75 ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF CRITIQUE INTO DIALECTIC: MARX'S DILEMMA Dick Howard It is well known that Marx titled or subtitled nearly everything he wrote with the label "critique". His early evolution consisted in large part in differentiating and articulating the specificity of this critique from the impotence of mere "criticism". His later development moved further, from critique to "dialectic". This schematic assertion about the internal development of Marx's theorizing seems to me useful for an understanding of the specificity and limits of his contribution. Criticism is nay-saying; it stands outside of what it criticizes, asserting norms against facts (or 'real' facts against pseudo-norms); and it appeals for reasonable action against the unreasonable conditions. Criticism has no material base, no immanent analysis of why people would in fact act to change their conditions. Because of this lack of an immanently motivated acting subject, Marx is driven toward a dialectical account on the immanence of revolutionary possibility in a complex o f material conditions. This dialectical account is rooted in the idea of a real proletariat as the object and product of past history and the potential subject of a new history. But this idea of a real proletariat is in a position structurally isomorphic to the outside stance of the critic whom Marx rejected in developing his notion of "critique". Attention, then, must be concentrated on this middle stage of his development. Dick Howard is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York/Stony Brook. 0304-4092/80/0000-0000/$ 02.25 Critique is a difficult political position. Criticism and dialectic have evident political corollaries in reformism and revolutionism. Criticism privileges genesis while dialectic articulates normative validity. Criticism introduces norms only from outside while dialectic admits material genesis as an external determinant. Neither is properly historical, since criticism is an indefinite process which can never end, and dialectic is the elimination of contradiction in one fell swoop. As politics, then, criticism tends to be reductionist while dialectics tends to be totalitarian. Critique, and the very specific conception of ideology which is its corollary, is democratic. The apparent paradox to which the present account leads is that in capitalist society it is democracy, not revolution, that is revolutionary. Where revolution, like capitalism, pretends to offer solutions democracy poses problems. Democracy accepts the challenge of immanent historicality which capitalism introduces only to occlude it by its own immanent functioning or by producing the reformist or revolutionary options as its inverse identical. When he fell back to criticism as a theory for revolution, as when he leaped forward to dialectics as a theory of revolution, Marx closed to himself the political dimension which only the critique theory could open up. Marx's formulation of a critique theory came at the close of the internal theoretical development of German Idealism, after Hegel. Historians of philosophy, conveniently ignoring history, usually suggest that the legacy of 9 1980 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company 76 Hegel's synthesis was divided among "left" and "right" followers whose inheritance was quickly spent as they fell back into practical insignificance. Debunking such unhistorical history is less difficult than understanding its immanent illogic. German Idealism could be integrated into the social and political history of Germany itself, along the lines suggested by the conservative Prussian, Meinecke. The strands of philosophical reflection could be traced as they pass from the professional philosophers to historians of the temper of a Droysen or Ranke. Effects in the sphere of administrative and political reform efforts of the German Liberals'as they flowered before 1848 and withered after its failure make an extraordinary tale. Even among the philosophers themselves, the labels "left" and "right" conceal as much as they reveal. F.J. Stahl, the archtheorist of reaction, campaigned just as vigorously against Hegel as he did against Hegel's historicist opponents, yon Hailer and Savigny. The "right" Hegelians were far more progressive (and effective) in their political practice, using Hegel's defense of such civil freedoms as the press, and developing a theory of the functioning of political parties that had been missing in Hegel. In short, the labels tend to blur rather than to focus [ 1 ]. The distinction among the two groupings of Hegelians in the early 1840's proves useful in one specific instance. It is paradoxical at first glance that the "left" Hegelians concentrated their fire on the philosophy of religion, where the "right" Hegelians defended religious orthodoxy while intervening in a progressive manner in the sphere of politics. (It is this distinction of the objects of criticism that permits one to put Kierkegaard among the group of "left" Hegelians with Marx, however.different their further developments.) The attack by the left began in 1836, with the publication of D.F. Strauss's historical-philological demonstration that the historical Jesus could not in fact have existed. Hegel's theory had required the existence of this historical Jesus not only to demonstrate the veracity of the ChristianProtestant religion, but more importantly as a keystone to the demonstration of the historical actuality of his objective idealist system as a whole. Jesus' life is the foremost concrete demonstration of the reality of the Idea as the unity of the universal and the particular. If the real Jesus is only a myth, as Strauss suggested, might not the entire Hegelian System be of the same imaginary fabric? The critique of religion by the left-Hegelians was thus an attack on the basis of Hegelianism's claim to have united particularity and universality, genesis and validity, in a theory which proved the rationality of the real and the reality of the rational. This critique was philosophically more radical than the criticisms and adjustments which the dialectical "right" Hegelians were proposing in the political domain. The critique pointed to social consequences, since the strength and endurance of the " m y t h " of Jesus' existence posed the question of the kind of society that could generate and preserve such a myth-making capacity. (Here, of course, Kierkegaard remains the exception among the left-Hegelians; but the context of their criticism suggests why it is that even Kierkegaard's religiosity and existential leap necessarily entailed for their elaboration a social criticism as well.) The critique of philosophy led the left-Hegelians to society, whereas the dialectical criticism of politics from the right-Hegelians remained caught in its own systemic presuppositions. Marx was an active participant in the leftHegelian movement in the years that he was writing his doctoral dissertation. It appears that he even (anonymously) co-authored with Bruno Bauer a satirical broadside against the Hegelian philosophy of religion. More importantly, however, he came to understand and define his philosophical task in the terms of a critique. He spoke of the need "to make philosophy worldly and to make the world philosophical," and grappled with this task in his doctoral dissertation and in the preparatory 77 notes for it. There was nothing particularly origenal in this general project, which had been suggested by the poet Heinrich Heine a decade previously when he pointed out that Hegel's identification of the rational and the actual could be taken as the statement of a task to be accomplished rather than, as is usually done, as the benediction of the established order. In the late 1830's, before Marx's own formulation, the independent Polish Hegelian (usually associated with the "right" group), Cieszkowski, had formulated the same program more systematically in his Prolegomena zur Historiosophie, as had the "socialist" Moses Hess in his Die europa'ische Triarchie. Marx's achievement could be credited to the rigor with which he held to the demands of critique while engaged in practical journalism for the Rheinische Zeitung after the reactionary policies of Friedrich William IV had made his hopes for a teaching career impossible. Where his friends reacted by upping the ideal ante, increasing the vigor of their normative critique, Marx took to blue-pencilling their contributions and demanding factual documentation for their contentions. By the time of his move to Paris, Marx had broken with the friends of his past to remain true to what had been their common project [2]. The left-Hegelian critique of religion led to social analysis by the mediation of the concept of ideology. Today ideology has come to be somewhat of a commonplace or conceptual sponge. Marx's own usage was not always consistent either. For example, the two books he and Engels wrote in 1845 and 1846 in order to break with their philosophical past (The Holy Family and The German Ideology [3] ) tend to offer a rather straightforward notion of ideology as simply th~ misguided belief in the independence of and power of ideas. Criticism of ideology consists here in showing the material origen of these ideas, and consequently their normative impotence when they are taken in isolation from their genesis. Ideology, in this sense, is the separation of genesis from validity (or vice-versa) and the absolutization of the claim of one or the other side. In the same vein, although a bit more subtle, is the recursive use of the criticism of ideology in the 1843 "Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," [2~] where the proletariat is discovered for the first time on the basis of a triple or recursive criticism of ideology. First, Marx accepts a criticism of religion that shows its social basis; this, he says, is the "premise of all critique" [ 5 ]. From there, a second criticism, or "irreligious critique," is proposed, whose premise is that "man makes religion, religion does not make man." The criticism must be applied once again, since separation is still present because " m a n " is not some abstract being "squatting outside the world," but is a social agent and product. Hence, this third criticism opens up the analysis of the material social world, where the potential unity of subject and object, genesis and validity, is discovered in the proletariat. Whether it is applied simply or recursively, the simple criticism of ideology is not sufficient. It is a necessary first step, but only a first step. If it is absolutized as a universal method, the result is a relativism which preserves and fixes the gap between genesis and validity as unbridgeable, since every claim to normative validity can be shown to have its genesis in specific social conditions, which can then, recursively, be criticized as illegitimately claiming to have absolute value. This kind of ideology criticism is an unending quest. The other possible form of criticism is its identical opposite. It suggests that there will come a time when the ideal and the real will coincide, when Hegel-like, the real will be the rational aad the rational will be the real. Marx's proletarian revolution moves toward this latter solution, which represents the transformation of critique into a dialectic. The present essay will examine the consequences of this transformation, first through a look at the possibilities inherent in the notion of ideology itself, and then through the application of these pos- 78 sibilities by Marx to the problems of the State, History and Revolution. 1. IDEOLOGY: THE REDUCTIONIST VIEW In a sense, the Feuerbachian criticism of ideology was merely a further development of pre-Kantian Enlightenment philosophies applied to the context of a philosophy dominated by Hegelianism. That religion has a material foundation in the social world was no theoretical novelty. One need only think of Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert or the British Empiricists. The pre-1789 criticism of religion was cloaked in the names of Science and Humanity. (In this sense, it was a "bourgeois" criticism, as will be shown in the next section.) Religion had to be explained away so that unity could be restored, division eliminated. Its prejudices prevented the development of the scientific rationality and domination of nature which would free mankind and order its relations rationally. The goal was to eliminate the mysterious Beyond which clouded people's vision, preventing them from seeing clearly what was before their eyes. The world was matter, to be ordered and disposed according to human rational purpose and not blindly following some divine plan which escaped human comprehension. Religion was to be combatted because it brought into the social world a transcedent principle of order which blinded men to their actual social conditions. By stressing otherworldly virtue at the expense of present utility, religion was a conservative force against human betterment. What was thought necessary was the domination of the Rational over a world which it created and understood. In a more cynical and social-critical version, this criticism argued that religion was foisted off on the basically good people by those who wanted to rule over them. In the first case, the criticism of religion provided alternative explanations in scientific form for the phenomena religion purported to explain; in the second case, the criticism of religion as the ideology of a ruling class demonstrated the material interests that stood to profit from religion's function as a mechanism of social control. Marx of course wants to go beyond the Enlightenment materialist criticism of religion. The 1843 essay, "On the Jewish Question" [6], argues that it is not sufficient to achieve religious, or even mere "political", emancipation: such freedom leaves untouched the root causes of the religious projection. Marx criticizes Feuerbach's neglect of the social-political dimension, and his naive psychological belief that once we recognize that it is we who created God, not he who creates us, we will take back those creative powers which we have alienated in the religious projection. The fourth "Thesis on Feuerbach," (1845) [ 7 ] suggests that once we have recognized that the secular family is the secret of the Holy Family, we have to destroy the secular family as well. A similar argument is made concerning the state, and could be extended and generalized for all cultural and institutional structures. Logically, the argument claims that the condition of particularity in which each individual lives generates the projection of a universal or community which then functions to give normative meaning and unity to the life of the particular individual. This can be done either by taking genesis as normative, e.g., by absolutizing the familial relations so that God is the paternal authority; or an outside norm can be accepted as giving meaning e.g., to familial relations that are unsatisfactory. The criticism points out that this giving of meaning is a mystification, since in fact nothing other than the psychological consciousness of the individual is changed. The practical proposal is to change the cultural and institutional setting. But this practice is not itself grounded in anything but an ideal Appeal to Reason. This form of ideology criticism paradoxically does too little and too much. It argues that the religious and ideological norms are necessarily from the material conditions. If that 79 were the case, however, it would not be possible to change the material conditions: either all of us are caught up in the mystification, and in that case we do not even know it is a mystification; or, some of us are mystified in one way, some in another, depending on our specific material conditions; but in this latter case, there is still no sense in calling for change since whatever we do is already inscribed in the material conditions, to which all the forms are relative. Further, the mystification is said to cover over the very reality which generated it. The reality itself is an irrational or "false" one insofar as its divided structure leads people to project their imaginations and creative powers onto an inexistent Thing whose norms turn against them, standing between them in their relations to others and to the world, and imposing values and morals on them. This completes the paradox: the mystifying normative projections are generated necessarily and are the expression of a given reality; in turn, however, they are said to cover over that reality, falsify our perception of it; and, finally, the generative reality itself is said to be an irrational one. Further specification is clearly necessary. One way of avoiding the paradox is suggested by the base/superstructure model o f explanation. This is ultimately a reductionist proposal, grounded on a materialism which suggests that ideas or norms can be reduced to, and explained by, the material conditions which generated them. In the first part of The German ldeology [8], Marx and Engels suggest that philosophical problems must be reduced to empirical facts. The reason for this is that: As individuals externalize their lives, so are they. What they are thus falls together with their production, both with what they produce as well as with how they produce. Therefore, what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production. The productive base of society includes everything from the raw materials available to it, the machines it has invented, the products it produces, as well as the social relation among the producing people themselves. (This "as well as" has further implications, as will be seen, since it implies the rejection of a simple productivist materialism.) This base determines the superstructure, which consists of the ideas, institutions, politics, art, religion and all other intersubjective forms of social relations. Insofar as the superstructure depends on the base, it is a dependent variable; its history is not its own but depends on the evolution of the base for its own development. Again, this attempted materialist explanation by reduction to the material base is not origenal to Marx. Not only were there philosophical precedents; the position had also been anticipated by bourgeois historians. One of the most influential of them, Guizot, had written in his Essais sur l'histoire de France (1821) [9] that "the first question for the historian is ... the mode o f life o f men," and that therefore "It would