks refer to exchange. The previous quotation alluded to money. Thus in the course ofour discussion of Hegel’s view of capitalist society we have advanced to the higher categories of politicaleconomy: exchange, commodity value, price and money.

Here too, in all essentials, Hegel’s remarks do not diverge from their basis in Adam Smith. But we knowfrom Marx’s criticism that this is where the contradictions in Smith’s work appear, rather than in what hehas to say about work and the division of labour. And naturally enough Hegel’s dependence on Smithshows to much greater disadvantage here than in his discussion of work. There was no economic realityin Germany at the time which might have given Hegel the opportunity to test these categories himself



and perhaps arrive at his own critique of Smith. Hegel’s achievement is that he was not confined to thecontemporary economic state of Germany, his philosophical examination of economic ideas does notreflect the backwardness of Germany, but is an attempt to analyse what his reading had taught him aboutthe English economy. Given the greater complexity of economic categories and the fact that theyinevitably contained contradictions, the effect on Hegel was that partly he just accepted thosecontradictions without comment and without recognising them for what they were and partly he wasforced to seek analogies in German conditions and to explain advanced theories in terms of the backwardGerman economy.

This situation is apparent at many points in Hegel’s discussions of economics, most of all in the fact thatdespite his fine dialectical appraisal of the philosophical implications of the Industrial Revolution inEngland he comes to the conclusion that the central figure in the whole development of capitalism wasthat of the merchant. Even where Hegel speaks with perfect justice about the concentration of capital andwhere he shows his understanding that this concentration is absolutely indispensable in capitalism hethinks of it in terms of merchants’ capital.

‘Like every mass wealth becomes a force. The increase of wealth takes place partly by chance, partlythrough its universality, through distribution. It is a focus of attraction which casts its net widely andcollects everything in its vicinity, just as a great mass attracts a lesser. To him that bath, more is given.Commerce becomes a complex system which brings in money from all sides, a system which a smallbusiness could not make use of.’

Hegel talks here in very general terms. But we shall later on consider other statements, especially thoseconcerned with the class structure of society from which it is apparent what when Hegel thinks ofconcentration of capital on a large scale, he always has merchants’ capital in mind. For example, in theSystem of Ethics he refers to commerce as the ‘highest point of universality’ in economic life. Thiscannot be a matter for astonishment if we reflect that the most developed form of manufacturing inGermany at that time was linen weaving which was still organised as a cottage industry.

For these reasons we can see all sorts of uncertainties and confusions Hegel’s definition of economiccategories, especially in his notion of value. Hegel never understood the crucial development in theclassical theory of value, viz. the exploitation of the worker in industrial production. It is in this lightabove all that we may interpret Marx’s criticism of Hegel, quoted above, that Hegel only took thepositive ideas about labour from classical economics, and not the negative sides. We have seen that heclearly sees and frankly describes the facts about the division of society into rich and poor. However,many progressive French and English writers saw and proclaimed this before him without coming anycloser than he to a labour theory of value.

Hegel’s confusion here is reflected also in his definition of value. He constantly hesitated betweensubjective and objective definitions, without ever coming down on one side or the other. Thus in the laterLectures we find such subjective definitions as: ‘Value is my opinion of the matter. And this despiteearlier statements, both in the same lectures and elsewhere, from which it is quite clear that he wishes tothink of value as an objective economic reality. Thus in the System of Ethics he says that the essence ofvalue lies in the equality of one thing with another:

‘The abstraction of this equality of one thing with another, its concrete un ty and legal status is value; orrather value is itself equality as an abstraction, the ideal measure; whereas the real, empirical measure isthe prices



However, all these unclarities and hesitations, and the confusion of economic and legal categories suchas we find in this quotation and which we shall consider in detail later on, do not prevent Hegel frompursuing the dialectics of objective and subjective, universal and particular right into the heart of thecategories of economics. In the process he brings a mobility into economic thought which was onlyobjectively present in the works of the classical economists, or to put it in Hegelian terms. a mobilitywhich was only present in itself, implicitly, and not explicitly, for us. Not until forty years later in thebrilliant essay of the young Engels in the Deutsch-Franzoesische Jahrbucher do the dialectical structureand the interplay of the various categories of economics come to the surface once again, and this time, ofcourse, at quite a different Hegel’s term, and who saw money as no more than a relation. Second,theoretical level, both economically and philosophically.

For example, in his analysis of exchange Hegel writes as follows:

‘The concept [of exchange] is mobile, it is destroyed in its antithesis, it absorbs the other thing opposedto it, replacing that which it previously possessed; and it does so in such a way that that which existedbefore as an idea, now enters as a reality ... an ideal which by its nature was at first a practical ideal,existing prior to enjoyment. Externally, exchange is two-fold, or rather a repetition of itself., for theuniversal object, superfluity, and then the particular, viz. need, is in substance a single object, but its twoforms are necessarily repetitions of the same thing. But the concept, the essence of the matter istransformation ... and its absolute nature is the identity of opposites.’

The dialectic -of the categories of economics is much more striking in Hegel’s discussion of moneywhere the reader can see even more clearly how in his view the structure of capitalism culminates intrade. Writing about the role of money he says:

‘All needs are comprehended in this single need. Need which had been a need for a thing, now becomesmerely an idea, unenjoyable in itself. The object here is valid only because it means something, and nolonger in itself, i.e. to satisfy a need. it is something utterly inward. The ruling principle of the merchantclass then is the realisation of the identity of the essence and the thing: a man is as real as the money heowns. Imagination vanishes, the meaning has immediate existence; the essence of the matter is the matteritself., value is hard cash. The formal principle of reason is present here. (But this money which bears themeaning of all needs is itself only an immediate thing) — it is the abstraction from all particularity,character, etc., individual skill. The outlook of the merchant is this hard-headedness in which theparticular is wholly estranged and no longer counts; only the strict letter of the law has value. The billmust be honoured whatever happens if family, wealth, position, life are sacrificed. No quarter is given..... Thus in this abstraction spirit has become object as selfless inwardness. But that which is within is theEgo itself, and this Ego is its existence. The internal constellation is not the lifeless thing -money, butlikewise the Ego.

For all the obscurity of parts of this argument two highly progressive and extremely profound ideasemerge from these passages. First, Hegel has a much greater understanding of the nature of money thanmany eighteenth century English writers on economics (such as Hume) who failed to recognise theobjectivity of money, its reality as a ‘thing’ in Hegel’s term, and who saw money as no more than arelation. Second, here and in a number of other places it is evident that Hegel had at least a glimmeringof the problem that Marx was later to describe as ‘fetishism’. He stresses the objectivity of money, itsthinghood, but sees no less clearly that in the last resort it is a social relation between men. This socialrelation appears here in the form of an idealist mystification (The Ego), but this does not detract in the



least from the brilliance of Hegel’s insight; it merely shows us once again the intimate connectionsbetween his achievements and his failings.

Further reading:

Hegel’s First System, Herbert Marcuse, 1941Marx’s Theory of Alienation,, Istvan Meszaros, 1970Hegel Theory of the Modern State, Shlomo Avineri, 1972

... previous section






Karl MarxCapital Volume One

1873AFTERWARD TO THESECOND GERMAN EDITION

I must start by informing the readers of the first edition about the alterations made in the second edition.One is struck at once by the clearer arrangement of the book. Additional notes are everywhere marked asnotes to the second edition. The following are the most important points with regard to the text itself:

In Chapter I, Section 1, the derivation of value from an analysis of the equations by which everyexchange-value is expressed has been carried out with greater scientific strictness; likewise theconnexion between the substance of value and the determination of the magnitude of value by sociallynecessary labour-time, which was only alluded to in the first edition, is now expressly emphasised.Chapter I, Section 3 (the Form of Value), has been completely revised, a task which was made necessaryby the double exposition in the first edition, if nothing else. — Let me remark, in passing, that thatdouble exposition had been occasioned by my friend, Dr. L Kugelmann in Hanover. I was visiting him inthe spring of 1867 when the first proof-sheets arrived from Hamburg, and he convinced me that mostreaders needed a supplementary, more didactic explanation of the form of value. — The last section ofthe first chapter, "The Fetishism of Commodities, etc.," has largely been altered. Chapter III, Section I(The Measure of Value), has been carefully revised, because in the first edition this section had beentreated negligently, the reader having been referred to the explanation already given in "Zur Kritik derPolitischen Oekonomie," Berlin 1859. Chapter VII, particularly Part 2 [Eng. ed., Chapter IX, Section 2],has been re-written to a great extent.

It would be a waste of time to go into all the partial textual changes, which were often purely stylistic.They occur throughout the book. Nevertheless I find now, on revising the French translation appearing inParis, that several parts of the German original stand in need of rather thorough remoulding, other partsrequire rather heavy stylistic editing, and still others painstaking elimination of occasional slips. Butthere was no time for that. For I had been informed only in the autumn of 1871, when in the midst ofother urgent work, that the book was sold out and that the printing of the second edition was to begin inJanuary of 1872.

The appreciation which "Das Kapital" rapidly gained in wide circles of the German working-class is thebest reward of my labours. Herr Mayer, a Vienna manufacturer, who in economic matters represents thebourgeois point of view, in a pamphlet published during the Franco-German War aptly expounded theidea that the great capacity for theory, which used to be considered a hereditary German possession, hadalmost completely disappeared amongst the so-called educated classes in Germany, but that amongst itsworking-class, on the contrary, that capacity was celebrating its revival.

To the present moment Political Economy, in Germany, is a foreign science. Gustav von Gulich in his"Historical description of Commerce, Industry," &c., [1] especially in the two first volumes published in1830, has examined at length the historical circumstances that prevented, in Germany, the development

Capital Vol. I — 1873 Afterword

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm (1 of 6) [11/06/2002 17:34:05]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1



of the capitalist mode of production, and consequently the development, in that country, of modernbourgeois society. Thus the soil whence Political Economy springs was wanting. This "science" had to beimported from England and France as a ready-made article; its German professors remained schoolboys.The theoretical expression of a foreign reality was turned, in their hands, into a collection of dogmas,interpreted by them in terms of the petty trading world around them, and therefore misinterpreted. Thefeeling of scientific impotence, a feeling not wholly to be repressed, and the uneasy consciousness ofhaving to touch a subject in reality foreign to them, was but imperfectly concealed, either under a paradeof literary and historical erudition, or by an admixture of extraneous material, borrowed from theso-called "Kameral" sciences, a medley of smatterings, through whose purgatory the hopeful candidatefor the German bureaucracy has to pass.

Since 1848 capitalist production has developed rapidly in Germany, and at the present time it is in thefull bloom of speculation and swindling. But fate is still unpropitious to our professional economists. Atthe time when they were able to deal with Political Economy in a straightforward fashion, moderneconomic conditions did not actually exist in Germany. And as soon as these conditions did come intoexistence, they did so under circumstances that no longer allowed of their being really and impartiallyinvestigated within the bounds of the bourgeois horizon. In so far as Political Economy remains withinthat horizon, in so far, i.e., as the capitalist regime is looked upon as the absolutely final form of socialproduction, instead of as a passing historical phase of its evolution, Political Economy can remain ascience only so long as the class-struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadicphenomena.

Let us take England. Its Political Economy belongs to the period in which the class-struggle was as yetundeveloped. Its last great representative, Ricardo, in the end, consciously makes the antagonism of classinterests, of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting-point of his investigations, naively takingthis antagonism for a social law of Nature. But by this start the science of bourgeois economy hadreached the limits beyond which it could not pass. Already in the lifetime of Ricardo, and in oppositionto him, it was met by criticism, in the person of Sismondi. [2]

The succeeding period, from 1820 to 1830, was notable in England for scientific activity in the domainof Political Economy. It was the time as well of the vulgarising and extending of Ricardo's theory, as ofthe contest of that theory with the old school. Splendid tournaments were held. What was done then, islittle known to the Continent generally, because the polemic is for the most part scattered through articlesin reviews, occasional literature and pamphlets. The unprejudiced character of this polemic — althoughthe theory of Ricardo already serves, in exceptional cases, as a weapon of attack upon bourgeoiseconomy — is explained by the circumstances of the time. On the one hand, modern industry itself wasonly just emerging from the age of childhood, as is shown by the fact that with the crisis of 1825 it forthe first time opens the periodic cycle of its modern life. On the other hand, the class-struggle betweencapital and labour is forced into the background, politically by the discord between the governments andthe feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance on the one hand, and the popular masses, led bythe bourgeoisie, on the other; economically by the quarrel between industrial capital and aristocraticlanded property- -a quarrel that in France was concealed by the opposition between small and largelanded property, and that in England broke out openly after the Corn Laws. The literature of PoliticalEconomy in England at this time calls to mind the stormy forward movement in France after Dr.Quesnay's death, but only as a Saint Martin's summer reminds us of spring. With the year 1830 came thedecisive crisis.



In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class-struggle,practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It soundedthe knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theoremor that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politicallydangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuinescientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic. Still, even the obtrusivepamphlets with which the Anti-Corn Law League, led by the manufacturers Cobden and Bright, delugedthe world, have a historic interest, if no scientific one, on account of their polemic against the landedaristocracy. But since then the Free-trade legislation, inaugurated by Sir Robert Peel, has deprived vulgareconomy of this its last sting.

The Continental revolution of 1848-9 also had its reaction in England. Men who still claimed somescientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of theruling-classes tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to beignored, of the proletariat. Hence a shallow syncretism of which John Stuart Mill is the bestrepresentative. It is a declaration of bankruptcy by bourgeois economy, an event on which the greatRussian scholar and critic, N. Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the light of a master mind in his "Outlinesof Political Economy according to Mill."

In Germany, therefore, the capitalist mode of production came to a head, after its antagonistic characterhad already, in France and England, shown itself in a fierce strife of classes. And meanwhile, moreover,the German proletariat had attained a much more clear class-consciousness than the German bourgeoisie.Thus, at the very moment when a bourgeois science of Political Economy seemed at last possible inGermany, it had in reality again become impossible.

Under these circumstances its professors fell into two groups. The one set, prudent, practical businessfolk, flocked to the banner of Bastiat, the most superficial and therefore the most adequate representativeof the apologetic of vulgar economy; the other, proud of the professorial dignity of their science,followed John Stuart Mill in his attempt to reconcile irreconcilables. Just as in the classical time ofbourgeois economy, so also in the time of its decline, the Germans remained mere schoolboys, imitatorsand followers, petty retailers and hawkers in the service of the great foreign wholesale concern.

The peculiar historical development of German society therefore forbids, in that country, all originalwork in bourgeois economy; but not the criticism of that economy. So far as such criticism represents aclass, it can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode ofproduction and the final abolition of all classes — the proletariat.

The learned and unlearned spokesmen of the German bourgeoisie tried at first to kill "Das Kapital" bysilence, as they had managed to do with my earlier writings. As soon as they found that these tactics nolonger fitted in with the conditions of the time, they wrote, under pretence of criticising my book,prescriptions "for the tranquillisation of the bourgeois mind." But they found in the workers' press — see,e.g., Joseph Dietzgen's articles in the Volksstaat — antagonists stronger than themselves, to whom (downto this very day) they owe a reply. [3]

An excellent Russian translation of "Das Kapital" appeared in the spring of 1872. The edition of 3,000copies is already nearly exhausted. As early as 1871, N. Sieber, Professor of Political Economy in theUniversity of Kiev, in his work "David Ricardo's Theory of Value and of Capital," referred to my theoryof value, of money and of capital, as in its fundamentals a necessary sequel to the teaching of Smith and



Ricardo. That which astonishes the Western European in the reading of this excellent work, is theauthor's consistent and firm grasp of the purely theoretical position.

That the method employed in "Das Kapital" has been little understood, is shown by the variousconceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of it.

Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I treat economicsmetaphysically, and on the other hand — imagine! — confine myself to the mere critical analysis ofactual facts, instead of writing receipts (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future. In answer to thereproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it: "In so far as it deals with actual theory, the method ofMarx is the deductive method of the whole English school, a school whose failings and virtues arecommon to the best theoretic economists." M. Block — "Les Théoriciens du Socialisme en Allemagne.Extrait du Journal des Economistes, Juillet et Août 1872" — makes the discovery that my method isanalytic and says: "Par cet ouvrage M. Marx se classe parmi les esprits analytiques les plus eminents."German reviews, of course, shriek out at "Hegelian sophistics." The European Messenger of St.Petersburg in an article dealing exclusively with the method of "Das Kapital" (May number, 1872, pp.427-436), finds my method of inquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation, unfortunately,German- dialectical. It says: "At first sight, if the judgment is based on the external form of thepresentation of the subject, Marx is the most ideal of ideal philosophers, always in the German, i.e., thebad sense of the word. But in point of fact he is infinitely more realistic than all his forerunners in thework of economic criticism. He can in no sense be called an idealist." I cannot answer the writer betterthan by aid of a few extracts from his own criticism, which may interest some of my readers to whom theRussian original is inaccessible.

After a quotation from the preface to my "Criticism of Political Economy," Berlin, 1859, pp. IV-VII,where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on:

"The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whoseinvestigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs thesephenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period.Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transitionfrom one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered,he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx onlytroubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successivedeterminate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that servehim for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both thenecessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first mustinevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they areconscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governedby laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary,determining that will, consciousness and intelligence.... If in the history of civilisation the consciouselement plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter iscivilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness.That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Suchan inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but withanother fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately aspossible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution;



but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences andconcatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said,the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the presentor the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary,in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own.... As soon as society has outlived a givenperiod of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also toother laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution inother branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when theylikened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows thatsocial organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the samephenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organismsas a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organsfunction, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. Heasserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population.... With thevarying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them varytoo. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economicsystem established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aimthat every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquirylies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a givensocial organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact,Marx's book has."

Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concernsmy own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?

Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has toappropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their innerconnexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is donesuccessfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if wehad before us a mere a priori construction.

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, thelife-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of "the Idea," heeven transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world isonly the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea." With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else thanthe material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was stillthe fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of "Das Kapital," it was the good pleasure of thepeevish, arrogant, mediocre 'Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in sameway as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a "dead dog." I thereforeopenly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on thetheory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification whichdialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its generalform of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It mustbe turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.



In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and toglorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdomand its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of theexisting state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of itsinevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement,and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it letsnothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practicalbourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, andwhose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but inits preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drumdialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.

Karl MarxLondonJanuary 24, 1873

Footnotes

[1] Geschichtliche Darstellung des Handels, der Gewerbe und des Ackerbaus, &c.. von Gustav vonGulich. 5 vols., Jena. 1830-45.

[2] See my work "Zur Kritik, &c.," p. 39.

[3] The mealy-mouthed babblers of German vulgar economy fell foul of the style of my book. No onecan feel the literary shortcomings in "Das Kapital" more strongly than I myself. Yet I will for the benefitand the enjoyment of these gentlemen and their public quote in this connexion one English and oneRussian notice. The Saturday Review always hostile to my views, said in its notice of the first edition:"The presentation of the subject invests the driest economic questions with a certain peculiar charm." The"St. Petersburg Journal" (Sankt-Peterburgskie Viedomosti), in its issue of April 8 (20), 1872, says: "Thepresentation of the subject, with the exception of one or two exceptionally special parts, is distinguishedby its comprehensibility by the general reader, its clearness, and, in spite of the scientific intricacy of thesubject, by an unusual liveliness. In this respect the author in no way resembles ... the majority ofGerman scholars who ... write their books in a language so dry and obscure that the heads of ordinarymortals are cracked by it."

Transcribed by Hinrich KuhlsHtml Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)

Prefaces and Afterwords

Capital Volume One- Index



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/part0.htm


Frederick EngelsLudwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Part 2: Materialism

The great basic question of all philosophy,especially of more recent philosophy, is thatconcerning the relation of thinking and being. Fromthe very early times when men, still completelyignorant of the structure of their own bodies, underthe stimulus of dream apparitions (1) came tobelieve that their thinking and sensation were notactivities of their bodies, but of a distinct soulwhich inhabits the body and leaves it at death —from this time men have been driven to reflectabout the relation between this soul and the outsideworld. If, upon death, it took leave of the body andlived on, there was no occassion to invent yetanother distinct death for it. Thus arose the idea ofimmortality, which at that stage of developmentappeared not at all as a consolation but as a fateagainst which it was no use fighting, and oftenenough, as among the Greeks, as a positivemisfortune. The quandry arising from the commonuniversal ignorance of what to do with this soul,once its existence had been accepted, after thedeath of the body, and not religious desire forconsolation, led in a general way to the tediousnotion of personal immortality. In an exactlysimilar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in thefurther development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a processof abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectualdevelopment, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds ofmen the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.

Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of the spirit to nature — the paramountquestion of the whole of philosophy — has, no less than all religion, its roots in the narrow-minded andignorant notions of savagery. But this question could for the first time be put forward in its wholeacuteness, could achieve its full significance, only after humanity in Europe had awakened from the longhibernation of the Christian Middle Ages. The question of the position of thinking in relation to being, aquestion which, by the way, had played a great part also in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, thequestion: which is primary, spirit or nature — that question, in relation to the church, was sharpened into

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy — Part 2: Materialism

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch02.htm (1 of 7) [11/06/2002 17:34:07]

this: Did God create the world or has the world been in existence eternally?

The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those whoasserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation insome form or other — and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes stillmore intricate and impossible than in Christianity — comprised the camp of idealism. The others, whoregarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.

These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing else but this; and here toothey are not used in any other sense. What confusion arises when some other meaning is put to them willbe seen below.

But the question of the relation of thinking and being had yet another side: in what relation do ourthoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of thecognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correctreflection of reality? In philosophical language this question is called the question of identity of thinkingand being, and the overwhelming majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question.With Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident; for what we cognize in the real world isprecisely its thought-content — that which makes the world a gradual realization of the absolute idea,which absolute idea has existed somewhere from eternity, independent of the world and before the world.But it is manifest without further proof that thought can know a content which is from the outset athought-content. It is equally manifest that what is to be proved here is already tacitly contained in thepremises. But that in no way prevents Hegel from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of theidentity of thing and being that his philosophy, because it is correct for his thinking, is therefore the onlycorrect one, and that the identity of thinking and being must prove its validity by mankind immediatelytranslating his philosophy from theory into practice and transforming the whole world according toHegelian principles. This is an illusion which he shares with well-nigh all philosophers.

In addition, there is yet a set of different philosophers — those who question the possibility of anycognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition, of the world. To them, among the more modern ones,belong Hume and Kant, and they played a very important role in philosophical development. What isdecisive in the refutation of this view has already been said by Hegel, in so far as this was possible froman idealist standpoint. The materialistic additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than profound.The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely,experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process bymaking it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposesinto the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”. The chemicalsubstances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such “things-in-themselves” untilorganic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” became athing for us — as, for instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble togrow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar. For 300years, the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with 100, 1,000, 10,000 to 1 chances in its favor, butstill always a hypothesis. But then Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not onlydeduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in theheavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when [Johann] Galle really found this planet[Neptune, discovered 1846, at Berlin Observatory], the Copernican system was proved. If, nevertheless,the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian conception in Germany, and the agnostics that



of Hume in England (where in fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their theoretical andpractical refutation accomplished long ago, scientifically a regression and practically merely ashamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world.

But during this long period from Descartes to Hegel and from Hobbes to Feuerbach, these philosopherswere by no means impelled, as they thought they were, solely by the force of pure reason. On thecontrary, what really pushed them forward most was the powerful and ever more rapidly onrushingprogress of natural science and industry. Among the materialists this was plain on the surface, but theidealist systems also filled themselves more and more with a materialist content and attemptedpantheistically to reconcile the antithesis between mind and matter. Thus, ultimately, the Hegeliansystem represents merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content.

It is, therefore, comprehensible that Starcke in his characterization of Feuerbach first of all investigatesthe latter’s position in regard to this fundamental question of the relation of thinking and being. After ashort introduction, in which the views of the preceding philosophers, particularly since Kant, aredescribed in unnecessarily ponderous philosophical language, and in which Hegel, by an all tooformalistic adherence to certain passages of his works, gets far less his due, there follows a detaileddescription of the course of development of Feuerbach’s “metaphysics” itself, as this course wassuccessively reflected in those writings of this philosopher which have a bearing here. This description isindustriously and lucidly elaborated; only, like the whole book, it is loaded with a ballast of philosophicalphraseology by no means everywhere unavoidable, which is the more disturbing in its effect the less theauthor keeps to the manner of expression of one and the same school, or even of Feuerbach himself, andthe more he interjects expressions of very different tendencies, especially of the tendencies now rampantand calling themselves philosophical.

The course of evolution of Feuerbach is that of a Hegelian — a never quite orthodox Hegelian, it is true— into a materialist; an evolution which at a definite stage necessitates a complete rupture with theidealist system of his predecessor. With irresistible force, Feuerbach is finally driven to the realizationthat the Hegelian premundane existence of the “absolute idea”, the “pre-existence of the logicalcategories” before the world existed, is nothing more than the fantastic survival of the belief in theexistence of an extra-mundane creator; that the material, sensuously perceptible world to which weourselves belong is the only reality; and that our consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuousthey may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, butmind itself is merely the highest product of matter. This is, of course, pure materialism. But, having gotso far, Feuerbach stops short. He cannot overcome the customary philosophical prejudice, prejudice notagainst the thing but against the name materialism. He says:

“To me materialism is the foundation of the edifice of human essence and knowledge; but to me it is notwhat it is to the physiologist, to the natural scientists in the narrower sense, for example, to Moleschott,and necessarily is from their standpoint and profession, namely, the edifice itself. Backwards I fullyagree with the materialists; but not forwards.”

Here, Feuerbach lumps together the materialism that is a general world outlook resting upon a definiteconception of the relation between matter and mind, and the special form in which this world outlookwas expressed at a definite historical stage — namely, in the 18th century. More than that, he lumps itwith the shallow, vulgarized form in which the materialism of the 18th century continues to exist today inthe heads of naturalists and physicians, the form which was preached on their tours in the fifties by



Buchner, Vogt, and Moleschott. But just as idealism underwent a series of stages of development, so alsodid materialism. With each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science, it has tochange its form; and after history was also subjected to materialistic treatment, a new avenue ofdevelopment has opened here, too.

The materialism of the last century was predominantly mechanical, because at that time, of all naturalsciences, only mechanics, and indeed only the mechanics of solid bodies — celestial and terrestrial — inshort, the mechanics of gravity, had come to any definite close. Chemistry at that time existed only in itsinfantile, phlogistic form [A]. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; vegetable and animal organisms hadbeen only roughly examined and were explained by purely mechanical causes. What the animal was toDescartes, man was to the materialists of the 18th century — a machine. This exclusive application of thestandards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature — in which processes the laws ofmechanics are, indeed, also valid, but are pushed into the backgrounds by other, higher laws —constitutes the first specific but at that time inevitable limitations of classical French materialism.

The second specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as aprocess, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development. This was in accordance with thelevel of the natural science of that time, and with the metaphysical, that is, anti-dialectical manner ofphilosophizing connected with it. Nature, so much was known, was in eternal motion. But according tothe ideas of that time, this motion turned, also eternally, in a circle and therefore never moved from thespot; it produced the same results over and over again. This conception was at that time inevitable. TheKantian theory of the origin of the Solar System [that the Sun and planets originated from incandescentrotating nebulous masses] had been put forward but recently and was still regarded merely as a curiosity.The history of the development of the Earth, geology, was still totally unknown, and the conception thatthe animate natural beings of today are the result of a long sequence of development from the simple tothe complex could not at that time scientifically be put forward at all. The unhistorical view of naturewas therefore inevitable. We have the less reason to reproach the philosophers of the 18th century on thisaccount since the same thing is found in Hegel. According to him, nature, as a mere “alienation” of theidea, is incapable of development in time — capable only of extending its manifoldness in space, so thatit displays simultaneously and alongside of one another all the stages of development comprised in it,and is condemned to an eternal repetition of the same processes. This absurdity of a development inspace, but outside of time — the fundamental condition of all development — Hegel imposes uponnature just at the very time when geology, embryology, the physiology of plants and animals, andorganic chemistry were being built up, and when everywhere on the basis of these new sciences brilliantforeshadowings of the later theory of evolution were appearing (for instance, Goethe and Lamarck). Butthe system demanded it; hence the method, for the sake of the system, had to become untrue to itself.

This same unhistorical conception prevailed also in the domain of history. Here the struggle against theremnants of the Middle Ages blurred the view. The Middle Ages were regarded as a mere interruption ofhistory by a thousand years of universal barbarism. The great progress made in the Middle Ages — theextension of the area of European culture, the viable great nations taking form there next to each other,and finally the enormous technical progress of the 14th and 15th centuries — all this was not seen. Thusa rational insight into the great historical interconnectedness was made impossible, and history served atbest as a collection of examples and illustrations for the use of philosophers.

The vulgarizing pedlars, who in Germany in the fifties dabbled in materialism, by no means overcamethis limitation of their teachers. All the advances of natural science which had been made in the



meantime served them only as new proofs against the existence of a creator of the world; and, indeed,they did not in the least make it their business to develop the theory any further. Though idealism was atthe end of its tether and was dealt a death-blow by the Revolution of 1848, it had the satisfaction ofseeing that materialism had for the moment fallen lower still. Feuerbach was unquestionably right whenhe refused to take responsibility for this materialism; only he should not have confounded the doctrinesof these itinerant preachers with materialism in general.

Here, however, there are two things to be pointed out. First, even during Feuerbach’s lifetime, naturalscience was still in that process of violent fermentation which only during the last 15 years had reached aclarifying, relative conclusion. New scientific data were acquired to a hitherto unheard-of extent, but theestablishing of interrelations, and thereby the bringing of order into this chaos of discoveries followingclosely upon each other’s heels, has only quite recently become possible. It is true that Feuerbach hadlived to see all three of the decisive discoveries — that of the cell, the transformation of energy, and thetheory of evolution named after Darwin. But how could the lonely philosopher, living in rural solitude,be able sufficiently to follow scientific developments in order to appreciate at their full value discoverieswhich natural scientists themselves at that time either still contested or did not know how to makeadequate use of? The blame for this falls solely upon the wretched conditions in Germany, inconsequence of which cobweb-spinning eclectic flea-crackers had taken possession of the chairs ofphilosophy, while Feuerbach, who towered above them all, had to rusticate and grow sour in a littlevillage. It is therefore not Feuerbach’s fault that this historical conception of nature, which had nowbecome possible and which removed all the one-sidedness of French materialism, remained inaccessibleto him.

Secondly, Feuerbach is quite correct in asserting that exclusively natural-scientific materialism is indeed“the foundation of the edifice of human knowledge, but not the edifice itself”. For we live not only innature but also in human society, and this also no less than nature has its history of development and itsscience. It was therefore a question of bringing the science of society, that is, the sum total of theso-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialist foundation, and ofreconstructing it thereupon. But it did not fall to Feuerbach’s lot to do this. In spite of the “foundation”,he remained here bound by the traditional idealist fetters, a fact which he recognizes in these words:“Backwards I agree with the materialists, but not forwards!”

But it was Feuerbach himself who did not go “forwards” here; in the social domain, who did not getbeyond his standpoint of 1840 or 1844. And this was again chiefly due to this reclusion which compelledhim, who, of all philosophers, was the most inclined to social intercourse, to produce thoughts out of hissolitary head instead of in amicable and hostile encounters with other men of his calibre. Later, we shallsee in detail how much he remained an idealist in this sphere.

It need only be added here that Starcke looks for Feuerbach’s idealism in the wrong place.

“Feuerbach is an idealist; he believes in the progress of mankind.” (p.19)

“The foundation, the substructure of the whole, remains nevertheless idealism. Realism for us is nothingmore than a protection again aberrations, while we follow our ideal trends. Are not compassion, love, andenthusiasm for truth and justice ideal forces?” (p.VIII)

In the first place, idealism here means nothing, but the pursuit of ideal aims. But these necessarily haveto do at the most with Kantian idealism and its “categorical imperative”; however, Kant himself called



his philosophy “transcendental idealism” by no means because he dealt therein also with ethical ideals,but for quite other reasons, as Starcke will remember. The superstitition that philosophical idealism ispivoted round a belief in ethical, that is, social, ideals, arose outside philosophy, among the Germanphilistines, who learned by heart from Schiller’s poems the few morsels of philosophical culture theyneeded. No one has criticized more severely the impotent “categorical imperative” of Kant — impotentbecause it demands the impossible, and therefore never attains to any reality — no one has more cruellyderided the philistine sentimental enthusiasm for unrealizable ideals purveyed by Schiller than preciselythe complete idealist Hegel (see, for example, his Phenomenology).

In the second place, we simply cannot get away from the fact that everything that sets men acting mustfind its way through their brains — even eating and drinking, which begins as a consequence of thesensation of hunger or thirst transmitted through the brain, and ends as a result of the sensation ofsatisfaction likewise transmitted through the brain. The influences of the external world upon manexpress themselves in his brain, are reflected therein as feelings, impulses, volitions — in short, as “idealtendencies”, and in this form become “ideal powers”. If, then, a man is to be deemed an idealist becausehe follows “ideal tendencies” and admits that “ideal powers” have an influence over him, then everyperson who is at all normally developed is a born idealist and how, in that case, can there still be anymaterialists?

In the third place, the conviction that humanity, at least at the present moment, moves on the whole in aprogressive direction has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism between materialism andidealism. The French materialists no less than the deists Voltaire and Rousseau held this conviction to analmost fanatical degree, and often enough made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If ever anybodydedicated his whole life to the “enthusiasm for truth and justice” — using this phrase in the good sense— it was Diderot, for instance. If, therefore, Starcke declares all this to be idealism, this merely provesthat the word materialism, and the whole antagonism between the two trends, has lost all meaning forhim here.

The fact is that Starcke, although perhaps unconsciously, in this makes an unpardonable concession tothe traditional philistine prejudice against the word materialism resulting from its long-continueddefamation by the priests. By the word materialism, the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lustof the eye, lust of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, avarice, covetousness, profit-hunting, andstock-exchange swindling — in short, all the filthy vices in which he himself indulges in private. By theword idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy, and in a general way a “betterworld”, of which he boasts before others but in which he himself at the utmost believes only so long ashe is having the blues or is going through the bankruptcy consequent upon his customary “materialist”excesses. It is then that he sings his favorite song, What is man? — Half beast, half angel.

For the rest, Starcke takes great pains to defend Feuerbach against the attacks and doctrines of thevociferous assistant professors who today go by the name of philosophers in Germany. For people whoare interested in this afterbirth of classical German philosophy this is, of course, a matter of importance;for Starcke himself it may have appeared necessary. We, however, will spare the reader this.

Part 3: Feuerbach



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch03.htm

(1) Among savages and lower barbarians the idea is still universal that the human forms which appear indreams are souls which have temporarily left their bodies; the real man is, therefore, held responsible foracts committed by his dream apparition against the dreamer. Thus Imthurn found this belief current, forexample, among the Indians of Guiana in 1884.

[A] Phlogistic Theory: The theory prevailing in chemistry during the 17th and 18th centuries thatcombustion takes place due to the presence in certain bodies of a special substance named phlogiston.

Table of Contents: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/index.htm

V.I.Lenin�s

The Theory of Knowledge ofEmpirio-Criticism and of DialecticalMaterialism. II

Chapter Two

1. The �Thing-In-Itself,� or V. Chernov Refutes Frederick Engels

Our Machians have written so much about the �thing-in itself� that were all their writings to be collectedthey would result in mountains of printed matter. The "thing-in-itself� is a veritable bête noire [38] withBogdanov and Valentinov, Bazarov and Chernov, Berman and Yushkevich. There is no abuse they havenot hurled at it, there is no ridicule they have not showered on it. And against whom are they breakinglances because of this luckless �thing-in-itself�? Here a division of the philosophers of Russian Machismaccording to political parties begins. All the would-be Marxists among the Machians are combatingPlekhanov�s �thing-in-itself"; they accuse Plekhanov of having become entangled and straying intoKantianism, and of having forsaken Engels. (We shall discuss the first accusation in the fourth chapter;the second accusation we shall deal with now.) The Machian Mr. Victor Chernov, a Narodnik and asworn enemy of Marxism, opens a direct campaign against Engels because of the �thing-in-itself.�

One is ashamed to confess it, but it would be a sin to conceal the fact that on this occasion open enmitytowards Marxism has made Mr. Victor Chernov a more principled literary antagonist than our comradesin party and opponents in philosophy.[39] For only a guilty conscience (and in addition, perhaps,ignorance of materialism?) could have been responsible for the fact that the Machian would-be Marxistshave diplomatically set Engels aside, have completely ignored Feuerbach and are circling exclusivelyaround Plekhanov. It is indeed circling around one spot, tedious and petty pecking and cavilling at adisciple of Engels, while a frank examination of the views of the teacher himself is cravenly avoided.And since the purpose of these cursory comments is to disclose the reactionary character of Machism andthe correctness of the materialism of Marx and Engels, we shall leave aside the fussing of the Machianwould-be Marxists with Plekhanov and turn directly to Engels, whom the empirio-criticist Mr. V.Chernov refuted. In his Philosophical and Sociological Studies (Moscow, 1907�a collection of articleswritten, with few exceptions, before 1900) the article �Marxism and Transcendental Philosophy� bluntlybegins with an attempt to set up Marx against Engels and accuses the latter of �naïve dogmaticmaterialism,� of �the crudest materialist dogmatism� (pp. 29 and 32). Mr. V. Chernov states that a�sufficient� example of this is Engels� argument against the Kantian thing-in itself and Hume�sphilosophical line. We shall begin with this argument.

In his Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels declares that the fundamental philosophical trends are materialism andidealism. Materialism regards nature as primary and spirit as secondary; it places being first and thought

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Chapter II

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/02.htm (1 of 28) [11/06/2002 17:34:13]

second. Idealism holds the contrary view. This root distinction between the �two great camps� into whichthe philosophers of the �various schools� of idealism and materialism are divided Engels takes as thecornerstone, and he directly charges with �confusion� those who use the terms idealism and materialismin any other way.

�The great basic question of all philosophy,� Engels says, �especially of modern philosophy, is thatconcerning the relation of thinking and being,� of �spirit and nature.� Having divided the philosophers into�two great camps� on this basic question, Engels shows that there is �yet another side� to this basicphilosophical question, viz., �in what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to thisworld itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas andnotions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality?[Fr. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, etc.,4th Germ. ed., p. 15. Russian translation, Geneva ed., 1905, pp. 12-13. Mr. V. Chernov translates theword Spiegelbild literally (a mirror reflection), accusing Plekhanov of presenting the theory of Engels �ina very weakened form � by speaking in Russian simply of a �reflection� instead of a �mirror reflection.�This is mere cavilling. Spiegelbild in German is also used simply in the sense of Abbild]

�The overwhelming majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question,� says Engels,including under this head not only all materialists but also the most consistent idealists, as, for example,the absolute idealist Hegel, who considered the real world to be the realisation of some premundane�absolute idea,� while the human spirit, correctly apprehending the real world, apprehends in it andthrough it the �absolute idea.�

�In addition [i.e., to the materialists and the consistent idealists] there is yet a set of different philosophers�those who question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition, of the world.To them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume and Kant, and they have played a very importantrole in philosophical development. . . .�[40]

Mr. V. Chernov, quoting these words of Engels�, launches into the fray. To the word �Kant� he makes thefollowing annotation:

�In 1888 it was rather strange to term such philosophers as Kant and especially Hume as �modern.� At thattime it was more natural to hear mentioned such names as Cohen, Lange, Riehl, Laas, Liebmann, Goring,etc. But Engels, evidently, was not well versed in �modern� philosophy� (op. cit., p. 33, note 2).

Mr. V. Chernov is true to himself. Equally in economic and philosophical questions he reminds one ofTurgenev�s Voroshilov,[41] annihilating now the ignorant Kautsky,[V. Ilyin, The Agrarian Question, PartI, St. Petersburg, 1908, p. 1908.] now the ignorant Engels by merely referring to �scholarly� names! Theonly trouble is that all the authorities mentioned by Mr. Chernov are the very Neo-Kantians whomEngels refers to on this very same page of his Ludwig Feuerbach as theoretical reactionaries, who wereendeavouring to resurrect the corpse of the long since refuted doctrines of Kant and Hume. The goodChernov did not understand that it is just these authoritative (for Machism) and muddled professorswhom Engels is refuting in his argument!

Having pointed out that Hegel had already presented the �decisive� arguments against Hume and Kant,and that the additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than profound, Engels continues:

�The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets (Schrullen) is practice, namely,experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by



making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposesinto the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian incomprehensible [or ungraspable, unfassbaren�thisimportant word is omitted both in Plekhanov�s translation and in Mr. V. Chernov�s translation]�thing-in-itself.� The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained justsuch �things-in-themselves� until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, where uponthe �thing-in-itself� became a �thing for us,� as, for instance, alizarin, the colouring matter of the madder,which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply andsimply from coal tar� (op. cit., p. 16).[42]

Mr. V. Chernov, quoting this argument, finally loses patience and completely annihilates poor Engels.Listen to this: �No Neo-Kantian will of course be surprised that from coal tar we can produce alizarin�more cheaply and simply.� But that together with alizarin it is possible to produce from this coal tar andjust as cheaply a refutation of the �thing-in-itself� will indeed seem a wonderful and unprecedenteddiscovery�and not to the Neo-Kantians alone.

�Engels, apparently, having learned that according to Kant the �thing-in-itself� is unknowable, turned thistheorem into its converse and concluded that everything unknown is a thing-in-itself� (p. 33).

Listen, Mr. Machian: lie, but don�t overdo it! Why, be fore the very eyes of the public you aremisrepresenting the very quotation from Engels you have set out to �tear to pieces,� without even havinggrasped the point under discussion!

In the first place, it is not true that Engels �is producing a refutation of the thing-in-itself.� Engels saidexplicitly and clearly that he was refuting the Kantian ungraspable (or unknowable) thing-in-itself. Mr.Chernov confuses Engels� materialist conception of the existence of things independently of ourconsciousness. In the second place, if Kant�s theorem reads that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, the�converse � theorem would be: the unknowable is the thing in-itself. Mr. Chernov replaces theunknowable by the unknown, without realising that by such a substitution he has again confused anddistorted the materialist view of Engels!

Mr. V. Chernov is so bewildered by the reactionaries of official philosophy whom he has taken as hismentors that he raises an outcry against Engels without in the least comprehending the meaning of theexample quoted. Let us try to explain to this representative of Machism what it is all about.

Engels clearly and explicitly states that he is contesting both Hume and Kant. Yet there is no mentionwhatever in Hume of �unknowable things-in-themselves.� What then is there in common between thesetwo philosophers? It is that they both in principle fence off �the appearance� from that which appears, theperception from that which is perceived the thing-for-us from the �thing-in-itself.� Furthermore, Humedoes not want to hear of the �thing-in-itself,� he regards the very thought of it as philosophicallyinadmissible, as �metaphysics� (as the Humeans and Kantians call it); whereas Kant grants the existenceof the �thing-in-itself,� but declares it to be �unknowable,� fundamentally different from the appearance,belonging to a fundamentally different realm, the realm of the �beyond� (Jenseits), inaccessible toknowledge, but revealed to faith.

What is the kernel of Engels� objections? Yesterday we did not know that coal tar contained alizarin.Today we learned that it does. The question is, did coal tar contain alizarin yesterday?

Of course it did. To doubt it would be to make a mockery of modern science.



And if that is so, three important epistemological conclusions follow:

1)Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for itis beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterdaywe knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.

2)There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and therecan be no such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. Andphilosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effectthat the thing-in-itself is �beyond� phenomena (Kant), or that we can and must fence ourselves off bysome philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknownbut which exists outside us (Hume)�all this is the sheerest nonsense, Schrulle, crotchet, invention.

3)In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, wemust not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledgeemerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.

Once we accept the point of view that human knowledge develops from ignorance, we shall find millionsof examples of it just as simple as the discovery of alizarin in coal tar, millions of observations not onlyin the history of science and technology but in the everyday life of each and every one of us that illustratethe transformation of �things-in-themselves� into �things-for-us,� the appearance of �phenomena� when oursense-organs experience an impact from external objects, the disappearance of �phenomena� when someobstacle prevents the action upon our sense-organs of an object which we know to exist. The sole andunavoidable deduction to be made from this�a deduction which all of us make in everyday practice andwhich materialism deliberately places at the foundation of its epistemology�is that outside us, andindependently of us, there exist objects, things, bodies and that our perceptions are images of the externalworld. Mach�s converse theory (that bodies are complexes of sensations) is nothing but pitiful idealistnonsense. And Mr. Chernov, in his �analysis� of Engels, once more revealed his Voroshilov qualities;Engels� simple example seemed to him �strange and naïve�! He regards only gelehrte fiction as genuinephilosophy and is unable to distinguish professorial eclecticism from the consistent materialist theory ofknowledge.

It is both impossible and unnecessary to analyse Mr. Chernov�s other arguments; they all amount to thesame pretentious rigmarole (like the assertion that for the materialists the atom is the thing-in-itself!). Weshall note only the argument which is relevant to our discussion (an argument which has apparently ledcertain people astray), viz., that Marx supposedly differed from Engels. The question at issue is Marx�ssecond Thesis on Feuerbach and Plekhanov�s translation of the word Diesseitigkeit.

Here is the second Thesis:

�The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, butis a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the �this-sidedness� of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice isa purely scholastic question.�[43]

Instead of �prove the this-sidedness of thinking� (a literal translation), Plekhanov has: prove that thinking�does not stop at this side of phenomena.� And Mr. V. Chernov cries: �The contradiction between Marxand Engels has been eliminated very simply. . . . It appears as though Marx, like Engels, asserted the



knowability of things-in-themselves and the �other-sidedness� of thinking� (loc. cit. p. 34, note).

What can be done with a Voroshilov whose every phrase makes confusion worse confoundedl It is sheerignorance, Mr. Victor Chernov, not to know that all materialists assert the knowability ofthings-in-themselves. It is ignorance, Mr. Victor Chernov, or infinite slovenliness, to skip the very firstphrase of the thesis and not to realise that the �objective truth� (gegenständliche Wahrheit) of thinkingmeans nothing else than the existence of objects (i.e., �things-in-themselves�) truly reflected by thinking.It is sheer illiteracy Mr. Victor Chernov, to assert that from Plekhanov�s paraphrase (Plekhanov gave aparaphrase and not a translation) �it appears as though� Marx defended the other-sidedness of thought.Because only the Humeans and the Kantians confine thought to �this side of phenomena.� But for allmaterialists, including those of the seventeenth century whom Bishop Berkeley demolished (seeIntroduction), �phenomena� are �things-for-us� or copies of the �objects in themselves.� Of course,Plekhanov�s free paraphrase is not obligatory upon those who desire to know Marx himself, but it isobligatory to try to understand what Marx meant and not to prance about like a Voroshilov.

It is interesting to note that while among people who call themselves socialists we encounter anunwillingness or inability to grasp the meaning of Marx�s �Theses,� bourgeois writers, specialists inphilosophy, sometimes manifest greater scrupulousness. I know of one such writer who studied thephilosophy of Feuerbach and in connection with it Marx�s �Theses.� That writer is Albert Lévy, whodevoted the third chapter of the second part of his book on Feuerbach to an examination of the influenceof Feuerbach on Marx.[Albert Lévy, La philosophie de Feuerbach et son influence sur la littérutureallemande [Feuerbach�s Philosophy and His Influence on German Literature] Paris, 1904, pp. 249-338,on the influence of Feuerbach on Marx, and pp. 290-98, an examination of the �Theses.�] Without goinginto the question whether Lévy always interprets Feuerbach correctly, or how he criticises Marx from theordinary bourgeois standpoint, we shall only quote his opinion of the philosophical content of Marx�sfamous �Theses.� Regarding the first Thesis, Lévy says: �Marx, on the one hand, together with all earliermaterialism and with Feuerbach, recognises that there are real and distinct objects outside uscorresponding to our ideas of things. . . .�

As the reader sees, it was immediately clear to Albert Levy that the basic position not only of Marxistmaterialism but of every materialism, of �all earlier � materialism, is the recognition of real objectsoutside us, to which objects our ideas �correspond.� This elementary truth, which holds good for allmaterialism in general, is unknown only to the Russian Machians. Lévy continues:

�. . . On the other hand, Marx expresses regret that materialism had left it to idealism to appreciate theimportance of the active forces [i.e., human practice], which, according to Marx, must be wrested fromidealism in order to integrate them into the materialist system. But it will of course be necessary to givethese active forces the real and sensible character which idealism cannot grant them. Marx�s idea, then, isthe following: just as to our ideas there correspond real objects outside us, so to our phenomenal activitythere corresponds a real activity outside us, an activity of things. In this sense humanity partakes of theabsolute, not only through theoretical knowledge but also through practical activity; thus all humanactivity acquires a dignity, a nobility, that permits it to advance hand in hand with theory. Revolutionaryactivity henceforth acquires a metaphysical significance. . . .�

Albert Lévy is a professor. And a proper professor must abuse the materialists as being metaphysicians.For the professorial idealists, Humeans and Kantians every kind of materialism is �metaphysics,� becausebeyond the phenomenon (appearance, the thing-for-us) it discerns a reality outside us. A. Lévy is



therefore essentially right when he says that in Marx�s opinion there corresponds to man�s �phenomenalactivity� �an activity of things,� that is to say, human practice has not only a phenomenal (in the Humeanand Kantian sense of the term), but an objectively real significance. The criterion of practice�as we shallshow in detail in its proper place (§ 6)�has entirely different meanings for Mach and Marx. �Humanitypartakes of the absolute� means that human knowledge reflects absolute truth ; the practice of humanity,by verifying our ideas, corroborates what in those ideas corresponds to absolute truth. A. Lévy continues:

�. . . Having reached this point, Marx naturally encounters the objections of the critics. He has admittedthe existence of things-in-themselves, of which our theory is the human translation. He cannot evade theusual objection: what assurance have you of the accuracy of the translation? What proof have you thatthe human mind gives you an objective truth? To this objection Marx replies in his second Thesis� (p.291).

The reader sees that Lévy does not for a moment doubt that Marx recognised the existence ofthings-in-themselves!

2. �Transcendence,� Or Bazarov �Revises� Engels

But while the Russian Machian would-be Marxists diplomatically evaded one of the most emphatic andexplicit statements of Engels, they �revised� another statement of his in quite the Chernov manner.However tedious and laborious the task of correcting distortions and perversions of the meaning ofquotations may be, he who wishes to speak of the Russian Machians cannot avoid it.

Here is Bazarov�s revision of Engels.

