Truth and Revolution in Marx's Critique of Society: Studies on a Fundamental Problematique 3031173570, 9783031173578

Table of contents :
Titles Published
Titles Forthcoming
Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Problem Outline
1.2 A Problematization of the International Marx Discussion
1.3 Abstracts
2 “in its essence critical and revolutionary”—Truth in Marx’s Scientific Critique of Society
2.1 Communist or Scientific Critique?—An Outline of the Problem
2.2 The “Riddle of History Solved”—The Justification of Communism in Marx’s Early Work
2.3 The “real movement which sublates the present state of things”—A Radical Break?
2.4 “… man not yet masters the process of production”—Liberated Society in the Critique of Political Economy
2.5 The Consequences
3 Declining or Modern Forms of Rule? Marx on Revolution and Restoration in Europe
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Can the Necessity of Revolution Be a Headline?
3.3 Two European Regimes Against Class Struggle
3.4 Class Struggle Cannot Be Pacified
3.5 “the need and the natural necessity of the revolution is as general…”
3.6 Declining or Modern Forms of Rule?
4 Truth and Power—On the Critique of Revolutionary Subjectivation in the Work of Marx and Stirner
4.1 Exposition: Lukács and the Communist Party
4.2 Development: Marx Against Stirner—A Missed Dialogue
4.3 Reprise: The Critique of Communist Politics That Failed to Appear
4.4 Coda: Žižek and the Communist Party
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society Studies on a Fundamental Problematique

Matthias Bohlender Anna-Sophie Schönfelder Matthias Spekker

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

Matthias Bohlender · Anna-Sophie Schönfelder · Matthias Spekker

Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society Studies on a Fundamental Problematique

Translated by Alexander Locascio

Matthias Bohlender Political Theory Universität Osnabrück Osnabrück, Germany Matthias Spekker Independent scholar in Political Theory and History of Ideas Hamburg, Germany

Anna-Sophie Schönfelder Research Associate at the DFG Collaborative Research Centre “Dynamics of Security” Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Gießen, Germany

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-031-17357-8 ISBN 978-3-031-17358-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17358-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Rusty Art/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018.

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TITLES PUBLISHED

12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, 2020. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, 2020. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction, 2020. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2020. 30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, 2020.

TITLES PUBLISHED

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31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, 2020. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy, 2020. 33. Farhang Rajaee, Presence and the Political, 2021. 34. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism, 2021. 35. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century, 2021. 36. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World, 2021. 37. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, 2021. 38. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism, 2021. 39. Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics, 2021. 40. Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation: Critical Studies, 2021. 41. Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives, 2021. 42. Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism, 2021. 43. Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists, 2021. 44. James Steinhoff, Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry, 2021. 45. Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism, 2021. 46. Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism, 2021. 47. Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Notes,” 2021. 48. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism, 2021. 49. Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in MidCentury Italy, 2021.

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TITLES PUBLISHED

50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx, 2021. 51. V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, 2021. 52. Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values, 2022. 53. Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance, 2022. 54. Achim Szepanski, Financial Capital in the 21st Century, 2022. 55. Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power, 2022. 56. Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism, 2022. 57. Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics, 2022. 58. Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration, 2022. 59. Fabio Perocco (Ed.), Racism in and for the Welfare State, 2022. 60. Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity, 2022. 61. Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina, 2022.

Titles Forthcoming

Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital after Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of Social Theory Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party

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TITLES FORTHCOMING

Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Working Class José Ricardo Villanueva Lira, Marxism and the Origins of International Relations Bertel Nygaard, Marxism, Labor Movements, and Historiography Marcos Del Roio, Gramsci and the Emancipation of the Subaltern Classes Marcelo Badaró, The Working Class from Marx to Our Times

TITLES FORTHCOMING

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Tomonaga Tairako, A New Perspective on Marx’s Philosophy and Political Economy Mauricio Vieira Martins, Marx, Spinoza and Darwin on Philosophy: Against Religious Perspectives of Transcendence Jean Vigreux, Roger Martelli, & Serge Wolikow, One Hundred Years of History of the French Communist Party Aditya Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism Fred Moseley, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital : A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation Armando Boito, The State, Politics, and Social Classes: Theory and History Anjan Chakrabarti & Anup Dhar, World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud Hira Singh, Annihilation of Caste in India: Ambedkar, Ghandi, and Marx Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, An Introduction to Ecosocialism

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Kohei Saito, who reached out to us and suggested the publication of our research findings in the Marx, Engels, and Marxism series. Furthermore, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of our book proposal for their acknowledging and insightful comments. Finally, our thanks go to Alexander Locascio for translating our book into English.

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Introduction Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, and Matthias Spekker 1.1 Problem Outline 1.2 A Problematization of the International Marx Discussion 1.3 Abstracts “in its essence critical and revolutionary”—Truth in Marx’s Scientific Critique of Society Matthias Spekker 2.1 Communist or Scientific Critique?—An Outline of the Problem 2.2 The “Riddle of History Solved”—The Justification of Communism in Marx’s Early Work 2.3 The “ real movement which sublates the present state of things”—A Radical Break? 2.4 “… man not yet masters the process of production”—Liberated Society in the Critique of Political Economy 2.5 The Consequences

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CONTENTS

Declining or Modern Forms of Rule? Marx on Revolution and Restoration in Europe Anna-Sophie Schönfelder 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Can the Necessity of Revolution Be a Headline? 3.3 Two European Regimes Against Class Struggle 3.4 Class Struggle Cannot Be Pacified 3.5 “the need and the natural necessity of the revolution is as general…” 3.6 Declining or Modern Forms of Rule? Truth and Power—On the Critique of Revolutionary Subjectivation in the Work of Marx and Stirner Matthias Bohlender 4.1 Exposition: Lukács and the Communist Party 4.2 Development: Marx Against Stirner—A Missed Dialogue 4.3 Reprise: The Critique of Communist Politics That Failed to Appear 4.4 Coda: Žižek and the Communist Party Conclusion Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, and Matthias Spekker

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Bibliography

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, and Matthias Spekker

1.1

Problem Outline

In the politically eventful year 1968, Max Horkheimer held an extremely remarkable lecture on the 150th anniversary of Marx’s birth entitled Marx Today. Only toward the end of the lecture, after Horkheimer had elaborated the core of truth of Marx’s critique of society, and neatly separated and earmarked what was outdated in Marx’s insights, does it become clear, however, what the immediate intention and the contemporary political thrust of the lecture consisted of: “Be that as it may,” he suddenly states very abruptly, “the time has come to finally elevate Marx’s teaching to one of the central topics of education in the West. Not because in a large part of the East it functions as a convenient ideology for catching up with the Western industrial lead […] but for the sake of its own future, its dissemination must now be put at least on par with, if not ahead of, much antiquated historical and other subject matter in schools, colleges, and universities” (Horkheimer 1972a, p. 158, o.t.1 ). 1 For some of the sources cited in the further course of our book, there exist no English translations so far. In these cases we have translated the quotations ourselves and indicate this in the following with the marking ‘o.t.’ for ‘own translation.’

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bohlender, A.-S. Schönfelder, M. Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17358-5_1

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For Horkheimer, the inclusion of Marx and his theory of history and society in the curriculum of schools and universities was a question of utmost social urgency, because in it and with it—for Horkheimer perhaps for the last time in the history of thought—a task and aim for humanity, especially for the “young generation” (ibid.), was posited and formulated: namely, the establishment of the “realm of freedom” (ibid., p. 159). Marx had continued and advanced what the Enlightenment since Kant had promised to people; his objective was in full “harmony with the tendencies of the bourgeois philosophy of history” (ibid., p. 158). All ideals of society, whether of a theological or idealist kind, had more or less fallen victim to science, only socialism, “in the sense of common mastery of nature, abolition of differences of property and distress, guarantee of the greatest individual independence limited only by the requirements of peaceful cohabitation” (ibid.), appears to Horkheimer as the currently possible and future resolution of the course of history. For Horkheimer, the point is to use Marx to critically educate a young generation currently in revolt, which has not yet forgotten or abandoned the practical aim of a ‘perpetual peace’ (Kant) or a ‘realm of freedom’ (Marx). Two things are revealing about this lecture by Horkheimer, namely on the one hand the obvious political impetus underlying it: Marx must now, in the course of university reforms, finally find his way comprehensively into historiography, the social sciences, economics, and philosophy and even be made the preferred subject matter. We find ourselves at the beginning of an academization of Marx’s theory and critique of society that then took hold in the 1970s. What until then had only been brought to attention sporadically in a few lecture halls and upper-level seminars about Marx, and had been acquired rather in non-university circles and working groups was now—not least perhaps for reasons of scholarly supervision and control—to find its place in undergraduate teaching on a broad scale. But the duty and urgency to open the academic doors for Marx insisted upon by Horkheimer could not be had without a price, already visible here and which would continue into the present. This is indeed the second remarkable aspect of Horkheimer’s lecture: that it basically presents to its audience, namely educational policymakers, university chancellors, and professorial colleagues (few of whom were women), an academicized, bourgeois-humanist Marx, who, although he could not yet be smoothly absorbed into the world of classical thinkers, had nevertheless considerably lost political and social potential for alarm. Thus, while evoking Marx’s critique of society as the inevitable starting point of an

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educated young generation, Horkheimer allays the fears and misgivings of those who already see in this the first step toward communism. For he never tires of emphasizing that Marx was of course mistaken on certain points: For example, the connection of socialism “with class struggle is outdated” (ibid.). Also, the “realization of Marx’s ideal”—the ‘realm of freedom’—must by no means be thought of as identical with the “abolition of classes” anymore, just as generally the aim of Marx’s aspirations “in truth has no greater proximity to proletarians than to the enlightened bourgeoisie” (ibid.). So no class struggle, no revolutionary proletarian subject, no party, no classless society, no communism, no revolution! Ultimately, Horkheimer does not think of the realization of Marx’s ideal as a necessary historical movement for the radical, at times violent overthrow of bourgeois-capitalist society, but as a downright global humanist act by a socio-philosophically enlightened techno-economic elite, familiar from Francis Bacon’s Nova Atlantis or Saint-Simon’s utopias: Would it be possible, one could ask, to unite people of expertise in the present day in order to devise a plan to overcome hardship, thought out in every detail and capable of being objectively fulfilled, under the obligation of disregarding political conditions and national concerns? Would it be possible, over years of devoted labor, to determine solely on the basis of exact research, what a country would have to accomplish with its raw materials and machines, without putting even one of its citizens in a worse position, in order to supply the food and instruments, to build the warehouses and transport routes, to regulate the increase in births, so that in an approximately calculated period of time no one on earth would have to starve, so that hospitals would be created, medical personnel educated and provided, epidemics prevented, and finally everyone would have a place to live worthy of a human being? (ibid., p. 159)

For Horkheimer, it is clear that Marx had spoken the truth about bourgeois society, namely the truth that this society still, and downright irrationally, produces domination, inequality, want, and material hardship, although the social knowledge and economic means have long since been available to build a human society based on solidarity and free of domination. This is the truth that Horkheimer would like to carry into school, university, and academic spaces and see circulating there—with the possible aim, described by him, of the formation of a new humanist elite that will muster the power and use the available knowledge to make this society of solidarity a reality. Horkheimer wishes to circulate the

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truth of Marx’s critique of society, but he believes he can circulate it without its political dimension, without class struggle, without the proletariat and without communism—in short, and to put it boldly: He wants the truth of the critique of society, but without revolution. The price that Horkheimer has to pay, intentionally or not, for this splitting off and rejection of the revolutionary dimension of the critique of society is ultimately that of having to fall a step behind Marx’s critique of society in order to imagine a bourgeois-humanist expert project that conceives of truth itself as an already finished product of knowledge, ready to be fed into a techno-economic process of realization. Of course, Horkheimer’s plea for the truth without revolution had, in the year 1968, a specific historical-political reason: Looking eastward to the countries under the ideological and practical rule of Soviet Marxism, for example, the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 had— two decades after the height of Stalinist terror—once again memorably demonstrated how the Bolshevik revolution, which invoked Marx, had turned into a totalitarian nightmare.2 So if one wanted to introduce the truth of Marx’s critique of society into academic spaces under the conditions of Cold War, ‘actually existing socialism,’ and a new anti-communist wave forming in the wake of the worldwide student movements, one had to place ‘Marx’ at the greatest possible distance from ‘Marxism’; one had to read his critique of society either as a strictly scientific critique of political economy or as a social-philosophical critique of bourgeois-social forms of life. At the very least, one had to deny any serious, systematically necessary connection between Marx’s critique of society (‘critical social philosophy,’ ‘critical social theory’) and Marx’s political project of communist revolution (‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ ‘classless society’). Today, one could say that it is indeed in this way that Marx and his critique of society have arrived and endured in colleges, universities, and academies. Whether Horkheimer, fifty years after his talk of the urgency of studying Marx’s critique of society, would today be satisfied with this kind of ‘endurance’ and transmission can perhaps be doubted, but it can be ascertained: Marx’s critique of political economy is today part of a

2 Horkheimer’s old companion Herbert Marcuse had already demonstrated in 1957, with his now almost forgotten analysis of Soviet Marxism, that the Marxism of Lenin and Stalin could be measured according to the theoretical premises developed by Marx and thus be subjected to a radical critique; see Marcuse (1961).

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comprehensive and global Marx research; the highly successful continuation of the second Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2 ) after 1990 has given an extraordinary boost to the academic study of Marx. In the domain of the social-philosophical critique of forms of life as well, there has been an academic transmission and continuation of Marx’s critique of society, which—in Germany—is linked today to such names as, for example, Axel Honneth and Rahel Jaeggi. However, if one consults Honneth’s volume of essays The Idea of Socialism (Honneth 2017), one has the impression rather that the aim here is to exorcise Marx’s critique of society as gently and discreetly as possible from the social-philosophical critique. Marx is reduced here to a mere supplier of keywords for a supposedly ‘socialist’ project that is hardly distinguishable from the social liberalism of the early twentieth century (John Dewey, Karl Polanyi). Bourgeois society is no longer understood as a form of domination that must be overcome, but must rather, as a sphere of markets, democracy, and freedom, ultimately be rescued from its supposedly historically contingent aberrations and deformations. Thus it is supposed to be the task of socialism to cleanse “the concept of the market from all subsequent capitalist additives in order to examine its own moral sustainability” (Honneth 2017, p. 67), just as generally the truth of socialism is now to be understood as “the specific modern articulation of the fact that in the course of history and on the basis of varying social circumstances, new groups constantly seek to draw public attention to their own demands by attempting to tear down barriers to communication and thereby expand the space of social freedom” (ibid., p. 65). Perhaps this sort of ‘transmission,’ of reception, and of dealing with Marx’s critique of society in the academic space is downright symptomatic. When in 1968 Horkheimer wanted to circulate the core of truth of Marx’s critique of society in academic spaces, he had to pay a price, namely the decoupling or isolation of truth from revolution. Today, 50 years later, and under completely different historical and social conditions, it’s evident that a scientific and social-philosophical Marx has found his way into academic spaces, but that now, along with the revolutionary perspective, the claim to truth of the critique of society itself has also been eroded. It is the fundamental intention of the present volume and the three studies it contains to demonstrate that the truth claim of Marx’s critique of society not only cannot be separated from its communist motivation and the aim of the revolutionary overthrow of its object, bourgeois

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society, but also that this immanent relation between analysis and political engagement, between theoretical critique and revolutionary aims, between truth and revolution, constitutes precisely the core of Marx’s science, and is only conceivable and understandable in this way. Already in our previous joint publication (Bohlender/Schönfelder/Spekker 2018), we attempted to demonstrate that a fundamental misconception prevails within contemporary Marx research and reception with regard to Marx’s critique of society: the misconception, namely, that one could simply banish Marx’s political voice from the scientific critique, or simply ignore it; the misconception that, without substantial losses, one could isolate Marx’s scientific voice and relegate the political, communist, revolutionary, and sometimes even violent, disturbing, irritating side of his thought to the realm of the ‘unscientific,’ the historically contingent. In contrast, our genealogy of the critique of society was able to reveal in a series of individual studies3 that Marx’s critique of society is deeply embedded in specific political constellations and that it is only in the ‘hand-to-hand fight’ with the respective opponents and antagonists that Marx’s critique of society takes shape. But the ‘hand-to-hand fight’ is not only a constitutive basis of the validity of Marx’s critique. The reverse also applies: The theoretical reasons, the scientific argumentations, and the analytical critique of Marx’s project are part of a performative-political engagement for the overthrow of bourgeois society; indeed, they are themselves a substantial part of a historically proceeding movement for communist revolution. Besides, an essential difference must be highlighted here between a critique of society that understands itself as an expression of a comprehensive historical movement for the revolutionary abolition of capitalistically formed relations of domination, and a critique which remains within the self-imposed limits of philosophy, epistemology, or science, a critique in the tradition of bourgeois Enlightenment which, where it expresses itself politically, merely determines the limits within which a practical improvement of relations of domination, i.e. a transformation of domination into government, governance, democracy, co-determination, participation, etc., is in principle possible, and beyond which change is senseless and impossible. Critique of society, in contrast, which has its historical

3 Along with the contributions in the mentioned volume, see especially Bohlender (2016, 2019), Schönfelder (2016), and Spekker (2016, 2017).

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beginning with Marx, takes aim at the bourgeois-capitalist social formation as a whole. Here again it becomes apparent how tightly truth and revolution are interlinked for Marx: If he conceptually unfolds and establishes as the truth of this society the fact that its historically emerged forms of domination have produced a fundamental inversion of practical human relations to the world, but have also produced at the same time the subjects and means for fundamentally overthrowing this state of affairs, then he doesn’t formulate a possible aim, a possible task, a proposal or plan of reform. By means of the scientific analysis, presentation, and thus critique of this society, the protagonists, the subjects of this ascertained historical truth, are driven into communist self-organization and the work of the revolutionary elimination of this society, from which no deviation can be tolerated. Marx and Engels even developed a new genre of political text for this mode of linking truth and revolution, and exemplified it in The Communist Manifesto. It would thus be a huge misunderstanding to believe that Marx’s critique of society could easily be stripped of its revolutionary, politicalperformative dimension, so that what would remain would be a scientific, epistemological, or socio-philosophical core that would have endured the last century-and-a-half—a core to be worked on academically, but politically aseptic, which one could allow to circulate with a clear conscience, because it would be far removed from the historical and current instrumentalizations of this critique of society in the Marxisms of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. One would not only miss the basic idea (revolution and classless society) and the specific mode (performative-political engagement) of Marx’s critique of society; one would also lop of the immense breadth and depth in the practical implementation of this critique of society. For the actual practice of the critique of society that Marx elaborated together with Engels from 1844 on, and which he advanced for almost forty years, encompasses diverse subject areas and medial fields, as the following studies will make clear: Of course, science was the field of the critique of the capitalist mode of production into which Marx poured the most extensive efforts throughout his life. Here he succeeded not only in unraveling the bourgeois nexus of domination and exploitation hidden beneath and moving through the economic forms, and thus in demonstrating that the aim of a liberated society can be achieved neither by reforming that mode of production nor by confronting it with its own ideals of justice, which would merely have been perverted by lies and deceit. At the same time, his concept of

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this mode of production as an inverted, negative one, is both immanently related in its epistemic presuppositions to his communist objective, just as he presents the latter as a determinate negation which necessarily matures in these relations and urges toward political-practical implementation. However, no less significant than the field of science for the critique of society are (at least) two other fields in which Marx unfolded his social-critical activity, but which mostly receive scant attention in today’s research: first of all, the field of journalistic practice, in which Marx seized the opportunity to demonstrate to a contemporary audience the revolutionary potential of the modern form of society by analyzing political and economic current events in Europe. In this context, one should recall not only the countless articles in the usual socialist and communist journals, but especially almost a decade of journalistic work for the New York (Daily) Tribune, in which Marx brought the critique of society and thus the communist voice of the class struggle onto the world stage. If the book and the monograph were the means of transmission for the scientific critique of society, Marx was nevertheless also always interested in establishing his own newspaper that would make his critique of society visible and present in everyday political, social, and economic struggles. However, as is well known, he only managed to do that once and for a relatively short period of time: In the revolution of 1848/1849 Marx even had the Communist League put on ice only to found the Neue Rheinische Zeitung —Organ der Demokratie (NRhZ), which he saw as an important medium for transmitting his critique of society. In the course of the revolution, the NRhZ was supposed to accompany and take up the debates and discussions, and constantly show to the revolutionary forces the direction of struggles that, proceeding from a bourgeois revolution, would culminate in a final proletarian revolution in Germany and Europe. The reference to the Communist League names a third significant medial field in which Marx articulates the critique of society: political organization. From the Communist Committees of Correspondence through the Communist League up to the International Workingmen’s Association, Marx, with Engels, repeatedly attempted to inscribe the dispositif of the critique of society in the already existing parties, alliances, and organizations of the international labor movement and to establish the program of critical and revolutionary communism within them. For here it was not least a question of finding, forming, and organizing that proletarian revolutionary subject which, according to theory, had to wage the class struggle and carry out the revolution on the terrain of bourgeois-capitalist society.

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So if you will, book, newspaper, and party are the essential media of the critique of society. As such, the first two aren’t merely forms of theoretical reflection, but at the same time themselves forms of practice, that fundamentally aim at what drove Marx since 1843/1844: working on the revolution. If one takes another look at the second thesis on Feuerbach, then this comprehensive practical-political and performative dimension of the critique of society is not especially astonishing, since the truth of the critique of society is a “practical question”: only in practical execution— and that means: in revolutionary practice 4 —the truth, power, and reality of this critique is proven. Truth for Marx is not ‘just’ a scientific, epistemological problem, it is in exactly this sense at the same time a problem of the practical overthrow of the object of its critique and the formation of a subject of this overthrow: It is a revolutionary problem. Truth and revolution: Only if one relates both of these concepts to each other and thinks them together do the precise meaning (revolutionary transformation of society), medial scope (science, journalism, organization), and political intensity (hand-to-hand fight, opposition) of Marx’s critique of society become comprehensible on the one hand. But on the other hand, a fundamental problematique appears with this connection between truth claim and the world-historical elimination of class rule, a connection or relation which is downright necessary for the critique of society. What namely now comes into focus from the perspective of truth and revolution is the militancy, the political rigor of a critique of society whose concept of truth at the same time harbors the instruction for the revolutionary abolition of its object. Marx understands his critique of society not as a passive, observational science, but as the expression of a historical, revolutionary movement that speaks the truth about the present and future of bourgeois society as a form of rule at the same time. In a remarkable passage from The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx very precisely describes the status or role of his own practice of the critique of society within the aforementioned revolutionary movement, thus emphasizing the relation between scientific truth and proletarian revolution:

4 In this regard, one must also read the third thesis on Feuerbach: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice” (MECW 5, p. 4).