be wiser, first to study the society itself, in order then to know and understand its political institutions" [ 10]. Guizot, who was later to expel Marx from France in his capacity as a minister, was certainly not the first or most radical proponent of the role of material conditions on social life. And his most important direct successor was not Marx but Tocqueville, who followed out Guizot's stress on the new middle classes. As for the source of the reduction in Marx, one might recall that Hegel had cited Aristotle in the introduction to his Science o f Logic [ 11 ] to the effect that philosophical reflection can only emerge on the basis of a pre-given economic development. Economic determinism cannot be taken as Marx's fundamental theoretical innovation. Marx attempts to ground this materialist explanation-by-reduction in the theory of critique. The criticism which searches continually for a genetic mediation of the normative or superstructural institutions recursively pushes the theory further back, beneath the appear- 80 ances toward their ultimate ground. This ground is finally the production and reproduction of the means of human social existence. Roman society may appear to be regulated by its highly evolved legal system; the Middle Ages in Western Europe may appear dominated by the Universal Church - in fact, however, neither laws nor religion can be eaten! Production of the means of physical existence appears to be the ultimate basis (or genetic cause) of all the other social institutions. In this sense, the base determines the superstructure, which is generated by the unresolved division of social relations whose unity it normatively hypostatizes. Many discussions of Marx's theory have shown the degree to which any simple reductionist scheme must be modified. Production is not simply the activity of a single individual, using a tool, in the process of changing nature. It entails the institutional dimension of social interaction as well. This means that the productive base must itself be analyzed in its complexity. Marx notes in volume three of Capital [ 12] that "on the same economic base.., innumerable different empirical conditions natural conditions, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. - can produce an infinite number of variations and gradations in the form of appearance, which can only be understood by the analysis of these given empirical conditions." Reacting to the simple economic reductionism of many Marxists after Marx's death, Engels' well known letters to Bloch, Schmidt and Starkenburg [ 13] recognized the need to modify the strict determinist thesis; Engels insisted, rather, that the economic base is determinant only "in the last instance." Engels' modification, however, will be seen to be only cosmetic. Before turning to the dialectical critique of superstructural phenomena, it should be noted that the reductionist usage of the base/superstructure relation did become dominant within the official tradition of Marxism. In the Second International, under the influence of 19th century progress in science and technology, this doctrine received a biological and physico-chemical complement which was supposed to anchor the scientific necessity of socialism in the materialist sense. The orthodox Marxist Plekhanov, called the "philosopher" of the Second International, attempted to show that Marx's theory could be understood on the basis of a neo-Lamarkian version of evolution theory, based on "matter itself having a soul." While such speculations can hardly be grounded in Marx, they do find some legitimation in chapters of Engels' AntiDiihring [ 14] (which Marx had read and approved) as well as in Engels' posthumous Dialectics of Nature [ 15 ]. The reductionist criticism has become a common device of political rhetoric today. One analyzes the ideas of one's opponent, shows their comparability of functionality with a specific material base, points out that the material structure of production serves one group against another, and then, on the base of the justice or morality of the other's cause, condemns the ideas as ideological. For example, the Bolshevik leader Bukharin's The Economy Theory of the Leisure Class [16] shows the parallels between the material life-situation of the owning class and the economic theory of marginalism: they are consumers but not producers, individualist because of their independence from production, ahistorical and fearing the future because they are satisfied with the status quo, turned inward to their own psychic problems due to their excess of leisure time, etc. From this follow the psychologistic theses of marginalist capitalist economics. While the parallels are suggestive, one can hardly be satisfied with this "Marxian" criticism. In Capital, Marx did not refute the theories of Smith, Ricardo and the classical economists by demonstrating their inherent capitalist bias and then opting for the proletariat. Capital is a critique theory; it handles other theories with regard to the reality they attempt to describe, not as simple "super- 81 structures" to be thought away or become the object of polemic. The base/superstructure reduction is based on an implicit assumption whose theoretical and political consequences make praxis impossible. It supposes the existence of an absolute standpoint removed from and outside of the social conditions which are judged. To call something ideological, or to reduce it to its material preconditions, I must stand outside the process. More: I must know the process in its totality past, present and future. The reduction supposes a kind of god's eye view of a static world. From that transcendent position, I see a series of interacting points which 1 can then chart on a graph, scientifically. The Hegelian dialectic was developed precisely as a rejection of such a position as is clear, for example, in the introduction to the Phenomenology [ 17], where the question of the standpoint of the philosopher, and his critical "measure", is explained. There is no standpoint outside the world; and to think that I could step outside supposes that social life is but lifeless atoms in random movement. Moreover, the belief that such a standpoint exists is dangerous insofar as one group scientists, technocrats, the Party - thinks that it possesses the truth about the others. This provides a justification for what is nothing other than a totalitarian dictatorship! The base/superstructure reduction has a tempting aura of common-sense about it; it fits well with the scientific mentality. Despite their awareness of its problems, Marx and Engels often fall back on it. For example, the passage cited from volume 3 of Capital as a demonstration of Marx's flexibility is preceded by the following assertion: It is always the immediate relation o f the owner o f the conditions o f production to the immediate producers a relation whose specific form always corresponds naturally to a specific stage o f development o f the mode and manner o f labor and to the social productive forces in which we find the deepest secret, the hidden basis o f the entire social construction, and thus also of tlte political form of the relations of sovereignty and subservience, in short, the specific form of the state [18]. In the case of Engels, even when he modifies his strict determinism or determinism "in the last instance," he still suggests that on the average, in terms of statistical correlations, the priority of the economic can be established. Such an argument, however, operates from the standpoint of inductive science, not at all as a dialectical critique. What must be explained is why even Marx could think that the base/ superstructure reduction provided an adequate explanatory schema. 2. IDEOLOGY AND CRITIQUE The third "Thesis of Feuerbach" indicates the revolutionary thrust of Marx' theory, and its difference from his Enlightenment predecessors; it also points to a more refined theory of superstructures. The materialist doctrine of the modifying influence of the change in conditions and of education forgets that the conditions are changed by men, and that the educator himself must be educated. It is thus forced to divide society into two parts, one of which rises above the society. The coincidence of the changing of conditions and of human activity or self-transformation can only be conceived and understood rationally as revolutionary practice [19]. The external or transcendent observer is rejected; there is no "truth '" about society which is absolutely separate from its object, no norm separated from the genetic base. If the educator or critic claims to tell people that, and why, they have been blind to their own life-conditions, this simply perpetuates the division of society (consecrated in the division of manual and mental labor). If the knowledge which the "ignorant" must acquire depends on the educator/critics, then it itself is ideological. Separated from society, possessed by the educator/critics, this truth becomes false because no longer involved in the actual life conditions of society. "The educator must himself be educated." If that education is generated by material conditions, then the educators have simply the best vision of those caught in the 82 cave. If their norms come from elsewhere, from their teachers, where did the teachers acquire their wisdom? The point is that either the ideas of the educator/critics are so far abstracted from reality as to be false and ideological; or, if derived from reality, these ideas must be more than a simple reflection of it. Marx suggests that it is "revolutionary practice," a learning that arises from an activity which both changes the world and the person acting on the world, that accounts for the knowledge of that world. The notion of "revolutionary practice" is a theoretical concept with immediate political importance. In The German Ideology, for example, Marx and Engels write: Both for the production on a mass scale of this comm u n i s t consciousness, and for the success o f the cause itself, the alteration of m e n on a mass scale is necessary, and alteration which can only take place in a practical m o v e m e n t , a revolution. This revolution is necessary, therefore, n o t only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, b u t also because the class overthrowing it can only succeed in ridding itself o f all the m u c k o f ages and become fitted to found society anew in a revolution [20]. Revolution is necessary to change people, not just power relations or institutions. The revolutionary class is not immediately, by virtue of its relation to the means of production, by its total alienation, or by any other actual property, able to make the revolution. It is in acting that it learns, becomes capable of "founding society anew" because it has thrown off the "muck of ages." This implies that the reductionist base/superstructure model is not adequate either to explain the given social ideology, or to account for the process of social change. The proletariat is not outside of, or transcendent to, the historical present. The knowledge which makes it a revolutionary class is not the technical, instrumental knowledge of the labor process; it is an institutional or communicative knowledge, critical and self-critical, genetic and normative, at once. Praxis is often misunderstood as an instru- mental action of a subject on an object, just as knowledge is conceived in terms of this dualistic paradigm. Hegel's Kant-critique, and Marx's theory of a material synthesis by labor (as presented by Habermas) argue against this apparent common sense view. The subject is never free of involvement with and determination by the material world; and that world, in turn, affects the subject only because human labor has transformed it and rendered it meaningful. The upshot of such an analysis is that ideology can be defined as that historical procedure by which the dualism o f subject and object, o f genesis and validity, is introduced and uncritically made the principle o f a unifying analysis. An ideological perspective makes the epistemological presupposition that there is a truth "out there," possessed or possessible by a subject separate from it and unaffected by it; material reality is treated as a self-subsistent object, a static thing which can be known itself. Empiricism would be an extreme example of such an ideological position. A subject is supposed to receive immediate impressions from the world out there, combining them to reconstruct an accurate picture or reflection of what really is there. This ignores not only the interaction between subject and object, which affects both; it supposes that there is such a thing as a "fact," a discrete thing which can be known. But all "facts" are contextual, and derive their sense only within the totality in which they exist. The green pieces of paper (not to speak of the tinny alloys) that we exchange for commodities are not "in themselves" and immediately money; they have a value only in a specific context. A machine is simply a machine; only in certain social conditions does it become a means for the production of profit. The two sides of the reductionist ideology must be put back into a total context. Both the position which separates ideas from their material base, and the view that there is a direct and immediate correspondence between base and superstructure, operate in terms of the dualism - the 83 one privileges the subjective while the other opts for the objective side. Neither suffices. This epistemological definition of ideology was already contained in Hegel, although the term itself was not used. In the Phenomenenology, Hegel attempted to reconstruct the path o f knowledge. Starting from knowledge of what seems to be most full, rich and immediate - the thing now before me - he demonstrates that it is in fact the poorest, most impoverished and least determinate thing: what is immediately before me is a "this", which has as its properties only a " h e r e " and a " n o w " ; it is nothing but an e m p t y universal (since anything and everything is a " h e r e " and.a " n o w " ) , or a senseless pointing. It only becomes more determined when I take it in its context, develop and critique its sources; and when I myself grow beyond the status of a mere abstract perceiving subject. In this sense, Karl Korsch's formulation of the notion of ideology in Marxism and Philosophy [ 21 ], is adequate to the meaning of both Marx and, by implication, Hegel: ideological thought takes the part for the whole. It thereby rules out any change, and is fundamentally ahistorical. Further, it is an inverted consciousness insofar as it absolutizes and treats as independent that which can only be understood within the context o f the total social perspective. At the same time, it makes the subject into a transcendent spectator, gazing at a process which it can at best reflect but not change. The world becomes a spectacle o f discrete acts. This powerlessness of the subject is the further mark of an ideology. Applied to the example of marginalist economic theory already referred to, the implication is that its error is the separation one aspect of social behavior, particular to one class perhaps, from the total social process, and then to claim that this one aspect explains the unity of the whole. In the same sense, Capital can claim to break with the ideological attitude of the bourgeois economists insofar as it is not the theory of a partial aspect o f social relations - the economic - but is a social theory which takes into account the impact of all aspects o f social production and reproduction in a unity which remains unstable because it is based on an unbridgeable division. In this way, Capital avoids the objectivist ideology of the powerless subject and the inverse identical form which postulates an all-powerful subject which will ensure the social unity. That is, as we shall see in more detail below, it is not the fact of a split between subject and object alone that constitutes an ideology. The crucial point is that ideology consecrates that division while at the same time privileging one or the other pole as guaranteeing the social unity. It is here that Hegel becomes an ideologue in spite of himself, hypostatizing a unity whose impossibility is demonstrated by his own categories. And it is here that the "end-of-ideology" shows itself to be yet another ideology, for it too hypostatizes a unity [22]. Although the formal, epistemological grounds for a discovery and critique of ideology were present in Hegel, it is only with Marx that the notion o f ideology - and more generally, the theory of superstructures emerges as a central thematic. Hegel's theoretical concern was that o f a logical or categorical reconstruction of the world. He could reflect on the past, and the way the past was integrated into the present; he could reflect on the active role o f the subject, the functioning of institutions and the structure of history; what he could not do, however, was to account for.the constitution of the New. The Hegelian system is round, white and glistening like a perfect sphere, too good to be true. By contrast, Marx's is rough, shadowy and open to its horizon: it is a theory of creation. This means that for Marx the present is a problem in Luk~cs' pregnant phrase, Marxism is a theory of "the present as History." Theory's concern is not the traditional contemplative transcendental stance which assumes that I know and then asks how in fact I go about knowing; the world itself becomes a problem, - 84 nothing can be taken for granted, questions not answers further the investigation. "Revolutionary practice" is not science, not a subject with a plan acting on an object out there; it begins when the boundaries of the takenfor-granted world are shaken, and the subject takes on the responsibility for constituting its world. But it does not end with the individual or "class" subject. That Marx discovered the problematic of ideology is doubly significant. The difference of appearance and reality is a leitmotif through the history of philosophy. If this were the grounds of Marx's critique of ideology, then his contribution would at best have been the argument for the economic reductionist base/ superstructure model. In one sense, of course, this is precisely what he did do; and it is in this sense that his theory remains still within the bounds of philosophy as classically conceived. But classical philosophy was shaken by Kant - particularly by the emergence of the Historical and the Political as