In the article �On Historical Materialism,�[This article forms the Introduction to the English edition ofEngels� Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and was translated by Engels himself into German in the NeueZeit XI, I (1892-93, No. 1), S. 15 et seq. The only Russian translation, if I am not mistaken, is to be foundin the symposium Historical Materialism p. 162, et seq. Bazarov quotes the passage in the Studies �in� thePhilosophy of Marxism, p. 64.] Engels speaks of the English agnostics (philosophers of Hume�s trend ofthought) as follows:

�. . . Our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the information (Mitteilungen) imparted tous by our senses. . . .�

Let us note for the benefit of our Machians that the agnostic (Humean) also starts from sensations andrecognises no other source of knowledge. The agnostic is a pure �positivist,� be it said for the benefit ofthe adherents of the �latest positivism!�

�. . . But, he [the agnostic] adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations(Abbilder) of the objects we perceive through them? And he proceeds to in form us that, whenever hespeaks of objects or their qualities, he does in reality not mean these objects and qualities, of which hecannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his senses. . ..[44]

What two lines of philosophical tendency does Engels contrast here? One line is that the senses give usfaithful images of things, that we know the things themselves, that the outer world acts on oursense-organs. This is materialism�with which the agnostic is not in agreement. What then is the essence



of the agnostic�s line? It is that he does not go beyond sensations, that he stops on this side of phenomena,refusing to see anything �certain� beyond the boundary of sensations. About these things themselves (i.e.,about the things-in-themselves, the �objects in themselves,� as the materialists whom Berkeley opposedcalled them), we can know nothing certain�so the agnostic categorically insists. Hence, in the controversyof which Engels speaks the materialist affirms the existence and knowability of things-in-themselves.The agnostic does not even admit the thought of things-in-themselves and insists that we can knownothing certain about them.

It may be asked in what way the position of the agnostic as outlined by Engels differs from the positionof Mach? In the �new� term �element�? But it is sheer childishness to believe that a nomenclature canchange a philosophical line, that sensations when called �elements� cease to be sensations! Or does thedifference lie in the �new� idea that the very same elements constitute the physical in one connection andthe psychical in another? But did you not observe that Engels� agnostic also puts �impressions� in place ofthe �things themselves�? That means that in essence the agnostic too differentiates between physical andpsychical �impressions �! Here again the difference is exclusively one of nomenclature. When Mach saysthat objects are complexes of sensations, Mach is a Berkeleian; when Mach �corrects� himself, and saysthat �elements� (sensations) can be physical in one connection and psychical in another, Mach is anagnostic, a Humean. Mach does not go beyond these two lines in his philosophy, and it requires extremenaïveté to take this muddlehead at his word and believe that he has actually �transcended� bothmaterialism and idealism.

Engels deliberately mentions no names in his exposition, and criticises not individual representatives ofHumism (professional philosophers are very prone to call original systems the petty variations one oranother of them makes in terminology or argument), but the whole Humean line. Engels criticises notparticulars but the essential thing; he examines the fundamental wherein all Humeans deviate frommaterialism, and his criticism therefore embraces Mill, Huxley and Mach alike. Whether we say (with J.S. Mill) that matter is the permanent possibility of sensation, or (with Ernst Mach) that matter is more orless stable complexes of �elements��sensations�we remain within the bounds of agnosticism, or Humism.Both standpoints, or more correctly both formulations, are covered by Engels� exposition of agnosticism:the agnostic does not go beyond sensations and asserts that he cannot know anything certain about theirsource, about their original, etc. And if Mach attributes such great importance to his disagreement withMill on this question, it is because Mach comes under Engels� characterisation of a professor-in-ordinary:Flohknacker.� Ay, gentlemen, you have only cracked a flea by making petty corrections and by alteringterminology instead of entirely abandoning the basic, half-hearted standpoint.

And how does the materialist Engels�at the beginning of the article Engels explicitly and emphaticallycontrasts his materialism to agnosticism�refute the foregoing arguments?

�. . . Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before therewas argumentation there was action. Im Anfang war die That. And human action had solved the difficultylong before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment weturn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallibletest the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then ourestimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But ifwe succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and doesanswer the purpose we intended it for, then that is positive proof that our perceptions of it and of itsqualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves. . . .�



Thus, the materialist theory, the theory of the reflection of objects by our mind, is here presented withabsolute clarity: things exist outside us. Our perceptions and ideas are their images. Verification of theseimages, differentiation between true and false images, is given by practice. But let us listen to a littlemore of Engels (Bazarov at this point ends his quotation from Engels, or rather from Plekhanov, for hedeems it unnecessary to deal with Engels himself):

�. . . And whenever we find ourselves face to face with a failure, then we generally are not long in makingout the cause that made us fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incompleteand superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them� (theRussian translation in On Historical Materialism is incorrect). �So long as we take care to train and to useour senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made andproperly used, so long we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity(Uebereinstimmung) of our perceptions with the objective (gegenstandlich) nature of the thingsperceived. Not in one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that oursense-perceptions, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are,by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outerworld and our sense-perceptions of it.

�But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say. . . .��[45]

We shall leave to another time the examination of the arguments of the Neo-Kantians. Let us remark herethat anybody in the least acquainted with the subject, or even the least bit attentive, cannot fail tounderstand that Engels is here expounding the very same materialism against which the Machians arealways and everywhere doing battle. And now just watch the manner in which Bazarov revises Engels:

�Here,� writes Bazarov in connection with the fragment of the quotation we have given, �Engels isactually attacking Kantian idealism. . . .�

It is not true. Bazarov is muddling things. In the passage which he quoted, and which is quoted by usmore fully, there is not a syllable either about Kantianism or about idealism. Had Bazarov really read thewhole of Engels� article, he could not have avoided seeing that Engels speaks of Neo-Kantianism, and ofKant�s whole line, only in the next paragraph, just where we broke off our quotation. And had Bazarovattentively read and reflected on the fragment he himself quotes, he could not have avoided seeing that inthe arguments of the agnostic which Engels here refutes there is not a trace of either idealism orKantianism; for idealism begins only when the philosopher says that things are our sensations, whileKantianism begins when the philosopher says that the thing-in-itself exists but is unknowable. Bazarovconfuses Kantianism with Humism; and he confuses them because, being himself a semi-Berkeleian,semi-Humean of the Machian sect, he does not understand (as will be shown in detail below) thedistinction between the Humean and the materialist opposition to Kantianism.

�. . . But, alas!� continues Bazarov, �his argument is aimed against Plekhanov�s philosophy just as much asit is against Kantian philosophy. In the school of Plekhanov-Orthodox, as Bogdanov has already pointedout, there is a fatal misunderstanding regarding consciousness. To Plekhanov, as to all idealists, it seemsthat everything perceptually given, i.e., cognised, is �subjective�; that to proceed only from what isfactually given is to be a solipsist; that real being can be found only beyond the boundaries of everythingthat is immediately given. . . .�

This is entirely in the spirit of Chernov and his assurances that Liebknecht was a true-Russian Narodnik!



If Plekhanov is an idealist who has deserted Engels, then why is it that you, who are supposedly anadherent of Engels, are not a materialist? This is nothing but wretched mystification, Comrade Bazarov!By means of the Machian expression �immediately given � you begin to confuse the difference betweenagnosticism, idealism and materialism. Don�t you understand that such expressions as the �immediatelygiven� and the �factually given� are part of the rigmarole of the Machians, the immanentists, and the otherreactionaries in philosophy, a masquerade, whereby the agnostic (and sometimes, as in Mach�s case, theidealist too) disguises himself in the cloak of the materialist? For the materialist the �factually given� isthe outer world, the image of which is our sensations. For the idealist the �factually given� is sensation,and the outer world is declared to be a �complex of sensations.� For the agnostic the �immediately given�is also sensation, but the agnostic does not go on either to the materialist recognition of the reality of theouter world, or to the idealist recognition of the world as our sensation. Therefore your statement that�real being [according to Plekhanov] can be found only beyond the boundaries of everything that isimmediately given � is sheer nonsense and inevitably follows from your Machian position. But while youhave a perfect right to adopt any position you choose, including a Machian one, you have no right tofalsify Engels once you have undertaken to speak of him. And from Engels� words it is perfectly clearthat for the materialist real being lies beyond the �sense-perceptions,� impressions and ideas of man, whilefor the agnostic it is impossible to go beyond these perceptions. Bazarov believed Mach, Avenarius, andSchuppe when they said that the �immediately� (or factually) given connects the perceiving self with theperceived environment in the famous �indissoluble� co-ordination, and endeavours, unobserved by thereader, to impute this nonsense to the materialist Engels!

�. . . It is as though the foregoing passage from Engels was deliberately written by him in a very popularand accessible form in order to dissipate this idealist misunderstanding. . . .�

Not for nought was Bazarov a pupil of Avenarius! He continues his mystification: under the pretence ofcombating idealism (of which Engels is not speaking here), he smuggles in the idealist �co-ordination.�Not bad, Comrade Bazarov!

�. . . The agnostic asks, how do we know that our subjective senses give us a correct presentation ofobjects?. . .�

You are muddling things, Comrade Bazarov! Engels himself does not speak of, and does not even ascribeto his foe the agnostic, such nonsense as �subjective � senses. There are no other senses except human,i.e., �subjective� senses, for we are speaking from the standpoint of man and not of a hobgoblin. You areagain trying to impute Machism to Engels, to imply that he says: the agnostic regards senses, or, to bemore precise, sensations, as only subjective (which the agnostic does not do!), while we and Avenariushave �co-ordinated� the object into an indissoluble connection with the subject. Not bad, ComradeBazarov!

�. . . But what do you term �correct�?�Engels rejoins.�That is correct which is confirmed by our practice;and consequently, since our sense-perceptions are confirmed by experience, they are not �subjective,� thatis, they are not arbitrary, or illusory, but correct and real as such. . . .�

You are muddling things, Comrade Bazarov! You have substituted for the question of the existence ofthings outside our sensations, perceptions, ideas, the question of the criterion of the correctness of ourideas of �these things themselves,� or, more precisely, you are hedging the former question with the helpof the latter. But Engels says explicitly and clearly that what distinguishes him from the agnostic is notonly the agnostic�s doubt as to whether our images are �correct,� but also the agnostic�s doubt as to



whether we may speak of the things themselves, as to whether we may have �certain� knowledge of theirexistence. Why did Bazarov resort to this juggling? In order to obscure and confound what is the basicquestion for materialism (and for Engels, as a materialist), viz., the question of the existence of thingsoutside our mind, which, by acting on our sense-organs evoke sensations. It is impossible to be amaterialist without answering this question in the affirmative; but one can be a materialist and still differon what constitutes the criterion of the correctness of the images presented by our senses.

And Bazarov muddles matters still more when he attributes to Engels, in the dispute with the agnostic,the absurd and ignorant expression that our sense-perceptions are confirmed by �experience.� Engels didnot use and could not have used this word here, for Engels was well aware that the idealist Berkeley, theagnostic Hume and the materialist Diderot all had recourse to experience.

�. . . Inside the limits within which we have to do with objects in practice, perceptions of the object and ofits properties coincide with the reality existing outside us. �To coincide� is somewhat different from beinga �hieroglyphic.� �They coincide� means that, within the given limits, the sense perception is [Bazarov�sitalics] the reality existing outside us. . . .

The end crowns the work! Engels has been treated à la Mach, fried and served with a Machian sauce.But take care you do not choke, worthy cooks!

�Sense-perception is the reality existing outside us�!! This is just the fundamental absurdity, thefundamental muddle and falsity of Machism, from which flows all the rest of the balderdash of thisphilosophy and for which Mach and Avenarius have been embraced by those arrant reactionaries andpreachers of priestlore, the immanentists. However much V. Bazarov wriggled, however cunning anddiplomatic he was in evading ticklish points, in the end he gave himself away and betrayed his trueMachian character! To say that �sense-perception is the reality existing outside us� is to return toHumism, or even Berkeleianism, concealing itself in the fog of �co-ordination.� This is either an idealistlie or the subterfuge of the agnostic, Comrade Bazarov, for sense-perception is not the reality existingoutside us, it is only the image of that reality. Are you trying to make capital of the ambiguous Russianword sovpadat? Are you trying to lead the unsophisticated reader to believe that sovpadat here means �tobe identical,� and not �to correspond�? That means basing one�s falsification of Engels à la Mach on aperversion of the meaning of a quotation, and nothing more.

Take the German original and you will find there the words stimmen mit, which means to correspondwith, �to voice with��the latter translation is literal, for Stimme means voice. The words �stimmen mit �cannot mean �to coincide� in the sense of �to be identical.� And even for the reader who does not knowGerman but who reads Engels with the least bit of attention, it is perfectly clear, it cannot be otherwisethan clear, that Engels throughout his whole argument treats the expression �sense-perception� as theimage (Abbild) of the reality existing outside us, and that therefore the word �coincide� can be used inRussian exclusively in the sense of �correspondence,� �concurrence,� etc. To attribute to Engels thethought that �sense-perception is the reality existing outside us� is such a pearl of Machian distortion,such a flagrant attempt to palm off agnosticism and idealism as materialism, that one must admit thatBazarov has broken all records!

One asks, how can sane people in sound mind and judgment assert that �sense-perception [within whatlimits is not important] is the reality existing outside us�? The earth is a reality existing outside us. Itcannot �coincide� (in the sense of being identical) with our sense-perception, or be in indissolubleco-ordination with it, or be a �complex of elements� in another connection identical with sensation; for



the earth existed at a time when there were no men, no sense-organs, no matter organised in that superiorform in which its property of sensation is in any way clearly perceptible.

That is just the point, that the tortuous theories of �co-ordination,� �introjection,� and the newly-discoveredworld elements which we analysed in Chapter I serve to cover up this idealist absurdity. Bazarov�sformulation, so inadvertently and incautiously thrown off by him, is excellent in that it patently revealsthat crying absurdity, which otherwise it would have been necessary to excavate from the piles of erudite,pseudo-scientific, professorial rigmarole.

All praise to you, Comrade Bazarov! We shall erect a monument to you in your lifetime. On one side weshall engrave your dictum, and on the other: �To the Russian Machian who dug the grave of Machismamong the Russian Marxists!�

We shall speak separately of the two points touched on by Bazarov in the above-mentioned quotation,viz., the criteria of practice of the agnostics (Machians included) and the materialists, and the differencebetween the theory of reflection (or images) and the theory of symbols (or hieroglyphs). For the presentwe shall continue to quote a little more from Bazarov:

�. . . But what is beyond these boundaries? Of this Engels does not say a word. He nowhere manifests adesire to perform that �transcendence,� that stepping beyond the boundaries of the perceptually-givenworld, which lies at the foundation of Plekhanov�s �theory of knowledge�. . . .�

Beyond what �boundaries�? Does he mean the boundaries of the �co-ordination� of Mach and Avenarius,which supposedly indissolubly merges the self with the environment, the subject with the object? Thevery question put by Bazarov is devoid of meaning. But if he had put the question in an intelligible way,he would have clearly seen that the external world lies �beyond the boundaries� of man�s sensations,perceptions and ideas. But the word �transcendence� once more betrays Bazarov. It is a specificallyKantian and Humean �fancy� to erect in principle a boundary between the appearance and thething-in-itself. To pass from the appearance, or, if you will, from our sensation, perception, etc., to thething existing outside of perception is a transcendence, Kant says; and transcendence is permissible notto knowledge but to faith. Transcendence is not permissible at all, Hume objects. And the Kantians, likethe Humeans, call the materialists transcendental realists, �metaphysicians,� who effect an illegitimatepassage (in Latin, transcensus) from one region to another, fundamentally different, region. In the worksof the contemporary professors of philosophy who follow the reactionary line of Kant and Hume, youmay encounter (take only the names enumerated by Voroshilov-Chernov) endless repetitions made in athousand keys of the charge that materialism is �metaphysical� and �transcendent.� Bazarov borrowedfrom the reactionary professors both the word and the line of thought, and flourishes them in the name of�recent positivism�! As a matter of fact the very idea of the �transcendence,� i.e., of a boundary inprinciple between the appearance and the thing-in-itself, is a nonsensical idea of the agnostics (Humeansand Kantians included) and the idealists. We have already explained this in connection with Engels�example of alizarin, and we shall explain it again in the words of Feuerbach and Joseph Dietzgen. But letus first finish with Bazarov�s �revision� of Engels:

�. . . In one place in his Anti-Dühring, Engels says that �being� outside of the realm of perception is anoffene Frage, i.e., a question, for the answer to which, or even for the asking of which we have no data.�

Bazarov repeats this argument after the German Machian, Friedrich Adler. This last example is perhapseven worse than the �sense-perception� which �is the reality existing outside us.� In his Anti-Dühring, p.



31 (5th Germ. ed.), Engels says:

�The unity of the world does not consist in its being, although its being is a pre-condition of its unity, as itmust certainly first be, before it can be one. Being, indeed, is always an open question (offene Frage)beyond the point where our sphere of observation (Gesichtskreis) ends. The real unity of the worldconsists in its materiality, and this is proved not by a few juggling phrases, but by a long and wearisomedevelopment of philosophy and natural science.�[46]

Behold the new hash our cook has prepared. Engels is speaking of being beyond the point where oursphere of observation ends, for instance, the existence of men on Mars. Obviously, such being is indeedan open question. And Bazarov, as though deliberately refraining from giving the full quotation,paraphrases Engels as saying that �being beyond the realm of perception � is an open question!! This isthe sheerest nonsense and Engels is here being saddled with the views of those professors of philosophywhom Bazarov is accustomed to take at their word and whom Dietzgen justly called the graduatedflunkeys of clericalism or fideism. Indeed, fideism positively asserts that something does exist �beyondthe world of perception.� The materialists, in agreement with natural science, vigorously deny this. Anintermediate position is held by those professors, Kantians, Humeans (including the Machians), etc.,�who have found the truth outside materialism and idealism� and who �com- 29

promise,� saying: it is an open question. Had Engels ever said anything like this, it would be a shame anddisgrace to call oneself a Marxist.

But enough! Half a page of quotation from Bazarov presents such a complete tangle that we are obligedto content ourselves with what has already been said and not to continue following all the waverings ofMachian thought.

3.L. Feuerbach and J. Dietzgen on the Thing-In-Itself

To show how absurd are the assertions of our Machians that the materialists Marx and Engels denied theexistence of things-in-themselves (i.e., things outside our sensations, perceptions, and so forth) and thepossibility of their cognition, and that they admitted the existence of an absolute boundary between theappearance and the thing-in-itself, we shall give a few more quotations from Feuerbach. The wholetrouble with our Machians is that they set about parroting the words of the reactionary professors ondialectical materialism without themselves knowing anything either of dialectics or of materialism.

�Modern philosophical spiritualism,� says Feuerbach, �which calls itself idealism, utters the annihilating,in its own opinion, stricture against materialism that it is dogmatism, viz., that it starts from the sensuous(sinnlichen) world as though from an undisputed (ausgemacht) objective truth, and assumes that it is aworld in itself (an sich), i.e., as existing without us, while in reality the world is only a product of spirit�(Sämtliche Werke, X. Band, 1866, S. 185).

This seems clear enough. The world in itself is a world that exists without us. This materialism ofFeuerbach�s, like the materialism of the seventeenth century contested by Bishop Berkeley, consisted inthe recognition that �objects in themselves� exist outside our mind. The an sich (of itself, or �in itself�) ofFeuerbach is the direct opposite of the an sich of Kant. Let us recall the excerpt from Feuerbach alreadyquoted, where he rebukes Kant because for the latter the �thing-in-itself� is an �abstraction without reality.� For Feuerbach the �thing-in-itself� is an �abstraction with reality,� that is, a world existing outside us,completely knowable and fundamentally not different from �appearance.�



Feuerbach very ingeniously and clearly explains how ridiculous it is to postulate a �transcendence� fromthe world of phenomena to the world in itself, a sort of impassable gulf created by the priests and takenover from them by the professors of philosophy. Here is one of his explanations:

�Of course, the products of fantasy are also products of nature, for the force of fantasy, like all otherhuman forces, is in the last analysis (zuletzt) both in its basis and in its origin a force of nature;nevertheless, a human being is a being distinguished from the sun, moon and stars, from stones, animalsand plants, in a word, from those beings (Wesen) which he designates by the general name, �nature�; andconsequently, man�s presentations (Bilder) of the sun, moon and stars and the other beings of nature(Naturwesen), although these presentations are products of nature, are yet products distinct from theirobjects in nature� (Werke, Band VII, Stuttgart, 1903, S. 516).

The objects of our ideas are distinct from our ideas, the thing-in-itself is distinct from the thing-for-us,for the latter is only a part, or only one aspect, of the former, just as man himself is only a fragment of thenature reflected in his ideas.

�. . . The taste-nerve is just as much a product of nature as salt is, but it does not follow from this that thetaste of salt is directly as such an objective property of salt, that what salt is merely as an object ofsensation it also is in itself (an und für sich), hence that the sensation of salt on the tongue is a propertyof salt thought of without sensation (des ohne Empfindung gedachten Salzes). . . .� And several pagesearlier: �Saltiness, as a taste, is the subjective expression of an objective property of salt� (ibid, p. 514).

Sensation is the result of the action of a thing-in-itself, existing objectively outside us, upon oursense-organs�such is Feuerbach�s theory. Sensation is a subjective image of the objective world, of theworld an und für sich.

�. . . So is man also a being of nature (Naturwesen), like sun, star, plant, animal, and stone, nevertheless,he is distinct from nature, and, consequently, nature in the head and heart of man is distinct from natureoutside the human head and heart.�

�. . . However, this object, viz., man, is the only object in which, according to the statement of theidealists themselves, the requirement of the �identity of object and subject� is realised; for man is anobject whose equality and unity with my being are beyond all possible doubt. . . . And is not one man foranother, even the most intimate, an object of fantasy, of the imagination? Does not each mancomprehend another in his own way, after his own mind (in und nach seinem Sinne)? . . . And if evenbetween man and man, between mind and mind, there is a very considerable difference which it isimpossible to ignore, how much greater must be the difference between an unthinking, non-human,dissimilar (to us) being in itself (Wesen an sich) and the same being as we think of it, perceive it andapprehend it?� (ibid., p. 518).

All the mysterious, sage and subtle distinctions between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself are sheerphilosophical balderdash. In practice each one of us has observed times without number the simple andpalpable transformation of the �thing-in-itself� into phenomenon, into the �thing-for-us.� It is precisely thistransformation that is cognition. The �doctrine� of Machism that since we know only sensations, wecannot know of the existence of anything beyond the bounds of sensation, is an old sophistry of idealistand agnostic philosophy served up with a new sauce.

Joseph Dietzgen is a dialectical materialist. We shall show below that his mode of expression is often



inexact, that he is often not free from confusion, a fact which has been seized upon by various foolishpeople (Eugen Dietzgen among them) and of course by our Machians. But they did not take the troubleor were unable to analyse the dominant line of his philosophy and to disengage his materialism fromalien elements.

�Let us take the world as the �thing-in-itself,�� says Dietzgen in his The Nature of the Workings of theHuman Mind. �We shall easily see that the �world in itself� and the world as it appears to us, thephenomena of the world, differ from each other only as the whole differs from its parts� (Germ. ed.,1903, p. 65). �A phenomenon differs no more and no less from the thing which produces it than theten-mile stretch of a road differs from the road itself� (pp. 71-72). There is not, nor can there be, anyessential difference here, any �transcendence,� or �innate disagreement.� But a difference there is, to besure, viz., the passage beyond the bounds of sense-perceptions to the existence of things outside us.

�We learn by experience (wir erfahren),� says Dietzgen in his Excursions of a Socialist into the Domainof the Theory of Knowledge, �that each experience is only a part of that which, in the words of Kant,passes beyond the bounds of all experience. . . . For a consciousness that has become conscious of itsown nature, each particle, be it of dust, or of stone, or of wood, is something unknowable in its full extent(Unauskenntliches), i.e., each particle is inexhaustible material for the human faculty of cognition and,consequently, something which passes beyond experience� (Kleinere philosophische Schriften [SmallerPhilosophical Essays], 1903, S. 199).

You see: in the words of Kant, i.e., adopting�exclusively for purposes of popularisation, for purposes ofcontrast�Kant�s erroneous, confusing terminology, Dietzgen recognises the passage �beyond experience.�This is a good example of what the Machians are grasping at when they pass from materialism toagnosticism: you see, they say, we do not wish to go �beyond experience�, for us �sense-perception is thereality existing outside us.�

�Unhealthy mysticism [Dietzgen says, objecting precisely to such a philosophy] unscientifically separatesthe absolute truth from the relative truth. It makes of the thing as it appears and the �thing-in-itself,� thatis, of the appearance and the verity, two categories which differ toto coelo [completely, fundamentally]from each other and are not contained in any common category� (S. 200).

We can now judge the knowledge and ingenuity of Bogdanov, the Russian Machian, who does not wishto acknowledge himself a Machian and wishes to be regarded as a Marxist in philosophy.

�A golden mean [between �panpsychism and panmaterialism�] has been adopted by materialists of a morecritical shade who have rejected the absolute unknowability of the �thing-in-itself,� but at the same timeregard it as being fundamentally [Bogdanov�s italics] different from the �phenomenon� and, therefore,always only �dimly discernible� in it, outside of experience as far as its content is concerned [that is,presumably, as far as the �elements� are concerned, which are not the same as elements of experience],but yet lying within the bounds of what is called the forms of experience, i.e., time, space and causality.Such is approximately the standpoint of the French materialists of the eighteenth century and among themodern philosophers�Engels and his Russian follower, Beltov�[47] (Empirio-Monism, Bk. II, 2nd ed.,1907, pp. 40-41).

This is a complete muddle. 1) The materialists of the seventeenth century, against whom Berkeleyargues, hold that �objects in themselves� are absolutely knowable, for our presentations, ideas, are onlycopies or reflections of those objects, which exist �outside the mind� (see Introduction). 2) Feuerbach,



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/intro.htm

and J. Dietzgen after him, vigorously dispute any �fundamental� difference between the thing-in-itself andthe phenomenon, and Engels disposes of this view by his brief example of the transformation of the�thing-in-itself� into the �thing-for-us.� 3) Finally, to maintain that the materialists regardthings-in-themselves as �always only dimly discernible in the phenomenon� is sheer nonsense, as we haveseen from Engels� refutation of the agnostic. The reason for Bogdanov�s distortion of materialism lies inhis failure to understand the relation of absolute truth to relative truth (of which we shall speak later). Asregards the �outside-of-experience� thing-in-itself and the �elements of experience,� these are already thebeginnings of the Machian muddle of which we have already said enough.

Parroting the incredible nonsense uttered by the reactionary professors about the materialists, disavowingEngels in 1907, and attempting to �revise� Engels into agnosticism in 1908�such is the philosophy of the�recent positivism� of the Russian Machians!

4.Does Objective Truth Exist?

Bogdanov declares: �As I understand it, Marxism contains a denial of the unconditional objectivity of anytruth whatsoever, the denial of all eternal truths� (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, pp. iv-v). What is meant by�unconditional objectivity�? �Truth for all eternity� is �an objective truth in the absolute meaning of theword,� says Bogdanov in the same passage, and agrees to recognise �objective truth only within the limitsof a given epoch.�

Two questions are obviously confused here: 1) Is there such a thing as objective truth, that is, can humanideas have a content that does not depend on a subject, that does not depend either on a human being, oron humanity? 2) If so, can human ideas, which give expression to objective truth, express it all at onetime, as a whole, unconditionally, absolutely, or only approximately, relatively? This second question isa question of the relation of absolute truth to relative truth.

Bogdanov replies to the second question clearly, explicitly and definitely by rejecting even the slightestadmission of absolute truth and by accusing Engels of eclecticism for making such an admission. Of thisdiscovery of eclecticism in Engels by A. Bogdanov we shall speak separately later on. For the present weshall confine ourselves to the first question, which Bogdanov, without saying so explicitly, likewiseanswers in the negative�for although it is possible to deny the element of relativity in one or anotherhuman idea without denying the existence of objective truth, it is impossible to deny absolute truthwithout denying the existence of objective truth.

�. . . The criterion of objective truth,� writes Bogdanov a little further on (p. ix), �in Beltov�s sense, doesnot exist truth is an ideological form, an organising form of human experience. . . .�

Neither �Beltov�s sense��for it is a question of one of the fundamental philosophical problems and not ofBeltov�nor the criterion of truth�which must be treated separately, without confounding it with thequestion of whether objective truth exists�has anything to do with the case here. Bogdanov�s negativeanswer to the latter question is clear: if truth is only an ideological form, then there can be no truthindependent of the subject, of humanity, for neither Bogdanov nor we know any other ideology buthuman ideology. And Bogdanov�s negative answer emerges still more clearly from the second half of hisstatement: if truth is a form of human experience, then there can be no truth independent of humanity;there can be no objective truth.

Bogdanov�s denial of objective truth is agnosticism and subjectivism. The absurdity of this denial is



evident even from the single example of a scientific truth quoted above. Natural science leaves no roomfor doubt that its assertion that the earth existed prior to man is a truth. This is entirely compatible withthe materialist theory of knowledge: the existence of the thing reflected independent of the reflector (theindependence of the external world from the mind) is a fundamental tenet of materialism. The assertionmade by science that the earth existed prior to man is an objective truth. This proposition of naturalscience is incompatible with the philosophy of the Machians and with their doctrine of truth: if truth is anorganising form of human experience, then the assertion that the earth exists outside human experiencecannot be true.

But that is not all. If truth is only an organising form of human experience, then the teachings, say, ofCatholicism are also true. For there is not the slightest doubt that Catholicism is an �organising form ofhuman experience.� Bogdanov himself senses the crying falsity of his theory and it is extremelyinteresting to watch how he attempts to extricate himself from the swamp into which he has fallen.

�The basis of objectivity,� we read in Book I of Empirio-Monism, �must lie in the sphere of collectiveexperience. We term those data of experience objective which have the same vital meaning for us and forother people, those data upon which not only we construct our activities without contradiction, but uponwhich, we are convinced, other people must also base themselves in order to avoid contradiction. Theobjective character of the physical world consists in the fact that it exists not for me personally, but foreverybody [that is not true! It exists independently of �everybody�!], and has a definite meaning foreverybody, the same, I am convinced, as for me. The objectivity of the physical series is its universalsignificance � (p. 25, Bogdanov�s italics). �The objectivity of the physical bodies we encounter in ourexperience is in the last analysis established by the mutual verification and coordination of the utterancesof various people. In general, the physical world is socially-co-ordinated, socially-harmonised, in a word,socially-organised experience � (p. 36, Bogdanov�s italics).

We shall not repeat that this is a fundamentally untrue, idealist definition, that the physical world existsindependently of humanity and of human experience, that the physical world existed at a time when no�sociality� and no �organisation� of human experience was possible, and so forth. We shall now on anexposure of the Machian philosophy from another aspect, namely, that objectivity is so defined thatreligious doctrines, �which undoubtedly possess a �universal significance�, and so forth, come under thedefinition. But listen to Bogdanov again: �We remind the reader once more that �objective� experience isby no means the same as �social� experience.... Social experience is far from being altogether sociallyorganised and always contains various contradictions, so that certain of its parts do not agree with others.Sprites and hobgoblins may exist in the sphere of social experience of a given people or of a given groupof people-for example, the peasantry; but they need not therefore be included under socially-organised orobjective experience, for they do not harmonise with the rest of collective experience and do not fit inwith its organising forms, for example, with the chain of causality� (45).

Of course it is very gratifying that Bogdanov himself �does not include� social experience in regard tosprites and hobgoblins under objective experience. But this well-meant amendment in the spirit ofanti-fideism by no means corrects the fundamental error of Bogdanov�s whole position. Bogdanov�sdefinition of objectivity and of the physical world completely falls to the ground, since the religiousdoctrine has �universal significance� to a greater degree than the scientific doctrine; the greater part ofmankind cling to the former doctrine to this day. Catholicism has been �socially organised, harmonisedand co-ordinated� by centuries of development; it �fits in� with the �chain of causality� in the mostindisputable manner; for religions did not originate without cause, it is not by accident that they retain



their hold over the masses under modern conditions, and it is quite �in the order of things� that professorsof philosophy should adapt themselves to them. If this undoubtedly universally significant andundoubtedly highly-organised religious social experience does �not harmonise� with the �experience� ofscience, it is because there is a radical and fundamental difference between the two, which Bogdanovobliterated when he rejected objective truth. And however much Bogdanov tries to �correct� himself bysaying that fideism, or clericalism, does not harmonise with science, the undeniable fact remains thatBogdanov�s denial of objective truth completely �harmonises� with fideism. Contemporary fideism doesnot at all reject science; all it rejects is the �exaggerated claims� of science, to wit, its claim to objectivetruth. If objective truth exists (as the materialists think), if natural science, reflecting the outer world inhuman �experience,� is alone capable of giving us objective truth, then all fideism is absolutely refuted.But if there is no objective truth, if truth (including scientific truth) is only an organising form of humanexperience, then this in itself is an admission of the fundamental premise of clericalism, the door isthrown open for it, and a place is cleared for the �organising forms� of religious experience.

The question arises, does this denial of objective truth belong personally to Bogdanov, who refuses toown himself a Machian, or does it follow from the fundamental teachings of Mach and Avenarius? Thelatter is the only possible answer to the question. If only sensation exists in the world (Avenarius in1876), if bodies are complexes of sensations (Mach, in the Analysis of Sensations), then we are obviouslyconfronted with a philosophical subjectivism which inevitably leads to the denial of objective truth. Andif sensations are called �elements� which in one connection give rise to the physical and in another to thepsychical, this, as we have seen, only confuses but does not reject the fundamental point of departure ofempirio-criticism. Avenarius and Mach recognise sensations as the source of our knowledge.Consequently, they adopt the standpoint of empiricism (all knowledge derives from experience) orsensationalism (all knowledge derives from sensations). But this standpoint gives rise to the differencebetween the fundamental philosophical trends, idealism and materialism and does not eliminate thatdifference, no matter in what �new� verbal garb (�elements�) you clothe it. Both the solipsist, that is, thesubjective idealist, and the materialist may regard sensations as the source of our knowledge. BothBerkeley and Diderot started from Locke. The first premise of the theory of knowledge undoubtedly isthat the sole source of our knowledge is sensation. Having recognised the first premise, Mach confusesthe second important premise, i.e., regarding the objective reality that is given to man in his sensations,or that forms the source of man�s sensations. Starting from sensations, one may follow the line ofsubjectivism, which leads to solipsism (�bodies are complexes or combinations of sensations�), or the lineof objectivism, which leads to materialism (sensations are images of objects, of the external world). Forthe first point of view, i.e., agnosticism, or, pushed a little further, subjective idealism, there can be noobjective truth. For the second point of view, i.e., materialism, the recognition of objective truth isessential. This old philosophical question of the two trends, or rather, of the two possible deductionsfrom the premises of empiricism and sensationalism, is not solved by Mach, it is not eliminated orovercome by him, but is muddled by verbal trickery with the word �element,� and the like. Bogdanov�sdenial of objective truth is an inevitable consequence of Machism as a whole, and not a deviation from it.

Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach calls Hume and Kant philosophers �who question the possibility of anycognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition, of the world.� Engels, therefore, lays stress on what iscommon both to Hume and Kant, and not on what divides them. Engels states further that �what isdecisive in the refutation of this [Humean and Kantian] view has already been said by Hegel� (4th Germ.ed., pp. 15-16).[48] In this connection it seems to me not uninteresting to note that Hegel, declaringmaterialism to be �a consistent system of empiricism,� wrote: �For empiricism the external (das



Ausserliche) in general is the truth, and if then a supersensible too be admitted, nevertheless knowledgeof it cannot occur (soll doch eine Erkenntnis desselben [d. h. des Uebersinnlichen] nicht stattfindenkönnen) and one must keep exclusively to what belongs to perception (das der WahrnehmungAngehörige). However, this principle in its realisation (Durchführung) produced what was subsequentlytermed materialism. This materialism regards matter, as such, as the truly objective (das wahrhaftObjektive).�[Hegel, Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse [Encyclopaedia ofthe Philosophical Sciences in Outline], Werke, VI. Band (1843), S. 83. Cf. S. 122.]

All knowledge comes from experience, from sensation, from perception. That is true. But the questionarises, does objective reality �belong to perception,� i.e., is it the source of perception? If you answer yes,you are a materialist. If you answer no, you are inconsistent and will inevitably arrive at subjectivism, oragnosticism, irrespective of whether you deny the knowability of the thing-in-itself, or the objectivity oftime, space and causality (with Kant), or whether you do not even permit the thought of a thing-in-itself(with Hume). The inconsistency of your empiricism, of your philosophy of experience, will in that caselie in the fact that you deny the objective content of experience, the objective truth of experimentalknowledge.

Those who hold to the line of Kant or Hume (Mach and Avenarius are among the latter, in so far as theyare not pure Berkeleians) call us, the materialists, �metaphysicians� because we recognise objectivereality which is given us in experience, because we recognise an objective source of our sensationsindependent of man. We materialists follow Engels in calling the Kantians and Humeans agnostics,because they deny objective reality as the source of our sensations. Agnostic is a Greek word: a in Greekmeans �no,� gnosis �knowledge.� The agnostic says: I do not know if there is an objective reality which isreflected, imaged by our sensations; I declare there is no way of knowing this (see the words of Engelsabove quoted setting forth the position of the agnostic). Hence the denial of objective truth by theagnostic, and the tolerance�the philistine, cowardly tolerance�of the dogmas regarding sprites,hobgoblins, Catholic saints, and the like. Mach and Avenarius, pretentiously resorting to a �new�terminology, a supposedly �new� point of view, repeat, in fact, although in a confused and muddled way,the reply of the agnostic: on the one hand, bodies are complexes of sensations (pure subjectivism, pureBerkeleianism); on the other hand, if we re-christen our sensations �elements,� we may think of them asexisting independently of our sense-organs!

The Machians love to declaim that they are philosophers who completely trust the evidence of oursense-organs, who regard the world as actually being what it seems to us to be, full of sounds, colours,etc., whereas to the materialists, they say, the world is dead, devoid of sound and colour, and in its realitydifferent from what it seems to be, and so forth. Such declamations, for example, are indulged in by J.Petzoldt, both in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Pure Experience and in his World Problem fromthe Positivist Standpoint (1906). Petzoldt is parroted by Mr. Victor Chernov, who waxes enthusiasticover the �new� idea. But, in fact, the Machians are subjectivists and agnostics, for they do not sufficientlytrust the evidence of our sense-organs and are inconsistent in their sensationalism. They do not recogniseobjective reality, independent of man, as the source of our sensations. They do not regard sensations as atrue copy of this objective reality, thereby directly conflicting with natural science and throwing the dooropen for fideism. On the contrary, for the materialist the world is richer, livelier, more varied than itactually seems, for with each step in the development of science new aspects are discovered. For thematerialist, sensations are images of the sole and ultimate objective reality, ultimate not in the sense thatit has already been explored to the end, but in the sense that there is not and cannot be any other. Thisview irrevocably closes the door not only to every species of fideism, but also to that professorial



scholasticism which, while not recognising an objective reality as the source of our sensations, �deduces�the concept of the objective by means of such artificial verbal constructions as universal significance,socially-organised, and so on and so forth, and which is unable, and frequently unwilling, to separateobjective truth from belief in sprites and hobgoblins.

The Machians contemptuously shrug their shoulders at the �antiquated� views of the �dogmatists,� thematerialists, who still cling to the concept matter, which supposedly has been refuted by �recent science�and �recent positivism.� We shall speak separately of the new theories of physics on the structure ofmatter. But it is absolutely unpardonable to confound, as the Machians do, any particular theory of thestructure of matter with the epistemological category, to confound the problem of the new properties ofnew aspects of matter (electrons, for example) with the old problem of the theory of knowledge, with theproblem of the sources of our knowledge, the existence of objective truth, etc. We are told that Mach�discovered the world-elements�: red, green, hard, soft, loud, long, etc. We ask, is a man given objectivereality when he sees something red or feels something hard, etc., or not? This hoary philosophical queryis confused by Mach. If you hold that it is not given, you, together with Mach, inevitably sink tosubjectivism and agnosticism and deservedly fall into the embrace of the immanentists, i.e., thephilosophical Menshikovs. If you hold that it is given, a philosophical concept is needed for thisobjective reality, and this concept has been worked out long, long ago. This concept is matter. Matter is aphilosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to mall by his sensations, and whichis copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.Therefore, to say that such a concept can become �antiquated� is childish talk, a senseless repetition of thearguments of fashionable reactionary philosophy. Could the struggle between materialism and idealism,the struggle between the tendencies or lines of Plato and Democritus in philosophy, the struggle betweenreligion and science, the denial of objective truth and its assertion, the struggle between the adherents ofsupersensible knowledge and its adversaries have become antiquated during the two thousand years ofthe development of philosophy?

Acceptance or rejection of the concept matter is a question of the confidence man places in the evidenceof his sense-organs, a question of the source of our knowledge, a question which has been asked anddebated from the very inception of philosophy, which may be disguised in a thousand different garbs byprofessorial clowns, but which can no more become antiquated than the question whether the source ofhuman knowledge is sight and touch, healing and smell. To regard our sensations as images of theexternal world, to recognise objective truth, to hold the materialist theory of knowledge�these are all oneand the same thing. To illustrate this, I shall only quote from Feuerbach and from two textbooks ofphilosophy, in order that the reader may judge how elementary this question is.

�How banal,� wrote Feuerbach, �to deny that sensation is the evangel, the gospel (Verkündung) of anobjective saviour.�[Feuerbach, Sämtliche Werke, X. Band, 1866, S. 194-95.] A strange, a preposterousterminology, as you see, but a perfectly clear philosophical line: sensation reveals objective truth to man.�My sensation is subjective, but its foundation [or ground�Grund] is objective� (S. 195). Compare thiswith the quotation given above where Feuerbach says that materialism starts from the perceptual worldas an ultimate (ausgemachte) objective truth.

Sensationalism, we read in Franck�s dictionary of philosophy,[Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques[Dictionary of the Philosophical Sciences], Paris, 1875.] is a doctrine which deduces all our ideas �fromthe experience of sense-organs, reducing all knowledge to sensations.� There is subjective sensationalism(scepticism and Berkeleianism), moral sensationalism (Epicureanism),[49] and objective sensationalism.



�Objective sensationalism is nothing but materialism, for matter or bodies are, in the opinion of thematerialists, the only objects that can affect our senses (atteindre nos sens).�

�If sensationalism,� says Schwegler in his history of philosophy,[Dr. Albert Schwegler, Geschichte derPhilosophie im Umriss [Outline History of Philosophy], 15-te Aufl., S. 194.] �asserted that truth or beingcan be apprehended exclusively by means of the senses, one had only [Schwegler is speaking ofphilosophy at the end of the eighteenth century in France] to formulate this proposition objectively andone had the thesis of materialism: only the perceptual exists; there is no other being save material being.�

These elementary truths, which have managed to find their way even into the textbooks, have beenforgotten by our Machians.

5. Absolute and Relative Truth, or the Eclecticism of Engels asDiscovered by A. Bogdanov

Bogdanov made his discovery in 1906, in the preface to Book III of his Empirio-Monism. �Engels inAnti-Dühring,� writes Bogdanov, �expresses himself almost in the same sense in which I have justdescribed the relativity of truth� (p. v)�that is, in the sense of denying all eternal truth, �denying theunconditional objectivity of all truth whatsoever.� �Engels is wrong in his indecision, in the fact that inspite of his irony he recognises certain �eternal truths,� wretched though they may be. . .� (p. viii). �Onlyinconsistency can here permit such eclectic reservations as those of Engels. . .� (p. ix). Let us cite oneinstance of Bogdanov�s refutation of Engels� eclecticism. �Napoleon died on May 5, 1821,� says Engels inAnti-Dühring, in the chapter �Eternal Truths,� where he reminds Dühring of the �platitudes� (Plattheiten)to which he who claims to discover eternal truths in the historical sciences has to confine himself.Bogdanov thus answers Engels: �What sort of �truth� is that? And what is there �eternal� about it? Therecording of a single correlation, which perhaps even has no longer any real significance for ourgeneration, cannot serve as a basis for any activity, and leads nowhere� (p. ix). And on page viii: �CanPlattheiten be called Wahrheiten? Are �platitudes� truths? Truth is a vital organising form of experience;it leads us somewhere in our activity and provides a point of support in the struggle of life.�

It is quite clear from these two quotations that Bogdanov, instead of refuting Engels, makes a meredeclamation. If you cannot assert that the proposition �Napoleon died on May 5, 1821,� is false orinexact, you acknowledge that it is true. If you do not assert that it may be refuted in the future, youacknowledge this truth to be eternal. But to call phrases such as truth is a �vital organising form ofexperience� an answer, is to palm off a mere jumble of words as philosophy. Did the earth have thehistory which is expounded in geology, or was the earth created in seven days? Is one to be allowed tododge this question by Is one to be allowed to dodge this question by talking about �vital� (�what does thatmean?) truth which �leads� somewhere, and the like? Can it be that knowledge of the history of the earthand of the history of humanity �has no real significance�? This is just turgid nonsense, used by Bogdanovto cover his re~treat. For it is a retreat, when, having taken it upon himself to prove that the admission ofeternal truths by Engels is eclecticism, he dodges the issue by a mere noise and clash of words and leavesunrefuted the fact that Napoleon did die on May 5, 1821, and that to regard this truth as refutable in thefuture is absurd.

The example given by Engels is elementary, and anybody without the slightest difficulty can think ofscores of similar truths that are eternal and absolute and that only insane people can doubt (as Engelssays, citing another example: �Paris is in France�). Why does Engels speak here of �platitudes�? Because



he refutes and ridicules the dogmatic, metaphysical materialist Dühring, who was incapable of applyingdialectics to the relation between absolute and relative truth. To be a materialist is to acknowledgeobjective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs. To acknowledge objective truth, i.e., truthnot dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one Way or another, to recognise absolute truth. And it isthis �one way or another� which distinguishes the metaphysical materialist Dühring from the dialecticalmaterialist Engels. On the most complex questions of science in general, and of historical science inparticular, Dühring scattered words right and left: ultimate, final and eternal truth. Engels jeered at him.Of course there are eternal truths, Engels said, but it is unwise to use high-sounding words (gewaltigeWorte) in connection with simple things. If we want to advance materialism, we must drop this trite playwith the words �eternal truth�; we must learn to put, and answer, the question of the relation betweenabsolute and relative truth dialectically. It was on this issue that the fight between Dühring and Engelswas waged thirty years ago. And Bogdanov, who managed �not to notice � Engels� explanation of theproblem of absolute and relative truth given in this very same chapter, and who managed to accuseEngels of �eclecticism� for his admission of a proposition which is a truism for all forms of materialism,only once again betrays his utter ignorance of both materialism and dialectics.

�Now we come to the question,� Engels writes in Anti-Dühring, in the beginning of the chapter mentioned(Part I, Chap. IX), �whether any, and if so which, products of human knowledge ever can have sovereignvalidity and an unconditional claim (Anspruch) to truth� (5th German ed., p. 79). And Engels answers thequestion thus:

�The sovereignty of thought is realised in a number of extremely unsovereignly-thinking human beings;the knowledge which has an unconditional claim to truth is realised in a number of relative errors; neitherthe one nor the other [i.e., neither absolutely true knowledge, nor sovereign thought] can be fully realisedexcept through an endless eternity of human existence.

�Here once again we find the same contradiction as we found above, between the character of humanthought, necessarily conceived as absolute, and its reality in individual human beings with theirextremely limited thought. This is a contradiction which can only be solved in the infinite progression, orwhat is for us, at least from a practical standpoint, the endless succession, of generations of mankind. Inthis sense human thought is just as much sovereign as not sovereign, and its capacity for knowledge justas much un limited as limited. It is sovereign and unlimited in its disposition (Anlage), its vocation, itspossibilities and its historical ultimate goal; it is not sovereign and it is limited in its individualexpression and in its realisation at each particular moment� (p. 81).[Cf. V. Chernov, loc. cit., p. 64, et seq.Chernov, the Machian, fully shares the position of Bogdanov who does not wish to own himself aMachian. The difference is that Bogdanov tries to cover up his disagreement with Engels, to present it asa casual matter, etc., while Chernov feels that it is a question of a struggle against both materialism anddialectics.]

�It is just the same,� Engels continues, �with eternal truths.�[50]

This argument is extremely important for the question of relativism, i.e., the principle of the relativity ofour knowledge, which is stressed by all Machians. The Machians one and all insist that they arerelativists, but the Russian Machians, while repeating the words of the Germans, are afraid, or unable topropound the question of the relation of relativism to dialectics clearly and straightforwardly. ForBogdanov (as for all the Machians) recognition of the relativity of our knowledge excludes even the leastadmission of absolute truth. For Engels absolute truth is compounded from relative truths. Bogdanov is a



relativist; Engels is a dialectician. Here is another, no less important, argument of Engels from thechapter of Anti-Dühring already quoted:

�Truth and error, like all thought-concepts which move in polar opposites, have absolute validity only inan extremely limited field, as we have just seen, and as even Herr Dühring would realise if he had anyacquaintance with the first elements of dialectics, which deal precisely with the inadequacy of all polaropposites. As soon as we apply the antithesis between truth and error outside of that narrow field whichhas been referred to above it becomes relative and therefore unserviceable for exact scientific modes ofexpression; and if we attempt to apply it as absolutely valid outside that field we really find ourselvesaltogether beaten: both poles of the antithesis become transformed into their opposites, truth becomeserror and error truth� (p. 86).[51] Here follows the example of Boyle�s law (the volume of a gas isinversely proportional to its pressure). The �grain of truth� contained in this law is only absolute truthwithin certain limits. The law, it appears, is a truth �only approximately.�

Human thought then by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which iscompounded of a sum-total of relative truths. Each step in the development of science adds new grains tothe sum of absolute truth, but the limits of the truth of each scientific proposition are relative, nowexpanding, now shrinking with the growth of knowledge. �Absolute truth,� says J. Dietzgen in hisExcursions,� �can be seen, heard, smelt, touched and, of course, also be known, but it is not entirelyabsorbed (geht nicht auf) into knowledge� (p. 195). �It goes without saying that a picture does not exhaustits object and the artist remains behind his model. . . . How can a picture �coincide� with its model?Approximately it can� (p. 197). �Hence, we can know nature and her parts only relatively; since even apart, though only a relation of nature, possesses nevertheless the nature of the absolute, the nature ofnature as a whole (des Naturganzen an sich) which cannot be exhausted by knowledge. . . . How, then,do we know that behind the phenomena of nature, behind the relative truths, there is a universal,unlimited, absolute nature which does not reveal itself to man completely? . . . Whence this knowledge?It is innate; it is given us with consciousness� (p. 198). This last statement is one of the inexactitudes ofDietzgen�s which led Marx, in one of his letters to Kugelmann, to speak of the confusion in Dietzgen�sviews.[52] Only by seizing upon such incorrect passages can one speak of a specific philosophy ofDietzgen differing from dialectical materialism. But Dietzgen corrects himself on the same page : �WhenI say that the consciousness of eternal, absolute truth is innate in us, that it is the one and only a prioriknowledge, experience also confirms this innate consciousness� (p. 198).