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Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the socialists and the Communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, and consequently so long as the very struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, […] these theoreticians are merely Utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, excogitate systems and go in search of a regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek the science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. […] From the moment they see this side, science will be the conscious product of the historical movement, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary. (MECW 6, p. 177 f., c.t.5 )

Regardless of the fact that here—as will be problematized later—Marx renders the philosophical presuppositions of his critique invisible with the empirical language of the apparent, it is particularly remarkable that he not only describes an objective process, but at the same time demands insight and expresses an imperative: The theoreticians of the proletariat ‘have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become [the revolution’s] mouthpiece.’ Herein is reflected nothing less than the central political problem necessarily inherent to any critique of society that makes its judgments with the scientifically founded claim to truth. Conceptual thought, the medium of rational critique, aims at universally valid, necessary judgments. As a critique of society, however, this thought is at the same time always already related to practical change, in fact to the revolutionary overthrow of its object, and it can indeed anticipate this overthrow with rational interest and perhaps also determine its adequate practical form, but in doing so it necessarily enters terrain that no longer directly obeys its universal laws, but can nevertheless be the only place 5 The existing English translations of Marx’s and Engels’ works are in many cases inaccurate and not infrequently even so deficient that they distort the meaning of the text—and it’s hardly any better with texts by other authors. A key reason for this is certainly the fundamental problem that in different languages different traditions of thought are reflected and one cannot be directly translated into the other. This is especially true of Marx’s formulations and concepts, which often still echo their origins in German Idealism. Another reason, however, is certainly simply shallow translation. Be that as it may, we have corrected many quotations in the further course of our book and indicate that with ‘c.t.’ for ‘corrected translation’.

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where the truth of the critique aiming at revolution must prove itself by historical deed.6 Thus, Marx’s substantiated “absolutism of truth” (Marcuse 1986, p. 322) is inevitably confronted with the question of how to actually deal with all those who don’t want to make themselves the organ of that revolution that consummates the truth; who remain within the ‘doctrinaire’ and ‘utopian’ and who even stand in the way of the consummation of the movement and thus of the truth. At the moment of the possibility of revolution, that is, within an intensifying antagonistic constellation of the class struggle, the critique of society must therefore pronounce judgment on those who do not constitute themselves into the conscious class of the proletariat (the ‘petite bourgeoisie,’ the ‘lumpenproletariat’) and on those who don’t convert to the historically proper communism (the ‘true socialism’ of Grün, the artisan communism of Weitling, the philosophical communism of Hess, the socialism of Proudhon, then later the anarchism of Bakunin, the socialism of Lassalle, etc.). With book, newspaper, and party, therefore, one never only works for the new communist project of a classless society free of domination, but with the same consistency also against all those who oppose the realization of this project—even if they are themselves proletarians, socialists, or communists.7 Today, wherever attempts are made to conduct the critique of society with and building upon Marx, the consequences of the revolutionary judgment of truth described here have been largely ignored, passed over, 6 Marx was aware of this, and it’s no coincidence that the second thesis on Feuerbach, which gets to the heart of this problem, is also chronologically located at the beginning of Marx’s party-building process. 7 Horkheimer, of all people, had once been very aware of the indissoluble relation between truth directed toward liberated society and the, if necessary, violent formation of its subject. Thus, about three decades before his lecture Marx Today, in his programmatic essay Traditional and Critical Theory, he still wrote: “The course of the conflict between the advanced sectors of the class and the individuals who speak out the truth concerning it […], is to be understood as a process of interactions in which consciousness comes to flower along with its liberating but also its inciting, disciplining, aggressive forces [in the original Version Horkheimer speaks of ›violent‹ – gewaltsamen – forces]. The sharpness of the conflict shows in the ever present possibility of tension between the theoretician and the class which his thinking serves. The unity of the social forces from whom liberation is awaited […] exists only as a conflict which continually threatens the subjects caught up in it. This becomes clearly evident in the person of the theoretician; his critique is aggressive; not only against the conscious defenders of the status quo but also against distracting, conformist, or Utopian tendencies within his own ranks” (Horkheimer 1972b, pp. 215 f., c.t.).

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or bracketed off. In the search for the pure scientific or pure philosophical critique of society (and perhaps also as a protection against the disturbing and irritating political consequences), the revolutionary, communist voice has been banished, thus making it impossible from the outset to perceive this problematique at all as one necessarily inherent in Marx’s critique. This problematique, however, can only become visible if the claim to truth embedded in the analysis of the bourgeois-capitalist formation of society is no longer understood as separate from the revolutionary upheaval of this society. If the basic intention of this volume is to bring back into focus the relation between truth and revolution, between analysis and judgment in Marx’s critique of society, we are equally concerned to reveal what is troubling and problematic about it. In our opinion, a critique of society that still wishes to refer to Marx with good reasons must face this problematique—not only because otherwise one runs the risk of blunting this critique’s perspective of radical social change, and in the end confusing the “idea of socialism” with the idea that it is merely a matter of tearing down “barriers to communication” in order to “expand the space of social freedom” (Honneth 2017, p. 65). One must problematize Marx’s critique of society above all because at the same time this conversely also brings to light the theoretical, political, and social costs that must remain concealed from an affirmation of the “idea of communism” that is blind to this fundamental problematique. Only this way can the fact be explained that recently also in parts of the academic left, people are again flirting with Lenin and Bolshevism and are virtually gushing about a “fidelity” to the idea, the hypothesis, or the horizon of communism in its ‘actually existing socialist’ forms, of all things, (Douzinas/Žižek 2010, p. x) once again celebrating “the actual greatness of Lenin” (Žižek 2002, p. 193), and describing the terror and the deaths of these projects with a peculiar gesture of trivialization, if not outright justification: [I]t is in regard to political terror that we can locate the gap which separates Lenin’s era from Stalinism: in Lenin’s time, terror was openly admitted (Trotsky sometimes even boasted, in an almost cocky way, about the non-democratic nature of the Bolshevik regime and the terror it used), while in Stalin’s time the symbolic status of the terror changed completely: terror turned into the publicly non-acknowledged obscene shadowy supplement of the public official discourse. (ibid., p. 261)

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Here it seems as if it’s not the terror that’s the problem, but merely its symbolic status. But whether openly and acknowledged (by whom, actually?) or concealed, whether loudmouthed or obscene, whether approved by the ‘genius’ Lenin or ordered by the mediocre Stalin: At any rate, those whom the terror strikes can no longer engage in a scholarly discourse about it. Perhaps one simply reckons with these dead, as the Maoist Alain Badiou reckons with the at least 750,000 dead of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: “How can anyone imagine that a struggle for a total reorientation of power, for a complete overhaul of the form of the state itself, could be accomplished without substantial material and human damage?” (Badiou 2016, p. 43) The social-philosophical trivialization of Marx’s claim to truth is obviously nothing compared to such political madness, with which the mere possibility of what Marx aimed at with this claim is destroyed: the rationally arranged society, the ‘association of free human beings.’

1.2 A Problematization of the International Marx Discussion As already outlined, the question of the relation between truth and revolution in Marx’s work plays no role in recent German Marx research in particular. What’s more, it’s common today to completely separate the scientific core of Marx’s theory from his political ambitions and to examine it in its supposed independence. Of course, nobody here actually denies the political stance that motivated Marx’s scientific engagement with the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s aim of abolishing capitalism and establishing a communist form of society is of course also recognized and in most cases even shared. Nonetheless, most German Marx scholars ignore or deny that Marx’s specific communist perspective was constitutive of his scientific understanding of capitalist relations, that it affected the form as well as the content of his categorical critique, and, finally, that his claim to truth was inseparable from the perspective of the revolutionary overthrow of the prevailing conditions. Intervening in this discourse was not least an essential motivation for writing this book. Now, the understanding of Marx in some prominent segments of Marx scholarship beyond the German-speaking world does indeed look different. Much more often it is taken for granted here that Marx’s scholarly work is not only politically motivated, but has an intrinsically

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political content. However, the immanent relation between the communist perspective and the scientific approach that characterizes Marx’s work is hardly examined systematically here either. The necessary (self)reflection of the materialist critique of society upon the conditions, the possibility, and the consequences of its specific concept of truth, to which we want to give a new impulse with our three studies, must therefore also remain absent. However, in the broad field of international Marx research (published in English), a few authors can be found who sometimes marginally, sometimes quite explicitly deal with questions and problems similar to ours. Some of their answers differ significantly from ours, but some also are related. The introduction to our book, which has already been published in German, cannot be the place to thoroughly cover worldwide Marx research and above all to document all the differences to our understanding of Marx’s work. Nevertheless, in the following—without any claim to completeness—a few spotlights will be thrown on authors who are particularly good for demonstrating commonalities and fundamental differences. Hopefully this will make it evident that the results of our research are an intervention not only in the specifically German-language debate, but also an objection to renowned non-German-language interpretations of Marx, some of which differ considerably from that debate. Our research project took its point of departure in particular from the insight that the development and concrete forms of Marx’s thought must be understood much more strongly from the ‘hand-to-hand fight’ in which he found himself, and as a political engagement, than is usually done in (German-language) Marx research. A stronger focus on this ‘engaged Marx’ is also found in Daniel Bensaïd and Terrell Carver, for example. Both have in common, however, a tendency to interpret Marx’s critique from a point of view that tends toward postmodernism, thus not being able to grasp its core at all—despite some interesting observations. Marx For Our Times (Bensaïd) as well as The Postmodern Marx (Carver) even explicitly reject any claim to getting to that core. Bensaïd is not concerned with “pitting some original, authentic Marx against counterfeit versions, or restoring a truth seized from us long ago, but disturbing the heavy slumber of orthodoxies” (Bensaïd 2009, p. 2). And Carver similarly explains that he has “made an effort to pull back from ‘Marx’ as a point of truth […] in order to let a self-consciously constructed ‘Marx’ raise issues and provoke controversy” (Carver 1998, p. 235), thereby making him the object of a political “reading strategy” (ibid., 234). If both

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nevertheless also attempt to work out the significance of, for example, Hegel for Marx’s thought in terms of the history of ideas, then they do so at times in an astonishingly eclectic manner; in some places they even lecture on Hegel or write digressions about the English Hegelians without any explanatory value for their understanding of Marx being discernible (see e.g. Bensaïd 2009, pp. 266–268; Carver 1998, pp. 191– 193). When it comes to Marx’s own conceptualizations, both show a tendency to interpret them by linguistic means primarily in their immediate effect as metaphors. Carver rightly criticizes Jacques Derrida for his completely arbitrary résonnement about Marx’s spectre metaphor in the Communist Manifesto, which is untenable both historically and in terms of the history of ideas (see Carver 1998, pp. 9–13). But he too—the same is true for Bensaïd—does not examine Marx’s metaphors sufficiently or even systematically within the scientific and conceptually rigorous context in which they stand in Marx’s works. Accordingly, it is not surprising that where Carver concretely engages with Marx’s scientific insights, he often remains superficial and at times falls far behind the state of research, as is particularly evident, for example, in his substantialist (mis)understanding of the category ‘abstract labor’ (see ibid., pp. 75–81). Basically, neither Carver nor Bensaïd succeeds in emphasizing the political, non-positivist content of Marx’s thought without, in the same breath, relativizing its scientific nature—Marx was essentially a political activist, according to Carver 2018—or misinterpreting it. Bensaïd finally even tips over into postmodern relativism with regard to truth by simply ascribing to Marx a “different rationality,” “another knowledge,” a novel “strategic thought” which “definitely cannot be laid securely on the epistemological plinth of his age” (Bensaïd 2009, p. 233), instead of adequately tracing the immanent relation between Marx’s communist and scientific claims, between truth and revolution. An approach that is initially more viable in this respect is Marx’s Temporalities by Massimiliano Tomba. In various texts by Marx, Tomba detects a “shift in perspective […] towards a vision able to grasp what another perspective occludes” (Tomba 2013a, p. xii). Thus, for example, against the “processual and abstract temporality of modernity” affirmed by political economy (ibid., p. xiii), as they appear in value and the sphere of circulation, Marx takes the perspective of a completely different temporality, namely that of the living labor exploited in the production process, the “living corporeality of the worker” (ibid., p. 97). In doing so, he shows that the “relation between the working class and capital

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is a struggle over time, for time” (ibid., p. 135). Beyond this correct observation, however, Tomba, too, fails to grasp the relation between the communist perspective (which does not already consist in the perspective on use value or on the workers’ self-defense against the abstract temporality of the law of value) and scientific critique in Marx. The reason for this seems to us in particular to be that he allows his gaze to be guided by Walter Benjamin in a manner that is too unreflective in regard to actual historical differences, and projects the core idea of Benjamin’s negative philosophy of history directly onto Marx (see e.g. ibid., pp. xi and 122), without taking into account that Benjamin’s materialism is and had to be significantly different from Marx’s because it was based on a changed historical experience (industrial warfare, increasing reformism of the workers’ parties, triumph of fascism). Accordingly, it is impossible for Tomba to recognize that Marx by no means just condemns capital for the subsumption of living labor and the devastating consequences of the development of productive power, but rather shows precisely in Capital how here at the same time—even though still in an inverted form—the conditions for a communist society based on conscious social labor arise for the first time, that is, capital itself brings about the possibility of its historical ‘determinate negation.’ Thus, although Tomba repeatedly emphasizes its importance, Marx’s understanding of inversion remains ultimately uncomprehended, and with it the assumptions that made Marx’s knowledge possible and which are mirrored in his scientific critique. Instead of reflecting on why this perspective could still claim validity historically with Marx, but why it had to prove increasingly problematic in view of the developments in the twentieth century at the latest—which Benjamin, of all people, knew with his emphasis on the temporal core of truth—, Tomba simply splits off this interrelation. However, we want to highlight the important contribution that in the same book Tomba makes to the discussion of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for he is the only one who fundamentally understands Marx’s texts in their character of being “historiographical interventions” (ibid., p. 41), without therefore doubting their scientific nature. In Marx’s text he identifies the practical aim of forcing “solutions beyond the immediate political and economic possibilities of the moment” (ibid.). For Tomba it’s clear that Marx didn’t just simply think up such solutions, but rather arrived at them by means of “an analysis of reality that can open new possibilities for change, the only analysis that the historical materialist can consider scientific” (ibid., p. 42). We will return to this

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shortly. Of course, the Eighteenth Brumaire is one of the most famous texts in which Marx’s political motivation is unmistakably evident, and this is accordingly—in contrast to the case of Marx’s critique of political economy—by all means addressed in the research literature. However, most authors usually criticize the relation between political or revolutionary motivation and historiographical knowledge more as a weakness of Marx’s interpretation of contemporary historical events. Amy Wendling , for example, quite justifiably recognizes that Marx’s approach in the Eighteenth Brumaire had been “to work the events of mid-nineteenth century France into his overarching revolutionary schema” (Wendling 2003, p. 43). The fact that Marx in this way also still interpreted the workers’ defeats and suffering as an expression of conditions that were developing toward their revolutionary overthrow, however, does not prompt Wendling to reflect on Marx’s materialist rationale for this perspective of development. She regards his notion of qualitatively different revolutionary temporalities to be a “prescriptive project” (ibid., p. 39) that loses itself in the contradiction between constant change and “teleological impulse” (ibid., p. 45). Thus, she aims to refute this “revolutionary schema” as false from the outset, stating with Georges Bataille that “the impossibility of Marx’s proletarian revolution was an historical fact” (ibid.). Whereas Wendling sees Marx’s supposed inability to recognize historical facts as such rooted in his theory of revolution, Gareth Stedman Jones , in Karl Marx. Greatness and Illusion, devotes himself directly to comparing Marx’s analyses with these facts. By doing so, he is in fact able to point out some misconceptions and blind spots in Marx’s work, for example that Marx did not at all recognize what was by all means innovative about Bonaparte’s way of governing, which was able to appropriate “political democracy […] for the populist politics of the right” (Stedman Jones 2016, p. 336), thus becoming the precursor of modern populism (see ibid., p. 340).8 Also, one must agree with Stedman Jones that Marx’s 8 Astonishingly, Terrell Carver, in his research on the Eighteenth Brumaire (Carver 2002 and 2018, Chapter 4), claims conversely that Marx fundamentally demonstrated “how fragile democratic structures are, how easily they fall to authoritarian politicians by electoral demagoguery and coups d’état” (Carver 2018, p. 109): “What Marx identifies is a dynamic within liberal democracy that many commentators and theorists miss, preferring to see it as an aberration or inexplicable puzzle: why do people vote for populist authoritarians […]?” (ibid., p. 110) This is not correct as stated. Marx saw Bonaparte precisely not as an expression of a possibility inherent in democratic systems of their tipping over

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materialist interpretation faltered in the face of Bonapartism because here none of the classes he identified oriented their political action according to their immediate economic interest. Marx had tried to cover this up as well as possible by concealing, for example, the many votes that had been cast for Bonaparte in December 1848 in the ‘quartiers populaires’ of the major French cities—not just, as he claimed, in the countryside, where even the only resistance to the coup d’état later took place (see ibid., pp. 337–339). However, some of Stedman Jones’ assertions are unfounded, due to the fact that on some topics, he doesn’t consider Marx’s journalistic articles at all. Contrary to what Stedman Jones believes (see ibid., pp. 340–342), for example, Marx recognized very well that the public fear of socialism and anarchy were reasons for Bonaparte’s electoral victory, he very well criticized Bonaparte’s military ambitions, and regarded universal suffrage as a legitimate and important demand. A major problem with Stedman Jones’ approach is that he is hardly interested in why Marx saw in political events more, and also different things, than just the supposedly objective facts. Stedman Jones does not even recognize that Marx tried to present the existing in the light of the possibility of its revolutionary overcoming and that this also reflects the fundamental question of the interrelation between knowledge and interest. Instead, he occasionally depicts Marx’s presentations simply as “unreal” and “abstract and doctrinaire” (ibid., p. 485). One of the very few who have studied Marx’s numerous journalistic works of the 1850s on English politics in depth is Miles Taylor, who in his article The English Face of Karl Marx shows in detail how intensively Marx followed the daily political debates in England and absorbed contemporary sources, especially newspapers, to substantiate his own positions. But Taylor, too, is content to note that Marx’s revolutionary perspective rendered his assessments increasingly unrealistic as the class conflict in England ebbed away over the course of the 1850s. Instead of posing the question of why Marx, who of course was not unaware of this into populist, authoritarian rule, but rather as a historical exception to the rule according to which class interests are actually also politically represented by their bearers (and not vicariously by a populist ‘compromise candidate’). The problem with Carver’s reading is that, on the one hand, unlike Stedman Jones, he allows all of Marx’s remarks in the Eighteenth Brumaire to stand unquestioned, but on the other hand, he attributes more to Marx (in this case, historically recent insights about authoritarianism) than is actually to be found here. Such distortions just go along with “a self-consciously constructed ‘Marx’”.

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ebbing, persisted in letting his eye be guided by such a perspective, Taylor makes a judgment similar to Wendling’s: “If Marx made a mistake about England – over-exaggerating its readiness for revolution – it was a mistake which followed from the way in which he conflated terms and propositions from what was an essentially political debate with his own scenario of social revolution” (Taylor 1996, p. 246). Ultimately he reduces Marx’s commentary to “a form of rhetoric” (ibid., p. 247). Kevin B. Anderson’s comprehensive study Marx at the Margins also stands out in particular. Among other things, Anderson examines in detail Marx’s still hardly explored journalistic articles of this period, in this case looking at Marx’s comments on non-Western societies, colonial domination, and what Anderson calls, using a contemporary term, intersectional oppression. By repeatedly contrasting these and later texts, excerpts, and manuscripts with the Communist Manifesto, which he uses as evidence for Marx’s earlier supposedly ‘unilinear’ and ‘progressivist’ view, he aims to show how much Marx’s perspective later broadened and differentiated, thus defending him against the accusation of ‘Eurocentrism,’ as raised by Edward Said or Shlomo Avineri, for example. According to Anderson, one can conversely diagnose in the development of Marx’s thought increasing attention over the course of time to “the need for a variety of pathways of development and toward revolution for societies outside Western Europe and North America” (Anderson 2010, p. xii) It is conspicuous, however, that Anderson doesn’t deal with the reasons for Marx’s broadening of perspective at all. Marx’s revolutionary perspective, his permanent search for the revolutionary potential in the present, is implicitly present throughout Anderson’s book, for example when he shows several times that Marx often saw in the subaltern movements allies of the English or European working class. But Anderson never discusses this context in greater detail, ultimately only stringing together evidence, and this is probably also the reason why his critique of Paresh Chattopadhyay, for example, misses the mark. The latter has convincingly presented Marx’s understanding of the conditions for a communist revolution, according to which historically “it is only capital which has, through its contradictions, generated these conditions” (Chattopadhyay 2006, p. 60). Accordingly, he convincingly argues that Marx saw, for example, the possibility that the Russian village community could skip over capitalism and directly become the basis of a communist development as a special case, the success of which would very well still depend on the developments in the capitalist center (see ibid., pp. 50–62).