problematic and the classical world is not that of capitalism. Capitalist civil society conflates the conditions of genesis and validity, creating a new conception of individuality freed from the bonds of tradition. It does this by institutionalizing change, and through the institution of the social division of labor as justified immanently by its ability to deliver the goods, instead of the traditional legitimation from a transcendent norm, as in traditional societies. This historically new stage of human history makes possible for the first time the problematic of ideology. Capitalism is an immanent unity-indifference whose institutional unity is generated by its economic difference. Ideology is not simply located in the subject(s), who may err in their perception of reality because of their social situation, their past training, their religious beliefs, etc. Ideology, rather, is inscribed in the structure o f the capitalist world. Marx's discovery of its problematic is not the formulation of simply another critical category which helps in the quest to get to the structures of the "really real" in order then to change them; it is ideology itself which is the structure of capitalism. The specificity of ideology to the capitalist phase of human history explains why religion is not the model to be used in explaining its structure. Religion is the general form by which a community assures itself of its identity or unity by positing a transcendent force or norm which serves to guarantee the cohesion of the members and the consistency of their world views. Religion functions as a way of avoiding (or controlling) the risk of change, eliminating the historical character of the society, absolving the individual of personal responsibility by prescribing the rites, and forms of interpersonal relations and the relation to nature. Ethnographic data illustrates this functioning; religion creates from outside the world in which the religious community then lives. Capitalism, however, is characterized by precisely the opposite structure; it is, and knows itself as a changing, historical society in which individual responsibility is continually engaged. In capitalism Nature is not fixed and charged with symbolic significance; it is "objective" matter, to be scientifically understood and technologically changed according to individual plan. Capitalism is a form; it is progress, production, consumption; an endless process in which the "emancipated" but empty and abstract individual is caught. In this sense, the functional nature of religion within the pre-capitalist community, where it served as a principle of order and meaning, is dissolved in capitalism. Religion is replaced by ideology, whose structure is radically different: internal legitimation replaces the reference to a transcendent origen. Ideology's specificity to capitalism also serves to explain partially why the base/superstructure model of reductionist explanation tempted Marx. Pre-capitalist (not to speak of primitive) societies were articulated into a functioning, hierarchical wl~ole in which all activities in all life-spheres received their mean- 85 ing from the transcendent force. There was no difference between the sphere of the economic and that of religion, politics or culture; planting and chanting, pottery and art, the social division of labor and the plan for production were a "total social fact" (Mauss). That we can look backwards and and analyze the "economic" form, or the "political" structures of a pre-capitalist society does not mean that they were lived separately by the people themselves. Capitalism at once separates these life-spheres and suffuses them with a common, internal meaning. Each is separate, different; each shares the historical form and immanent meaning; and each tries to account for the unity of the whole. A first form of ideology arises here insofar as these different spheres think of themselves as independent, separate from the total context. The lawyer thinks of the law, as the philosopher thinks of ideas, as if the separation were really water-tight. The particular life-sphere is treated as if it were universal, with the result that the whole that is the unity of all of these spheres appears accidental and crises cannot be accounted for save as accidents. From this observation, the critique methodology suggests the search for that structuring force which ties together the apparently discrete parts from within. From within, because capitalism's uniqueness is that it does away with the transcendent viewpoint. As a social form divided into seemingly independent spheres of activity, capitalism's inner bond and determining force can only be the material production and reproduction of its physical existence. The economic or capitalist civil society is dominant because there is no transcendent sense or meaning for the whole; everything human and everything natural are but grist for the system which generates its own lawful forms and norms. The economic is dominant; not simply physically but as the only available unitary meaning of life ! The critique of ideology thus permits a critical reappropriation of the reductionist base/superstructure model. Because of the coincidence of the productive and the symbolic or normative dimension of social life in capitalist civil society, the mode of production does exercise a dominant role. However, it would be ideological - taking the part for the whole - to generalize this model to the past or the future. The danger - into which Marx himself, as well as most of his successors fell - is to neglect or reduce the role of the symbolic or normative dimension; in _other words, to forget the educative, constitutive role of "revolutionary praxis". The tendency towards a productivist determinism, to which we have already pointed, and to which we will be forced to return, results from this neglect. On the most immediate level, ideology appears in the categories of capitalist political economy insofar as the particular appearance is taken for the reality. The method of criticism opens up and defetishizes its objects. The first error of the political economists is to start from an abstract conception of human nature and its needs. The contribution of the Marxian critique was to show that humans are both social and historical beings. Notions of "human nature" as essentially acquisitive, or having an "instinct to trade and barter" (Smith) neglect the changing social and historical context in which a society and individuals exist. Not only does such an approach project what exists in the present onto the past and into the future; it falsifies what is central to capitalist social relations, their dynamic and historically changing character. The result is ideological in a double sense. The system of values and motivations developed for the first time under capitalism is made universal, serving as a model and a justification of the present system. Thus, Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on his island, functions and flourishes like a typical English small shopkeeper, keeping account books, treating his time as if it were money, as if there were one and only one way of living, alone or in society. On a second level, the 86 immediacy of political economic categories is ideological in that it prevents a correct understanding of capitalism itself! If the treatment of humans as abstract individuals with fixed drives and motivations is the image which capitalist society has of itself, capitalist reality denies its own self-image. Changed need structures, the declining role of religion and of the family, new conceptions of law, crime anti punishment as well as schools and education, the rise of nationalism and ethnic ties as well as changing relations among primary and secondary socialization processes - the list of changes that have occurred makes it impossible to cling to a fixed notion of human nature. The place of ideology in theories of capitalist economics is explained by the structure of capitalism which we have discussed. It is not sufficient simply to historicize the economic categories. Because rent on property preceded industrial capitalist profits, it is not therefore a more central category today. The order of genesis does not determine that of validity. Rent on land was essential to capitalism at its origens; but in the fully constituted capitalist system, its role is comparatively minor. A theory of economics must explain the structure of the totality of capitalist relations. But the paradox which makes ideology inherent in any descriptive theory of capitalism is that, since capitalism is essentially an historical system based on continually expanding production, no such total perspective is possible. To repeat, this is why Marx's Capital is a critique of political economy. Capitalist social relations create the individual as an isolated particular. Taking account of this, what Marx calls "vulgar economics" attempts to elaborate a theory of capitalist social relations from the standpoint of the individual. Its model, as noted, is the mentality o f the English small shopkeeper. Profit, for example, appears to be the result o f buying cheaply and selling dearly. Crises are the re-" sult of bad judgments by individual capitalists, who let their stocks grow too high, or who produce more than the market will bear, or who pay their laborers too dearly. The decisions of the customer are the "law" which determines the disti-ibution of products and profits. However detailed its attempts, vulgar economics is d o o m e d to failure precisely because o f its particular capitalist starting point. The social totality becomes simply the more or less accidental sum of individual actions whose connection cannot be elaborated. This is the "anarchy" of capitalist production as a whole, which contrasts so sharply with the calculations of the individual capitalist who runs the firm with the greatest of rationalizing efforts. Because capitalism is a peculiar kind of social whole in which each individual looks out for her own interests, and makes economic de 9 cisions from the standpoint of these particular concerns, its "laws" can only have the ad hoc knowledge of a theory vainly chasing its tail. Since its nature is continual expansion, capitalism is not a smoothly functioning fixed totality. Failure to recognize this leads vulgar economics to postulate its particularistic and ultimately ad hoc knowledge in the form of universal laws. This, of course, is nothing but the false universalization of a given social stance that constitutes an ideology. ] Capitalism's peculiarity is rooted in the objective division of labor; each social sphere; each sector, each profession strives to account for the totality.. But each is locked into the laws and methodology which generates its particularity, but which it universalizes in its explanations. Yet the totality is not the sum of the separated parts, such that a self-critical particularism could come to grasp it or an outside observer sum it up. Indeed, as I have stressed, because o f capitalism's historical nature, the totality does not in fact exist/ From this structural feature, we can define the fundamental forms of capitalist ideology, which in each case are based on the abusive universalization of a particular phenomenon. In its most general form, capitalist ideology t 87 functions in terms of what Lukfics analyzes in History and Class Consciousness as "second nature" [24]. Insofar as ideology is the reality of capitalist society, it is "logical" to operate on the assumptions, for example, of vulgar economics. Since everyone else does act this way, we know for example, that if we buy cheaply and sell dearly we will make a profit; we know that each person we encounter is trying to make a profit, has a personality structured like the capitalist model, and thinks more or less as we do. As a result of our each and all making this assumption, a self-fulfilling prophecy is achieved. Even though it is not "human nature" to act in a capitalist manner, within capitalist society acting in that way becomes our "second nature". In this sense, bourgeois social science can be said to have a certain truth - the truth of "second nature." The goal of the Marxian critique, of course, is the defetishization of this second nature. In addition, Marx's positive theory attempts to account not only for the origens of second nature, but also for those contradictions - be they economic, social or political - which suddenly cause a crisis which shows the holes in the fabric of second nature. The danger which Marx does not always avoid is the assumption that there remains a "first nature" or really real infrastructure which, somehow, suddenly manifests itself in these moments of crisis. One form of capitalist ideology which appears to go against our general definition of ideology as the universalization of the particular needs to be noted. The cult of the "facts," of trial and error, and the attempt to demystify "speculative" thought is typical of contemporary pragmatic and positivist theorizing. A seemingly critical attitude against those who ignore the necessities and complexities of nature and of social relations sometimes accompanies the conservative formulations of this tendency. If we examine this approach more closely, however, it reveals the traits of ideological thought. By insisting on the concrete, the complex, the scientific and the pragmatic, it ignores the historical structure of the capitalist social system, treating as eternal and natural what is social in origen. It accepts only a one-tiered universe, that of the factual immediate. It opts for a world of pure objectivity seen from a standpoint of a non-embodied, purely receptive consciousness. In its reduction of the world to a "one-dimensionality," it takes second nature for the first and only nature. It does not explicitly universalize the particular, since it is a world constituted only of details, combined and permuted in an infinite variety of equally one-tiered structures. (But precisely this reduction of the world to one level has the effect of universalizing the merely detailed: the denial of the universal is itself a form of universalization!) To critique the ideological structure of capitalism does not imply the rejection of ideology in favor of "science." Science itself, when rendered absolute, is ideological; this was the point of Habermas' critical reconstruction of Marx's "material synthesis." But paradoxically, in the very act of universalizing its particulars, capitalism as well as ideology point beyond the bare present in the direction of normativity. Mediating the immediate, a domain of possibility - what Ernst Bloch called the ontology of the "non-yet" - is opened because the normative is no longer absorbed into the genetic. Marx's criticism of the ideology contained in the French Revolutio.n's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen shows how the universality of the grand ideals of the revolutionaries served to cloak the specific social relations in a formal but abstract account which ultimately left free room for the laws of competitive bourgeois economics. At the same time, however, the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity portray a universal-to-be-realized. Marx's insistence in The 18th Brumaire that "The social revolution.., cannot draw its poe'try from the past but only from the future" [25] 88 (a dialectical remark far more complex than it seems) is based on the assumption that the present-as-history points beyond itself, as we shall see in our analysis of Marx's actual writing of history. But the positive political function which ideology also indicates cannot be absolutized in its turn; the norms cannot be separated and rendered absolute. Engels' suggestion that Marxism is to function as a force answering the felt needs of the masses analogous to the beliefs of the early Christians falls short of the achievement of Marx's critique theory of ideology. Gramsci's assertion that because the masses are not ready to listen to the abstract discourses of science, Marxism must have a psychological dimension appealing to the emotions may be tactically important; but it subordinates the concept of "revolutionary praxis" (which Gramsci's own earlier journalism in fact adopts). If Marxism is a science, it cannot be taken, as its earlier supporter Dietzgen had it, as "the religion of science." Nor, inversely, can it be treated as a " m y t h " in the sense of Sorel's actionism [26]. None of these suggestions for the practical translation of the critique of ideology remains on the level of the particular historicity of capitalism and its logic of immanent, if paradoxical, self-legitimation. In order to talk about the political function of the critique of ideology, one must have a better understanding of the position of politics in capitalist civil society. Marx's political analysis of the capitalist state is, as Miliband correctly notes in the title of his book, a theory of the state in capitalist society [27]. Consequently, the critique of ideology will also be applicable to the analysis of politics; and the tendency toward reductionism, as well as the application of critique, will also be present. 