members – the superhuman and too human giant of the state.
We shall have to return to this paradox: Hegel’s tripod monster and his rational vision, the philosopher’s approval and the good conduct certificate given by philosophy, the juncture of knowledge and power, of Western logos and raison d’état, this intolerable ensemble of ‘truth’. Starting from this central conception: the Hegelian state produced its moments, its elements, its materials, in historical time. In the resulting space, it re-produces them in an immobile movement. Since ‘each member dissolves as soon as it sets itself apart’, the movement, the revolving sphere, the round, in a word, the system, are also ‘transparent and serene rest’, in the words of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Thus, the Hegelian state offers the model of a self-generated and self-maintained system that regulates itself, in other words, the perfect automatism.11 Architectonic colossus, necessary and sufficient, it is so. Es ist so. (These were supposedly the last words of the dying Hegel.)
5) Let us now reconsider what is currently known as ‘Marxism’. (Do I need to repeat that this is not the first time and will not be the last either?)
Preliminary remark: Hegelianism can be defined as a system. True, specialists in the history of philosophy are familiar with the difficulties arising from the diversity of Hegel’s texts and their dates. Agreement between Hegel’s phenomenology (description and linkage of figures and moments of consciousness, both for the individual and for humanity in its progress) and his logic (which includes the relation of formal logic, theory of coherence, with dialectic, theory of contradictions), as well as with history (sequence of struggles, violence, wars and revolutions), has nothing like Cartesian self-evidence. Yet we can be confident that Hegelian thought, in the course of the philosopher’s life, focused in a definable direction, that of the philosophical and political system.
What then of Marxism? This is only a word, a political label, a polemical amalgam. Only an outdated dogmatism still tries to find in Marx’s works a homogeneous body of doctrine: a system. Between the works of his youth, those of his maturity and those of his latter years, there is more than diversity, and anything but a quiet plant-like development. There are fissures, gaps, contradictions, incoherencies. Take dialectics, for example, which is first of all exalted and turned against Hegel like a weapon seized from the enemy, then denied and rejected, then taken up in a renewed form that Marx never clearly explained.
In so far as it is possible to draw a body of doctrine from a monumental work such as Capital, it refers to competitive capitalism, whose disappearance Marx foresaw and proclaimed. But why stubbornly stick to constructing an ensemble of this kind, given that the work was not completed? Why conceive it as a totality adequate to the mode of production that it analyses and explains, capitalism? It may well be that the final chapters, no less rich than the opening ones, contain discoveries that appear only by confronting them with what emerged from competitive capitalism in the twentieth century. Marx’s thought may today play a similar role as does Newton’s physics in relation to modern physics, the physics of relativity, nuclear energy, atoms and molecules: a staging post for going further, a truth at a certain level, a date – in a word, a moment – which prohibits, on the one hand, dogmatism, ‘Marxist’ rhetoric, and on the other, presumptuous discourse on the death of Marx and Marxism. Let us make this attitude clear right away; the reasons for it will appear later. It is not a question of reconsidering Marx’s thought, following the usual schema of ‘revisionism’, as a function of what has been new in the world over the last century. On the contrary: the correct and legitimate procedure consists in the determination of what is new in the world on the basis of Marx’s work. This is how changes in the productive forces, the relations of production, social structures and superstructures (ideological and institutional) manifest themselves.
Today there are multiple Marxisms, and it is a vain effort to try and reduce them to a single ‘model’. The thought of Marx and Engels was grafted on to concepts and values that were already widespread in the countries where it penetrated. Hence the birth of a Chinese Marxism and a Soviet (Russian) Marxism, of Marxist schools in Germany, Italy, France and the English-speaking countries. Hence the diversity and unevenness of theoretical development. The graft took either well or less well. In France, the Cartesian spirit, fundamentally anti-dialectical, offered neither a terrain nor a favourable ‘mentor’; the graft only bore fruit belatedly, which did not mean these were of poor quality.
What relationship did Marx’s thought have with that of Hegel? This question, which as everyone knows has led to a flood of ink being spilled, requires just one answer: Marx’s dialectical thought had a relationship with Hegel’s dialectical thought that was itself dialectical, which means unity and conflict. Marx took from Hegel the essentials of his ‘essentialist’ thought: the importance of work and production, the self-production of the human species (of ‘man’), the rationality immanent to practice, consciousness and knowledge, as also to political struggles, hence the meaning of history.
It is possible to find in Hegel (as also in Saint-Simon) almost everything that Marx said, including the role of work, production, classes, etc.,12 with the result that it is impossible to deny the continuity between the two thinkers. Yet the order and linkage, orientation and perspective, content and form, differ radically, so that the impression of a brusque discontinuity is no less striking than that of an uninterrupted continuity.
Throughout his life, Marx struggled against Hegel, to wrest from him his ill-gotten gains and transform these by appropriating them. What was Hegel for Marx? At the same time the father, possessor of the inheritance, and the boss and owner of the means of production, acquired knowledge.
In their struggle, there was a generational quarrel but also a class struggle. This combat went through phases with varying fortunes: highs and lows, victories and defeats, by one or other combatant. The stakes changed: either knowledge as totality or dialectic as method, or the theory of the state, etc. Contrary to Hegel, Marx used whatever he could lay hands on. He passed Hegelianism through the sieve of anthropology (Feuerbach), political economy (Smith, Ricardo), historiography (the historians of the French Restoration, especially Adolphe Thierry and the history of the Third Estate), philosophy (French materialism of the eighteenth century) and nascent sociology (Saint-Simon and Fourier). From this sieving and filtering, this critical negation, emerged a different thought and above all a different project, ‘Marxism’, built from the materials of a reprised and metamorphosed Hegelianism. This struggle ran from radical critique of Hegel’s theses on law and the state, on philosophy (the so-called Young Marx, 1842–5), to refutation of the Hegelian political strategy accepted by Ferdinand Lassalle (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875). No one today is unaware of how Marx understood and approved the Paris Commune, as destructive of the state. He opposed this revolutionary practice to the state socialism that was unfortunately coming to dominate the German workers’ movement, and would do so for a very long period, as it still persists today. In the course of this theoretical struggle, Marx never lost sight for a moment of the practical objective of the real stake, which is not the constitution of a system opposed to Hegelianism, but analysis of social practice and the modern world, in order to act and transform these on the basis of their immanent tendencies.
Continuity and discontinuity. There is therefore a ‘break [coupure]’, a point of rupture. Where should we situate this? Drawing on both texts and contexts, we can maintain that this break was neither philosophical (transition from idealism to materialism) nor epistemological (transition from ideology to science). These two aspects are encompassed in a more complex break, richer in both content and meaning: a political break. It was not true, for Marx, that philosophy (reason and truth, fullness and happiness as conceived by the philosophers) was realized in the state and ended in a constraining system. The working class would realize philosophy by a total revolution. But this was no longer classical philosophy (abstract, speculative, systematic); the realization of philosophy is accomplished in practice, in a way of living. By superseding traditional philosophy, by superseding itself, the proletariat opens up limitless possibilities. Time