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Whereas the above mentioned authors, in their analyses of Marx’s texts and articles on the major European political events of the 1850s, pay great attention to the question of whether Marx’s description of these events is at all historically valid, Tomba now conversely emphasizes precisely the performative content and political claim of Marx’s remarks. According to Tomba, Marx’s point in the Eighteenth Brumaire is to demonstratively contrast Bonaparte’s claim that the Second Empire continued France’s imperial tradition with another French tradition: that of the Revolution, which since 1789 had repeatedly interrupted the continuum of domination over the working class. Marx attempts, with a “materialist historiography” (Tomba 2013a, p. 40), to write history in such a way that its revolutionary possibilities are set free for the present: “He wants to build a tradition from past attempts at liberation that is able to join in a fight in the present” (ibid., p. 41). In Marx’s description of the autonomy of state authority in the Second Empire as a “struggle against the class-struggle,” a “reaction to an insurgent proletariat” (ibid., p. 55), Tomba sees political engagement and an objective view of history as inseparable: “With this overturning of perspective, Marx shows the proletariat as the active side of the fight and presents it from the point of view of the working class in struggle” (ibid.) Tomba is so fascinated by this change of perspective, however, that he presents Marx’s intention to support the proletariat with a new historiography as if it immediately served the desired purpose. Because he treats the “possibilities for change” like certainties of change, Tomba reads the Eighteenth Brumaire as proof “that the proletariat already possesses a destructive force needed to break up that state mechanism” (Tomba 2013b, p. 40). That’s astonishing, since he even quotes Marx’s reservation that all revolutions perfected the state machine instead of breaking it (see MECW 11, p. 186). Already for Marx it was a problem—albeit an unacknowledged one—to empirically prove in the face of the coup d’état the revolutionary potential of the epoch that he asserted. Tomba’s thesis that Marx’s claim to truth and his political-practical goals are virtually harmoniously intertwined would actually be suitable as a starting point for an immanent problematization of Marx’s mode of critique and has therefore also enriched the second study in our book. Tomba’s account offers no basis, however, for a discussion of the practical consequences and strategic limits of Marx’s journalistic engagement, since he omits considerations of the relationship between theory and practice. His enthusiasm for performative historiography in Benjamin’s sense prevents him from reflecting on the conditions

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necessary for a practical egression from the continuum of domination. Nor does Tomba ask himself, anymore than Marx does: If the state transforms all resistance into its own force—what form of political action can be revolutionary at all under conditions of reaction? For him, it seems sufficient to ascertain that Marx, by naming “the event” instead of merely reporting on it (Tomba 2013b, p. 38), breaks through the historical continuum and ensures that the proletariat re-appropriates the past revolutionary opportunities. With his positive reference to the concept of the ‘event,’ which authors such as Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, or Alain Badiou also praise—in the tradition of Martin Heidegger—as an interruption of the predictability and monotony of everyday life, Tomba ultimately avoids in a spontaneist way the question of the transition to praxis. Accordingly, what is conspicuous about Tomba’s remarks on both Marx’s “historiographical interventions” and the critique of political economy is also that the proletariat as a potentially revolutionary subject is basically always already something given for him. The needs and consciousness of the proletariat seem to him to be something so selfevident that the question of their objective conditions of emergence does not even arise, but their confrontation with the existing conditions apparently follows of its own accord. This seems to us symptomatic of many of those approaches that actually initially take the proper path and don’t simply exclude the immanently political content of Capital, but explicitly examine it. This especially applies to the lineage of reception that goes by the loose label Open Marxism. For example, Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, and Kosmas Psychopedis emphasize “that social phenomena have to be seen as forms assumed by class struggle, as forms in and against which social conflict obtains” (Bonefeld/Gunn/Psychopedis 1992, p. xiii). Whereas they correctly regard form analysis as central to Marx’s critique or the critique of society in general, their claim that the class struggle is the content expressed in all those forms is, however, questionable, not least because in this way they hypostatize the class struggle, and thus also a consciousness underlying it, as something that always already and permanently exists. The reason for this lies in their ultimately ahistorical understanding of human essence, which is what their initially very correct statement, informed by Critical Theory, “that Marx’s work amounts to a reductio ad hominem” (Bonefeld 2004, p. 104), amounts to. For they all understand this human essence as something that authentically (eigentlich) constitutes humans, as an anthropological substance that,

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alienated from human beings, exists inverted by and in the capitalist forms and can come into its own again in the course of their abolition.9 Accordingly, Bonefeld writes: “Human social practice exists, then, through the constituted forms of capital: ‘in-itself’, as relations between things whose constituted form is the separation of human social practice from its conditions, and ‘for-itself’ because human social relations subsist in and through the relations between things, a world of things that is reproduced by ‘active humanity’ in and through its class-divided social practice. It follows that human social practice subsists also ‘against-itself’ as, on the one hand, a perverted social category and, on the other, as a power that makes history and is thus capable of leaving behind its own perverted existence” (ibid., p. 114, emphasis ours).10 In Psychopedis, the explanation of what characterizes this seemingly eternal human essence, how it subsists in the inhuman society and how it becomes the source of opposing values, even takes on traits that are more reminiscent of Lebensphilosophie than of materialistic critique: “The conditions of life refer to the preservation of life and health themselves, to creativity, communication, friendship, love. They refer to the power of people in giving meaning to their actions, using and inventing symbols, living in non-violent societies, contributing to the definition of collective goals. The particular tension through which these conditions subsist transforms them into the values for which actors struggle in societies of power, threat, exploitation. The real then takes the form of cancellation of values” (Psychopedis 2000, p. 91).11 We agree with the exponents of Open Marxism that—to put it in a simplified way—“a human world of autonomy, cooperation and social

9 By the way, the critique that Michael Heinrich, following Althusser’s claim of an ‘epistemological break,’ quite wrongly makes of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, because he does not understand Marx’s concept of human essence at all (see Chapter 2.2 of the present book), ironically hits the mark in the case of the Open Marxists. 10 Bonefeld distinguishes between different temporalities in a manner similar to Tomba and Wendling and emphasizes the specific “political economy of struggle for human cooperation, solidarity, dignity, and the democratic organisation of social time. The time of class struggle entails a different conception of time to that which holds that time is money” (Bonefeld 2004, p. 115). 11 John Holloway, for his part, repeatedly drifts into Existentialism and kitsch with his philosophy of the scream. See also Holloway 2015 and the critique thereof in Chapter 2.4.

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solidarity” (Bonefeld/Gunn/Holloway/Psychopedis 1995, p. 4) represents Marx’s standard of critique, but this standard does not simply emerge—especially according to Marx’s own claim—from a transhistorical human substance. The Open Marxists don’t reflect upon how Marx sought to mediate the epistemic presuppositions of his critique with the materialist claim of that very critique to scientifically represent the capitalist relations as a totality that itself produces the conditions of possibility for their revolutionary upheaval. Here they obviously also don’t see any particular problem, because this possibility is basically always already secured with their understanding of the human essence and its nature. The understanding of the critique of political economy as a reductio ad hominem and the ultimately ontologically-anthropologically grounded determination of emancipatory subjectivity, both of which are symptomatic for Open Marxism, have nowhere been more accurately criticized than by Moishe Postone and Guido Starosta. In Time, Labor, and Social Domination Postone pointedly summarizes: “Capital is not the mystified form of powers that ‘actually’ are those of the workers; rather it is the real form of existence of ‘species capacities,’ no longer those of the workers alone, that are constituted historically in alienated form as socially general powers” (Postone 1996, pp. 349 f.). “Marx’s conception of the possible overcoming of capitalism” builds precisely on this understanding of species-being as social labor, which only began to develop once capital had emerged, i.e. through capital itself and therefore in an alienated form, for with this development the “contradiction between the potential of the species-general capabilities that have been accumulated, and their existent, alienated form” is ever growing: “It is this structurally generated gap between what is and what could be, according to Marx’s analysis, that allows for the possible historical transformation of capitalism and, relatedly, provides the immanent grounds for the possibility of the critique itself” (ibid., p. 360). Starosta goes a decisive step further. In Marx’s Capital, Method, and Revolutionary Subjectivity, he praises Postone’s groundbreaking book for having understood “emancipatory consciousness as socially constituted by the alienated historical dynamic of capital itself” (Starosta 2016, p. 3). At the same time, however, with his own elaborations, he wishes to react to the “challenge posed by Postone” (ibid., p. 4), which he locates in the fact that the latter does not see revolutionary subjectivity

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embodied in the proletariat.12 His following reconstruction of Marx’s scientific critique indeed shows, on the one hand, by far the greatest commonalities of all current Marx research with our own understanding of Marx’s scientific claim: He is explicitly concerned with the recovery of “the intrinsic connection between the specifically dialectical form of social science and its revolutionary content” (ibid.), and his analysis of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts exhibits—with a few differences in detail, for example, with regard to his interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its significance for Marx’s understanding of history—clear parallels to the first of the three studies in our book. The same is the case for his understanding of Capital. And yet, on the other hand (and only seemingly paradoxically), his methodological reflections and his theoretical as well as practical conclusions ultimately differ fundamentally from our argumentation. For this reason, Starosta’s approach will be illuminated here in a bit more detail. Starosta is indeed completely right with his critique that Postone “denies the working class the determination of material bearer of the necessity to abolish capital” (ibid., p. 165, fn. 1, emphasis ours), because he does not recognize that, following Marx’s argument, “the revolutionary political consciousness of the working class can only be a concrete mode of existence of their productive consciousness ” (ibid., p. 294).

12 Chris Arthur, too, explicitly takes issue with Postone’s remarks on the proletariat (see Arthur 2004). His critique of Postone’s understanding of abstract labor as its own self-mediating social ground does indeed hit a weak spot: “The conditioning sequence does not run: abstract labour → value → money, but the reverse. Money posits all commodities as values, and their positing as value brings about the abstract identity of the labours embodied in all products” (ibid., p. 99). But his assertion that Postone’s rejection of the standpoint of labor as the foundation of the critique of capitalism “disqualifies the proletariat from forming itself as a counter-subject to capital, and rebelling against wageslavery” (ibid., p. 101) completely misses the point of what Postone means when he writes: “The logic of Marx’s presentation does not support the notion that the proletariat is the revolutionary Subject” (Postone 1996, p. 325). Postone’s point is by no means the claim that workers per se can’t develop revolutionary consciousness; rather, the point is that they aren’t the ‘actual’ subject of economic development (keyword: reductio ad hominem) who must simply assert their proletarian subjectivity against private property. “Rather, the logical thrust of Marx’s presentation clearly implies that this historical negation should be conceived as people’s reappropriation of socially general capacities that are not ultimately grounded in the working class and had been constituted historically in alienated form as capital. Such reappropriation would be possible only if the structural basis of this process of alienation – value, hence, proletarian labor – were abolished” (ibid., p. 357).

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According to Starosta, Postone only sees the objective potential of capitalist development, but not that this objective development must necessarily take on the form of the revolutionary subjectivity of the proletariat. Starosta’s reconstruction of Marx condenses into the following, almost mechanistic determination of revolutionary or communist subjectivity: “the alienated social necessity arises for the human being to be produced as a productive subject that is fully and objectively conscious of the social determinations of her/his individual powers and activity. Thus, she/he no longer sees society as an alien and hostile power that dominates her/him. Instead, he/she consciously experiences the materiality of social life (that is, productive co-operation) as the necessary condition for the development of the plenitude of his/her individuality, and therefore consciously recognises the social necessity of the expenditure of her/his labour power in organic association with the other producers” (ibid., pp. 284 f.). Now, the interesting thing about this presentation is that Starosta gets to the heart of Marx’s argument completely correctly, but at the same time he does not reflect at all on why Marx argued and had to argue in this way. For Marx was confronted from the outset with a fundamental epistemological problem: How is a communist scientific critique of the capitalist social relations possible that is not based on subjective or ‘normativephilosophical’ presuppositions, which remain external to its object and are thus unsupported? Indeed, drawing on deliberations of his mentor Juan Iñigo Carrera, Starosta aptly reproduces Marx’s attempted solution: Marx’s revolutionary science “immediately is, in its generic condition as a historical form of social consciousness, an inner moment of the unfolding of human practice itself,” and that’s why it succeeds in “uncovering and ideally appropriating human practice’s immanent material and social determinations – hence its objective transformative potentialities” (ibid., p. 54). However, because for Starosta the unity of (materialist) theory and (revolutionary) practice is thus secured and the further question of philosophical basic assumptions has utterly been settled—which was indeed Marx’s and Engels’ argumentation strategy in the German Ideology 13 —, he completely misses that (a) without these very well philosophically grounded communist presuppositions and a certain interest Marx could not have recognized and conceptualized the social relations as

13 For an extensive treatment, see (only available in German, however) Spekker (2018) (also with reference to Starosta) as well as Bohlender (2018).

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inverted, not yet rational, and that (b) in order to redeem these presuppositions in a materialist way as justified, he had to burden his presentation with the onus of showing communism as a determinate negation necessarily produced by these relations themselves. Marx’s assumption that only such a representation of capital was possible and, above all, true which understood it as an inverted form in which the possibility of true human sociality develops, still had—up to a certain degree—its historical justification in view of real proletarian revolutionary struggles (and also in view of the fact that the productive forces had not yet so clearly taken the form of gigantic forces of destruction as they have since the beginning of the twentieth century). Whereas Marx however at least had an inkling that it had yet to be proven “in practice” “whether objective truth can be attributed” to his theory (MECW 5, p. 3; emphasis ours), for Starosta that’s not a question of ‘whether’ at all and therefore not worth any methodological reflection. Evincing a determinism typical of ideological or ‘Worldview’ Marxism, Starosta sees the coming of such a revolutionary practice as ‘scientifically’ guaranteed and Marx’s theory, because it is a conscious reflection of this objective development, as proven to be true anyway. Accordingly, it is no wonder that at the end of his book, which despite all this is one of the most elaborate commentaries on Marx’s work in recent years, Starosta ultimately drifts into dogmatism completely removed from reality by postulating in all seriousness and completely imperturbably for the present: “What is required is dialectical research on contemporary concrete forms in which the alienated development of the productive subjectivity of the workers towards its fully developed universality realises itself through its own negation” (Starosta 2016, p. 315). That way materialism turns into ideology: Even one and a half centuries after Marx’s critique of political economy, we are accordingly actually just still on the law-bound track of historical development toward the one day fully realized universality of humanity. No matter how long and how drastically humanity continues to be negated by the capitalist mode of production: Starosta manages to justify this continuous negation as simply necessary for the—ad calendas graecas finally concluded—positive development of humanity. Not to mention the very immediate, even more drastic ‘negations’ which are the twentieth-century crimes against humanity: If Starosta were to say a word about them at all, they would have a place in his historical determinism, unperturbed by actual history, at best as insignificant deviations, at worst as equally ‘necessary’ transit stations for the positive development of the human species. In contrast

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to Starosta’s Marx exegesis, which turns into dogmatism, the critique of society offered by Postone—who, not coincidentally, also made important contributions to the critique of anti-Semitism—is, precisely because of its partial lack of fidelity to the letter of Marx’s writing, historically much more reflective and many times more adequate to contemporary conditions. A completely different form of dogmatism, on the other hand, has been observable for some years in academic debates which, although not part of Marx research in the strict sense, explicitly refer to Marx and, above all, to the history of Marxism in the twentieth century. Slavoj Žižek and Jodi Dean, for example, are particularly prominent in hyping the concept of the communist party, referring, in addition to the hodgepodge of (post-)modern philosophers and psychoanalysts that is typical of their thinking, not only—in a relatively eclectic way—to Marx, but also to Lenin in particular (see Žižek 2002; Douzinas/Žižek 2010; Dean 2018 and 2019). The interesting thing about them, however, is that precisely through their completely uncritical, affirmative praise of the Leninist cadre party, which is downright cynical in view of actual historical events, they inadvertently actually draw attention to a problem that follows from Marx’s thought itself—a problem that Chattopadhyay, on the other hand, simply resolves and externalizes by means of literalism. Marx himself could not help the fact that later Marxists drew on him to legitimize themselves as the executors of progress, even though their goals and actions had nothing to do with an ‘association of free human beings’ and could not be reconciled with his theories: “there is an unbridgeable gulf between Marx’s conception of the socialist revolution led by the producers themselves and the revolutions that took place in the twentieth century under the leadership, not of the producers themselves, but of small groups of radicalised intelligentsia acting in their name, even if with mass support at the initial stage. […] He [Marx] never mentions the need for a special apparatus to substitute itself to the spontaneous self-activity of the masses towards their own emancipation” (Chattopadhyay 2006, p. 62). Dean distrusts this “spontaneous self-activity” and states that the masses can develop real political subjectivity only as a consequence of representation, leadership, organization, and discipline by the party: “The energy of the crowd opens to political subjectivity, but it is not the same as political subjectivity. It’s necessary but insufficient, an incomplete part of a politics not yet the politics of a part, half a split subject” (Dean 2018,

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pp. 124 f.). And Žižek, who can’t mitigate his dogmatism through the distancing gesture of scare quotes, writes that the “‘truth’ of Marxism” is “not just the ‘point of view’ of a particular historical subject: ‘external’ intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive its own place within the social totality, which enables it to accomplish its ‘mission’ – this insight has to be mediated through an external element” (Žižek 2002, p. 187): the party. With that, Dean and Žižek actually touch upon the often neglected political-organizational dimension, which cannot simply be detached from Marx’s critique of society: How is it ensured that proletarians actually develop into the communist subjects they must become according to the materialist critique as reconstructed by Starosta, for example? How do they receive adequate class consciousness, that is, how do they become conscious subjects of historical truth? And how to deal with those who do not comply with this mission? But instead of dealing with these problems and also contradictions in Marx’s thought itself and critically addressing its possible consequences, Dean and Žižek simply position themselves completely affirmatively and naively on the standpoint of Leninism. Thus, not only do they blatantly lack a systematic critique of revolutionary subjectivation from Marx to Lenin and Lukács, and not only do they lack a critique of communist politics, which with the party concept turned the revolutions in the twentieth century into mass graves. What is even more and surprisingly completely lacking is a materialist analysis of that immense power which they uncritically concede to the party and even ennoble with categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the power of the party to convert a collective ‘pre-political’ crowd into a revolutionary political subject by means of authoritarian techniques of government and practices of truth. Ignorance—in the above case even open affirmation—of the power of organizations supposedly operating in the service of truth and revolution is part of a central problematique, the reasons for which are addressed in our book on the basis of Marx’s thoughts on revolutionary subjectivation and their specific blind spots. Such a path is also taken by Jacques Bidet in his book Foucault with Marx, which in this aspect correspondingly has interesting points of contact with our own project. What the third study in our book reveals in detail in its confrontation of Marx and Max Stirner is also partly the subject of Bidet’s much broader attempt to meta-theoretically frame and integrate what he considers to be the two most important social-critical undertakings of the nineteenth and

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twentieth centuries, namely Marx’s materialist critique of the capitalist mode of production and domination and Foucault’s materialist critique of organizational and institutional relations of power in modernity. One may certainly rightly criticize the crudeness and schematic nature of his grand thesis that Marx and Foucault had each systematically analyzed only one of the two poles of the exercise of power and domination in modern society. Interestingly, however, this enables Bidet to partially capture the weaknesses and blind spots of the respective positions. In this way, he is able to demonstrate well that although Marx certainly had the organizational power of the state and the violent apparatuses of the bureaucracy, police, and army in view, he ultimately attributed the negative power effects of these apparatuses to the ruling class alone. Marx’s impressive materialist, but one-sided, view of exploitation, class domination, property and the power of the market had, according to Bidet, two fatal consequences: On the one hand, Marx lost analytical sight of the pole of institutional dispositifs and organizational violence (from the psychiatric wards and prisons to schools and the family) and the interrelation between knowledge production and the exercise of power and attributed it, if at all, solely to capitalist socialization. On the other hand, he had also laid aside the critical view of the bourgeois legacies of these dispositifs and organizational apparatuses of violence in a future socialist or communist society. “Organisational domination as such remains outside of the theoretical field of Marxian critique, even if it intervenes in its descriptive register” (Bidet 2016, p. 199). The lack of a critique of communist politics, the lack of a critique of the knowledge-power of a communist party in Marx’s thought and later in Marxist thought, can thus be understood at least to some extent. However, the question of how these blind spots are fundamentally linked to the peculiar relationship between the scientific claim to truth and the substantiation of revolution in Marx’s thought is not explored in any detail by Bidet either. Thus, it remains open whether the violent consequences depicted here are simply the result of Marx’s intellectual failures or whether they should rather be understood and reflected upon as an aporia that is necessarily inherent in the materialist critique of society. All authors dealt with here have in common that they hardly, if at all, reflect upon the epistemic preconditions and, along with these, the historical conditions of possibility of Marx’s critique of society. Whereas some take up Marx’s ideas quite loosely for their own contemporary political objectives but ignore the inner coherence of Marx’s critique,

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others indeed recognize that Marx’s insights were influenced by his revolutionary assumptions, which they nonetheless discard as distorting the facts. Others again, although providing precise reconstructions of his theory, refer dogmatically to Marx in a quasi-Leninist manner—“The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true”—, whereby every reflection upon Marx’s criteria of truth falls outside of their horizons. In contrast, in the few cases where such a reflection is attempted to some extent, standards of critique are foisted on Marx that remain external to his theory and cannot be substantiated from it at all. If in contrast we work out in the following how Marx’s scientific account of capitalist relations not only has its epistemic precondition in his communist perspective, but at the same time its criterion of truth in a revolutionary practice first brought about by the relations themselves understood in this way, truth and revolution in Marx’s understanding of science thus forming an indissoluble relationship; if we carve out how this materialist conception of truth made possible, but also limited, his peculiar understanding of the historical-political events of his time, and how it ultimately had to go hand in hand with a narrowed conception of the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity that was largely blind to the associated power procedures and their possible consequences, we are not simply concerned with mere exegesis. Nor do we simply want to straighten out Marx in order to create the firm foundation on which a now really true Marxism could stand. What we wish to achieve with our book is a contribution to the necessary reflection of materialist critique of society upon its own philosophical presuppositions, upon the temporal core (Zeitkern) of its truth mediated with revolutionary practice, the validity of which does not remain untouched by its historically specific, and in the course of history increasingly denied, conditions of possibility, and upon the violence that accompanies its specific ‘absolutism of truth’ when the latter does not become aware of its own limits. Materialist critique must therefore turn to its own site of emergence (Entstehungsherd) in order to achieve a radical enlightenment about itself.

1.3

Abstracts

The three studies on Marx’s critique of society and its fundamental problematique that now follow each deal predominantly with one of the three medial fields in which Marx articulated and practiced his critique as a scientist, journalist, and communist organizer.