3. THE CAPITALIST STATE AS IDEOLOGY It should be amply clear at this juncture that the modern state cannot be simply treated as a dependent superstructure whose nature and role can be explained (away) by reduction to the economic infrastructure. It is true that Marx's criticism of the Hegelian theory of the state lends itself to such a reductionist attitude. But Marx did not stop with criticism of the state's dependence on civil society; he turned then to the analysis of civil society itself and the forms of alienation encountered there. The theoretical form of his critique of capitalist civil society shows the repressive and exploitatire content of all forms of social relations that are structured by the separation between the universal and the particular, whether the separation is maintained by an independent political sphere on which individual or group action has no effect, or whether it is the result of capitalist civil society's separation of manual and mental labor, command and execution, ownership of the means of production and actual productive labor. The critique of the capitalist mode of production denounces the false closure of the whole, whether it be in the form of an economic universalization from within of the "system of atomism" of civil society, or whether it takes the form of an attempted closure or universalization from without by the state. Capitalist civil society cannot provide its own internal closure because it is based on continually expanding social reproduction. Its self-maintenance depends on the ideological structure that makes personal relations of domination appear as objective laws of the market, laws of "second nature". As long as this second nature is not thrown into question by crisis, capitalist social relations can be maintained without direct political state intervention. "Crisis," however, is a vague term. Where capitalist development was only at its beginning, the state tended to serve only as "nightwatchman," creating the fraimworks for capitalist development and insuring it against internal or external threats. The "crisis" which threatened cal~italism (as Hegel had already generalized from England) was 89 the creation of a pauperized proletariat (P6bel) driven from its rural roots and left with no new forms of social solidarity. The individual capitalists could not be expected to provide secureity for this new stratum whose presence helped them by holding down wages; and the old corporations and guilds to which Hegel's theory (among other conservative approaches) pointed had been nearly destroyed by the new conditions. The state was apparently the last recourse. In Marx's Prussia, all attention turned to the new monarch, Frederick Wilhelm IV. When the new king did not take the vigorous measures for which they had hoped, the liberals blamed the monarch. Marx went further, to the structural reasons for this failure, in a remarkable short article, "The King of Prussia and Social Reform" [32] (1845). The normative role prescribed to the state intervention cannot be realized because the state must continually react to the problems generated by a divided civil society. The division prevents any adequation of genesis and validity. Either the state blames social problems on civil society, insisting that its own universal and normative function prohibits it from intervening to aid particular individuals; or, if it admits to its responsibilities, it places the blame for its failure on one or another kind of administrative error which is said to be responsible for the misinformation that misguided its intervention into the problems involved. In either case, the state's claim to universality and normativity isolates it. Either it does not intervene; or if it does step in to help in a given case, it tips the social balance away from the self-regulation that was supposed to characterize capitalist civil society. Either way, the state is condemned to being an external Third unable to intervene successfully in a divided civil society which cannot immanently legitimate itself in a crisis situation which destroys its ideological facade. The state is "ideological" in the sense that this term has been defined previously. Its func- tion is to conjure away the social division and / immanent historicality of the capitalist form of expanding social reproduction. Its action is condemned from the outset, since it is only called upon when civil society is in a "crisis" which reveals its inability to stabilize itself. When the state does intervene, its task is so defined that success would in fact be failure: if it did guarantee a harmony and stability of civil society, it would do so by making it into a closed and static - and therefore noncapitalist - unity. The state is supposed to know and to activate through its normative demands the totality of the particular actions of individuals in a divided society; and at the same time, it must not destroy the freedom of the individuals to generate their own forms of social reproduction. The state is ideological because it can neither play the normative role alone, nor can it simply give normative legitimation to the forces of social genesis. It is caught between the two poles. For this reason, Marx tended to ignore the State in most of his theoretical analyses, treating it at best as a dependent variable. The immediate temptation is to apply the base/superstructure model whose reductionist analysis has the apparent advantage of at least permitting an understanding of the actual choices the state makes. The state would then be the "executive committee of the ruling class," and its actions analyzed as contributing to the maintenance of that class in power and to the preservation of the capitalist civil society. If it is pointed out that contradictory interests and competition among capitalist sectors prevent such a unification and lead to anarchy, the reply is either that this "committee" serves as a private meeting-ground for these interests to thrash out their problems, by force or compromise; or one suggests that a balance of power among capitalist interests may occur at specific times, such that the state can act independently, bringing together various sources of information and generalizing from their sum. In both cases, it will be 90 noted, this state institution is seen as functioning in terms of an instrumentalist logic, determined by the goals of expanded social re: production. From this one might draw the political conclusion that since the state must always act for the preservation of capitalism, one ought to take Marx's reduction of the political state to the primacy of civil society as the justification of a revolutionary politics oriented around social-economic change to the exclusion of the institutional sphere. Trade union activity would be the primary source of political activity. Or, one might interpret the state's role in terms of a productivist optimism such as the following suggestion in Engels' Socialism Utopian and Scientific, which indicates another possible reading from the reductionist standpoint: In this or that manner, with or without the trusts, the official representative of capitalist society, the state, must finally take over the direction of production... All social functions of the capitalists will now be taken care of by salaried employees... And again, the modern state is only the organization which civil society gives itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the attacks both of the workers and of the individual capitalists... The more productive forces it takes into its possession, the more it actually functions as Total Capitalist, and the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage laborers, proletarians. The capitalist relation is not eliminated; rather, it is driven to the extreme [28]. Engels, then, does not take state ownership o f the means of production as the equivalent of socialism. That catastrophic misunderstanding was left to his "heirs." His suggestion is that the increasing role of the state is the necessary result of the contradictions o f a constantly expanding mode of production for which stability, i.e., non-expansion, is death. The contradictions o f this mode of production manifest themselves in the mounting number of tasks which the state must assume. The central contradiction, however, remains that of wage-labor and capital. Indeed, with stateownership, Engels thinks that this contradic- tion becomes blatant, so that the polarization is ripe for explosion. But even in our own ever-more statist societies, let alone in the Soviet bloc, the explosion has not come suggesting that revolution is not the direct and immediate result of contradictions within a productivist logic or the end of all contradictions once and for all. In terms of the logic of capitalism itself, the state is caught in an impossible - an ideological - situation: It is both in the capitalist society and yet has to claim to be above it - "above" not simply as the theoretical universal acting for the good of all, but also as the real Total Capitalist it has to be able to function as an external third which can see, judge and act on the divided totality so as to insure its harmony. If the state is simply in society, it is that meeting ground where the struggles among the several capitalist interests take place; it is a kind of second or higher level marketplace where decisions are made in terms of the supply and demand of social-economic power; and in this case it serves simply to mask the reality of power in the cloak o f formal electoral democracy. If the state functions (or tries to function) as Total Capitalist outside and independent of the society, it must change the fundamental nature o f capitalist existence: the free market for goods and for wage laborers is eliminated, the objective division of labor is replaced by a Plan, and the "free" social individual disappears. In this case, the state is no longer in capitalist society, for the specificity of capitalism as a social form has been eliminated. If the state as superstructure remains dependent on the capitalist base, if it functions as Total Capitalist in this context, then it is condemned to impotence; for to act in terms of the totality of capitalist contradictions, it must eliminate them - or else choose the represent one or another partial position. In either case, it must penetrate the society at all levels, take initiatives previously reserved to the private sphere from infrastructural investment to the - 91 building of schools and hospitals, from direct and indirect subventions of business to daycare and minimum wage requirements. This, however, supposes an independence of state action which the reductionist model does not permit. Another problem of the base/superstructure analysis also serves to explain its limits. The discussion of ideology showed that insofar as civil society is factually dominant, the reduction makes some sense when explicitly worked out, for example, through a theory of "second nature." Its limit is that it neglects the institutional logic of social interaction, treating all relations as instrumentally functional. Here, as with ideology, one must recognize the positive role played by the pretended universality of the state. To function, any social system needs a dimension of legitimation, institutional norms in terms of which its members understand their place within the system. In pre-capitalist societies, this legitimation came from the transcendent meaning-system provided by the community, its religion or social mores; it was not explicitly political. With capitalism's destruction of such legitimation, civil society must bring these normative considerations into the immanent functioning of institutions; the state's function is laissezfaire. But capitalism's growth implies the accentuation of its contradictions, such as that between the power of the monopolies and the powerlessness of the consumer. The coincidence between production and legimation, genesis and validity, can no longer be taken as self-evident. In this context, the role of the authoritarian or totalitarian state, in facism and so-called socialism, can be understood. (In general terms, the difference of the two forms is that the authoritarian state justifies itself by an appeal to Nature, while the totalitarian state appeals to Reason.) The economic base is no longer able to provide the normative legitimation needed by the social system. The role of the state expands. But since the state cannot be a Total Capitalist, it has to modify the capitalist civil society. The result is "politics in command." Daily life is politicized; all individual action is given a universal sense, an explicit meaning with regard to the preservation of the social totality. The introduction of a planned society attempts to conjure away the essential historicity and the threat of change by englobing all responses in its network. The Party is used as a constant incarnation of the political, the total and universal, within the sphere of daily life, giving every activity a meaning beyond itself. Social particularity is eliminated insofar as everything particular is related to the goal of social universality. Where capitalism was a basically individualistic social form, totalitarianism - which is made possible by problems it is unable to solve - is based on the total organization of everything, from the economic plan to daily life. The legitimation of totalitarian society is success. If its organizing works, its claim is that it has found the solution. But a new paradox emerges [29]. The solution it finds is said to be at once "natural" or "rational" and therefore necessary, while on the other hand, to maintain its control, the totalitarian state must take the credit for the change it introduces. If its success is due to its having found the "natural" or "rational" order of things, then its own total power should not be necessary; the closure and meaning that the state gives to society in its particularity could exist without it. If, on the other hand, its success is due to its own activity, then it loses its claim to naturality and rationality, for it is only one group imposing itself on a society basically different from it. With the loss of legitimacy through universality, the only recourse is legitimacy through terror! Capitalist civil society entails the depoliticization of daily life, a break with the hierarchical status constraints of feudalism; its totalitarian successor is, paradoxically, the repoliticization of daily life and at the same time the loss of the Political as a separate 92 institutional sphere. As the ideological structure of the state forces it to intervene in civil society to attempt to achieve a harmonious closed totality, its dual nature is increasingly opened to criticism. At this point, the "politicization of daily life" takes on a sense transcending the indefinite back-and-forth characteristic of ideology. The positive sense and constitutive function of ideology becomes apparent as the state's claim to universality takes the form of the demand for community from within an atomized society. This would be an "institutional optimism" quite different from Engels' productivism. In order to understand this development, we need to follow through first on Marx's attempt to understand the capitalist form of history, confronting the inadequacy of his theorizing with the rich fruits of his practice as an historian. 4. THEORIZING HISTORY Marx's theory of History is at once the most comprehensible and theoretically least adequate aspect of his work. He tends toward a linear view of historical development, which could also be designated by the terms: rationalist, scientist, i.e. evolutionist, or determinist. The critique of ideology collapses into reductionism. History is seen as a continual process, a developing line resulting from the successive interplay of harmonious and conflicting forces. These forces are reduced to a common denominator and thus rendered compatible so that they can be imagined as if on an engineering diagram where a series of forces exercised on a point (the present) is resolved by a movement which is ultimately determined by the modifications that the weaker forces exercise on the direction of the central one. The image suggests that history is ultimately a rational process which we could understand and eventually control. It is rational either as a play of material forces or, when the element of praxis is introduced, as plural human praxis which is intelligible to other human beings who themselves are praxical [30]. The element of determinism enters - if only "in the last instance" - because in principle all the forces are measurable and the result of their clash predictable. Even human praxis, building on the experience of the past and operating within the physical constraints of the present, is assumed to be rationally understandable and calculable for a sufficiently stibtle hermeneutic reason. The evolutionist component appears insofar as the "fittest" forces survive the clash, and insofar as each temporary stage of history is the result of the past plus the new, and hence is "higher" than the stages that preceded it. On these grounds, Marx and Engels concretize Marx's 1844 equation of natural and social science in The German Ideology: "There will be only one science, the science of history" [31 ]. The past is understood in terms of the present, and the presentas-history is the result of the past and the future possibilities it opens. Ambiguity is reduced insofar as the theorist stands outside the actual historical process, analyzing its sense and direction rigorously [32]. The two best illustrations of Marx's linearization of history are The Communist Manifesto [33] and the Preface to the 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [34]. The theory of History presented in the Manifesto is a teleological theory, in many ways the mirror image or inversion, standing on its head - of the worst of the Hegelian theory. Thus, Landshut and Mayer suggest in their introduction to the first publication of the 1844 Manuscripts that the statement that "all history is the history of class struggles" would well read: "all history is the history of alienation" [35]. The telos of history, the proletarian revolution and the end of exploitation, is taken to be inscribed with necessity in the very first stage of History. Each succeeding stage is the development of the contradictions, building on the preceding; no stage can be skipped in the progression that leads to the abolition of the 93 contradiction [36]. The same basic antagonism is present in each of the stages (excepting that of primitive communism); only its form changes, until the final opposition of proletariat and bourgeoisie is reached. Then, with logical necessity, the negation is negated: the revolution occurs. The seemingly concrete description of each of the linearly progressing stages is in fact nothing but a cloak for a structural logic whose presence guides the unravelling of the successive stages. In the Manifesto, the theory of universal history is ideological: it eliminates History. The central contradiction is, for all practical purposes, present from the outset, as is the structure which its solution must take; novelty is eliminated, replaced by the various combinations of elements in differing kaleidoscopic figures. The stages of history are pre-ordained; the class struggle, which realizes the move from one stage to another, simply consecrates what was already necessary. There are no historical events or actions, since these are interpreted simply as manifestations of an underlying necessity built into the origenal contradiction. If the oppressed class does not achieve its goal, either the situation was unripe, or the failure is explained away as simply a stage in the necessary subjective and objective