the real history of bourgeois society appears and forces Marx to outline an original dialectic, distinct from a mere inversion of the Hegelian idea of the progress of Geist …
In fact, each of Marx’s works is simultaneously imbued with philosophical labour and ranged confrontationally against the way the tradition has isolated and circumscribed philosophy (which is one of the driving forces of its idealism). But this gives rise to a final anomaly which, in a sense, he experienced within himself.
A break and ruptures
More than other writers, Marx wrote in the conjuncture. Such an option did not exclude either the ‘patience of the concept’ of which Hegel spoke, or the rigorous weighing of logical consequences. But it was certainly incompatible with stable conclusions: Marx is the philosopher of eternal new beginnings, leaving behind him many uncompleted drafts and projects … The content of his thought is not separable from his shifts of position. That is why, in studying him, one cannot abstractly reconstruct his system. One has to retrace his development, with its breaks and bifurcations.
In the wake of Althusser, discussion in the nineteen sixties and seventies was greatly preoccupied with the ‘break’ or ‘rupture’ which he saw as occurring in 1845, with some writers supporting his arguments and others contesting them. That break, contemporaneous with the emergence of the concept of ‘social relation’ in Marx, was seen as marking a point of no return, the origin of a growing distancing from the earlier theoretical humanism. I shall return to this term below. This continued rupture is, in my view, undeniable. Among its underlying causes are a number of immediate political experiences: in particular, the encounter with the German and French proletariats (the British proletariat in Engels’s case), and the active re-entry into social struggles (which has its direct counterpart in the exit from academic philosophy). Its content, however, is essentially the product of intellectual elaboration. On the other hand, there were at least two other equally important ruptures in Marx’s life, determined by events potentially ruinous for the theory which, at the time, he believed he could safely uphold. The result was that that theory could only be ‘rescued’ on each occasion by are-foundation, carried out either by Marx himself or by another (Engels). Let us recall briefly what were the ‘crises of Marxism’ before Marxism as such existed. This will also provide us with a general framework for the readings and discussions which follow.
Three sources or four masters?
The presentation of Marxism as a world-view long ago coalesced around the formula, the ‘three sources of Marxism’: German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy. This derives from the way in which Engels divided up his exposition of historical materialism in Anti-Dühring (1878), and sketched the history of the antithetical relations between materialism and idealism, metaphysics and dialectics. This schema would be systematized by Kautsky in a lecture of 1907 entitled ‘The Three Sources of Marxism. The Historic Work of Marx’, in which the ‘science of society, starting out from the standpoint of the proletariat’ is characterized as ‘the synthesis of German, French and British thought’. The intention was not only to promote internationalism, but to present the theory of the proletariat as a totalization of European history, ushering in the reign of the universal. Lenin was to adopt the formulation in a lecture of 1913, ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’. However, the symbolic model of a combination of the component parts of culture was, in reality, not new: it reflected the persistence of the great myth of the ‘European triarchy’, expounded by Moses Hess (who had used the expression as the title of one of his books in 1841) and taken up by Marx in his early writings, in which the notion of the proletariat made its appearance.
Once we put behind us the dream of effecting a totalization of thought in terms of this ‘three parts of the world’ archetype (a world bounded, significantly, by Europe), the question of the ‘sources’ of Marx’s philosophical thinking, i.e. of its privileged relations with the work of past theorists, becomes an open one. In an impressive recent work (Il filo di Arianna, Quindici lezioni di filosofia marxista, Vangelista, Milan, 1990), Constanzo Preve has given a lead here, assigning to Marx ‘four masters’: Epicurus (on whom he had written his thesis, ‘On the Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’, 1841) for the materialism of freedom, given metaphorical expression in the doctrine of the clinamen or random ‘swerving’ of atoms; Rousseau, who supplies the idea of egalitarian democracy or association based on the direct participation of citizens in the formation of the general will; Adam Smith, from whom the idea that the basis of property is labour is taken; and, lastly, Hegel, the most important and the most ambivalent, a constant inspiration and adversary to Marx in his work on ‘dialectical contradiction’ and historicity. The advantage of this schema is that it directs attention towards the internal complexity of Marx’s work and the successive shifts which mark his critical relation to the philosophical tradition.
After 1848
The first crisis coincides with an epochal change for the whole of nineteenth-century thought: this was the failure of the revolutions of 1848. It is sufficient simply to read the Communist Manifesto (written in 1847) to understand that Marx had entirely shared the conviction that a general crisis of capitalism was imminent.3 This was to create a situation in which the proletariat, taking the lead for all the dominated classes in all (the) countries (of Europe), would establish a radical democracy which would itself lead, in short order, to the abolition of classes and to communism. The intensity and enthusiasm of the insurrections of the ‘springtime of peoples’ and the ‘social republic’ could not but seem to him to be the execution of that programme.
The disappointment, when it came, was therefore all the greater. The defection of a section of the French socialists to Bonapartism and the ‘passivity of the workers’ in the face of the coup d’état, coming as they did in the wake of the June massacres, were particularly demoralizing in their implications. I shall return below to the way this experience caused the Marxian idea of the proletariat and its revolutionary mission to waver. The extent of the theoretical upheavals this produced in Marx’s thinking cannot be underestimated. It meant abandoning the notion of ‘permanent revolution’, which precisely expressed the idea of an imminent transition from class to classless society and also the corresponding political programme of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (as opposed to the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’).4 It meant the enduring eclipse – for which I shall attempt to outline the theoretical reasons below – of the concept of ideology, which had only just been defined and scarcely been utilized. But it also led to the definition of a research programme bearing on the economic determination of political conjunctures and the long-term trends of social evolution. And it is at this point that Marx returns to the project of a critique of political economy, to recast its theoretical bases and carry it through to completion – at least up to the appearance of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867. This involved him in unremitting labour which we may legitimately interpret as reflecting a strong desire to gain revenge upon victorious capitalism – and the anticipated conviction that he would do so – both by laying bare its secret mechanisms (mechanisms it did not itself understand) and demonstrating its inevitable collapse.
After 1871
Then, however, came the second crisis, in the form of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, followed by the Paris Commune. These events plunged Marx into depression, providing a stark reminder of the ‘bad side of history’ (to which we shall return), i.e. its unpredictable course, its regressive effects and its appalling human costs (tens of thousands dead in the war, tens of thousands of others killed in the semaine sanglante – not to mention the numbers deported – which, for the second time in twenty-five years, decapitated the revolutionary proletariat of France and struck terror into those of other countries). I cite this emotive catalogue of events only because we have to take the full measure of the break they represented. The