From all these statements by Engels and Dietzgen it is obvious that for dialectical materialism there is noimpassable boundary between relative and absolute truth. Bogdanov entirely failed to grasp this if hecould write: �It [the world outlook of the old materialism] sets itself up as the absolute objectiveknowledge of the essence of things [Bogdanov�s italics] and is incompatible with the historicallyconditional nature of all ideologies� (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. iv). From the standpoint of modernmaterialism i.e., Marxism, the limits of approximation of our knowledge to objective, absolute truth arehistorically conditional, but the existence of such truth is unconditional, and the fact that we areapproaching nearer to it is also unconditional. The contours of the picture are historically conditional, butthe fact that this picture depicts an objectively existing model is unconditional. When and under whatcircumstances we reached, in our knowledge of the essential nature of things, the discovery of alizarin incoal tar or the discovery of electrons in the atom is historically conditional; but that every such discoveryis an advance of �absolutely objective knowledge� is unconditional. In a word, every ideology ishistorically conditional, but it is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology (as distinct, for



instance, from religious ideology), there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature. You will saythat this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: yes, it issufficiently �indefinite� to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, frombecoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but it is at the same time sufficiently �definite� to enable us todissociate ourselves in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner from fideism and agnosticism, fromphilosophical idealism and the sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant. Here is a boundary whichyou have not noticed, and not having noticed it, you have fallen into the swamp of reactionaryphilosophy. It is the boundary between dialectical materialism and relativism.

We are relativists, proclaim Mach, Avenarius, Petzoldt. We are relativists, echo Mr. Chernov and certainRussian Machians, would-be Marxists. Yes, Mr. Chernov and Comrades Machians�and therein lies yourerror. For to make relativism the basis of the theory of knowledge is inevitably to condemn oneself eitherto absolute scepticism, agnosticism and sophistry, or to subjectivism. Relativism as a basis of the theoryof knowledge is not only the recognition of the relativity of our knowledge, but also a denial of anyobjective measure or model existing independently of humanity to which our relative knowledgeapproximates. From the standpoint of naked relativism one can justify any sophistry; one may regard itas �conditional� whether Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, or not; one may declare the admission,alongside of scientific ideology (�convenient� in one respect), of religious ideology (very �convenient� inanother respect) a mere �convenience� for man or humanity, and so forth.

Dialectics�as Hegel in his time explained�contains the element of relativism, of negation, of scepticism,but is not reducible to relativism. The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels certainly does containrelativism, but is not reducible to relativism, that is, it recognises the relativity of all our knowledge, notin the sense of denying objective truth, but in the sense that the limits of approximation of our knowledgeto this truth are historically conditional.

Bogdanov writes in italics: �Consistent Marxism does not admit such dogmatism and such static concepts� as eternal truths. (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. ix.) This is a muddle. If the world is eternally movingand developing matter (as the Marxists think), reflected by the developing human consciousness, what isthere �static� here? The point at issue is not the immutable essence of things, or an immutableconsciousness, but the correspondence between the consciousness which reflects nature and the naturewhich is reflected by consciousness. In connection with this question, and this question alone, the term�dogmatism� has a specific, characteristic philosophical flavour: it is a favourite word used by theidealists and the agnostics against the materialists, as we have already seen in the case of the fairly �old�materialist, Feuerbach. The objections brought against materialism from the standpoint of the celebrated�recent positivism� are just ancient trash.

6.The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge

We have seen that Marx in 1845 and Engels in 1888 and 1892 placed the criterion of practice at the basisof the materialist theory of knowledge.[53] �The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking whichis isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question,� says Marx in his second Thesis on Feuerbach.The best refutation of Kantian and Humean agnosticism as well as of other philosophical crotchets(Schrullen) is practice, repeats Engels. �The result of our action proves the conformity(Uebereinstimmung) of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived,� he says inreply to the agnostics.[54]



Compare this with Mach�s argument about the criterion of practice: �In the common way of thinking andspeaking appearance, illusion, is usually contrasted with reality. A pencil held in front of us in the air isseen as straight; when we dip it slantwise into water we see it as crooked. In the latter case we say thatthe pencil appears crooked but in reality it is straight. But what entitles us to declare one fact to be thereality, and to degrade the other to an appearance?. . . Our expectation is deceived when we fall into thenatural error of expecting what we are accustomed to although the case is unusual. The facts are not toblame for that. In these cases, to speak of appearance may have a practical significance, but not ascientific significance. Similarly, the question which is often asked, whether the world is real or whetherwe merely dream it, is devoid of all scientific significance. Even the wildest dream is a fact as much asany other� (Analysis of Sensations, pp. 18-19).

It is true that not only is the wildest dream a fact, but also the wildest philosophy. No doubt of this ispossible after an acquaintance with the philosophy of Ernst Mach. Egregious sophist that he is, heconfounds the scientific-historical and psychological investigation of human errors, of every �wild dream�of humanity, such as belief in sprites, hobgoblins, and so forth, with the epistemological distinctionbetween truth and �wildness.� It is as if an economist were to say that both Senior�s theory that the wholeprofit of the capitalist is obtained from the �last hour� of the worker�s labour and Marx�s theory are bothfacts, and that from the standpoint of science there is no point in asking which theory expresses objectivetruth and which�the prejudice of the bourgeoisie and the venality of its professors. The tanner JosephDietzgen regarded the scientific, i.e., the materialist, theory of knowledge as a �universal weapon againstreligious belief� (Kleinere philosophische Schriften [Smaller Philosophical Essays], S. 55), but for theprofessor-in-ordinary Ernst Mach the distinction between the materialist and the subjective-idealisttheories of knowledge �is devoid of all scientific significance�! That science is non partisan in the struggleof materialism against idealism and religion is a favourite idea not only of Mach but of all modernbourgeois professors, who are, as Dietzgen justly expresses it, �graduated flunkeys who stupefy thepeople by their twisted idealism� (op. cit., p. 53

And a twisted professorial idealism it is, indeed, when the criterion of practice, which for every one of usdistinguishes illusion from reality, is removed by Mach from the realm of science, from the realm of thetheory of knowledge. Human practice proves the correctness of the materialist theory of knowledge, saidMarx and Engels, who dubbed all attempts to solve the fundamental question of epistemology withoutthe aid of practice �scholastic� and �philosophical crotchets.� But for Mach practice is one thing and thetheory of knowledge another. They can be placed side by side without making the latter conditional onthe former. In his last work, Knowledge and Error, Mach says: �Knowledge is a biologically useful(förderndes) mental experience� (2nd Germ. ed., p. 115). �Only success can separate knowledge fromerror� (p. 116). �The concept is a physical working hypothesis� (p. 143). In their astonishing naïveté ourRussian Machian would-be Marxists regard such phrases of Mach�s as proof that he comes close toMarxism. But Mach here comes just as close to Marxism as Bismarck to the labour movement, or BishopEulogius[55] to democracy. With Mach such propositions stand side by side with his idealist theory ofknowledge and do not determine the choice of one or another definite line of epistemology. Knowledgecan be useful biologically, useful in human practice, useful for the preservation of life, for thepreservation of the species, only when it reflects objective truth, truth which is independent of man. Forthe materialist the �success� of human practice proves the correspondence between our ideas and theobjective nature of the things we perceive. For the solipsist �success� is everything needed by me inpractice, which can be regarded separately from the theory of knowledge. If we include the criterion ofpractice in the foundation of the theory of knowledge we inevitably arrive at materialism, says the



Marxist. Let practice be of the ancients Pyrrho and Sextus). He emphatically rejects every thing-in-itselfand the possibility of objective knowledge, and emphatically insists that we should not go beyond�experience,� beyond sensations, in which connection he anticipates the following objection from theother camp: �Since the sceptic when he takes part in the affairs of life assumes as indubitable the realityof objective things, behaves accordingly, and thus admits a criterion of truth, his own behaviour is thebest and clearest refutation of his scepticism.��[G. E. Schulze, Aenesidemus oder über die Fundementeder von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementarphilosophie [Aenesidemus, or theFundamentals of the Elementary Philosophy Propounded by Professor Reinhold in Jena], 1792, S. 253.]�Such proofs,� Schulze indignantly retorts, �are only valid for the mob (Pöbel).� For �my scepticism doesnot concern the requirements of practical life, but remains within the bounds of philosophy� (pp. 254,255).

In similar manner, the subjective idealist Fichte also hopes to find room within the bounds of idealisticphilosophy for that �realism which is inevitable (sich aufdringt) for all of us, and even for the mostdetermined idealist, when it comes to action, i.e., the assumption that objects exist quite independently ofus and outside us� (Werke, I, 455).

Mach�s recent positivism has not traveled far from Schulze and Fichte! Let us note as a curiosity that onthis question too for Bazarov there is no one but Plekhanov�there is no beast stronger than the cat.Bazarov ridicules the �salto vitale philosophy of Plekhanov� (Studies, etc., p. 69), who indeed made theabsurd remark that �belief� in the existence of the outer world �is an inevitable salto vitale � (vital leap) ofphilosophy (Notes on Ludwig Feuerbach, p. III). The word �belief� (taken from Hume), although put inquotation marks, discloses a confusion of terms on Plekhanov�s part. There can be no question about that.But what has Plekhanov got to do with it? Why did not Bazarov take some other materialist, Feuerbach,for instance? Is it only because he does not know him? But ignorance is no argument. Feuerbach also,like Marx and Engels, makes an impermissible�from the point of view of Schulze, Fichte and Mach��leap�to practice in the fundamental problems of epistemology. Criticising idealism, Feuerbach explains itsessential nature by the following striking quotation from Fichte, which superbly demolishes Machism: ��You assume,� writes Fichte, �that things are real, that they exist outside of you, only because you seethem, hear them and touch them. But vision, touch and hearing are only sensations. . . . You perceive, notthe objects, but only your sensations�� (Feuerbach, Werke, X. Band, S. 185). To which Feuerbach repliesthat a human being is not an abstract ego, but either a man or woman, and the question whether the worldis sensation can be compared to the question: is the man or woman my sensation, or do our relations inpractical life prove the contrary? �This is the, fundamental defect of idealism: it asks and answers thequestion of objectivity and subjectivity, of the reality or unreality of the world, only from the standpointof theory� (ibid., p. 189). Feuerbach makes the sum-total of human practice the basis of the theory ofknowledge. He says that idealists of course also recognise the reality of the I and the Thou in practicallife. For the idealists �this point of view is valid only for practical life and not for speculation. But aspeculation which contradicts life, which makes the standpoint of death, of a soul separated from thebody, the standpoint of truth, is a dead and false speculation� (p. 192). Before we perceive, we breathe;we cannot exist without air, food and drink.

�Does this mean that we must deal with questions of food and drink when examining the problem of theideality or reality of the world?�exclaims the indignant idealist. How vile! What an offence against goodmanners soundly to berate materialism in the scientific sense from the chair of philosophy and the pulpitof theology, only to practise materialism with all one�s heart and soul in the crudest form at the table d�h(tm)te� (p. 195). And Feuerbach exclaims that to identify subjective sensation with the objective world



�is to identify pollution with procreation� (p. 198).

A comment not of the politest order, but it hits the vital spot of those philosophers who teach thatsense-perception is the reality existing outside us.

The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge. And itinevitably leads to materialism, brushing aside the endless fabrications of professorial scholasticism. Ofcourse, we must not forget that the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirmor refute any human idea completely. This criterion also is sufficiently �indefinite� not to allow humanknowledge to become �absolute,� but at the same time it is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight onall varieties of idealism and agnosticism. If what our practice confirms is the sole, ultimate and objectivetruth, then from this must follow the recognition that the only path to this truth is the path of science,which holds the materialist point of view. For instance, Bogdanov is prepared to recognise Marx�s theoryof the circulation of money as an objective truth only for �our time,� and calls it �dogmatism� to at tributeto this theory a �super-historically objective� truth (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, p. vii). This is again amuddle. The correspondence of this theory to practice cannot be altered by any future circumstances, forthe same simple reason that makes it an eternal truth that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821. But inasmuchas the criterion of practice, i.e., the course of development of all capitalist countries in the last fewdecades, proves only the objective truth of Marx�s whole social and economic theory in general, and notmerely of one or other of its parts, formulations, etc., it is clear that to talk of the �dogmatism� of theMarxists is to make an unpardonable concession to bourgeois economics. The sole conclusion to bedrawn from the opinion of the Marxists that Marx�s theory is an objective truth is that by following thepath of Marxist theory we shall draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); butby following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies.

Footnotes

[38] bête noire

[39] In preparing the first edition of Materialism end Empirio-criticism for the press, A. I.Ulyanova-Yelizarova altered the words "a more honest literary antagonist" to "a more principled literaryantagonist". Lenin objected to this correction and on February 27 (March 12), 1909, he wrote to hissister: "Please do not tone down anything in the passages against Bogdanov, Lenaeharsky and C0.Toning down is impossible. You have done away with the statement that Cheraov is a 'more honest'antagonist than they are, and that is a great pity. That shade is not brought out. It is not in accord with thewhole nature of my accusations. The crux of the matter is that our Machists are dishonest, basely cravenenemies of Marxism in philosophy" (Collected Works, present edition, Volume 37., p. 416).

[40] See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, pp. 369-71.

[41] Lenin is referring to Voroshilov, a character depicted by I. S. Turgenevirs his novel Smoke, as thetype of a pseudo-learned dogmatist. Lenin gave a description of him in his work "The Agrarian Questionand the 'Critics of Marx'" (see present edition, Vol. 5, p. 151).

[42] See F. Engels, Luduwig Feuerbach end the End of Classical German Philosophy (K. Marx and F.Engels, Selected Works, Volume 11, Moscow, 1958, p. 371).

[43] K. Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach" (K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, p.



403). 44. See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow,1958, p. 100.

[44] See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, pp. 100

[45] F. Engels, "Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892" of his work Socialism: Utopian andScientific (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, p. 100).

[46] See F. Engels, Anti-Dühring , Moscow, 1959, p. 65.

[47] Beltov, N.-a pseudonym of G. V. Plekhanov.

[48] See F. Engels, Luduwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (K. Marx and F.Engels, Selected Works, Volume II, Moscow, 1958, p. 371).

[49] Scepticism-a philosophical trend that casts doubt on the possibility of knowing objective reality. Itarose in ancient Greece as early as the 4th to 3rd centuries B. C. (Pyrrho, Aenesidemus, SextusEmpiricus). The adherents of ancient scepticism drew agnostic conclusions from the premises ofsensationalism, Making the subjectivity of sensation into an absolute, the sceptics insisted on the need torefrain from any definite judgments about things. They considered that ,man cannot go beyond hissensations and determine their truth. During the period of the Renaissance, the French philosophersMichel Montaigne, Pierre Charron and Pierre Bayle made use of scepticism for combating medievalscholasticism and the Church.

In the eighteenth century scepticism was revived in the agnosticism of I-fume an(l Kant, and an attemptto modernise ancient scepticism was made by Gottlieb Schulze (Aenesideinus). The arguments ofscepticism were used by the Machists, neo-Kantians and other idealist philosophical schools from themiddle of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Epicureanism the doctrine of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus of the 4th to 3rd centuries B. C.and his successors. The aim of philosophy, according to this doctrine, was man's happiness; freeing himfrom suffering and enabling him to attain a state of bliss. It taught that philosophy was called upon toover come obstacles to happiness: the fear of death due to ignorance of the laws of nature and giving risetherefore to belief in super natural, divine forces.

As regards the theory of knowledge, Epicurus was a sensationalist. He supposed that very subtle imagesproceed from things and penetrate the human soul through the sense-organs. Conceptions of things areformed on the basis of the sensuous perceptions of the soul, in which memory preserves only the generalfeatures of images. Epicurus regarded sense-perceptions themselves as the criterion of truth, and heconsidered that the source of errors lay in the accidental character of individual sensations or in theover-hasty formation of judgments.

The idealists, who distorted the teaching of this great materialist of ancient Greece, made more attacks onEpicureanism than on the other philosophical theories of antiquity.

In the definition of sensationalism quoted by Lenin, Franck rightly regards Epicureanism as a variety ofit, but he draws an incorrect distinction between Epicureanism and objective materialist sensationalism.

[50] See F. Engels, Anti-Dühring , Moscow, 1959, pp. 120-22.

[51] See F. Engels, Anti-Dühring , Moscow, 1959, p. 127. p. 135



[52] See the letter of K. Marx to L. Kugelmann of December 5, 1868 (K. Marx, Briefe en Kugelraenn,Inoizdat, 1940).

[53] Lenin is referring to Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845) and to the works by F. Engels: LudwigFeuerbach end the End of Classical German Philosophy (1388) and the "Special Introduction to theEnglish Edition of 1892" of his Socielism: Utopian and Scientific (see K. Marx and F. Bagels, SelectedWorks, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, pp. 403-05, 358-403, 93-115).

[54] See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, pp. 403, 101.

[55] Bishop Eulogius member of the State Duma, a monarchist and extreme reactionary.

Table of Contents | Next ChapterCollected Works Volume 14Collected Works Table of ContentsLenin Works Archive



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/03.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/volume14.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/index.htm

THE ABC OF COMMUNISMBukharin & Preobrazhensky (1919)

§5. THE SCIENTIFIC CHARACTER OF OUR PROGRAMME

We have already said that it is wrong to manufacture a programme out of our own heads, and that ourprogramrne should be taken from life. Before the time of Marx, those who represented working-classinterests were apt to draw fancy pictures of future paradise, without troubling to ask themselves whetherthis paradise could ever be reached, and without seeing the right road for the workers and peasants tofollow. Marx taught us another way. He examined the evil, unjust, barbaric social order which stillprevails throughout the world, and studied its structure. Precisely after the manner in which we mightstudy a machine, or, let us say, a clock, did Marx study the structure of capitalist society, in whichfactory owners and landowners rule, while workers and peasants are oppressed. Let us suppose we havenoticed that two of the wheels of our clock are badly fitted, and that at each revolution they interferemore and more with one another's movements. Then we can foresee that the clock will break down andstop. What Marx studied was not a clock, but capitalist society; he examined it thoroughly, examined lifeunder the dominion of capital. As the outcome of his researches, Marx recognized very clearly thatcapitalism digging its own grave, that the machine will break down, and that the cause of the break-downwill be the inevitable uprising of the workers, who will refashion the whole world to suit themselves.

Marx's chief instruction to all his followers was that they should study life as it actually is. Thus only cana practical programme be drawn up. It is self-evident, therefore, why our programme begins, with adescription of the capitalist regime.

The capitalist regime has now been overthrown in Russia. What Marx prophesied is being fulfilled underour very eyes. The old order is collapsing. The crowns are falling from the heads of kings and emperors.Everywhere the workers are advancing towards revolution, and towards the establishment of soviet rule.In order fully to understand how all this has come about, it is necessary to be thoroughly well acquaintedwith the nature of the capitalist system. Then we shall realize that its breakdown was inevitable. Once wegrasp that there will be no return of the old system and that the victory of the workers is assured, we shallhave full strength and confidence as we carry on the struggle on behalf of the new social order of theworkers.

§13. FUNDAMENTAL CONTRADICTIONS OF THE CAPITALISTSYSTEM

We must now examine whether capitalist or bourgeois society is well or ill constructed. Anything issound and good when the mutual adaptation of its parts is entirely satisfactory. Let us consider themechanism of a clock. It works accurately and freely if all the cog-wheels are properly adjusted one toanother.

Let us now look at capitalist society. We can perceive without difficulty that capitalist society is far lesssoundly constructed than it appears to be at the first glance. On the contrary, it exhibits gravecontradictions and disastrous flaws. In the first place, under capitalism the production and distribution of

THE ABC OF COMMUNISM (1919)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1910s/abc-abs.htm (1 of 2) [11/06/2002 17:34:15]

goods is quite unorganized; 'anarchy of production' prevails. What does this mean? It means that all thecapitalist entrepreneurs (or capitalist companies) produce commodities independently of one another.Instead of society undertaking to reckon up what it needs and how much of each article, the factoryowners simply produce upon the calculation of what will bring them most profit and will best enablethem to defeat their rivals in the market. The consequence often is that commodities are produced inexcessive quantities - we are talking, of course, of pre-war days. There is then no sale for them. Theworkers cannot buy them, for they have not enough money. Thereupon a crisis ensues. The factories areshut down, and the workers are turned out into the street. Furthermore, the anarchy of production entailsa struggle for the market; each producer wants to entice away the others'customers, to corner the market.This struggle assumes various forms: it begins with the competition between two factory owners; it endsin the world war, wherein the capitalist States wrestle with one another for the world market. Thissignifies, not merely that the parts of capitalist society interfere with one another's working, but that thereis a direct conflict between the constituent parts.

THE FIRST REASON, THEREFORE, FOR THE DISHARMONY OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY ISTHE ANARCHY OF PRODUCTION, WHICH LEADS TO CRISES, INTERECINE COMPETITION,AND WARS.

THE SECOND REASON FOR THE DISHARMONY OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY IS TO BE FOUNDIN THE CLASS STRUCTURE OF THAT SOCIETY. Considered in its essence, capitalist society is notone society but two societies; it consists .of capitalists, on the one hand, and of workers and poorpeasants, on the other. Between these two classes there is continuous and irreconcilable enmity; this iswhat we speak of as the class war. Here, also, we see that the various parts of capitalist society are notmerely ill-adapted to one another, but are actually in unceasing conflict.

Is capitalism going to collapse, or is it not? The answer to the question depends upon the followingconsiderations. If we study the evolution of capitalism, if we examine the changes it as undergone in thecourse of time, and if we perceive that its disharmonies are diminishing, then we can confidently wish itlong life. If, on the other hand, we discover that in the course of time the various parts of the capitalistmachine have come to clash with one another more and more violently, if we discern that the flaws in thestructure are becoming positive chasms, then is time to say, 'Rest in peace'.

We have now, therefore, to study the evolution of capitalism.

Taken from the Pelican Edition.

Philosophy Archive @ marxists.org

THE ABC OF COMMUNISM (1919)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1910s/abc-abs.htm (2 of 2) [11/06/2002 17:34:15]

Karl Korsch (1923)

Marxism and Philosophy

Source: Marxism and Philosophy, Monthly Review Press, 1970, reproduced in its entirety.

Until very recently, neither bourgeois nor Marxist thinkers had much appreciation of the fact that therelation between Marxism and philosophy might pose a very important theoretical and practical problem.For professors of philosophy, Marxism was at best a rather minor sub-section within the history ofnineteenth-century philosophy, dismissed as 'The Decay of Hegelianism'. But 'Marxists' as well tendednot to lay great stress on the 'philosophical side' of their theory, although for quite different reasons.Marx and Engels, it is true, often indicated with great pride that historically the German workers'movement had inherited the legacy of classical German philosophy in 'scientific socialism'. But they didnot mean by this that scientific socialism or communism were primarily 'philosophies' .They rather sawthe task of their 'scientific socialism' as that of definitively overcoming and superseding the form andcontent, not only of all previous bourgeois idealist philosophy, but thereby of philosophy altogether.Later I shall have to explain in more detail what, according to the original conception of Marx andEngels, the nature of this supersession was or was intended to be. For the moment I merely record thathistorically this issue simply ceased to be a problem as far as most later Marxists were concerned. Themanner in which they dealt with the question of philosophy can best be described in the vivid terms inwhich Engels once described Feuerbach's attitude to Hegelian philosophy: Feuerbach simply 'shoved' it'unceremoniously aside'. In fact, very many later Marxists, apparently in highly orthodox compliancewith the masters' instructions, dealt in exactly the same unceremonious way not only with Hegelianphilosophy but with philosophy as a whole. Thus, for example, Franz Mehring more than oncelaconically described his own orthodox Marxist position on the question of philosophy by saying that heaccepted the 'rejection of all philosophic fantasies' which was the precondition for the masters'(Marx andEngels) immortal accomplishments'. This statement came from a man who could with justice say that hehad 'concerned himself with the philosophical origins of Marx and Engels more thoroughly than anyoneelse', and it is extremely significant for the generally dominant position on all philosophical problemsfound among the Marxist theoreticians of the Second International (1889-1914). The prominent Marxisttheoreticians of the period regarded concern with questions that were not even essentially philosophicalin the narrower sense, but were only related to the general epistemological and methodological bases ofMarxist theory, as at most an utter waste of time and effort. Of course, whether they liked it or not, theyallowed discussion of such philosophical issues within the Marxist camp and in some circumstances theytook part themselves. But when doing so they made it quite clear that the elucidation of such problemswas totally irrelevant to the practice of proletarian class struggle, and would always have to remain so.Such a conception was, however, only self-evident and logically justified given the premise that Marxismas a theory and practice was in essence totally unalterable and involved no specific position on anyphilosophical questions whatever.

This meant that it was not regarded as impossible, for example, for a leading Marxist theoretician to be afollower of Arthur Schopenhauer in his private philosophical life.

Marxism and Philosophy by Karl Korsch (1923)

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/korsch.htm (1 of 22) [11/06/2002 17:34:19]

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/1841.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm#44H2



During that period, therefore, however great the contradictions between Marxist and bourgeois theorywere in all other respects, on this one point there was an apparent agreement between the two extremes.Bourgeois professors of philosophy reassured each other that Marxism had no philosophical content ofits own - and thought they were saying something important against it. Orthodox Marxists also reassuredeach other that their Marxism by its very nature had nothing to do with philosophy - and thought theywere saying something important in favour of it. There was yet a third trend that started from the samebasic position; and throughout this period it was the only one to concern itself somewhat morethoroughly with the philosophical side of socialism. It consisted of those 'philosophising socialists' ofvarious kinds who saw their task as that of 'supplementing' the Marxist system with ideas fromKulturphilosophie or with notions from Kant, Dietzgen or Mach, or other philosophies. Yet preciselybecause they thought that the Marxist system needed philosophical supplements, they made it quite clearthat in their eyes too Marxism in itself lacked philosophical content.

Nowadays it is rather easy to show that this purely negative conception of the relation between Marxismand philosophy, which we have shown to be held in apparent unanimity by bourgeois scholars as well asby orthodox Marxists, arose in both cases from a very superficial and incomplete analysis of historicaland logical development. However, the conditions under which they both came to this conclusion in partdiverge greatly, and so I want to describe them separately. It will then be clear that in spite of the greatdifference between the motives on either side, the two sets of causes do coincide in one crucial place.Among bourgeois scholars in the second half of the nineteenth century there was a total disregard ofHegel's philosophy, which coincided with a complete incomprehension of the relation of philosophy toreality, and of theory to practice, which constituted the living principle of all philosophy and science inHegel's time. On the other hand Marxists simultaneously tended in exactly the same way increasingly toforget the original meaning of the dialectical principle. Yet it was this that the two young Hegelians Marxand Engels, when they were turning away from Hegel in the 1840s, had quite deliberately rescued fromGerman idealist philosophy and transferred to the materialist conception of history and society.

First I shall summarise the reasons why, since the middle of the nineteenth century, bourgeoisphilosophers and historians have progressively abandoned the dialectical conception of the history ofphilosophy; and why they have therefore been incapable of adequately analysing and presenting theindependent essence of Marxist philosophy and its significance within the general development ofnineteenth-century philosophy.

One could perhaps argue that there were much more immediate reasons for the disregard andmisinterpretation of Marxist philosophy, and that there is therefore absolutely no need for us to explainits suppression by reference to the abandonment of the dialectic. It is true that in nineteenth-centurywriting on the history of philosophy, a conscious class instinct undeniably contributed to the perfunctorytreatment of Marxism, and, what is more, to a similar treatment of such bourgeois 'atheists' and'materialists' as David Friedrich Strauss, Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. But we would only have avery crude idea of what in reality constitutes a very complex situation if we simply accused bourgeoisphilosophers of having consciously subordinated their philosophy, or history of philosophy, to classinterest. There are of course instances which do correspond to this crude thesis. But in general therelation of the philosophical representatives of a class to the class which they represent is a good dealmore complex. In his Eighteenth Brumaire Marx deals specifically with interconnections of this kind. Hesays there that the class as a whole creates and forms 'an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarlyformed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life' out of its 'material foundations'. A partof the superstructure that is 'determined by class' in this way, yet is particularly remote from its 'material



and economic foundation', is the philosophy of the class in question. This is most obvious as regards itscontent; but it also applies in the last instance to its formal aspects. If we want to understand the completeincomprehension of the philosophical content of Marxism on the part of bourgeois historians ofphilosophy, and really to understand it in Marx's sense of the word - that is 'materialistically andtherefore scientifically' we must not be content to explain this phenomenon directly and immediately byits 'earthly kernel' (namely class consciousness and the economic interests which it conceals 'in the lastinstance'). Our task is to show in detail the mediations of the process whereby even those bourgeoisphilosophers and historians who sincerely try to investigate 'pure' truth with the greatest 'objectivity' arebound completely to overlook the philosophical content of Marxism or are only able to interpret it in aninadequate and superficial way. For our purposes the most important of these mediations is undoubtedlythe fact that since the middle of the nineteenth century the whole of bourgeois philosophy, andespecially, the bourgeois writing of the history of philosophy, has for socioeconomic reasons abandonedHegelian philosophy and the dialectical method. It has returned to a method of philosophy, and of writingthe history of philosophy, which renders it almost impossible for it to make anything 'philosophical' outof a phenomenon like Marx's scientific socialism.

In the normal presentations of the history of the nineteenth-century philosophy which emanate frombourgeois authors, there is a gap at a specific point which can only be overcome in a highly artificialmanner, if at all. These historians want to present the development of philosophical thought in a totallyideological and hopelessly undialectical way, as a pure process of the 'history of ideas'. It is thereforeimpossible to see how they can find a rational explanation for the fact that by the 1850s Hegel'sgrandiose philosophy had virtually no followers left in Germany and was totally misunderstood soonafterwards, whereas as late as the 1830s even its greatest enemies (Schopenhauer or Herbart) were unableto escape its overpowering intellectual influence. Most of them did not even try to provide such anexplanation, but were instead content to note in their annals the disputes following Hegel's death underthe utterly negative rubric of 'The Decay of Hegelianism'. Yet the content of these disputes was verysignificant and they were also, by today's standards, of an extremely high formal philosophical level.They took place between the various tendencies of Hegel's school, the Right, the Centre and the differenttendencies of the Left, especially Strauss, Bauer, Feuerbach, Marx and Engels. To close this period, thesehistorians of philosophy simply set a kind of absolute 'end' to the Hegelian philosophic movement. Theythen begin the 1860s with the return to Kant (Helmholtz, Zeller, Liebmann, Lange) which appears as anew epoch of philosophical development, without any direct connection to anything else. This kind ofhistory of philosophy has three great limitations, two of which can be revealed by a critical revision thatitself remains more or less completely within the realm of the history of ideas. Indeed, in recent yearsmore thorough philosophers, especially Dilthey and his school, have considerably expanded the limitedperspective of normal histories of philosophy in these two respects. These two limits can therefore beregarded as having been overcome in principle, although in practice they have survived to this day andwill presumably continue to do so for a very long time. The third limit, however, cannot in any way besurpassed from within the realm of the history of ideas; consequently it has not yet been overcome evenin principle by contemporary bourgeois historians of philosophy.

The first of these three limits in the bourgeois history of philosophy during the second half of thenineteenth century can be characterised as a 'purely philosophical' one. The ideologues of the time didnot see that the ideas contained in a philosophy can live on not only in philosophies, but equally well inpositive sciences and social practice, and that this process precisely began on a large scale with Hegel'sphilosophy. The second limit is a 'local' one, and was most typical of German professors of philosophy in



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/dilthey.htm

the second half of the last century: these worthy Germans ignored the fact that there were otherphilosophers beyond the boundaries of Germany. Hence, with a few exceptions, they quite failed to seethat the Hegelian system, although pronounced dead in Germany for decades, had continued to flourishin several foreign countries, not only in its content but also as a system and a method. In the developmentof the history of philosophy over recent decades, these first two limits to its perspective have in principlebeen overcome, and the picture painted above of the standard histories of philosophy since 1850 has oflate undergone considerable improvement. However, bourgeois philosophers and historians are quiteunable to overcome a third limitation on their historical outlook, because this would entail these'bourgeois' philosophers and historians of philosophy abandoning the bourgeois class standpoint whichconstitutes the most essential a priori of their entire historical and philosophical science. For whatappears as the purely 'ideal' development of philosophy in the nineteenth century can in fact only be fullyand essentially grasped by relating it to the concrete historical development of bourgeois society as awhole. It is precisely this relation that bourgeois historians of philosophy, at their present stage ofdevelopment, are incapable of studying scrupulously and impartially.

This explains why right up to the present day certain phases of the general development of philosophy inthe nineteenth-century have had to remain 'transcendent' for these bourgeois historians of philosophy. Italso explains why there are still certain curious 'blank patches' on the maps of contemporary bourgeoishistories of philosophy (already described in connection with the 'end' of the Hegelian movement in the1840s and the empty space after it, before the 'reawakening' of philosophy in the 1860s). It also becomesintelligible why bourgeois histories of philosophy today no longer have any coherent grasp even of aperiod of German philosophy whose concrete essence they previously had succeeded in understanding.In other words, neither the development of philosophical thought after Hegel, nor the precedingevolution of philosophy from Kant to Hegel, can be understood as a mere chain of ideas. Any attempt tounderstand the full nature and meaning of this whole later period - normally referred to in history booksas the epoch of 'German idealism' - will fail hopelessly so long as certain connections that are vital for itswhole form and course are not registered, or are registered only superficially or belatedly. These are theconnections between the 'intellectual movement' of the period and the 'revolutionary movement' that wascontemporary with it.

In Hegel's History of Philosophy and other works there are passages describing the nature of thephilosophy of his immediate predecessors - Kant, Fichte, and Schelling - which are valid for the wholeperiod of so-called 'German idealism' including its crowning 'conclusion', the Hegelian system itself.They are also applicable to the later conflicts in the 1840s between the various Hegelian tendencies.Hegel wrote that in the philosophic systems of this fundamentally revolutionary epoch, 'revolution waslodged and expressed as if in the very form of their thought'. Hegel's accompanying statements make itquite clear that he was not talking of what contemporary bourgeois historians of philosophy like to call arevolution in thought - a nice, quiet process that takes place in the pure realm of the study and far awayfrom the crude realm of real struggles. The greatest thinker produced by bourgeois society in itsrevolutionary period regarded a 'revolution in the form of thought' as an objective component of the totalsocial process of a real revolution. Only two peoples, the German and the French - despite or preciselybecause of their contrasts - took part in this great epoch of world history, whose deepest essence isgrasped by the philosophy of history. Other nations took no inward part in it: their governments andpeoples merely played a political role. This principle swept Germany as thought, spirit and concept; inFrance it was unleashed in effective reality. What reality there was in Germany, however, appeared as aviolent result of external conditions and as a reaction to them. A few pages further on, when presenting



the philosophy of Kant, Hegel returns to the same theme:

'Rousseau already placed the Absolute in Freedom; Kant possesses the same principle, only in a moretheoretical version. The French regard it from the point of view of will, for they have a proverb 'Il a latête pres du bonnet' (He is hot-headed). France has a sense of reality, of accomplishment, because ideasthere are translated more directly into action; consequently men there have applied themselves practicallyto reality. However much freedom in itself is concrete, in France it was applied to reality in anundeveloped and abstract form; and to establish abstraction in reality is to destroy that reality. Thefanaticism of freedom, when the people took possession of it, became terrible. In Germany the sameprinciple aroused the interest of consciousness but was only developed in a theoretical manner. We haveall kinds of commotions within us and about us; but through them all the German head prefers to let itssleeping cap sit quietly where it is and silently carries on its operations beneath it - Immanuel Kant wasborn in Königsberg in 1724", and so on.

These passages from Hegel affirm a principle which renders intelligible the innermost nature of this greatperiod of world history: the dialectical relation between philosophy and reality. Elsewhere Hegelformulated this principle in a more general way, when he wrote that every philosophy can be nothing but'its own epoch comprehended in thought.' Essential in any event for a real understanding of thedevelopment of philosophical thought, this axiom becomes even more relevant for a revolutionary periodof social evolution. Indeed, it is exactly this that explains the fate which irresistibly overtook the furtherdevelopment of philosophy and the historical study of philosophy by the bourgeois class in thenineteenth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century this class ceased to be revolutionary in itssocial practice, and by an inner necessity it thereby also lost the ability to comprehend in thought the truedialectical interrelation of ideas and real historical developments, above all of philosophy and revolution.In social practice, the revolutionary development of the bourgeoisie declined and halted in the middle ofthe nineteenth century. This process found its ideological expression in the apparent decline and end ofphilosophical development, on which bourgeois historians dwell to this day. A typical example of thiskind of thinking is the comment of Überweg and Heinze, who begin the relevant section of their book bysaying that philosophy found itself at this time 'in a state of general exhaustion', and 'increasingly lost itsinfluence on cultural activity'. According to Überweg , this sad occurrence was due primarily to'tendencies of psychological revulsion', whereas all 'external moments' had only a 'secondary effect'. Thisfamous bourgeois historian of philosophy explains the character of these 'tendencies of psychologicalrevulsion' to himself and his readers as follows: 'People became tired of both inflated idealism and ofmetaphysical speculation (!) and wanted spiritual nourishment that had more substance to it.' Thephilosophic developments of the nineteenth century appear at once in a totally different form (even fromthe standpoint of the history of ideas a more adequate one) if they are tackled resolutely and thoroughlywith a dialectical method, even in the undeveloped and only partly conscious form in which Hegel used it- in other words in the form of Hegel's idealist dialectic as opposed to Marx's materialist dialectic.

Viewed in this perspective, the revolutionary movement in the realm of ideas, rather than abating andfinally ceasing in the 1840s, merely underwent a deep and significant change of character. Instead ofmaking an exit, classical German philosophy, the ideological expression of the revolutionary movementof the bourgeoisie, made a transition to a new science which henceforward appeared in the history ofideas as the general expression of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat: the theory of 'scientificsocialism' first founded and formulated by Marx and Engels in the 1840s. Bourgeois historians ofphilosophy have hitherto either entirely ignored this essential and necessary relation between Germanidealism and Marxism, or they have only conceived and presented it inadequately and incoherently. To



grasp it properly, it is necessary to abandon the normal abstract and ideological approach of modernhistorians of philosophy for an approach that need not be specifically Marxist but is juststraightforwardly dialectical, in the Hegelian and Marxist sense. If we do this, we can see at once notonly the interrelations between German idealist philosophy and Marxism, but also their internalnecessity. Since the Marxist system is the theoretical expression of the revolutionary movement of theproletariat, and German idealist philosophy is the theoretical expression of the revolutionary movementof the bourgeoisie, they must stand intelligently and historically (i.e. ideologically) in the same relation toeach other as the revolutionary movement of the proletariat as a class stands to the revolutionarymovement of the bourgeoisie, in the realm of social and political practice. There is one unified historicalprocess of historical development in which an 'autonomous' proletarian class movement emerges fromthe revolutionary movement of the third estate, and the new materialist theory of Marxism'autonomously' confronts bourgeois idealist philosophy. All these processes affect each otherreciprocally. The emergence of Marxist theory is, in Hegelian-Marxist terms, only the 'other side' of theemergence of the real proletarian movement; it is both sides together that comprise the concrete totalityof the historical process.

This dialectical approach enables us to grasp the four different trends we have mentioned - therevolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie, idealist philosophy from Kant to Hegel, the revolutionaryclass movement of the proletariat, and the materialist philosophy of Marxism - as four moments of asingle historical process. This allows us to understand the real nature of the new science, theoreticallyformulated by Marx and Engels, which forms the general expression of the independent revolutionarymovement of the proletariat. This materialist philosophy emerged from the most advanced systems ofrevolutionary bourgeois idealism; and it is now intelligible why bourgeois histories of philosophy hadeither to ignore it completely or could only understand its nature in a negative and - literally - invertedsense. The essential practical aims of the proletarian movement cannot be realised within bourgeoissociety and the bourgeois State. Similarly, the philosophy of this bourgeois society is unable tounderstand the nature of the general propositions in which the revolutionary movement of the proletariathas found its independent and self-conscious expression. The bourgeois standpoint has to stop in theorywhere it has to stop in social practice - as long as it does not want to cease being a 'bourgeois' standpointaltogether, in other words supersede itself. Only when the history of philosophy surmounts this barrierdoes scientific socialism cease to be a transcendental Beyond and become a possible object ofcomprehension. The peculiarity, however, that greatly complicates any correct understanding of theproblem of 'Marxism and philosophy' is this: it appears as if in the very act of surpassing the limits of abourgeois position - an act indispensable to grasp the essentially new philosophical content of Marxism -Marxism itself at once superseded and annihilated as a philosophical object.

At the outset of this investigation we stated that Marx and Engels, the founders of scientific socialism,were far from wanting to construct a new philosophy. In contrast to bourgeois thinkers, on the otherhand, they were both fully aware of the close historical connection between their materialist theory andbourgeois idealist philosophy. According to Engels, socialism in its content is the product of newconceptions that necessarily arise at a definite stage of social development within the proletariat as aresult of its material situation. But it created its own specific scientific form (which distinguishes it fromutopian socialism) by its link with German idealism, especially the philosophical system of Hegel.Socialism, which developed from utopia to science, formally emerged from German idealist philosophy.Naturally, this (formal) philosophical origin did not mean that socialism therefore had to remain aphilosophy in its independent form and further development. From 1845 onwards, at the latest, Marx and




Engels characterised their new materialist and scientific standpoint as no longer philosophical. It shouldbe remembered here that all philosophy was for them equivalent to bourgeois philosophy. But it isprecisely the significance of this equation of all philosophy with bourgeois philosophy that needs to bestressed. For it involves much the same relationship as that of Marxism and the State. Marx and Engelsnot only combated one specific historical form of the State, but historically and materialistically theyequated the State as such with the bourgeois State and they therefore declared the abolition of the State tobe the political aim of communism. Similarly, they were not just combating specific philosophicalsystems - they wanted eventually to overcome and supersede philosophy altogether, by scientificsocialism. It is here that find the major contradiction between the 'realistic' (i.e. dialectically materialist)conception of Marxism and the 'ideological humbug of jurists and others' (Marx) characteristic ofLassalleanism and all earlier and later versions of 'vulgar socialism'. The latter basically never surpassedthe 'bourgeois level', i.e. the standpoint of bourgeois society.

Any thorough elucidation of the relationship between 'Marxism and philosophy' must start from theunambiguous statements of Marx and Engels themselves that a necessary result of their newdialectical-materialist standpoint was the supersession, not only of bourgeois idealist philosophy, butsimultaneously of all philosophy as such. It is essential not to obscure the fundamental significance ofthis Marxist attitude towards philosophy by regarding the whole dispute as a purely verbal one - implyingthat Engels simply bestowed a new name on certain epistemological principles known in Hegelianterminology as 'the philosophical aspect of sciences', which were, substantially preserved in thematerialist transformation of the Hegelian dialectic. There are, of course, some formulations in Marx andespecially the later Engels which appear to suggest this. But it is easy to see that philosophy itself is notabolished by a mere abolition of its name . Such purely terminological points must be dismissed in anyserious examination of the relationship between Marxism and philosophy. The problem is rather how weshould understand the abolition of philosophy of which Marx and Engels spoke - mainly in the 1840s,but on many later occasions as well. How should this process be accomplished, or has it already beenaccomplished? By what actions? At what speed? And for whom? Should this abolition of philosophy beregarded as accomplished so to speak once and for all by a single intellectual deed of Marx and Engels?Should it be regarded as accomplished only for Marxists, or for the whole proletariat, or for the whole ofhumanity ? Or should we see it (like the abolition of the State) as a very long and arduous revolutionaryprocess which unfolds through the most diverse phases? If so, what is the relationship of Marxism tophilosophy so long as this arduous process has not yet attained its final goal, the abolition of philosophy?

If the question of the relationship of Marxism to philosophy is posed like this, it becomes clear that weare not dealing with senseless and pointless reflections on issues that have long been resolved. On thecontrary, the problem remains of the greatest theoretical and practical importance. Indeed, it is especiallycrucial in the present stage of the proletarian class struggle. Orthodox Marxists behaved for manydecades as if no problem was involved at all, or at most only one which would always remain immaterialto the practice of the class struggle. It is now this position itself which appears highly dubious - all themore so in the light of the peculiar parallelism between the two problems of Marxism and Philosophyand Marxism and State. It is well known that the latter, as Lenin says in State and Revolution 'hardlyconcerned the major theoreticians and publicists of the Second International'. This raises the question: ifthere is a definite connection between the abolition of the State and the abolition of the philosophy, isthere also a connection between the neglect of these two problems by the Marxists of the SecondInternational? The problem can be posed more exactly. Lenin's bitter criticism of the debasement ofMarxism by opportunism connects the neglect of the problem of the State by the Marxists of the Second



International to a more general context. Is this context also operative in the case of Marxism andphilosophy? In other words, is the neglect of the problem of philosophy by the Marxists of the SecondInternational also related to the fact that 'problems of revolution in general hardly concerned them'?

To clarify the matter, we must make a more detailed analysis of the nature and causes of the greatestcrisis that has yet occurred in the history of Marxist theory and which in the last decade has splitMarxists into three hostile camps.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the long period of purely evolutionary development ofcapitalism came to an end, and a new epoch of revolutionary struggle began. Because of this change inthe practical conditions of class struggle, there were increasing signs that Marxist theory had entered acritical phase. It became obvious that the extraordinarily banal and rudimentary vulgar-Marxism of theepigones had an extremely inadequate awareness of even the totality of its own problems, let alone anydefinite positions on a whole range of questions outside them. The crisis of Marxist theory showed itselfmost clearly in the problem of the attitude of social revolution towards the State. This major issue hadnever been seriously posed in practice since the defeat of the first proletarian revolutionary movement in1848, and the repression of the revolt of the Commune of 1871. It was put concretely on the agenda onceagain by the World War, the first and second Russian Revolutions of 1917, and the collapse of theCentral Powers in 1918. It now became clear that there was no unanimity whatever within the camp ofMarxism on such major issues of transition and goal as the seizure of State power by the proletariat, the'dictatorship of the proletariat', and the final 'withering away of the State' in communist society. On thecontrary, no sooner were all these questions posed in a concrete and unavoidable manner, than thereemerged at least three different theoretical positions on them, all of which claimed to be Marxist. Yet inthe pre-war period, the most prominent representatives of these three tendencies - respectively Renner,Kautsky and Lenin - had not only been regarded as Marxists but as orthodox Marxists. For some decadesthere had been an apparent crisis in the camp of the Social Democrat parties and trade unions of theSecond International; this took the shape of a conflict between orthodox Marxism and revisionism. Butwith the emergence of different socialist tendencies over these new questions, it became clear that thisapparent crisis was only a provisional and illusory version of a much deeper rift that ran through theorthodox Marxist front itself. On one side of this rift, there appeared Marxist neo-reformism which soonmore or less amalgamated with the earlier revisionism. On the other side, the theoretical representativesof a new revolutionary proletarian party unleashed a struggle against both the old reformism of therevisionists and the new reformism of the 'Centre', under the battle-cry of restoring pure or revolutionaryMarxism.

This crisis erupted within the Marxist camp at the outbreak of the World War. But it would be anextremely superficial and undialectical conception of the historical process thoroughly non-Marxist andnon-materialist, indeed not even Hegelian-idealist - to attribute it merely to the cowardice, or deficientrevolutionary convictions, of the theoreticians and publicists who were responsible for thisimpoverishment and reduction of Marxist theory to the orthodox vulgar-Marxism of the SecondInternational. Yet it would be equally superficial and undialectical to imagine that the great polemicsbetween Lenin, Kautsky and other 'Marxists' were merely intended to restore Marxism, by faithfullyre-establishing the Marxist doctrine. Hitherto we have only used the dialectical method, which Hegel andMarx introduced into the study of history, to analyse the philosophy of German idealism and the Marxisttheory that emerged from it. But the only really materialist and therefore scientific method (Marx) ofpursuing this analysis is to apply it to the further development of Marxism up to the present. This meansthat we must try to understand every change, development and revision of Marxist theory, since its



original emergence - from the philosophy of German Idealism, as a necessary product of its epoch(Hegel). More precisely, we should seek to understand their determination by the totality of thehistorico-social process of which they are a general expression (Marx). We will then be able to grasp thereal origins of the degeneration of Marxist theory into vulgar-Marxism. We may also discern themeaning of the passionate yet apparently 'ideological' efforts of the Marxist theorists of the ThirdInternational today to restore 'Marx's genuine doctrine'.

If we thus apply Marx's principle of dialectical materialism to the whole history of Marxism, we candistinguish three major stages of development through which Marxist theory has passed since its birth -inevitably so in the context of the concrete social development of this epoch. The first phase beginsaround 1843, and corresponds in the history of ideas to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Itends with the Revolution of 1848 - corresponding to the Communist Manifesto. The second phase beginswith the bloody suppression of the Parisian proletariat in the battle of June 1848 and the resultantcrushing of all the working class's organisations and dreams of emancipation 'in a period of feverishindustrial activity, moral degeneration and political reaction', as Marx masterfully describes it in hisInaugural Address of 1864. We are not concerned here with the social history of the working-class as awhole, but only with the internal development of Marxist theory in its relation to the general class historyof the proletariat. Hence the second period may be said to last approximately to the end of the century,leaving out all the less important divisions (the foundation and collapse of the First International; theinterlude of the Commune; the struggle between Marxists and Lassalleaner; the Anti-socialist laws inGermany; trade unions; the founding of the Second International. The third phase extends from the startof this century to the present and into an indefinite future.

Arranged in this way, the historical development of Marxist theory presents the following picture. Thefirst manifestation of it naturally remained essentially unchanged in the minds of Marx and Engelsthemselves throughout the later period, although in their writings it did not stay entirely unaltered. Inspite of all their denials of philosophy, this first version of the theory is permeated through and throughwith philosophical thought. It is a theory of social development seen and comprehended as a livingtotality; or, more precisely, it is a theory of social revolution comprehended and practised as a livingtotality. At this stage there is no question whatever of dividing the economic, political and intellectualmoments of this totality into separate branches of knowledge, even while every concrete peculiarity ofeach separate moment is comprehended analysed and criticised with historical fidelity. Of course, it isnot only economics, politics and ideology, but also the historical process and conscious social action thatcontinue to make up the living unity of 'revolutionary practice' (Theses on Feuerbach). The best exampleof this early and youthful form of Marxist theory as the theory of social revolution is obviously theCommunist Manifesto.