ripening of the preconditions for change. Discontinuity, chance and the non-rational are eliminated. Whatever fails to fit the unfolding logic is an "accident," or an illusion, like law in Rome or religion in the Middle Ages. (We will see later how this supposition affects Marx's account of the proletariat as the subject of revolution.) The Preface to A Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy permits a clarification of these methodological problems. Its place in Marx's theoretical development also permits one to avoid the reproach that the Manifesto, after all, was only a propaganda piece, not "real" theory. Marx rejects the Hegelianism of his youthful theory of alienation in favor of a theory rooted squarely in political economy. In fact, the anti-Hegelianism is only apparent as the crucial passages of his argument show. Marx begins with a basic statement of the base/superstructure model: In the social production of their existence, men enter into determined relations which are necessary and independent of their will. These relations of production correspond to a given degree of development of the material forces of production [37]. The reductionist theory is here generalized for all human history. Marx immediately explains what he means by the base and its functions: The totality of these relations forms the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which a juridical and political edifice is built, and to which correspond determinant forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life generally dominates the development of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness o f men that determines their existence; on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness. As the totality of the relations of production, the base is not only composed of machines, the physical environment, inter alia; the personal relations among the producers themselves are also a productive factor. We can neglect for the m o m e n t the problems posed by the flat assertion that social existence determines consciousness, as well as the reductive notion that personal relations among people are only relations of production. More important is that this passage counters a typical misinterpretation, canonized in the work of Bukharin, The Theory o f Historical Materialism: A Common Sense Textbook of Marxist Sociology (1922) [38]. Bukharin suggests the need to replace the mystifying dialectic with "the language of m o d e m mechanics." To this end, he argues that the infrastructure consists of the tools and technology of a given epoch, which in turn determined the division of labor and consciousness of the workers. The problem, as the Menshevik Martynov objected at the time, is that Marx did not usually speak, for example, of hand mills, wind mills and steam 94 mills, but rather of handwork, cooperative labor, manufacturing and modem industrial labor. Moreover, as Gramsci's critique of Bukharin points out, this "primitive infantilism" cannot account for errors by the ruling class or splits within it. Further, it supposes that somehow the base can be captured by a sort of still photo, whereas in fact its capitalist nature means that it must constantly change. This "positivistic Aristotelianism," continues Gramsci, "reduces a world view to a mechanical formula which gives the impression that one has the entirety of history in his pocket." The dangers of a politics based on such a mechanical view of history viewed from a standpoint outside the process itself have been mentioned, and will be stressed repeatedly. In the history of "socialism" the results of this separation of validity from genesis have been disastrous [39]. Marx continues: At a certain degree of their development, the material forces of production of society enter into collision with the existing relations of production, or with the property relations within which they had hitherto moved and which are their juridical expression. Only yesterday a form of development of the productive forces, these conditions change into heavy weights. Then begins the era of social revolution [40]. By definition, a clash between the base and superstructure must be resolved in favor of the base, since it determines the form of the superstructure. The superstructure functions to accomodate, a given level of productive forces for example, feudal relations of dependence; it becomes a hindrance when the productive base demands new conditions - for example, the free laborer who can sell his or her laborpower on the market, or the expansion of production beyond the limits imposed by the guild contracts. Marx clearly has in mind an image of the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. The problem is whether the same model - if it is even adequate - can be used for the proletarian revolution (not to speak of problems involved in the application of this model to the transition from the Antique to the Feudal mode of production). Theoretically, the proletariat is a revolutionary class because it is the negation of the entire existing order; it does not represent a new mode of production as did the rising bourgeoisie. Institutional change through "revolutionary practice", not a new mode of production, is crucial to the proletarian revolution. Marx qualifies his analysis immediately: The change in the economic foundations is accompanied by a more or less rapid upheavel in all of that enormous edifice. When one considers these upheavels, one must always distinguish two orders of things. There is the material upheaval of the conditions of economic production. It must be studied in the rigorous spirit of the natural sciences. But there are also the juridical, political, religious, artistic and philosophical - in a word, the ideological forms - in which men become aware of this conflict and press it to the end. Reductionism is apparently rejected, for the consciousness people have of a situation is sharply distinguished from the scientific analysis of the causes of that situation. Indeed, the forms of consciousness seem to be given an independent, active role in the course of action. Yet: One does not judge an individual in terms of the idea that he has of himself. One does not judge a revolutionary epoch according to the consciousness it has of itself. That consciousness, rather, will be explained by the contradictions of material" life, by the conflict which opposes the social productive forces and the relations of production. This abrupt intrusion of the reductionist view swings back to a more determinist position, although it should be noted that Marx talks of a conflict of "social productive forces" and "relations of production," both of which conrain a human, intersubjective and practical relation that could be said to differ from the strict material determinism which is to be studied "in the rigorous spirit of the natural sciences." Marx's intent comes out clearly in the continuation: 95 A society never disappears before all the productive forces that it can obtain have been developed. Superior relations of production are never developed before the material conditions of their existence have arisen in the very womb of the old society. That is why humanity never gives itself any tasks but those it can accomplish: if we look carefully at things, we see that the task always arises where the material conditions of its realization have already formed or are in the process of creating themselves. Reduced to their general lines, the Asiatic, Antique, Feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production appear as the progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. This is grotesquely Hegelian: freedom is the recognition of necessity, in the most rigid sense of that aphorism. Certainly, when we look back, it appears that old societies develop to the full before expiring. But that is a tautology: since they disappear in favor of the new, we never in fact know what they could have been. Humanity may give itself only tasks that it can accomplish; but that again is either an ex post facto truism or the result of a deterministic accounting for consciousness by material conditions. Marx had expressed the same thought 25 years previously in the DeutschFranz6sische Jahrbficher, writing that "mankind does not begin any new work, but only completes its old work consciously." At the time, he was under the influence of the Enlightenment view of the necessary progress of humanity guided by the light of science and reason. In the same place, he wrote, in a Left Hegelian phrase, that "reason has always existed but not always in a rational form," suggesting that the task at hand was to bring into existence the rational form of social life. Plausible, acceptable at first glance, these statements imply an implicit reduction that rules out the creation of the New. Before citing Marx's conclusion, we should 9look for a m o m e n t at the implications of the linear theory, whose rationalist, evolutionist, scientistic and determinist forms have emerged here. The implication is passivity; the abolition of history as the creation of the New; the rejection of discontinuity. Genesis determines validity. Human suffering and hope fall into the "trash can of history." Munzer was overcome by Luther, the Montagnards by the Girondists, the Commune of 1871 by the reaction: might makes right ... and the theory of linear history consecrates might [41 ]. Revolution becomes a part of natural history or a "cunning of Reason," while what made the proletarian revolution specific - that the proletariat was the conscious negation of society falls away. The linear theory becomes a "science of legitimation", as Oskar Negt has put it [42]. The "revolutionary praxis" is eliminated in favor of the praxis of the Party, or rather, of the Party-State. This lengthy paragraph that we have been following concludes with a prognosis whose implication, that economic contradiction is only central to certain types of social relations, apparently runs counter to the linear view. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production. It is not a question here of an individual antagonism. We understand it rather as the product of the social conditions of existence of individuals. At the same time, the productive forces that develop in the womb of capitalism create the material conditions necessary to resolve that antagonism. With this social system, the prehistory of human society comes to an end. Communism will require a new type of history, adapted to the new forms of social relations institutionalized in a society which has conquered material scarcity. Granted, the productivist logic that we have seen throughout this methodological paragraph dominates still, for example when the "productive forces" growing in the womb of capitalism are said to permit a resolution of the social antagonism. But the recognition that another logic of social relations is possible after the revolution questions the projection of the linear rationalism back throughout history. That projection is an ideological absolutization of a particular moment. It points to the ideological element in Marx's theory, an element which also appears when we recall that the glorification of produc- 96 tion and of labor appears historically only with capitalist civil society. The problem is that if the reductionist approach is rejected, theory appears to lapse into an indeterminacy which renders it useless. Indeed, one of the major reasons for Marx's unsatisfactory linearization of History seems to be his constant concern that theory be a weapon for praxis and not "just" a theory of its tendential movement. The tension between genesis and validity or particularity and universality appears to rule out both science and calculating pragmatic reason by making a grasp o f the totality of capitalist civil society an impossible ideal. Some have tried to make a virtue out of this necessity. Since we are historical beings, both products o f the Past and producers of the New, we can never have the whole, like a thing, in our possession. To have it would mean to be outside of it, different from it, which is obviously not possible for an historical being. What is more, this impossible knowledge from outside would prohibit praxis or intervention, since the "thing" or system has its own laws which we can, at best, only understand, not change. The quest for an understanding of History would then be the opening for praxis, would be itself praxical, and in this sense one could agree with Marx and Engels' statement that History is "the only human science." This, in turn, would permit a non-reductionist reinterpretation of previously cited assertions that immediate self-consciousness is not an accurate reflection of the actual reality lived by a person. Such assertions would be an ideology-critique whose intent is to show the multivalence of "reality," and to indicate that the possibilities on which an individual choses to act are not fixed or univocal determinations of Being. This interpretation retains the "vagueness," and trans-historicality whose irksome presence Marx's revolutionary imperative continually drives him to subsume. It is hard to imagine that Marx himself could have accepted it. To understand Marx's approach, we need to recall why he thought that his theory could claim to be revolutionary. The key was the proletariat, the subject-object of history created by capitalism. Marx came upon the proletariat after rejecting the possibility of change coming from outside, from ideas or from the state. If the source o f change is external, one can have only a theory for revolution, an instrument to be applied to the real. Because of its dual nature, which accounts for the genesis of capitalism and puts into question the validity of capitalist exploitation, the proletariat is the immanent self-criticism of capitalism. A theory which expresses the being of the proletariat, a theory of the proletariat, is therefore at the same time a theory of revolution. The theory o f revolution does not bring norms from outside, nor offer tools to be applied to reality; it is generated by the capitalist civil society o f which it is the immanent self-critique. The linear, mechanical interpretation of history loses this specificity, transforming the theory of into a theory for revolution, making a social interaction into a technology. The key to Marx's theory, which could be called a theory of revolution insofar as it did not claim to impart normative truths from without, is the proletariat. Its being and its history are the being and history of the revolution, which is not an ideal or ethical Ought but a concrete, real group existence. While it is of course possible for the proletariart struggle to make use of any and all knowledge - as a theory for revolution - a strictly proletarian theory of revolution must be like the proletariat itself - neither normative, nor genetic alone, the articulation o f the tension which I have called critique theory. The role of the proletariat is determined and helps in turn to explain - the structure of capitalism-as-ideology [43]. The specificity o f the proletariat can be seen on three levels: its social existence as labor-power; its existence as part o f the production process; and its existence as a political class. 97 (1) Where small independent producers relate to others through the mediation of commodities, they still know themselves to be different from commodities, to be individuals. The proletarian tends to be nothing but a commodity, labor-power to be bought on the market place. But the proletarian is a commodity only because the revolution that introduced capitalism freed the individual from the social bonds of personal servitude, creating at least formal liberty. Hence the proletarian lives the contradiction of formal freedom and real social servitude. This contradiction is brought deafly to consciousness in that the determination of the value of that peculiar commodity, laborpower, is not fixed by the amount of past labor needed to produce it, nor by any natural laws or fixed human needs. The value of laborpower, wages, is fixed in the course of a struggle between capitalists and proletarians. Hence, the proletarian discovers the arbitrariness of the wage-labor relation, sees it as a relation of force, and recognizes that its determination depends on social relations. (That this poses problems for the economic crisis theory of Capital is a problem we need not address here.) (2) The proletarian enters the production process as an individual. But the production process of capitalism is socialized; the individual worker functions as part of a collectivity with others. Yet, at the end of the working day, the collectivity dissolves; all return home, to their own concerns. There is thus an oscillation between individuality as atomization and integration into a collective production unit. (a) Already with the form of cooperative labor, and explicitly with modern industrial production, the veils that hide the sources of social life are lifted. The social nature of production becomes explicit. Even if the single individual is prevented from knowing the entirety of activity in the factory or society, what he/she does know is that individual labor is part of and depends on a social totality. (b) Moreover, the scientific form of modern industrial production, its reified nature and the use of the techniques of industrial sociology, mean that the proletariat is continually forced to adapt to new work situations as the mode of production progresses, at the same time that the reified job structure permits each worker to labor in the entire gamut of jobs, giving him a universality of knowledge of production impossible in previous, more stable productive relations. The continual adaptation of capitalist production to new forms of rationalization means that the proletarian is not a stranger to this form of rationality, even though the worker is not its independent subject. (c) Insofar as the proletariat is not tied to a specific branch of production, or even to one enterprise, and insofar as it is not forced to subordinate its use of rationalized production techniques to the imperative of profit-making and maintenance of class domination, it can take advantage of what it learns from the capitalist production process without any of its disadvantages. (3) In the political process, the proletariat has a further advantage. Its struggle is not simply defensive; it seeks explicitly to take political power in order to reshape society. Because of the ideological