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The first study is intended to illuminate the fundamental understanding of science as it runs throughout Marx’s work, eventually reaching its peak in Capital. Starting from the observation that especially even here a variety of references to a future communist society can be found, which apparently don’t just represent embellishments to a scientific ‘core’ of the argumentation which could simply be separated from it, but which flow into the scientific presentation itself, the fundamental status of these references will be examined here. To this end, it’s necessary to first of all make a historical leap back to the (textual) location where Marx for the first time makes communism the fulcrum of his critical investigations of the bourgeois relations of domination: the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Here Marx establishes communism from the capitalist relations themselves as their determinate negation and thus as truth, as the ‘solved riddle’ of previous history, which thereby presents itself as an inversion. This emphatic concept of truth, which he substantially develops in a critical engagement with Hegel, extends—as will also be demonstrated by refuting the common assertion of an ‘epistemological break’ (Althusser) consummated with the German Ideology—into Marx’s main scientific work: the critique of political economy. Thus this study will have to make clear that there is an immanent relation between Marx’s perspective of a communist, revolutionary upheaval and his scientific critique of the capitalist mode of production; that Marx’s specific understanding of communism is not only the epistemic precondition of his systematic presentation, but that the truth of bourgeois relations, which in this manner become conceptually accessible now, is their own revolutionary sublation. However, as will be shown in conclusion, this also entails considerable problems that must be reflected upon. The second study approaches Marx’s view of the political situation in Europe after 1848. At a time when European governments were cultivating alliances among each other to restore the pre-revolutionary order and secure their power against domestic opposition, how could he detect signs of revolution everywhere? The reason for this perspective, with which Marx as a journalist appears before a broad audience, lies in his claim that in depicting contemporary events he is not merely describing the current balance of power. Rather, he believes that he can explain these events through an insight into the historical laws of development that he is convinced are pushing toward liberation from social domination, toward a revolutionary upheaval. The focus of examination are the newspaper articles Marx wrote about England and France in the

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1850s. This material reveals in particular how he operationalizes his revolutionary perspective on current political situations: In Marx’s account, the Bonapartist redraft of imperial rule in France and the ruling arrangement between aristocracy and bourgeoisie in England do not appear as forms of unrestrained power but as strategies of defense against the class struggle, the reasons for which had not been cleared up even after the European revolutions of 1848–1849. With this approach to events, he succeeds in identifying techniques for authoritarian pacification of social conflict on both sides of the English Channel: nationalist populism, the prerogative state, and liberalism protected by state violence. At the same time, however, his attempt to prove, by invoking ‘real, empirical history,’ the necessity and inevitability of revolution, thus justifying his materialist perspective as true, also narrows the scope of his insight: Marx cannot imagine that he is dealing here with extremely modern crisis resolution regimes that could achieve future prominence. His expectation of revolution makes him inattentive to some of the strengths of its opponents. Critique of society today can therefore not take up his thought directly, but must first be clear about the historical and epistemic conditions under which Marx arrived at his political judgments. The third study is concerned with the question of the transformation of the subject of the critique of society into a revolutionary, proletarian, or communist class subject. How does it come about that the multitudinous and variegated plebeian-proletarian subjects merge into a single proletariat, into a revolutionary subject? Already in the formative period of Marx’s critique of society, this problem emerges and finds its first significant expression in the altercation between Marx and Max Stirner. Stirner had described the process of subjectivation, i.e. the production and formation of a ‘subject of truth,’ in his work The Ego and Its Own as a comprehensive historical and institutionalized power procedure in which a supra-individual truth (state, nation, religion, man, proletariat, communism, etc.) must be anchored in the individual, in the form of specific ‘belief practices.’ For Marx, on the other hand, the subjectivation of the ‘proletariat,’ that is, the conscious becoming-a-class of the workers, was a truth procedure inscribed in the historical development of the capitalist mode of production. According to him, the ‘proletariat’ had to undergo, within the capitalist mode of production as well as against it, a political and socio-economic (class) formation process that would induce in a dual way social transformation and self-transformation. In the reconstruction

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of the clash of the two positions, it becomes clear not only that two independent, but by all means complementary ways of critiquing bourgeois society as a form of domination confront each other here (critique of bourgeois relations of meaning; critique of capitalist relations of production). Likewise, it is shown that Marx underestimates the social and political power of subjectivation practices and therefore easily resorts to communist forms of organization (league, party, workers’ association) to ‘support’ the process of formation and consciousness of the ‘proletariat,’ especially when the workers deviate from the path of industrial-proletarian subjectivation and indeed do not fulfill their historical task—when they become, for example, ‘lumpenproletarians’ or ‘labor aristocrats.’ Marx, in rejecting Stirner’s perspective of a critique of power, left a gap in his critique of society with regard to the question of subjectivation, which later Marxist authors—from Lenin and Lukács to Žižek—would step into with the effective but at the same time fatal notion of a communist party. The party now becomes the important educational instrument and security dispositif of a ‘proletariat’ that, at the moment of revolution, falls into “ideological crisis” (Lukács) and into reformist or even counterrevolutionary aberrations. We conclude our book with a reflection on the consequences that— especially against the background of the experiences of the twentieth century—arise for a materialist critique of society from the relation between truth and revolution in Marx’s thought as we have carved it out.

CHAPTER 2

“in its essence critical and revolutionary”—Truth in Marx’s Scientific Critique of Society Matthias Spekker

2.1 Communist or Scientific Critique?---An Outline of the Problem Capital is Marx’s undisputed magnum opus; a decades-long process of research culminates in it, the aim of which was the scientific critique of the capitalist mode of production. Condensed in this way, academic Marx research should actually be able to light-heartedly indulge in the scholastic reconstruction and verification of Marx’s reasoning and logical argumentation—were it not for individual sentences and entire sections that refuse to conform to the scientific ideal that seems to be recognizable in Capital . Not just—or even primarily—in the preface and postfaces, but

Some fundamental insights that have fed into the present study have acquired contour through the intensive discussions I’ve had with Patrick Viol and Jan Rickermann. My special thanks go to both of them.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bohlender, A.-S. Schönfelder, M. Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17358-5_2

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also in the main text, where the scientific presentation of capitalist relations occurs, one is repeatedly confronted with allusions to the liberated society, sometimes even with philosophy of history reflections. As is well known, the greatest stumbling block is provided by Chapter 32 on The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,1 and the deterministic language that Marx uses here isn’t just challenged by his Marxological critics, but also forced Marx himself, at least later, to relativizations.2 However, it is of all things the supposedly inconspicuous formulations—those that have been lost sight of in the course of a 150-year history of the reception of Capital , including its systematizations, reconstructions, and popularizations or at any rate its narrow focus (initially justified, of course) on the basic categories and concepts of Marx’s science—the disdain or disregard of which is symptomatic of many of today’s readings of Marx. In fact, it is precisely these formulations which, when looked at more closely, speak volumes about the irrefutable claim that suffuses the critique of political economy right into its concepts and fundamental argumentation. What does it say about Marx’s critical presentation when he says, for example, concerning the development of large-scale industry, that it must come into a contradiction with its capitalist form and will be forced “to recognize the utmost versatility of the worker as the general social law and to remodel the [social] relations adequate to his normal [self-] realization” (Marx 1990, p. 618, c.t., emphasis mine), which for its part won’t be ensured before the worker will have become nothing less than a “totally developed individual” (ibid.)? Does it contribute to the analysis when the compulsory law of the valorization of value is determined at the same time as the “real basis of a higher form of society” in which “the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle” (ibid., p. 739)? What does the observation that through cooperation in the capitalist factory, the worker “strips off his individual fetters and develops his species-capabilities” (ibid., p. 447, c.t.) has to do with the explanation of the production of relative surplus value? Even—or better yet, especially—in the fetish subchapter that the analysis of the value-form culminates in and the central significance of which within Marx’s critique

1 See Spekker 2018 on its meaning. 2 See his letter to the editors of Otechestvenniye Zapiski, written in 1877 but never sent

(MECW 24, pp. 196–201), to which we will return later.

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of political economy is always rightly emphasized, one finds such references to the liberated society. Here, the realization of a “practical workday life” (ibid., p. 174, c.t.), that presents itself to humans as “transparent and rational relations with each other and with nature” (ibid., c.t.), and the realization of a “social life-process, i.e. the process of material production” (ibid.), which “as a product of freely associated humans stands under their consciously planned control” (ibid., p. 48, c.t.), are determined not as a result, but as a precondition for the disappearance of the fetishism generated by the existing economic relations and of the religious illusions corresponding to them.3 So Marx apparently links his critique to a historical transcendence, which he even places in an inner connection with the cognition of the economic forms and categories themselves, when he ultimately writes: Forms that have it written on their forehead that they belong to a formation of society in which the process of production masters men; in which man does not yet master the process of production, are reckoned by political economy’s bourgeois consciousness a self-evident necessity of nature as much as productive labour itself (ibid., pp. 174 f., c.t.).4

3 The usual English translations are misleading to the extent that they, in accordance

with customary English usage, speak in an ambiguous way of ‘freely associated men’. But the reader is thus unable to recognize whether Marx is speaking here of all people, or only the male half, which, in light of the fact that politically, Marx was mainly addressing men, is not such an absurd assumption. In the German language, however, the words Mann/Männer (man/men) and Mensch/Menschen (human/humans) are, with few exceptions (such as the hardly still used jedermann [everyone]), not used synonymously, so Marx does not speak of frei assoziierten Männern, but rather of frei assoziierten Menschen. The same applies in the following even when the translation man/men is retained. Only in the quotation on factory inspectors does Marx actually speak of Männern. 4 The usual English versions of this passage in particular are unfortunately symptomatic for the quality of English translations of Marx’s work as a whole. The temporal, indeed historical-philosophical (geschichtsphillosophische) dimension of the passage is made to disappear completely, in that on the one hand the phrase noch nicht (not yet) is simply omitted and on the other hand Marx’s quite conscious distinction between plural and singular—die Menschen (men) vs. der Mensch (man)—is ignored. Whereas the former is to be understood simply in the sense of all people, the latter designates a future “unified, self-conscious species-subject,” as Alfred Schmidt correctly emphasizes (Schmidt 1981, p. 132, fn. 321). Interestingly, Jeffrey Herf simply quietly corrected the English version of the Marx quotation in his translation of Schmidt’s text. The original passage is as follows: “Formen, denen es auf der Stirn geschrieben steht, daß sie einer Gesellschaftsformation angehören, worin der Produktionsprozeß die Menschen, der Mensch noch nicht den Produktionsprozeß bemeistert, gelten ihrem [political economy’s; M.S.] bürgerlichen Bewußtsein für eben so

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Especially in the German-language academic reception of Marx, such formulations are regarded today rather as worldview embellishments that must be fundamentally separated from the scientific core of the critique of political economy—an attitude that does not at all have to be expressed in an explicit separation of Marx’s text in an ‘esoteric,’ i.e. internally coherent science, on one hand and ‘exoteric’ assertions that are incompatible with it on the other.5 Often, the irritating statements are simply passed over in silence or at least not understood in terms of their full implications.6 On the other hand, reconstructions that, instead of splitting off or ignoring Marx’s statements, recognize in it a strong ethical motive and seek to place this alongside the scientific presentation, often differ only at first glance from the aforementioned lineage of reception. In fact, they fundamentally share its conception of Marx’s science, with which those supposedly ethical parts ultimately stand in no necessary relationship, but rather merely complement it from outside.7

selbstverständliche Naturnothwendigkeit als die produktive Arbeit selbst” (MEGA2 II/5, p. 49). 5 For a more extensive treatment of the enterprise of splitting Marx’s Capital along a dividing line between ‘esoteric/exoteric,’ see Spekker (2017). 6 The present study will address that in particular in the fourth chapter. 7 This can be vividly illustrated by Urs Lindner’s study Marx und die Philosophie, in

which Lindner identifies the ‘scientific realism’ of Capital, not least with reference to Louis Althusser’s structuralism and Analytical Marxism, in the supposed fact that it is by no means the expression of an in the meantime superseded ‘historical materialism,’ but rather should be read “as a work of process theory” that integrates “structure and agency theoretical within a perspective of complexity theory” (Lindner 2013, p. 284, o.t.) and—as he states with reference to the ethicist Bernard Williams on one hand, and the critical realist Andrew Sayer on the other—is linked to “evaluative descriptions” based on “dense ethical concept[s]” (ibid., p. 285). This repeats in a sense what Alfred Schmidt has already criticized around 50 years ago in Der strukturalistische Angriff auf die Geschichte concerning the anti-historicism of the Parisian Althusser school: “the structuralist interpretation of Marx can’t really handle” the false condition of subjectless, naturally evolved (naturwüchsigen) relations of production “from a inner-theoretical point of view, because the question of constitution (which cannot be skipped, even materialistically) remains outside of its horizon; it can only condemn it morally—in the categories of a humanism borrowed from the political sphere” (Schmidt 1971a, p. 208, o.t.). In Lindner’s case, it’s correspondingly ethics. Similar to parts of today’s reception of Marx, Althusser separates “his theoretical construction from the idea of changing the world, precisely to which the concept of science of dialectical materialism is oriented” (ibid.).

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To avoid any misunderstandings, it should be emphasized here that it cannot, of course, be assumed a priori that Marx’s critique of political economy is a self-contained, coherent whole that does not contain any contradictions and is therefore consistent and convincing in all of its propositions and thoughts. Such a harmonization that simply ignores or handwaves away contradictions that are actually present has nothing to do with a reasonable text comprehension. However, it’s also an inadmissible harmonization when everything that doesn’t fit into the scientific core of the critique of political economy—defined in the course of one’s own interpretation—is simply split off as a supposed contradiction. In contrast, the following should make it plausible that the passages in Capital pointing in one way or another to the liberated society rationally established by human beings are by no means merely movement prose embellishments, or even supposed philosophical atavisms long superseded by Marx’s scientific approach; nor are they merely political conclusions drawn here from an already finished scientific analysis. Rather, in them, a problematique is expressed that is essential to Marx’s entire work, and especially to the enterprise of the critique of political economy and the specific character of its scientific status. They do not testify to a supposedly ethical motivation for his scientific critique, but rather to its epistemological foundation. The fundamental problem of the statements from the beginning of Capital just quoted emerges even more clearly in the Grundrisse manuscripts written almost ten years earlier. Against Adam Smith’s determination of the ‘value of labor’ by the quantum of calm, freedom, and happiness that the worker must ‘sacrifice’ for a specific quantum of labor, Marx not only argues that there can be no such ‘value of labor,’ but also goes on to determine labor not simply as the opposite of freedom and happiness—as Smith does, despite however aptly describing the “historical forms of labor as slavery-corvee-wage labor”—but rather as an activity that, in the form of a future “travail attractif ,” would be the realization of freedom and happiness: But equally A. Smith has no inkling that the overcoming of these obstacles is in itself a manifestation of freedom – and, moreover, that the external aims are thereby stripped of their character as merely external natural

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necessity, and become posited as aims which only [erst]8 the individual himself posits, that they are therefore posited as self-realisation, objectification of the subject, and thus real freedom, whose action is precisely work. (MECW 28, p. 530, c.t.)

What Marx formulates here is nothing less than the definition of realized reason, and the apparent connotation of fundamental ideas of German Idealism, especially those of Hegel, is by no means coincidental, but rather clarifies, especially within the framework of the critique of political economy, how the latter does not represent a rupture cutting all ties but—this will be demonstrated here—the consummated project of the materialist sublation of the idealistic substantiation of the rational unity of subject and object. But contrary to Hegel’s philosophy, Marx of course does not understand this realization of the subject to be that of the absolute Geist, but rather as the practical self-realization of the human being, whose result is the “universality of the individual” in the sense of the “universality of his real and ideational relations” (ibid., p. 466, c.t.), that is, of something not yet real. Nor is it the case that here an ideal, a normative standard, is held up against the actual social relations. What Marx is essentially concerned with is disclosing the material relations as ones that of themselves necessarily generate “the real condition of their own 8 The English language does not have a suitable word for the translation of the German word ‘erst.’ It is usually translated with ‘only,’ which however means ‘nur’ in German. Thus the temporal and even historical dimension of ‘erst ’ disappears. For ‘only’/‘nur’ expresses an exclusivity, i.e. emphasizes that what is stated in the sentence in question applies solely to the situation, person or time depicted here. ‘Erst,’ on the other hand, describes that something did not apply before, but has now come into being with the advent of a certain circumstance or through the actions of certain persons, and will possibly still apply after further (historical) developments. In some cases this can be captured with phrases like ‘not until’ or ‘only … once,’ but often this is not possible. Two examples may illustrate the translation problem: “Nur im Kapitalismus haben die Produkte der menschlichen Arbeit Wert.”—“Only in capitalism the products of human labor have value.” Indeed, labor products have this property only in, that is, neither before nor after, capitalism. In contrast, take this statement: “Erst der Kapitalismus verbindet potentiell alle Menschen miteinander in universellem gesellschaftlichem Verkehr.” If one translates here ‘erst ’ with ‘only’ (“Only capitalism potentially connects all people with each other in universal social intercourse.”), the statement of the sentence will be completely distorted, because it would suggest that in a future, post-capitalist society people would be separated again from each other. On the contrary, the sentence is supposed to say that universal intercourse and interconnection of all people has been realized by capitalism—however limited—for the first time. For this reason, in cases where there is no useful alternative, we will add to the insufficient ‘only’ the clarifying note ‘(erst )’.

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sublation [Aufhebung ]” (ibid., p. 465, c.t.), thus placing human beings in a condition of becoming a subject for the first time, “which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, naturally evolved form, but as an activity controlling all natural forces” (ibid., p. 530, c.t.). With that, these “[u]niversally developed individuals, whose social relationships are their own communal relations and therefore subjected to their own communal control,” wouldn’t be “products of nature but of history” (ibid., p. 99). According to Hegel’s famous dictum, the true is the whole (Hegel 2018, p. 13), truth thus the accomplished (self-)recognition of Geist as a substance dialectically unfolding through its determinations and thus of the subject of the totality substantiated as rational, of reality. But also in the formulations given above, in which Marx’s early materialist critique of Hegel reappears, is indicated what one could call his emphatic concept of truth which—despite all fundamental differences—does just as well as Hegel’s not suffice itself as a mere description of what is, that is, as a positivist statement of fact, but rather aims at realized reason— now given, however, a historical and social-theoretical twist by Marx—, the synonym of which should be understood as communism realized by the revolutionary upheaval of the inverted social relations. Truth is accordingly—this study is intended to emphasize this—not simply the criterion of correct (individual) statements about the immediately present ‘is’ condition to be contemplated merely scientifically, but rather something that must yet be achieved historically, the recognition of which therefore cannot be dissociated from the real possibility of rational praxis. It’s well known that Marx did not write a methodological elaboration of his understanding of truth, not to even speak of a ‘theory of truth,’ and when he uses the term ‘truth’ in his manuscripts and publications of the critique of political economy in the 1850s and 1860s, then usually in the sense of an everyday understanding as a correct, unblinded description of the facts.9 To regard this as the final word on the subject, however, would be superficial and truncated, because of course it’s not the name but the thing itself, in this case the critique of political economy, through which the content, Marx’s understanding of truth, must be disclosed. 9 For example in the preface to Capital, where he describes English factory inspectors, medical reporters, and commissioners of investigation as “competent [men], […] free from partisanship and respect of persons” who were “armed with […] plenary powers to get at the truth” (Marx 1990, p. 91).

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However, this applies just as much to the present study: If therefore in the following I trace the emergence of Marx’s understanding of truth from, among other things, the materialistically sublated tradition of German Idealism and its claim to reason and truth, it is by no means a matter of taking certain individual formulations from Marx’s main work, simply because of their echoes, as proof of the unwavering continuation of older problematiques and arguments inherent to Marx’s early work. On the contrary, such an understanding of truth must ultimately be made plausible within the framework of the fundamental argumentation of the critique of political economy itself. The aim of this study is therefore to prove, starting from Marx’s emphatic understanding of truth, which will be explained in greater detail, that there is an immanent relation between Marx’s perspective of a communist, revolutionary upheaval, that is, the practical realization of a rational society, and his scientific critique of the capitalist form of society.10 The intent is to demonstrate that Marx’s critique of political 10 In doing so, I am not least reviving an idea that has been largely forgotten in today’s academic Marx research, and which was central especially for Critical Theory— as a continuation of Marx’s critique under the changed circumstances of the twentieth century. Thus Marcuse writes in 1941 in his study of Hegel, Reason and Revolution, that Marx’s categories “aim at a new form of society even when describing its current form. Essentially they address themselves to a truth to be had only through the abolition of civil society” (Marcuse 1986, p. 258). And he summarizes: “According to Marx, the correct theory is the consciousness of a practice that aims at changing the world” (ibid., p. 321). This observation, which is already expressed in Max Horkheimer’s programmatic essay Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) in the determination that critical social theory (and thus in essence Marx’s as well) is a “single unfolded existential judgment” (Horkheimer 1972b, p. 227, c.t.), would later become a central theme of Alfred Schmidt’s studies of Marx’s critique. Schmidt demonstrates that Marx identifies the “dialectical truth of history” in the creation of the “– initially – capitalistically mediated universality of essential human powers [menschlichen Wesenskräfte]” (Schmidt 1976, p. 92) and that he accordingly—as Schmidt writes in various places—examines the capital relation “from the point of view of its susceptibility to being sublated in the future” (Schmidt 1977, p. 165, o.t.; see also Schmidt 1981, pp. 44 and 132, fn. 321). Schmidt also deserves emphasis here because with his dissertation The Concept of Nature in Marx (Schmidt 1971c), and further essays and monographs on Marx’s work published in subsequent years, he was one of the central figures who set in motion in West Germany that important revision of the hitherto dominant understanding of Marx that would become known as the Neue Marx-Lektüre. Today, this heterogeneous ‘current’ includes of all things (and arguably to a greater extent) those Marx interpretations that, building upon Althusser, tend to reject such a more philosophically grounded understanding of Marx mediated by Critical Theory. However, the critical strand continuing the focus on the unavoidable problem that was the fulcrum of the efforts of Critical Theory—namely of how Marx’s critique, carried out

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economy draws its intrinsic design not least from communism conceived as truth to be realized historically, and that thus an epistemic foundation of Capital is to be found here, which in turn becomes plausible only as a systematic presentation of the capital relation as a negative, inverted mode of socialization to which people are subjected because, and as long as, they do not yet make their history in a self-conscious way. This concept of the capitalist mode of production has its criterion of truth—that shall be reconstructed here as an essential element of Marx’s understanding of science—in nothing less than the sublation (Aufhebung ) of this negative social relation.