It is wholly understandable from the viewpoint of the materialist dialectic that this original form ofMarxist theory could not subsist unaltered throughout the long years of the second half of the nineteenthcentury (which was in practice quite unrevolutionary). Marx's remark in the Preface to the Critique ofpolitical Economy on mankind as a whole is necessarily also true for the working class, which was thenslowly and antagonistically maturing towards its own liberation: 'It always sets itself only such problemsas it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itselfarises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood tobe in the process of emergence'. This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedespresent relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch. To accord theory an autonomous



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch01.htm


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm


existence outside the objective movement of history would obviously be neither materialist nordialectical in the Hegelian sense; it would simply be an idealist metaphysics. A dialectical conceptioncomprehends every form without exception in terms of the flow of this movement, and it necessarilyfollows from it that Marx's and Engels's theory of social revolution inevitably underwent considerablechanges in the course of its further development. When Marx in 1864 drafted the Inaugural Address andthe Statutes of the First International he was perfectly conscious of the fact that time was needed for thereawakened movement to permit the old audacity of language. This is of course true not only forlanguage but for all the other components of the theory of the movement. Therefore the scientificsocialism of the Capital of 1867 - 94 and the other later writings of Marx and Engels represent anexpression of the general theory of Marxism, which is in many ways a different and more developed onethan that of the direct revolutionary communism of the Manifesto of 1847 - 8 - or for that matter, ThePoverty of Philosophy, The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire. Nevertheless, thecentral characteristic of Marxist theory remains essentially unaltered even in the later writings of Marxand Engels. For in its later version, as scientific socialism, the Marxism of Marx and Engels remains theinclusive whole of a theory of social revolution. The difference is only that in the later phase the variouscomponents of this whole, its economic, political and ideological elements, scientific theory and socialpractice, are further separated out. We can use an expression of Marx's and say that the umbilical cord ofits natural combination has been broken. In Marx and Engels, however, this never produces a multiplicityof independent elements instead of the whole. It is merely that another combination of the components ofthe system emerges developed with greater scientific precision and built on the infrastructure of thecritique of political economy. In the writings of its creators, the Marxist system itself never dissolves intoa sum of separate branches of knowledge, in spite of a practical and outward employment of its resultsthat suggests such a conclusion. For example, many bourgeois interpreters of Marx and some laterMarxists thought they were able to distinguish between the historical and the theoretico-economicmaterial in Marx's major work Capital; but all they proved by this is that they understood nothing of thereal method of Marx's critique of political economy. For it is one of the essential signs of his dialecticalmaterialist method that this distinction does not exist for it; it is indeed precisely a theoreticalcomprehension of history. Moreover, the unbreakable interconnection of theory and practice, whichformed the most characteristic sign of the first communist version of Marx's materialism, was in no wayabolished in the later form of his system. It is only to the superficial glance that a pure theory of thoughtseems to have displaced the practice of the revolutionary will. This revolutionary will is latent, yetpresent, in every sentence of Marx's work and erupts again and again in every decisive passage,especially in the first volume of Capital. One need only think of the famous seventh section of Chapter24 on the historical tendency of capital accumulation.

On the other hand, it has to be said that the supporters and followers of Marx, despite all their theoreticaland methodological avowals of historical materialism, in fact divided the theory of social revolution intofragments. The correct materialist conception of history, understood theoretically in a dialectical way andpractically in a revolutionary way, is incompatible with separate branches of knowledge that are isolatedand autonomous, and with purely theoretical investigations that are scientifically objective in dissociationfrom revolutionary practice. Yet later Marxists came to regard scientific socialism more and more as aset of purely scientific observations, without any immediate connection to the political or other practicesof class struggle. Sufficient proof of this is one writer's account of the relation between Marxist scienceand politics, who was in the best sense a representative Marxist theoretician of the Second International.In December 1909, Rudolph Hilferding published his Finance Capital which attempts to 'understandscientifically' the economic aspects of the most recent development of capitalism 'by inserting these



phenomena into the theoretical system of classical political economy'. In the introduction he wrote:

'Here it need only be said that for Marxism the study of politics itself aims only at the discovery of causalconnections. Knowledge of the laws governing a society of commodity production reveals at once thedeterminants of the will of the classes of this society. For a Marxist, the task of scientific politics - apolitics which describes causal connections - is to discover these determinants of the will of classes.Marxist politics, like Marxist theory, is free of value-judgements. It is therefore false simply to identifyMarxism with socialism, although it is very common for Marxists and non-Marxists to do so. LogicallyMarxism, seen only as a scientific system and therefore apart from its historical effects, is only a theoryof the laws of motion of society, which the Marxist conception of history formulated in general, whileMarxist economics has applied it to the age of commodity production. The advent of socialism is a resultof tendencies that develop in a society that produces commodities. But insight into the correctness ofMarxism, which includes insight into the necessity of socialism, is in no way a result of valuejudgements and has no implications for practical behaviour. It is one thing to acknowledge a necessityand quite another to place oneself at the service of this necessity. It is more than possible that a man maybe convinced of the final victory of socialism, and yet decides to fight against it. The insight into the lawsof motion of society provided by Marxism ensures superiority to whoever has mastered them. The mostdangerous opponents of socialism are undoubtedly those who have profited most from its experience.'

According to Hilferding, Marxism is a theory which is logically 'a scientific, objective and free science,without value judgements'. He has no difficulty in explaining the remarkable fact that people so oftenidentify it with the struggle for socialism by invoking the 'insuperable reluctance of the ruling class toaccept the results of Marxism' and therefore to take the 'trouble' to study such a 'complicated system'.'Only in this sense is it the science of the proletariat and the opponent of bourgeois economics, since itotherwise holds unflinchingly to the claim made by every science of the objective and general validity ofits conclusions'. Thus the materialist conception of history, which in Marx and Engels was essentially adialectical one, eventually become something quite undialectical in their epigones. For one tendency, ithas changed into a kind of heuristic principle of specialised theoretical investigation. For another, thefluid methodology of Marx's materialist dialectic freezes into a number of theoretical formulations aboutthe causal interconnection of historical phenomena in different areas of society - in other words it becamesomething that could best be described as a general systematic sociology. The former school treatedMarx's materialist principle as merely a subjective basis for reflective judgement in Kant's sense, whilethe latter dogmatically regarded the teachings of Marxist 'sociology' primarily as an economic system, oreven a geographical and biological one. All these deformations and a row of other less important oneswere inflicted on Marxism by its epigones in the second phase of its development, and they can besummarised in one all-inclusive formulation: a unified general theory of social revolution was changedinto criticisms of the bourgeois economic order, of the bourgeois State, of the bourgeois system ofeducation, of bourgeois religion, art, science and culture. These criticisms no longer necessarily developby their very nature into revolutionary practices they can equally well develop, into all kinds of attemptsat reform, which fundamentally remain within the limits of bourgeois society and the bourgeois State,and in actual practice usually did so. This distortion of the revolutionary doctrine of Marxism itself - intoa purely theoretical critique that no longer leads to practical revolutionary action, or does so onlyhaphazardly - is very clear if one compares the Communist Manifesto or even the 1864 Statutes of theFirst International drawn up by Marx, to the programmes of the Socialist Parties of Central and WesternEurope in the second half of the nineteenth century, and especially to that of the German SocialDemocratic Party. It is well known how bitterly critical Marx and Engels were of the fact that German



Social Democracy made almost entirely reformist demands in the political as well as cultural andideological fields in their Gotha (1875) and Erfurt (1891) programmes. These documents contained not awhiff of the genuine materialist and revolutionary principle in Marxism. Indeed, towards the end of thecentury this situation led to the assaults of revisionism on orthodox Marxism. Eventually, at the start ofthe twentieth century, the first signs of the approaching storm heralded a new period of conflicts andrevolutionary battles, and thereby led to the decisive crisis of Marxism in which we still find ourselvestoday.

Both processes may be seen as necessary phases of a total ideological and material development - once itis understood that the decline of the original Marxist theory of social revolution into a theoretical critiqueof society without any revolutionary consequences is for dialectical materialism a necessary expressionof parallel changes in the social practice of the proletarian struggle. Revisionism appears as an attempt toexpress in the form of a coherent theory the reformist character acquired by the economic struggles of thetrade unions and the political struggles of the working class parties, under the influence of alteredhistorical conditions. The so-called orthodox Marxism of this period (now a mere vulgar-Marxism)appears largely as an attempt by theoreticians, weighed down by tradition, to maintain the theory ofsocial revolution which formed the first version of Marxism, in the shape of pure-theory. This theory waswholly abstract and had no practical consequences - it merely sought to reject the new reformist theories,in which the real character of the historical movement was then expressed as un-Marxist. This isprecisely why, in a new revolutionary period, it was the orthodox Marxists of the Second Internationalwho were inevitably the least able to cope with such questions as the relation between the State andproletarian revolution. The revisionists at least possessed a theory of the relationship of the 'workingpeople' to the State, although this theory was in no way a Marxist one. Their theory and practice had longsince substituted political, social and cultural reforms within the bourgeois State for a social revolutionthat would seize, smash and replace it by the dictatorship of the proletariat. The orthodox Marxists werecontent to reject this solution to the problems of the transitional period as a violation of the principles ofMarxism. Yet with all their orthodox obsession with the abstract letter of Marxist theory they wereunable to preserve its original revolutionary character. Their scientific socialism itself had inevitablyceased to be a theory of social revolution. Over a long period, when Marxism was slowly spreadingthroughout Europe, it had in fact no practical revolutionary task to accomplish. Therefore problems ofrevolution had ceased, even in theory, to exist as problems of the real world for the great majority ofMarxists, orthodox as well as revisionist. As far as the reformists were concerned these problems haddisappeared completely. But even for the orthodox Marxists they had wholly lost the immediacy withwhich the authors of the Manifesto had confronted them, and receded into a distant and eventually quitetranscendental future. In this period people became used to pursuing here and now policies of whichrevisionism may be seen as the theoretical expression. Officially condemned by party congresses, thisrevisionism was in the end accepted no less officially by the trade unions. At the beginning of thecentury, a new period of development put the question of social revolution back on the agenda as arealistic and terrestrial question in all its vital dimensions. Therewith purely theoretical orthodoxMarxism - till the outbreak of the World War the officially established version of Marxism in the SecondInternational - collapsed completely and disintegrated. This was, of course, an inevitable result of its longinternal decay. It is in this epoch that we can see in many countries the beginnings of third period ofdevelopment, above all represented by Russian Marxists, and often described by its major representativesas a 'restoration' of Marxism.

This transformation and development of Marxist theory has been effected under the peculiar ideological



guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism. Yet it is easy to understand both thereasons for this guise and the real character of the process which is concealed by it. What theoreticianslike Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Lenin in Russia have done, and are doing, in the field of Marxisttheory is to liberate it from the inhibiting traditions of the Social Democracy of the second period. Theythereby answer the practical needs of the new revolutionary stage of proletarian class struggle, for thesetraditions weighed 'like a nightmare' on the brain of the working masses whose objectively revolutionarysocioeconomic position no longer corresponded to these evolutionary doctrines. The apparent revival oforiginal Marxist theory in the Third International is simply a result of the fact that in a new revolutionaryperiod not only the workers' movement itself, but the. theoretical conceptions of communists whichexpress it, must assume an explicitly revolutionary form. This is why large sections of the Marxistsystem, which seemed virtually forgotten in the final decades of the nineteenth century, have now cometo life again. It also explains why the leader of the Russian Revolution could write a book a few monthsbefore October in which he stated that his aim was 'in the first place to restore the correct Marxist theoryof the State'. Events themselves placed the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the agenda asa practical problem. When Lenin placed the same question theoretically on the agenda at a decisivemoment, this was an early indication that the internal connection of theory and practice withinrevolutionary Marxism had been consciously re-established. A fresh examination of the problem ofMarxism and philosophy would also seem to be an important part of this restoration. A negativejudgement is clear from the start. The minimisation of philosophical problems by most Marxisttheoreticians of the Second International was only a partial expression of the loss of the practical,revolutionary character of the Marxist movement which found its general expression in the simultaneousdecay of the living principles of dialectical materialism in the vulgar-Marxism of the epigones. We havealready mentioned that Marx and Engels themselves always denied that scientific socialism was anylonger a philosophy. But it is easy to show irrefutably, by reference to the sources, that what therevolutionary dialecticians Marx and Engels meant by the opposite of philosophy was something verydifferent from what it meant to later vulgar-Marxism. Nothing was further from them than the claim toimpartial, pure, theoretical study, above class differences, made by Hilferding and most of the otherMarxists of the Second International. The scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, correctly understood,stands in far greater contrast to these pure sciences of bourgeois society (economics, history orsociology) than it does to the philosophy in which the revolutionary movement of the Third Estate oncefound its highest theoretical expression. Consequently, one can only wonder at the insight of more recentMarxists who have been misled by a few of Marx's well-known expressions and by a few of the laterEngels, into interpreting the Marxist abolition of philosophy as the replacement of this philosophy by asystem of abstract and undialectical positive sciences. The real contradiction between Marx's scientificsocialism and all bourgeois philosophy and sciences consists entirely in the fact that scientific socialismis the theoretical expression of a revolutionary process, which will end with the total abolition of thesebourgeois philosophies and sciences, together with the abolition of the material relations that find theirideological expression in them.

A re-examination of the problem of Marxism and philosophy is therefore very necessary, even on thetheoretical level, in order to restore the correct and full sense of Marx's theory, denatured and banalisedby the epigones. However, just as in the case of Marxism and the State, this theoretical task really arisesfrom the needs and pressures of revolutionary practice. In the period of revolutionary transition, after itsseizure of power, the proletariat must accomplish definite revolutionary tasks in the ideological field, noless than in the political and economic fields - tasks which constantly interact with each other. Thescientific theory of Marxism must become again what it was for the authors of the Communist Manifesto



- not as a simple return but as a dialectical development: a theory of social revolution that comprises allareas of society as a totality. Therefore we must solve in a dialectically materialist fashion not only 'thequestion of the relationship of the State to social revolution and of social revolution to the State' (Lenin),but also the 'question of the relationship of ideology to social revolution and of social revolution toideology'. To avoid these questions in the period before the proletarian revolution leads to opportunismand creates a crisis within Marxism, just as avoidance of the problem of State and revolution in theSecond International led to opportunism and indeed provoked a crisis in the camp of Marxism. To evadea definite stand on these ideological problems of the transition can have disastrous political results in theperiod after the proletarian seizure of State power, because theoretical vagueness and disarray canseriously impede a prompt and energetic approach to problems that then arise in the ideological field.The major issue of the relation of the proletarian revolution to ideology was no less neglected by SocialDemocrat theoreticians than the political problem of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.Consequently in this new revolutionary period of struggle it must be posed anew and the correct -dialectical and revolutionary - conception of original Marxism must be restored. This task can only beresolved by first investigating the problem which led Marx and Engels to the question of ideology: howis philosophy related to the social revolution of the proletariat and how is the social revolution of theproletariat related to philosophy? An answer to this question is indicated by Marx and Engels themselvesand may be deduced from Marx's materialist dialectics. It will lead us on to a larger question: how isMarxist materialism related to ideology in general?

What is the relation of the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels to philosophy? 'None', repliesvulgar-Marxism. In this perspective it is precisely the new materialist and scientific standpoint ofMarxism which has refuted and superseded the old idealist philosophical standpoint. All philosophicalideas and speculations are thereby shown to be unreal - vacuous fantasies which still haunt a few mindsas a kind of superstition, which the ruling class has a concrete material interest in preserving. Oncecapitalism is overthrown the remains of these fantasies will disappear at once.

One has only to reflect on this approach to philosophy in all its shallowness, as we have tried to do, torealise at once that such a solution to the problem of philosophy has nothing in common with the spirit ofMarx's modern dialectical materialism. It belongs to the age in which that 'genius of bourgeois stupidity',Jeremy Bentham, explained 'Religion' in his Encyclopedia with the rubric 'crude superstitious opinions'.It is part of an atmosphere which was created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and whichinspired Eugen Dühring to write that in a future society, constructed according to his plans, there wouldbe no religious cults - for a correctly understood system of sociability would suppress all the apparatusneeded for spiritual sorcery, and with it all the essential components of these cults. The outlook withwhich modern or dialectical materialism - the new and only scientific view of the world according toMarx and Engels - confronts these questions is in complete contrast to this shallow, rationalist andnegative approach to ideological phenomena such as religion and philosophy. To present this contrast inall its bluntness one can say: it is essential for modern dialectical materialism to grasp philosophies andother ideological systems in theory as realities, and to treat them in practice as such. In their early periodMarx and Engels began their whole revolutionary activity by struggling against the reality of philosophy;and it will be shown that, although later they did radically alter their view of how philosophical ideologywas related to other forms within ideology as a whole, they always treated ideologies - includingphilosophy - as concrete realities and not as empty fantasies.

In the 1840s Marx and Engels began the revolutionary struggle - initially on a theoretical and





philosophical plane for the emancipation of the class which stands 'not in partial opposition to theconsequences, but in total opposition to the premises' of existing society as a whole. They wereconvinced that they were thereby attacking an extremely important part of the existing social order. Inthe editorial of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, Marx had already stated that 'philosophy does not standoutside the world, just as the brain does not stand outside man merely because it is not in his stomach'.He repeats this later in the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: 'Previousphilosophy itself belongs to this world and is its, albeit idealist, elaboration. This is the work of whichfifteen years later, in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx said that in it he definitivelyaccomplished the transition to his later materialist position. Precisely when Marx, the dialectician,effected this transition from the idealist to the materialist conception, he made it quite explicit that thepractically oriented political party in Germany at the time, which rejected all philosophy, was making asbig a mistake as the theoretically oriented political party, which failed to condemn philosophy as such.The latter believed that it could combat the reality of the German world from a purely philosophicalstandpoint, that is, with propositions that were derived in one way or another from philosophy (much asLassalle was later to do by invoking Fichte). It forgot that the philosophical standpoint itself was part ofthis dominant German world. But the practically oriented political party was basically trapped by thesame limitation because it believed that the negation of philosophy 'can be accomplished by turning one'sback on philosophy, looking in the opposite direction and mumbling some irritable and banal remarksabout it'. It too did not regard 'philosophy as part of German reality'. The theoretically oriented partyerroneously believed that 'it could realise philosophy in practice without superseding it in theory'. Thepractically oriented party made a comparable mistake by trying to supersede philosophy in practicewithout realising it in theory - in other words, without grasping it as a reality.

It is clear in what sense Marx (and Engels who underwent an identical development at the same time - ashe and Marx often later explained) had now really surpassed the merely philosophical standpoint of hisstudent days; but one can also see how this process itself still had a philosophical character. There arethree reasons why we can speak of a surpassal of the philosophical standpoint. First, Marx's theoreticalstandpoint here is not just partially opposed to the consequences of all existing German philosophy, butis in total opposition to its premises; (for both Marx and Engels this philosophy was always more thansufficiently represented by Hegel). Second, Marx is opposed not just to philosophy, which is only thehead or ideal elaboration of the existing world, but to this world as a totality. Third, and mostimportantly, this opposition is not just theoretical but is also practical and active. 'The philosophers haveonly interpreted the world, our task is to change it', announces the last of the Theses on Feuerbach.Nevertheless, this general surpassal of the purely philosophical standpoint still incorporates aphilosophical character. This becomes clear, once one realises how little this new proletarian sciencediffers from previous philosophy in its theoretical character, even though Marx substitutes it forbourgeois idealist philosophy as a system radically distinct in its orientation and aims. German idealismhad constantly tended, even on the theoretical level, to be more than just a theory or philosophy. This iscomprehensible in the light of its relation to the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie (discussedabove), and will be studied further in a later work. This tendency was typical of Hegel's predecessors -Kant, Schelling and especially Fichte. Although Hegel himself to all appearances reversed it, he too infact allotted philosophy a task that went beyond the realm of theory and became in a certain sensepractical. This task was not of course to change the world, as it was for Marx, but rather to reconcileReason as a self-conscious Spirit with Reason as an actual Reality, by means of concepts andcomprehension. German idealism from Kant to Hegel did not cease to be philosophical when it affirmedthis universal role (which is anyway what is colloquially thought to be the essence of any philosophy).



Similarly it is incorrect to say that Marx's materialist theory is no longer philosophical merely because ithas an aim that is not simply theoretical but is also a practical and revolutionary goal. On the contrary,the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels is by its very nature a philosophy through and through, asformulated in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach and in other published and unpublished writings of theperiod. It is a revolutionary philosophy whose task is to participate in the revolutionary struggles wagedin all spheres of society against the whole of the existing order, by fighting in one specific area -philosophy. Eventually, it aims at the concrete abolition of philosophy as part of the abolition ofbourgeois social reality as a whole, of which it is an ideal component. In Marx's words: 'Philosophycannot be abolished without being realised.' Thus just when Marx and Engels were progressing fromHegel's dialectical idealism to dialectical materialism, it is clear that the abolition of philosophy did notmean for them its simple rejection. Even when their later positions are under consideration, it is essentialto take it as a constant starting point that Marx and Engels were dialecticians before they werematerialists. The sense of their materialism is distorted in a disastrous and irreparable manner if oneforgets that Marxist materialism was dialectical from the very beginning. It always remained a historicaland dialectical materialism, in contrast to Feuerbach's abstract-scientific materialism and all otherabstract materialisms, whether earlier or later, bourgeois or vulgar-Marxist. In other words, it was amaterialism whose theory comprehended the totality of society and history, and whose practiceoverthrew it. It was therefore possible for philosophy to become a less central component of thesocio-historical process for Marx and Engels, in the course of their development of materialism, than ithad seemed at the start. This did in fact occur. But no really dialectical materialist conception of history(certainly not that of Marx and Engels) could cease to regard philosophical ideology, or ideology ingeneral, as a material component of general socio-historical reality - that is, a real part which had to begrasped in materialist theory and overthrown by materialist practice.

In his Theses on Feuerbach Marx contrasts his new materialism not only to philosophical idealism, butjust as forcefully to every existing materialism. Similarly, in all their later writings, Marx and Engelsemphasised the contrast between their dialectical materialism and the normal, abstract and undialecticalversion of materialism. They were especially conscious that this contrast was of great importance for anytheoretical interpretation of so-called mental or ideological realities, and their treatment in practice.Discussing mental representations in general, and the method necessary for a concrete and critical historyof religion in particular, Marx states:

'It is in fact much easier to uncover the earthly kernel within nebulous religious ideas, through analysis,than it is to do the opposite, to see how these heavenly forms develop out of actual concrete relations.

The latter is the only materialist and therefore scientific method. A theoretical method which was contentin good Feuerbachian fashion to reduce all ideological representations to their material and earthly kernelwould be abstract and undialectical. A revolutionary practice confined to direct action against theterrestrial kernel of nebulous religious ideas, and unconcerned with overthrowing and superseding theseideologies themselves, would be no less so. When vulgar-Marxism adopts this abstract and negativeattitude to the reality of ideologies, it makes exactly the same mistake as those proletarian theoreticians)past and present, who use the Marxist thesis of the economic determination of legal relations, state formsand political action, to argue that the proletariat can and should confine itself to direct economic actionalone. It is well known that Marx strongly attacked tendencies of this kind in his polemics againstProudhon and others. In different phases of his life, wherever he came across views like this, which stillsurvive in contemporary syndicalism, Marx always emphasised that this 'transcendental underestimation'of the State and political action was completely unmaterialist. It was therefore theoretically inadequate



and practically dangerous.

This dialectical conception of the relationship of economics to politics became such an unalterable partof Marxist theory that even the vulgar-Marxists of the Second International were unable to deny that theproblem of the revolutionary transition existed, at least in theory, although they ignored the problem inpractice. No orthodox Marxist could even in principle have claimed that a theoretical and practicalconcern with politics was unnecessary for Marxism. This was left to the syndicalists, some of whominvoke Marx, but none of whom have ever claimed to be orthodox Marxists. However, many goodMarxists did adopt a theoretical and practical position on the reality of ideology which was identical tothat of the syndicalists. These materialists are with Marx in condemning the syndicalist refusal ofpolitical action and in declaring that the social movement must include the political movement. Theyoften argue against anarchists that even after the victorious proletarian revolution, and in spite of all thechanges undergone by the bourgeois State, politics will long continue to be a reality. Yet these verypeople fall straight into the anarcho-syndicalist 'transcendental underestimation' of ideology when theyare told that intellectual struggle in the ideological field cannot be replaced or eliminated by the socialmovement of proletariat alone, or by its social and political movements combined. Even today mostMarxist theoreticians conceive of the efficacy of so-called intellectual phenomena in a purely negative,abstract and undialectical sense, when they should analyse this domain of social reality with thematerialist and scientific method moulded by Marx and Engels. Intellectual fife should be conceived inunion with social and political life, and social being and becoming (in the widest sense, as economics,politics or law) should be studied in union with social consciousness in its many different manifestations,as a real yet also ideal (or 'ideological') component of the historical process in general. Instead allconsciousness is approached with totally abstract and basically metaphysical dualism, and declared to bea reflection of the one really concrete and material developmental process, on which it is completelydependent (even if relatively independent, still dependent in the last instance).

Given this situation, any theoretical attempt to restore what Marx regarded as the only scientific,dialectical materialist conception and treatment of ideological realities, inevitably encounters evengreater theoretical obstacles than an attempt to restore the correct Marxist theory of the State. Thedistortion of Marxism by the epigones in the question of the State and politics merely consisted in thefact that the most prominent theoreticians of the Second International never dealt concretely enough withthe most vital political problems of the revolutionary transition. However, they at least agreed in abstract,and emphasised strongly in their long struggles against anarchists and syndicalists that, for materialism,not only the economic structure of society, which underlay all other socio-historical phenomena, but alsothe juridical and political superstructure of Law and the State were realities. Consequently, they couldnot be ignored or dismissed in an anarcho-syndicalist fashion: they had to be overthrown in reality by apolitical revolution. In spite of this, many vulgar-Marxists to this day have never, even in theory,admitted that intellectual life and forms of social consciousness are comparable realities. Quoting certainstatements by Marx and especially Engels they simply explain away the intellectual (ideological)structures of society as a mere pseudo-reality which only exists in the minds of ideologues - as error,imagination and illusion, devoid of a genuine object. At any rate, this is supposed to be true for all theso-called 'higher' ideologies. For this conception, political and legal representatives may have anideological and unreal character, but they are at least related to something real - the institutions of Lawand the State, which comprise the superstructure of the society in question. On the other hand, the'higher' ideological representations (men's religions, aesthetic and philosophical conceptions) correspondto no real object. This can be formulated concisely, with only a slight caricature, by saying that for



vulgar-Marxism there are three degrees of reality: (i) the economy, which in the last instance is the onlyobjective and totally non-ideological reality; (2) Law and the State, which are already somewhat less realbecause clad in ideology, and (3) pure ideology which is objectless and totally unreal ('pure rubbish').

To restore a genuine dialectically materialist conception of intellectual reality, it is first necessary tomake a few mainly terminological points. The key problem to settle here is how in general to approachthe relationship of consciousness to its object. Terminologically, it must be said that it never occurred toMarx and Engels to describe social consciousness and intellectual life merely as ideology. Ideology isonly a false consciousness, in particular one that mistakenly attributes an autonomous character to apartial phenomena of social life. Legal and political representations which conceive Law and the State tobe independent forces above society are cases in point. In the passage where Marx is most precise abouthis terminology, he says explicitly that within the complex of material relations that Hegel called civilsociety, "the social relations of production ... the economic structure of society forms the real foundationon which arise juridical and political superstructures and to which determinate forms of socialconsciousness correspond". In particular, these forms of social consciousness which are no less real thanLaw and the State, include commodity fetishism, the concept of value, and other economicrepresentations derived from them. Marx and Engels analysed these in their critique of politicaleconomy. What is strikingly characteristic of their treatment is that they never refer to this basiceconomic ideology of bourgeois society as an ideology. In their terminology only "the legal, political,religious, aesthetic or philosophical forms of consciousness" are ideological. Even these need not be so inall situations, but become so only under specific conditions which have already been stated. The specialposition now allotted to forms of economic consciousness marks the new conception of philosophywhich distinguishes the fully matured dialectical materialism of the later period from its undevelopedearlier version. The theoretical and practical criticisms of philosophy is henceforward relegated to thesecond, third, fourth or even last but one place in their critique of society. The 'critical philosophy' whichthe Marx of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher saw as his essential task became a more radicalcritique of society, which went to the roots of it through a critique of political economy. Marx once saidthat a critic could 'start from any form of philosophical and practical consciousness and develop from thespecific forms of existent reality, its true reality and final end'. But he later became aware that nojuridical relations, constitutional structures or forms of social consciousness can be understood inthemselves or even in Hegelian or post-Hegelian terms of the general development of the human Spirit.For they are rooted in the material conditions of life that form 'the material basis and skeleton' of socialorganisation as a whole. A radical critique of bourgeois society can no longer start from 'any' form oftheoretical or practical consciousness whatever, as Marx thought as late as 1843. It must start from theparticular forms of consciousness which have found their scientific expression in the political economyof bourgeois society. Consequently the critique of political economy is theoretically and practically thefirst priority. Yet even this deeper and more radical version of Marx's revolutionary critique of societynever ceases to be a critique of the whole of bourgeois society and so of all its forms of consciousness. Itmay seem as if Marx and Engels were later to criticise philosophy only in an occasional and haphazardmanner. In fact, far from neglecting the subject, they actually developed their critique of it in a moreprofound and radical direction. For proof, it is only necessary to re-establish the full revolutionarymeaning of Marx's critique of political economy, as against certain mistaken ideas about it which arecommon today. This may also serve to clarify both its place in the whole system of Marx's critique ofsociety, and its relation to his critique of ideologies like philosophy.

It is generally accepted that the critique of political economy - the most important theoretical and






practical component of the Marxist theory of society - includes not only a critique of the materialrelations of production of the capitalist epoch but also of its specific forms of social consciousness. Eventhe pure and impartial 'scientific science' of vulgar-Marxism acknowledges this. Hilferding admits thatscientific knowledge of the economic laws of a society is also a 'scientific politics' in so far as it shows'the determinant factors which define the will of the classes in this society'. Despite this relation ofeconomics to politics, however, in the totally abstract and undialectical conception of vulgar-Marxism,the critique of political economy has a purely theoretical role as a 'science'. Its function is to criticise theerrors of bourgeois economics, classical or vulgar. By contrast, a proletarian political party uses theresults of critical and scientific investigation for its practical ends - ultimately the overthrow of the realeconomic structure of capitalist society and of its relations of production. (On occasion, the results of thisMarxism can also be used against the proletarian party itself, as by Simkhovitch or Paul Lensch.)

The major weakness of vulgar socialism is that, in Marxist terms, it clings quite 'unscientifically' to anaive realism - in which both so-called common sense, which is the 'worst metaphysician', and thenormal positivist science of bourgeois society, draw a sharp line of division between consciousness andits object. Neither are aware that this distinction had ceased to be completely valid even for thetranscendental perspective of critical philosophy, and has been completely superseded in dialecticalphilosophy. At best, they imagine that something like this might be true of Hegel's idealist dialectic. It isprecisely this, they think, that constitutes the 'mystification' which the dialectic according to Marx,'suffered at Hegel's hands'. It follows therefore for them that this mystification must be completelyeliminated from the rational form of the dialectic: the materialist dialectic of Marx. In fact, we shallshow, Marx and Engels were very far from having any such dualistic metaphysical conception of therelationship of consciousness to reality - not only in their first (philosophical) period but also in theirsecond (positive-scientific) period. It never occurred to them that they could be misunderstood in thisdangerous way. Precisely because of this, they sometimes did provide considerable pretexts for suchmisunderstandings in certain of their formulations (although these can easily be corrected by a hundredtimes as many other formulations). For the coincidence of consciousness and reality characterises everydialectic, including Marx's dialectical materialism. Its consequence is that the material relations ofproduction of the capitalist epoch only are what they are in combination with the forms in which they arereflected in the pre-scientific and bourgeois-scientific consciousness of the period; and they could notsubsist in reality without these forms of consciousness. Setting aside any philosophical considerations, itis therefore clear that without this coincidence of consciousness and reality, a critique of politicaleconomy could never have become the major component of a theory of social revolution. The conversefollows. Those Marxist theoreticians for whom Marxism was no longer essentially a theory of socialrevolution could see no need for this dialectical conception of the coincidence of reality andconsciousness: it was bound to appear to them as theoretically false and unscientific.

In the different periods of their revolutionary activity, Marx and Engels speak of the relationship ofconsciousness to reality at the economic level, or the higher levels of politics and law, or on the highestlevels of art, religion and philosophy. It is always necessary to ask in what direction these remarks areaimed (they are nearly always, above all in the late period, only remarks!). For their import is verydifferent, depending on whether they are aimed at Hegel's idealist and speculative method or at 'theordinary method', essentially Wolff's metaphysical method, which has become fashionable once again'.After Feuerbach had 'dispatched speculative concepts', the latter re-emerged in the new natural-scientificmaterialism of Büchner, Vogt and Moleschott and 'even bourgeois economists wrote large ramblingbooks' inspired by it. From the outset, Marx and Engels had to clarify their position only with regard to



the first, Hegelian method. They never doubted that they had issued from it. Their only problem was howto change the Hegelian dialectic from a method proper to a superficially idealist, but secretly materialistconception of the world into the guiding principle of an explicitly materialist view of history and society.Hegel had already taught that a philosophico-scientific method was not a mere form of thought whichcould be applied indiscriminately to any content. It was rather 'the structure of the whole presented in itspure essence'. Marx made the same point in an early writing: 'Form has no value if it is not the form of itscontent.' As Marx and Engels said, it then became a logical and methodological question of 'stripping thedialectical method of its idealist shell and presenting it in the simple form in which it becomes the onlycorrect form of intellectual development'. Marx and Engels were confronted with the abstract speculativeform in which Hegel bequeathed the dialectical method and which the different Hegelian schools haddeveloped in an even more abstract and formal way. They therefore made vigorous counter-statements,such as: all thought is nothing but the 'transformation of perceptions and representations into concepts';even the most general categories of thought are only 'abstract, unilateral relations of a living totality thatis already given'; an object which thought comprehends as real 'remains as before, independent andexternal to the mind. Nevertheless, all their lives they rejected the undialectical approach whichcounterposes the thought, observation, perception and comprehension of an immediately given reality tothis reality, as if the former were themselves also immediately given independent essences. This is bestshown by a sentence from Engels' attack on Dühring, which is doubly conclusive because it is widelybelieved that the later Engels degenerated into a thoroughly naturalistic-materialist view of the world bycontrast to Marx, his more philosophically literate companion. It is precisely in one of his last writingsthat Engels, in the same breath as he describes thought and consciousness as products of the human brainand man himself as a product of nature, also unambiguously protests against the wholly 'naturalistic'outlook which accepts consciousness and thought 'as something given, something straightforwardlyopposed to Being and to Nature'. The method of Marx and Engels is not that of an abstract materialism,but of a dialectical materialism: it is therefore the only scientific method. For Marxism, pre-scientific,extra-scientific and scientific consciousness no longer exist over and against the natural and (above all)social-historical world. They exist within this world as a real and objective component of it, if also an'ideal' one. This is the first specific difference between the materialist dialectic of Marx and Engels, andHegel's idealist dialectic. Hegel said that the theoretical consciousness of an individual could not 'leapover' his own epoch, the world of his time. Nevertheless he inserted the world into philosophy far morethan he did philosophy into the world. This first difference between the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic isvery closely related to a second one. As early as 1844 Marx wrote in The Holy Family:

'Communist workers well know that property, capital, money, wage-labour and such like, far from beingidealist fantasies are highly practical and objective products of their own alienation; they must betranscended in a practical and objective way so that man can become man, not only in thought and inconsciousness, but in his (social) Being and in his life.'

This passage states with full materialist clarity that, given the unbreakable interconnection of all realphenomena in bourgeois society as a whole, its forms of consciousness cannot be abolished throughthought alone. These forms can only be abolished in thought and consciousness by a simultaneouspractico-objective overthrow of the material relations of production themselves, which have hithertobeen comprehended through these forms. This is also true of the highest forms of social consciousness,such as religion, and of medium levels of social being and consciousness, such as the family. Thisconsequence of the new materialism is implied in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and isexplicitly and comprehensively developed in the Theses on Feuerbach which Marx wrote in 1845 to



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch01.htm

clarify his own ideas.

‘The question of whether objective truth corresponds to human thought is not a theoretical question but apractical one. Man must prove the truth - that is, the reality, the power, and the immanence of histhought, in practice. The dispute about the reality or unreality of thought thought isolated from practice ispurely scholastic.’

It would be a dangerous misunderstanding to think that this means that criticism in practice merelyreplaces criticism in theory. Such an idea merely replaces the philosophical abstraction of pure theorywith an opposite anti-philosophical abstraction of an equally pure practice. It is not in ‘human practice’alone, but only ‘in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice’ that Marx as a dialecticalmaterialist locates the rational solution of all mysteries that 'lure theory into mysticism'. The translationof the dialectics from its mystification by Hegel to the ‘rational form’ of Marx's materialist dialecticessentially means that it has become the guiding principle of a single theoretical-practical andcritical-revolutionary activity. It is a 'method that is by its very nature critical and revolutionary'.

Even in Hegel ‘the theoretical was essentially contained in the practical’. ‘One must not imagine thatman thinks on the one hand and wills on the other, that he has Thought in one pocket and Will in another;this would be a vacuous notion’. For Hegel, the practical task of the Concept in its ‘thinking activity’ (inother words, philosophy) does not lie in the domain of ordinary ‘practical human and sensuous activity’(Marx). It is rather ‘to grasp what is, for that which is, is Reason’." By contrast, Marx concludes theself-clarification of his own dialectical method with the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach:

'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, it is now a question of changing it.'

This does not mean, as the epigones imagine, that all philosophy is shown to be mere fantasy. It onlyexpresses a categorical rejection of all theory, philosophical or scientific, that is not at the same timepractice - real, terrestrial immanent, human and sensuous practice, and not the speculative activity of thephilosophical idea that basically does nothing but comprehend itself. ">Theoretical criticism andpractical overthrow are here inseparable activities, not in any abstract sense but as a concrete and realalteration of the concrete and real world of bourgeois society. Such is the most precise expression of thenew materialist principle of the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels.

We have now shown the real consequences of the dialectical materialist principle for a Marxistconception of the relationship of consciousness to reality. By the same token, we have shown the error ofall abstract and undialectical conceptions found among various kinds of vulgar-Marxists in theirtheoretical and practical attitudes to so-called intellectual reality. Marx’s dictum is true not just of formsof economic consciousness in the narrower sense, but all forms of social consciousness: they are notmere chimeras, but ‘highly objective and highly practical’ social realities and consequently ‘must beabolished in a practical and objective manner’. The naively metaphysical standpoint of sound bourgeoiscommon sense considers thought independent of being and defines truth as the correspondence ofthought to an object that is external to it and ‘mirrored’ by it. It is only this outlook that can sustain theview that all forms of economic consciousness (the economic conceptions of a pre-scientific andunscientific consciousness, as well as scientific economics itself) have an objective meaning becausethey correspond to a reality (the material relations of production which they comprehend) whereas allhigher forms of representation are merely objectless fantasies which will automatically dissolve into their



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm#003







http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm



essential nullity after the overthrow of the economic structure of society, and the abolition of its juridicaland political superstructure. Economic ideas themselves only appear to be related to the materialrelations of production of bourgeois society in the way an image is related to the object it reflects. In factthey are related to them in the way that a specific, particularly defined part of a whole is related to theother parts of this whole. Bourgeois economics belongs with the material relations of production tobourgeois society as a totality. This totality also contains political and legal representations and theirapparent objects, which bourgeois politicians and jurists - the 'ideologues of private property' (Marx) -treat in an ideologically inverted manner as autonomous essences. Finally, it also includes the higherideologies of the art, religion and philosophy of bourgeois society. If it seems that there are no objectswhich these representations can reflect, correctly or incorrectly, this is because economic, political orlegal representations do not have particular objects which exist independently either, isolated from theother phenomena of bourgeois society. To counterpose such objects to these representations is an abstractand ideological bourgeois procedure. They merely express bourgeois society as a totality in a particularway, just as do art, religion and philosophy. Their ensemble forms the spiritual structure of bourgeoissociety, which corresponds to its economic structure, just as its legal and political superstructurecorresponds to this same basis. All these forms must be subjected to the revolutionary social criticism ofscientific socialism, which embraces the whole of social reality. They must be criticised in theory andoverthrown in practice, together with the economic, legal and political structures of society and at thesame time as them. Just as political action is not rendered unnecessary by the economic action of arevolutionary class, so intellectual action is not rendered unnecessary by either political or economicaction. On the contrary it must be carried through to the end in theory and practice, as revolutionaryscientific criticism and agitational work before the seizure of state power by the working class, and asscientific organisation and ideological dictatorship after the seizure of state power. If this is valid forintellectual action against the forms of consciousness which define bourgeois society in general, it isespecially true of philosophical action. Bourgeois consciousness necessarily sees itself as apart from theworld and independent of it, as pure critical philosophy and impartial science, just as the bourgeois Stateand bourgeois Law appear to be above society. This consciousness must be philosophically fought by therevolutionary materialistic dialectic, which is the philosophy of the working class. This struggle will onlyend when the whole of existing society and its economic basis have been totally overthrown in practice,and this consciousness has been totally surpassed and abolished in theory. — ‘Philosophy cannot beabolished without being realised.’

Further Reading:Biography | Theses on Feuerbach, Marx 1845 | German Ideology, Marx & Engels, 1845 | ABC ofCommunism, Bukharin & Preobrazhensky 1919 | 1967 Preface to History & Class Consciousness, 1923 |What is Proletarian Culture?, Trotsky 1923 | Kautsky | Dialectical & Historical Materialism, Stalin 1938 |Cyril Smith, 1998




http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/k/o.htm#korsch-karl


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/works/1920s/mch-abs.htm

Leon Trotsky's

What Is Proletarian Culture, and Is ItPossible?Transcribed for the Philisophy/History Archive, mirrored here with permission.

Every ruling class creates its own culture, and consequently, its own art. History has known theslave-owning cultures of the East and of classic antiquity, the feudal culture of medieval Europe and thebourgeois culture which now rules the world. It would follow from this that the proletariat has also tocreate its own culture and its own art.

The question, however, is not as simple as it seems at first glance. Society in which slave owners werethe ruling class, existed for many and many centuries. The same is true of feudalism. Bourgeois culture,if one were to count only from the time of its open and turbulent manifestation, that is, from the period ofthe Renaissance, has existed five centuries, but it did not reach its greatest flowering until the nineteenthcentury, or, more correctly, the second half of it. History shows that the formation of a new culture whichcenters around a ruling class demands considerable time and reaches completion only at the periodpreceding the political decadence of that class.

Will the proletariat have enough time to create a "proletarian" culture? In contrast to the regime of theslave owners and of the feudal lords and of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat regards its dictatorship as abrief period of transition. When we wish to denounce the all-too-optimistic views about the transition tosocialism, we point out that the period of the social revolution, on a world scale, will last not months andnot years, but decades - decades, but not centuries, and certainly not thousands of years. Can theproletariat in this time create a new culture? It is legitimate to doubt this, because the years of socialrevolution will be years of fierce class struggles in which destruction will occupy more room than newconstruction. At any rate the energy of the proletariat itself will be spent mainly in conquering power, inretaining and strengthening it and in applying it to the most urgent needs of existence and of furtherstruggle. The proletariat, however, will reach its highest tension and the fullest manifestation of its classcharacter during this revolutionary period and it will be within such narrow limits that the possibility ofplanful, cultural reconstruction will be confined.

On the other hand, as the new regime will be more and more protected from political and militarysurprises and as the conditions for cultural creation will become more favourable, the proletariat will bemore and more dissolved into a socialist community and will free itself from its class characteristics andthus cease to be a proletariat. In other words, there can be no question of the creation of a new culture,that is, of construction on a large historic scale during the period of dictatorship. The culturalreconstruction, which will begin when the need of the iron clutch of a dictatorship unparalleled in historywill have disappeared, will not have a class character. This seems to lead to the conclusion that there isno proletarian culture and that there never will be any and in fact there is no reason to regret this. Theproletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture and to make way forhuman culture. We frequently seem to forget this.

The formless talk about proletarian culture, in antithesis to bourgeois culture, feeds on the extremely

Leon Trotsky: 1923 -- What Is Proletarian Culture, and Is It Possible?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1923/tia23c.htm (1 of 8) [11/06/2002 17:34:21]

uncritical identification of the historic destinies of the proletariat with those of the bourgeoisie. A shallowand purely liberal method of making analogies of historic forms has nothing in common with Marxism.There is no real analogy between the historic development of the bourgeoisie and of the working class.

The development of bourgeois culture began several centuries before the bourgeoisie took into its ownhands the power of the state by means of a series of revolutions. Even when the bourgeoisie was a thirdestate, almost deprived of its rights, it played a great and continually growing part in all the fields ofculture. This is especially clear in the case of architecture. The Gothic churches were not built suddenly,under the impulse of a religious inspiration. The construction of the Cologne cathedral, its architectureand its sculpture, sum up the architectural experience of mankind from the time of the cave and combinethe elements of this experience in a new style which expresses the culture of its own epoch which is, inthe final analysis, the social structure and technique of this epoch. The old pre-bourgeoisie of the guildswas the factual builder of the Gothic. When it grew and waxed strong, that is, when it became richer, thebourgeoisie passed through the Gothic stage consciously and actively and created its own architecturalstyle, not for the church, however, but for its own palaces.

With its basis on the Gothic, it turned to antiquity, especially to Roman architecture and the Moorish, andapplied all these to the conditions and needs of the new city community, thus creating the Renaissance(Italy at the end of the first quarter of the fifteenth century). Specialists may count the elements which theRenaissance owes to antiquity and those it owes to the Gothic and may argue as to which side is thestronger. But the Renaissance only begins when the new social class, already culturally satiated, feelsitself strong enough to come out from under the yoke of the Gothic arch, to look at Gothic art and on allthat preceded it as material for its own disposal, and to use the technique of the past for its own artisticaims. This refers also to all the other arts, but with this difference, that because of their greater flexibility,that is, of their lesser dependence upon utilitarian aims and materials, the 'free' arts do not reveal thedialectics of successive styles with such firm logic as does architecture.

From the time of the Renaissance and of the Reformation, which created more favourable intellectual andpolitical conditions for the bourgeoisie in feudal society, to the time of the revolution which transferredpower to the bourgeoisie (in France), there passed three or four centuries of growth in the material andintellectual force of the bourgeoisie. The Great French Revolution and the wars which grew out of ittemporarily lowered the material level of culture. But later the capitalist regime became established asthe "natural' and the 'eternal.' Thus the fundamental processes of the growth of bourgeois culture and ofits crystallisation into style were determined by the characteristics of the bourgeoisie as a possessing andexploiting class. The bourgeoisie not only developed materially within feudal society, entwining itself invarious ways with the latter and attracting wealth into its own hands, but it weaned the intelligentsia to itsside and created its cultural foundation (schools, universities, academies, newspapers, magazines) longbefore it openly took possession of the state. It is sufficient to remember that the German bourgeoisie,with its incomparable technology, philosophy, science and art, allowed the power of the state to lie in thehands of a feudal bureaucratic class as late as 1918 and decided, or, more correctly, was forced to takepower into its own hands only when the material foundations of German culture began to fall to pieces.

But one may answer: It took thousands of years to create the slave-owning art and only hundreds of yearsfor the bourgeois art. Why, then, could not proletarian art be created in tens of years? The technical basesof life are not at all the same at present and therefore the tempo is also different. This objection, which atfirst sight seems convincing, in reality misses the crux of the question. Undoubtedly, in the developmentof the new society, the time will come when economics, cultural life and art will receive the greatest



impulse forward. At the present time we can only create fancies about their tempo. In a society whichwill have thrown off the pinching and stultifying worry about one's daily bread, in which communityrestaurants will prepare good, wholesome and tasteful food for all to choose, in which communallaundries will wash clean everyone's good linen, in which children, all the children, will be well-fed andstrong and gay, and in which they will absorb the fundamental elements of science and art as they absorbalbumen and air and the warmth of the sun, in a society in which electricity and the radio will not be thecrafts they are today, but will come from inexhaustible sources of superpower at the call of a centralbutton, in which there will be no "useless mouths," in which the liberated egotism of mana mighty force!- will be directed wholly towards the understanding, the transformation and the betterment of theuniverse-in such a society the dynamic development of culture will be incomparable with anything thatwent on in the past. But all this will come only after a climb, prolonged and difficult, which is still aheadof us. And we are speaking only about the period of the climb.

But is not the present moment dynamic? It is in the highest degree. But its dynamics is centred inpolitics. The war and the revolution were dynamic, but very much at the expense of technology andculture. It is true that the war has produced a long series of technical inventions. But the poverty which ithas produced has put off the practical application of these inventions for a long time and with this theirpossibility of revolutionising life. This refers to radio, to aviation, and to many mechanical discoveries.

On the other hand, the revolution lays out the ground for a new society. But it does so with the methodsof the old society, with the class struggle, with violence, destruction and annihilation. If the proletarianrevolution had not come, mankind would have been strangled by its own contradictions. The revolutionsaved society and culture, but by means of the most cruel surgery. All the active forces are concentratedin politics and in the revolutionary struggle, everything else is shoved back into the background andeverything which is a hindrance is cruelly trampled underfoot. In this process, of course there is an ebband flow; military communism gives place to the NEP, which, in its turn, passes through various stages.

But in its essence, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an organisation for the production of theculture of a new society, but a revolutionary and military system struggling for it. One must not forgetthis. We think that the historian of the future will place the culminating point of the old society on thesecond of August, 1914, when the maddened power of bourgeois culture let loose upon the world theblood and fire of an imperialistic war. The beginning of the new history of mankind will be dated fromNovember 7, 1917. The fundamental stages of the development of mankind we think will be establishedsomewhat as follows: prehistoric 'history' of primitive man; ancient history, whose rise was based onslavery; the Middle Ages, based on serfdom; capitalism, with free wage exploitation; and finally,socialist society, with, let us hope, its painless transition to a stateless commune. At any rate, the twenty,thirty, or fifty years of proletarian world revolution will go down in history as the most difficult climbfrom one system to another, but in no case as an independent epoch of proletarian culture.