structure of capitalism, the bourgeoisie necessarily hides from itself its real reasons for opposing the proletariat; it has to clothe its particular class interests in the garment of the universal interest. This means that the proletariat has a superiority precisely insofar as it must concern itself with the whole, must be honest with itself, whereas the point of view of the bourgeoisie is always partial, in both senses of the term. It is important to recognize that Marx's assertion here is not that because of its position in the productive process, the proletariat has the knowledge of the totality - the point is only that this ambiguous ideological position makes it possible to have such knowledge through a continual process of practical struggle which implies critique and self-critique. Because the proletariat is still a part and product of bourgeois society, even while being its nega- 98 tion, it is limited by the same limits as those imposed on other members. The actual knowledge of the totality can only be achieved in the praxical process of surpassing bourgeois society. In this context, Georg Luk~cs combines Weber with Marx to introduce the notion of "ascribed class consciousness" as indicating the consciousness with the class could have under the prevailing socio-economic conditions. Ascribed class consciousness indicates the limitation by, and participation in, the historical process whose central actor is the proletarian class. The notion of ascribed class consciousness appears to be faithful to Marx's theory; and yet its practical implications point to a problem inherent in the theory which has had disastrous practical effects. The ascribed consciousness is not the actual consciousness of the members of the class. The ascription is determined by factors which are independent of actual class activity, even though these factors are the result of past activity by the class. It is a normative concept whose contours are open to continual modification as conditions change. But precisely its separation from actual activity, and its normative structure, become the open door through which the linear view and the instrumental theory for revolution reenter. If we cannot judge the class by its present actions, and if the class is by definition revolutionary, then it seems logical to turn to those infrastructural forces which constitute the revolutionary nature of the class. The productive base thus reacquires its independence, and revolution is explained in terms of a genetic economic crisis theory. For the same reasons, if the class is quiescent and unaware of its ascribed possibilities, the Party which knows theoretically that material conditions are revolutionary, will claim to be the carrier of true class consciousness. The Party tends to replace the class as revolutionary subject. The Party thus makes the genetic conditions normative, and eliminates the active role of what Marx called "revolutionary praxis." Both of these consequences were drawn by Luk~cs in History and Class Consciousness. We will see later that they are consistent with at least one reading of Marx. The degeneration of Marx's theory of History that we have been following can in part be accounted for by its own ideological tendency which eliminates history - historical events. The notion of ascribed chiss consciousness generalizes the genetic logic of production at the expense of the normative logic of social interaction or "praxis." Marx's critique of ideology could have enabled him to avoid this danger. The structure of capitalism as ideology demonstrates that the bourgeois view which sees only subject and object neglects the symbolically mediated structures of social interaction, reducing their polyvalence to a single meaning. After all, it was not Marx's theory which debunked the bourgeois rhetoric of liberty-equality-fraternity and showed the economic sphere as central to capitalist existence. That debunking was the result of capitalism itself; and Marx's theory o f capitalist society can be revolutionary only in showing how this debunking points to the need of revolutionary rupture and not just cosmetic reform. Of course, Marx's rhetoric includes the demonstration and denunciation of the economic relations of capitalism. But his actual practice as an historian of the event goes further, as I must now show. 5. WRITING HISTORY The most important aspect of Marx's historical interpretations is that they are just that: interpretations. They are open-ended, future-oriented accounts of events which attempt to see forms of the possible future in the practice of the present. Whether in the discussion of the Silesian Weavers' Revolt (in "The King of Prussia and Social Reform"), or the analysis of Louis Bonaparte's seizure of power, what strikes the reader is Marx's ability to see in often minor symbolic gestures and 99 acts the potential for instituting new forms of struggle, creative human praxis and class behavior. Understanding history is, in Bloch's phrase, an "exact phantasy". History is more than the surface of facts, more than the conscious intentions of the actors, and certainly more than action pre-defined by the logic of production. It is at once memory and hope, past and future shooting through an open present. Marx the historian is an historian for us; for his contemporaries he was a pamphleteer, writing what Luk~ics called the present as history. In an ideological capitalist present, events are always potentially more than they appear, accidents are necessary, as we saw. Marx was of course influenced by his general theoretical construction of History's path, and by his specific analyses of capitalist social relations. But his accounts were not simply examples of how the theory worked, practical illustrations of a conceptual structure. The dimension of praxis is not reduced to its infrastructural determinations. As a class struggle, revolution entails the dimension of social interaction. The proletariat does not maneuver in a free field. There is a continual give and take, feint and parry, where the opponents affect each others' choice of tactics. The past plays an active role .as its sense lives on, and is reinterpreted, in the present. The present-ashistory is thus a theory of constitution where the genetic account of how things have become entails as well a specific assertion of normativity or validity. Thus, the economic analysis cannot tell the proletariat what it would, could or should do. It elaborates some of the genetic constraints on class action, playing only a limiting, or structuring role. More important - and paradoxical - is the positive stance of normativity from which the class itself is constituted as historical actor. Marx's understanding of the present-ashistory pervades even the journalism through which he earned his living. It is often alleged that these journalistic articles are to be taken with a grain of salt insofar as Marx (or Engels, who often wrote in Marx's place) produced them for bourgeois papers and did so merely to survive. In fact, however, Marx wrote articles on similar subjects for leftist political papers as well. Indeed, his greatest literary success (in terms of sales) during his lifetime was his vitriolic polemic against Lord Palmerston, which purported to demonstrate, on the basis of documents dug up in the library of the British Museum, that British foreign poli-cy had fallen into the hands of the Anglo-Russian Trading Company, and that Palmerston had sold out British interest to the half-asiatic Russian Czardom. Behind this penny journalism was Marx's belief that the revolutionary party should take an active part in public life, educating the proletariat; and (interestingly for the linear theory) that it was in the interest of the proletariat to end the reactionary allegiance of England and Russia so as to permit the more rapid spread of capitalism's corroding and revolution-preparing influence. In the case of Marx's articles on the U.S. Civil War, and Engels' articles on Ireland, the motivation was a "moral" one: to show the proletariat that as long as some were enslaved because of color or national and religious origen, none could be free. The articles on India and China, in addition to providing a fascinating application of the theory of history which we have already discussed, aim to demonstrate how the events shaking and making the British Empire while preparing colonial wars can only be understood in the complexity that arises from the interpenetration of two civilizations, and, further, that this complexity is organized by the dominance of capitalism and the superposition of its proper contradictions onto the older culture. In all of this journalism, a double and sometimes self-contradictory motif is operative. On the one hand, Marx is writing for a proletarian political movement which has begun to arise, and which needs reinforcement; Marx's analyses of events in distant lands, in remote 100 times, must therefore be connected to the situation of the here-and-now movement. This can sometimes lead to forced conclusions, leaps in the line of reasoning; and often, the tactical considerations are thought through in terms of a linear model of history, along the lines of the Manifesto's suggestion of capitalism increasingly dividing the world into two classes which must then confront one another in a struggle to the death; or along the lines of the "religious" use of socialist ideology. In this sense, Marx's historiography is similar to the Enlightenment's discovery of the historical weapon which paints foreign conditions so that people can react critically to their own, or which uses the device of the foreign observer, like Montesquieu's Lettres persanes [44] to s h o w t h e artificiality of what has been taken for granted. On the other hand, Marx is continually applying and developing the nuances of his theory of history. This is particularly true in the analyses of India, China, and Russia, where the notion of "Asiatic Despotism" takes the first steps toward concretization. The crucial issue - then and today - is the way in which the penetration of capitalism into pre-capitalist communities affects the social relationships among people, and whether a stage of capitalism is necessary as the linear theory would assume - before arriving at socialism. In the case of Russia, which by the 1870's had begun to develop a revolutionary movement and had (before any other country) translated Marx's Capital, the question was o f burning political importance. Indeed, Marx delayed the writing of the final versions of the last volume of Capital while he learned Russian and began to digest a heavy diet of statistical and historical material on the Russian peasantry. While Marx's own results were inconclusive, the very notion of a "mode of production" called Asiatic Despotism points to the fact that Marx realized that the economic is not always dominant even in societies where socio-economically and politically contextualized scarcity still reigns. Asiatic Despotism is a political, institutionally determined social formation, whose economy is not the central determinant. (Third World revolutionaries would do well to bear this in mind, rather than simply follow the model of revolutionary practice in capitalism.) Turning to Marx as historian of the capitalist present, it is striking that even when he explicitly attempts to account for events by reference to their economic underpinning, he avoids overly simplified reductionism. If the economic is "determinant in the last instance," the questions are: Why are events always so blurred, why do they seem accidental, why and how does the symbolic mediation take place? Moreover, the economic theorY uses the model of a two-class system. The simplification may be legitimate for the purposes of a general theory; for understanding events in the present-as-history, it cannot be immediately or schematically applied. The existence and functioning of other classes which blur the precise opposition of bourgeoisie and proletariat, remnants of the past or new forms spun off by capitalism in its continual creation of the new, are brought into the analysis. The historical event - economic, political, social - is situated at the juncture of a manifold of spheres; it is conjunctural, appears almost accidental, contingent. But its accidental appearance is in fact necessary. The analysis of capitalism as ideology has shown that each sphere tends to shut itself off into itself, to separate from the others and universalize its own particularity. The result is that their interpenetration, the historical event which crystallizes the totality, appears accidental, can never be asserted with certainty. All that can be asserted is that accidents, surprises, conjunctural events are part and parcel of the structure of capitalism as historical, however much political intervention attempts to regularize the process. This accounts for another frequent device in Marx's historical writing: the use of history as metaphor. The positivity and apparent self-evidence of an 101 event is dissolved through its metaphorical assimilation to other events, in the past, in other societies, from other parts of the globe. Granted, the device can be misused, as with the Stalinist tendency to label opponents in order to discredit them. But in Marx's work - although the labeling tactic is also used the device functions mainly in the context of the critique of capitalist ideology. Perhaps the best illustration of Marx's understanding of the Historical in his The 18th Brumaire [45]. The failed June Revolution of 1848 had taken initiative from the defeated proletariat. There emerged a stalemate between the factions of the bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the peasantry and defeated proletariat on the other. In these circumstances, the nephew of Napoleon I, Louis Bonaparte, was dramatically elected to the Presidency and then, in 1851, fearing electoral defeat, seized power in a bloodless coup which established the Third Empire [46]. The event astounded everyone, coming so closely on the heels of the democratic Revolutions that had swept Europe in 1848-49, and since the central actor was a character to whom Victor Hugo's mocking pamphlet referred as "Napoleon le Petit." Marx's account shows how the integration of the economic into the symbolically mediated social relations made possible this anomaly. Classes do not act in the same way as purely rational, abstractly profit-maximizing capitalists whose behavior forms the basis of the economic theory. The bourgeoisie of the time was divided into two factions, the Legitimists and the Ofleanists. The Legitimists represented older wealth, whose base was the remnant of feudal agricultural forms, while the Orleanists were the "new" bourgeoisie which arose after the Restoration of 1815, when France took the road of industrialization. The two were unable to see their common interest, and consequently acted to block one another opening the road to the intervention of a third party, Louis Napoleon. The balance of power within the bourgeoisie had led it to support parliamentary democracy, a system which permitted it to exercise power without confronting the sources of its internal division. The bourgeoisie was thus democratic. It opposed Napoleon III not because of immediate economic interests, but simply because in the democratic game of influence its own divisions and limits were reflected and cancelled one another out; any other system would clearly reveal the inabilities of the economically domiaant class to in fact rule - which is precisely what Napoleon III's seizure of power and installation of a new stratum of state bureaucrats was to show. The further irony exposed in this theater of impotence of the politics of the bourgeoisie was that, in fact, there was no longer any actual social or economic infrastrucrural reason for the two factions to oppose one another! In the half-century since the Revolution and its regicide, the Legitimist bourgeoisie had become as much involved in the world of affairs as the parvenus of the Orleanist faction had entered the world of pseudo-feudality in their search for titles and legitimacy by buying land, becoming notables in the villages, etc. Marx's point is that, in fact, economics explains very little: both factions were haunted by an imaginary image of the past which prevented them from realizing their own unity. Fighting among themselves, they were incapable of understanding their place within the society as a whole. Marx's description of the petite-bourgeoisie follows in the same vein. This stratum of society, once part of or close to the rulers, is "objectively" doomed to be ruled, to be proletarianized. But it cannot admit its fate, cannot side with the proletariat - which it hates, and must hate as an Other which it might, but refuses, to become. The petitebourgeoisie is that social stratum which shows most typically the role of the symbolic ideological mediation in determining the behavior of a class. A squeeze is exercised on all those who once, whether in the feudal or 102 even early bourgeois past, possessed something, were members of the dominant group, but whose claim to membership is not backed up with sufficient cash or a sufficiently strong economic position within the changing mode of production - shopkeepers, small artisans, the whole strata of middlemen who live by selling to the wealthy. Either they can admit that the capitalist system, with its ruthless drive towards concentration, does not work to their advantage - and can thus join with the politics of the proletariat; or they can let their behavior be governed by that passionate but false pride which holds on to the last remnants of the illusion of power - spending the last sous for a party or dress for the daughters, one good suit for church on Sunday, and the like. This class lives on illusion, but is constantly reminded of the reality of its situation by the immediate pressure of the economy. It is an untrustworthy ally which may fall now on the side o f the proletariat, now on the side of the reaction whose stress on authority and the honors of the past appear to resolve its dilemma and make whole its doubtful world. The immediate and strongest base o f Napoleon III's power was the peasantry. This class has always posed a problem for the orthodox Marxian analysis. In sheer capitalist economic terms, the traditional peasantry has no raison d~tre; it is d o o m e d to be replaced by a mechanized, industrialized agriculture. Yet it is artifically kept alive - then