2.2 The “Riddle of History Solved”---The Justification of Communism in Marx’s Early Work Marx’s outline of communism, as already indicated in the few quotations above, plays no role in most reconstructions of Marx’s method in his critique of political economy—other than a negative one of not counting as relevant for Marx’s science.11 Where Marx takes these considerations from and how he justifies them is often not further pursued; not infrequently, things remain only at hints, for example at the (early) socialist and communist movements, with which Marx was connected in varying ways, or references to Marx’s (inadmissible) historical-philosophical (geschichtsphilosophische) convictions.12 But in fact, Marx’s attempt at a scientific

in the consciousness or at least in the hope of the real possibilities of a liberating course of history, is still possible at all in light of the historical turn into barbarism that took place in the twentieth century—today is more likely to be found outside of the academy, and often in the form of polemical interventions, for example in particular in publications by the small German publishing house ça ira (which, among other things, has published the German translation of Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination) and by the recently deceased Joachim Bruhn. 11 That Marx was concerned with communism is not disputed, but acknowledged as a matter of course, while still being regarded as having nothing to do with the scientific content of the critique. Thus, for example, Anne Steckner states symptomatically in Die Waffen schärfen: Zum Kritikbegriff bei Karl Marx: “With his theoretical work, Marx wants to grasp and conceptually penetrate capitalism. The fact that he repeatedly formulated biting critiques of capitalism, especially in his political and journalistic writings, and that he intervened in social conflicts between labor and capital on the side of wage laborers, doesn’t alter this ” (Steckner 2012, p. 158, o.t., emphasis mine). 12 In contrast, Michael Heinrich, in The Science of Value, devotes extensive consideration to the emergence of Marx’s critical enterprise and specifically also to Marx’s justification

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justification of communism, the philosophical content—and content critical of philosophy—of which will be traced in the following, stands not only at the beginning of his theoretical endeavor, but also makes its further development comprehensible in a meaningful way at all. In the German-speaking world, the discussion of communism was conducted intensively from 1842 at the latest, fueled by Lorenz v. Stein’s text Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreich. Whereas at this time intellectuals and radicals from the circle of the Young Hegelians—for example Moses Hess, who was also the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (RhZ) he had helped to found and who had already formulated initial socialist demands in his Die heilige Geschichte der Menscheit (1837), but also Engels—had declared communism to be their goal (see Stedman Jones 2016, pp. 141 f.), Marx initially still rejected it.13 The reasons why Marx, who until then had opted for a truly universal, rational state as the embodiment of freedom out of a (Young) Hegelian radical-democratic conviction, became a communist himself only a short time later are diverse; what was central, however, was certainly the new experience of the social reality of the working population that he had in exile in Paris starting in October 1843,14 and the simultaneous contact with an already institutionalized scene of socialist and communist artisan associations, including a lively literary tradition. This experience coincided with his interpretation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy. Marx finally formulated his first extensive explanation and justification of communism

of communism in his early work, albeit with the aim of proving that Marx broke with these previously developed conceptions in 1845; see Heinrich 2006, pp. 86–157. I will return to this later. The reason why in the following I repeatedly contrast my findings with Heinrich’s interpretation of Marx is that in the last two decades, no one has shaped the understanding of Marx in the German-speaking world as much as Heinrich, whose Science of Value is now in its ninth edition, whose How to Read Marx’s Capital is in its fourth edition, and whose Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Eine Einführung (English title: An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital ) is in its 15th edition. The last two have been translated into English by Alex Locascio and published by Monthly Review Press. 13 Thus Marx felt compelled to refute the accusation that the RhZ was communist (MECW 1, pp. 215–221). 14 Already his everyday journalistic work as editor-in-chief of the RhZ made Marx focus more strongly on concrete social problems, the best-known examples of which are his articles on the wood theft law and the situation of the Moselle peasants (MECW 1, pp. 224–263 and 332–358).

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in mid-1844 in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, which were not published in his lifetime. Especially in the third notebook of the Manuscripts, Marx develops a concept of communism that is not external to the bourgeois relations or is opposed to them as an ideal, but rather is supposed to represent the positive historical sublation of the still-dominant private property, which Marx attempts to explain “by analysis from the concept of externalized [entäußerten] labour, i.e., of externalized man, of alienated [entfremdeten] labour, of alienated life, of alienated man” (MECW 3, p. 279, c.t.).15 This is where Marx’s idiosyncratic link to Feuerbach’s philosophy of species-being comes into play: In no way does he directly adopt Feuerbach’s position, simply opposing it to the Hegelian philosophy that he had previously shared; rather, he confronts the latter with the former in such a way that he preserves its form and central concepts and thus at the same time goes beyond Feuerbach’s static conception of materialism.16 What had led Marx—like other Young Hegelians before him—to Feuerbach’s thought was in particular its radical claim to no longer explain the world from the idea, but rather from the actual human being; that is—in Marx’s words—“by making the social relationship of ‘man to man’ the basic principle of the theory” (ibid., p. 328). Feuerbach was so important to Marx because he offered a way out of the fundamental problem that had driven the Young Hegelians for ten years: that in light of repressive relations, the philosophical justification of reality as rational no longer appeared tenable (see Arndt 2012, p. 20). Whereas the Young Hegelians still attempted to solve this problem philosophically, Feuerbach explained philosophy (above all Hegel’s)—analogous to religion—as “another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man” (MECW 3, p. 328), which, however, he did not

15 The common English translation of the terms Entäußerung and Entfremdung with alienation and estrangement is misleading, since in view of their Latin stems (alienus = fremd; extra = außer), the latter two should be used exactly the other way around. Moreover, in many places alienated is used again for entfremdet, and colloquially alienated and estranged are even often used synonymously. For this reason, for Entäußerung, I will explicitly use externalization in the following, while estrangement and alienation will be used synonymously. 16 The following will not be concerned with examining Marx’s connection to and critique of Feuerbach and Hegel to see whether Marx really even fundamentally understood the latter two correctly and really did justice to them. What I am concerned with are the consequences for Marx’s further thought that result from this peculiar connection.

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conceive as an essence inherent to the individual human being, but as a relationship between human beings: “The single human for himself does not have the essence of man contained in himself […]. The essence of man only exists in the community, in the unity of man with man” (Feuerbach 2012, p. 244, c.t.). In contrast to Feuerbach, however, for Marx it’s not love through which species-being is confirmed; rather, it expresses itself through human labor: “In creating an objective [gegenständliche] world by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being” (MECW 3, p. 276, c.t.). However, this is not a mere conceptual shift; rather, it constitutes a fundamental difference from Feuerbach, which is grounded not least in the critical confrontation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with Feuerbach’s philosophy of species-being—a confrontation that allows him at the same time to recognize “[t]he outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie” (ibid., p. 332). For the Phenomenology, which claims to unfold how Geist progresses through history toward absolute knowledge, in which it ultimately recognizes the world as constituted by itself and therefore as rational, grasps, according to Marx, “labour as the essence of man—as man’s essence proving itself” (ibid., p. 333, c.t.)—as “man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man” (ibid.), because here, in Hegel’s work, labor is determined only “within the sphere of abstraction” (ibid., p. 342), as the labor of Geist. What is decisive for Marx’s critique of Hegel is the twist of grasping the human being as an immediate “human natural being” (ibid., p. 337). That is made especially clear by the concept of alienation (Entfremdung ) or externalization (Entäußerung ): For Hegel, who is also essentially concerned with overcoming the epistemological dualism of the subject of cognition and the ‘thing in itself,’ the objective world is not only—as it is for Kant— an object of cognition “constituted by the (intellectual) activity of the subject” (Marcuse 1986, p. 94), but objective (gegenständliche), sensuous reality is the product of the real self-externalization of the subject, that is, of Geist, and precisely as such discernable to reason. Knowledge is correspondingly not without history, but rather a process of becoming, which can be traced through the course of the historical manifestations of Geist. Absolute knowledge is ultimately achieved in the recognition that “Spirit [Geist ] is the self of the actual consciousness which spirit [Geist ] confronts, or rather which confronts itself as an objective [gegenständliche] actual world, a world which has, for the self, just as much lost

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all significance as something alien, just as the self has lost all sense of being a dependent or independent being-for-itself separated from that world” (Hegel 2018, pp. 253 f.). Hegel thus understands the external world, sensuous objects, as the objectification of human essence; in contrast to Marx, however, he is initially only concerned with the fact that consciousness understands objects, which initially appear as its negation, to be “its self-externalization” (MECW 3, p. 338, c.t.), thus sublating their objective (gegenständliche) externality through the speculative act of thought of the ‘negation of the negation.’ Externalization or alienation and their ultimate revocation are thus in Hegel’s case of course not morally judgmental concepts, but rather constitute the forms of movement of Geist and of speculative thought, by which it understands itself: The human essence is Geist, which realizes itself as the substance and subject of (and in) history. Marx’s accusation is therefore that Hegel does not at all object to the “determinate character of the object” (ibid.) in which Geist externalizes itself by means of human practice. For Hegel, the concrete forms of this practice as well as of its results are ultimately unimportant; he doesn’t care “that the human essence objectifies itself inhumanly, in opposition to itself” (ibid., p. 331, c.t.). Thus he affirms the world in its configuration being alienated from human beings, and unjustifiably presents it as the “true mode of being” (ibid., p. 339). But since Marx, together with Feuerbach (and going beyond him), identifies the essence of the human being in its practical species activity, labor, Hegel’s Phenomenology presents itself to him in a different light: Hegel has, with the ‘negation of the nation’ as the “spontaneous activity of all being,” “only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history, which is not yet the real history of man as a presupposed subject, but until now only the act of creation, the history of the development of man” (ibid., p. 329, c.t.). For even though Hegel still rests upon the “standpoint of the political economists,” because he presents the contemporary manifestations of externalized life, which speculative sublation allows to persist as a mere moment of thought, as “true human life” (ibid., p. 339),17 what is expressed here in idealistic form is nonetheless already the practical sublation of alienation through the real 17 Accordingly, see also Marx’s characterization of the political economists in his excerpt on Mill written immediately after the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts: “It is seen that political economy defines the estranged form of social intercourse as the essential and

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“appropriation of the objective [gegenständliche] essence” (ibid., p. 341). Marx understands bourgeois economic relations, which he attempts to criticize for the first time in the Manuscripts by reference to the theories of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Jean-Baptiste Say in particular, as alienated from human essence. The productive activity of the human being is his natural species-being, which consists in appropriating the external, objective (gegenständliche) world, i.e. nature, by working on it in “free conscious activity” (ibid., p. 276), thus successively humanizing it, thus giving it a “human meaning ” by objectifying himself in it (ibid., pp. 336– 338, c.t.). But the economic forms that are simply presupposed by the political economists express that labor (confronted by capital and landed property) precisely does not correspond to this essence, but is rather alienated18 : In the worker’s product, which does not belong to him, his own power confronts him as alien, which is why his labor also does not belong to him, is not a need, not self-activity, but rather a mere means. Thus, with the objects of his production, his species life, which expresses itself in an object, is torn away from him; it becomes a mere means of existence instead of being the conscious form of expression of his free will, whereby, ultimately, man is alienated from his species-being and – what amounts to the same thing – “one man is estranged from the other” (ibid., p. 277). By giving a materialist twist to Hegel’s concept of alienation/estrangement and making it a denunciatory one, however, Marx’s conception of the sublation of alienation, the ‘negation of the negation,’ can no longer be speculative or a “sublation in thought” (ibid., p. 341, c.t.) that asserts and affirms the given “reality […] to be self-confirmation of itself” (ibid.). Instead, it must be the practical sublation of alienated relations, thus necessarily implying not only a theory of history, whose goal is this revolutionary sublation, but, moreover, can only grow out of these relations themselves. This is why Marx speaks several times of the upcoming “positive sublation of private property” (ibid., p. 296, c.t.) Capitalist conditions do not stand opposed to an ‘original’ ideal human

original form corresponding to man’s nature. Political economy—like the real process— starts out from the relation of man to man as that of property owner to property owner” (MECW 3, p. 217). 18 The four different dimensions of alienated labor that Marx points out in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (MECW 3: 270–282) are sufficiently well known in view of their extensive history of reception and will therefore only briefly be mentioned here, but not examined in greater detail.

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condition; on the contrary—and Marx positively highlights precisely this aspect of Hegel’s (albeit idealistically inverted) philosophy—“man’s selfestrangement, the externalization of his essence, his de-objectification and de-actualization” (ibid., p. 342, c.t.) are the historical forms corresponding to private property through which the human essence realizes itself for the first time. “[M]an’s relation to himself as an alien being and the [practical] manifestation of himself as an alien being” is “the emergence of species-consciousness and species-life” (ibid.). The “creation of man through human labour” (ibid., p. 305), according to Marx, only takes place in a historical process, through alienation. So the reality of species-being is for Marx—and that is a further central difference from Feuerbach—not a “supratemporal anthropological finding” (Schmidt 1976, p. 96, o.t.), not a contemporary fact that human beings simply have to recognize in order to overcome the religious forms of thought in which their own essence is expressed in an inverted way, but rather something in the process of historical becoming, for which he finds such different concepts as society,19 “the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature” (MECW 3, p. 298), socialism and communism.20 If Marx now designates “the history of industry and

19 “Just as through the movement of private property, of its wealth as well as its poverty—of its material and spiritual wealth and poverty—the budding [werdende] society finds at hand all the material for this development, so established [gewordene] society produces man in this entire richness of his being—produces the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses —as its enduring reality” (MECW 3, p. 302). Against this background, the following lines, which Marx wrote in a letter to Feuerbach pretty much at the time of the completion of the manuscripts, can be understood as an attempt not simply to pay homage to him, but at the same time to gently steer him in the direction of Marx’s own interpretation: “In these writings you have provided—I don’t know whether intentionally—a philosophical basis for socialism and the Communists have immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!” (ibid., p. 354). 20 In the Manuscripts, Marx partly still uses the terms socialism and communism in a rather unspecific way, in a decisive passage even contrary to what in Marxism would later become canonical as the stages of socialism and communism, when he describes socialism as the historical final goal, and communism as movement of sublation of the existing order leading to it (MECW 3, pp. 305 f.).

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the established objective [gegenständliche] existence of industry” as the— however, still under the form of alienation—“open book of man’s essential powers ” (ibid., p. 302) or in a later passage, in dealing with political economy’s theories of the division of labor, emphasizes that division of labor and exchange as “manifestations of private property” provide the “twofold proof on the one hand that human life required private property for its realisation, and on the other hand that it now requires the sublation of private property” (ibid., p. 321, c.t.), then it becomes evident that already in 1844 it was clear to him that communism must be explained from material reality itself, as a movement immanent to this reality. Marx’s attempts at such an explanation are not at all already adequate, but only from such an understanding does it make any sense when Marx writes of Communism as the positive sublation of private property, as human selfestrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man for himself as a social (i. e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the veritable resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. (ibid., pp. 296 f., c.t.)

At this point it should have already become clear that in the case of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts we are not at all dealing with an ideological, quasi ‘pre-Marxist’ application of Feuerbachian philosophy, as Althusser claimed with his thesis of an “epistemological break” (Althusser 2005, p. 32) which rigorously separates Marx’s work from 1845 on from his early works. Nonetheless, that has been exactly the usual assertion up to now reproduced in contemporary Marx research, most prominently by Michael Heinrich in the Science of Value under the keyword “philosophy of essence [Wesensphilosophie]” and in a succession of misunderstandings. In fact, however, Heinrich’s assertion that for the Marx of the Manuscripts, the true society is “created by the species-being intrinsic to each individual” (Heinrich 2006, p. 115, o.t.) not only does not apply to Marx; it doesn’t even apply to Feuerbach. This interpretation of the meaning of species-being is all the more irritating since just one

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sentence before, Heinrich himself quotes Feuerbach’s explicit determination of human essence as a relation that exists between human beings (see my corrected translation of Feuerbach 2012, p. 244, further above). So the notion that in the Manuscripts, Marx proceeds “from the same individualism […] as political economy” (Heinrich 2006, p. 115) is already wrong in terms of the history of ideas. Nor is it the case that in the argumentation of the Manuscripts, social reality is “diametrically opposed to some kind of essence or thought” (ibid., p. 147). When Marx criticizes that the contemporary form of production is not an expression of human essence, he is by no means “distilling” from a preconceived anthropology a “state of society corresponding to human essence and contrasting it with reality as an ideal”; he is not “measuring a bad reality against a true human essence” (ibid., p. 117; see ibid., p. 103); rather, he is attempting, as we’ve seen, to grasp bourgeois economic relations as forms under which this human essence starts to practically develop—but still in an alienated form. It’s undoubtedly the case that in the Manuscripts he has not yet achieved a satisfactory proof of this; nonetheless, he neither stands “on the threshold of utopian socialism,” nor does he apply a “moral figure of critique” (ibid., p. 117). This does not correctly understand either Marx’s critique, or the philosophy that is both its object and foundation.21 Precisely against the background of the critique of Hegel’s Phenomenology, it’s untenable to assert that Marx’s determination of communism as the “complete return of man for himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development ” (MECW 3, p. 296)22 —implies an original condition “in which man still possessed his human essence” (Heinrich 2006, p. 116) as something authentic (Eigentliches ).23 This attributes a 21 Against such misunderstandings, Max Horkheimer had already emphasized in an addendum to Traditional and Critical Theory: “The dialectic theory does not practice any criticism based solely on ideas. Even in its idealist form it had rejected the notion of a good-in-itself wholly set over against reality. It does not judge by what is beyond time but by what is about time” (Horkheimer 1972c, p. 250, c.t.). 22 All emphasis except for the first is mine. Heinrich, on the other hand, suppresses exactly this more precise determination of the ‘return.’ 23 Denis Mäder also takes up this claim in his study Fortschritt bei Marx and even thinks he can identify “a historic-philosophical [geschichtsphilosophische] aporia” in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts: “If people must first become what they are supposed to be, but at the same time what they’ve always been, how can they have a history at all?” (Mäder 2010, p. 158, o.t.) Mäder misunderstands Marx in two senses: For one

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position to Marx that he explicitly criticized using the example of ‘crude communism,’ since it only negated civilization abstractly and was “regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and frugal man who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it” (MECW 3, p. 295, c.t.). Just as Geist for Hegel, for Marx the true social human being is not the origin, but rather the result of its selfrealization. Developing Geist through the “advance” of the manifestations of consciousness, and the “retreat into their ground and essence” as the “self-supporting, absolute, real essence” (Hegel 2018, p. 254), as Hegel does in the Phenomenology of Spirit, is not an exploration of some kind of primordial soup of a spectral ‘authentic’ spirit, but rather the consummated “process of the experience of consciousness” (Schnädelbach 1999, p. 77, o.t.) through which Geist understands itself as the historically developed “whole […] of intellectual or cultural reality” (ibid., p. 72),24 about which Hegel already correspondingly writes in the preface to the Phenomenology that it—the whole—is “only the essence completing itself through its own development. This much must be said of the absolute: It is essentially a result, and only at the end is it what it is in truth. Its nature consists just in this: to be actual, to be subject, or, to be the becoming-of-itself” (Hegel 2018, p. 13). Marx in turn does not simply discard this philosophy, but rather criticizes that in it, “[s]ubject and predicate are […] related to each other in absolute reversal,” because here, “[r]eal man and real nature” (MECW 3, p. 342) figure as mere predicates of the absolute Geist. Mind you, the accusation is not simply that there even is an inversion of subject and predicate in Hegel’s philosophy,

thing, Marx doesn’t just simply adopt Feuerbach’s philosophy of species-being—as Mäder thinks—but fundamentally transforms it, when he identifies the human essence in selfgeneration through labor and thus necessarily understands it as a developing essence. Thus, the ‘new’—the occurrence of which Mäder determines to be the essential feature of historical development and progress—is neither the ‘old,’ ‘original’—that would indeed be an aporia—nor an “unmediated new grounded in itself” (ibid.), as Feuerbach posits it against Hegel’s ‘negation of the negation,’ but rather something becoming. For another thing, Mäder fails to recognize that an essential motif of the manuscripts is to develop communism or ‘the real human being’ precisely against (and as a critique of) the Young Hegelian approach and others not from an “authentic determination of human beings” (ibid., p. 156), i.e. in terms of “teleological determination” (bestimmungsteleologisch), but from the inverted relations themselves as their result which has become possible historically. 24 Marcuse therefore refers to Geist as “the term that designates reason as history” (Marcuse 1986, p. 110).

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since “formal[ly] and abstract[ly]” (ibid.), he grasps the self-generation of man that occurs within alienation quite rightly. What Marx reproaches Hegel for, not without sarcasm, is making this inversion absolute and transfiguring it into real reason: “Thus reason is at home in unreason as unreason. […] Self-affirmation, self-confirmation in contradiction with itself—in contradiction with both the knowledge and the essential being of the object—is thus true knowledge and life” (ibid., p. 339). In view of the mode as well as the results of Marx’s critique of Hegel depicted up to this point, it must be clear that the quote above does not express a strict renunciation of these central principles of Idealist philosophy—reason and truth25 —however, nor does Marx relate to them in an unwavering quasi Young Hegelian, way, as a reference point for an intra-philosophical critique.26 So what are reason and truth for Marx? Already a year before, in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , also not published during his lifetime, Marx accuses Hegel of making “the idea the subject and turn[ing] the proper, the actual subject […] into a predicate” (MECW 3, p. 11), thus bending bourgeois reality into shape and speculatively making it conform to the “matter of logic” (ibid., p. 18), in order to justify reality as rational. This, however, doesn’t simply make Hegel an apologist of the existing, since he was concerned with nothing less than a justification of the unity of the universal grounded in reason and the self-determined individual—an enterprise whose critical content was also emphasized by Adorno: “The real can be considered rational only insofar as the idea of freedom, that is, mankind’s genuine self-determination, shines through it. Anyone who tries to conjure away this legacy of the Enlightenment in Hegel and campaign for the idea that his Logic has nothing to do with a rational ordering of the world falsifies him” (Adorno 1993, p. 44, c.t.).27 Marx knows this too, and he does not simply (only) accuse Hegel of the unfounded, premature assertion of 25 In this passage as well, Marx has little in common with Feuerbach’s materialist sensualism, according to which—and in explicit rejection of Hegel’s speculative figure of the negation of the negation—truth yields itself to the subject—understood primarily as receptive, passive—as immediate sensual certainty from external objects. 26 This is, for example, Althusser’s insinuation (2005, pp. 79–81). 27 See also Marcuse’s explanation that the Idealist attempt to ground “a universal

rational order” (Marcuse 1986, p. 18) from the general structure of thought, from the subject, was directed against “the attack of British empiricism” (ibid., p. 16) which ultimately committed people to submission to the merely given, because it conceived of concepts and thought solely as mere expressions of the ordinary experience of given facts.