At present, in these years of respite, some illusions may arise in our Soviet Republic as regards this. Wehave put the cultural questions on the order of the day. By projecting our present-day problems into thedistant future, one can think himself through a long series of years into proletarian culture. But no matterhow important and vitally necessary our culture-building may be, it is entirely dominated by theapproach of European and world revolution. We are, as before, merely soldiers in a campaign. We arebivouacking for a day. Our shirt has to be washed, our hair has to be cut and combed, and, mostimportant of all, the rifle has to be cleaned and oiled. Our entire present-day economic and cultural workis nothing more than a bringing of ourselves into order between two battles and two campaigns. The



principal battles are ahead and may be not so far off. Our epoch is not yet an epoch of new culture, butonly the entrance to it. We must, first of all, take possession, politically, of the most important elementsof the old culture, to such an extent, at least, as to be able to pave the way for a new culture.

This becomes especially clear when one considers the problem as one should, in its internationalcharacter. The proletariat was, and remains, a non-possessing class. This alone restricted it very muchfrom acquiring those elements of bourgeois culture which have entered into the inventory of mankindforever. In a certain sense, one may truly say that the proletariat also, at least the European proletariat,had its epoch of reformation. This occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, when, withoutmaking an attempt on the power of the state directly, it conquered for itself under the bourgeois systemmore favourable legal conditions for development.

But, in the first place, for this period of 'reformation' (parliamentarism and social reforms) whichcoincides mainly with the period of the Second International history allowed the working classapproximately as many decades as it allowed the bourgeoisie centuries. In the second place, theproletariat, during this preparatory period, did not at all become a richer class and did not concentrate inits hands material power. On the contrary, from a social and cultural point of view, it became more andmore unfortunate. The bourgeoisie came into power fully armed with the culture of its time. Theproletariat, on the other hand, comes into power fully armed only with the acute need of masteringculture. The problem of a proletariat which has conquered power consists, first of all, in taking into itsown hands the apparatus of culture-the industries, schools, publications, press, theatres, etc.-which didnot serve it before, and thus to open up the path of culture for itself.

Our task in Russia is complicated by the poverty of our entire cultural tradition and by the materialdestruction wrought by the events of the last decade. After the conquest of power and after almost sixyears of struggle for its retention and consolidation, our proletariat is forced to turn all its energiestowards the creation of the most elementary conditions of material existence and of contact with the ABCof culture -ABC in the true and literal sense of the word. It is not for nothing that we have put toourselves the task of having universal literacy in Russia by the tenth anniversary of the Soviet regime.

Someone may object that I take the concept of proletarian culture in too broad a sense. That if there maynot be a fully and entirely developed proletarian culture, yet the working class may succeed in putting itsstamp upon culture before it is dissolved into a communist society. Such an objection must be registeredfirst of all as a serious retreat from the position that there will be a proletarian culture. It is not to bequestioned but that the proletariat, during the time of its dictatorship, will put its stamp upon culture.However, this is a far cry from a proletarian culture in the sense of a developed and completelyharmonious system of knowledge and of art in all material and spiritual fields of work. For tens ofmillions of people for the first time in history to master reading and writing and arithmetic is in itself anew cultural fact of great importance. The essence of the new culture will be not an aristocratic one for aprivileged minority, but a mass culture, a universal and popular one. Quantity will pass into quality; withthe growth of the quantity of culture will come a rise in its level and a change in its character. But thisprocess will develop only through a series of historic stages. In the degree to which it is successful, it willweaken the class character of the proletariat and in this way it will wipe out the basis of a proletarianculture.

But how about the upper strata of the working class? About its intellectual vanguard? Can one not saythat in these circles, narrow though they are, a development of proletarian culture is already taking place



today? Have we not the Socialist Academy? Red professors? Some are guilty of putting the question inthis very abstract way. The idea seems to be that it is possible to create a proletarian culture by laboratorymethods.

In fact, the texture of culture is woven at the points where the relationships and interactions of theintelligentsia of a class and of the class itself meet. The bourgeois culture-the technical, political,philosophical and artistic, was developed by the interaction of the bourgeoisie and its inventors, leaders,thinkers and poets. The reader created the writer and the writer created the reader. This is true in animmeasurably greater degree of the proletariat, because its economics and politics and culture can bebuilt only on the basis of the creative activity of the masses.

The main task of the proletarian intelligentsia in the immediate future is not the abstract formation of anew culture regardless of the absence of a basis for it, but definite culture-bearing, that is, a systematic,planful and, of course, critical imparting to the backward masses of the essential elements of the culturewhich already exists. It is impossible to create a class culture behind the backs of a class. And to buildculture in cooperation with the working class and in close contact with its general historic rise, one has tobuild socialism, even though in the rough. In this process, the class characteristics of society will notbecome stronger, but, on the contrary, will begin to dissolve and to disappear in direct ratio to the successof the revolution. The liberating significance of the dictatorship of the proletariat consists in the fact thatit is temporary-for a brief period only-that it is a means of clearing the road and of laying the foundationsof a society without classes and of a culture based upon solidarity.

In order to explain the idea of a period of culture-bearing in the development of the working class moreconcretely, let us consider the historic succession not of classes, but of generations. Their continuity isexpressed in the fact that each one of them, given a developing and not a decadent society, adds itstreasure to the past accumulations of culture. But before it can do so, each new generation must passthrough a stage of apprenticeship. It appropriates existing culture and transforms it in its own way,making it more or less different from that of the older generation. But this appropriation is not, as yet, anew creation, that is, it is not a creation of new cultural values, but only a premise for them. To a certaindegree, that which has been said may also be applied to the destinies of the working masses which arerising towards epoch-making creative work. One has only to add that before the proletariat will havepassed out of the stage of cultural apprenticeship, it will have ceased to be a proletariat.

Let us also not forget that the upper layer of the bourgeois third estate passed its cultural apprenticeshipunder the roof of feudal society; that while still within the womb of feudal society it surpassed the oldruling estates culturally and became the instigator of culture before it came into power. It is different withthe proletariat in general and with the Russian proletariat in particular. The proletariat is forced to takepower before it has appropriated the fundamental elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrowbourgeois society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that society does not allow it access toculture. The working class strives to transform the state apparatus into a powerful pump for quenchingthe cultural thirst of the masses. This is a task of immeasurable historic importance. But, if one is not touse words lightly, it is not as yet a creation of a special proletarian culture. 'Proletarian culture,'"proletarian art," etc., in three cases out of ten are used uncritically to designate the culture and the art ofthe coming communist society, in two cases out of ten to designate the fact that special groups of theproletariat are acquiring separate elements of pre-proletarian culture, and finally, in five cases out of ten,it represents a jumble of concepts and words out of which one can make neither head nor tail.



Here is a recent example, one of 6 hundred, where a slovenly, uncritical and dangerous use of the term'proletarian culture is made. "The economic basis and its corresponding system of superstructures,"writes Sizoy, "form the cultural characteristics of an epoch (feudal, bourgeois or proletarian)." Thus theepoch of proletarian culture is placed here on the same plane as that of the bourgeois. But that which ishere called the proletarian epoch is only a brief transition from one social-cultural system to another,from capitalism to socialism. The establishment of the bourgeois regime was also preceded by atransitional epoch. But the bourgeois revolution tried, successfully, to perpetuate the domination of thebourgeoisie, while the proletarian revolution has for its aim the liquidation of the proletariat as a class inas brief a period as possible. The length of this period depends entirely upon the success of therevolution. Is it not amazing that one can forget this and place the proletarian cultural epoch on the sameplane with that of feudal and bourgeois culture?

But if this is so, does it follow that we have no proletarian science? Are we not to say that thematerialistic conception of history and the Marxist criticism of political economy represent invaluablescientific elements of a proletarian culture?

Of course, the materialistic conception of history and the labor theory of value have an immeasurablesignificance for the arming of the proletariat as a class and for science in general. There is more truescience in the Communist Manifesto alone than in all the libraries of historical andhistorico-philosophical compilations, speculations and falsifications of the professors. But can one saythat Marxism represents a product of proletarian culture? And can one say that we are already makinguse of Marxism, not in political battles only, but in broad scientific tasks as well?

Marx and Engels came out of the ranks of the petty bourgeois democracy and, of course, were brought upon its culture and not on the culture of the proletariat. If there had been no working class, with its strikes,struggles, sufferings and revolts, there would, of course, have been no scientific communism, becausethere would have been no historical necessity for it. But its theory was formed entirely on the basis ofbourgeois culture, both scientific and political, though it declared a fight to the finish upon that culture.Under the pressure of capitalistic contradictions, the universalising thought of the bourgeois democracy,of its boldest, most honest, and most far-sighted representatives, rises to the heights of a marvellousrenunciation, armed with all the critical weapons of bourgeois science. Such is the origin of Marxism.

The proletariat found its weapon in Marxism not at once, and not fully even to this day. Today thisweapon serves political aims almost primarily and exclusively. The broad realistic application and themethodological development of dialectic materialism are still entirely in the future. Only in a socialistsociety will Marxism cease to be a one-sided weapon of political struggle and become a means ofscientific creation, a most important element and instrument of spiritual culture.

All science, in greater or lesser degree, unquestionably reflects the tendencies of the ruling class. Themore closely science attaches itself to the practical tasks of conquering nature (physics, chemistry,natural science in general), the greater is its non-class and human contribution. The more deeply scienceis connected with the social mechanism of exploitation (political economy), or the more abstractly itgeneralises the entire experience of mankind (psychology, not in its experimental, physiological sensebut in its so-called philosophic sense), the more does it obey the class egotism of the bourgeoisie and theless significant is its contribution to the general sum of human knowledge. In the domain of theexperimental sciences, there exist different degrees of scientific integrity and objectivity, depending uponthe scope of the generalisations made. As a general rule, the bourgeois tendencies have found a much



freer place for themselves in the higher spheres of methodological philosophy, of Weltanschauung. It istherefore necessary to clear the structure of science from the bottom to the top, or, more correctly, fromthe top to the bottom, because one has to begin from the upper stories.

But it would be naive to think that the proletariat must revamp critically all science inherited from thebourgeoisie before applying it to socialist reconstruction. This is just the same as saying with the utopianmoralists: before building a new society, the proletariat must rise to the heights of communist ethics. Asa matter of fact, the proletarian will reconstruct ethics as well as science radically, but he will do so afterhe will have constructed a new society, even though in the rough.

But are we not travelling in a vicious circle? How is one to build a new society with the aid of the oldscience, and the old morals? Here we must bring in a little dialectics, that very dialectics which we nowput so uneconomically into lyric poetry and into our office bookkeeping and into our cabbage soup andinto our porridge. In order to begin work, the proletarian vanguard needs certain points of departure,certain scientific methods which liberate the mind from the ideological yoke of the bourgeoisie; it ismastering these, in part has already mastered them. It has tested its fundamental method in many battles,under various conditions. But this is a long way from proletarian science. A revolutionary class cannotstop its struggle because the party has not yet decided whether it should or should not accept thehypothesis of electrons and ions, the psychoanalytical theory of Freud, the new mathematical discoveriesof relativity, etc. True, after it has conquered power, the proletariat will find a much greater opportunityfor mastering science and for revising it. This is more easily said than done.

The proletariat cannot postpone socialist reconstruction until the time when its new scientists, many ofwhom are still running about in short trousers, will test and clean all the instruments and all the channelsof knowledge. The proletariat rejects what is clearly unnecessary, false and reactionary, and in thevarious fields of its reconstruction makes use of the methods and conclusions of present-day science,taking them necessarily with the percentage of reactionary class-alloy which is contained in them. Thepractical result will justify itself generally and on the whole, because such a use when controlled by asocialist goal will gradually manage and select the methods and conclusions of the theory. And by thattime there will have grown up scientists who are educated under the new conditions. At any rate, theproletariat will have to carry its socialist reconstruction to quite a high degree, that is, provide for realmaterial security and for the satisfaction of society culturally before it will be able to carry out a generalpurification of science from top to bottom. I do not mean to say by this anything against the Marxistwork of criticism, which many in small circles and in seminars are trying to carry through in variousfields. This work is necessary and fruitful. It should be extended and deepened in every way. But one hasto maintain the Marxian sense of the measure of things to count up the specific gravity of suchexperiments and efforts today in relation to the general scale of our historic work.

Does the foregoing exclude the possibility that even in the period of revolutionary dictatorship, theremight appear eminent scientists, inventors, dramatists and poets out of the ranks of the proletariat? Not inthe least. But it would be extremely light-minded to give the name of proletarian culture even to the mostvaluable achievements of individual representatives of the working class. One cannot turn the concept ofculture into the small change of individual daily living and determine the success of a class culture by theproletarian passports of individual inventors or poets. Culture is the organic sum of knowledge andcapacity which characterises the entire society, or at least its ruling class. It embraces and penetrates allfields of human work and unifies them into a system. Individual achievements rise above this level andelevate it gradually.



Does such an organic interrelation exist between our present-day proletarian poetry and the cultural workof the working class in its entirety? It is quite evident that it does not. Individual workers or groups ofworkers are developing contacts with the art which was created by the bourgeois intelligentsia and aremaking use of its technique, for the time being, in quite an eclectic manner. But is it for the purpose ofgiving expression to their own internal proletarian world? The fact is that it is far from being so. Thework of the proletarian poets lacks an organic quality, which is produced only by a profound interactionbetween art and the development of culture in general. We have the literary works of talented and giftedproletarians, but that is not proletarian literature. However, they may prove to be some of its springs.

It is possible that in the work of the present generation many germs and roots and springs will berevealed to which some future descendant will trace the various sectors of the culture of the future, justas our present-day historians of art trace the theatre of Ibsen to the church mystery, or impressionism andcubism to the paintings of the monks. In the economy of art, as in the economy of nature, nothing is lost,and everything is connected in the large. But factually, concretely, vitally, the present-day work of thepoets who have sprung from the proletariat is not developing at all in accordance with the plan which isbehind the process of preparing the conditions of the future socialist culture, that is, the process ofelevating the masses. . . .



http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/index.htm



DIALECTICAL ANDHISTORICAL MATERIALISM

byJ. V. Stalin

September 1938

Transcribed for the Internet by M.

Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. Itis called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of

nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while itsinterpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena,

its theory, is materialistic.

Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialecticalmaterialism to the study of social life, an application of the principles of

dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study ofsociety and of its history.

When describing their dialectical method, Marx and Engels usually refer toHegel as the philosopher who formulated the main features of dialectics. This,however, does not mean that the dialectics of Marx and Engels is identical with

the dialectics of Hegel. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from theHegelian dialectics only its “rational kernel," casting aside its Hegelian

idealistic shell, and developed dialectics further so as to lend it a modernscientific form.

"My dialectic method," says Marx, "is not only different from theHegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, ... the process of thinking

which, under the name of 'the Idea,' he even transforms into anindependent subject, is the demiurgos (creator) of the real world, and thereal world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea.' With me,

on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material worldreflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought."

(Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Volume I ofCapital.)

1938: Dialectical and Historical Materialism

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm (1 of 26) [11/06/2002 17:34:26]

When describing their materialism, Marx and Engels usually refer toFeuerbach as the philosopher who restored materialism to its rights. This,

however, does not mean that the materialism of Marx and Engels is identicalwith Feuerbach's materialism. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from

Feuerbach's materialism its "inner kernel," developed it into ascientific-philosophical theory of materialism and cast aside its idealistic andreligious-ethical encumbrances. We know that Feuerbach, although he wasfundamentally a materialist, objected to the name materialism. Engels morethan once declared that "in spite of" the materialist "foundation," Feuerbach

"remained... bound by the traditional idealist fetters," and that "the realidealism of Feuerbach becomes evident as soon as we come to his philosophy

of religion and ethics." (Marx and Engels, Vol. XIV, pp. 652-54.)

Dialectics comes from the Greek dialego, to discourse, to debate. In ancienttimes dialectics was the art of arriving at the truth by disclosing the

contradictions in the argument of an opponent and overcoming thesecontradictions. There were philosophers in ancient times who believed that thedisclosure of contradictions in thought and the clash of opposite opinions was

the best method of arriving at the truth. This dialectical method of thought,later extended to the phenomena of nature, developed into the dialectical

method of apprehending nature, which regards the phenomena of nature asbeing in constant movement and undergoing constant change, and the

development of nature as the result of the development of the contradictions innature, as the result of the interaction of opposed forces in nature.

In its essence, dialectics is the direct opposite of metaphysics.

1) Marxist Dialectical Method

The principal features of the Marxist dialectical method are as follows:

a) Nature Connected and Determined

Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard nature as an accidentalagglomeration of things, of phenomena, unconnected with, isolated from, andindependent of, each other, but as a connected and integral whole, in which

things, phenomena are organically connected with, dependent on, anddetermined by, each other.

The dialectical method therefore holds that no phenomenon in nature can beunderstood if taken by itself, isolated from surrounding phenomena, inasmuchas any phenomenon in any realm of nature may become meaningless to us if itis not considered in connection with the surrounding conditions, but divorced

from them; and that, vice versa, any phenomenon can be understood andexplained if considered in its inseparable connection with surrounding

phenomena, as one conditioned by surrounding phenomena.



b) Nature is a State of Continuous Motion and Change

Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics holds that nature is not a state of rest andimmobility, stagnation and immutability, but a state of continuous movement

and change, of continuous renewal and development, where something isalways arising and developing, and something always disintegrating and dying

away.

The dialectical method therefore requires that phenomena should beconsidered not only from the standpoint of their interconnection and

interdependence, but also from the standpoint of their movement, their change,their development, their coming into being and going out of being.

The dialectical method regards as important primarily not that which at thegiven moment seems to be durable and yet is already beginning to die away,but that which is arising and developing, even though at the given moment itmay appear to be not durable, for the dialectical method considers invincible

only that which is arising and developing.

"All nature," says Engels, "from the smallest thing to the biggest. fromgrains of sand to suns, from protista (the primary living cells -- J. St.) to

man, has its existence in eternal coming into being and going out ofbeing, in a ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change (Ibid., p. 484.)

Therefore, dialectics, Engels says, "takes things and their perceptual imagesessentially in their interconnection, in their concatenation, in their movement,

in their rise and disappearance." (Marx and Engels, Vol. XIV,' p. 23.)

c) Natural Quantitative Change Leads to Qualitative Change

Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard the process of developmentas a simple process of growth, where quantitative changes do not lead to

qualitative changes, but as a development which passes from insignificant andimperceptible quantitative changes to open' fundamental changes' to qualitativechanges; a development in which the qualitative changes occur not gradually,but rapidly and abruptly, taking the form of a leap from one state to another;

they occur not accidentally but as the natural result of an accumulation ofimperceptible and gradual quantitative changes.

The dialectical method therefore holds that the process of development shouldbe understood not as movement in a circle, not as a simple repetition of whathas already occurred, but as an onward and upward movement, as a transitionfrom an old qualitative state to a new qualitative state, as a development from

the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher:

"Nature," says Engels, "is the test of dialectics. and it must be said formodern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich and dailyincreasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last

analysis nature's process is dialectical and not metaphysical, that it does



not move in an eternally uniform and constantly repeated circle. butpasses through a real history. Here prime mention should be made ofDarwin, who dealt a severe blow to the metaphysical conception of

nature by proving that the organic world of today, plants and animals,and consequently man too, is all a product of a process of development

that has been in progress for millions of years." (Ibid., p. 23.)

Describing dialectical development as a transition from quantitative changes toqualitative changes, Engels says:

"In physics ... every change is a passing of quantity into quality, as aresult of a quantitative change of some form of movement either

inherent in a body or imparted to it. For example, the temperature ofwater has at first no effect on its liquid state; but as the temperature ofliquid water rises or falls, a moment arrives when this state of cohesion

changes and the water is converted in one case into steam and in theother into ice.... A definite minimum current is required to make aplatinum wire glow; every metal has its melting temperature; every

liquid has a definite freezing point and boiling point at a given pressure,as far as we are able with the means at our disposal to attain the requiredtemperatures; finally, every gas has its critical point at which, by properpressure and cooling, it can be converted into a liquid state.... What areknown as the constants of physics (the point at which one state passesinto another -- J. St.) are in most cases nothing but designations for thenodal points at which a quantitative (change) increase or decrease of

movement causes a qualitative change in the state of the given body, andat which, consequently, quantity is transformed into quality." (Ibid., pp.

527-28.)

Passing to chemistry, Engels continues:

"Chemistry may be called the science of the qualitative changes whichtake place in bodies as the effect of changes of quantitative composition.

his was already known to Hegel.... Take oxygen: if the moleculecontains three atoms instead of the customary two, we get ozone, a bodydefinitely distinct in odor and reaction from ordinary oxygen. And whatshall we say of the different proportions in which oxygen combines with

nitrogen or sulphur, and each of which produces a body qualitativelydifferent from all other bodies !" (Ibid., p. 528.)

Finally, criticizing Dühring, who scolded Hegel for all he was worth, butsurreptitiously borrowed from him the well-known thesis that the transition

from the insentient world to the sentient world, from the kingdom of inorganic



matter to the kingdom of organic life, is a leap to a new state, Engels says:

"This is precisely the Hegelian nodal line of measure relations in whichat certain definite nodal points, the purely quantitative increase or

decrease gives rise to a qualitative leap, for example, in the case of waterwhich is heated or cooled, where boiling point and freezing point are thenodes at which -- under normal pressure -- the leap to a new aggregatestate takes place, and where consequently quantity is transformed into

quality." (Ibid., pp. 45-46.)

d) Contradictions Inherent in Nature

Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics holds that internal contradictions areinherent in all things and phenomena of nature, for they all have their negativeand positive sides, a past and a future, something dying away and something

developing; and that the struggle between these opposites, the struggle betweenthe old and the new, between that which is dying away and that which is being

born, between that which is disappearing and that which is developing,constitutes the internal content of the process of development, the internal

content of the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes.

The dialectical method therefore holds that the process of development fromthe lower to the higher takes place not as a harmonious unfolding of

phenomena, but as a disclosure of the contradictions inherent in things andphenomena, as a "struggle" of opposite tendencies which operate on the basis

of these contradictions.

"In its proper meaning," Lenin says, "dialectics is the study of thecontradiction within the very essence of things." (Lenin, Philosophical

Notebooks, p. 265.)

And further:

"Development is the 'struggle' of opposites." (Lenin, Vol. XIII, p. 301.)

Such, in brief, are the principal features of the Marxist dialectical method.

It is easy to understand how immensely important is the extension of theprinciples of the dialectical method to the study of social life and the history ofsociety, and how immensely important is the application of these principles to

the history of society and to the practical activities of the party of theproletariat.

If there are no isolated phenomena in the world, if all phenomena areinterconnected and interdependent, then it is clear that every social system andevery social movement in history must be evaluated not from the standpoint of"eternal justice" or some other preconceived idea, as is not infrequently done



by historians, but from the standpoint of the conditions which gave rise to thatsystem or that social movement and with which they are connected.

The slave system would be senseless, stupid and unnatural under modernconditions. But under the conditions of a disintegrating primitive communalsystem, the slave system is a quite understandable and natural phenomenon,

since it represents an advance on the primitive communal system

The demand for a bourgeois-democratic republic when tsardom and bourgeoissociety existed, as, let us say, in Russia in 1905, was a quite understandable,proper and revolutionary demand; for at that time a bourgeois republic wouldhave meant a step forward. But now, under the conditions of the U.S.S.R., the

demand for a bourgeois-democratic republic would be a senseless andcounterrevolutionary demand; for a bourgeois republic would be a retrograde

step compared with the Soviet republic.

Everything depends on the conditions, time and place.

It is clear that without such a historical approach to social phenomena, theexistence and development of the science of history is impossible; for onlysuch an approach saves the science of history from becoming a jumble of

accidents and an agglomeration of most absurd mistakes.

Further, if the world is in a state of constant movement and development, ifthe dying away of the old and the upgrowth of the new is a law of

development, then it is clear that there can be no "immutable" social systems,no "eternal principles" of private property and exploitation, no "eternal ideas"

of the subjugation of the peasant to the landlord, of the worker to the capitalist.

Hence, the capitalist system can be replaced by the socialist system, just as atone time the feudal system was replaced by the capitalist system.

Hence, we must not base our orientation on the strata of society which are nolonger developing, even though they at present constitute the predominant

force, but on those strata which are developing and have a future before them,even though they at present do not constitute the predominant force.

In the eighties of the past century, in the period of the struggle between theMarxists and the Narodniks, the proletariat in Russia constituted an

insignificant minority of the population, whereas the individual peasantsconstituted the vast majority of the population. But the proletariat was

developing as a class, whereas the peasantry as a class was disintegrating. Andjust because the proletariat was developing as a class the Marxists based their

orientation on the proletariat. And they were not mistaken; for, as we know, theproletariat subsequently grew from an insignificant force into a first-rate

historical and political force.

Hence, in order not to err in policy, one must look forward, not backward.

Further, if the passing of slow quantitative changes into rapid and abruptqualitative changes is a law of development, then it is clear that revolutionsmade by oppressed classes are a quite natural and inevitable phenomenon.

Hence, the transition from capitalism to socialism and the liberation of the



working class from the yoke of capitalism cannot be effected by slow changes,by reforms, but only by a qualitative change of the capitalist system, by

revolution.

Hence, in order not to err in policy, one must be a revolutionary, not areformist.

Further, if development proceeds by way of the disclosure of internalcontradictions, by way of collisions between opposite forces on the basis of

these contradictions and so as to overcome these contradictions, then it is clearthat the class struggle of the proletariat is a quite natural and inevitable

phenomenon.

Hence, we must not cover up the contradictions of the capitalist system, butdisclose and unravel them; we must not try to check the class struggle but carry

it to its conclusion.

Hence, in order not to err in policy, one must pursue an uncompromisingproletarian class policy, not a reformist policy of harmony of the interests of

the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, not a compromisers' policy of the"growing" of capitalism into socialism.

Such is the Marxist dialectical method when applied to social life, to thehistory of society.

As to Marxist philosophical materialism, it is fundamentally the directopposite of philosophical idealism.

2) Marxist Philosophical Materialism

The principal features of Marxist philosophical materialism are as follows:

a) Materialist Contrary to idealism, which regards the world as the embodiment of an

"absolute idea," a "universal spirit," "consciousness," Marx's philosophicalmaterialism holds that the world is by its very nature material, that the

multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter inmotion, that interconnection and interdependence of phenomena as establishedby the dialectical method, are a law of the development of moving matter, and

that the world develops in accordance with the laws of movement of matter andstands in no need of a "universal spirit."

"The materialistic outlook on nature," says Engels, "means no more thansimply conceiving nature just as it exists, without any foreign

admixture." (Marx and Engels, Vol. XIV, p. 651.)

Speaking of the materialist views of the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, whoheld that "the world, the all in one, was not created by any god or any man, but



was, is and ever will be a living flame, systematically flaring up andsystematically dying down"' Lenin comments: "A very good exposition of the

rudiments of dialectical materialism." (Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, p.318.)

b) Objective Reality

Contrary to idealism, which asserts that only our consciousness really exists,and that the material world, being, nature, exists only in our consciousness' inour sensations, ideas and perceptions, the Marxist philosophical materialismholds that matter, nature, being, is an objective reality existing outside and

independent of our consciousness; that matter is primary, since it is the sourceof sensations, ideas, consciousness, and that consciousness is secondary,

derivative, since it is a reflection of matter, a reflection of being; that thought isa product of matter which in its development has reached a high degree of

perfection, namely, of the brain, and the brain is the organ of thought; and thattherefore one cannot separate thought from matter without committing a grave

error. Engels says:

"The question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of spirit tonature is the paramount question of the whole of philosophy.... The

answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into twogreat camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature ...

comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature asprimary, belong to the various schools of materialism." (Marx, Selected

Works, Vol. I, p. 329.)

And further:

"The material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselvesbelong is the only reality.... Our consciousness and thinking, howeversupra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodilyorgan, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is

merely the highest product of matter." (Ibid., p. 332.)

Concerning the question of matter and thought, Marx says:

"It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. Matter isthe subject of all changes." (Ibid., p. 302.)

Describing Marxist philosophical materialism, Lenin says:

"Materialism in general recognizes objectively real being (matter) asindependent of consciousness, sensation, experience.... Consciousness is



only the reflection of being, at best an approximately true (adequate,perfectly exact) reflection of it." (Lenin, Vol. XIII, pp. 266-67.)

And further:

-- "Matter is that which, acting upon our sense-organs, producessensation; matter is the objective reality given to us in sensation....

Matter, nature, being, the physical-is primary, and spirit, consciousness,sensation, the psychical-is secondary." (Ibid., pp. 119-20.)

-- "The world picture is a picture of how matter moves and of how'matter thinks.'" (Ibid., p. 288.)

-- "The brain is the organ of thought." (Ibid., p. 125.)

c) The World and Its Laws Are Knowable

Contrary to idealism, which denies the possibility of knowing the world and itslaws, which does not believe in the authenticity of our knowledge, does not

recognize objective truth, and holds that the world is full of"things-in-themselves" that can never be known to science, Marxist

philosophical materialism holds that the world and its laws are fully knowable,that our knowledge of the laws of nature, tested by experiment and practice, is

authentic knowledge having the validity of objective truth, and that there are nothings in the world which are unknowable, but only things which are as yet notknown, but which will be disclosed and made known by the efforts of science

and practice.

Criticizing the thesis of Kant and other idealists that the world is unknowableand that there are "things-in-themselves" which are unknowable, and defendingthe well-known materialist thesis that our knowledge is authentic knowledge,

Engels writes:

"The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchetsis practice, namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the

correctness of our conception of a natural process by making itourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve

our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantianungraspable 'thing-in-itself.' The chemical substances produced in the

bodies of plants and animals remained such 'things-in-themselves' untilorganic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereuponthe 'thing-in-itself' became a thing for us, as, for instance, alizarin, thecoloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow ill

the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply andsimply from coal tar. For 300 years the Copernican solar system was a

hypothesis with a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand chances to one inits favor, but still always a hypothesis. But when Leverrier, by means of



the data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of theexistence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in theheavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when Gallereally found this planet, the Copernican system was proved." (Marx,

Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 330.)

Accusing Bogdanov, Bazarov, Yushkevich and the other followers of Mach offideism (a reactionary theory, which prefers faith to science) and defending the

well-known materialist thesis that our scientific knowledge of the laws ofnature is authentic knowledge, and that the laws of science represent objective

truth, Lenin says:

"Contemporary fideism does not at all reject science; all it rejects is the'exaggerated claims' of science, to wit, its claim to objective truth. Ifobjective truth exists (as the materialists think), if natural science,

reflecting the outer world in human 'experience,' is alone capable ofgiving us objective truth, then all fideism is absolutely refuted." (Lenin,

Vol. XIII, p. 102.)

Such, in brief, are the characteristic features of the Marxist philosophicalmaterialism.

It is easy to understand how immensely important is the extension of theprinciples of philosophical materialism to the study of social life, of the historyof society, and how immensely important is the application of these principles

to the history of society and to the practical activities of the party of theproletariat.

If the connection between the phenomena of nature and their interdependenceare laws of the development of nature, it follows, too, that the connection and

interdependence of the phenomena of social life are laws of the development ofsociety, and not something accidental.

Hence, social life, the history of society, ceases to be an agglomeration of"accidents", for the history of society becomes a development of society

according to regular laws, and the study of the history of society becomes ascience.

Hence, the practical activity of the party of the proletariat must not be basedon the good wishes of "outstanding individuals." not on the dictates of

"reason," "universal morals," etc., but on the laws of development of societyand on the study of these laws.

Further, if the world is knowable and our knowledge of the laws ofdevelopment of nature is authentic knowledge, having the validity of objectivetruth, it follows that social life, the development of society, is also knowable,and that the data of science regarding the laws of development of society are

authentic data having the validity of objective truths.



Hence, the science of the history of society, despite all the complexity of thephenomena of social life, can become as precise a science as, let us say,

biology, and capable of making use of the laws of development of society forpractical purposes.

Hence, the party of the proletariat should not guide itself in its practicalactivity by casual motives, but by the laws of development of society, and by

practical deductions from these laws.

Hence, socialism is converted from a dream of a better future for humanityinto a science.

Hence, the bond between science and practical activity, between theory andpractice, their unity, should be the guiding star of the party of the proletariat.

Further, if nature, being, the material world, is primary, and consciousness,thought, is secondary, derivative; if the material world represents objective

reality existing independently of the consciousness of men, whileconsciousness is a reflection of this objective reality, it follows that thematerial life of society, its being, is also primary, and its spiritual life

secondary, derivative, and that the material life of society is an objective realityexisting independently of the will of men, while the spiritual life of society is a

reflection of this objective reality, a reflection of being.

Hence, the source of formation of the spiritual life of society, the origin ofsocial ideas, social theories, political views and political institutions, should

not be sought for in the ideas, theories, views and political institutionsthemselves, but in the conditions of the material life of society, in social being,

of which these ideas, theories, views, etc., are the reflection.

Hence, if in different periods of the history of society different social ideas,theories, views and political institutions are to be observed; if under the slave

system we encounter certain social ideas, theories, views and politicalinstitutions, under feudalism others, and under capitalism others still, this is not

to be explained by the "nature", the "properties" of the ideas, theories, viewsand political institutions themselves but by the different conditions of the

material life of society at different periods of social development.

Whatever is the being of a society, whatever are the conditions of material lifeof a society, such are the ideas, theories political views and political

institutions of that society.

In this connection, Marx says:

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, onthe contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

(Marx Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 269.)

Hence, in order not to err in policy, in order not to find itself in the position ofidle dreamers, the party of the proletariat must not base its activities on abstract



"principles of human reason", but on the concrete conditions of the materiallife of society, as the determining force of social development; not on the goodwishes of "great men," but on the real needs of development of the material life

of society.

The fall of the utopians, including the Narodniks, anarchists andSocialist-Revolutionaries, was due, among other things to the fact that they did

not recognize the primary role which the conditions of the material life ofsociety play in the development of society, and, sinking to idealism, did notbase their practical activities on the needs of the development of the material

life of society, but, independently of and in spite of these needs, on "idealplans" and "all-embracing projects", divorced from the real life of society.

The strength and vitality of Marxism-Leninism lies in the fact that it does baseits practical activity on the needs of the development of the material life of

society and never divorces itself from the real life of society.

It does not follow from Marx's words, however, that social ideas, theories,political views and political institutions are of no significance in the life of

society, that they do not reciprocally affect social being, the development ofthe material conditions of the life of society. We have been speaking so far ofthe origin of social ideas, theories, views and political institutions, of the way

they arise, of the fact that the spiritual life of society is a reflection of theconditions of its material life. As regards the significance of social ideas,theories, views and political institutions, as regards their role in history,

historical materialism, far from denying them, stresses the important role andsignificance of these factors in the life of society, in its history.

There are different kinds of social ideas and theories. There are old ideas andtheories which have outlived their day and which serve the interests of the

moribund forces of society. Their significance lies in the fact that they hamperthe development, the progress of society. Then there are new and advanced

ideas and theories which serve the interests of the advanced forces of society.Their significance lies in the fact that they facilitate the development, the

progress of society; and their significance is the greater the more accuratelythey reflect the needs of development of the material life of society.

New social ideas and theories arise only after the development of the materiallife of society has set new tasks before society. But once they have arisen theybecome a most potent force which facilitates the carrying out of the new tasksset by the development of the material life of society, a force which facilitates

the progress of society. It is precisely here that the tremendous organizing,mobilizing and transforming value of new ideas, new theories, new politicalviews and new political institutions manifests itself. New social ideas andtheories arise precisely because they are necessary to society, because it is

impossible to carry out the urgent tasks of development of the material life ofsociety without their organizing, mobilizing and transforming action. Arisingout of the new tasks set by the development of the material life of society, thenew social ideas and theories force their way through, become the possession



of the masses, mobilize and organize them against the moribund forces ofsociety, and thus facilitate the overthrow of these forces, which hamper the

development of the material life of society.

Thus social ideas, theories and political institutions, having arisen on the basisof the urgent tasks of the development of the material life of society, the

development of social being, themselves then react upon social being, upon thematerial life of society, creating the conditions necessary for completely

carrying out the urgent tasks of the material life of society, and for rendering itsfurther development possible.

In this connection, Marx says:

"Theory becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses."(Marx and Engels, Vol. I, p. 406.)

Hence, in order to be able to influence the conditions of material life of societyand to accelerate their development and their improvement, the party of the

proletariat must rely upon such a social theory, such a social idea as correctlyreflects the needs of development of the material life of society, and which is

therefore capable of setting into motion broad masses of the people and ofmobilizing them and organizing them into a great army of the proletarian party,prepared to smash the reactionary forces and to clear the way for the advanced

forces of society.

The fall of the "Economists" and the Mensheviks was due, among otherthings, to the fact that they did not recognize the mobilizing, organizing and

transforming role of advanced theory, of advanced ideas and, sinking to vulgarmaterialism, reduced the role of these factors almost to nothing, thus

condemning the Party to passivity and inanition.

The strength and vitality of Marxism-Leninism is derived from the fact that itrelies upon an advanced theory which correctly reflects the needs of

development of the material life of society, that it elevates theory to a properlevel, and that it deems it its duty to utilize every ounce of the mobilizing,

organizing and transforming power of this theory.

That is the answer historical materialism gives to the question of the relationbetween social being and social consciousness, between the conditions ofdevelopment of material life and the development of the spiritual life of

society.

3) Historical Materialism.

It now remains to elucidate the following question: What, from the viewpointof historical materialism, is meant by the "conditions of material life of



society" which in the final analysis determine the physiognomy of society, itsideas, views, political institutions, etc.?

What, after all, are these "conditions of material life of society," what are theirdistinguishing features?

There can be no doubt that the concept "conditions of material life of society"includes, first of all, nature which surrounds society, geographical

environment, which is one of the indispensable and constant conditions ofmaterial life of society and which, of course, influences the development of

society. What role does geographical environment play in the development ofsociety? Is geographical environment the chief force determining the

physiognomy of society, the character of the social system of man, thetransition from one system to another, or isn't it?

Historical materialism answers this question in the negative.

Geographical environment is unquestionably one of the constant andindispensable conditions of development of society and, of course, influences

the development of society, accelerates or retards its development. But itsinfluence is not the determining influence, inasmuch as the changes and

development of society proceed at an incomparably faster rate than the changesand development of geographical environment. in the space of 3000 years three

different social systems have been successively superseded in Europe: theprimitive communal system, the slave system and the feudal system. In theeastern part of Europe, in the U.S.S.R., even four social systems have beensuperseded. Yet during this period geographical conditions in Europe have

either not changed at all, or have changed so slightly that geography takes nonote of them. And that is quite natural. Changes in geographical environment

of any importance require millions of years, whereas a few hundred or a coupleof thousand years are enough for even very important changes in the system of

human society.

It follows from this that geographical environment cannot be the chief cause,the determining cause of social development; for that which remains almost

unchanged in the course of tens of thousands of years cannot be the chief causeof development of that which undergoes fundamental changes in the course of

a few hundred years

Further, there can be no doubt that the concept "conditions of material life ofsociety" also includes growth of population, density of population of onedegree or another; for people are an essential element of the conditions ofmaterial life of society, and without a definite minimum number of people

there can be no material life of society. Is growth of population the chief forcethat determines the character of the social system of man, or isn't it?

Historical materialism answers this question too in the negative.

Of course, growth of population does influence the development of society,does facilitate or retard the development of society, but it cannot be the chief

force of development of society, and its influence on the development ofsociety cannot be the determining influence because, by itself, growth of



population does not furnish the clue to the question why a given social systemis replaced precisely by such and such a new system and not by another, why

the primitive communal system is succeeded precisely by the slave system, theslave system by the feudal system, and the feudal system by the bourgeois

system, and not by some other.

If growth of population were the determining force of social development,then a higher density of population would be bound to give rise to a

correspondingly higher type of social system. But we do not find this to be thecase. The density of population in China is four times as great as in the U.S.A.,yet the U.S.A. stands higher than China in the scale of social development; forin China a semi-feudal system still prevails, whereas the U.S.A. has long ago

reached the highest stage of development of capitalism. The density ofpopulation in Belgium is I9 times as great as in the U.S.A., and 26 times as

great as in the U.S.S.R. Yet the U.S.A. stands higher than Belgium in the scaleof social development; and as for the U.S.S.R., Belgium lags a whole historical

epoch behind this country, for in Belgium the capitalist system prevails,whereas the U.S.S.R. has already done away with capitalism and has set up a

socialist system.

It follows from this that growth of population is not, and cannot be, the chiefforce of development of society, the force which determines the character of

the social system, the physiognomy of society.

a) What Is the Chief Determinant Force?

What, then, is the chief force in the complex of conditions of material life ofsociety which determines the physiognomy of society, the character of the

social system, the development of society from one system to another?

This force, historical materialism holds, is the method of procuring the meansof life necessary for human existence, the mode of production of material

values -- food, clothing, footwear, houses, fuel, instruments of production, etc.-- which are indispensable for the life and development of society.

In order to live, people must have food, clothing, footwear, shelter, fuel, etc.;in order to have these material values, people must produce them; and in orderto produce them, people must have the instruments of production with whichfood, clothing, footwear, shelter, fuel, etc., are produced, they must be able to

produce these instruments and to use them.

The instruments of production wherewith material values are produced, thepeople who operate the instruments of production and carry on the productionof material values thanks to a certain production experience and labor skill --

all these elements jointly constitute the productive forces of society.

But the productive forces are only one aspect of production, only one aspect ofthe mode of production, an aspect that expresses the relation of men to theobjects and forces of nature which they make use of for the production of

material values. Another aspect of production, another aspect of the mode ofproduction, is the relation of men to each other in the process of production,

men's relations of production. Men carry on a struggle against nature and



utilize nature for the production of material values not in isolation from eachother, not as separate individuals, but in common, in groups, in societies.

Production, therefore, is at all times and under all conditions social production.In the production of material values men enter into mutual relations of one kind

or another within production, into relations of production of one kind oranother. These may be relations of co-operation and mutual help between

people who are free from exploitation; they may be relations of domination andsubordination; and, lastly, they may be transitional from one form of relations

of production to another. But whatever the character of the relations ofproduction may be, always and in every system they constitute just as essential

an element of production as the productive forces of society.

"In production," Marx says, "men not only act on nature but also on oneanother. They produce only by co-operating in a certain way and

mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter intodefinite connections and relations with one another and only within these

social connections and relations does their action on nature, doesproduction, take place." (Marx and Engels, Vol. V, p. 429.)

Consequently, production, the mode of production, embraces both theproductive forces of society and men's relations of production, and is thus the

embodiment of their unity in the process of production of material values.

b) The First Feature of Production

The first feature of production is that it never stays at one point for a long timeand is always in a state of change and development, and that, furthermore,

changes in the mode of production inevitably call forth changes in the wholesocial system, social ideas, political views and political institutions -- they call

forth a reconstruction of the whole social and political order. At differentstages of development people make use of different modes of production, or, to

put it more crudely, lead different manners of life. In the primitive communethere is one mode of production, under slavery there is another mode ofproduction, under feudalism a third mode of production and so on. And,

correspondingly, men's social system, the spiritual life of men, their views andpolitical institutions also vary.

Whatever is the mode of production of a society, such in the main is thesociety itself, its ideas and theories, its political views and institutions.

Or, to put it more crudely, whatever is man's manner of life such is his mannerof thought.

This means that the history of development of society is above all the historyof the development of production, the history of the modes of production

which succeed each other in the course of centuries, the history of thedevelopment of productive forces and of people's relations of production.

Hence, the history of social development is at the same time the history of the



producers of material values themselves, the history of the laboring masses,who are the chief force in the process of production and who carry on the

production of material values necessary for the existence of society.

Hence, if historical science is to be a real science, it can no longer reduce thehistory of social development to the actions of kings and generals, to the

actions of "conquerors" and "subjugators" of states, but must above all devoteitself to the history of the producers of material values, the history of the

laboring masses, the history of peoples.

Hence, the clue to the study of the laws of history of society must not besought in men's minds, in the views and ideas of society, but in the mode of

production practiced by society in any given historical period; it must besought in the economic life of society.

Hence, the prime task of historical science is to study and disclose the laws ofproduction, the laws of development of the productive forces and of therelations of production, the laws of economic development of society.

Hence, if the party of the proletariat is to be a real party, it must above allacquire a knowledge of the laws of development of production, of the laws of

economic development of society.

Hence, if it is not to err in policy, the party of the proletariat must both indrafting its program and in its practical activities proceed primarily from the

laws of development of production from the laws of economic development ofsociety.

c) The Second Feature of Production

The second feature of production is that its changes and development alwaysbegin with changes and development of the productive forces, and in the first

place, with changes and development of the instruments of production.Productive forces are therefore the most mobile and revolutionary element of

productions First the productive forces of society change and develop, andthen, depending on these changes and in conformity with them, men's relationsof production, their economic relations, change. This, however, does not mean

that the relations of production do not influence the development of theproductive forces and that the latter are not dependent on the former. While

their development is dependent on the development of the productive forces,the relations of production in their turn react upon the development of the

productive forces, accelerating or retarding it. In this connection it should benoted that the relations of production cannot for too long a time lag behind andbe in a state of contradiction to the growth of the productive forces, inasmuchas the productive forces can develop in full measure only when the relations ofproduction correspond to the character, the state of the productive forces and

allow full scope for their development. Therefore, however much the relationsof production may lag behind the development of the productive forces, theymust, sooner or later, come into correspondence with -- and actually do comeinto correspondence with -- the level of development of the productive forces,

the character of the productive forces. Otherwise we would have a fundamental



violation of the unity of the productive forces and the relations of productionwithin the system of production, a disruption of production as a whole, a crisis

of production, a destruction of productive forces.

An instance in which the relations of production do not correspond to thecharacter of the productive forces, conflict with them, is the economic crises in

capitalist countries, where private capitalist ownership of the means ofproduction is in glaring incongruity with the social character of the process of

production, with the character of the productive forces. This results ineconomic crises, which lead to the destruction of productive forces.

Furthermore, this incongruity itself constitutes the economic basis of socialrevolution, the purpose of which IS to destroy the existing relations of

production and to create new relations of production corresponding to thecharacter of the productive forces.

In contrast, an instance in which the relations of production completelycorrespond to the character of the productive forces is the socialist national

economy of the U.S.S.R., where the social ownership of the means ofproduction fully corresponds to the social character of the process of

production, and where, because of this, economic crises and the destruction ofproductive forces are unknown.

Consequently, the productive forces are not only the most mobile andrevolutionary element in production, but are also the determining element in

the development of production.

Whatever are the productive forces such must be the relations of production.

While the state of the productive forces furnishes the answer to the question --with what instruments of production do men produce the material values theyneed? -- the state of the relations of production furnishes the answer to another

question -- who owns the means of production (the land, forests, waters,mineral resources, raw materials, instruments of production, production

premises, means of transportation and communication, etc.), who commandsthe means of production, whether the whole of society, or individual persons,

groups, or classes which utilize them for the exploitation of other persons,groups or classes?

Here is a rough picture of the development of productive forces from ancienttimes to our day. The transition from crude stone tools to the bow and arrow,and the accompanying transition from the life of hunters to the domesticationof animals and primitive pasturage; the transition from stone tools to metaltools (the iron axe, the wooden plow fitted with an iron coulter, etc.), with acorresponding transition to tillage and agriculture; a further improvement in

metal tools for the working up of materials, the introduction of the blacksmith'sbellows, the introduction of pottery, with a corresponding development of

handicrafts, the separation of handicrafts from agriculture, the development ofan independent handicraft industry and, subsequently, of manufacture; the

transition from handicraft tools to machines and the transformation ofhandicraft and manufacture into machine industry; the transition to the



machine system and the rise of modern large-scale machine industry -- such isa general and far from complete picture of the development of the productive

forces of society in the course of man's history. It will be clear that thedevelopment and improvement of the instruments of production was effectedby men who were related to production, and not independently of men; and,consequently, the change and development of the instruments of production

was accompanied by a change and development of men, as the most importantelement of the productive forces, by a change and development of their

production experience, their labor skill, their ability to handle the instrumentsof production.

In conformity with the change and development of the productive forces ofsociety in the course of history, men's relations of production, their economic

relations also changed and developed.

Main types of Relations of Production

Five main types of relations of production are known to history: primitivecommunal, slave, feudal, capitalist and socialist.

The basis of the relations of production under the primitive communal systemis that the means of production are socially owned. This in the main

corresponds to the character of the productive forces of that period. Stonetools, and, later, the bow and arrow, precluded the possibility of men

individually combating the forces of nature and beasts of prey. In order togather the fruits of the forest, to catch fish, to build some sort of habitation,

men were obliged to work in common if they did not want to die of starvation,or fall victim to beasts of prey or to neighboring societies. Labor in commonled to the common ownership of the means of production, as well as of the

fruits of production. Here the conception of private ownership of the means ofproduction did not yet exist, except for the personal ownership of certainimplements of production which were at the same time means of defense

against beasts of prey. Here there was no exploitation, no classes.

The basis of the relations of production under the slave system is that theslave-owner owns the means of production, he also owns the worker in

production -- the slave, whom he can sell, purchase, or kill as though he werean animal. Such relations of production in the main correspond to the state of

the productive forces of that period. Instead of stone tools, men now havemetal tools at their command; instead of the wretched and primitive husbandry

of the hunter, who knew neither pasturage nor tillage, there now appearpasturage tillage, handicrafts, and a division of labor between these branches ofproduction. There appears the possibility of the exchange of products betweenindividuals and between societies, of the accumulation of wealth in the handsof a few, the actual accumulation of the means of production in the hands of aminority, and the possibility of subjugation of the majority by a minority and

the conversion of the majority into slaves. Here we no longer find the commonand free labor of all members of society in the production process -- here there

prevails the forced labor of slaves, who are exploited by the non-laboring



slave-owners. Here, therefore, there is no common ownership of the means ofproduction or of the fruits of production. It is replaced by private ownership.Here the slaveowner appears as the prime and principal property owner in the

full sense of the term.

Rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, people with full rights and peoplewith no rights, and a fierce class struggle between them -- such is the picture of

the slave system.