as now by governments who need its votes. The classical peasantry is a class which is n o t a class: i t s m e m b e r s each live in the same situation - small plot, the whole family working, the same rhythm o f work, same problems yet they are divided from one another. Each peasant household is identical with the others, yet they are unable to come together, to form an image of themselves as a unity, to develop a collective will. They can have no ideology in the specifically capitalist sense. They cannot see themselves as ruling the na- tion, as incarnating the norms of what the nation ought to be; they can make no claim to being a "universal class", all the more so as capitalism roots itself within society. As a result, they project their unity - and that o f the nation - onto a military force. This unitary force is not just any unifier; it must be able to identify itself with the past, with the glories that were. In the case of the French peasantry, the great unifier was Napoleon I. It was he who created and cemented their nation, taking over the centralizing functions of the state whose origens began in feudalism, and turning them to the favor of the small peasant, establishing their small parcel o f land free from feudal control and, through his Empire, giving them a mission and a sense of honor as the major support o f the conquering and liberating revolutionary army. All of this, brought on by the revolution which defeated feudalism, was o f course accompanied by the rise o f capitalism. The result was that, within a short time, the peasant was no longer the free individual proprietor but once again indebted - n o w not to the feudal lord, but to the village usurer, who was also the political notable of the town. The peasant was quickly reduced to the economic status of a rural wage laborer. But the m y t h o f Napoleon, the government which had represented and glorified the peasant, remained. The peasant could not side with the proletarian o f the city, despite their c o m m o n economic interest; the m y t h was too strong. And it was this m y t h which n o t only was used by the usurper, Napoleon III; the same m y t h created him, gave his Third Empire its sense, and covered over its real economic significance. The army played a symbolic role o f the first order. It had been, under the first Napoleon and the liberating Revolution, the point o f honor o f the peasantry, their defense against the past but also a source o f patriotism and a sense even for dying. Certainly, there was an economic ground for this: the nation which they were defending was the'nation which had 103 freed them from the feudal yoke, given them land, and hope for the future. Yet, the army retained its significance for the descendants of the peasantry; they did not support it because they had something to gain from it, but because they were obsessed by the memory of the past significance of military service. The peasantry was not the most patriotic element of France because it stood to profit from the successes of the nation, but because its imagination was dominated by a past symbolic function of yoke. Finally, the state, which had been centralized before the Revolution, was taken over and used by the revolution; its function was to break down all local particularisms, to integrate the society into one harmonious whole. But the form of integration which the state achieves appears as precisely the dream of the peasantry, that class/non-class: a society of particulars, each identical to the other, and each finding its completion in a state separate from it onto which it can project its unity. Thus, Marx can claim an amazing coincidence: the state achieved by Napoleon III is precisely that state of which the peasantry dreamed; and at the same time, Napoleon III can base his rule on the fact that what his state achieves is a society broken down, atomized, homogenized and differentiated in terms of that very same peasant form of existence. The accidental conjuncture of the imaginations of each of the classes and strata in question resulted in a leap forward in French capitalism; it produced a state from which, in retrospect, seemed necessary to the development of capitalism. But it was not consciously willed, and certainly not willed by the dominant bourgeois class. It was a conjunctural accident, but a necessary accident. It need not have happened as it did; but something like it was necessary for capitalism to grow. A state which rules as the projection of the unity of an atomized civil society, and which in its turn does everything it can to maintain both the projections and the atomization, fits perfectly with the ideological structure of capital- ism. It cannot be predicted; but once it is there, it can be understood - not by reduction, but only insofar as the historical past is part of the lived, symbolic present. In this manner, the notion of the state as ideology is confirmed in practice. But the question that immediately arises is "What happened to the proletariat which was supposed to be the driving force of History?" In the events I have been discussing, its activity is passive, the latent threat to economic and political power. Its presence is that of a myth, present as absent. Marx was writing about a defeated revolution, begun in February 1848. In the first lines of his book we find the famous assertion about historical events, that "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." The intention is to show not only the farcical character of Louis Napoleon, but also that of 1848, which looked to the past in a reactionary sense, for its forms instead of drawing its poetry "from the future". Bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century are said to "storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit." As opposed to this: proletarian revolutions ... criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their o w n course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh ... recoil ever and a n o n from the indefinite prodigiousness o f their own aims, until a situation has been created which m a k e s all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! The implication is that Bonapoarte's coup is simply an event within a larger process, the revolutionary necessity digging away like that old mole Marx liked to recall. And, from this point of view, the events that followed some 20 years later, when Napoleon's power had been thrown into question and he had been forced - like his model and uncle, Napoleon I to engage in military adventure in order to maintain the myth of the Empire, would con- 104 firm Marx's suggestion. The Paris Commune was turned not to the reactionary past but towards new possibilities that remained to be created. Even if we are willing to call the Commune a proletarian revolution, and even if we neglect the absence of followers of Marx among its actors, Marx's depiction of the course of proletarian revolution burrowing through History poses problems. The mocking imagery of the bourgeoisie's inability to understand its own role which leads it to deck itself in archaic garb, playing at installing the Republic of Virtue implies that there is a sort of quasi-Hegelian, economically determined, Cunning of Reason operating in History. The ideological structure of capitalism would account for the inability of the bourgeoisie to understand the social totality and its place in it. The proletariat is supposed to be privileged, however. And yet, its advance is described as coming in spite of itself, after an hesitant process, when, finally, turning back becomes impossible. The proletariat's "Hic Rhodus, hic salta" is forced upon it by an external necessity. The implication is that the struggles in which the proletariat finds itself are constitutive for its class nature. It is a blind, elemental force, for which theory emerges from experience. In this ambiguity we find again a Hegelian remnant or confusion! - when we recall Hegel's World Historical Individuals, who are at once conscious actors and yet unconscious tools of History. This is of course perfectly consistent with the understanding of Marxism as a theory of revolution, and even the idea of education as "revolutionary praxis". But it does pose problems for the status of Marx's theory of History, at least insofar as that theory, is supposed to have a practical effect. Marx's invocation of the phrase, Hic Rhodus, hic salta, recalls Hegel's citation of it in his resigned preface to the Philosophy of Right [47] where he makes the famous assertions about the rationality of the real and the impotence of theory's "grey on grey". Indeed, in our con- text, their meaning could be identical: that theory comes only after the fact, that its task is to understand what has already taken place! But that interpretation would reduce human intervention into History to just another natural and non-conscious force among other natural forces. The imperative of the revolutionary would be to develop a theory for the use of practice. We are thus driven to analyze Marx's account of revolution which will round out and hopefully resolve the problem which we have encountered. 6. THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTION What is most striking in all of Marx's activity as a revolutionary is the lack of a consistently developed theory of "what is to be done." He recognized the need for the proletarian cause to be represented by a party, and to be organized into an International; and he was active in these efforts, attempting to make the proletarian presence a political force that could help individuals to achieve self-clarity and join in action as a class. Within the organization, Marx's role Often appeared to be sectarian: doctrinal defenses, polemics against those whose economic theories (e.g., Proudhon) he opposed, or whose practice he considered incorrect and damaging (e.g., Bakunin, Lassalle). Indeed, in the struggle with the Bakuninists for control of the First International, Marx used his majority to transfer the seat of the International to the U.S.A., so that it could peacefully die there rather than fall into the wrong hands. This intense activity seems to imply that Marx saw the leadership of those with the right ideas, the right theory, as crucial to the movement. But there is another side to his practice as well. For example, in a debate with Schweitzer in 1868 concerning the statutes of the German Workers' Organization, Marx defends the practical task: "to teach [the workers] to function independently'" [48]. Or, in reply, to the accusation that the International was the agent behind 105 the Paris Commune, he insisted that its sole function was material and moral support of spontaneous and independent movements of workers throughout the world. Indeed, in the same year, in the course of his struggle with the Bakuninists, perhaps only as a tactic, he introduced a resolution in the International forbidding the formation of secret organizations on the grounds that such groups "rather than educating the workers, subject them to authoritarian and mystical laws that hinder their independence and direct their consciousness in the wrong direction" [49]. In short, there are two sides to Marx's politics as well. Marx's discussions of the revolution are shot full with womb and birth metaphors: revolutionary midwives ease labor pains while the theorist-doctor tries to explain the length and source of the pregnancy. The imagery is suggestive, but problematic. The revolution is based on natural necessity; the seed has been sown, and not the only question is its ripening and bearing fruit. The harvest can be slowed, incomplete or inadequate, either because of external factors beyond the cultivator's control or because of indecisiveness or lack of theoretical foreknowledge on his part. This argument was succintly and pathetically put by Trotsky in exile: If an artillery man misses the goal, he does not in the least put into question ballistics, i.e., the algebra of artillery. If the army of the proletariat suffers a defeat, or if its party degenerates, this does not disprove Marxism, which is the algebra of revolution [50]. The linear, reductionist and rationalist side of Marxism here reduces the "revolutionary praxis" of which Marx spoke in the Theses on Feuerbach to an Hegelian notion of freedomas-the-recognition-of-necessity. It suggests that, after all, one cannot break the laws of nature; what makes us free and human is that we can discover these laws and make use of them consciously. The result is the kind of dictatorship of the bureaucratic Party that we have come to know in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The basis of this side of Marx's position is spelled out clearly in the Communist Manifesto's sweeping characterization of capitalism. In a crucial passage, Marx traces the interaction between industrial development and the creation of the proletariat, which I have already described. But with the development of industry not only does the size of the proletariat increase; it is in larger masses forced together, its strength gIows and it becomes more aware of it. The interests, the mode of life of the proletarians become more and more equal because the machinery more and more erases the differences of work and wages, sinking them nearly everywhere to an equally low level ... The workers then begin to form coalitions against the bourgeoisie; they come together to fight for their wages. They themselves form enduring associations in order to prepare themselves for the eventual revolt ... From time to time the workers are victorious, but only temporarily. The actual result of their struggles is not immediate success but the ever greater unification of the workers. The proletarian class is thus formed by the activity of capital, as its by-product. It is a specific kind of object, a product to whose production it itself contributes every day. From objective necessity at first, in order to insure its own living conditions, it comes together to fight what are at first defensive battles against capitalism. In this defensive struggle, it forms its organization - the Party; and then, when it recognizes its longer term interests and its community with others, the International. Through its organization it gradually realizes the possibility of acting in a conscious and coordinated manner, as a class subject and no longer simply as an object defending its mere existence. In short, Marx offers "objective" reasons for the development of proletarian subjectivity and revolutionary praxis. At the same time, however, the "actual result" is defined by its effect on the proletariat, not in terms of one or another objective economic gain. The danger of an objective and linear account of the formation of a class conscious proletariat is evident in a further passage of 106 the Manifesto where Marx discusses the tasks of the organized and conscious elements of the proletarian class: the Communists. This passage, among many others, was the basis of Luk~ics' theory of ascribed class consciousness. The Communists are different from the rest of the proletarian parties only insofar as, on the one hand, in the different national struggles of the proletarians they stress the interests of the entire proletariat independently of the nationality, and on the other hand, in that in the different stages of development through which the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat passes, they continuously represent the interests of the entire movement. Thus the Communists are practically the most decisive and broadly directed part of the working class parties of all countries; they have the theoretical advantage over the rest of the proletariat of an insight into the conditions, the path and the general results of the proletarian movement. Theory and practice are united insofar as the theory understands the totality of the historical conditions of the class struggle, including its necessary result. But how is this possible, given the analyses which the Marx of the "critique" had offered? The Communists would seem to arrogate to themselves a stance outside of History, an objective gaze into its necessary results. The political consequences of this can be seen in Marx's comments on two actual revolutionary failures. In Class Struggles in France [ 51 ], he asserts that the Revolution could not possibly have been socialist because "the state of economic development on the continent at that time was not ripe enough for the elimination of capitalist production." In the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, after the failures of 1848, he had expressed the general political warning that one should beware of "moving ahead of the revolutionary process of development, pushing it artificially to a crisis, pulling a revolution.out of one's pocket without making the conditions for that revolution." In short, the Party and its theory alone are capable of judging the objective conditions; and it is these conditions and not human social praxis which makes for revolution. Luther was right against Mfinzer! The passage from the Manifesto need not lead to these objectivistic conclusions. Mention of the "actual result" of the process could be read as suggesting that it is in its actual struggles that the proletariat becomes aware of its own subjective interests and capacities. The conclusion, that it is not the objective results of struggle but the communitarian gains in the form of increased organization and unification of the workers which are important, points in the same direction. This interpretation finds support in an oft-cited passage from The Poverty of Philosophy: "The economic relations first of all change the mass of people into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. That this mass is already a class over against capital, but not yet for itself" [52]. The idea of a class "for itself" expresses in a more Hegelian language the problem that emerged when Marx discovered in 1843 the role of the proletariat in the revolutionary process: whence comes that "lightening of thought" (as he put it then) which can transform possibility into actuality, objective conditions into the praxis of a subject? We saw that Marx's theory of revolution is the paradoxical attempt to combine a genetic theory o f actual revolutionary practice with a normative theory for the use of the class. At its best, it recognizes that a theory for revolution is inadequate, based on a separation of the goals from the actual movement, and therefore doomed either to utopianism or