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an already prevailing reality of reason, or of an intentionally reactionary legitimation of irrational domination, but rather also recognizes—especially in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts —that here there is also a problem, the solution of which is not at all possible within (Hegelian) philosophy, by theoretical means. The latter can do nothing other than forcibly bring the contradictions, the real antagonisms, under its own roof, when it unfolds the realization of reason as the self-movement and self-realization of Geist.28 Marx is the first to open up—by grasping reason in a materialist way in its practical dimension as a historically progressing self-generation of humanity through labor, through the practical working on nature—an understanding of the possibility of a real sublation of the contradictions: We see how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, lose their antagonistic character, and thus their existence as such antagonisms, only [erst ] within the societal state”—which is socialism/communism—; “we see how the resolution of the theoretical antagonisms”—in Hegel’s view already the rational recognition of their unity within a dialectically mediated totality und thus the recognition of truth—“is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man and how their resolution is therefore by no means merely a task for recognition, but a real life task, which philosophy could not solve, precisely because it conceived this task as merely a theoretical one. (MECW 3, p. 302, c.t.)29

28 In his lectures on epistemology (1957/58), Adorno formulates the rule of thumb that in case of difficulties with imagining something specific in the case of (speculative) concepts like that of Geist, one should attempt “to construct the problems that are to be solved by introducing, by constructing such a concept” (Adorno n.d., p. 89, o.t.). An essential point of speculation is namely to “balance to a degree” the contradictions arising from Idealist thought (ibid.; see also MECW 3, pp. 340 f.). Logic thus corresponds to the forms of the state, as Marx criticizes it as an abstract universality in On the Jewish Question, and of money, which equates antithetical commodities, which is why Marx even refers to logic as “the money of Geist ” (MECW 3, p. 330, c.t.). 29 In his Theses on Feuerbach written a year later, he would formulate the same thought again in a similar manner: “The question whether objective [gegenständliche] truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice” (MECW 5, p. 3). In general, the Theses on Feuerbach—contrary to what Heinrich claims, following Althusser’s dictum—do not at all represent a break with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and don’t say anything that hasn’t already—at most, just in a partially less pointed manner—been developed in them. Only the critique of the concept

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In order to substantiate the reality of reason according to the standard of universality and necessity, (Idealist) philosophy had to construct a subject that, going beyond the concrete, incidental consciousness, psychology, and the interests of individual subjects, represents their commonality and—here corresponding to Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ and Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’—works through them (see Adorno n.d., pp. 78 f.). The hypostasizing of objective Geist in relation to the individuals, which necessarily follows hot on the heels here,—the individuals even get “sacrificed and relinquished” (Hegel 1986, p. 49, o.t.)—reduces the concept of reason, in the sense of the subordination of the world to the determinations of human beings, to an absurdity. Marx solves this self-contradiction, this aporia of Idealist philosophy, with his understanding of human species-being as the conscious communalsocietal interrelation of human labor, as the practical self-generation of the species: The fact that Hegel had to speculatively substantiate the reality of reason is rooted in the fact that human beings—as now becomes graspable within the horizon of Marx’s conceptual determinations of their practical species-being—do not yet communally arrange the world consciously; the universal and necessary—the social nexus encompassing the individuals—thus far only develops and asserts itself behind their backs. The central content and object of philosophy—reason—does not, however, therefore disappear from Marx’s work. On the contrary, it is—as practical self-generation and self-determination of human beings—sublated in

of “species” in the sixth thesis is new, but even here it should be noted that with it, Marx for one thing merely turns against Feuerbach’s concrete ahistorical and non-societal conception, which he had already de facto done in the Manuscripts with his concept of species-being as the successive self-production and mutual production of human beings through labor. For another thing, as we’ve already seen, he’ll use the concept of species himself repeatedly over the subsequent years and decades.

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the already presented concept of communism and its materialist derivation from the specific historical development itself.30 Horkheimer once pointedly explained this transformation as follows: Reason’s self-contemplation, regarded by philosophy in former times as the highest degree of happiness, is transformed in more recent thinking into the materialist concept of the free, self-determining society, while retaining from idealism the conviction that man has other possibilities than being merged into the status quo or accumulating power and profit. (Horkheimer 1972c, p. 248, c.t.)

At the same time, the concept of truth based on reason is transformed. For Marx, the whole as the reality of reason is, of course, no longer true in the sense that it can be represented conceptually as a dialectical unfolding of Geist through its appearances, which thereby proves itself as substance and subject of this whole, whose contradictions continue to exist ‘sublated’ within it. Rather, for Marx, the whole proves to be true in an emphatic sense—and Hegel’s concept of truth is also already an emphatic one—not before it is really and practically placed under the conscious determinations of the unified human beings as a “presupposed subject” (MECW 3, p. 329, c.t.).31 Science, the goal of which is truth,

30 Marx’s emphasis on the practical dimension of reason as the self-generation of the human species should not, however, lead to the false assumption that reason is replaced by him with blind, virile practice, that he thus takes leave of it as a subjective, intellectual capacity and that human beings are thus reduced to a mere bundle of stimulus and reaction. Practice without the capacity for reason characterizes animals, not human beings, as Marx states for the record in the Manuscripts: “The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e. that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity” (MECW 3, p. 276). It rings forth from these lines that Marx—although this is maybe somewhat lost in the manuscripts at first glance—does not at all reproach Hegel with the initially quite correct impulse of wanting to grasp history as a successive appropriation of the world guided by reason, as “progress in the consciousness of freedom” (Hegel 1986, p. 32, o.t.), but criticizes the idealistic manner in which Hegel does so, thus being compelled to slip into the affirmation of irrational conditions. 31 In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx therefore situates his ‘new’ materialism—directed equally against both Idealism and Feuerbach’s ‘old,’ ‘contemplative’ materialism, according

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is concerned, as Marx still puts it in a nutshell 20 years later in his critical ‘obituary’ for Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with the “critical knowledge of the historical movement, a movement which itself produces the material conditions of emancipation” (MECW 20, p. 29). While it was already the case with Hegel that he was not concerned with simply reporting on what is, but rather with the successful representation of the whole as an unfolded, conceptual totality, in order to prove that it was constituted by reason and thus to determine this recognition of the whole alone as true, then merely fact positivism is even less the concern of Marx’s materialism. When Marx understands history as being a process of the unfolding of the practical essential forces of human beings, which up to now has been alienated from them, then the existing is not—as Hegel still wished to demonstrate—identical with its concept, in that it integratively ‘sublates’ the contradictions conceptually within itself as a speculative unity; then, only a science can be true that is able to represent the alienated society as a whole, whose real contradictions drive it to go beyond itself toward the still pending practically realized “appropriation of the human essence by and for man” (MECW 3, p. 296). What Marx’s recognition moves toward, in contrast to Hegel’s, is, in Schmidt’s words, “not an absolute concept but rather the history which bursts all logical immanence and can never be spiritualized” (Schmidt 1982, p. 52). In this sense, capitalist society cannot at all be understood as a rational unity, which has sublated all its individual elements; rather, it is only (erst ) communism, in which the contradictions of the up to now inverted society shaped by domination will have a “veritable resolution” (MECW 3, p. 296), which is the truth, one day historically realized, of this still untrue society.32

2.3 The “real movement which sublates the present state of things”---A Radical Break? To dismiss Marx’s articles and manuscripts from the years 1843 and 1844—and of all things the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts —as attempts at a critique that still remain on the terrain and within the to which truth only follows from sensuous perception—from the standpoint of “human society” or “societal humanity” (MECW 5, p. 5, c.t.), that is: communism. 32 “Truth is not only attached to propositions and judgements, it is, in short, not only an attribute of thought, but of reality in process. Something is true if it is what it can be, fulfilling all its objective possibilities” (Marcuse 1986, p. 25).

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problematique of philosophy and have nothing to do with the ‘historical materialism’ of the subsequent years not only ignores what Marx actually intended with that earlier research, and on top of that exhibits not only a lack of understanding for the practical and political implications of German Idealism. In this way, it also completely loses sight of the fundamental problems on which the project of ‘historical materialism’ is actually based. The Manuscripts are—as a first attempt—rather essentially borne by the claim of not holding up socialism or communism against reality as an idea or nurtured from notions of justice (not infrequently justified in Christian terms), but to show it as a movement of this very reality really asserting itself, by emphasizing its contradictory nature on the basis of the results of the most advanced state of social sciences at the time, political economy, and it is the extensive engagement with and critique of Hegel (and Feuerbach), as I have depicted it here, that provides Marx with the means of doing so33 : Only (erst ) on the basis of a concept of human species-being as successive self-generation through labor does he recognize the categories of political economy to be forms under which this self-generation occurs in an alienated way, that is, as an inverted process, which human beings are dominated by instead of consciously shaping it, and which nonetheless thus creates the conditions of possibility for human beings to one day consciously take their relations under their collective direction. And so, for its part, the concept of alienation, too, is not simply the means of a critique that makes a moral accusation against the existing relations of production, but rather of a historically enlightening critique, and ultimately it broaches nothing less than the condition of enabling, the creation process of, human liberation. The manuscripts of The German Ideology take up precisely this desideratum, already fundamentally formulated in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, of explaining communism from the development of the

33 See Arndt (2012, p. 39), who, however, also states that Marx merely draws a parallel between history and Hegel’s Phenomenology, thus hypostatizing the contradiction to the “energetic principle” (ibid., p. 43, o.t.) instead of examining the real contradictions as such. That Marx does not yet provide an immanent critique of the categories of political economy is just as completely correct as the observation that, on the other hand, the manuscripts push toward overcoming speculation and the examination, still yet to be done, of the objective (gegenständlichen) forms of mediation along with their historical emergence. As will become clear in the following, however, this by no means dissolves that construction of history (see ibid., p. 44) which rather continues to run through Marx’s subsequent research as well.

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productive forces, and formulate in multiple more elaborate attempts the elements of a materialist historiography, with which not only the idealistic and Young Hegelian conceptions of history are explained and criticized at the same time, but crucially communism is meant to be substantiated as such a “real movement.”34 Now, as is well known, what is distinctive about The German Ideology is that it not only exhibits a completely new, even anti-philosophical language (even more so for Marx’s than for Engels’ standards at the time), but also that it is quite explicitly intended as a critique of philosophical discourse, even—as Marx was to put it years later—as a fundamental ‘settling of accounts’ with his own “former philosophical conscience” (MECW 29, p. 264), still borne not least by the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.35 One must first of all recall what purpose Marx and Engels (and at times Moses Hess, Joseph Weydemeyer, and Roland Daniels, who were also involved in this project) were pursuing with the publication—which ultimately never happened—of The German Ideology 36 : Both Bruno Bauer as well as Max Stirner had shortly before denounced communism as mere Feuerbachianism. Stirner in particular, in his polemical text The Ego and its Own (1844), had among other things attacked categories intended as materialist such as ‘man’ (der Mensch) and human ‘species-being’ as mere inversions of religious categories and thus had taken aim at nothing less than the foundation of socialist and communist journalism in Germany, which in fact essentially built upon Feuerbach. Marx and Engels, however, do not initiate a rebuttal of this critique of Feuerbach, but neither do they accept Stirner’s eulogy to the completely

34 Marx even emphasizes the centrality of this point in the manuscript by marking the entire passage (documented in MEGA2 I/5, p. 37): “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which sublates the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise” (MECW 5, p. 49, c.t.). 35 The fact that The German Ideology was not only elevated by Party-Marxism to the foundation of a ‘historical-materialist worldview’ but also—at the other end of the spectrum of linkages to Marx, so to say—could be interpreted by large parts of scholarly Marx research as a central document of the break with philosophy, is thus of course not a coincidence. 36 For a more extensive treatment, see Spekker (2018), in particular 175–190, as well as Bohlender (2018).

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unmediated, concrete ‘Ego’ (Der Einzige)37 ; rather, they deepen the approach of explaining communism from the real contradictions of the economic conditions driving toward their own historical overcoming, already envisaged in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. However, what is interesting here is how the argumentation has apparently shifted compared to the Manuscripts: While in the latter it still had an inner connection with a theory of species-being, in The German Ideology it is now brought to bear explicitly against Feuerbach and philosophy in general. From a genealogical perspective, one can observe here a quite brilliant, albeit momentous evasive maneuver, with which Marx and Engels wish to demonstrate to Stirner and Bauer that the latter two are fighting a pseudo-opponent, which in the shape of German philosophical communism or of ‘true socialism’ might indeed consider itself to be part of the communist movement, but has nothing at all to do with its real manifestations38 : It is characteristic, however, that Saint Bruno and Saint Max immediately put in place of the real communist Feuerbach’s conception of the communist; they do this partly in order to be able to combat communism too as “spirit of the spirit”, as a philosophical category, as an equal opponent. (MECW 5, p. 58)

With a grand gesture, Marx and Engels now hold up empirical observation against the ‘ideological’ altercations of the philosophers. In particular, in the parts of the manuscript extracted for a projected Chapter I. Feuerbach, they demonstrate why all philosophical justifications of

37 Stirner’s quasi anti-philosophical philosophy of the ‘Ego’ (Ich) or ‘Unique’ (Einzige) is picked apart in epic breadth in the intended Chapter III. Saint Max. For a problematization, see in particular Matthias Bohlender’s study in the present volume. With a grain of salt, the confrontation between Stirner, Marx, and Engels, as well as Moses Hess (with his 1845 text, Die letzten Philosophen), can be read as the ‘primal scene’ of the conflict between (postmodern) deconstruction and Critical Theory. 38 See in particular Marx and Engels’ polemic against this ‘self-misunderstanding’ of German philosophical communism in the chapters of The German Ideology on ‘true socialism’ and Karl Grün (MECW 5: 455–493). In Spekker 2018, pp. 181 ff., I have attempted to elucidate the extent to which these debates were by no means merely the consequence of scientific insights, but must also be explained from Marx’s and Engels’ daily political activity—especially in the League of the Just—and thus understood in their significance for orienting scientific critique in a certain manner.

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communism (along with the equally philosophical attempts at refutation) are nonsensical: Communism fundamentally has nothing to do with philosophical principles and ideas, one must simply observe the material relations and their historical development in an unbiased way, verify them “in a purely empirical way” (ibid., p. 31), in order to grasp that communism as a movement of their revolutionary sublation is necessarily generated by those relations themselves.39 Thus, by means of brief historical reconstructions of the development of the social division of labor and forms of property, they demonstrate how the development of human productive forces generates social and political relations and forms of intercourse as well as forms of consciousness corresponding to their respective stage. With the paradigm formulated for the first time in this context and which would become canonical for Marxism, according to which, with the advancing development of the forces of production, “an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, is replaced by a new one corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals—a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another” (ibid., 82), Marx and Engels are certain they can explain historical development and ultimately communism as its goal without any philosophical presuppositions or basic assumptions. The argumentation isn’t so sharply different from that of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts: With the progressing division of labor under the rule of private property, the forces of production have taken on a life of their own as an objective (sachliche) force against individuals increasingly isolated from each other. The “large-scale industry” (ibid., p. 64) that develops in this way, however, at the same time creates for the first time the precondition for these individuals uniting and appropriating these productive forces as a whole, since the productive forces “only exist within a universal intercourse” and as a totality for the first time (ibid., p. 87): The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments

39 Only a short time later, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx would correspondingly maintain against Proudhon and ‘utopianism’ alike that socialists and communists “have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece” (MECW 6, p. 177).

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of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves. This appropriation is further determined by the individuals appropriating. Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve their complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the development of a totality of capacities entailed by this. (ibid., c.t.)40

So here, Marx further elaborates what he means when in the Manuscripts he refers to industry as “the open book of man’s essential powers ” (MECW 3, p. 302), and the result of this process: “the total individuals” whose “self-activity coincides with material life” (MECW 5, p. 88, c.t.), is fundamentally what Marx meant by conscious, real species-being. But exactly this ‘historical materialist’ argumentation is now explicitly held up in The German Ideology against the use of such philosophical concepts: “The individuals, who are no longer subject to the division of labour, have been conceived by the philosophers as an ideal, under the name ‘man’” (ibid.), and the latter has been “deified” (ibid., p. 54) as transhistorically real, so that it must only be a question of the development of consciousness that man will recognize himself as the real subject one day. And Feuerbach ultimately “stops at the abstraction ‘man’” (ibid., p. 40), whose sensuousness he only locates in love and friendship, but not in his practical activity, the production of his own material life,41 which is why his materialism is ahistorical. However, one should not be deceived by such attacks on philosophy, especially that of Feuerbach: The argumentation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts is—as already described—also characterized by this fundamental difference from Feuerbach, but there Marx apparently does not yet see a reason to spell out this difference, whereas in The German Ideology such explicit contrasts are now an essential part of the argumentative strategy against Stirner and Co., and not least are 40 The fact that this is a necessary prerequisite is made even clearer elsewhere: “the contradiction between the instrument of production and private property is only the product of large-scale industry, which, moreover, must be highly developed to produce this contradiction. Thus only with large-scale industry does the sublation of private property become possible” (MECW 5, pp. 63 f.). 41 See also the ninth Thesis on Feuerbach (MECW 5, p. 5).

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intended to underscore the new emphasis on empirically ascertainable facts: Communism is a fact asserting itself historically that is explainable by means of positive science. But how convincing is this new objectivism really? And does it really fundamentally dispatch the matter of philosophy in Marx’s scientific critique? Alfred Schmidt has raised the justified question of how a historical dialectic—and Marx’s paradigm of the development of the forces of production is nothing else—is possible at all when at the same time, in the course of the materialist critique of Hegel’s philosophy, the speculative concept is dispensed with it (see Schmidt 1977, pp. 158 and 176). After all, Marx and Engels explicitly reject the Idealist philosophy of history as a ‘speculative distortion’ of the real course of history, that makes “later history […] the purpose of earlier history” and transposes the self-evident “active influence which earlier history exercises on later history” into its speculative concepts (MECW 5, p. 50, c.t.).42 And in fact, the materialist reconstruction of history gets along without notions of an idea that realized itself in it, of Geist as the unity, the essence of successive historical ‘manifestations’ (Erscheinungen). It is the forces of production, the objective economic conditions themselves, that drive history and create the technical preconditions for communism as well as the mass consciousness for its objective possibility. However, it can hardly be argued that Marx and Engels have demonstrated here by means of meticulous historical research a scientifically robust law of historical progress; but nevertheless one might initially think that it was at least the most plausible explanation for real “proletarian communism” (ibid., p. 456) as it had emerged among industrial workers in the most economically and politically advanced countries of Europe at the time. Accordingly, Marx and Engels would have started out from an empirical fact that on its own provided important clues to the concrete material preconditions of its emergence, which could now be simply reconstructed in

42 It is noticeable, however, that this critique simply ignores the idealistic claim of a rational justification of history reflected in the speculative concept.

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a comparatively easy manner.43 Yet, this ‘fact’ must itself still be understood as a construct by Marx and Engels: The “proletarian movement in France and England” (ibid., p. 455) whose “real party interests” (ibid., p. 457) supposedly corresponded to the “consciousness of certain historically conditioned spheres of life” (ibid., p. 456) and which they hold up in contrast to philosophical ‘true socialism,’ argued at that time in a manner that was hardly less ‘utopian,’ ‘moralistic,’ and ‘philosophical’ than German communism; and above all else, its base was made up not so much of modern industrial workers than of radical, proletarianized artisans, who, according to Marx and Engels, could not at all be suitable for a universal, revolutionary appropriation of the means of production, since all of their attempts at revolution must remain blinkered as a result of their subsumption to a merely “crude instrument of production and a limited intercourse” (ibid., p. 88) (see Spekker 2018, pp. 187 ff.). Communism in the sense that Marx and Engels claimed, as a “real movement,” was basically to a great extent ‘written into existence’ in The German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, which appeared shortly thereafter and was essentially the written-down result of the expulsions of all those ‘petit-bourgeois,’ ‘philosophical,’ and ‘reactionary’ factions. For the project of a ‘historical materialist’ substantiation of communism, which is what Marx and Engels are concerned with here, however, that means: Obviously their presentation of history is not speculative philosophy in Hegel’s sense—and yet, it cannot do without speculative elements. Marx and Engels don’t just analyze history in an manner free of values or interests, as if it would just begin to sing the song of communism on its own as a result of mere contemplation. On the contrary, communism is the specific interest that is already presupposed to Marx’s and Engels’ conception and perception of history, and

43 Thus The German Ideology states: “The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises of the latter sufficient has already been said above (pp. [18–19, 22–23])” (MECW 5, p. 60). In the original manuscript, the page reference is left blank (see MEGA2 I/5, pp. 61 f.). While the editors of the popular version in the German-language Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) have inserted the page reference “[33–36]” (MEW 3, p. 47), the MECW editors refer to slightly different original manuscript pages corresponding to pages 34–36 and 69–70 in the MEW. In both cases, however, reference is correctly made to those passages in which communism is explained to be a “real movement” arising from the development of the economic productive forces.

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helps to explain why they are able to distance themselves fundamentally from the usual “confinement to high-sounding actions of leaders and states” (MEGA2 I/5, p. 39, o.t.) just as much as from political economy, which derives—and thus naturalizes—the bourgeois social nexus and the capitalist division of labor from a natural inclination toward exchange inherent to individuals, hypostatized as monadic owners of private property.44 While the former is only good for mere chronicle, which serves more to legitimize the narrative of domination than to show the inner nexus of historical development, the latter amounts to a completely ahistorical understanding of society, since history must be reduced to the dogmatic distinction between ‘unnatural’ and ‘natural’ relations.45 Neither is capable of understanding society as a self-divided, self-contradictory one (see MECW 5, p. 4 [Thesis 4]) whose contradictions must drive it toward its historical sublation. It belongs to the core of Hegel ’s philosophy that understanding division and contradiction rationally necessarily implies developing them as interrelated diremptions of a unity, a whole. This unity represents the absolute concept unfolded to totality, and without this speculative moment, rational knowledge of the whole (and its having developed historically [geschichtliche Gewordenheit ]) is according to Hegel not possible at all (see Stapelfeldt 2009, pp. 256 ff.). Now, Marx and Engels deny that this speculative philosophy, which does not care about “real life,” is able to contribute anything at all to the scientific presentation of the “practical process of development of men” (MECW 5, p. 37): Asserted as manifestations of a rational unity that encompasses them, the real contradictions are “arbitrated” (Stapelfeldt 2009, p. 265, o.t.) instead of, as Marx already argues against Hegel in 1843, being conceived of themselves as essential (see MECW 3, p. 91) and which must be explained and lead to their practical-revolutionary sublation (see MECW 5, p. 4 [Thesis 3]). But even Marx and Engels are by no means able—despite all the foreground emphasis upon empiricism—to understand these real contradictions, let alone explain them as the “absolutely necessary practical premise” (MECW 5, p. 49) for communist upheaval, without themselves having a concept of rational, 44 According to Marx already in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, see MECW 3, pp. 317–322. 45 According to Marx in his polemic against Proudhon, published shortly after his work on The German Ideology; see MECW 6, p. 174. Marx will return to this point in the fetish chapter of Capital, and the present study will do the same.

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real unity, which is for them indeed communism. That the historically developing forms of the practical appropriation of nature, the “production of material life” (ibid., p. 42), constitute a social nexus, which creates a “common interest” in the first place, an interest which in the “naturally evolved society” thus far still exists in the inverted form of an “alien power opposed to [man],” but at the same time represents the necessary condition of possibility of a consciously established “communist society” (ibid., p. 47), in which particular and communal interest are no longer in contradiction to each other—this is only revealed to Marx and Engels from the communist perspective that they have already embraced, and this capacity for experience is, as Max Horkheimer will bring to a point some 90 years later, a differentia specifica between critical and traditional theory: The aspects which the latter derives from historical analysis as the goals of human activity, especially the idea of a reasonable organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community, are immanent in human work but are not present to individuals or the common mind in the correct form. A certain concern is also required if these tendencies are to be experienced and perceived. (Horkheimer 1972b, p. 213, c.t., emphasis mine)

This does not at all mean that communism is merely an arbitrary standard externally applied to bourgeois society, to which Marx and Engels attempt to “accommodate science to” (MECW 31, p. 350). In fact, they try to redeem this epistemic precondition of their research precisely by means of the scientific or materialist presentation of the relations as ones which establish communism as a “real movement that sublates the present state of things” that emerges from them. To present bourgeois relations in the light of the possibility of their susceptibility to communist sublation, which they generate themselves, is thus also not the sheer opposite of speculation, but rather its sublation in historical-materialist critique: Only because and if communism, that is, the rational organization of human relations, is practically possible as a determinate negation of bourgeois society, that is, is inherent in it (and only therefore gives rise to the possibility of being thought rationally), can bourgeois society be conceived as a negative, i.e. not yet rational condition.46 Rational scientific knowledge 46 This basic idea is found similarly, albeit in a more strongly philosophical language, already in Marx’s letter from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (edited by Arnold Ruge,

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of bourgeois society is therefore not possible other than as its critique, and as such it stands in a virtual relationship with the pending communist abolition of this very society. Science in the sense that Marx and Engels conduct it in The German Ideology—or rather, outline it—and ‘scientific communism’ are—regardless of what was meant later in (Party-) Communism by this expression—one and the same thing.

2.4

“… man not yet masters the process of production”---Liberated Society in the Critique of Political Economy

A leap in time: Marx, living in London since the suppression of the 1848 revolutions, publishes Capital in 1867 after many years of research, initially only in German, and he leaves no doubt that it is an entirely scientific work, for example when he already denies the scientific nature of contemporary bourgeois economists in the preface. But does his scientific critique still stand in that immanent relation with the perspective of the rational—and for Marx, that means: communist—arrangement of society? As is well known, Marx enumerates several “Robinson Crusoe stories” (“Robinsonades,” Marx 1990, p. 169)47 in the first subchapter of the chapter The Commodity, in order to shed light on the fetishism of bourgeois economics, generated by the commodity form itself, that products of labor are commodities by nature and have a value, the magnitude of which is determined by the labor time required to produce them: That which seems self-evident to both political economy as well as everyday consciousness does not apply to the literary example of the stranded Robinson Crusoe, nor to corvée and serf labor in the middle ages, nor to the patriarchal peasant family. These forms of production “contain all the essential determinants of value” (ibid., p. 170), that is, the entirety of productive labor is distributed among the single individuals (or in the

admittedly), according to which the critic can “develop the true reality as its obligation and its final purpose” from “the forms peculiar to existing reality,” precisely because reason already exists, “but not always in a reasonable form” (MECW 3, p. 143, c.t.). 47 In the first edition, Marx doesn’t use this term; furthermore, he only uses two examples instead of four; see MEGA2 II/5, pp. 45 f. In the following, passages that are only found in the first edition of Capital are reproduced and translated according to MEGA2 II/5, since no English version of this text is available yet.

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case of Robinson, is carried out by one person in a sequence) and the labors are measured by the duration of their expenditure, thus standing in a specific quantitative relation to each other. Nonetheless, the products of labor here do not assume the form of value, and correspondingly, the respective duration of the labor required for each product is not expressed in specific magnitudes of value. However, Marx describes, as a further and final example of a form of society not based on commodity and value production, “an association of free humans, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full selfawareness as one single social labour force” (ibid., p. 171, c.t.), that is, a possible future communist society, and the question arises what additional explanatory content is provided by this “Robinsonade.” The fact that here, the total laboring time of the members of the association, as well as each respective individual share that can be consumed from the total product, are socially distributed according to plan, is indeed, as Michael Heinrich, in his guide to reading Capital, claims to be the central function of this example, a contrast to commodity production, in which “value mediates both processes. The social relationships among the private labor activities therefore present themselves as social relationships among things” (Heinrich 2021, p. 174). But this peculiarity of commodity and value production, to which the appearance of ahistorical naturalness adheres, is already sufficiently clearly contrasted by the two preceding historical examples.48 The “association of free people” in contrast points—precisely in connection with the scientific argumentation of the first chapter—to something much further reaching, namely to that epistemic interrelation between the representability of the bourgeois social nexus as a negative one, and its determinate negation, communism, and thus to the specific political-historical content of the critique of these relations in general. For the statement that only under specific bourgeois relations determined by commodity production and exchange, labor is expressed in values measured in terms of the duration of its expenditure and value mediates social relationships, whereas this wasn’t the case in pre-bourgeois relations of production, doesn’t confuse bourgeois economics at all. The 48 And conversely, if the central function of the example of the “association of free people” would have been to demonstrate this peculiarity, Marx wouldn’t have needed to expand the number of “Robinsonades” in the second edition of Capital by including the medieval and smallholding peasant modes of production.

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question of why this content (labor, labor time) assumes “this form” (value, the magnitude of value) isn’t a question for political economy, since “the pre-bourgeois forms of the social organism of production are treated by political economy in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions” (Marx 1990, p. 175, c.t.). Of course bourgeois economists know that the laws of commodity production did not apply previously; their treatment of value, however, is not a purely analytical one, but has a normative foundation, which Marx points out with his self-quotation from The Poverty of Philosophy: “There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. […] Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any” (MECW 6, p. 174; see Marx 1990, p. 175, fn. 35). Bourgeois economists are concerned, as Marx notes in The Poverty of Philosophy, with justifying relations “in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature”—laws “which must always govern society” (ibid., emphasis mine). So these economists are not simply naive; rather, they legitimize—as is also known from John Locke’s theory of property, which was an important precursor of the labor theory of value—their views in terms of natural law. If, however, one takes a closer look at the further course of the argument following the Robinsonades,49 it becomes easier to deduce what Marx is getting at with the example of a communist mode of production: that bourgeois relations based upon commodity production and exchange are not just a historical product, something historically developed, but rather—contrary to the claim of the economists—are not yet rational, thus something still becoming. This ‘not yet’—which also prominently pervades the Grundrisse manuscripts in particular, in which Marx for example mentions the “foreignness and isolation” which the interrelation of individuals acquires in the commodity relation as proof “that they are still in the process of creating the conditions of their social life instead of having started it from these conditions” (MECW 28, p. 99,

49 In the second edition, Marx shifted the page-and-a-half following the “association of free people” passage in the first edition further forward and expanded it, but the mediation with the thought that now follows it instead (the correspondence between commodity production and Protestantism) suffers a bit from it. See MEGA2 II/5, pp. 46 f. and II/6, p. 109 (Marx 1990, p. 172).

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c.t., emphasis mine)50 —cannot be demonstrated at all by this contrast with pre-bourgeois modes of production and distribution, since these are “based on the superordination and subordination (natural or political) of individuals to each other […] (whatever the character of this superordination and subordination: patriarchal, ancient or feudal)” (ibid., p. 96), and thus are even more irrational than the bourgeois mode of socialization itself. Marx is concerned with illustrating, on the basis of “[c]irculation as the first totality among the economic categories,” that social relationships taking on a life of their own in value is the “necessary result of the fact that the starting point is not the free social individual” (ibid., p. 132).51 What now follows the contrast between bourgeois exchange society and communist society in Marx’s critique of fetishism (in the first edition of Capital ) is the resolution of the mysticism of the commodity form: In that people in commodity exchange “relate their products to each other as values,” they relate “their different acts of labor to each other as human labor,” which in turn, however, necessarily confronts them “in a material shell [sachlicher Hülle],” namely—as Marx has previously shown in the analysis of the value-form—in the form of commodity and money (MEGA2 II/5, p. 46, o.t.).52 The result is on the one hand a real social inversion—“the producers’ own movement within society has for them the form of a movement of things, and these things, instead of being under their control, in fact control them”—which on the other hand is “materially [sachlich] concealed” by the value-form itself (MEGA2 II/5, p. 47, o.t.), so that people don’t know that in commodity exchange they “equate their various labors with abstract human labor” (ibid., p. 46, o.t.), that is, with the “value-forming substance” (ibid., p. 20). The full scope of the category of abstract human labor introduced by Marx, which is expressed in the value-form of the objects of use produced as commodities by independent private labor, becomes even clearer, however, in connection with the idea of the correspondence between commodity society

50 Marx even specially marked this sentence in the manuscript. See MEGA2 II/1.1, p. 94. 51 By this he understands the “universally developed individuals, whose social relationships are their own communal relations and therefore subjected to their own communal control” (MECW 28, p. 99) and who will exist not earlier than in the communist “association of free people.” 52 See the second edition in MEGA2 II/6, p. 88, where the formulations deviate slightly from the first edition.

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and (Protestant) Christianity that follows here (or, in the second edition, directly after the Robinsonades): For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material [sachlichen] form bring their individual, private labours into relation with each other as homogeneous [equal] human labour, Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion. (Marx 1990, p. 192)

What Marx intends to make clear with this correspondence, which in the first edition, along with the “association of free people,” frames the demystification of the commodity form just presented, necessarily eludes the grasp of a predominantly only analytical reading of Capital of the sort proposed by Michael Heinrich. If the latter thinks that the correspondence consists in the fact that Christianity abstracts from the concrete differences between human beings, in that they are all “equal before God as his creations” (Heinrich 2021, p. 175), in a manner similar to how in the exchange of commodities an abstraction is made from “every concrete determination” and their “differences” (ibid., p. 174), then he obviously does not recognize either the origin or the sense of the argument, which is already known from Marx’s early work, influenced not least by Feuerbach’s critique of religion: God is not simply an abstraction from the concrete differences between people, but rather in God—according to Feuerbach—people observe their own essence, that is, what characterizes them in common as a human species and thus constitutes them as equals, and externalize it into an inessential entity that appears as an entity that connects people. The young Marx would identify the reason for this “inverted world-consciousness ” in the “inverted world” (MECW 3, p. 175) and begin to investigate the latter. Radicalizing Feuerbach’s fundamental idea, he recognized in both the modern political state as well as in money actual forms of such an inverted mediation: Just as the “externalized ability of mankind” takes on an independent manifestation in money, human beings who in bourgeois relations only face each other as egoistic individuals encounter their common bond, their species-being, as a political state, in which “the true man is thus far only recognized in the shape of the abstract citoyen” (MECW 3, p. 167, c.t.); in other words,

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in the state, as in money, humanity is thus far only an abstract, not a real universality. The concept of abstract human labor must also be understood in this sense. It expresses more than merely an abstraction from concrete practical (private) labor and its various forms that expresses itself in value and has an actual, concrete existence in its material form, a universally valid exchange value. Abstract human labor must also be understood in the sense of that ‘not yet’: Under bourgeois relations of universal commodity exchange, “human labour” (Marx 1990, p. 166) as the “common capabilities” (MECW 28, p. 96, c.t.) of the human species, acquires in value for the first time the universal social character which it never had in pre-bourgeois forms of the division of labor and production.53 But this universality also appears here completely detached from the real, concrete, and above all only privately expended—that is, directly non-societal— labors in a material (sachlichen) shell; it is thus only abstractly realized. For one thing, the abstract human or equal labor objectified (vergegenständlicht ) in value is not just a case of disregarding the manifold concrete acts of labor that produce the various use-values; rather, what exists in value “as a fate” (ibid., c.t.) outside of the human beings, is their common capacity, which is deducted, separated from their concrete labors, which in turn are only immediately expended as private and non-societal labor, thus

53 It may be possible to notice retrospectively that in “every social form of labor […] the labors of the various individuals are also related to each other as human” (MEGA2 II/5, p. 41, o.t.). But as Marx demonstrates with regard to the example of Aristotle’s historically necessary failure to determine a consubstantiality between objects of exchange which could logically explain their exchangeability with each other, here—and this applies to all pre-bourgeois relations, in which (as Marx shows in the second and third ‘Robinsonades’) immediate personal domination or (supposed) natural hierarchies characterized the bond between people as well as between their labors—“equal human labour” could not be understood at all as the common substance of the products of labor, because production at that time “had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers” (Marx 1990, p. 152). That “the concept of human equality” has “the fixity of a popular preconception” is “only [erst ] possible in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities” (ibid., c.t.). In the Theories of Surplus Value, Marx also explicitly emphasizes that it is only (erst ) the bourgeois relations of production, in which labor and ownership of the conditions of production are separated, torn apart from each other, that can “develop labour as social labour and the productive power of social labour” (MECW 33, p. 340).

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only taken into consideration in the form of difference.54 But for another thing, Marx understands under value—as the commonality of their labor separated from the human beings and thus the embodiment of abstract labor—at the same time also the form in which, in an inverted manner, and mediated by material things, “a system of general social metabolism, a system of universal relations, universal requirements and universal capacities” is formed (ibid., p. 95, c.t.), in which human beings—however only ‘in itself,’ external to them (see also MECW 33, p. 489)—develop their practical powers into a universality which ultimately makes possible the “subordination of their communal, social productivity, which is their social capacities” (MECW 28, p. 95, c.t.) in an association of free people. So with The Fetish Character of the Commodity and Its Secret Marx expresses more than the peculiarity that the commodity form “mirrors to men the social characteristics of their own labour as objective [gegenständliche] characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as social natural properties of things” (MEGA2 II/6, p. 103, o.t.; compare Marx 1990, p. 164) and the social nexus only comes about through their mediation by things. Especially the example of the association of free people, the raising the topic of the correspondence between the society of commodity exchange and Protestantism, and finally Marx’s statement quoted at the beginning of this paper that the economic forms of bourgeois society “have it written on the forehead that they belong to a formation of society in which the process of production masters men; in which man does not yet master the process of production” (MEGA2 II/5, p. 49, o.t., emphasis mine; compare Marx 1990, pp. 174 f.) bear witness to the fact that within and even only (erst ) through the “substitution” (Marx 1990, p. 165) expressed in the commodity form, through this inversion, historical development opens up toward the rational, communist society as its determinate negation. And what’s more: It demonstrates that Marx is able to get at what’s behind the “mysterious character of the commodity-form” (ibid., p. 164) because he is able to take into view the bourgeois forms, as he once noted ad Feuerbach, from the “standpoint” of the—admittedly hitherto only theoretically anticipated—“human society” (MECW 5, p. 5) as necessary manifestations of still irrational 54 Marx will ultimately outline the historical reasons for this in part eight, on the So-Called Primitive Accumulation (Marx 1990, pp. 873–940). The Modern Theory of Colonization, which is an independent chapter in the German editions, was incorporated by Marx into part eight for the French edition.

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relations that are not yet subordinated to the planned determinations of a self-conscious subject.55 To such an understanding of the economic forms of bourgeois society—their examination from the “viewpoint of their susceptibility to being sublated in the future” (Schmidt 1977, p. 165, o.t.)—a positivist understanding of science must either snap back with the reproach of making a ‘historical-philosophical’ (geschichtsphilosophisch) claim, or with the ‘generosity’ of stating that the scientific core of Capital is fortunately not touched by it. However, as has already been demonstrated with regard to Marx’s early writings and The German Ideology in particular, the capitalist state of society cannot be represented solely as what it immediately is without at the same time grasping it as still irrational, necessarily pointing

55 This epistemic interrelation can also be confirmed genealogically, as I have demonstrated in detail in Spekker 2016, by Marx’s altercation with Proudhonism in the Grundrisse. Although Proudhonism considers itself to be in opposition to capitalist economy, because it opposes a supposedly just economy of independent small producers— who are supposed to receive the entire ‘value’ of the products they offer for sale, measured according to their concretely expended labor time—to exchange mediated by money, it thus—as Marx had already criticized in The Poverty of Philosophy—in reality only affirms the basic principles of the economic relations he denounces, and approves—like bourgeois economists did before—the individual producer and his private labor as the basis of a just, ideal order which—according to Proudhon and his adepts—would be hindered by the power of money, which is why it should be replaced by ‘time sheets.’ It is essentially Marx’s communist stance against this ‘petit-bourgeois’ ideal (a stance also carried over into his disputes with the socialist/communist scene of the time) that leads him to the decisive realization that labor time cannot, as concrete time, be expressed in value at all, but that value must necessarily have the form of money in addition to the form of the commodity, and that money must be “labour time as general object, or the objectification of general labour time” (MECW 28, p. 105). So with this realization, Marx is the first to discover that in value labor must be distinguished from itself as abstract labor, because—in contrast to bourgeois economists and their socialist epigones—he grasps that commodity-producing labor “is not directly social, not THE OFFSPRING OF ASSOCIATION distributing labour within itself. The individuals are subsumed under social production, which exists outside them as a fate; but social production is not subsumed under the individuals who manage it as their common capabilities ” (ibid., pp. 95 f., c.t., emphasis mine). Thus Marx not only opens up the secret of the economic forms of bourgeois society, but on this basis he is finally able to also immanently demonstrate, with his critique of fetishism, which he later elaborates systematically in Capital, why the bourgeois economists as well as the socialists who follow their theories in an ‘anti-capitalist’ way have a social-atomist understanding of labor and must naturalize value: It is these forms themselves that generate this fetishism as “objective [gegenständlichen]” and real “semblance” (MEGA2 II/5, p. 50, o.t.).

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beyond itself historically; the scientific presentation of it and the communist critique of it are thus mutually dependent. That this does not apply any less to the ‘mature’ scientific critique in Capital was also emphasized by Marx in a methodological sentence in the postface to the second edition, where he identifies his mode of presentation as dialectic “in its rational form,” because it “includes in its positive insight into the existing state of things also the insight into the negation, into the necessary demise of that state; because it grasps every evolved [gewordne] form as being in a fluid state, and therefore grasps the transient nature of these forms as well; because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary” (MEGA2 II/6, p. 709, o.t.; compare Marx 1990, p. 103). That also means, however, that Marx cannot just let the ‘not yet,’ that immanent relation between the negative character of the economic forms and their determinate negation engendered by themselves, flow into the scientific presentation merely selectively as a presupposed assumption; rather, the systematic presentation as a whole must proceed toward communism as its determinate negation, by which the truth of this ‘not yet’ must still be substantiated. That this is in fact his concern is explicitly emphasized by Marx ten years after the publication of the first edition of Capital in his (never sent) letter to the Russian publication Otechestvenniye Zapiski: For the thesis raised in the chapter on The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation that the capitalist mode of production necessarily brings about its own negation, he doesn’t give “any proof at this point for the very good reason that this assertion itself is nothing but a summary recapitulation of long developments previously set out in the chapters on capitalist production” (MECW 24, p. 200). This statement must—against the background of what’s presented above—be made more specific: From the very first sentence of Capital on, Marx’s entire argumentation proceeds toward this negation of the negation. The theoretical beginning of Capital and the determination of the historical end of capital are necessarily mediated with each other. Without exception, Marx begins all of the (surviving) systematic presentations of the capitalist mode of production—from the first draft of a chapter 1) Value in the Grundrisse manuscripts through the first notebook of the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to the Results of the Immediate Process of Production and finally to Capital in all of its

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different versions—with wealth 56 (see MECW 29, p. 252; ibid., p. 269; MEGA2 II/4.1, p. 24; Marx 1990, p. 125). If Marx initially emphasizes that under bourgeois relations of production the commodity is the elementary form or form of appearance of wealth, and therefore does by no means analyze it in its immediate occurrence, then this demonstrates that he understands the bourgeois forms right from the outset as necessary expressions of an inversion pointing historically beyond itself. For wealth is not simply an “immense collection of commodities” (Marx 1990, p. 125; see MECW 29, p. 269), but rather appears in it in the form of “total alienation” (MECW 28, p. 412). What wealth is “if the narrow bourgeois form is peeled off” (ibid., p. 411), Marx elaborates in greater detail in the Grundrisse and by the use of images known from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of all places: Wealth is nothing other than “the universality of the individual’s needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive forces, etc., produced in universal exchange” (ibid.), “the full development of human control over the forces of nature – over the forces of so-called Nature, as well as those of his own nature” (ibid.), the “absolute unfolding of man’s creative abilities”; he makes the “development of all human powers” (ibid., p. 412) an “end-in-itself” (ibid.). But just as little as Marx identifies wealth in a transhistorical sense with its commodity form, is he describing here what wealth ‘authentically’ [eigentlich] is. On the contrary: Wealth must take on the form of commodities and (as Marx will conceptually unfold it in Capital ) of money multiplying as capital; that is—like human labor as a common species capacity, which is contained in that concept of wealth—, it must initially take the form of abstract universality, in order to be able to develop for the first time into that real universality, to become truly universal wealth. Thus he writes in the Results of the Immediate Process of Production of the “inversion of subject into object and vice versa” that expresses itself in capital as the domination of things over human beings: Viewed historically this inversion is the necessary point of passage to force the creation of wealth as such, i.e. the relentless productive forces of social labour, which alone can form the material base of a free human society, at the expense of the majority. Man must pass through this antagonistic

56 As John Holloway (see next footnote) rightly points out, “richness” actually captures the content of the German word “Reichtum” better. Since my interpretation will become clear even without this more accurate translation, I will continue to use the common term “wealth” in the following.

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stage, just as man must first religiously give his mental powers the form of independent powers which oppose him. It is the alienation process of his own labour. (Marx 1990b, p. 990, c.t.; see also pp. 1064 f.)