The basis of the relations of production under the feudal system is that thefeudal lord owns the means of production and does not fully own the worker in

production -- the serf, whom the feudal lord can no longer kill, but whom hecan buy and sell. Alongside of feudal ownership there exists individualownership by the peasant and the handicraftsman of his implements ofproduction and his private enterprise based on his personal labor. Such

relations of production in the main correspond to the state of the productiveforces of that period. Further improvements in the smelting and working ofiron; the spread of the iron plow and the loom; the further development of

agriculture, horticulture, viniculture and dairying; the appearance ofmanufactories alongside of the handicraft workshops -- such are the

characteristic features of the state of the productive forces.

The new productive forces demand that the laborer shall display some kind ofinitiative in production and an inclination for work, an interest in work. Thefeudal lord therefore discards the slave, as a laborer who has no interest in

work and is entirely without initiative, and prefers to deal with the serf, whohas his own husbandry, implements of production, and a certain interest in

work essential for the cultivation of the land and for the payment in kind of apart of his harvest to the feudal lord.

Here private ownership is further developed. Exploitation is nearly as severeas it was under slavery -- it is only slightly mitigated. A class struggle between

exploiters and exploited is the principal feature of the feudal system.

The basis of the relations of production under the capitalist system is that thecapitalist owns the means of production, but not the workers in production --

the wage laborers, whom the capitalist can neither kill nor sell because they arepersonally free, but who are deprived of means of production and) in order not

to die of hunger, are obliged to sell their labor power to the capitalist and tobear the yoke of exploitation. Alongside of capitalist property in the means ofproduction, we find, at first on a wide scale, private property of the peasants

and handicraftsmen in the means of production, these peasants andhandicraftsmen no longer being serfs, and their private property being based on

personal labor. In place of the handicraft workshops and manufactories thereappear huge mills and factories equipped with machinery. In place of themanorial estates tilled by the primitive implements of production of the

peasant, there now appear large capitalist farms run on scientific lines andsupplied with agricultural machinery

The new productive forces require that the workers in production shall be



better educated and more intelligent than the downtrodden and ignorant serfs,that they be able to understand machinery and operate it properly. Therefore,the capitalists prefer to deal with wage-workers, who are free from the bonds

of serfdom and who are educated enough to be able properly to operatemachinery.

But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism hasbecome enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing

larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices,capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium privateowners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power,

with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commoditiesproduced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating

millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process ofproduction a social character and thus undermines its own foundation,

inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands thesocial ownership of the means of production; yet the means of productionremain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social

character of the process of production.

These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productiveforces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crisesof over-production, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for theirgoods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselveshave brought about, are compelled to burn products, destroy manufacturedgoods, suspend production, and destroy productive forces at a time whenmillions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation, not

because there are not enough goods, but because there is an overproduction ofgoods.

This means that the capitalist relations of production have ceased tocorrespond to the state of productive forces of society and have come into

irreconcilable contradiction with them.

This means that capitalism is pregnant with revolution, whose mission it is toreplace the existing capitalist ownership of the means of production by socialist

ownership.

This means that the main feature of the capitalist system is a most acute classstruggle between the exploiters and the exploited.

The basis of the relations of production under the socialist system, which sofar has been established only in the U.S.S.R., is the social ownership of themeans of production. Here there are no longer exploiters and exploited. The

goods produced are distributed according to labor performed, on the principle:"He who does not work, neither shall he eat." Here the mutual relations of

people in the process of production are marked by comradely cooperation andthe socialist mutual assistance of workers who are free from exploitation. Herethe relations of production fully correspond to the state of productive forces;

for the social character of the process of production is reinforced by the social



ownership of the means of production.

For this reason socialist production in the U.S.S.R. knows no periodical crisesof over-production and their accompanying absurdities.

For this reason, the productive forces here develop at an accelerated pace; forthe relations of production that correspond to them offer full scope for such

development.

Such is the picture of the development of men's relations of production in thecourse of human history.

Such is the dependence of the development of the relations of production onthe development of the productive forces of society, and primarily, on thedevelopment of the instruments of production, the dependence by virtue ofwhich the changes and development of the productive forces sooner or later

lead to corresponding changes and development of the relations of production.

"The use and fabrication of instruments of labor," says Marx, "althoughexisting in the germ among certain species of animals, is specifically

characteristic of the human labor-process, and Franklin therefore definesman as a tool-making animal. Relics of bygone instruments of labor

possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economicalforms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct

species of animals. It is not the articles made, but how they are made thatenables us to distinguish different economical epochs. Instruments of

labor not only supply a standard of the degree of development to whichhuman labor has attained, but they are also indicators of the social

conditions under which that labor is carried on." (Marx, Capital, Vol. I,1935, p. 121.)

And further:

-- "Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. Inacquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production;

and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way ofearning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-millgives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the

industrial capitalist." (Marx and Engels, Vol. V, p. 564.)

-- "There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, ofdestruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable

thing is the abstraction of movement." (Ibid., p. 364.)

Speaking of historical materialism as formulated in The Communist Manifesto,Engels says:



"Economic production and the structure of society of every historicalepoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for thepolitical and intellectual history of that epoch; ... consequently (ever

since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) allhistory has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between

exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes atvarious stages of social development; ... this struggle, however, has nowreached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat)

can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits andoppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time for ever freeing

the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and classstruggles...." (Engels' Preface to the German Edition of the Manifesto.)

d) The Third Feature of Production

The third feature of production is that the rise of new productive forces and ofthe relations of production corresponding to them does not take place

separately from the old system, after the disappearance of the old system, butwithin the old system; it takes place not as a result of the deliberate and

conscious activity of man, but spontaneously, unconsciously, independently ofthe will of man It takes place spontaneously and independently of the will of

man for two reasons.

Firstly, because men are not free to choose one mode of production or another,because as every new generation enters life it finds productive forces andrelations of production already existing as the result of the work of former

generations, owing to which it is obliged at first to accept and adapt itself toeverything it finds ready-made in the sphere of production in order to be able

to produce material values.

Secondly, because, when improving one instrument of production or another,one clement of the productive forces or another, men do not realize, do not

understand or stop to reflect what social results these improvements will leadto, but only think of their everyday interests, of lightening their labor and of

securing some direct and tangible advantage for themselves.

When, gradually and gropingly, certain members of primitive communalsociety passed from the use of stone tools to the use of iron tools, they, of

course, did not know and did not stop to reflect what social results thisinnovation would lead to; they did not understand or realize that the change tometal tools meant a revolution in production, that it would in the long run leadto the slave system. They simply wanted to lighten their labor and secure an

immediate and tangible advantage; their conscious activity was confined withinthe narrow bounds of this everyday personal interest.

When, in the period of the feudal system, the young bourgeoisie of Europebegan to erect, alongside of the small guild workshops, large manufactories,

and thus advanced the productive forces of society, it, of course, did not knowand did not stop to reflect what social consequences this innovation would lead



to; it did not realize or understand that this "small" innovation would lead to aregrouping of social forces which was to end in a revolution both against thepower of kings, whose favors it so highly valued, and against the nobility, towhose ranks its foremost representatives not infrequently aspired. It simplywanted to lower the cost of producing goods, to throw larger quantities of

goods on the markets of Asia and of recently discovered America, and to makebigger profits. Its conscious activity was confined within the narrow bounds of

this commonplace practical aim.

When the Russian capitalists, in conjunction with foreign capitalists,energetically implanted modern large-scale machine industry in Russia, whileleaving tsardom intact and turning the peasants over to the tender mercies ofthe landlords, they, of course, did not know and did not stop to reflect what

social consequences this extensive growth of productive forces would lead to;they did not realize or understand that this big leap in the realm of the

productive forces of society would lead to a regrouping of social forces thatwould enable the proletariat to effect a union with the peasantry and to bring

about a victorious socialist revolution. They simply wanted to expandindustrial production to the limit, to gain control of the huge home market, to

become monopolists, and to squeeze as much profit as possible out of thenational economy.

Their conscious activity did not extend beyond their commonplace, strictlypractical interests.

Accordingly, Marx says:

"In the social production of their life (that is. in the production of thematerial values necessary to the life of men -- J. St.), men enter into

definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will,relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of

development of their material productive forces." (Marx, SelectedWorks, Vol. I, p 269).

This, however, does not mean that changes in the relations of production, andthe transition from old relations of production to new relations of production

proceed smoothly, without conflicts, without upheavals. On the contrary such atransition usually takes place by means of the revolutionary overthrow of the

old relations of production and the establishment of new relations ofproduction. Up to a certain period the development of the productive forces

and the changes in the realm of the relations of production proceedspontaneously independently of the will of men. But that is so only up to a

certain moment, until the new and developing productive forces have reached aproper state of maturity After the new productive forces have matured, theexisting relations of production and their upholders -- the ruling classes --

become that "insuperable" obstacle which can only be removed by theconscious action of the new classes, by the forcible acts of these classes, by



revolution. Here there stands out in bold relief the tremendous role of newsocial ideas, of new political institutions, of a new political power, whosemission it is to abolish by force the old relations of production. Out of the

conflict between the new productive forces and the old relations of production,out of the new economic demands of society, there arise new social ideas; thenew ideas organize and mobilize the masses; the masses become welded into a

new political army, create a new revolutionary power, and make use of it toabolish by force the old system of relations of production, and to firmly

establish the new system. The spontaneous process of development yieldsplace to the conscious actions of men, peaceful development to violent

upheaval, evolution to revolution.

"The proletariat," says Marx, "during its contest with the bourgeoisie iscompelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a

class...by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, assuch, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production...."

(Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1938, p. 52.)

And further:

-- "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees,all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of

production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized asthe ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly

as possible." (Ibid., p. 50 )

-- "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one."(Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 1955, p. 603.)

Here is the formulation -- a formulation of genius -- of the essence of historicalmaterialism given by Marx in 1859 in his historic Preface to his famous book,

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relationsthat are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of

production which correspond to a definite stage of development of theirmaterial productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production

constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, onwhich rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond

definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production ofmaterial life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process

in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being,but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their

consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material



productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relationsof production, or -- what is but a legal expression for the same thing --

with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn

into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With thechange of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure ismore or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations adistinction should always be made between the material transformation

of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined withthe precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious,

aesthetic or philosophic -- in short, ideological forms in which menbecome conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion ofan individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we notjudge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on

the contrary this consciousness must be explained rather from thecontradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the

social productive forces and the relations of production. No social orderever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room init have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear

before the material conditions of their existence have matured in thewomb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only

such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, itwill always be found that the task itself arises only when the materialconditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of

formation." (Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 269-70.)

Such is Marxist materialism as applied to social life, to the history of society.

Such are the principal features of dialectical and historical materialism.

Josef StalinInternet Archive

Reference Archive



http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/index.htm



http://www.marxists.org/reference/index.htm


Jean-Paul SarteCritique of Dialectical Reason

Written: 1960Source: Critique of Dialectical ReasonTranslator: Allen Sheridan-SmithTranscribed: Andy BlundenHTML Markup: Andy Blunden

The Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic

1 Dialectical Monism

Everything we established in The Search for Method follows from our fundamental agreement withhistorical materialism. But as long as we present this agreement merely as one option among others weshall have achieved nothing, and our conclusions will remain conjectural. I have proposed certainmethodological rules; but they cannot be valid, in fact they cannot even be discussed, unless thematerialist dialectic can be assumed to be true. It must be proved that a negation of a negation can be anaffirmation, that conflicts — within a person or a group — are the motive force of History, that eachmoment of a series is comprehensible on the basis of the initial moment, though irreducible to it, thatHistory continually effects totalisations of totalisations, and so on, before the details of ananalytico-synthetic and regressive-progressive method can be grasped.

But these principles cannot be taken for granted; indeed most anthropologists (anthropologistes) wouldreject them. Of course, the determinism of the positivists is necessarily a form of materialism: whateverits subject matter, it endows it with the characteristics of mechanical materiality, namely inertia andexterior causation. But it normally rejects the reinteriorisation of the different moments in a syntheticprogression. Where we see the developmental unity of a single process, the positivists will attempt toshow several independent, exterior factors of which the event under consideration is the resultant. Whatthe positivists reject is a monism of interpretation. Take, for example, the excellent historian GeorgesLefebvre. He criticises Jaures for claiming to see the unity of a process in the events of 1789. Aspresented by Jaures, 1789 was one simple event. The cause of the Revolution was the ripening of thepower of the bourgeoisie, and its result was the legalisation of that power. But it is now well known thatthe Revolution of 1789 as a specific event required a truly abnormal and unpredictable set of immediatecauses: a financial crisis aggravated by the war in America; unemployment, caused by the commercialtreaty of 1786 and by the war in the Far East; and, finally, high prices and shortages brought about by thepoor harvest of 1788 and by the edict of 1787 which had emptied the granaries.

As for underlying causes, Lefebvre stresses the fact that without the abortive aristocratic revolution,which began in 1787, the bourgeois revolution would have been impossible. He concludes: ‘The rise of arevolutionary class is not necessarily the only cause of its victory; nor is its victory inevitable; nor need it


http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre2.htm (1 of 17) [11/06/2002 17:34:29]



lead to violence. In this instance, the Revolution was begun by those whom it was to annihilate ratherthan by those who profited from it, and . . . there is no reason to suppose that great kings could not havechecked the progress of the aristocracy in the eighteenth century.’

I do not wish to analyse this text, at least at present. Certainly, Lefebvre may be right to say that Jaures’interpretation is simplistic, that the unity of a historical process is more ambiguous, more ‘polyvalent’than he says — at least in its origins. One might try to find the unity of the disparate causes in a broadersynthesis, to show that the incompetence of the eighteenth century kings was effect as much as cause,etc., to rediscover circularities, and to show how chance is integrated into those ‘feed-back’ deviceswhich are the events of History; and that it is instantly incorporated by the whole so that it appears toeveryone as a manifestation of providence, etc. But this misses the point. It is not a matter even ofshowing that such syntheses are possible, but of proving that they are necessary: not any particular one,but in general that the scientist must adopt, in every case and at every level, a totalising attitude towardshis subject matter.

Let us not forget that anthropologists never reject the dialectical method absolutely. Even Lefebvre doesnot formulate a general criticism of every attempt at totalisation. On the contrary, in his celebratedlectures on the French Revolution he approached the relations between the Assembly, the Commune andvarious groups of citizens, from lo August to the September Massacres, as a dialectician; he gave the‘First Terror’ the unity of a developing totalisation. But Lefebvre refused to adopt the totalising attitudeconsistently. In response to our questions, he would no doubt say that History is not a unity, that it obeysdiverse laws, that an event may be produced by the pure accidental coincidence of independent factors,and that it may, in turn, develop according to totalising schemata which are peculiar to it. In short,Lefebvre would simply say that he rejects monism, not because it is monism, but because it seems to hima priori.

The same attitude has been formulated in other branches of knowledge. The sociologist GeorgesGurvitch has described it very accurately as dialectical hyper-empiricism. This is a Neopositivism whichrejects every a priori; neither the exclusive appeal to analytical Reason, nor the unconditional choice ofdialectical Reason can be justified rationally. We must accept the object as it is and let it develop freelybefore our eyes, without prejudging what types of rationality we will encounter in our investigations. Theobject itself dictates the method, the manner of approach. Gurvitch calls his hyper-empiricism‘dialectical’, but this hardly matters since all he means is that his object (social facts) presents itself toinvestigation as dialectical. His dialecticism is thus itself an empirical conclusion. This means that theattempt to establish totalising movements, reciprocities of conditioning — or, as Gurvitch quite correctlyputs it, reciprocities of ‘perspectives’ — etc., is based on past investigations and is confirmed by presentones. Generalising this attitude, one might, I think, speak of a neo-positivism which discovers in a givenregion of anthropology now a dialectical field, now a field of analytical determinism, and now, ifoccasion demands, other types of rationality.

Within the limits of an empirical anthropology this distrust of the a priori is perfectly justified. I haveshown in The Problem of Method that this is necessary if a living Marxism is to incorporate into itself thedisciplines which have hitherto remained external to it. However, whatever else one may say about it,this incorporation must consist in revealing beneath the classical determinism of particular ‘fields’, theirdialectical connection with the whole or, where we are dealing with processes whose dialectical characteris already recognised, in revealing this regional dialectic as the expression of a deeper totalisingmovement. In the end, this means that we are confronted once again with the need to establish the



dialectic as the universal method and universal law of anthropology. And this amounts to requiringMarxists to establish their method a priori: whatever relations are investigated, there will never beenough of them to establish a dialectical materialism. Such an extrapolation — that is, an infinitelyinfinite extrapolation — is radically different from scientific induction.

2 Scientific and Dialectical Reason

The attempt to ground the Marxist dialectic on anything other than its content, that is to say, theknowledge which it provides, might be denounced as idealism. In the first place, it might be said thatDiogenes demonstrated motion by walking; but what if he had been momentarily paralysed? There is acrisis in Marxist culture; there are many signs today that this crisis is temporary, but its very existenceprohibits us from justifying the principles by their results.

The supreme paradox of historical materialism is that it is, at one and the same time, the only truth ofHistory and a total indetermination of the Truth. The totalising thought of historical materialism hasestablished everything except its own existence. Or, to put it another way, contaminated by the historicalrelativism which it has always opposed, it has not exhibited the truth of History as it defines itself, orshown how this determines its nature and validity in the historical process, in the dialectical developmentof praxis and of human experience. In other words, we do not know what it means for a Marxist historianto speak the truth. Not that his statements are false — far from it; but he does not have the concept ofTruth at his disposal. In this way, Marxism presents itself to us, as ideologists, as an unveiling of being,and at the same time as an unanswered question as to the validity of this unveiling.

In response to this, it may be claimed that physicists are not concerned with the ground of theirinductions. This is true. But there is a general, formal principle; that there are strict relations betweenfacts. This means: the real is rational. But is this really a principle, in the ordinary sense of the term? Letus say, rather, that it is the condition and fundamental structure of scientific praxis. Throughexperimentation, as through any other form of activity, human action posits and imposes its ownpossibility. Praxis does not, even dogmatically, affirm the absolute rationality of the real, if this meansthat reality obeys a definite system of a priori principles and laws, or, in other words, that it complieswith a kind of constituted reason. Whatever the object of his research, whatever its orientation, thescientist, in his activity, assumes that reality will always manifest itself in such a way that a provisionaland fluid rationality can be constituted in and through it. This amounts to saying that the human mindwill accept everything presented to it by investigation and will subordinate its conception of logic and ofintelligibility to the actual data revealed by its investigations. Bachelard has shown clearly how modernphysics is in itself a new rationalism: the only presupposition of the praxis of the natural sciences is anassertion of unity conceived as the perpetual unification of an increasingly real diversity. But this unitydepends on human activity rather than on the diversity of phenomena. Moreover, it is neither aknowledge, nor a postulate, nor a Kantian a priori. It is action asserting itself within the undertaking, inthe explanation of the field and the unification of the means by the end (or of the sum of experimentalresults by the aim of the experiment).

This is why any comparison between the scientific principle of rationality and the dialectic is absolutelyunacceptable.

Scientific research can in fact be unaware of its own principal features. Dialectical knowledge, incontrast, is knowledge of the dialectic. For science, there is not any formal structure, nor any implicit



assertion about the rationality of the universe: Reason is developing and the mind prejudges nothing. Incomplete contrast, the dialectic is both a method and a movement in the object. For the dialectician, it isgrounded on a fundamental claim both about the structure of the real and about that of our praxis. Weassert simultaneously that the process of knowledge is dialectical, that the movement of the object(whatever it may be) is itself dialectical, and that these two dialectics are one and the same. Takentogether, these propositions have a material content; they themselves are a form of organised knowledge,or, to put it differently, they define a rationality of the world.

The modern scientist sees Reason as independent of any particular rational system. For him, Reason isthe mind as an empty unifier. The dialectician, on the other hand, locates himself within a system: hedefines a Reason, and he rejects a priori the purely analytical Reason of the seventeenth century, orrather, he treats it as the first moment of a synthetic, progressive Reason. It is impossible to see this as akind of practical assertion of our detachment; and equally impossible to make of it a postulate, or aworking hypothesis. Dialectical Reason transcends the level of methodology; it states what a sector ofthe universe, or, perhaps, the whole universe is. It does not merely direct research, or even pre-judge themode of appearance of objects. Dialectical Reason legislates, it defines what the world (human or total)must be like for dialectical knowledge to be possible; it simultaneously elucidates the movement of thereal and that of our thoughts, and it elucidates the one by the other. This particular rational system,however, is supposed to transcend and to integrate all models of rationality. Dialectical Reason is neitherconstituent nor constituted reason; it is Reason constituting itself in and through the world, dissolving initself all constituted Reasons in order to constitute new ones which it transcends and dissolves in turn. Itis, therefore, both a type of rationality and the transcendence of all types of rationality. The certainty ofalways being able to transcend replaces the empty detachment of formal rationality: the ever presentpossibility of unifying becomes the permanent necessity for man of totalising and being totalised, and forthe world of being an ever broader, developing totalisation. But knowledge of such scope would be amere philosophical dream if it did not have all the marks of apodictic certainty. This means that practicalsuccesses are not enough; even if the assertions of the dialectician were infinitely confirmed by research,this permanent confirmation would not get us beyond empirical contingency.

So we must take up the whole problem once again, and explore the limits, the validity and the extent ofdialectical Reason. We cannot deny that a Critique (in the Kantian sense of the term) of dialecticalReason can be made only by dialectical Reason itself; and indeed it must be allowed to ground itself andto develop itself as a free critique of itself, at the same time as being the movement of History and ofknowledge. This is precisely what has not been done until now: dialectical Reason has been walled up indogmatism.

3 Hegelian Dogmatism

The source of this dogmatism lies in the basic problem of ‘dialectical materialism’. In setting thedialectic back on its feet Marx revealed the true contradictions of realism. These contradictions were tobe the very substance of knowledge, but they have been concealed. We must therefore take them as ourstarting-point.

The superiority of Hegelian dogmatism, for those who believe in it, lies precisely in that part of it whichwe now reject — its idealism. For Hegel, the dialectic had no need to prove itself. In the first place Hegeltook himself to be at the beginning of the end of History, that is to say, at that moment of Truth which isdeath. The time had come to judge, because in future the philosopher and his judgement would never be



required again. Historical evolution required this Last Judgement; it culminated in its philosopher. Thusthe totalisation was complete: all that remained was to bring down the curtain. Besides, and mostimportant, the movement of Being and the process of Knowledge are inseparable. This implies, asHyppolite rightly says, that Knowledge of the Other (object, world, nature) is self-Knowledge, andconversely. Thus Hegel could write: ‘Scientific knowledge, however, demands precisely that wesurrender to the life of the object, or, which means the same thing, that one hold present and express theinternal necessity of this object.’ Absolute empiricism becomes identical with absolute necessity: theobject is taken as given, at its moment in the history of the World and of Spirit. But this means thatconsciousness returns to the beginning of its Knowledge and allows this Knowledge freely to reconstituteitself within consciousness — it reconstitutes knowledge for itself; it means, in other words, thatconsciousness can see the strict necessity of the sequence and of the moments which gradually constitutethe world as a concrete totality, because it is consciousness itself which constitutes itself for itself asabsolute Knowledge, in the absolute freedom of its strict necessity. The reason why Kant could preservethe dualism of noumena and phenomena is that, for him, the unification of sense experience was effectedby formal and non-temporal principles: the content of Knowledge could not change the mode ofknowing. But if form and knowledge were modified together, and by each other, if necessity no longerbelonged to a pure conceptual activity, but to a perpetual, and perpetually total, transformation, then itwould have to be suffered in the realm of Being in order to be recognised in the development ofKnowledge; and it would have to be lived in the movement of knowledge in order to be attributed to thedevelopment of the object. In Hegel’s time, this seemed to imply the identity of Knowledge and itsobject. Consciousness was consciousness of the Other, and the Other was the being-other ofconsciousness.

4 The Dialectic in Marx

Marx’s originality lies in the fact that, in opposition to Hegel, he demonstrated that History is indevelopment that Being is irreducible to Knowledge, and, also, that he preserved the dialecticalmovement both in Being and in Knowledge. He was correct, practically. But having failed to re-think thedialectic, Marxists have played the Positivist game. Positivists often ask Marxists how they can claim,given that Marx had the good sense to realise that ‘pre-history’ had not yet come to an end, to detect the‘ruses’ of History, the ‘secret’ of the proletariat, and the direction of historical development. ForPositivists, prediction is possible only to the extent that the current order of succession re-enacts aprevious order of succession; and so the future repeats the past. Hegel could have answered them bysaying that he had only predicted the past, in that his history was finished and complete and that, as amatter of fact, the moment which posits itself for itself in the process of living History can only guess thefuture, as the truth of its own incompleteness, unknowable for it. The Marxist future, however, is agenuine future: it is completely new, and irreducible to the present. Nevertheless, Marx does makepredictions, and long term rather than short term ones. But in fact, according to Positivist Rationalism,Marx had disqualified himself from doing this, and given that he himself was pre-historical and withinprehistory, his judgements can have only a relative and historical significance — even when they concernthe past. Thus Marxism as dialectic must reject the relativism of the positivists. And it must beunderstood that relativism rejects not only vast historical syntheses, but also the most modest assertionsof dialectical Reason: whatever we may say or know, however close we may be to the present or pastevent which we attempt to reconstitute in its totalising movement, Positivism will always deny us theright. It does not regard the synthesis of all knowledge as completely impossible (though it envisages itas an inventory rather than as an organisation of Knowledge): but it considers such a synthesis



impossible now. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate, in opposition to Positivism, how, at this verymoment, dialectical Reason can assert certain totalising truths — if not the whole Truth.

5 Thought, Being and Truth in Marxism

But that is not all. For Hegel, as we have seen, the apodicticity of dialectical knowledge implied theidentity of being, action and knowledge. Marx, however, began by positing that material existence wasirreducible to knowledge, that praxis outstrips Knowledge in its real efficacy. Needless to say, this is myown position. However, this position gives rise to new difficulties: how can we establish that one and thesame movement animates these different processes? In particular, thought is both Being and knowledgeof Being. It is the praxis of an individual or a group, in particular conditions, at a definite moment ofHistory. As such, thought is subject to the dialectic as its law, just like the historical process, consideredeither as a whole or in its particular details. But it is also knowledge of the dialectic as Reason, that is, asthe law of Being. But this presupposes an explanatory separation from dialectical objects, allowing us tounveil their movement. Is there not an inevitable contradiction between the knowledge of Being and thebeing of knowledge? The demonstration that thought, as Being, is carried along in the same movement asthe whole of history, does not dissolve all contradictions. In fact it is precisely to this extent that thoughtis incapable of grasping itself in the necessity of its own dialectical development.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness apprehends its own necessity in the Other and, at the sametime, it apprehends in itself the necessity of the Other. But according to Hegel, Christianity andscepticism provide the means for understanding the previous moment, Stoicism; and, in general, Being isKnowledge, and thought itself is simultaneously both constituent and constituted. In one and the samemovement it is subject to its law in so far as it is constituted, and it knows this law in so far as it isconstituent. But if thought were no longer the whole, it would see its own development as if it were anempirical succession of moments, and this lived experience (le vecu) would appear as contingency andnot as necessity. If thought were to understand itself as a dialectical process, it could not formulate itsdiscovery except as a simple fact. Still less could thought pretend to settle the question whether themovement of its object is modelled on the movement of thought, or whether the movement of thought ismodelled on that of its object. If material being, praxis and knowledge are indeed irreducible realities, dowe not have to appeal to a pre-established harmony in order to relate their developments? In other words,if the search for Truth is to be dialectical in its methods, how can it be shown without idealism that itcorresponds to the movement of Being? And on the other hand, if Knowledge is to allow Being todevelop itself according to its own laws, how can w e prevent whatever processes are involved fromappearing as empirical? Moreover, in the latter case, the question arises how passive, and thereforenon-dialectical, thought can evaluate the dialectic; or in ontological terms, how it can be that the onlyreality which lies beyond the laws of synthetic Reason is that which decrees them. Let no one think thathe can get out of these dilemmas by means of some pseudo-dialectical answer such as: Thought isdialectical by virtue of its object, it is simply the dialectic as the movement of the real. For, even if it istrue that History becomes intelligible when considered dialectically, the example of the Positivists showsthat this can be regarded as mere determinism. For this reason, one must already be situated withinconstituent dialectical Reason in order to see History as constituted dialectical Reason. But if dialecticalReason creates itself (rather than suffering itself), how can one prove that it corresponds to the dialecticof Being, without relapsing into idealism? This old problem recurs whenever traditional dogmaticdualism is revived. No doubt it will seem surprising that I refer to Marxist monism as a dualism; it is, infact, both monist and dualist.



It is dualist because it is monist. Marx’s ontological monism consisted in affirming the irreducibility ofBeing to thought, and, at the same time, in reintegrating thoughts with the real as a particular form ofhuman activity. This monistic claim, however, appears as a dogmatic Truth. But we must distinguish itfrom conservative ideologies which are mere products of the universal dialectic: in this way thought asthe vehicle of truth can recover what it has lost ontologically since the: collapse of idealism, and becomea Norm of Knowledge.

Of course dialectical materialism has a practical advantage over contemporary ideologies in that it is theideology of the rising class. But if it were merely the inert expression of this rise, or even ofrevolutionary praxis, if it did not direct its attention back upon this rise so as to explain it to reveal it toitself, how could we speak of a progress of consciousness? How could the dialectic be regarded as thereal movement o f History unfolding itself? Like philosophical liberalism today, it would be no morethan a mythical reflection. Besides, for the dialectician, even ideologies, however mystifying, contain anelement of truth, as Marx often emphasised. But how is this partial truth to be established? Materialistmonism, in short, has successfully eliminated the dualism of thought and Being in favour of total Being,which is thereby grasped in its materiality. But the effect of this has only been to re-establish, as anantinomy — at least an apparent one — the dualism of Being and Truth.

6 The External Dialectic in Modern Marxism

This difficulty has appeared insurmountable to modern Marxists. They have seen only one solution: torefuse to acknowledge thought itself as a dialectical activity, to dissolve it into the universal dialectic,and to eliminate man by dispersing him into the universe. This enables them to substitute Being forTruth. There is no longer knowledge in the strict sense of the term; Being no longer manifests itself inany way whatsoever: it merely evolves according to its own laws. The dialectic of Nature is Naturewithout men. There is therefore no more need for certainty, for criteria; even the attempt to criticise andestablish knowledge becomes useless. Knowledge of whatever form is a relation between man and theworld around him, and if man no longer exists this relation disappears.

The source of this unfortunate approach is well known: as Whitehead said, a law begins by being ahypothesis and ends by becoming a fact. When we say that the earth revolves, we do not feel as thoughwe are stating a theory, or that we are relying on a system of knowledge; we feel that we are in thepresence of the fact itself, which immediately eliminates us as knowing subjects in order to restore to usour ‘nature’ as objects of gravitation. For anyone with a realist view of the world, knowledge thereforedestroys itself in order to become the world, and this is true not only of philosophy but also of allscientific Knowledge. When dialectical materialism claims to establish a dialectic of Nature it does notpresent itself as an attempt at an extremely general synthesis of human knowledge, but rather as a mereordering of the facts. And its claim to be concerned with facts is not unjustified: when Engels speaks ofthe expansion of bodies or of electric current, he is indeed referring to the facts themselves — althoughthese facts may undergo essential changes with the progress of science. This gigantic — and, as we shallsee, abortive — attempt to allow the world to unfold itself by itself and to no one, we shall call externalor transcendental, dialectical materialism (le materialisme dialectique da dehors ou transcendental).

7 The Dialectic of Nature

It is clear that this kind of materialism is not Marxist, but still it is defined by Marx: “The materialistoutlook on nature means nothing more than the conception of nature just as it is, without alien



addition”[from draft of Ludwig Feuerbach, by Engels]. On this conception, man returns to the very heartof Nature as one of its objects and develops before our eyes in accordance with the laws of Nature, thatis, as pure materiality governed by the universal laws of the dialectic. The object of thought is Nature asit is, and the study of History is only a particular form of it: we must trace the movement that produceslife out of matter, man out of primitive forms of life, and social history out of the first humancommunities. The advantage of this conception is that it avoids the problem: it presents the dialectic apriori and without justification, as the fundamental law of Nature. This external materialism lays downthe dialectic as exteriority: the Nature of man lies outside him in an a priori law, in an extra-humannature, in a history that begins with the nebulae. For this universal dialectic, partial totalisations do nothave even provisional value; they do not exist. Everything must always be referred to the totality ofnatural history of which human history is only a particular form. Thus all real thought, as it actuallyforms itself in the concrete movement of History, is held to be a complete distortion of its objects. Itbecomes a truth again only if it is reduced to a dead object, to a result; and thus a position outside man,and on the side of things, is adopted so that the idea can be seen as a thing signified by things rather thanas a signifying act. In this way, that ‘alien addition’ which is man — concrete, living man with hishuman relations, his true or false thoughts, his actions, his real purposes — is removed from the world.An absolute object is put in his place:

‘What we call a subject is only an object considered as the centre if particular reactions’ [Pierre Naville].The notion of truth is replaced by those of success or normality as applied to performances in tests: ‘Asthe centre of more or less delayed reactions, the body performs movements which organise themselves asbehaviour. This produces actions. (Thinking is an action. Suffering is an action). These actions can beregarded as “tests”..., as trials’. [Naville]

Thus we get back to the disguised scepticism of ‘reflection’. But when everything has apparentlyculminated in sceptical objectivism, we suddenly realise that it has been imposed on us dogmatically,that it is the Truth of Being as it appears to universal consciousness. Spirit sees dialectic as the law of theworld. Consequently we fall back into complete dogmatic idealism.

Scientific laws are experimental hypotheses verified by facts; but at present, the absolute principle that‘Nature is dialectical’ is not open to verification at all. You may claim that some set of laws establishedby scientists represents a certain dialectical movement in the objects of these laws, but you cannot proveit. [These remarks apply, of course, only to the dialectic conceived as an abstract and universal law ofNature. However, when the dialectic is applied to human history, it loses none of its heuristic value.Concealed, it directs the collection of facts; then it reveals itself by making them comprehensible, bytotalising them. This comprehension reveals a new dimension of History, and finally, its truth, itsintelligibility]. Neither the laws nor the ‘great theories’ will change, however you view them. Yourproblem is not whether light transmits energy particles to the bodies it illuminates, but whether thequantum theory can be integrated into a dialectical totalisation of the universe. You need not question thekinetic theory of gases; you need only see whether it weakens the totalisation. You are reflecting onKnowledge. And since the law discovered by the scientist, taken in isolation, is neither dialectical noranti-dialectical (it is only a quantitative determination of a functional relation), the consideration ofscientific facts (that is to say, of established laws) cannot furnish, or even suggest, a proof of thedialectic. Dialectical Reason can only be captured elsewhere, so that it can be forcibly imposed on thedata of physics and chemistry. It is well known, in fact, that the notion of dialectic emerged in Historyalong quite different paths, and that both Hegel and Marx explained and defined it in terms of therelations of man to matter, and of men to each other. The attempt to find the movement of human history



within natural history was made only later, out of a wish for unification. Thus the claim that there is adialectic of Nature refers to the totality of material facts — past, present, future — or, to put it anotherway, it involves a totalisation of temporality. It has a curious similarity to those Ideas of Reason which,according to Kant, were regulative and incapable of being corroborated by any particular experience.

8 Critique of the External Dialectic

Thus a system of ideas is contemplated by a pure consciousness which has pre-constituted their law forthem, though utterly incapable of justifying this ukase. But in order to grasp materiality as such, it is notsufficient to discuss the word ‘matter’. Language is ambiguous in that words sometimes designateobjects and sometimes concepts; and this is why materialism as such is not opposed to idealism. In fact,there is a materialist idealism which, in the last analysis, is merely a discourse on the idea of matter; thereal opposite of this is realist materialism — the thought of an individual who is situated in the world,penetrated by every cosmic force, and treating the material universe as something which graduallyreveals itself through a ‘situated’ praxis. In the present case, we are evidently confronted with anidealism which has appropriated the vocabulary of science in order to express ideas of such poverty thatone can see straight through them. But the important point is this: if you are hunting for the Truth (as ahuman undertaking) of the Universe, you will find it, in the very words you use, as the object of anabsolute and constituting consciousness. This means that it is impossible to get away from the problem ofTruth. Naville deprives his ‘centres of delayed reactions’ of the ability to distinguish between True andFalse; he imposes the dialectic on them without allowing them knowledge of it; but what he says therebybecomes an absolute truth without foundation.

How can we accept this doubling of personality? How can a man who is lost in the world, permeated byan absolute movement coming from everything, also be this consciousness sure both of itself and of theTruth? It is true that Naville observes that ‘these centres of reaction elaborate their behaviour accordingto possibilities which, at the level both of the individual and of the species, are subject to an unalterableand strictly determined development . . .’, and that ‘experimentally established reflex determinations andintegrations enable one to appreciate the narrowing margin within which organic behaviour can be saidto be autonomous’. We obviously agree with this; but the important thing is Naville’s application ofthese observations, which inevitably leads to the theory of reflection, to endowing man with constitutedreason; that is, to making thought into a form of behaviour strictly conditioned by the world (which ofcourse it is), while neglecting to say that it is also knowledge of the world. How could ‘empirical’ manthink? Confronted with his own history, he is as uncertain as when he is confronted by Nature, for thelaw does not automatically produce knowledge of itself- indeed, if it is passively suffered, it transformsits object into passivity, and thus deprives it of any possibility of collecting its atomised experiences intoa synthetic unity. Meanwhile, at the level of generality where he is situated, transcendental man,contemplating laws, cannot grasp individuals. Thus, in spite of Naville, we are offered two thoughts,neither of which is able to think us, or, for that matter, itself: the thought which is passive, given, anddiscontinuous, claims to be knowledge but is really only the delayed effect of external causes, while thethought which is active, synthetic and desituated, knows nothing of itself and, completely immobile,contemplates a world without thought. Our doctrinaires have mistaken for a real recognition of Necessitywhat is actually only a particular form of alienation, which makes their own lived thinking appear as anobject for a universal Consciousness, and which reflects on it as though it were the Thought of the Other.

We must stress this crucial fact: Reason is neither a bone nor an accident. In other words, if dialecticalReason is to be rationality, it must provide Reason with its own reasons. From this point of view,



analytical rationalism demonstrates itself, because, as we have seen, it is the pure affirmation — at aquite superficial level — of the bond of exteriority as permanent possibility. But let us see what Engelssays about ‘the most general laws’ of ‘the history of nature and human society’. It is this:

‘... they can be reduced in the main to three:

• The law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa;

• The law of the interpenetration of opposites;

• The law of the negation of the negation.

All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought.... The mistake lies in thefact that these laws are foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them.’[Engels, Dialectics of Nature]

Engels’ uncertainty is revealed by his words, for abstraction is not the same as deduction. And how canuniversal laws be deduced from a set of particular laws? If you want a name, it can only be calledinduction. And as we have seen, the only dialectic one will find in Nature is a dialectic that one has putthere oneself. But let us suppose for a moment that universal laws can actually be induced, that is to say,that they provide both a means of ordering scientific Knowledge and a heuristic procedure. For all that,they will remain only probabilities. Let us suppose, also, that their probability is very high and that,consequently, we are obliged to accept them as true. Where will this get us? To a discovery of the laws ofReason in the universe, like Newton’s discovery of the principle of gravitation. When Newton said‘Hypotheses non fingo’, he meant that while calculation and investigation permitted him to prove the defacto existence of gravitation, he would not try to establish it de jure, to explain it, to reduce it to somemore general principle. Thus, to his contemporaries, rationality seemed to come to a halt withdemonstrations and proofs; the fact in itself remained inexplicable and contingent. Science does not haveto account for the facts that it discovers; it firmly establishes their existence and their relations with otherfacts. Later, the movement of scientific thought itself was to overthrow this hypothesis, for incontemporary physics gravitation is treated quite differently; without ceasing to be a fact, it is no longerthe untranscendable final fact; it is part of a new conception of the universe and we know now that everycontingent fact, however untranscendable it may appear, will be transcended in its turn, by other facts.

But what are we to make of a doctrine which presents the laws of Reason in the same way as Newtonpresented those of gravitation? If someone had asked Engels: Why are there three laws rather than ten, orjust one?; Why are the laws of thought these and not others?; Where do they come from?; Is there somemore general principle from which they might be deduced, instead of appearing as having thecontingency of a fact?; Is there some way of uniting them in an organised synthesis, and putting them insome order?; etc., he would probably have shrugged his shoulders and replied, like Newton, ‘Hypothesesnon fingo’. The upshot of this is paradoxical: Engels criticises Hegel for imposing the laws of thought onmatter, but he does precisely the same himself, in that he expects the sciences to verify a dialecticalreason which he discovered in the social world. But, in the historical and social world, as we shall see,there really is a dialectical reason; by transferring it into the ‘natural’ world, and forcibly inscribing itthere, Engels stripped it of its rationality: there was no longer a dialectic which man produced byproducing himself, and which, in turn, produced man; there was only a contingent law, of which nothingcould be said except it is so and not otherwise. In short, Reason once more becomes a bone, since it ismerely a fact and has no knowable necessity. It so happens that opposites interpenetrate. Rationality is



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883-don/don02.htm

merely a final and universal law; and therefore it is irrationality pure and simple. However one looks atit, transcendental materialism leads to the irrational, either by ignoring the thought of empirical man, orby creating a noumenal consciousness which imposes its law as a whim, or again, by discovering inNature ‘without alien addition’ the laws of dialectical Reason in the form of contingent facts.

9 The Domain of Dialectical Reason

Must we then deny the existence of dialectical connections in inanimate Nature? By no means. Indeed, inthe present state of our knowledge, I do not see that we are in a position to affirm or deny it. Every one isfree either to believe that physico-chemical laws express a dialectical reason, or not to believe it. In anycase, in the domain of the facts of inorganic Nature, the claim must be extra-scientific. We merely ask forthe restoration of the order of certainties and discoveries: for if there is such a thing as a dialecticalreason, it is revealed and established in and through human praxis, to men in a given society at aparticular moment of its development. On the basis of this discovery, the limits and scope of dialecticalcertainty have to be established. The dialectic will be an effective method as long as it remains necessaryas the law of intelligibility and as the rational structure of Being. A materialist dialectic will bemeaningless if it cannot establish, within human history, the primacy of material conditions as they arediscovered by the praxis of particular men and as they impose themselves on it. In short, if there is to beany such thing as dialectical materialism, it must be a historical materialism, that is to say, a materialismfrom within; it must be one and the same thing to produce it and to have it imposed on one, to live it andto know it. Consequently, this materialism, if it exists, can be true only within the limits of our socialuniverse. It is at the heart of a society which is organised and stratified — and which is also rent by strife— that the appearance of a new machine will bring profound changes which will reverberate from theinfrastructures to the superstructures; it is within a society which possesses tools and institutions that thematerial facts — the poverty or richness of the subsoil, the climate, etc. — which condition it and inrelation to which it is itself defined, will be discovered.

As for the dialectic of Nature, it cannot be anything more than the object of a metaphysical hypothesis.The procedure of discovering dialectical rationality in praxis, and then projecting it, as an unconditionallaw, on to the inorganic world, and then returning to the study of societies and claiming that thisopaquely irrational law of nature conditions them, seems to us to be a complete aberration. A humanrelation, which can be recognised only because we are ourselves human, is encountered, hypostasised,stripped of every human characteristic and, finally, this irrational fabrication is substituted for thegenuine relation which was encountered in the first place. Thus in the name of monism the practicalrationality of man making History is replaced by the ancient notion of a blind Necessity, the clear by theobscure, the evident by the conjectural, Truth by Science Fiction. If there is a dialectic now, and if we areto establish it, we shall have to seek it where it is. We shall accept the idea that man is a material beingamong other material beings and, as such, does not have a privileged statute; we shall even refuse toreject a priori the possibility that a concrete dialectic of Nature will one day be discovered, which wouldmean that the dialectical method would become a heuristic in the natural sciences and would be used byscientists themselves and under experimental control. All I say is that dialectical Reason must be turnedover once again, that it must be recognised where it is there to be seen, instead of being dreamed of inareas where we cannot yet grasp it. There is such f a thing as historical materialism, and the law of thismaterialism is the , dialectic. But if, as some writers imply, dialectical materialism is to be understood asa monism which is supposed to control human history from outside, then we are compelled to say thatthere is no such thing as dialectical materialism, at least for the time being.



[It may be said that the metaphysical hypothesis of a dialectic of Nature becomes more interesting whenit is used to explain the passage from inorganic matter to organic bodies, and the evolution of life onearth. This is true. But it should be noted that this formal interpretation of life and evolution will never bemore than a pious dream as long as scientists have no way of using the notions of ‘totality’ and‘totalisation’ as a guiding hypothesis. Nothing is gained by proclaiming that the evolution of the speciesor the appearance of life are moments of the ‘dialectic of Nature’ as long as we are ignorant of how lifeappeared and how species are transformed. For the present, biology, in its actual research, remainspositivistic and analytical. It is possible that a deeper knowledge of its object, through its contradictions,will force biology to consider the organism in its totality, that is to say, dialectically, and to consider allbiological facts in their relation of interiority. This is possible, but it is not certain. In any event, it iscurious that Marxists, as dialecticians of nature, denounce as idealists those who, like Goldstein, attempt(rightly or wrongly) to consider organic beings as totalities although this only involves showing (ortrying to show) the dialectical irreducibility of the ‘state of matter’ which is life, to another state —inorganic matter — which nevertheless generated it.]

This long discussion has not been useless. it has enabled us to formulate our problem; it has revealed theconditions under which a dialectic can be established. No doubt these conditions are contradictory, but itis their moving contradictions which will throw us into the dialectical movement. Engels’ mistake, in thetext we quoted above, was to think that he could extract his dialectical laws from Nature bynon-dialectical procedures comparison, analogy, abstraction and induction. In fact, dialectical Reason is awhole and must ground itself by itself, or dialectically.

(1) The failure of dialectical dogmatism has shown us that the dialectic as rationality must be open todirect, everyday investigation, both as the objective connection between facts and as the method forknowing and fixing this connection. But at the same time. the provisional character of dialecticalhyper-empiricism forces us to the conclusion that dialectical universality must be imposed a priori as anecessity. The ‘a priori’, here, has nothing, to do with any sort of constitutive principles which are priorto experience. It relates to a universality and necessity which are contained in every experience but whichtranscend any particular experience. But since, as Kant showed, experience provides facts but notnecessity, and since we reject all idealist solutions, there is obviously a contradiction here. Husserl couldspeak of apodictic certainty without much difficulty, but this was because he remained on the level ofpure, formal consciousness apprehending itself in its formality; but, for us, it is necessary to find ourapodictic experience in the concrete world of History.

(2) We have noticed the aporias of being and knowledge in Marx. It is clear that the former is irreducibleto the latter. On the other hand, the ‘dialectic of Nature’ has shown us that knowledge vanishes whenreduced to one modality of being among others. Nevertheless, this dualism, which threatens to lead usinto some form of disguised spiritualism, must be rejected. The possibility that a dialectic exists is itselfdialectical; or, to put it another way, the only possible unity of the dialectic as law of historicaldevelopment and the dialectic as knowledge-in-movement of this development is the unity of adialectical movement. Being is the negation of knowledge, and knowledge draws its being from thenegation of being.

(3) ‘Men make their own History . . . but under circumstances . . . given and transmitted from the past.’ Ifthis statement is true, then both determinism and analytical reason must be categorically rejected as themethod and law of human history. Dialectical rationality, the whole of which is contained in thissentence, must be seen as the permanent and dialectical unity of freedom and necessity. In other words,



as we have seen, the universe becomes a dream if the dialectic controls man from outside, as hisunconditioned law. But if we imagine that every one simply follows his inclinations and that thesemolecular collisions produce large scale effects, we will discover average or statistical results, but not ahistorical development. So, in a sense, man submits to the dialectic as to an enemy power; in anothersense, he creates it; and if dialectical Reason is the Reason of History, this contradiction must itself belived dialectically, which means that man must be controlled by the dialectic in so far as he creates it,and create it in so far as he is controlled by it. Furthermore, it must be understood that there is no suchthing as man; there are people, wholly defined by their society and by the historical movement whichcarries them along; if we do not wish the dialectic to become a divine law again, a metaphysical fate, itmust proceed from individuals and not from some kind of supra-individual ensemble. Thus we encountera new contradiction: the dialectic is the law of totalisation which creates several collectivities, severalsocieties, and one history — realities, that is, which impose themselves on individuals; but at the sametime it must be woven out of millions of individual actions. We must show how it is possible for it to beboth a resultant, though not a passive average, and a totalising force, though not a transcendent fate, andhow it can continually bring about the unity of dispersive profusion and integration.

(4) We are dealing with a materialist dialectic; and by this I mean from a strictly epistemological point ofview — that thought must discover its own necessity in its material object, at the same time asdiscovering in itself, in so far as it is itself a material being, the necessity of its object. This could bedone within Hegelian idealism, and either the dialectic is a dream or it can be done in the real materialworld of Marxism. This inevitably refers us from thought to action. Indeed, the former is only a momentof the latter. We must therefore inquire whether, in the unity of an apodictic experience, every praxis isconstituted, in and through the material universe, as the transcendence of its object-being (etre-objet) bythe Other, while revealing the praxis of the Other as an object. But, at the same time, a relation must beestablished, by and through the Other, between each praxis and the universe of things, in such a way that,in the course of a perpetual totalisation, the thing becomes human and man realises himself as a thing. Itmust be shown, in concrete reality, that the dialectical method is indistinguishable from the dialecticalmovement; indistinguishable, that is to say, both from the relations which each person has with everyonethrough inorganic materiality, and from those which he has with his materiality and with his own organicmaterial existence, through his relations with others. We must show, therefore, that the dialectic is basedon this, everyone’s permanent experience: in the universe of exteriority, one’s relation of exteriority tothe material universe and to the Other is always accidental, though always present; but one’s relation ofinteriority with men and with things is fundamental, though often concealed.