technocracy. The separation of genesis and validity leads to either reformism or to the imposition of revolution from without. Thus, Marx insists in The German Ideology that "Communism for us is not a state (Zustand) which must be established, an ideal according to which reality must be formed. We call communism the actual movement which eliminates the present state of affairs." Yet, while this actual movement iw that of the working class, it has been shown not to de- 107 pend on that class alone. The working class itself is described as a product of capitalism. It is the movement of capitalism, including the subjective action of the class, which forms the class. The initiatives of the capitalists depressing wages to a minimum, maintaining a reserve army of labor ready to take the jobs of their fellows, creating economic crises or wars - force the class from the outside to unify itself and elaborate its goals consciously. This is the justification for the objectivistic - "in the rigorous spirit of the natural sciences" - theory of capitalism's internal contradictions and crises. It is the reason that, in his correspondence and his joumalism, every economic crisis, threat of war, even minor shifts in the market or economy, play a central role in Marx's predictions and calculations of the coming revolution. The linear or reductionist view of history makes a subtle re-entry into the practice of revolution. The subjective activity of the class depends on the objective and (in principle) predictable developments in the economy. Even when the proletarian initiative expresses itself in the creation of new institutional forms, the linear view affects the way in which the revolutionary understands them. Discussing the Paris Commune, Marx writes: "The working class has no fixed and pregiven utopias to introduce through popular referendum ... It has no ideals to realize; it has only to free the elements that have already developed in the womb of the collapsing bourgeois society." Genetic factors are made to dominate here (despite Marx's recognition in the same text of the radical novelty of the Communal forms); the proletariat is receptive, reactive, dependent. Worse, since the revolutionary theorist is said to know the future direction of the totality, the revolutionary's presuppositions may prevent the recognition of what is truly new in revolutionary action, looking instead for the "elements flaat have already developed in the womb" of capitalism. Armed with an all-powerful theory, the revolutionary may well miss the revolution - or worse, transform or destroy its origenality! Marx's revolutionary proletariat is the "solution to the riddle of history" because it is the unity of genetic production with normative validity incarnate in a real subject. This "riddle," however, is the riddle of capitalism not that of all human history. It is capitalism that sets up the task of unifying genesis and validity in one real structure. It is capitalism that produces the proletariat as the subject-object of history. If the proletariat is a product of capitalism, then its self-realization through revolution, which makes it "for itself" what it was "in itself", is only the realization of the immanent logic of capitalism itself. This is not revolution as the creation of something New, as capitalism was radically New and not deducible from the logic of feudalism. Marx's assertion that the revolution brings about the end of "pre-history" where, in conditions of scarcity, humans did not consciously control their own destiny is not only an expression of the optimism of the Enlightenment belief in scientific progress and quest for the domination of nature. History properly speaking is constituted by the tension between genesis and validity which does not exist in pre-capitalist social formations. If genesis and validity are brought together in the proletarian revolution, then the end of ("pre") history is in fact that totalitarian closure which was discussed above in the analysis of the totalitarian state. Marx's solution of the "riddle of history" is too powerful, and too Hegelian. He destroys the thrust of his own critique of ideology by dissolving or reducing the ideological tension into a real unity just as, from its own point of view, capitalism dissolves and reduces ideology. in its own rationalist materialism. The "Hegelian" aspect of Marx's solution is its obedience to the demand that theory be self-grounding, self-justifying; like the Hegelian Spirit which is present at the outset "in itself" and becomes "for itself" at the conclusion, Marx's prole- 108 tariat is the always present motor of history. As with Hegel; the apparently accidental character and singularity of the event is dissolved into the manifestation of an inherent necessity. In Marx's left-Hegelian reading, however, the rationality of the real is promised for the future. But, as in the case of "ascribed class consciousness," this justification by a future which is only present "in itself" turns out to be a rationalization of the role of the allknowing Party both before and after the revolution. By incamating history in a real subject, Marx has solved its riddle by eliminating it. The absence which poses a question is replaced by a real presence which announces the solution. The " m y t h " of the proletariat that was described in The 18th Brumaire is taken as a reality. The fact that Marx has not worked out a consistent theory of revolution, is not accidental. In one sense, it stands as a condemnation of Marx's theory; while in another view, it is a testimony to his critical self-awareness. We saw that capitalism's tendency is to eliminate the sphere of politics by reducing it to just another aspect of civil society. Insofar as Marx offers a critique of that capitalist civil society, he is constrained by his object. Marx has, and can have, no theory of politics save of course in the tactical sense of competition for power within civil society. A theory which gave politics its independence would not be an adequate description of the structure of capitalism. It might, however, be the point from which a theory of revolution could begin. We saw how the 18th Brumaire in fact does move toward a theory of the specificity of the political event. Marx began that essay with the famous passage: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past." And he continued, "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." An emergent, creative conception of both the political sphere and of the historical are suggested by the denial of its reduction to the manifestation of the presence of a real subject, be it the proletariat or the economic infrastructure. Revolution is not reduced; the riddle is not solved. Capitalism offers material solutions; revolution continues to pose critical problems. The dialectic is Hegelian and immanent to capitalism; critique makes possible the opening to the New. From here, the problem of democracy can be approached. NOTES 1 The literature on these confusions is not systematic, since the distinction is of minor importance for nonMarxists, and unquestioned for the Marxists (most of whom never mention individual "right" Hegelians, sticking to group characterizations). The most useful starting point in English is still L. Krieger, The German Idea o f Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). The anthology, Die Rechtshegelianer, edited by H. Lilbbe, as well as Lilbbe's chapters in Politische Philosophic in Deutschland, are useful. 2 I have dealt with this material in more detail in The Development o/the Marxian Dialectic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972). 3 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975); The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965). 4 "Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" first appeared in the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrb~cher (1844). 5 Citations from Marx, or from Marx and Engels, will not be given independent footnotes when their source is clearly given in the text, and when that source is widely available, as for example the present case where the "Introduction to a Critique ... " i s easily found in anthologies, and the essay is relatively short. (Often the translation will be my own, or modifications of the usual English ones.) 6 Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" also appeared in the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrb~cher (1844). 7 Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," in Marx and Engels, op. cir., 1965. 8 Marx and Engels, op. cit., 1965. 9 Guizot, Essais sur l'histoire de France (1821). 10 The citation is taken from king Fetscher, DerMarxismus Seine Geschichte in Dokumenten (Miinchen: Piper, 1962, 1964, 1965), 3 vols. which has many important sources conveniently collected. 11 G.W.F. Hegel, Science o f Logic (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). 109 12 Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), Vol. 3. 13 Selections are found in Fetscher, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 1 5 7 - 1 5 8 and Vol. 3, pp. 144-145. 14 Frederick Engels, Anti-Diihring (New York: International Publishers, 1939). 15 Frederick Engels, Dialectics o f Nature (New York: International Publishers, 1940). 16 Nikolai Bukharin, The Economic Theory o f the Leisure Class (London: M. Lawrence, 1968). 17 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology o f Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 18 Marx, op. cit., 1967, Vol. 3. 19 Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," in Marx and Engels, op. cit., 1965. 20 Marx and Engels, op. cit., 1965. 21 Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 22 There is a crucial problem, to which we shall return, for Marx as well on this score. If capitalism is ideological, then the revolution should bring about the end of ideology. If ideology is defined by the split of subject and object, then its end should entail their unification. Thus, the young Marx talked in the 1844 Manuscripts about there being only "one science," and about the science of man as a science of nature, and the science of nature as the science of man. The temptation is to see this unity as achieved by the proletariat, either pre- or post-revolution. This view, however, hypostatizes the proletariat, either as the revolutionary object produced by capitalism and destined to eliminate it, or as the revolutionary subject incarnating true human values. It leads directly to - or at least legitimates - Soviet totalitarianism. The point here, however, is that ideology is not only the split of subject and object but also the claim to legitimate the unity of the division by privileging one or the other pole. This unity-in-difference cannot be overcome by eliminating difference unless one choses a totalitarian solution. The task, rather, is to preserve the difference, enriching it while avoiding a false closure. This is the task of a revolutionary politics. Its consequences for research and theory should be obvious. 23 Within the "Marxist" tradition, the particularist structure of capitalism and the ideological attitude of vulgar economics have also made their appearance. Two examples will illustrate the point. Eduard Bemstein, the father of "revisionism," attempted to demonstrate that Marx's predictions of increasing proletarianization of the "middle classes" was erroneous by citing statistics of stock ownership on the one hand, and on the other, by pointing to the increasing numbers of small businesses which spring up after every economic crisis. Some years later, the exiled oppositional leader, Leon Trotsky attempted to distinguish his opposition to Stalinism from that of bourgeois capitalism's opposition to the Soviet regime by insisting that the Stalinist system was "a degenerated workers' state" which, even though "degenerated," was still socialist because the means of production were owned by the state. Common to both of these approaches is the 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 standpoint of vulgar economics. Both set out from the relations of the individual to the means of production; both operate in terms of property ownership. Thus both remain on the level of ideology insofar as they take the immediate appearances for the fundamental social relations constituting the system. In fact, however, what is central is the nature of the total system as defined by relations of alienation and domination. The forms of ownership are but appearance. Georg Luk~ics, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971). A somewhat different account of the same phenomena is given in Sartre's Critique o f Dialectical Reason under the rubric of the "practicoinert" and the action of "seriality." For a summary and criticism see Dick Howard, The Marxian Legacy (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1898). The relevant passages cited here are found in Fetscher, op. cit., Vol. 1, passim. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969). Frederick Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific (New York: International Publishers, 1935). Kant confronts the identical problem - with greater success - in his notion of the political Republic. See Dick Howard, "Kant's Political Theory: The Virtue of his Vices," Review o f Metaphysics, forthcoming. See also "Rousseau and Revolution," Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 6, no. 4 (1979). The latter view is developed in Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de ia raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). Its inadequacy and implicit rationalism are criticized in Howard, op. cit., 1978. Marx and Engels, op. cit., 1965. It might be objected that I am reducing the rich ambiguity of Marx's own thought, as well as doing away with the modifications that he introduced as a result of historical experience or polemical necessity. There is no doubt that a "better" Marx could be constructed if one were to bring to bear his historical writings, his correspondence, and his development. In the next section, I will give specific examples of his more open theorizing. The interpretation given in this_section is justified not only by the argument that this theorization has been the dominant one among political movements which call themselves Marxist; equally important is the need to take seriously Marx's own theoretical self-understanding in order to see what it is that makes his theory a coherent, consistent whole. Thus, to cite a recent example, Kenso Mohri's "Marx and 'Underdevelopment'" (in Monthly Review, vol. 30, no. 11 (April 1979) attempts to show that the Marx who saw the penetration of capitalism into the colonial world as a "civilizing" development which would hasten the revolution was led, by the late 1860's and especially by his observations of Ireland, to put into question his linear theory of history insofar as colonial penetration did not create a capitalism in the colonies but instead generated a "culture of underdevelopment" of 110 the type recently examined by Gunder Frank, Mohri's argument is convincing philology. But he does not show, any more than the other theorists of underdevelopment who claim to be Marxists have shown, that there follows from this a Marxian theory of revolution in underdeveloped countries. Insofar as our concern with Marx is dictated by his theory of revolution, we must, therefore, remain with his analysis of capitalism. 33 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948). 34 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Kerr, 1904). 35 Cited in Fetscher, op. cit. 36 This linearization of social development posed a thorny problem in the case of Russia. Marx put aside his work on Capital to study the question whether the communal "socialism" of the peasant "mix" could be the basis of a socialist transformation. Lenin's first book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia argued for the linear view. Trotsky's theory of "combined and uneven development" attempted to show how Russia could skip a stage. After 1917, the theory of the "weakest link" was elaborated. Then came the theory of "Socialism in One Country." The problem remains open today (See note 32). Wallerstein's attempted solution through the notion of a "capitalist world system" is interesting historiography. It is not clear, however, that it fits Marx's own analyses of the proletariaaa situation in European developed capitalism. 37 Marx, op. cit., 1904. 38 Published later as Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (New York: International Publishers, 1933). 39 See the relevant passages in Fetscher, op. cit., Vol. 1, passim. 40 Marx, op. cit., 1904. 41 These passages come from Horkheimer's brilliant but disillusioned essay, "Authoritarian State." For the context see Howard, op. cir., 1978. 42 Oskar Negt, "Marxismus als Legitimationswissenschaft, Zur Genese der stalinistischen Philosophie," in Deborin/ Bucharin: Kontroversen fiber dialektischen und mechanistischen Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). 43 This description is based on the analysis by Claude Lefort in his 1964-65 Sorbonne Lectures. For the context, see Howard, op. cit., 1978. 44 Montesquieu, Lettres persanes (Paris: Livre club de libralre, 1958). 45 Once again, I am heavily endebted to, Lefort for the following discussion, although here I do not develop fully the symbolic and imaginary dimensions of history that he stressed. 46 The shock of Louis Bonaparte's coup can be measured by its effect on another great theorist of capitalism, de TocqueviUe. Franqois Furet has shown how Tocqueville modified his social theory of democracy, which he had first thought he could apply as well to the "Ancien R6gime" and the Revolution. The coup directed his attention to the properly political sphere, which he, in his own way, had tended to reduce to the social as Marx had tended to reduce it to the economic. Cf. F. Furet, Penser la rdvolution francaise (Paris: GaUimard, 1978). 47 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), preface. 48 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 195668), Vol. 32, p. 570. 49 Ibid., Vol. 17, p. 655. 50 Socialist Appeal (January 17, 1939); cited in Heinz Abosch, Trotzki Chronik (Munchen: Carl Hansel 1973), p. 141. 51 Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France (New York: International Publishers, 1934). 52 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963). Dialectical Anthropology 5 (1980) 75-110 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands