not, however, be arbitrary to register its presence here between the lines, on condition that we clearly specify what is meant by the term in this case. Thanks to the work of scholars in the field of German studies, we have for some years now been better acquainted with the intellectual environment that gave rise to these formulations, which Marx articulated in terms that are particularly striking, but which were not absolutely his own as regards their content.8
The revolution Marx has in mind clearly refers to French traditions. What the young radical democrats wish to see is the revival of the movement which had been interrupted, then reversed, by the ‘bourgeois’ establishment of the republic after Thermidor, by Napoleon’s dictatorship and, finally, by the Restoration and the Counter-revolution (in any case, by the State). To be even more precise, the aim was to bring the revolutionary movement to fruition on a European scale, and to render it universal by recovering the inspiration and energy of its ‘left wing’, that egalitarian component of the Revolution (represented principally by Babeuf) from which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of communism emerged.9 Marx would be very emphatic that this was not a speculative conception, implying an ideal or experimental community (like Cabet’s ‘Icarie’), but a social movement with demands that were merely a coherent application of the principle of Revolution – gauging how much liberty had been achieved by the degree of equality and vice versa, with fraternity as the end result. All in all, what Marx and others come to recognize is that there is no middle way: if the revolution is halted in its course, it can only regress and reconstitute an aristocracy of owners who use the – reactionary or liberal – State to defend the established order. Conversely, the only possibility of completing the revolution and rendering it irreversible is to give it greater depth, to make it a social revolution.
But who will bring about this social revolution? Who are the heirs of Babeuf and the Montagnards? One has simply to open one’s eyes to what is currently going on in Europe, to listen to the cries of alarm of the possessing classes. They are the English ‘Chartist’ workers (whom Engels has just described in his Condition of the Working Class in England of 1844, a book which can still be read with admiration today and which had an absolutely crucial effect on Marx); they are the Canuts of Lyon, the artisans of the Parisian faubourgs and of the caves of Lille which Victor Hugo described, the Silesian weavers to whom Marx devoted long columns in his Cologne-based Rheinische Zeitung. In short, they are all those now called (from an old Roman word) proletarians, which the Industrial Revolution created in huge numbers, crowding them into its cities and plunging them into poverty, and who have now begun to shake the bourgeois order by their strikes, their ‘combinations’, their insurrections. They are, so to speak, the people of the people (le peuple du peuple), its most authentic fraction and the pre-figurement of its future. At the point when critical intellectuals, full of goodwill and illusions, are still pondering ways of democratizing the State and, to that end, of enlightening what they call ‘the masses’, those masses themselves have already gone into action; they have in fact already recommenced the revolution.
In a decisive formula which recurs in all the texts of this period, from The Holy Family (1844) to the Communist Manifesto (1847), Marx will say that this proletariat ‘represents the dissolution in action of bourgeois/civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]’, meaning by this: (1) that the conditions of existence of the proletarians (what we would today term social exclusion) are in contradiction with all the principles of that society; (2) that they themselves live by other values than those of private property, profit, patriotism and bourgeois individualism; and (3) that their growing opposition to the State and the dominant class is a necessary effect of the modern social structure, but one which will soon prove lethal for that structure.
Action in the present
The words ‘in der Tat’ (in action) are particularly important. On the one hand, they evoke the present, effective reality, the ‘facts’ (die Tatsachen): they therefore express Marx’s profoundly anti-utopian orientation and allow us to understand why the reference to the first forms of proletarian class struggle, as it was beginning to become organized, is so decisive for him. The revolutionary practice of which the Theses speak does not have to implement a programme or a plan for the reorganization of society. Still less does it need to depend upon a vision of the future offered by philosophical and sociological theories (like those of the philanthropists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). But it must coincide with ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’, as Marx was soon to write in The German Ideology, explaining that this was the only materialist definition of communism.
But here we touch on the second aspect: ‘in action’ also means that we are speaking of an activity (Tätigkeit), an enterprise unfolding in the present to which individuals are committed with all their physical and intellectual powers. This represents a significant reversal. As opponents of the philosophies of history which were always ruminating on the meaning of the past, and the philosophies of right which simply provided a commentary on the established order, Moses Hess and other ‘Young Hegelians’ had proposed a philosophy of action (and Feuerbach had published a manifesto for a philosophy of the future). But, deep down, what Marx means is this: action must be ‘acted out’ in the present, not commented upon or announced. But then philosophy must give up its place. It is not a ‘philosophy of action’, but action itself, action ‘sans phrases’, which corresponds to revolutionary demands and the revolutionary movement.
And yet this injunction to give up its place cannot be ignored by philosophy: if it is consistent, philosophy must paradoxically see in that injunction its own realization. Naturally, Marx is thinking here, first and foremost, of that German idealist tradition with which his own thinking is imbued, a tradition which has such close affinities with the French revolutionary idea. He is thinking of the Kantian injunction to ‘do one’s duty’, to act in the world in conformity with the categorical imperative (the content of which is human fraternity). And also of Hegel’s phrase in the Phenomenology: ‘What must be is also in fact [in der Tat], and what only must be, without being, has no truth.’ More politically, he is thinking of the fact that modern philosophy has identified the universal with the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. But these principles, sacrosanct in theory, are either ignored and contradicted at every turn by bourgeois society, where neither equality nor even liberty reigns, to say nothing of fraternity; or else they are beginning to pass into reality, but in a revolutionary, ‘insurrectionary’ practice (the practice of those who are rising up together, where necessary substituting the ‘criticism of weapons’ for the ‘weapons of criticism’). It is, first and foremost, this consequence, which is somewhat hard for philosophy to take but arises out of its own principles, that Marx has in mind when he writes here of inverting idealism to produce materialism.
The two sides of idealism
Let us halt here, once again, and examine this point. If these remarks are accurate, it means that Marx’s materialism has nothing to do with a reference to matter – and this will remain the case for a very long time, until Engels undertakes to reunite Marxism with the natural sciences of the second half of the nineteenth century. For the moment, however, we are dealing with a strange ‘materialism without matter’. Why, then, is this term used?
Here historians of philosophy come back into their own, in spite of the knocks they have just taken from Marx. They must explain this paradox, which also leads them to point up the imbroglio that arises from it (though, let us repeat, that imbroglio is anything but arbitrary). If Marx declared that it was a principle of materialism to change the world, seeking at the same time to differentiate his position from all existing materialism (which he terms ‘old’ materialism and which depends precisely on the idea that everything has ultimately to be explained in terms of matter – which is also an ‘interpretation of the world’ and contestable as such), this was clearly in order to take
