fact carries with it the insertion of a contradiction between consciousness and knowledge,” Revueltas writes, to which he adds a long explanation:
The question turns out to be not so simple when we approach the knowledge of consciousness from the point of view of its internal nature, as constant mobility and transformation, and externally, as contradiction and alienation. As mobility and transformation, consciousness is always unhappy with what knowledge provides it with. This changes what it knows (it discovers new data and reveals what is hidden beneath its new objectivity) but it also transforms consciousness itself and submits it to the anxiety of absolute non-knowledge, to the extreme point where a given impotence could turn it into an unreal consciousness. As for the external, its externalization, consciousness is in itself and in its other, in the form of religion, civil society, the state, as consciousness alienated from itself that no longer knows itself, in this exteriorization, as individual and free consciousness in itself. The state, religion, civil society are the consciousness of itself of the others, accumulated throughout time by historical knowledge.17
Reason here has to come to grips with its intrinsic other. In fact, its concrete movement is nothing but the process of its own self-splitting. Far from singing the stately glories of spirit as self-consciousness fully coming into its own, the dialectic tells the story of this ongoing scission between consciousness and knowledge, as well as between cogito and the unconscious. Such a story, which makes for an almost impossible narrative, always involves the risk of absolute non-knowledge, irretrievable anxiety, or downright madness.
Finally, one important corollary of this internally divided nature of consciousness is that, just as there lies a rational kernel even within ideology, radical or revolutionary thought can also become alienated into mere ideology, which it always carries with it as a shadow. At this moment, the split nature of all elements of the dialectic is erased in favor of a false purity: ideology without reason, or revolutionary reason without the truth of practice. “Every ideology, without exception, reaches a point where, by virtue of its proper nature as ideology, it must renounce all criticism, that is, the ‘rational kernel’ of which it could avail itself in the periods of revolutionary ascent, given its conditions as consciousness alienated onto a concrete praxis.”18 For Revueltas, this last moment is precisely the one that defines the crisis of Marxism after the death of Lenin, and even more so after the watershed year of 1927, when the living ghost of Trotsky started to wander in exile through much of Europe, before meeting his untimely death in Mexico. It is also the moment, however, when ideology lost its rational kernel, and the road was opened for a maddening and suicidal exasperation of the conflict, which increasingly threatened to become nuclear, between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Marx in his Limits
Indeed, another way of addressing the complex question of how to situate this writer’s theoretical work would be to draw out all the consequences of the otherwise unsurprising fact that for Revueltas, by the early 1970s, Marxism was caught in a deep crisis. In this sense, too, Revueltas is much closer to Althusser than either one of them—or, for that matter, any of their critics—would be willing to admit. “Marx in his Limits,”19 the heading under which, in the 1970s, Althusser collected many of his thoughts that were to be published only after his death, could thus very well serve as a subtitle for the posthumous Dialéctica de la conciencia as well. Revueltas is certainly not proposing an uncritical return to some pristine orthodoxy or hidden doctrinal kernel of the early Marx. The aim is rather more contorted, as can be gleaned from the proposed plan of study that is included in the latter half of the book by way of framing its impressive range of notes, quotes, and interpretive glosses, most of them written between 1968 and 1971 in Mexico City’s Lecumberri prison. If Revueltas sought to come to terms with the fundamental concepts of alienation, consciousness, and the philosophy of praxis implied in the Manuscripts of the young Marx, this was primarily in order to provide himself with the means to understand the dogmatic and revisionist deformations of the dialectic in the latter half of the twentieth century, at the hands of so-called vulgar, uncritical, or non-reflective Marxism. Marx’s theory of alienation and ideology thus serves as a critical tool with which to analyze, and hopefully undo the effects of, the ideological alienation of Marxism itself.
Along this complex trajectory Revueltas found a symptomatic turning point precisely in the split between the early Marx and other Young Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach or Arnold Ruge. As he wrote in his “General Plan of Study”: “It is a question of leading this investigation toward a clarification of the current crisis of Marxism. The point of departure for this investigation is situated at the moment of transition when Marxism discerns itself as such, separating itself from critical philosophy by extending the latter to society and its economic foundations.”20 In the operations with which critical philosophy becomes first dialectical, and then materialist, a logic of the social is contained that, once it is cut off from the concrete understanding of society as a contradictory totality, might paradoxically serve to explain the principles of its very own deformation. Revueltas finds this process at work not only in the official doctrine of Stalinism or in the inertia of many Soviet-oriented Communist parties, but also in the ideological radicalism of another typical product of the 1960s: the ultraleftist groups, or grupúsculos, throughout much of Europe and Latin America. One of the early titles for the main text in Dialéctica de la conciencia hinted precisely at this secondary aspect of the crisis of Marxism: La locura brujular del marxismo en México (ensayo ontológico sobre los grupúsculos marxistas).21 This ambitious plan to arrive at a dialectical ontology of group formations, which is much indebted to Sartre’s project in his own unfinished Critique of Dialectical Reason (the first volume of which is significantly subtitled Theory of Practical Ensembles), obviously did not come to full fruition in Revueltas’s notes for Dialéctica de la conciencia. But the reader will find long passages in which the internal crisis of critical consciousness, as explained through the notion of thought’s self-alienation and disorientation, is tied to the proliferation of extreme left-wing groups, all proclaiming their fidelity to an hyper-ideological form of Marxism.
Let us look in more detail at a brief instance of this self-reflexive critique of Marxism. As a starting point, the theoretical activity of consciousness can be situated on two levels, or as two kinds of act: “To put this in the most general way, theory functions by way of two acts that belong to the same process of knowledge. First, in those who think theory and confront it with itself as abstract thought; and, second, concretely, as praxis, when it adequately, that is, in ways consistent with itself, transforms the object proposed to it.”22 Whenever this regime of consistency is interrupted, the inner necessity of the concept, from being a moving restlessness, turns into the baleful objectivity of the practico-inert. For Revueltas, it is in this gap, in this “no man’s land” between a sequence of thought and its logical consequences, that the “false consciousness” of so-called vulgar or uncritical Marxism finds its niche. In a passage that is worth quoting extensively, if for no other reason than to give a sense of his idiosyncratic style, Revueltas continues:
The internal contradictions of knowledge that are unresolved (that do not resolve themselves) in their immediate becoming, in different ways, give way to certain inevitable fissures between a proposed (that is, not yet given) sequence and its consequence within the process, which establishes a provisionally empty space, a kind of “no man’s land,” which interposes itself between the prefiguration of the concept and the objective reality that has not yet been conceptualized. Thus, in a true act of usurpation of the rights of rationality, “false consciousness” with its hosts occupies this “no man’s land” of knowledge and declares over it its absolute dogmatic sovereignty. Such is the point where, under the protection of said sovereignty, this concrete self-sufficient form of being flourishes, self-absorbed and impermeable to questioning, that represents the false consciousness of vulgar Marxism. Hence, the examination of contradictions will allow us to clarify the fact—hidden underneath all kinds of demagogic and leftist phrases—that practice without praxis is nothing but a maddening sense of disorientation, a loss of the magnetic pole of knowledge—which defines, however, in essence, the activity of “Marxist” groupuscles and of vulgar Marxism as a whole, from which fatally follows an objective deformation of