(5) The dialectic, however, if it is to be a reason rather than a blind law, must appear as untranscendableintelligibility. The content, the development, the order of appearance of negations, of negations ofnegations, of conflicts, etc., the phases of the struggle between opposed terms, and its outcome — inshort, the reality of the dialectical movement, is governed in its entirety by the basic conditions, thestructures of materiality, the initial situation, the continuous action of external and internal factors, andthe balance of the forces involved. Thus there is no one dialectic which imposes itself upon the facts, asthe Kantian categories impose themselves on phenomena; but the dialectic, if it exists, is the individualcareer of its object. There can be no pre-established schema imposed on individual developments, neitherin someone’s head, nor in an intelligible heaven; if the dialectic exists, it is because certain regions ofmateriality are structured in such a way that it cannot not exist. In other words, the dialectical movementis not some powerful unitary force revealing itself behind History like the will of God. It is first andforemost a resultant; it is not the dialectic which forces historical men to live their history in terrible



contradictions; it is men, as they are, dominated by scarcity and necessity, and confronting one another incircumstances which History or economics can inventory, but which only dialectical reason can explain.Before it can be a motive force, contradiction is a result; and, on the level of ontology, the dialecticappears as the only type of relation which individuals, situated and constituted in a certain way, and onaccount of their very constitution, can establish amongst themselves. The dialectic, if it exists, can onlybe the totalisation of concrete totalisations effected by a multiplicity of totalising individualities. I shallrefer to this as dialectical nominalism. Nevertheless, the dialectic cannot be valid for all the particularcases which recreate it, unless it always appears as necessity in the investigation which reveals it, nor is itvalid unless it provides us with the key to the process which expresses it, that is, unless we apprehend itas the intelligibility of the process in question.

The combination of the necessity and intelligibility of dialectical Reason, with the need to discover itempirically in each instance, leads to several reflections. In the first place, no one can discover thedialectic while keeping the point of view of analytical Reason; which means, among other things, that noone can discover the dialectic while remaining external to the object under consideration. Indeed, foranyone considering a given system in exteriority, no specific investigation can show whether themovement of the system is a continuous unfolding or a succession of discrete instants. The stance of thedesituated experimenter, however, tends to perpetuate analytical Reason as the model of intelligibility;the scientist s passivity in relation to the system will tend to reveal to him a passivity of the system inrelation to himself. The dialectic reveals itself only to an observer situated in interiority, that is to say, toan investigator who lives his investigation both as a possible contribution to the ideology of the entireepoch and as the particular praxis of an individual defined by his historical and personal career within thewider history which conditions it. In short, in order to preserve the Hegelian idea (that Consciousnessknows itself in the Other and knows the Other in itself), while completely discarding its idealism, I mustbe able to say that the praxis of everyone, as a dialectical movement, must reveal itself to the individualas the necessity of his own praxis and, conversely, that the freedom, for everyone, of his individualpraxis must re-emerge in everyone so as to reveal to the individual a dialectic which produces itself andproduces him in so far as it is produced. The dialectic as the living logic of action is invisible to acontemplative reason: it appears in the course of praxis as a necessary moment of it; in other words, it iscreated anew in each action (though actions arise only on the basis of a world entirely constituted by thedialectical praxis of the past) and becomes a theoretical and practical method when action in the courseof development begins to give an explanation of itself. In the course of this action, the dialectic appearsto the individual as rational transparency in so far as he produces it, and as absolute necessity in so far asit escapes him, that is to say, quite simply, in so far as it is produced by others. Finally, to the extent thatthe individual becomes acquainted with himself in the transcendence (depassement) of his needs, hebecomes acquainted with the law which others impose on him in transcending their own (he becomesacquainted with it: this does not mean that he submits to it), and becomes acquainted with his ownautonomy (in so far as it can be and constantly is, exploited by the other — shamming, manoeuvring,etc.) as an alien power and the autonomy of the others as the inexorable law which enables him to coercethem. But, through the very reciprocity of coercions and autonomies, the law ends up by escapingeveryone, and in the revolving movement of totalisation it appears as dialectical Reason, that is to say,external to all because internal to each; and a developing totalisation, though without a totaliser, of all thetotalised totalisations and of all the de-totalised totalities.

If dialectical Reason is to be possible as the career of all and the freedom of each, as experience and asnecessity, if w e are to display both its total translucidity (it is no more than ourself) and its



untranscendable severity (it is the unity of everything that conditions us), if we are to ground it as therationality of praxis, of totalisation, and of society’s future, if we are then to criticise it as analyticalReason has been criticised, that is to say, if we are to determine its significance, then we must realise thesituated experience of its apodicticity through ourselves. But let it not be imagined that this experience iscomparable to the intuitions of the empiricists, or even to the kind of scientific experiments whoseplanning is long and laborious, but whose result can be observed instantaneously. The experience of thedialectic is itself dialectical: this means that it develops and organises itself on all levels. At the sametime, it is the very experience of living, since to live is to act and be acted on, and since the dialectic isthe rationality of praxis. It must be regressive because it will set out from lived experience (le vecu) inorder gradually to discover all the structures of praxis. However, we must give notice that theinvestigation we are undertaking, though in itself historical, like any other undertaking, does not attemptto discover the movement of History, the evolution of labour or of the relations of production, or classconflicts. Its goal is simply to reveal and establish dialectical rationality, that is to say, the complex playof praxis and totalisation.

When we have arrived at the most general conditionings, that is to say, at materiality, it will then be timeto reconstruct, on the basis of the investigation, the schema of intelligibility proper to the totalisation.This second part, which will be published later will be what one might call a synthetic and progressivedefinition of ‘the rationality of action’. In this connection, we shall see how dialectical Reason extendsbeyond analytical Reason and includes within itself its own critique and its own transcendence. However,the limited character of the project cannot be emphasised sufficiently. I have said — and I repeat — thatthe only valid interpretation of human History is historical materialism. So I shall not be restating herewhat others have already done a thousand times; besides, it is not my subject.

If a summary of this introduction is required, however, one could say that in the field of dialecticalrationality historical materialism is its own proof, but that it does not provide a foundation for thisrationality even, and above all, if it provides the History of its development as constituted Reason.Marxism is History itself becoming conscious of itself, and if it is valid it is by its material content,which is not, and cannot be, at issue here. But precisely because its reality resides in its content, theinternal connections which it brings to light, in so far as they are part of its real content, are indeterminatein form. In particular, when a Marxist makes use of the notion of ‘necessity’ in order to characterise therelation of two events within one and the same process, we remain hesitant, even if the attemptedsynthesis convinces us completely. This does not mean that we reject necessity in human affairs quite theopposite; but simply that dialectical necessity is by definition different from the necessity of analyticalReason and that Marxism is not concerned — why should it be? — with determining and establishingthis new structure of being and of experience. Thus our task cannot in any way be to reconstruct realHistory in its development, any more than it can consist in a concrete study of forms of production or ofthe groups studied by the sociologist and the ethnographer. Our problem is critical. Doubtless thisproblem is itself raised by History. But it is precisely a matter of testing, criticising and establishing,within History and at this particular moment in the development of human societies, the instruments ofthought by means of which History thinks itself in so far as they are also the practical instruments bymeans of which it is made. Of course, we shall be driven from doing to knowing and from knowing todoing in the unity of a process which will itself be dialectical. But our real aim is theoretical. It can beformulated in the following terms: on what conditions is the knowledge of a History possible? To whatextent can the connections brought to light be necessary? What is dialectical rationality, and what are itslimits and foundation? Our extremely slight dissociation of ourselves from the letter of Marxist doctrine



(which I indicated in The Search for Method) enables us to see the meaning of this question as thedisquiet of the genuine experience which refuses to collapse into non-truth. It is to this disquiet that weare attempting to respond. But I am far from believing that the isolated effort of an individual canprovide a satisfactory answer — even a partial one — to so vast a question, a question which engageswith the totality of History. If these initial investigations have done no more than enable me to define theproblem, by means of provisional remarks which are there to be challenged and modified, and if theygive rise to a discussion and if, as would be best, this discussion is carried on collectively in workinggroups, then I shall be satisfied.

Totality & Totalisationfrom 2. Critique of Critical Investigation

From this point of view, and before taking the discussion any further, we must make a clear distinctionbetween the notions of totality and totalisation. A totality is defined as a being which, while radicallydistinct from the sum of its parts, is present in its entirety, in one form or another, in each of these parts,and which relates to itself either through its relation to one or more of its parts or through its relation tothe relations between all or some of them. If this reality is created (a painting or a symphony areexamples, if one takes integration to an extreme), it can exist only in the imaginary (1’imaginaire), that isto say, as the correlative of an act of imagination. The ontological status to which it lays claim by its verydefinition is that of the in-itself, the inert. The synthetic unity -which produced its appearance of totalityis not an activity, but only the vestige of a past action (just as the unity of a medallion is the passiveremnant of its being struck). Through its being-in-exteriority, the inertia of the in-itself gnaws away atthis appearance of unity; the passive totality is, in fact, eroded by infinite divisibility. Thus, as the activepower of holding together its parts, the totality is only the correlative of an act of imagination: thesymphony or the painting, as I have shown elsewhere, are imaginaries projected through the set of driedpaints or the linking of sounds which function as their analogon. In the case of practical objects —machines, tools, consumer goods, etc. — our present action makes them seem like totalities byresuscitating, in some way, the praxis which attempted to totalise their inertia. We shall see below thatthese inert totalities are of crucial importance and that they create the kind of relation between menwhich we will refer to, later, as the practico-inert. These human objects are worthy of attention in thehuman world, for it is there that they attain their practico-inert statute; that is to say, they lie heavy on ourdestiny because of the contradiction which opposes praxis (the labour which made them and the labourwhich utilises them) and inertia, within them. But, as these remarks show, they are products; and thetotality, despite what one might think, is only a regulative principle of the totalisation (and all at oncedisintegrates into the inert ensemble of its provisional creations).

If, indeed, anything is to appear as the synthetic unity of the diverse, it must be a developing unification,that is to say, an activity. The synthetic unification of a habitat is not merely the labour which hasproduced it, but also the activity of inhabiting it; reduced to itself, it reverts to the multiplicity of inertia.Thus totalisation has the same statute as the totality, for, through the multiplicities, it continues thatsynthetic labour which makes each part an expression of the whole and which relates the whole to itselfthrough the mediation of its parts. But it is a developing activity, which cannot cease without themultiplicity reverting to its original statute. This act delineates a practical field which, as theundifferentiated correlative of praxis, is the formal unity of the ensembles which are to be integrated;



within this practical field, the activity attempts the most rigorous synthesis of the most differentiatedmultiplicity. Thus, by a double movement, multiplicity is multiplied to infinity, each part is set against allthe others and against the whole which is in the process of being formed, while the totalising activitytightens all the bonds, making each differentiated element both its immediate expression and itsmediation in relation to the other elements. On this basis, it is easy to establish the intelligibility ofdialectical Reason; it is the very movement of totalisation. Thus, to take only one example, it is withinthe framework of totalisation that the negation of the negation becomes an affirmation. Within thepractical field, the correlative of praxis, every determination is a negation, for praxis, in differentiatingcertain ensembles, excludes them from the group formed by all the others; and the developing unificationappears simultaneously in the most differentiated products (indicating the direction of the movement), inthose which are less differentiated (indicating continuities, resistances, traditions, a tighter, but moresuperficial, unity), and in the conflict between the two (which expresses the present state of thedeveloping totalisation). The new negation, which, in determining the less differentiated ensembles, willraise them to the level of the others, is bound to eliminate the negation which set the ensembles inantagonism to each other. Thus it is only within a developing unification (which has already defined thelimits of its field) that a determination can be said to be a negation and that the negation of a negation isnecessarily an affirmation. If dialectical Reason exists, then, from the ontological point of view, it canonly be a developing totalisation, occurring where the totalisation occurs, and, from the epistemologicalpoint of view, it can only be the accessibility of that totalisation to a knowledge which is itself, inprinciple, totalising in its procedures. But since totalising knowledge cannot be thought of as attainingontological totalisation as a new totalisation of it, dialectical knowledge must itself be a moment of thetotalisation, or, in other words, totalisation must include within itself its own reflexive re-totalisation asan essential structure and as a totalising process within the process as a whole.

next section

Jean-Paul Sartre Internet Archive



http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre4.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/index.htm

István Mészáros

Marx’s Theory of Alienation

Written: 1970.Source: Marx’s Theory of Alienation.Transcribed: Andy Blunden.

Table of Contents:

1. Origins of the Concept of Alienation2. Genesis of Marx's Theory of Alienation3. Conceptual Structure of Marx's Theory of Alienation

Glossary References:

Alienation | Labour | Fetishism

Further reading:

On the Jewish Question, MarxPhilosophy of Right, HegelLukacs

István Mészáros Internet Archive

Marx's Theory of Alienation by Meszaros

http://www.marxists.org/archive/meszaros/works/alien/index.htm [11/06/2002 17:34:30]


http://www.marxists.org/archive/meszaros/works/alien/meszaro1.htm



http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/a/l.htm#alienation

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/a.htm#labour

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/f/e.htm#fetishism

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prconten.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/meszaros/index.htm

Marx at the Millennium by Cyril Smith

2 How the "Marxists" Buried Marx

Marx and "Marxism"

Many people these days will tell you ‘Marxism is dead’, usually with the collapse of the USSR in mind.There are still several varieties of ‘Marxist’ who deny it, of course. However, neither side shows muchinclination to talk about the actual ideas whose death or survival are being disputed.

I believe that every current of thought since October 1917, however remote from that event it mightappear, has reflected the problems raised by the Russian Revolution. For millions of working people,October shone a ray of hope on their lives, while for the ruling classes of the world it represented amortal threat. However you looked at the problems of world society, whether from a factory bench orfrom a university philosophy department, whether you sought a radical change or were utterly hostile tosocialism, the Soviet experiment was seen as the alternative to the existing social order.

When this attempt to establish a new way of life gave way to the bureaucratic monstrosity nowuniversally associated with the name of Stalin, all forms of thought reflected the failure. Today, whenlittle remains of this experiment, its outcome marks the way people think even more strongly. For many,the issue of socialism is now closed: you can’t beat the system.

As I have already explained, I don’t agree with them at all. On the contrary, while this may be a dreadfultime to try to patch up bits and pieces of Marxism, it is precisely now, at last, that it is possible to lookafresh at Marx’s work and at the entire socialist project. The virtual disappearance of Stalinism hasbrought the freedom to question dogma long taken on trust, to ask ourselves what Marx was really tryingto do and even to read what he actually wrote. Re-examining texts that you thought you knew all aboutoften leads to quite surprising conclusions.

In a way, Marx’s ideas have shared the fate of many other historical figures. The following ‘generalheuristic principle’ might not be too wide of the mark: Let ‘X’ be any great thinker; then ‘X’-ism, or‘X’-ianity, or ‘X’-ianism, will be in direct opposition to the ideas of ‘X’. The case of Jesus of Nazareth istoo well known to require comment. A less familiar example might be Isaac Newton. Books still appeartelling the innocent student about ‘Newton’s mechanical outlook’. Their authors are incapable ofacknowledging the historical research which has made this picture quite untenable. It is now inescapablethat the author of Principia, founder of modern physics, was a continuator of the tradition of alchemy,Cabalism, Hermetic magic and Arian theology, violently opposed to the ‘mechanical philosophy’.

What frequently happens is this: the ideas of an original thinker are first denounced as sheer madness.Then, after a decent interval, these ideas are processed into a few sound-bites and assimilated into theexisting mind-set of the time, while their author is subjected to the most absurd adulation. Finally, theunfortunate man or woman becomes a household name, and ‘everybody knows’ what they ‘reallymeant’.

After that, as you pick up one of their books and just look at the titlepage, you already ‘know’ what it is

How the Marxists Buried Marx

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith2.htm (1 of 24) [11/06/2002 17:34:34]

all about. Anything which contradicts your original notion of the author’s ideas can then be dismissed asan aberration. They are now effectively silenced for the rest of time. Safely dead, they can’t stop theirwork being falsified in this way. It is extremely difficult to get through to their ideas and to listen to whatthey actually had to say.

In the case of Karl Marx, the obstacles preventing us from appreciating his thought are reinforced withseveral extra protective layers. ‘Marxism’ is not just a doctrine, but a tradition, not just a set oftheoretical notions, but the life activity of large numbers of people. These men and women have investedtheir entire lives in fighting for what they thought were the theories of Marx, convinced they werestruggling for the emancipation of humanity from exploitation and oppression. Their theory was anattempt to give a coherent account of what was happening in the world, including their own activity. It isa very painful business for them to cut a path through the misconceptions on which they had based theirefforts. Not surprisingly, many find it much easier to ditch the whole thing.

When I accuse ‘Marxists’ of burying Marx, I don’t mean to condemn attempts to develop older ideas totake account of new situations and events — of course, that is legitimate. I am talking about the processwhereby Marx’s essential insights were obscured and denied.

Each generation of ‘Marxists’ inherited a set of ideas and defended it against its critics. As theseopponents were, in general, utterly ignorant of what they purported to refute, their attacks only helped toshore up the prejudices of the ‘Marxists’. Particular prominent figures in the movement became acceptedas ‘authorities’, quotations from whose works would decide the issue in the event of dispute.

When Marxism became the doctrine claimed by large organisations, a canon of ‘orthodoxy’ wasestablished. Anybody appearing to contradict standard texts or interpretations was perceived as anenemy. As happened to Jesus of Nazareth, too, the ideas of ‘orthodox Marxism’ became bound up with amassive state structure. Soon, orthodoxy was protected by state power, with all its sanctions of isolation,exile, violence and death.

That is why, if we want to find out what Marx’s ideas have to say about the contemporary world, wecan’t do it just by reading his books. We have to retrace the path by which the tradition came into being,to find out how and where Marx was buried. I am certainly not the only one today trying to re-examinethis history. Some people want to ‘reconstruct Marxism’. Others are also trying to discover and correctthe distortions which are now so evident. Each of these people must base their work on his or her ownexperience. Some of this work is useful, but I think little of it digs very deep.

In this chapter, I try to retrace my own steps and attempt to find my way back to Marx’s actual ideas. Letme repeat, I am not looking for the ‘genuine’, ‘pure’, ‘perfect’, ‘original’ Marx, who will provide us withthe ‘correct’ answers — such a person never existed. I want to establish what were Marx’s real ideas, inorder to see what they have to say about our present predicament.

Even in their lifetimes, Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895) were dismayed to see theirfundamental notions buried under the myth of infallibility. Marx would have been utterly hostile to thestatement of Plekhanov (1856-1918) that ‘Marxism is an integral world outlook’. In fact, only a fractionof Marx’s original plan for his work was ever completed. By the time of his death, bourgeois society wasalready entering a new stage. A large and important part of his writings remained as unedited andundeciphered manuscripts, unknown even to Engels.

The early work of Marx began to become widely available from the tum of the century. As late as the



1960s and 1970s, important works were still appearing. The difficulty of making this material fit in withthe ‘orthodox’ picture was dealt with by attributing it to someone called ‘the Young Marx’.

If you imagine this was a young chap in short trousers and schoolboy cap, consider that in 1844, when hewrote the Paris Manuscripts, Marx was a 26-year-old married man with a child, who had already lostone job as the editor of a major journal. In any case, the long manuscript known as Grundrisse, writtenwhen the author was 40 years old, contradicts the ‘orthodox’ view as sharply as anything he was writingfifteen years earlier. Marx’s work in the last decade of his life is also most troublesome for the‘orthodox’ story.

Of course, in nearly half a century of Marx’s political struggle and scientific work, there areinconsistencies, digressions and mistakes. But his life had one central aim: to fight for the emancipationof humanity. He strove to find a path to a world without exploitation or oppression, in which men andwomen developed their human potential as free individuals in a free society, without the distortion ofmoney or state power.

He believed that the liberation of humanity would centre on the movement of the working class toliberate itself. He was devoted to democratic forms and had no time for centralised, disciplined politicalorganisations, operating behind the backs of the mass of working people. He was utterly opposed to theidea of self-appointed leaders, however well intentioned, setting up a strong state. And yet this strugglefor human freedom became identified with its direct opposite. How could that happen?

I am not trying to write a history of the socialist movement. By looking back at some episodes in thedevelopment of the ‘Marxist’ myth, I want to focus on its philosophical foundations. Instead of movingchronologically through the decades, I am going to take four slices of history, starting with the mostrecent:

the formation of the Stalinised version, known falsely as ‘Marxism-Leninism’;●

the outlook of the Communist International;●

the ‘orthodoxy’ of the Second International before 1914, and its relation to the work of Engels;●

Karl Marx’s attitude to ‘Marxism’.●

I hope, by stripping away the layers of distortion and misunderstanding deposited by these episodes, toclear the way to re-examine Marx’s actual notions. Three themes keep appearing in the story: the wayhistory moves, the nature of the state and the role of a revolutionary party.

The Philosophy of Thuggery

Since this book is about the importance of Marx’s insights for the tasks of human liberation, it isappropriate to begin with one of the most widely circulated philosophical statements of the twentiethcentury. It starts like this:

Dialectical materialism is the outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialismbecause its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of apprehending them is dialectical, whileits interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, ismaterialistic.

Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social



life, an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, tothe study of society and of its history.

This stuff appeared in 1939. In my view, its method, standpoint, dogmatic style and conclusions are allutterly opposed to everything that Marx stood for. Large numbers of people, some of them very clever,hailed it as a work of genius. The most important thing to know about it is that its author was responsiblefor the murder and torture of millions of people, many of whom considered themselves to be Marxists.Although Dialectical and Historical Materialism, by J. V. Stalin (1879-1953), goes on to quoteextensively from the works of Engels and Lenin, and even some of Marx, a vast, blood-filled gulfseparates it from these writers. It was an obscene caricature, which raised an enormous barrier tocomprehending Marx’s work, not just for the devotees of Stalinism, but for everybody else too.

Stalin’s pseudo-philosophical document was extracted from the infamous History of the CPSU(Bolsheviks): Short Course, prepared by a Commission of the Central Committee. For eighteen years,this volume of lies and slanders formed the basis of all educational work in the USSR, and of all ‘theory’in the world communist movement. In 1956, at the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union)Twentieth Congress, it was announced that ‘historical inaccuracies’ had been discovered in it, and it wassimply decided to withdraw it from circulation.

This was not so easy, however. These pages embodied the basic notions on which the leaders ofCommunist Parties and several then-powerful states tried to find justification for their actions. That iswhy many devout ‘Marxist-Leninists’ were incapable of carrying out the decision, denying the authorityof Moscow for the first time in their lives.

In 1939, the insertion of this ‘philosophical’ section was essential to Stalin’s purpose in issuing the ShortCourse. (He made some other ‘suggestions’ for additional material, but they were mainly to increase thelying abuse of his enemies and to glorify the image of himself still further.) By that time, the last of theOld Bolsheviks, those who had led the 1917 Revolution, had been humiliated in the Moscow ShowTrials, and had been forced to ‘confess’ to the most fantastic crimes. They were shot or sent to perish inthe Gulags. The last vestiges of independent thought had been eliminated.

The ruling group around Stalin felt it necessary to take command of every aspect of life and knowledge.The bureaucracy’s political organisation went under the name of ‘Communist Party’, or ‘Party of theproletariat’. The original leaders of the organisation of that name had been effectively wiped out by thesecret-police thugs of the ‘philosopher’ Stalin.

The name of Marx was now obscenely linked with the ‘theory’ of this Party. In that terrible time, thevery terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ came to be identified with this monstrosity. But even for thosewho could see what a falsification this was, the ideas of Marx became inextricably fouled up in thenetwork of bureaucratic assumptions, including terms like ‘workers’ state’, ‘revolutionary party’, and‘orthodox theory’. The name of Marx, who stood for the liberation of mankind from exploitation and thedisappearance of state oppression, became entangled with the defence of the privileges of a bureaucraticcaste and the power of a brutal state apparatus.

’Dialectical materialism’ — also known as ‘Diamat’, the original of Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ — expressedthe ideological needs of this bureaucracy. In Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Stalin attachedthese words to a set of pseudo-philosophical notions, which became for many people a form of religiousbelief. It was forced down the throats of Soviet school children as the state religion, and it was the



obligatory creed of members of Stalinist parties the world over.

The doctrine here called ‘materialism’ opposes a mechanically interpreted nature- ‘objectivity’ — to allsubjective thought, will and feeling, which are declared to be ‘secondary’, ‘determined’ by this ‘materialworld’. In this bureaucratic script, human beings were cast as puppets controlled by an impersonalhistorical process.

Not all of them, though. Into this nightmare was inserted a body called the ‘revolutionary party’, whoseleaders were somehow exempt from the influence of material forces. A set of rules called ‘dialectics’explained how these leaders could change their decisions at will. The bureaucrats w ere the proprietors ofHistory.

During the previous decade, even while the Stalinisation of the Comintern was taking place, a certainkind of philosophical discussion had still been possible and, in the late 1920s, a war began between twogroups of Soviet philosophers. On the one side stood those who leant heavily on some of Lenin’s notes,which their leader Deborin had discovered after Lenin’s death. This group emphasised the importance ofHegel (1770 1831) and ‘dialectics’. Against them, the ‘mechanists’ were devoted to ‘materialism’. Theyalso cited Lenin: his 1908 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Each side claimed that its ‘line’ wasmore ‘correct’, that is, more attuned to the current requirements of the Stalin leadership.

In January 1931 this dispute was finally settled. Stalin himself intervened at a meeting of the CPSUCentral Committee. A certain M. B. Mitin became the authority on all things philosophical. As heexplained so well: ‘The further advancement of Marxist-Leninist theory in every department, includingthat of the philosophy of Marxism, is associated with the name of Comrade Stalin.’

The mechanists were denounced as followers of the recently demoted Bukharin, while the Deboriniteswere now discovered to be ‘Menshevising idealists’. Within a few years, many of each of these groupswere dead, and so were some of those who had displaced them. While this meeting was taking place,millions of Soviet peasants were being starved to death and entire nations were being transportedthousands of miles from their homes in cattle-trucks.

Let us bring ourselves to look briefly at the way the Stalinist catechism of 1939 hitched up a highlymechanised materialism with something called ‘dialectics’. On the one hand, ‘Nature, being, the materialworld, is primary, and mind, thought, is secondary.’ What does this word ‘primary’ mean? Does it mean‘first in time’ or ‘first in importance’? Or does it mean that matter ‘causes’ changes in ‘mind’? Nobodycan tell, and precisely this ambiguity conferred mysterious power.

On the other hand, ‘dialectical laws of development’ were somehow extracted from the system of G. W.F. Hegel — who was, however, an ‘idealist’, which meant a mirror-image of the kind of ‘materialist’referred to just now. This was a reference to Engels’s ‘three laws of dialectics’. (But great problems werecaused for the faithful when it was found that, after ‘the passage of quantity into quality’ and ‘thestruggle of opposites’, Stalin had forgotten the third of Engels’s ‘laws’, the ‘law of the negation ofnegation’.)

This utterly dehumanised way of thinking was now ready to be ‘applied’ to human history:

The material life of society, its being, is also primary, and its spiritual reality secondary, derivative.... Thematerial life of society is an objective reality existing independently of the will of men, while thespiritual life of society is a reflection of this objective reality, a reflection of being.



Hence social life, the history of society, ceases to be an agglomeration of ‘accidents’ and becomes thehistory of the development of society according to regular laws, and the study of history becomes ascience.... Hence the practical activity of the party of the proletariat must . . . be based . . . on the laws ofdevelopment of society . . . and the data of science regarding the laws of development of society areauthentic data having the validity of objective truths.

There is a ‘force’ which ‘determines’ the ‘physiognomy’ of society: ‘This force, historical materialismholds, is the method of procuring the means of life necessary for human existence, the mode ofproduction of material values — food, clothing, footwear, houses, fuel, instruments of production, etc.’

On this theoretical foundation — the only ‘correct’ one, of course it could be asserted that: ‘five maintypes of relations of production are known to history: primitive communal, slave, feudal, capitalist andsocialist’. The last of these five has already arrived:

The basis of the relations of production under the Socialist. system, which so far has been establishedonly in the USSR, is the; social ownership of the means of production. Here there are n6 longerexploiters and exploited. The goods produced are distributed according to labour performed, on theprinciple: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’. Here the mutual relations of people in the processof production are marked by comradely cooperation and the Socialist mutual assistance of workers whoare free from exploitation.

Under the name ‘Marxism-Leninism’, and with the ‘scientific’ authority of the secret police and itstorture chambers, the bureaucracy decided what was ‘correct’. They, the proprietors of ‘the dialectic’,decided what the ‘laws of history’ held in store for ‘workers who are free from exploitation’. Living at alevel far removed from the desperate poverty of the mass of Soviet workers and peasants, protected by amassive security apparatus, the bureaucrats administered the ‘distribution according to labourperformed’. As Trotsky explained, in The Revolution Betrayed, those with the power to decide on thisdistribution began by grabbing their own giant share.

Is it really necessary to be reminded of this nightmare ‘world-outlook’? Unfortunately, it is, in order tore-examine the ideas of Marx. For it became impossible to view Marx’s work unless it was first refractedthrough the distorting lens of this tradition. For example, it is depressing to note that a thinker of thestature of Jurgens Habermas can describe Stalin’s essay as ‘a handbook of historical materialism’.

Even those who fought against the murder-machine which was ideologically lubricated by this stuffcould not escape being affected by it. Trotsky (1879-1940) and his supporters struggled to maintain theoutlook which inspired and guided the Russian Revolution and the formation of the CommunistInternational. With whatever voice they had, they denounced the lies and corruption of Stalinism —especially the lie that Stalin’s Russia was ‘socialism’. But they never had the theoretical resources topenetrate to its philosophical core. The best they could do was to show that Stalinist policies anddistortions were contrary to the decisions of Lenin’s party and the teachings of ‘Marxism’.

Throughout the 1930s, Trotsky, while never claiming any special philosophical knowledge, continuallybut vainly implored his followers to undertake the study of such matters. When, under the terribleconditions of exile, he tried to continue with his planned biography of Lenin, he found it necessary tostudy Hegel’s Science of Logic. He managed to get through about 30 pages before being forced to turn toother questions.



At best, the Trotskyists could strive to defend an existing body of theory. Trotsky’s great article Stalinismand Bolshevism, which he wrote in 1937, begins like this:

Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and isolate its vanguardbut also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw it back to stages long sincepassed through. In these conditions the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried alongby the backward flow: it must swim against the current. In an unfavourable relation of forces prevents itfrom holding the positions it has won, it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them isexpressed the dearly-paid experience of the past. Fools will consider this policy ‘sectarian’. In fact it isthe only means of preparing for a new tremendous surge forward with the coming historical tide.

But defence of an established set of ideas, however heroic, proved to be quite inadequate.

Trotsky refused to accept the often-parroted notion that Stalinism was the inevitable continuation ofLenin’s work. This idea, now more fashionable than ever, actually explains nothing. The false ideas ofone person cannot be explained simply by the false ideas of another. However, what is true is that, whenStalin erected his massive historical road-block to communism, he exploited to the full every weaknesscontained in the outlook of Lenin’s party. Unless we investigate these defects as thoroughly as we can, itwill prove impossible to find our way through.

Philosophy and the Russian Revolution

In 1917, the Soviets took over the government of what had been the Tsarist Empire, under the leadershipof the organisation which now renamed itself the Communist Party. For the first time, working men andwomen took the struggle for control over their own lives to the level of capturing the state power. Almostwithout precedent, this movement of the small and inexperienced Russian working class pointed to a wayout of the hell of the World War.

The success of this attempt was predicated on the rapid spread of the revolution to Germany and otherindustrialised countries. With the help of the more advanced working-class movements, the Soviets couldtransform their economically and culturally backward peasant country, devastated by the imperialist war.Its aim of establishing socialism would be realised on a European and world scale.

With the disappointment of these hopes, huge problems arose. The determination of the Bolshevikleaders to confront and not to evade them remains one of the great stories of the twentieth century. But,however great my admiration for their struggles, I am obliged to look with great care at their effect on theway we see ourselves today.

When it was a matter of the Revolution holding on by all possible means for a few weeks or months, thedevotion and courage of the Soviet workers and their allies inside and outside the former Tsarist Empirecould be sustained. But when these months stretched into years and even decades, the question appearedin quite a different shape.

In 1919, the Communist International, ‘World Party of Socialist Revolution’, came into being, winningthe allegiance of the best sections of the working class throughout the world. The Communists insistedthat ruthless and violent struggle was required to destroy the political power of capital. Theycounterposed this to the conception of peaceful, parliamentary transformation, to which the ruling classwould quietly submit, the view attributed to their enemies, the Social Democratic leaders.



But by that time, the idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had been changed into something quitenew. To Marx this phrase meant that the functions of the state would be taken into the hands of the wholeof the working class, preparatory to its dissolution in a free community. When this was seen to be out ofthe question in backward Russia, the Communists invented something called a ‘workers’ state’ — a termnot used by Marx, nor by any of his followers before 1918 — to describe the bureaucratic machinewhose tentacles were already taking hold of the heart of the Revolution. (As far as I can tell, the phrasefirst appeared when communists begin to discuss the ‘bureaucratic deformations’ of the Soviet state.There is more about this in Chapter 3.)

Without such an apparatus, the survival of the Revolution would have been impossible. How else couldyou Will a civil war against enemies who had massive support from the most powerful imperialist states?Yes, but with this apparatus, what was it that survived?

I shall argue that behind the thinking of the Bolsheviks stood notions of the state and of the Party whichblocked the path to any understanding of what was happening. This can be seen, for example, in theseextracts from a book which was widely read in the ‘heroic’ days of the Revolution and the Civil War:

In the hands of the Party is concentrated the general control.... It has the final word in all fundamentalquestions.... The last word rests with the Central Committee.... We have more than once been accused ofhaving substituted for the dictatorship of the soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said withcomplete justice that the dictatorship of the soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship ofthe party.

We oppose capitalist slavery by socially-regulated labour.... Wages ... must be brought into the closestpossible touch with the productivity of individual labour. Under capitalism, the system of piece-work andof grading, the application of the Taylor system, etc., have as their object to increase the exploitation ofthe workers by the squeezing out of surplus value. Under socialist production, piece-work, bonuses, etc.,have as their problem to increase the volume of social product, and consequently to raise the generalwell-being. Those workers who do more for the general interest receive the right to a greater quantity ofthe social product than the lazy, the careless and the disorganisers.

Just as a lamp before going out shoots up a brilliant flame, so the state before disappearing assumes theform of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of thecitizens authoritatively in every direction.

Leon Trotsky wrote these lines early in 1920, in the armoured train from which he directed the victoriesof the Red Army over the armies sent by the imperialists. The pamphlet Terrorism and Communism,from which I have extracted them- somewhat unfairly, because their author had many other things to sayin it — was representative of Comintern thinking at the time. Each delegate to the Second Congress ofthe International was given a copy, together with Lenin’s Left- wing Communism. (It certainly does notrepresent Trotsky’s attitude after 1923. However, I am sorry to say that, when Trotsky re-issued it inEnglish in 1935 and in French in 1936, he gave his readers no ideological health warning.) By 1920, theinternational isolation of the Revolution was already beginning to have its dire effect on the theory of thecommunist movement. Lenin and Trotsky, as well as other leaders of the International, struggled to finda theoretical framework within which to tackle the terrible economic and social issues facing the Sovietstate. But, as I shall show, ‘Marxism’ as they understood it already formed a barrier, walling them offfrom Marx himself.



In his last writings, the dying Lenin battled with the growing forces of the Soviet state bureaucracy, nowgaining ground within the Communist Party itself and in the International. The frequently posed theproblem of how to ‘draw the masses into the administration of the State’. But who were those whosought to do the ‘drawing’? What had happened to the idea of the self-emancipation of the working class,and of the ‘dying-out of the state’, which Lenin himself had rediscovered in 1917? Lenin did not try tohide from these excruciating questions, raised by the harsh reality of the Civil War. He referred morethan once to the ‘declassing’ of the tiny Russian working class in the course of the Civil War and itsaftermath, and pointed out the perils this implied for the future of the Party.

By 1919, the soviets, the organs of mass democratic action which sprang up in 1917, had vanished in allbut name. Many thousands of those workers who had been to the fore in 1917 had perished in the courseof the Civil War. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had been transformed into a kind of spiritual forcedirected by the Party and its leadership, independently of the will or knowledge of the human beingsactually struggling to live in those terrible days. Stalin later completed the work of destroying thatgeneration and replaced the Party with a bureaucratic machine. ...

Lenin Canonised

However unpopular the idea may be in some circles today, I still believe that V. I. Lenin was the greatestindividual figure of our century. In his own life and thought, he concentrated the world-wide striving ofmillions for emancipation. So I approach the task of re-examining his theoretical work with trepidation.Everything he wrote is of great importance. But if it is accepted as biblical authority — and he wouldhave denounced any attempt to treat it as such — it will be impossible to find a way through theconfusion surrounding Marx’s ideas.

Stalin’s canonisation of Lenin was an essential part of the destruction of Marx’s method — that methodMarx had declared ‘lets nothing impose upon it and is in its essence critical and revolutionary’. It isironical to read in this context Lenin’s words of 1917:

What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to thetheories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During thelifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theorieswith the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies andslander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons.

Once the embalmed body of Lenin had been stuck in the mausoleum, his writings, editoriallyembalmed,} were pressed into the service of the ruling caste. Contrary to every tradition of Bolshevismand of Marx’s ideas, it soon became impossible to question any approved text of Lenin.

In the worst traditions of religious bigotry, some of Lenin’s writings had to be suppressed, in particularhis 1922 Letter to the Congress, know as ‘Lenin’s Testament’, with its postscript calling for Stalin’sremoval. But even those of his works which were printed by the million had their revolutionary spiritcrushed under the weight of pious commentary and lying footnotes.

Bukharin, the Mechanical Revolutionary

Until 1924, Nicolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was the leader of the left wing of Lenin’s party, often verycritical of its policies. One of the most popular of Party leaders, he stood for the immediate



implementation of the measures that Lenin had discussed theoretically in his pamphlet The State andRevolution, written in the heady days of 1917. He was also one of the very few leading Bolsheviks whotook an interest in philosophical matters.

In 1919, assisted by the young economist E. A. Preobrazhensky (188S1937), he wrote a commentary onthe newly agreed Programme of the Party. Issued under the title The ABC of Communism, it was abest-seller among the communists of many countries. Its Utopian conceptions were presented with all ofBukharin’s undoubted charm and clarity. But they make spine-chilling reading in the light of the historyof the past seventy years.

This is what Bukharin thinks Marx’s theory is all about:

Marx ... examined the evil, unjust, barbaric social order which still prevails throughout the world, andstudied its structure. Precisely after the manner in which we might study a machine or, let us say, a clock,did Marx study the structure of capitalist society, in which landlords and factory-owners rule, whileworkers and peasants are oppressed. Let us suppose that we have noticed that two of the wheels of ourclock are badly fitted, and that at each revolution they interfere more and more with one another’smovements. Then we can foresee that the clock will break down and stop.... Marx recognised veryclearly that capitalism is digging its own grave, that the machine will break down, and that the cause ofthe break-down will he the inevitable uprising of the workers, who will refashion the whole world to suitthemselves.

This way of looking at the world, Bukharin explains, is ‘scientific’. Communism, he is quite sure, is asystem in which the parts of the mechanism are much better ‘mutually adapted’. It will be a societywhich is ‘organised throughout’.

Bukharin recommends the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only way to make the transition to theclassless society, and explains that “dictatorship” signifies strict method of government and a resolutecrushing of enemies’. On the other hand, he quotes the new Constitution to confirm that this dictatorshipis only a transitory form.

In 1920, Bukharin completed his theoretical justification of these ideas in Historical Materialism, whichremained in print for a decade. He explains the difference between ‘proletarian science’ and ‘bourgeoisscience’ by analogy: we can either view the world through red eyeglasses or through white ones. His‘system’ of ‘Marxian sociology’ runs on purely mechanical lines, which is how he understands ‘science’.

Cause and effect are his chief categories. The clash of opposing forces, the resultant of many wills,results in equilibrium. Reality moves through a cycle in which the disturbance of each equilibrium givesrise to a new one. The meaning of historical materialism is for him ‘social determinism’, while society isa system of interactions between its ‘elements’ .

Towards the end of 1920, a dispute broke out in the Bolshevik Party on the role of the trade unions in theSoviet economy, which reveals some of the difficulties faced by the Bolsheviks in understanding theirown state. Trotsky and Bukharin each proposed that the unions be absorbed into the economic planningmachinery. The argument was simple: if the unions operate under a workers’ state, against whom do theyneed to protect their members? But Lenin denounced this argument as ‘abstraction’:

For one thing, ours is not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state.... We now have astate under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for



our part, must use these workers’ organisations to protect the workers from their state and to get them toprotect our state.

When Lenin was speaking, Bukharin interrupted this characterisation of the Soviet state as a ‘workers’and peasants’ state’, and, in a later article in Pravda, Lenin answered him.

I was wrong and Comrade Bukharin was right. What I should have said is: ‘A workers’ state is anabstraction. What we actually have is a workers’ state with this peculiarity, firstly, that it is not theworking class but the peasant population that predominates in the country, and secondly, that it is aworkers’ state with bureaucratic distortions.’

These remarks have often been quoted, but I think they should be examined again. Of course, theydisplay Lenin’s amazing flexibility of thought and his refusal to evade the most awkward difficulties forhis own viewpoint. But look at how he describes the relation between the Soviet state and the workingclass. The leaders of the Communist Party must regard the Soviet state as ‘our’ state. If ‘we’ can ‘use’the workers’ organisations to protect the workers from ‘our’ state, ‘we’ will get them, in return, to protect‘our’ state. All of this is contained in Lenin’s remarkable formulation: ‘Our state is not a workers’ state,as Trotsky abstractly employed the term, but a “workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions.”

What happened after this dispute? Trotsky became the leader of the struggle, begun by Lenin, against thebureaucratisation of the state and the Party. As the bureaucratic machine strangled the remnants of theOctober Revolution, and indeed incorporated the trade unions into the state, Trotsky carried on this fightuntil Stalin’s assassin killed him. .Bukharin became the leader of the Right, showing how his mechanisticconceptions were equally suited to this new role. After Lenin’s death, he became Stalin’s chief ally,helping him to defeat the Left opposition. Having used him, Stalin destroyed him, first politically andeventually physically.

A Philosophical ‘Discussion’

In 1923, the Hungarian communist Georgi Lukacs (1885-1971), then a leader of the ‘leftist’ faction,published his book History and Class Consciousness. Aimed against ‘the Marxism of the SecondInternational’ that is, ‘Marxism’ as it had been understood before 1917 — it attacked the mechanicalideas of Bukharin. It was also directly opposed to the ‘materialism’ of the earlier Lenin — although itnever says so. It stressed the origins of Marx’s work, especially Capital, in the philosophy of G. W. F.Hegel, and it contained a famous attack on Engels’s conception of a ‘dialectics of nature’. At the sametime, a leading German communist, Karl Korsch (1889-1961), published his Communism andPhilosophy, with a somewhat similar outlook.

A fierce dispute broke out, in which Lukacs and Korsch were attacked for ‘idealism’. At the Fifth WorldCongress of the International in 1924, Zinoviev (1883-1936), then President of the International andallied with Stalin against Trotsky, spoke on ‘The Struggle against the Ultra-lefts and TheoreticalRevisionism’. He included a characteristic onslaught on the two authors and those intellectuals whosupported them. In line with his ‘Bolshevisation’ campaign, then in full swing, he denounced them as‘professors’, a species he counterposed to ‘honest workers’: ‘If we get a few more of these professorsspinning out their Marxist theories, we shall be lost. We cannot tolerate theoretical revisionism of thiskind in our communist international.’ Bukharin, soon to replace Zinoviev as Stalin’s ally, is reported tohave declared in conversation with Korsch and other delegates: ‘Comrades, we cannot put every piece ofgarbage up for discussion.’



The ideas of Korsch and Lukacs, instead of being combated in open debate, were answered withbureaucratic crudity. It is doubtful whether Zinoviev ever bothered to look at the books he wasdenouncing. Their authors’ responses were interesting. Lukacs made his recantation, the first of many.Soon afterwards he wrote his essay, Lenin, a Study in the Unity of his Thought (1924),which opened theway for a new ‘orthodoxy’ called ‘Leninism’ — really a code name for Stalinism. Korsch also continuedfor a time to defend the current Comintern line, attacking both ‘Trotskyism’ and ‘Luxemburgism’ onbehalf of ‘Leninism’. In 1926, however, he developed left-wing criticisms of Stalin’s line and was soonthrown out of both the German Party and the International.

The new ‘approach’ to theory, very different from the vigorous inner disputes of the movement inLenin’s time, was already taking shape. In Stalin’s capable hands, this was transformed into a regimewhere nobody could question any action of the leadership — until the current line had been switched.

In the 1930s, the Frankfurt School, including Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer and others, tried to developsome aspects of Lukacs’s approach. With the rise of Nazism in Germany, they lost faith in the possibilityof a socialist transformation. For them and their successors, Marxism became no more than an academiceffort to maintain the traditions of the Enlightenment.

Trotsky and Lenin

In the nightmare conditions under which Trotsky had to fight from 1923 onwards, he was forced to makedifficult tactical decisions. One of them was to try to minimise his earlier differences with Lenin, notonly where he thought Lenin’s view was later proved correct, but sometimes also when it was wrong.This was understandable in view of the monstrous campaign of slander against him- but it is inexcusablefor anyone today.

A remark Trotsky made in 1933 is illuminating in this connection. It was in a conversation with thewriter Fritz Sternberg, who had his own disagreements with Lenin. Sternberg reports:

One day, when we were discussing Russian problems, he said: ‘Stalin and the Stalinists are always tryingto brand me as an anti-Leninist. It’s a dirty slander, of course. l had profound differences with Lenin,before, during, and after the Revolution and in the vital Civil War years agreement always predominatedbetween us.’ Pursuing this theme, Trotsky declared that he had no wish to present his opponents inRussia with a new weapon by adopting a stance against Lenin’s views on the workers’ aristocracy. Oncehe had made it clear that, if only for tactical reasons, he did not wish to attack Lenin’s position on thisquestion, we abandoned the subject.

Today there is no such choice. We must look closely, in particular, at Lenin’s conception of arevolutionary party, its relation to the class it strives to lead and the nature of the form of state whichemerged from its victory. Above all, we must re-examine his conception of the status of the theory ofsuch a party, its origin and the criteria for its validity.

’Marxism’ in the Second International

Kautsky and ‘Revisionism ‘

In 1889, the attempts to rebuild an international workers’ organisation after the defeat of the ParisCommune finally bore fruit. This was six years after the death of Karl Marx, and 17 years after the



International Workingmen’s Association (’First International’) had faded away.

By that time, the socialist movement included several mass organisations, of which the German SocialDemocratic Party (SPD) was the most significant. Of course, the most prominent figure in the ‘SecondInternational’, as it became, was Frederick Engels. (I shall say more about him later.) But, from his deathin 1895 until 1914, the SPD leaders gave the International its main direction.

That is how the outlook of Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), theoretical leader of the SPD, came to shape whatbecame known as ‘orthodox Marxism’. Kautsky placed great emphasis on the ‘scientific’ character ofthis orthodoxy. He saw the movement to socialism as being guaranteed by the operation of ‘laws ofhistory’. These resembled laws of nature, in that they operated independently of human will andconsciousness. They applied universally and used human beings as their instruments. Their study was ascience called ‘historical materialism’, or ‘the materialist conception of history’.

Kautsky had already reduced Capital to a set of ‘economic doctrines’, completely unconnected with theidea of communism. He believed these doctrines showed how the economic expansion of capitalistproduction brought about both the development of technology and the growth and concentration of theproletariat. Armed with the scientific doctrines of ‘Marxism’, the ‘Marxist Party’ had the task of bringingthe truth to the masses. The socialist intellectuals would teach scientific socialism to the workers.

For Kautsky, he and people like him had gained possession of this truth through the work of science, so itwas not possible for lesser mortals to steer the same course. But he never doubted that the organisedworkers, under this leadership, would eventually form a force large enough and sufficiently organised toensure the disappearance of capitalism.

This was Kautsky’s ‘Road to Power’. What he called the socialist revolution was to be a long, drawn-outaffair, punctuated by ‘political revolutions’. Socialism meant chiefly that industry would come under thecentralised control of the state, a state he envisaged as a form of advanced parliamentarism.

The SPD grew stronger, withstanding the years of Bismark’s antisocialist laws and becoming anincreasingly successful electoral force. Now, other trends became more vocal among its leaders. EdwardBernstein (1850-1932), while he was exiled in London, became enamoured of the Fabian ideas ofgradualism. Together with some other proteges of Engels, he began to question the very basis ofKautsky’s ‘orthodoxy’.

In 1897, Bernstein announced that Kautsky’s conception of socialist revolution — he called it Marx’s —was now outmoded. Capitalism would be peacefully and gradually transformed into socialism. Thetheory of surplus value had been superseded. Dialectics was no more than mysticism, and materialism anold-fashioned prejudice. The movement towards socialism would get on better if it ditched Marx’s‘Hegelianism’ in favour of the ‘return to Kant’, so fashionable in academic circles at that time. To getsocialist policies adopted in Germany, it would be necessary to form alliances with Liberal critics of theEmpire.

Kautsky had the job of fighting off this attack on ‘orthodoxy’. Fairly politely, and after some hesitation,he reaffirmed what he thought Marx had said about the development of capitalism leading to socialism.But Bernstein was only giving a theoretical voice to what many leading Social Democratparliamentarians and trade union wheeler-dealers already silently believed. They cared nothing abouttheoretical niceties, as long as they could get on with the ‘real’ politics — and with their careers.



Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) spoke for a new and younger group of left-wingers. Her answer toBernstein, Social Reform or Revolution?, went much deeper than Kautsky’s. In it, she demonstratedbrilliantly that ‘revisionism’ represented an opportunist adaptation to bourgeois society. But nowhere didshe approach the philosophical basis of the problem. Indeed, in the vast output of books and articleswhich she contributed to the international movement she displayed little interest in such matters. Thetruth of Marxism’ was taken for granted as a body of doctrine by her as much as by Kautsky. And, asfirmly as Kautsky, she thought that Capital was about the ‘economic structure of capitalism’.

In the Tsarist Empire, a working, class was developing, and with it an illegal but growing workers’movement. Georgi Plekhanov, in exile in Switzerland, had gathered around him a group of intellectualswho strove to build a socialist organisation, which claimed to be based on Marxism. Lenin, despite someoccasional organisational differences, founded his theoretical ideas on those of Plekhanov and Kautsky.

Plekhanov himself became a leading defender of ‘orthodoxy’ in the International, impatiently pressingKautsky to step up his attacks on the philosophical foundations of Bernstein’s ‘revisionism’. Kautskycould not get anywhere near the core of Bernstein’s attack. In a letter to Plekhanov in 1898 thetheoretical leader of the International declared:

I have never been strong on philosophy. Although I stand entirely on the point of view of dialecticalmaterialism, still I think that the economic and historical viewpoint of Marx and Engels is in the lastresort compatible with neo-Kantianism.

For Plekhanov, Marx’s materialism was crucial. We shall see later the huge distance which separatedPlekhanov’s ‘orthodox’ views from what Marx actually thought.

