itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice …
VI. Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:
1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.
2. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as ‘genus’, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals …
XI. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
(Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Penguin/New Left Review, Harmondsworth, 1975, pp. 421–23).
Revolution against philosophy
The difficulties begin precisely at this point. There can be no doubt that Marx never ventured to publish a call for such an exit, or did not find an opportunity to do so. And yet he wrote it and, like a ‘purloined letter’, it has come down to us. Now, the statement in question is rather paradoxical. In a sense, it is absolutely consistent with itself. What it requires, it immediately does (employing a later terminology, one might be tempted to say that there is something ‘performative’ about it). To write: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’, is to posit a point of no return for all thinking that wishes to be effective, down-to-earth or ‘worldly’. It is also to forbid oneself to regress, revert to philosophy. Or, if one prefers, it is to condemn oneself, if one were by any chance to begin interpreting the world again – particularly the social world – to lapse back into the ambit of philosophy, since there is no third way between philosophy and revolution. At the outside, it may therefore mean condemning oneself to silence.
But the harshness of this alternative reveals its other side: if ‘saying is doing’,6 then, on the other hand, ‘doing is saying’ and words are never innocent. For example, it is not innocent to posit that the interpretations of the world are various, whereas the revolutionary transformation is, implicitly, one or univocal. For that means there is only one single way of changing the world: the one which abolishes the existing order – the revolution – which cannot be reactionary or anti-popular. Let us note, in passing, that Marx was very soon to retract this thesis: as early as the Manifesto and, a fortiori, in Capital, he was to note the power with which capitalism ‘changes the world’. And the question of whether the world cannot be changed in several different ways and of how one change can fit into another – or even divert it from its course – would become crucial. Moreover, this thesis would mean that this single transformation also provides the ‘solution’ to the internal conflicts of philosophy – and ‘revolutionary practice’ would thus realize an old ambition of philosophers (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel …) better than they could!
The critique of political economy
The expression ‘critique of political economy’ figures repeatedly in the title or programme of Marx’s main works, though its content constantly changes. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are themselves a draft of a work which was to have been entitled Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, a title later given to the work published in 1859 as the ‘first part’ of a general treatise and used as the subtitle of Capital (of which Volume 1, the only volume published by Marx himself, appeared in 1867). To these we may add a great many unpublished pieces, articles and sections in polemical works.
It seems, then, that this phrase expresses the permanent modality of Marx’s intellectual relation to his scientific object. The initial objective was the critique of political alienation in civil/bourgeois society, as well as the ‘speculative subjects’ the organic unity of which philosophy claimed to express. But a fundamental shift occurred at a very early stage: ‘criticizing’ law, morality and politics meant confronting them with their ‘materialist basis’, with the process by which social relations are constituted in labour and production.
In his own way, Marx thus discovered the dual meaning of the term critique: on the one hand, the eradication of error; on the other, knowledge of the limits of a faculty or practice. But what conducted this critique, for Marx, was no longer merely analysis, but history. This is what enabled him to combine ‘dialectically’ the critique of the necessary illusions of theory (‘commodity fetishism’), the development of the internal, irreconcilable contradictions in economic reality (crises, the antagonism between labour and capital, based on the exploitation of ‘labour-power’ as a commodity) and, finally, the outline of a ‘political economy of labour’, opposed to that of the bourgeoisie (‘Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association’, 1864). The fate of Marx’s critique is dependent on the ‘two discoveries’ he claimed: the deduction of the money form from the necessities of commodity circulation and the reduction of the laws of accumulation to the capitalization of surplus value (Mehrwert). Both are related to the definition of value as an expression of socially necessary labour, in which is rooted rejection of the viewpoint of the abstract homo oeconomicus, defined solely by the calculation of his individual ‘utility’.
For an account of the technical aspects of the critique of political economy in Marx, see Pierre Salama and Tran Hai Hac, Introduction a l’économie de Marx (La Découverte, Paris, 1992).
But there is more to it than this: it was not by chance that this formula coined by Marx, this injunction which is already, in itself, an act of ‘departure’, acquired its philosophical renown. If we search our memories a little, we can very soon find a profound kinship not only with other watchwords (such as Rimbaud’s ‘changer la vie’: we know that Andre Breton, among others, made this connection),7 but with some equally lapidary, philosophical propositions, which are traditionally considered ‘fundamental’ and which take the form, at times, of tautologies and, at others, of antitheses. All these formulations, different in content or opposed in intent as they may be, share a common concern with the question of the relation between theory and practice, consciousness and life. This is true from Parmenides’s ‘Thinking and being are one’ to Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, via Spinoza (‘God is nature’), Kant (‘I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’), and Hegel (‘The rational is real and the real is rational’). And here is Marx ensconced not just at the heart of philosophy, but at the heart of its most speculative turn, in which it strives to think its own limits, whether to abolish them or to establish itself on the basis of a recognition of those limits.
Let us keep in mind this profound ambiguity (which we must be careful not to turn into an insurmountable contradiction, but which we must not make into a sign of unfathomable profundity either, since this would soon lead us back to that ‘mysticism’ the roots of which Marx is, in fact, seeking out here …) and let us examine more closely two key questions implied in the Theses: that of the relation between ‘practice’ (or praxis) and ‘class struggle’; and that of anthropology or the ‘human essence’.
Praxis and class struggle
The