Philosophy and Bolshevism

Right from the start of the dispute in the International, Lenin and his comrades were firm supporters ofKautsky. It is true that the illegal organisations of Russian revolutionaries had little in common with the‘official’ bodies of social democracy in the more advanced countries. But in their theoretical work, theynever strayed far from the ‘orthodox’ leadership.

Among the Russian ‘Marxists’ trying to organise the illegal Russian Social Democratic Labour Party(RSDLP), Lenin was very keen on fighting the ‘Economist’ tendency which sought to elevate‘spontaneous’ trade-union (’economic’) struggles above all theory. Lenin connected this issue with theeffort to replace the ‘circle’ spirit which dominated the illegal Marxist movement with an organisation of‘professional revolutionaries’, which would be capable of mobilising the young Russian working class tolead the overthrow of Tsarism.

However, in the course of this fight, Lenin tied himself to the most extreme theoretical position he couldfind, as he often did, and this appeared most strongly in his book What is to be Done?, issued in 1902.Taking the ideas of his leader Kautsky only a bit further, he brought out their implications. He contendedthat Marxist theory cannot arise ‘spontaneously’ in the working class, but must be brought into the labourmovement by bourgeois intellectuals, ‘from without’.

The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to developonly trade union consciousness, ie the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight theemployers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory ofsocialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by



educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status, the founders ofmodern socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.

The task of Social Democracy is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from thisspontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under thewing of revolutionary Social-Democracy.

Nothing like this is to be found in the writings of Marx or Engels. All their lives, they fought againstthose who built sects which aimed to show the world what it should be like. Instead, they declared thatcommunism was ‘the movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority’.Only the working class could achieve its own emancipation. While they would be supported in this jobby people from every section of society, nobody could do it for them.

This gap between Marx and the ‘Marxists’ is inseparable from another. When Plekhanov drafted theParty Programme, he brought Marx’s formula ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ into it. But the Russian‘Marxists’ read this phrase quite differently from anything Marx would have recognised.

Marx and Engels used the term precisely to distinguish themselves from the followers of the Frenchrevolutionary Auguste Blanqui (18091881). Blanqui spent his life plotting for a revolutionary‘dictatorship’, to be exercised by a conspiratorial elite. The workers would hear about it later. In directopposition to this, Marx and Engels argued that communism could only come about through the action ofthe entire class of proletarians, which in advanced countries was the mass of society. The state whichoppressed the exploited on behalf of the exploiters would be destroyed and replaced, not by a new,‘workers’ state’, but by a body which would at once begin to dissolve itself into the community. This iswhat Marx called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.

But the Russian revolutionaries, with the heroic tradition of ‘terrorism’ behind them, had to workillegally to organise a proletariat which was a small minority in an overwhelmingly peasant country. Thatis how ‘dictatorship’ to the Russian social democrats came to mean a form of state, whose apparatus was‘unrestricted by laws’. It is clear that Plekhanov, at any rate, thought in terms of this apparatus in thehands of a determined and benevolent minority. In 1902-3, the implications of this outlook were onlybeginning to be discussed.

The Second Congress of the RSDLP took place in 1903, only a few months after the editorial board ofthe newspaper Iskra — which included Plekhanov, Julius Martov (1873-1923) and Trotsky — had issuedLenin’s book. Lenin’s formulations in What is to be Done? were challenged. Instead of defending themliterally, he declared:

Obviously, an episode in the struggle against economism has here been confused with a principledpresentation of a major theoretical question, namely the formation of an ideology.... We all know that the‘economists’ bent the stick in one direction. In order to straighten the stick it was necessary to bend it inthe other direction, and that is what I did.

But by the end of the 1920s, a god-like Lenin was no longer allowed to be corrected on any topic, evenby himself. These particular formulations in this particular book had become enshrined as fundamentaltheoretical principles.

Trotsky, for one, never accepted them. But, so great was the pressure of Stalinism, that, after 1917, henever said so in anything published in his lifetime. The statement about What is to be Done? which



appears in his unfinished biography of Stalin, instead of being the starting-point for a development ofunderstanding of the nature of revolutionary organisation, was always an embarrassment to Trotskyists.Indeed, in some Trotskyist groups, Lenin’s position in What is to be Done? was made a fetish, central totheir attitude to theory and organisation.

In the hands of the Stalinists, the idea of extreme centralism and ‘revolutionary discipline’ was used tojustify the suppression of all criticism or even discussion. The very idea of a ‘Party’ was made into thefetish of fetishes, far removed from Marx’s contention that the proletariat had to ‘form itself into a party’.

Another episode at the 1903 Congress is also illuminating. Discussing the inclusion of the demand foruniversal suffrage in the Party Programme, a delegate named Posadovsky asked:

’Should all democratic principles be exclusively subordinated to the interests of our Party?’

To both applause and alarm, he answered his own question decisively in the affirmative. He wasvigorously supported by Plekhanov:

Plekhanov: If the elections turned out badly for us, we should have to try to disperse the resultingparliament not after two years, but, if possible, after two weeks.

Applause. From some benches, hissing. Voices: ‘You should not hiss!’

Plekhanov: Why not? I strongly request the comrades not to restrain themselves.

Although Lenin did not actually speak in this discussion, he was completely united with Plekhanov. Asthe split in the Iskra group revealed itself, Lenin and Plekhanov were at first lined up against Martov andTrotsky. Only in the following year did the division between ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Menshevism’ begin totake its later shape, with Plekhanov as a leader of Menshevism and Trotsky outside both groups.(Plekhanov only began to criticise What is to be Done? three years after it had appeared.) Each faction,Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, adopted both the centralised form of organisation and Plekhanov’s‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ conception.

It is worth contrasting the views of Plekhanov and Lenin at that time with those of Rosa Luxemburg.Following the 1905 Revolution in Russia, she had intervened in the discussion raging in the GermanSocial Democratic Party with her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions.

The revolution, even when the proletariat, with the Social Democrats at their head, appear in the leadingrole, is not a manoeuvre of the proletariat i n the open field, but a fight in the midst of the incessantcrashing, displacing and crumbling of the social foundation. In short, in the mass strikes in Russia,spontaneity plays such a predominant part, not because the Russian proletariat are ‘uneducated’, butbecause revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them.

’Dialectical Materialism’

The Stalinist movement has ensured that the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’ is widely associated withKarl Marx. It had been used earlier, but not in Marx’s lifetime. In the preface to his 1908 bookMaterialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin declared: ‘Marx and Engels scores of times termed theirphilosophical views dialectical materialism.’ He was so sure about this, that he felt no need to give anyreferences.



In fact, there is not one! Marx never employed the phrase in any of his writings. The term ‘dialecticalmaterialism’ was introduced in 1891 by Plekhanov, in an article in Kautsky’s Neue Zeit. He thoughtwrongly, I believe — that he was merely adapting it from Engels’s usage in Anti-Duhring and LudwigFeuerbach. This was not just a matter of terminology. He was intent on combating the tendency of thepopulists (narodniki) to put subjective revolutionary will at the foundation of their idea of the RussianRevolution. In its place, Plekhanov installed a materialism which left no room for will at all and this iswhat he foisted on to Marx. Many years later (1920), Lenin wrote: ‘Bolshevism arose in 1903 on a veryfirm foundation of Marxist theory.’ Alas, it did nothing of the kind.

Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) was one of Lenin’s closest collaborators and an enthusiastic advocateof the basic ideas of What is to be Done? Along with other Party members, Bogdanov was also anenthusiastic follower of Ernst Mach (1838-1916) a leading Austrian physicist, philosopher and historianof science, who was concerned with the methodological problems arising from contemporarydevelopments in physics. Bogdanov thought that his ideas offered a ‘scientific’ alternative to ‘dialectics’as a foundation for socialism.

Mach’s ‘theory of knowledge’ was based on sensation — something like the scepticism of theeighteenth-century Scot, David Hume. Lenin, following Plekhanov, later came to see it as an attack on‘Marxist orthodoxy’. This, they believed, was founded on ‘materialism’, which began with the objectiveexistence of the world, independent of what anyone thinks about it.

But that came later. Trotsky recalls how, when he came to London in 1902 (after his escape fromSiberia), he told Lenin about his discussions in prison:

In philosophy we had been much impressed with Bogdanov’s book, which combined Marxism with thetheory of knowledge put forward by Mach and Avenarius. Lenin also thought, at the time, thatBogdanov’s theories were right. ‘I am not a philosopher,’ he said with a slightly timorous expression,‘but Plekhanov denounces Bogdanov’s philosophy as a disguised sort of idealism’. A few years later,Lenin dedicated a big volume to the discussion of Mach and Avenarius; his criticism of their theorieswas fundamentally identical with that voiced by Plekhanov.

Between 1904 and 1906, Bogdanov’s three-volume Empirio-Monism appeared in Moscow, while itsauthor remained Lenin’s second-in command in the Bolshevik faction. After the defeat of the 1905uprising, all factions of the RSDLP inevitably faced great political difficulties. One expression of thesewas the renewal of interest in Mach’s philosophy of science. (Another was the effort of Lunacharsky(1875-1933) to build a secular ‘socialist religion’.)

In 1905, Mach’s Knowledge and Error had appeared. The following year, Machist members of bothMenshevik and Bolshevik factions combined to issue Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism. In 1908, aRussian edition of Mach’s earlier The Analysis of Sensations appeared, with an enthusiastic Introductionby Bogdanov. Lenin now decided that these ideas represented a fundamental attack on Marxism andwere thus embarrassing for the Bolshevik faction.

For a long time, he held his tongue to avoid a split among the Bolsheviks, and stood by an agreement onthe editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Proletary that it should remain neutral on philosophicalissues. Plekhanov, now leading Lenin’s Menshevik opponents, was delighted at Lenin’s embarrassment.He made the most of the accusation that Lenin’s group were ‘subjectivists’ like old narodnik terrorists.Attacking ‘Lenin and the Nietzscheans and Machists who surround him’, Plekhanov gleefully alleged



that those who ‘talk about the seizure of power by the Social-Democrats in the now impending bourgeoisrevolution . . . are returning to the political standpoint of the late “Narodnaya Volya trend"’.

For a time a perplexed Lenin considered proposing a struggle jointly with Plekhanov against bothMenshevik and Bolshevik Machists. Then Lenin broke the agreement with the Bolshevik Machists, withwhom he now had important political disagreements. Borrowing a large number of books on philosophyfrom the Menshevik-Machist Valentinov (1890-1975) — one of the targets for his attack — Lenin beganwork on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, and spent the best part of 1908 on it, in Geneva, Londonand Paris. (Valentinov reports that Lenin returned all his books when the job was done.) Under Stalin,this book became the unquestionable source for ‘dialectical materialism’.

In The Development of the Monist View of History (1894), Plekhanov had been rather cautious. TheMachist controversy had not yet begun and ‘revisionism’ had not yet shown its hand.

Materialism . . . tries to explain psychic phenomena by these or those qualities of matter, by this or thatorganisation of the human, or in more general terms, of the animal body.... That is all that can be saidabout materialism in general.

In the preface to his Essays on the History of Materialism (1896), Plekhanov had brushed aside allquestions about the ‘theory of knowledge’:

Since I do not number myself among the adherents of the theoretico-scholasticism that is such voguetoday, I have had no intention of dwelling on this absolutely secondary question.

But in 1908, Plekhanov answered an open challenge from Bogdanov with his booklet MaterialismusMilitans. In his usual lofty manner, he attacked the superficiality of Bogdanov’s arguments. ForPlekhanov and Lenin, the way to combat philosophical attacks on Marxism in the International was tounderline the continuity between the views of Marx and Engels and those of earlier materialists, and theyboth thought this meant stressing how ‘materialist’ they were. So, in Materialismus Militans, Plekhanovgave a ‘definition of matter’:

In contrast to ‘spirit’, we call ‘matter’ that which acts on our sense-organs and arouses in us varioussensations.... We call material objects (bodies) those objects that exist independently of ourconsciousness and, acting on our senses, arouse in us certain sensations which in turn underlie ournotions of the material world, that is, of those same material objects as well as of their reciprocalrelationships.

Plekhanov goes on to identify matter with Kant’s ‘things-in-themselves’, while denying Kant’scontention that ‘things-in-themselves’ were essentially unknowable. Does that mean that our sensationsgive us direct knowledge of matter? No, says Plekhanov. What we get from our senses is a ‘hieroglyph’,which has then to be decoded by thought.

Plekhanov’s ‘definition’ of matter has an honourable history, but not in the works of either Marx orEngels. That matter is ‘given to us in our sensations’ had certainly been the view of the old materialists,whose writings were well known to Plekhanov. He quotes the great eighteenth-century mechanicalmaterialist Holbach, for whom ‘matter is what acts in one way or another on our senses’.

But these were bourgeois thinkers, in the sense that they took human beings to be discrete, reasoningatoms. For them, sensations were the physical traces left by the impact of external bodies in these



individuals. Knowledge was thus implicitly reducible to the passive responses of individual citizens, who were assumed to exist outside society.

Plekhanov had tried to demonstrate that Bernstein’s return to Kant (or rather to the neo-Kantian versionof Kant) was part of a general adaptation to bourgeois society. But, in effect, so was his version ofeighteenth-century materialism. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin also gives a definition ofmatter, very much like Plekhanov’s:

Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations,and which is copied, photo graphed and reflected by our sensations while existing independently of them.

Characteristically, to show that he is a more radical philosopher than Plekhanov, Lenin sharpens hismaterialism. He insists that sensations are ‘copies’ of material reality. The theory of ‘hieroglyphs’,declares Lenin, is an impermissible concession to the Kantians and positivists: ‘To regard our sensationsas images of the external world, to recognise objective truth, to hold the materialist theory of knowledge— these are all one and the same thing ‘ (By the way, Plekhanov later withdrew his use of the term‘hieroglyph’, saying it had been ‘a mistake’.)

Lenin’s ‘copy theory’ — and it is hard to see just what he meant by it — was designed to root out the lasttraces of idealism and subjectivism. But, in fact, it left ‘dialectical materialism’ perched precariously onthe view that ‘objective truth’ is founded on individual ‘sensation’.

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin is sometimes vaguely aware of these weaknesses, but onthe fundamental issues he is still not able to break free from Plekhanov’s philosophical tutelage. When,twenty years later, Lenin’s works had been transformed from a living struggle for clarification intoreligious dogma, this provided a basis for the philosophy of the bureaucrats.

Lenin did emphasise Engels’s remark in Ludwig Feuerbach that materialism ‘has to change its form’‘with every epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science’. But Materialism andEmpirio-Criticism, with all its inconsistencies, itself became fixed as a definitive text, a central part ofthe canon of ‘dialectical materialism’. This dogmatic outlook was, of course, obligatory for Stalinists; butthose who followed Trotsky in his battle against Stalinism were never able to challenge it and so freethemselves from its influence.

Lenin’s political conceptions were demonstrated in practice to be diametrically opposed to those of hisphilosophical mentor. But he was never able to clarify the philosophical foundation of this vitaldifference, or his attitude to Plekhanov’s work as 3 whole. While denouncing Plekhanov’s politicaltreachery in 1905, his attitude to the World War in 19t4 and his support for Kerensky’s ProvisionalGovernment in 1917, he never ceased to pay tribute to Plekhanov’s philosophical work and never brokewith it openly. (Interestingly, Bogdanov’s views actually crop up again in the history of Bolshevism,through their influence on Bukharin.)

Lenin versus ‘Orthodoxy’

Until August 1914, Lenin supported the theoretical authority of Karl Kautsky without fundamentaldisagreement. Although the Bolsheviks had fought against Georgi Plekhanov’s political line for adecade, his writings on philosophy continued to be accepted by them as the genuine continuation of thework of Marx and Engels, with only minor amendments.



In the early part of the century, as the acknowledged leader of the International, Kautsky, supported byPlekhanov, had signed, and sometimes written, resolutions pledging working-class action againstimperialist war. Then, in August 1914, these two became supporters of opposing empires in theimperialist war. When the German Social Democrats voted for the Kaiser’s War Budget in the Reichstag,only Karl Liebknecht’s voice protested. Kautsky, the ‘pope of Marxism’, found quotations from Marxand Engels to justify some kind of compromise. The Second International, as the universally acceptedorganisation of workers’ parties, was finished.

This evolution of the leader of Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ came as no great surprise to Rosa Luxemburg. Shehad broken with Kautsky four years earlier, in a dispute in which Lenin had sided with Kautsky. Now,she brilliantly analysed the break-up of the International, and with her cothinkers fought heroically toreaffirm the principles of proletarian internationalism. In 1919, she was to meet a brutal death at thehands of thugs encouraged by the Social Democratic leaders.

But to Lenin, Kautsky’s 1914 betrayal was totally unexpected. Shocked by this development, hedetermined to discover all its implications and its objective basis. He began to probe every aspect of theideas of the International, including especially his own — although he rarely says so.

In Switzerland at the start of the war, he turned to the study of philosophy and especially to Hegel. In his‘Notebooks’ of 1914-15, it is possible to trace how this study of Hegel’s Science of Logic and parts of hisHistory of Philosophy became more and more important to him as it went on. The Stalinised version ofhistory has naturally denied the radical nature of the shift in his thought.

In 1908, in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin had defended ‘orthodoxy’, leaning heavily onPlekhanov’s work and quoting Kautsky as an authority. But in his 1915 ‘Notebooks’ he writes aboutCapital: ‘Half a century later, none of the Marxists understood Marx!!’ Lenin’s startlingly self-criticalstatement must not be dismissed as rhetoric. He was trying to use Hegel to deepen and clarify thetheoretical and political break with Kautsky and Plekhanov which he belatedly recognised as essential.

’Orthodox Marxists’ — myself among them! — have twisted and turned, trying to reconcile Lenin’s‘Notebooks’ with Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, written only six years earlier. Of course, it can’t bedone. For example, in 1908 Lenin had identified idealist philosophy with ‘clerical obscurantism’. Sevenyears on, he wrote: ‘Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism.’ Inhis earlier book, his disagreements with Plekhanov were secondary. In the Notebooks he writes:

Concerning the question of the criticism of modem Kantianism, Machism, etc.: Plekhanov criticisesKantianism (and agnosticism in general) more from a vulgar-materialist standpoint than from adialectical-materialist standpoint, insofar as he merely rejects their views a limine [from the threshold].

And yet Lenin was never able to complete his break with the philosophical ideas he had learnt fromPlekhanov.

Lenin and the State

In July 1917, Lenin sent a note to Kamenev (1883-1936) which reveals a great deal about the real storyof the development of Marxism:

Comrade Kamenev, in strict confidence, if I should be killed [the Russian original actually reads morelike ‘bumped off’, or ‘done ill’], T beg you to publish a notebook with the title ‘Marxism and the State’



(it has been left in safe keeping in Stockholm). Bound, with a blue cover. There are collected all thequotations from Marx and Engels, as well as those of Kautsky’s controversy with Pannekoek. Also aseries of remarks and reviews. It has only to be edited. l think this work could be published within aweek. l think it is very important, because it isn’t only Kautsky and Plekhanov who have gone off therails. [My emphasis]. All this on one condition; that it is in strictest confidence between ourselves.

When Lenin began to write up this material in The State and Revolution — he never finished the work —he was surprised to find how far the views of Marx and Engels had been forgotten. This was especiallystriking when it came to the question of the destiny of the state in the course of the transition tocommunism, following a proletarian revolution.

For instance, Lenin quotes, from The Poverty of Philosophy Marx’s statement that ‘the working class .. .will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will preclude classes and theirantagonism, and there will be no more political power proper’. And in the Communist Manifesto he findswhat he ironically calls ‘one of the forgotten words of Marxism’:

... the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of rulingclass, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political power to wrest by degrees allcapital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, ie, of theproletariat organised as the ruling class.

It is interesting to note that, in The State and Revolution, Lenin is quite clear that the phrase ‘dictatorshipof the proletariat’, which Marx and Engels used on some occasions, is equivalent precisely to this idea:that the proletariat will organise itself as the ruling class. Then, the state will begin at once to ‘witheraway’.

Lenin notes especially the development which Marx was able to make as a result of the experience of theParis Commune of 1871. Now he could be clear that ‘the precondition for any real people’s revolution onthe Continent’ was ‘no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic military machine from one hand toanother, but to smash it’.

What was to replace this ‘machine’? Lenin recalls that Marx saw the form of this replacement in the waythe Commune organised itself.

The standing army was to be suppressed and replaced by ‘the armed people’.1.

The people’s representatives were to be elected by universal suffrage, subject to recall at any timeand paid the wages of a workman. Judges were also to be elected.

2.

Instead of an executive, inaccessible to electors, ‘the Commune was to be a working, not aparliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time’.

3.

Local communes would take over many of the functions of the central government.4.

When Marx spoke of the violent overthrow of the existing order and the establishment of proletariandictatorship, this is what he had in mind. In 1917, Lenin agreed with him, seeing the Soviets of Workers’and Soldiers’ Deputies as the Russian equivalent of the Commune, as ‘a democratic republic of theCommune type’. But, as the brutality and desperation of the wars of intervention and the Civil War sweptaway all such notions, these ideas were once more forgotten.

Perhaps with the exception of the April Theses of a few months earlier, Lenin had never written anythinglike The State and Revolution. As a follower of Plekhanov on nearly all theoretical issues, he had



accepted his teacher’s crude interpretation of the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which had beenwritten into the programmes of both Menshevik and Bolshevik wings of the RSDLP. As we have seen, itwas Plekhanov who introduced the notion that this ‘dictatorship’ was to be exercised by a devotedminority, in a state form opposed to that of ‘democracy’.

Lenin in 1914-17 was partially rediscovering Marx’s notion of communism, self-critically trying todevelop his ideas in the light of the collapse of the International. Returning to the most fundamentalissues, he was grappling with their falsification in the movement of which he had been a part. Thesebooks are permeated with this deeper understanding of the way forward for humanity to liberate itselfthrough the world socialist revolution. However, they represent the start of work which was nevercontinued, and then forgotten.

Even after the political outlooks of Kautsky and Plekhanov were clear for all to see, and Lenin wasengaged in defending what he thought were the ideas of Marx and Engels against them, he neverpublished a word which challenged their philosophical outlooks. Even when he did begin to see theimportance of Hegel for Marx’s thinking, and glimpsed the superficiality of Plekhanov’s discussion ofthis, he could not break free from his mentor’s influence. After 1917, there was no opportunity tocontinue this advance or consider its significance. Later, the mythological picture of Lenin whichStalinism inflicted on the world prevented any objective assessment being made.

Indeed, as far as I can make out, Lenin hardly breathed a word about his reading of Hegel to anyone else.I know of two exceptions. One was in the article On the Significance of Militant Materialism (1922), andeven there, he makes a favourable mention of Plekhanov. The other reference was in the Trade Uniondiscussion of 1920-21, mentioned on pages 31-2. There, too, Lenin was unable to talk about philosophywithout invoking the name of Plekhanov.

Let me add in parenthesis for the benefit of young Party members that you cannot hope to become a real,intelligent Communist without making a study — and I mean study — of all of Plekhanov’sphilosophical writings, because nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world.

He even adds a footnote calling for a special edition of Plekhanov’s works, including an index.

What I am trying to show is that the philosophical bases of Marx’s thought, lost in the days of the SecondInternational, were never rediscovered in the Third. Even before Stalin began his ‘revision’ of Marxism— ‘not with the theoretician’s pen but with the heel of the GPU’ the fundamental ideas of Marx had beenburied.

Engels and ‘Marxism’

Frederick Engels worked closely with Marx from 1844, until Marx’s death in 1883. From then until hisown death in 1895, Engels was the leading figure in the rapidly growing movement which became theSecond International.

It is quite common to hear Engels blamed exclusively for the vulgarisation of Marx’s ideas, but I thinkthis is too easy an option. It is true that some of Engels’s formulations do lend themselves to the spreadof several inadequate conceptions. In particular, the idea that Capital was a book about ‘capitalisteconomics’ owes more than a little to Engels’s Anti-Duhring, his treatment of Volumes 2 and 3, and tohis authorisation of the appalling English translation of Volume 1.



However, compared with the later perversions of Marx’s work, Engels’s errors are insignificant. By theend of his life, he was almost entirely isolated amidst a sea of opportunism, and fighting a lone battle forthe concepts Marx had originated, as he understood them. His followers certainly made use of theweaknesses of his writings in the construction of their ‘Marxism’. However, in this process, these works,which played an enormous part in the popularisation of Marx’s ideas, were misinterpreted nearly asbadly as Marx’s own writings.

Engels wrote Anti-Duhring in Marx’s lifetime, and it rapidly became one of the most popular theoreticalworks in the socialist movement. (Parts were later issued as the pamphlet Socialism, Utopian andScientific.) In it, he wrote: ‘Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialecticsfrom German idealist philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and history.’

Such remarks, made in texts designed for popular reading, do not say everything which Marx thought onthese issues. But they in no way conform to the Plekhanovite picture. The closest Engels comes tospeaking about ‘dialectical materialism’ is this:

Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modernmaterialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof.With the French of the eighteenth century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of nature as awhole moving in narrow circles and for ever immutable.... Modern materialism embraces the more recentdiscoveries of natural science, according to which nature also has its history in time.... In both cases, it[modern materialism] is essentially dialectic, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above theother sciences.

This passage may not be written with Engels’s usual clarity, but it gives no support to the idea that‘modern materialism’ is just the ‘old materialism’ with an extra ‘dialectical’ flourish. Nor is there anyquestion of ‘applying’ dialectic independently to nature and to history. Rather, Engels is arguing quitethe opposite: the ‘dialectic’ of Hegel has been refounded on a materialist basis.

Engels’s incomplete manuscripts on the natural sciences were written in the 1870s, but published only in1925, under the title Dialectics of Nature. The ‘Marxists’ then absorbed them into their world-outlookDespite the fairly tentative way that Engels wrote about the ‘laws of dialectics’, they were turned intotablets of stone

In 1888, Engels wrote a review article, Ludwig Feuerbach, and this became another source for‘dialectical materialism’ However, it was when Plekhanov translated it into Russian, and wrote extensiveexplanatory notes for it, that it formed the shape in which it became a major part of the ‘Marxist’ canon.

This is how Engels posed the question of materialism:

The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning therelation of thinking and being.... The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them intotwo great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and therefore, in the last instance,assumed world creation in one form or another — and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, thiscreation often becomes still more intricate than in Christianity comprised the camp of idealism. Theothers, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.

Later in this book he contrasts the views of Marx and himself with those of Hegel:



It was resolved to comprehend the real world — nature and history — just as it presents itself toeveryone who approaches it free from preconceived idealist crotchets. It was decided mercilessly tosacrifice every idealist crotchet which could not be brought into harmony with the facts conceived ontheir own and not in a fantastic interconnection. And materialism means nothing more than this.

We comprehended the concepts in our head once more materialistically — as images of real thingsinstead of regarding the real things as images of this or that stage of the absolute concept. Thus dialecticsreduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of humanthought — both sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as thehuman mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in humanhistory, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of anendless series of seeming accidents. In this way the dialectic of ideas became merely the consciousreflection of the dialectical movement of the real world, and thus Hegel’s dialectic was put on its head, orrather, from its head, on which it was standing, it was put on its feet.

I do not believe that this is the same as Plekhanov’s ‘dialectical materialism’ at all. For Engels, ‘laws ofhistory’ have ‘asserted themselves unconsciously’ only ‘up to now’.

In any case, Engels deserves to be considered as an independent thinker and not looked at as if hiswritings were merely a part of Marx’s output. Since it would take me too far away from my presentpurpose to undertake this study here, in this book I shall restrict myself almost entirely to Marx’s ownwritings.

Contents | next section

1844 Manuscripts | Significance of Militant MaterialismMaterialism & Empirio-Criticism | Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach, etc.Utopian & Scientific | Lukacs | Sartre

Cyril Smith Internet Archive



http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith3.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm



http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/index.htm

MIA Index Hegel Page Works Reference Home Page No_Frames

Works byAuthorAdler, Mind &BodyAdorno, CultureIndustryAdorno, NegativeDialecticsAlthusser,ContradictionandOverdeterminationAvineri, Hegel &StateBacon, NaturalHistoryBakunin, God &the StateBarthes,SemiologyBerkeley, HumanKnowledgeBerman,FetishismBohr,Discussions withEinsteinBrenkert, Marx'sEthicsBrentano,Psychology

The Value of Knowledge:A Miniature Library ofPhilosophytracing the development of ideas on the relation between consciousnessand matter through the words of 140 philosophers over 400 years:—Overview

French Materialism & Communism, Marx and Engels, 1845●

The Task of the Historian of Philosophy, Hegel, 1830●

» from Galileo to Feuerbach «Classical Epistemology

Considerations on the Copernican Opinion, Galilei Galileo, 1615●

A Natural History for the Building of Philosophy, Francis Bacon,1607

●

Discourse on Method, Rene Descartes, 1637●

Leviathan and De Cive, Thomas Hobbes, 1650●

Ethics, Benedicto Spinoza, 1677●

On the Nature of Human Understanding, John Locke, 1689●

Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, Bishop George Berkeley,1710

●

Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton, 1712●

Monadology, Gottfried Leibnitz, 1714●

Utility and Value, Adam Smith, 1759●

Spirit of Laws, Charles de Montesquieu, 1752●

Emile & Origin of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762●

Conversation between D'Alembert and Diderot, Denis Diderot, 1769●

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume, 1772●

Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, 1787●

Age of Reason, Thomas Paine, 1794●

MIA Philosophy Resource from Andy Blunden

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/index.htm (1 of 12) [11/06/2002 17:34:41]

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/li_works.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/li_help.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/front_pg.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/adler.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/index.htm


http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/bacon.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/barthes.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/berkeley.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/berman1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/dk/bohr.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/brenkert.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/brentano.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/collect.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_d.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/hegel2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/classic.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/galileo.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/bacon.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/descarte.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/hobbes.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/decive.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ne/spinoza.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/locke.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/berkeley.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/newton.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/leibniz.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/part3c.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/montesqu.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/rousseau.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/ineq1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/diderot.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/hume.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/kant.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/paine/works/age-reason/ch01.htm

Bridgman, Logicof ModernPhysicsBrouwer,IntuitionismBublitz,Reconciliation &RejectionBukharin, ABC ofCommunismCarnap,PhilosophicalFoundations ofPhysicsChomsky,Language &MindComte, GeneralView ofPositivismCornell,TransformationsCroce,HegelianismDebeauvoir,Second SexDebord, Societyof SpectacleDerrida,GrammatologyDerrida, HegelDerrida, Spectresof MarxDescartes,Discourse on

Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva, Claude-Henri Saint-Simon,1803

●

Outlines of the Doctrine of Knowledge, Johann Fichte, 1810●

System of Transcendental Philosophy, Friedrich Schelling, 1800●

On the Critical Philosophy, G W F Hegel, 1830●

Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Ludwig Feuerbach, 1843●

» Marx & Engels «Preface to Critique of PoliticalEconomy

Engels on Hegel and Schelling, 1841●

Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy, Karl Marx,1844

●

Private Property & Communism, Marx, 1844●

Estranged Labour, Marx, 1844●

The German Ideology, Marx and Engels, 1845●

Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx, 1845●

Preface to Contribution to Critique of Political Economy, KarlMarx, 1859

●

Commodities: Use Value & Value, Karl Marx, 1867●

Commodities: The Two-fold Character of Labour, Karl Marx, 1867●

The Fetishism of Commodities, Karl Marx, 1867●

Socialism, Utopian & Scientific, Part III, Frederick Engels, 1877●

Ludwig Feuerbach, the End of Classical German Philosophy,Engels, 1888

●

» After the Expurgation ofHegelianism «1841 - The World Historic Split inWestern Philosophy

Schelling's Criticism of Hegel, 1841●

The Concept of Dread, Søren Kierkegaard, 1844●



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/bridgman.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ne/brouwer.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/bublitz.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/carnap.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/chomsky.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/comte.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/cornell.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/croce.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/2ndsex.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/debord.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/descarte.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/st-simon.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/fichte.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/schellin.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/hegel.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/marxism.htm



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/anti-schelling/ch03.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm









http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/schelli2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/dk/kierkega.htm

MethodDewey, Questionof CertaintyDiderot,ConversationsDilthey, HumanSciencesDunayevskaya,Mao PervertsLeninDunaveyskaya,Philosophy &RevolutionDunaveyskaya,Ambivalence ofLeninDunaveyskaya,On SartreDunaveyskaya,New ForcesDurkheim, OnPragmatismEbert, RedFeminismEinstein, Replyto CriticismsEngels, OnSchellingOn Feuerbach IOn Socialism IIFanon, NationalCultureFeuerbach,Philosophy ofFuture

The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer, 1844●

God & the State, Mikhail Bakunin, 1872●

A General View of Positivism, Auguste Comte, 1856●

A System of Logic, John Stuart Mill, 1843●

Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, 1863●

Reasons for Dissenting from M. Comte, Herbert Spencer, 1864●

Perception under the Microscope

The Challenge of every Great Philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874●

Concept and Purpose of Psychology, Franz Brentano, 1874●

Facts of Perception, Hermann Helmholtz, 1878●

How to Make our Ideas Clear, Charles Peirce, 1878●

Outline of Psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, 1897●

Analysis of Sensations, Ernst Mach, 1886●

The Relativity of Space, Henri Poincaré, 1900●

What Pragmatism Means, William James, 1906●

Sociology before the Russian Revolution

Introduction to the Human Sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey, 1883●

Sociology & Science, Max Weber, 1897●

Lectures in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, 1910●

Pragmatism & Sociology, Emile Durkheim, 1914●

Mind & Society, Vilfredo Pareto, 1916●

» from Freud, Pavlov & Einstein toFascism & War «Psychology & Phenomenology

The Work of the Cerebral Hemispheres, I P Pavlov, 1924●

“Weltanschauung”, Sigmund Freud, 1932●

The Philosopher's Search for the Immutable, John Dewey, 1929●

Mind & Body, Alfred Adler, 1931●

Principles of Gestalt Psychology, Kurt Koffka, 1932●



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/dewey.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/diderot.htm


http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/articles/raya.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/phil-rev/dunayev0.htm




http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/durkheim.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/einstein/works/1940s/reply.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/anti-schelling/index.htm



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/fanon.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/schopenh.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/ch01.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/comte.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/mill.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/utility1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/spencer.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/percept.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/nietzsch.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/brentano.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/helmholt.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/peirce.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/wundt.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/poincare.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james.htm


http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/weber.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/saussure.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/durkheim.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/pareto.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/pavlov.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/dewey.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/adler.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/koffka.htm

Feyerabend,Against MethodFichte, Doctrineof KnowledgeFirestone,Dialectic of SexFoucault,Archaeology ofKnowledgeFoucault, Unitiesof DiscourseFreud,WeltanschauungFreud, MentalPersonalityFriedan, OnFreudFriedman, OnMethodologyFromm,Character &Social ProcessFukuyama, Endof HistoryGalileo, OnCopernicanOpinionGödel,Foundations ofMathematicsHabermas,Theory ofKnowledgeHeidegger,Existence &

Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology, Carl Jung, 1933●

The Crisis in Psychology, Lev Vygotsky, 1927●

Lectures on Philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1933●

The Crisis of European Sciences, Edmund Husserl, 1937●

The Basic Problems of Phenomenonology, Martin Heidegger, 1927●

The Phenomenological Method in Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, 1934●

On My Philosophy, Karl Jaspers, 1941●

The Structure of Behaviour, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1942●

Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946●

Foundations of Mathematics

Philosophical Importance of Mathematical Logic, Bertrand Russell,1911

●

Pure Induction, John Maynard Keynes, 1920●

Foundations of Mathematics, David Hilbert, 1927●

Lectures on Intuitionism, L E J Brouwer, 1951●

Hegel and Mathematics, Ernst Kolman, 1931●

Foundations of Mathematics in the light of Philosophy, Kurt Gödel,1961

●

Computing Machinery & Intelligence, Alan Turing, 1950●

Epistemology & Modern Physics

Epistemology & Modern Physics, Moritz Schlick, 1925●

The Logic of Modern Physics, Percy Bridgman, 1927●

Discussions with Einstein on Epistemology and Physics, Niels Bohr,1949

●

Reply to Criticism, Albert Einstein, 1949●

Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg, 1958●

The Philosophical Foundations of Physics, Rudolph Carnap, 1966●

Empiricism without the Dogmas, Willard Quine, 1951●

Marxist Orthodoxy

The Dialectic, Karl Kautsky, 1927●

The Materialist Conception of History, G V Plekhanov, 1897●



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/feyerabe.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/fichte.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fireston.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/foucaul2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/foucault.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/friedan.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/friedman.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1942/character.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/galileo.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/godel.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/habermas.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heidegg2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/jung.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/wittgens.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heidegge.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/jaspers.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/merleaup.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/maths.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/russell.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/keynes.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/hilbert.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ne/brouwer.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/kolman.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/godel.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/turing.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/maths.htm#Physics

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/schlick.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/bridgman.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/dk/bohr.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/einstein.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heisenb2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/carnap.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/quine.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/marxism.htm#orthodox


http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/works/1890s/history/part1.htm

BeingHeidegger,PhenomenologyHeisenberg,Quantum TheoryHeisenberg,CopenhagenSchoolHeisenberg,PhilosophyHelmholtz, Factsof PerceptionHegel, On KantHilbert,Foundations ofMathsHobbes, De CiveHobbes,LeviathanHume, Cause &EffectHusserl, Crisis ofScienceHusserl,PhenomenologyHolzman, LevVygotskyHyppolite,Organisation ofLogicIlyenkov,Abstract &ConcreteIlyenkov, Essayson Dialectical

Stagnation & Progress of Marxism, Rosa Luxemburg, 1903●

The "Thing-in-Itself" and Dialectical Materialism, V I Lenin, 1908●

The Recent Revolution in Natural Science, V I Lenin, 1908●

Summary of Dialectics, V I Lenin, 1915●

The ABC of Communism, Bukharin & Preobrazhensky, 1919●

On the Significance of Militant Materialism, Lenin 1922●

What is Proletarian Culture?, Leon Trotsky, 1923●

History & Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs, 1923●

Marxism & Philosophy, Karl Korsch, 1923●

Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Joseph Stalin, 1938●

On Practice, Mao Tse Tung, 1937●

Philosophy & Methodology of Present-day Science, Shoichi Sakata,1968

●

Pragmatism and Empiricism, George Novack, 1968●

» The Modern World «Cognition & Psychology

Thought and Language, Lev Vygotsky, 1934●

Logic & Existence, Jean Hyppolite, 1952●

The Virtue of Scientific Humility, Konrad Lorenz, 1963●

The Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing, 1967●

Genetic Epistemology, Jean Piaget, 1968●

Language & Mind, Noam Chomsky, 1968●

The Origins of Cognitive Thought, B F Skinner, 1989●

Social TheoryStructuralism

What is a Sign?, Charles Sanders Peirce, 1894●

Structure of Social Action, Talcott Parsons, 1937●

Lectures on Sound & Meaning, Roman Jakobson, 1942●

The Culture Industry, Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, 1944●

The Methodology of Positive Economics, Milton Friedman, 1953●

Structural Anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1958●



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heidegge.htm




http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/helmholt.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/hegel.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/hilbert.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/decive.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/hobbes.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/hume.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/lois1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/hyppolit.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/works/1903/sta-prog.htm


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/summary.htm


http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/07.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/sakata2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/empiric/empir09.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/hyppolit.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/lorenz.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/laing.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/piaget.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/chomsky.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/skinner.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/structur.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/peirce1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/parsons.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/jakobson.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/friedman.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/levistra.htm

LogicIlyenkov, OnPositivismJakobson,Sound &MeaningC L R James,DialecticsC L R James,Black PowerJames, William,WhatPragmatismMeansJameson,PostmodernismJaspers, MyPhilosophyJung, AnalyticalPsychologyKant, Critiue ofPure ReasonKautsky, TheDialecticKeynes, PureInductionKlein, PatriarchyKierkegaard,Concept ofDreadKoffka, GestaltPsychologyKojeve, Dialecticof RealKolman, Hegel &

Contradiction & Overdetermination, Louis Althusser, 1962●

The End of History, Francis Fukuyama, 1992●

Science & Society

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, 1962●

Objective Knowledge, Karl Popper, 1966●

The Ethic of Knowledge and the Socialist Ideal, Jacques Monod,1970

●

Against Method, Paul Feyerabend, 1975●

Gaia: A new look at life on Earth, James Lovelock, 1975●

Overcoming Epistemology, Charles Taylor, 1995●

"Western" Marxism

Reason and Revolution, Herbert Marcuse, 1941●

Character and the Social Process, Eric Fromm, 1942●

The Search for Method, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1960●

The Dogmatic Dialectic & the Critical Dialectic, Jean-Paul Sartre,1960

●

One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, 1964●

Preface to History & Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs, 1967●

The Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory, Jürgen Habermas,1968

●

Marx's Theory of Alienation, Istvan Meszaros, 1970●

Liberation Epistemology

The Negro Question, C L R James, 1948●

The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949●

National Culture & Fight for Freedom, Frantz Fanon, 1959●

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, 1963●

Sexual Politics, Kate Millett, 1969●

The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone, 1971●

Challenge of the Matriarchy, Evelyn Reed, 1975●

The Archæology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault, 1969●

Man Made Language, Dale Spender, 1980●



http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positiv1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/jakobson.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/dialecti/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/articles/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/jaspers.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/jung.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/kant.htm


http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/keynes.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/klein.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/dk/kierkega.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/koffka.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/kolman.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/kuhn.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/popper.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/monod.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/feyerabe.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/gaia.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/taylor.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/marxism.htm#lukacs


http://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1942/character.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/onedimen/marcuse.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/habermas.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/lib.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/2ndsex.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/fanon.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/friedan.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/millett.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fireston.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/reedevel.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/foucault.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/spender.htm

MathsKorsch,Philosophy &RevolutionKuhn, ScientificRevolutionsLaing, Politics ofExperienceLeibniz,MonadologyLenin, on HegelLenin,Thing-in-itselfLenin,Revolution inScienceLenin, MilitantMaterialismLeontev,PersonalityLevi-Strauss,StructuralAnalysisLocke,UtilitarianismLocke, HumanUnderstandingLorenz, ScientificHumilityLovelock, GaiaLukacsLyotard,PostmodernConditionMach, Analysis

Gender & History, Linda Nicholson, 1986●

Transformations, Drucilla Cornell, 1991●

(Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism, Teresa Ebert, 1995●

Patriarchy Gets Funky, Naomi Klein, 2001●

Literary CriticismPost-structuralism

Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes, 1964●

Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida, 1967●

Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967●

The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard, 1979●

Consequences of Pragmatism, Richard Rorty, 1982●

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson, 1991●

Recent Marxism

Essays from the History of Dialectics, Evald Ilyenkov, 1960●

A Materialist Critique of Objective Idealism, Evald Ilyenkov, 1960●

Freedom and Fetishism, Marshall Berman, 1963●

Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Shlomo Avineri, 1972●

Philosophy & Revolution (Lenin), Raya Dunayevskaya, 1973●

Philosophy & Revolution (Sartre), Raya Dunayevskaya, 1973●

Philosophy & Revolution ("New Forces"), Raya Dunayevskaya,1973

●

The Riddle of the Self, Feliks Mikhailov, 1976●

The Metaphysics of Positivism, Evald Ilyenkov, 1979●

Marxist Theory & Class Consciousness, Cliff Slaughter, 1975●

Marx's Critique of Classical Political Economy, Geoff Pilling, 1980●

The Violence of Abstraction, Derek Sayer, 1987●

Logic of Capital, Tony Smith, 1990●

Marx's Grundrisse & Hegel's Logic, Hiroshi Uchida, 1988●

Science and Humanity - Hegel, Marx and Dialectic, Cyril Smith,1994

●

How the "Marxists" Buried Marx, Cyril Smith, 1995●

Minimum Utopia: Ten Theses, Norman Geras, 2000●



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/kuhn.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/laing.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/leibniz.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/index.htm



http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1977/leon1977.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/levistra.htm


http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/locke.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/lorenz.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/gaia.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/lyotard.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/nichols.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/cornell.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/klein.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/foucaul1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/barthes.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/debord.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/lyotard.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/marxism.htm#nineties

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay7.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/berman1.htm





http://www.marxists.org/archive/mikhailov/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/slaughte.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/geoff1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/sayer1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/tonysmi.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/uchida.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith4.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/geras1.htm

of SensationsMao, OnContradictionMao, On PracticeMarcuse, Reason& RevolutionMarcuse, OneDimensional ManMarx, 1844ManuscriptsMarx, FrenchMaterialismMarx, Theses onFeuerbachMarx, GermanIdeologyMarx, Critique ofPol/Econ.Marx,CommoditiesMarx, LabourMarx, ValueMarx, FetishismMerleau-Ponty,Structure ofBehaviourMeszaros,AlienationMikhailov, Riddleof SelfMill, System ofLogicMill,UtilitarianismMill, On Nature

The Informatisation of Production, Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri,2000

●

On Belief: The Leninist Freedom, Slavoj Zizek, 2001●

Repeating Lenin, Slavoj Zizek, 2001●

Email comments welcome, to Andy Blunden, or visit my homepage

LinksMarxism & Ethics ¤ Marxism & Philosophy ¤ HegelCritical Thinking Resource ¤ Rauno Huttunen's Library ofPhilosophy ¤ Philosophy on Web ¤ Classics in Psychology ¤Philosophers' Valhalla ¤ Bureau of Public Secrets

Philosophy MarxistsReference Archive

visitors since9th November 1997

Reference Indexes for No_Frames OnlyHegel — Works — Portraits — Analysis & Biography —

Biography — Glossary







http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/onedimen/marcuse.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/li_1844.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_d.htm


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01.htm






http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/merleaup.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mikhailov/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/mill.htm


http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/mill2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/negri.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm

mailto:[email protected]?subject=Value_of_Knowledge

http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm

http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/subject/philosophy/index.htm


http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/reason/critical/

http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~rakahu/kirjasto.html

http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~rakahu/kirjasto.html

http://www-personal.monash.edu.au/~dey/phil/index.htm

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/

http://sites.netscape.net/hannibalism/index.html

http://www.slip.net/~knabb/index1.htm


http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/li_works.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/li_images.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/li_texts.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/li_biogs.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/li_gloss.htm

Millett, SexualPoliticsMonod, Ethic ofKnowledgeNegri, ImmaterialLabourNewton,PrincipiaNicholson,Gender & HistoryNietzsche,ChallengeNietzsche,Beyond Good &EvilNovack, Logic ofMarxismNovack,EmpiricismPaine, Age ofReasonPareto, Mind &SocietyParsons,FunctionalismPavlov, TheBrainPeirce, ClearIdeasPelnczynski,Hegel & StatePiaget, GeneticEpistemologyPiaget,Construction of



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/millett.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/monod.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/negri.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/newton.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/nichols.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/nietzsch.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/nietzsc1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/logic/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/empiric/empir09.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/paine/works/age-reason/ch01.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/pareto.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/parsons.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/pavlov.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/peirce.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/pelczyns.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/piaget.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/piaget2.htm

RealityPilling, Marx &PoliticalEconomyPilling, Conceptsof CapitalPlekhanov, OnHegelPlekhanov,MaterialistConception ofHistoryPoincare,RelativityPopper, RealistView of PhysicsQuine,VerificationReed, MatriarchyRorty,PragmatismRousseau, EmileRousseau,InequalityRussell,MathematicalLogicRussell, Theoryof KnowledgeSt-Simon, Letterfrom GenevaSakata, ModernPhysicsSartre, Marxism& Existentialism



http://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/geoff1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/works/1890s/hegel.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/works/1890s/history/part1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/poincare.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/popper.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/quine.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/reedevel.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/rousseau.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/ineq1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/russell.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/russell1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/st-simon.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/sakata1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm

Saussure,LinguisticsSayer,ProductiveForcesSayer,ProductionRelationsSchelling,TranscendentalPhilosophySchelling,History ofPhilosophySchelling, OnHegelSchlick,Epistemology &PhysicsSchopenhauer,World as WillSkinner,CognitiveThoughtSlaughter, Lenin& HegelSlaughter,Marxist TheoryAdam Smith,UtilityCyril Smith Marx& HegelTony Smith,Logic of CapitalSpencer,



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/saussure.htm



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/schellin.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/schelli3.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/anti-schelling/ch01.htm#004

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/schlick.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/schopenh.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/skinner.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/cliff.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/slaughte.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/part3c.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/tonysmi.htm


Herbert, ComteSpencer, Laws inGeneralSpender, ManMade LanguageSpinoza, EthicsStalin, Dia-MatTrotsky, ABC ofDialecticsTrotsky, SocialFunction ofLiteratureTrotsky, TheirMorals & OursUchida,Grundrisse &Hegel's LogicVygotsky,PsychologyWeber,SociologyWittgenstein,LecturesWundt,PsychologyZizek, On Belief

Value of Knowledge




http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/spencer2.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/spender.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ne/spinoza.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1939/1939-abc.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1923/tia23b.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936/1936-mor.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/uchida.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/weber.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/wittgens.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/wundt.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htm

| | Català | Cesky | | Dansk | Deutsch | Español | Euskara | Français | Ellinika | Bahasa Indonesia |Italiano | Hebrew || Nederlands | Nihongo | Norsk | Polski | Português | Pycckuú | Român� | Srpskohrvatski | Suomi | Svenska |Türkçe |

Search | Text Index | Contact Us | Volunteer! | Marxist Archive on CD!

Please use a marxists.org server close to where you are: Asia | Europe | U.S.All material within these Archives, unless noted otherwise, is protected by the Free Documentation License

Marxists Internet Archive

http://www.marxists.org/index.htm [11/06/2002 17:34:44]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/noneng/arabic/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/catala/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/czech/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/chinese/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/noneng/dansk/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/deutsch/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/espanol/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/euskara/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/francais/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/ellinika/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/indonesia/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/italiano/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/hebrew/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/nederlands/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/nihon/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/norsk/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/polski/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/noneng/portugue/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/noneng/russkij/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/noneng/romana/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/noneng/srpshrva/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/noneng/suomi/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/noneng/svenska/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/noneng/turkce/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/admin/new/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/admin/intro/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/subject/students/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/frame.htm


http://www.marxists.org/subject/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/history/index.htm


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm


http://search.marxists.org/

http://www.marxists.org/txtindex.htm

http://www.marxists.org/admin/mail/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/admin/volunteers/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/admin/cd/index.htm

http://marxists.anu.edu.au/

http://www.marxists.org.uk/

http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/

http://www.marxists.org/admin/intro/main.htm#fdl

The Georg Lukacs Internet Archive

Documents

Transcript of The Georg Lukacs Internet Archive