So Marx begins Capital with this concept of wealth and its inverted form of appearance, and the fact that he wishes to scientifically redeem the preconditions of this concept, that is, present how this form, the domination of capital, at the same time represents the condition of possibility of wealth’s historical realization, determines the argumentative structure of Capital in an essential way.57 And it is not earlier than with Capital 57 So far, almost no one has explicitly analyzed the fundamental significance of the concept of wealth in these various formulations of the first sentence, and the consequent immanent relation between the conceptual beginning of Capital and the historical abolition of its object by communist revolution. I only know of two exceptions: Joachim Bruhn and John Holloway. In his polemical article Studentenfutter (“student food,” i.e. trail mix), Bruhn directs his interpretation of the first sentence against ‘academic’ readings of Marx which, in his view, exorcise the revolutionary content from Marx’s critique. Unfortunately, however, he does not succeed himself in convincingly determining the necessary interrelation of critical presentation and revolutionary imperative. His insistence upon ‘materialist critique’ and his rejection of normative judgements, ethics, and morality cannot conceal the fact that the “evidence of reason posited in the form of critique and carried out socially,” as he claims to recognize it in Capital and as Marx supposedly obtains it “from the proletarian natural law” of early socialism (Bruhn 2007, p. 25, o.t.), is ultimately just that: normative critique. For wealth, which he understands in accordance with the Grundrisse as “universal and free appropriation according to need, free association,” comes along as something ‘authentic’ (Eigentliches ) (which it isn’t for Marx!), appearing “in the form of its exact opposite”: the commodity, and thus “self-negating” (ibid., p. 26). Things aren’t different with Holloway: He meticulously expounds the exact meaning of the individual terms wealth or richness (Reichtum), collection of commodities (Warensammlung ), and appearance (Erscheinung ), and aptly points out all the errors of interpretation due to poor English translations of the German original (which can also be observed in Massimiliano Tomba’s Marx’s Temporalities, whose interpretation in passing of the first sentence fails because of the lack of understanding of the concept of Erscheinung; see Tomba 2013b, p. 99). But ultimately he arrives at the questionable interpretation that Marx depicts—figuratively speaking—a “dragging of richness into the dungeon of the commodity” (“the unlimited richness of human becoming is forced into the form of an immense collection of commodities”) and understands wealth as “moving against and beyond the commodity form, a communising” (Holloway 2015). Whereas for Holloway, that’s already sufficient for slipping into kitschy movement phrases (“we, the readers of Capital, are on the side of wealth, digging our heels into the ground and screaming that we do not want to be dragged into the dungeon”; Capital “starts from the dignity of rebellion” etc.; ibid.), Bruhn on the other hand correctly emphasizes that value must first be critically comprehended as a negative form of mediation of the sociality negated in the antagonistically divided species. But he also, at least in this sense not so different from Holloway, reduces the revolutionary substance of the critique of political economy

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that he succeeds in scientifically substantiating the development of the forces of production, which he establishes as a necessary condition for the possibility not only of the technical-practical implementation of a future communist society, but also of a communist consciousness. If in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx still writes in very general terms about modern industry, based upon private property and the division of labor, as the “open book of man’s essential powers ” (MECW 3, p. 302), and if in The German Ideology the development of the forces of production was recounted on the basis of historical indications rather than proven as a law, Marx is basically only now able to convincingly demonstrate within the framework of the theory of value how and why the forces of production have to develop restlessly in a process independent of human beings and capitalist relations have to go beyond themselves. In Capital he not only shows that value is the thing-like and inverted expression of the social character of human labor, but must yet also explain in the further course of the presentation the actual possibility of such to a “provocation […]” (Bruhn, p. 27) to revolutionary upheaval which will basically just introduce out of the “moment of revolutionary decision” (ibid., p. 29) the fundamental other as an inexplicably occuring ‘event’. The inner-theoretical reason for this tipping into Political Existentialism, which is strange in view of Bruhn’s and the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum’s otherwise ruthless and correct critique of Heideggerianism and Schmittianism and doesn’t become any more correct if one calls it a “decisionism of reason” (ibid., p. 32, fn. 27), is, however, completely different compared to Holloway and is to be found in Bruhn’s understanding of Capital, which was essentially influenced by Stefan Breuer. According to Breuer, with the real subsumption of labor to capital, Marx describes a process of total socialization generated by value as automatic subject, which renders impossible any substantiation of revolutionary consciousness immanent to the society mediated by value (see Breuer 1977, pp. 33–50). In this way, Breuer turns Marx from a historical materialist into a structuralist and systems theorist, not understanding that it was precisely in that inversion that he saw the emergence of the real possibility of communist, revolutionary consciousness (for a critique of Breuer, see Krug 1999). However, this Marxian motive of revolutionary theory has become problematic in light of the transformation of the capitalist mode of production in the twentieth century not into a liberated society, but into barbarism. Thus Bruhn was always correctly preoccupied with the critique of political economy reflexively incorporating this experience (and of course not in the completely ahistorical and relativizing way that Holloway does, who asks in all seriousness whether our insensitivity “to the suffering that this [first] sentence relates” is the same “insensitivity that made Auschwitz possible, that allows Guantanamo to continue”; Holloway 2015). Nothing would be more wrong than to avoid this reflection, whether out of revolutionary nostalgia unperturbed by reality, or out of exegetic literalism. Nevertheless, Bruhn’s concrete execution must be countered by Adorno: “Existentialist decisionism is merely a reflexive movement to the seamless totality of the Weltgeist. Nevertheless, the latter is also semblance” (Adorno 1969, p. 44, o.t.).

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a concept of value. If Marx had already shown in the analysis of the value-form that value can only appear (and thus exist) when there is a socially valid general equivalent for all commodities, namely money (see Marx 1990, pp. 138–163), he argues further in the sections that follow that simple circulation, the value-mediated exchange of commodities for money, which in turn is again exchanged for other commodities (C – M – C) (see ibid., pp. 198–209), has, from the standpoint of the owner of money, as the movement M – C – M, no sense at all if the sale of the commodity that follows its purchase does not increase the original sum of money, that is, realize a surplus value, so that the movement takes the shape M – C – M’. Money is only thrown into circulation for the purpose of valorizing value, that is, to create surplus value, as capital (see ibid., pp. 247–257). Hence Marx makes something clear at this point which cannot be understood at all if one believes to recognize here the description of a supposed historical development from isolated exchange by means of a ‘simple commodity production’ (with money as a mere instrument of exchange) to a capitalist usurpation of this ‘original’ and ‘just’ process: that value cannot exist at all without its thing-like, independent form as money and its property of having to restlessly increase itself as capital. In this restless process, which is the necessary condition of its existence, value does not just represent in a material (sachlichen) shell the social relationship between the producers existing outside of them, but is at the same time the “automatic subject” (ibid., p. 255) and “self-moving substance” (ibid., p. 256) of this process.58 As is known, Marx now elaborates how surplus value, which becomes apparent to people only as profit, can be achieved without standing in contradiction to the law of exchange of commodities of equal value, 58 In this sense—and of course Marx alludes to this here with the terms ‘subject’ and ‘substance’—value has properties which for Hegel are possessed by Geist: The contradictions that value—as their unity—mediates, that is, the economic forms (commodity, money), are its own diremptions, between which it constantly proceeds back and forth, thus increasing itself. These forms are, however, as Marx already explained, already the expression of an actual social division of people into mutually opposed atoms (and—as their basis—into an antagonistic class society, as he will elucidate in the course of further argumentation), and it is accordingly here that Marx’s early critique of Hegel is repeated once again at the level of economic concepts: Value is the social synthesis that only forcibly holds together and perpetuates the real contradictions in the system of the capitalist mode of production. It represents the inverted, irrational unity of these contradictions, which must still be really resolved, so that the human beings ultimately ascend to the status of a rational (that is, not automatic) subject consciously shaping its world.

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namely through the purchase of the commodity labor power and its application in the process of production, in which it can be applied for longer than the socially necessary labor time required to produce the means of subsistence necessary for its own reproduction; in which, therefore, it can add more value to the objects of its labor than what it’s worth itself, thus producing commodities whose value, when finally realized in sale, is higher than the capital advanced by the capitalist for labor and means of production (see ibid., pp. 270–306). However, the astonishing thing now is that Marx does not at all condemn this exploitation as directly as one might initially think. He does depict elaborately all of the human devastation caused by the “[ravenous] appetite for surplus labour” (ibid., p. 348), in that, for example, the working day is constantly extended and intensified or conditions are created under which a permanent, completely immiserated “disposable industrial reserve army” stands at the ready (ibid., p. 784) (as is well known, for propertyless wagelaborers, even worse than being exploited, is not being exploited). But Marx does not see here a process that would have to be reversed, let alone that he opposes it with a “just exchange,” which he has already precisely proved to be the actually existing and necessary form of mediation for that exploitation in the process of production. On the contrary, the capitalist who, under the conditions of general competition with all other capitalists, extracts surplus labor from the workers by increasingly ingenious methods, is “respectable” precisely because “being a fanatic of value’s valorization, he ruthlessly forces mankind to produce for production’s sake, therefore he forces them to develop society’s productive forces and to create those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle” (ibid.,

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p. 477, c.t.; see MECW 28, pp. 464 f.).59 The capitalist mode of production itself, the inherent laws of which the capitalists are no less subject to than the proletariat (albeit with completely different consequences for ´ their lives), thus pushes forward “the tendentially and δυναμει universal development of the productive forces—of wealth in general” (MECW 28, p. 465); according to Marx this is even the “(immanent) purpose of this process” (MEGA2 II/1.2, p. 698, o.t.; see also MECW 29, p. 210), and the immanent compulsion of value toward increasing itself is its motor.60

59 In his discussion of the bourgeois Theories of Surplus Value, Marx even more rigorously argues against the “sentimental opponents of Ricardo’s” “that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself . To oppose the weal of the individual to this end, as Sismondi does, is to assert that the development of the species must be arrested in order to safeguard the weal of the individual […]. Apart from the barrenness of such edifying reflections, they reveal a failure to understand the fact that, although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and whole human classes, in the end it breaks through this antagonism and coincides with the development of the single individual; a failure to understand the fact that the higher development of individuality is only achieved by a historical process during which the individuals are sacrificed” (MECW 31, pp. 347 f., c.t.). Note also the wording of the last remark, which is hardly coincidentally also found in Hegel’s lectures on The Philosophy of History (Hegel 1986, p. 49). Such staged indifference toward ‘individual fate’ in the face of the greater historical matter is not rare to find in Marx’s writings, and especially in the writings of the critique of political economy; for a particularly striking example see MECW 30, p. 168. 60 This explanation of the development of the productive forces is thus limited to the capitalist mode of production alone and does not represent a universal law of history. Against the possibility of misunderstanding, Marx emphasized in his letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski as well as in the French edition of Capital that his presentation only referred to Western Europe (see MECW 24, p. 199; MEGA2 II/7, p. 634). When he states in this letter, and even more clearly in his draft letters to Vera Zasulich (1881), that for Russia, starting with the village commune producing on the basis of common property, a direct transition to a communist form of society is also possible, one shouldn’t believe that Marx simply dropped his grounding of communism in the development of the capitalist forces of production (against this misunderstanding, see Chattopadhyay 2006, pp. 50–62). Not only does he stick to the explanation that feudalism in Western Europe has necessarily led to capitalism, just as only (erst ) capitalism ultimately makes communism possible; he also sees the possibility of a completely different development in Russia only as a special case, which stands in a necessary relationship of dependence to precisely this Western European development: “It is precisely thanks to its contemporaneity with capitalist production that it may appropriate the latter’s positive acquisitions without experiencing all its frightful misfortunes. Russia does not live in isolation from the modern world” (MECW 24, p. 349).

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What this process looks like practically, Marx depicts in detail in the chapter on Machinery and Large-Scale Industry (see Marx 1990, pp. 492–639)61 : The objective compulsion, central to the capitalist mode of production, of increasing relative surplus value leads to increasingly efficient machines or technologies being introduced and to labor, really subsumed to capital, being increasingly dissected according to scientific benchmarks. ‘Large-scale industry’ does not only produce with increasing speed and with a constantly decreasing amount of direct human effort an increasingly greater amount of material wealth (even though this is not its purpose, but rather only a means to the realization of value), it also revolutionizes the labor process to such an extent that it ultimately becomes “a question of life and death” to replace “the partial individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, […] by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are just as many different modes of activity” (ibid., p. 618, c.t.). According to Marx, under the form of inversion, the “universality of the worker” develops “in itself ” (MECW 33, p. 489) in the capitalist factory system; this system is “the point of departure for the social revolution” (Marx 1990, p. 635, fn. 46), in that it gestates “the elements necessary for the creation of a new society and the elements necessary for the overthrow of the old one” (ibid., p. 635, c.t.). In the notorious section on the Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation, this is precisely what is thought out to the end: Hand in hand with this concentration, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the earth, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used conjointly, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, pressure, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the indignation of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by 61 For an extensive treatment of what follows, see my article Produktivkraftentfaltung und Kommunismus (Spekker 2018), in particular pp. 165–175.

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the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. (ibid., p. 929, c.t.)

So here, two parallel developments—(a) the until now merely abstract development of their practical social “species capability” (ibid., p. 447, c.t.), which occurs externally to human beings; the “development of the richness of human nature” (MECW 31, p. 348), and (b) the emergence of a consciousness by the workers that this is their own capability, expropriated from them, which they must appropriate communally; a consciousness which is itself “product of the mode of production based on capital” (MECW 28, p. 390)—culminate in the necessity of a revolutionary overthrow, the determinate negation of the capitalist mode of production. That this mode of production will bring about its overthrow itself “with the inexorability of a ‘natural process’” (Marx 1990, p. 929), is however a prognosis whose deterministic claim seems untenable in this form. For many it is therefore clear: The chapter on the Historical Tendency is unscientific and represents an ‘exoteric’ ballast that must be tossed away in order to concentrate on the scientific core of Capital . However, with that, one therefore completely loses sight of fundamental problems of materialist critique of society which just here become apparent.

2.5

The Consequences

As has been extensively demonstrated, Marx’s concepts grasp their objects not just as having developed historically, but in a process of becoming: They grasp the economic forms from the perspective of the ‘not yet,’ of the liberated society, the “historical premises ” of which develop in these forms that are already “foreshadowing the future” (MECW 28, p. 389), thus treating them as transient, pointing beyond themselves. On this basis, Marx is able to systematically present capital as a relation that contains and unfolds its own determinate, that is to say, conceptually necessary, negation. This negation: communism, the realization of reason as the conscious, planned subordination of the world to the practical determinations of a unified humanity, that is, as the rational unity of subject and object, Marx thus claims to establish from the material relations themselves, by means of scientific critique, with the claim to general validity and the necessity of its prepositions. The truth of capital would accordingly be that it cannot remain what it is, but necessarily transcends itself, and only a presentation that is able to conceptually grasp that would

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be scientific at all. The truth of capital, understood as the “veritable resolution” (MECW 3, p. 296, c.t.) of this inverted, antagonistic relation, would be its revolutionary upheaval by communism, the “real movement which sublates the present state of things” (MECW 5, p. 49, c.t.). If however Marx understands the economic categories as inverted forms, in which true human wealth and the practical human species capacity appear and develop for the first time in a universal, albeit still abstract manner, and if he therefore conceptually posits capital under the determinations of reason, in order to be able to criticize it as an inverted, still irrational condition, then he must on the other hand also present communism as a necessary determinate negation, because it bears the burden of proof for the correctness of these epistemic presuppositions. However, this indicates several fundamental problems with which any critique of society that has such a claim to truth aiming at reality is necessarily confronted: Whether this critical presentation of capitalist society proves to be true in an emphatic sense, and communism really proves to be the determinate negation of capital, is—as Marx already knew in 1845—“not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice”62 (MECW 5, p. 3). With this, however, critique is referred to a terrain that does not function immediately and quasi-automatically according to the laws of reason, but is a field of struggle, one on which alone, however, the revolution, as the real relations’ becoming rational, can practically take place. Here, concrete individuals act, who are not just subject to objective forms of thought which must first be ‘de-fetishized,’ but who are also never pure rational beings or only mere ‘character masks’ of economic laws. Marx—and this is basically philosophically old hat—merely build upon people’s capability of reason. A fundamental political problem thus also becomes visible here, because the “real movement” to which Marx refers is not simply identical with the concrete motley political and social movements that have taken up the fight against capitalism as their banner. For Marx, a movement can only be considered ‘real’ if it can be justified with conceptual 62 In this respect—taking into account, however, my criticism outlined above—, one must basically agree with Joachim Bruhn’s and the ISF’s conclusion that “materialism is unproven before communism, and is made superfluous by it” (Bruhn 2007, p. 30, fn. 8, o.t.).

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necessity as a determinate negation from the systematically presented capitalist relations (thus, here in the concept of the movement, there is a convergence of the movement of these relations, that is, their progressive as well as crisis-prone development, and the labor movement as their result which practically overcomes them). Accordingly, in the scientific critique with which Marx sought to ensure ‘clear conditions’ in the socialist/communist movement from 1845 on, the logic of the party is already virtually laid out (which he also attempted repeatedly to consistently enforce). However, this should not be seen as an immanent ‘error’ of materialist critique or as proof that behind the language of science and truth there is concealed ‘in reality’ merely an ordinary friend-enemy way of thinking, or that—as the postmodernists would very much like to have it—there is no such thing as the truth at all. Rather, an aporia is expressed in this problem. In his study Reason and Revolution, Marcuse highlighted as the core idea of the Idealist defense of objective reason against English empiricism “that reason’s right to shape reality depended upon man’s ability to hold generally valid truths. Reason could lead beyond the brute fact of what is, to the realization of what ought to be, only by virtue of the universality and necessity of its concepts” (Marcuse 1986, p. 19). This is what Marx’s materialist critique still has in common, in this fundamental way, with Idealist philosophy: Critique that aims at the abolition of all relations of domination and at the creation of a world placed under the conscious and practical determinations of a rational subject, an ‘association of free people,’ cannot do without truth and reason, without general and necessary concepts which the inverted society to be abolished and the liberated society that is to be created from it must be grasped with. In doing so, however, it inevitably gets caught up in the aforementioned aporia, since the practical consequences of its necessary “absolutism of truth” (ibid., p. 322) cannot be resolved at all purely theoretically, but at best only contained—and this would be a requirement of all those wishing to refer positively to Marx—by constant self-reflection.63 To simply split off the chapter on The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation as scientifically useless movement prose from the rest of Capital is thus only possible at the expense of understanding Marx’s 63 Postmodern ‘critique,’ in contrast, can get along well without all that and, ultimately, without truth and reason, since it is in any case no longer concerned with such considerations—dismissed as ‘grand narratives’—as the establishment of a universally rational human world.

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scientific critique and its practical implications. It is not least here that the immanent and, from a practical standpoint, always precarious relation between scientific presentation and communist perspective, between truth and revolution, becomes palpable. Moreover, it is only on the basis of such an understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy that another problem—probably the greatest problem which social critique following Marx is confronted with today— can be addressed: its being antiquated, its antiquatedness. This is not at all to claim that Marx’s critique is no longer correct, but rather to point out its temporal core (Zeitkern). That Marx, precisely because of his communist perspective, was able to recognize the capitalist form of society as an inverted, not yet rational nexus of human relations, to present it in a scientifically stringent way, and to assume communism as its necessary abolition, became possible in a specific historical constellation (in which his critique was also to intervene practically). In a certain way, this constellation has been outpaced or thwarted by the subsequent course of history. Not only did all real attempts at liberation in the twentieth century fail due to the overwhelming power of the prevailing conditions or (far more often) due to their own betrayal. In the course of the totalization of capitalist socialization, people have above all become so fully integrated, and expend such a high degree of energy to maintain this precarious status at the penalty of their individual downfall, that they can hardly conceive of the rational overcoming of these conditions anymore, even where they obviously suffer from them. Instead, crimes against humanity of such an extent, of such monstrosity—namely Auschwitz—have become possible and real, that in the face of experiencing them, Marx’s perspective on the possibility of the association of free people, and thus of the critique of those relations which is inseparable from this perspective, indeed looks old. Perhaps for this reason, the lack of understanding of this indissoluble relation between truth and revolution, so widespread in contemporary Marx research, the dissociation of those motives and arguments from the supposedly independent scientific ‘core’ of the critique of political economy, today belittled as ‘philosophy of history,’ must be understood as a symptom of the repression, of the unconscious discarding of experiences with which “we can all no longer cope” (Hannah Arendt), or simply as a deceptive self-reassurance that science is fortunately above such ‘profane’ problems: Once the question of revolution has been removed from its relation with the critique of political economy and done away with, one can diligently occupy oneself with the ‘pure’ Marxian science,

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without even wasting a single thought on that, and how, the barbarism that instead occurred in the twentieth century, that is, the real counterrevolution, no longer leaves untouched Marx’s scientific critique and critique of society in general. Against exactly this, it is precisely that antiquatedness of Marx’s critique that must be adhered to, because within it, it remains not only evident that there is a necessary epistemic relation between the scientific critique of capitalist society and the interest in its abolition, but also that it is therefore just as imperative that the reflection upon this disastrous course of history must be taken up as part of the critique. This antiquatedness must also be adhered to because in it is still preserved the memory that a future reasonable society—which has been increasingly denied by the further course of history and made more and more unthinkable—was once really possible and is still pending.

CHAPTER 3

Declining or Modern Forms of Rule? Marx on Revolution and Restoration in Europe Anna-Sophie Schönfelder

3.1

Introduction

There are sentences by Marx that seem like they aren’t by Marx: [T]he need and the natural necessity of the revolution is as general as the desperation of the downtrodden peoples on whom your throne rests, as the hatred of the despoiled proletarians with whose wretchedness you played such pleasant games. […] Where and how this eruption may take place is of little importance. The main thing is that it should occur. This time Prussia seems to be called on to express, against its will, the general need for revolution. (MECW 16, p. 381)

Hard to believe that this flowed from the quill of the same author who a few years earlier had described German conditions as standing “below the level of history” (MECW 3, p. 177) and a few years later was outraged over how “The Versailles Government in abject dependence on Prussia” (MECW 22, p. 343) suppressed the Paris Commune. But in 1859, as Marx wrote these sentences in Das Volk, the newspaper of the Kommunistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein in London, he could no longer hope, as he

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bohlender, A.-S. Schönfelder, M. Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17358-5_3

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had in his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , that “the ringing call of the Gallic cock” (MECW 3, p. 187) would also shake up Prussian conditions because France had once again gone from being a republic to an empire. The Prussian regime wasn’t even the greatest problem for socialists at this point in time, since the most determined resistance to democratic and independence movements in Europe now came from Austria. The distinction between countries that could be revolutionized and those opposed to revolution, which had previously seemed clear to Marx, had proved to be unstable. After 1849, many European governments cultivated alliances with each other to restore the pre-revolutionary political order and to secure economic and political power against domestic opposition. Social peace was even being enforced by repression in England and France—two countries which Marx had shortly before highlighted as centers of a revolutionary movement in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850, referring to their industrial development and political tradition (see MECW 10, p. 509 f.). Under the impression of this restorationist situation, he began with what researchers such as Kevin Anderson (2010) and Teodor Shanin (1983) have emphasized as a characteristic of his late work: In searching for indications and possibilities for revolutionary struggles, his view expanded to include increasingly broader sections of the world, until he also attributed to the periphery of the British Empire or even the despised homeland of the German ‘Krautjunker’ the potential to disrupt the equilibrium of the international power structure, thus becoming hotbeds of revolution. Marx’s temporary ceasefire with Prussia, however, is not the only unusual thing about this quote. What might also surprise the reader is that after 1852, he invokes ‘need’ and ‘natural necessity’ for revolution at all. The almost prophetic tone doesn’t really seem to fit an era when a revolutionary slump prevailed in Europe. It also doesn’t seem to fit the central topic of his newspaper articles from this period; after all, in those, Marx repeatedly identifies and criticizes those political forces seeking to preserve the old social order. And yet nonetheless he strikes this tone in many of his articles. In the very decade in which European governments were doing a great deal to be rid of revolutionary efforts, in his journalistic commentaries Marx frequently wove in remarks characterizing the political present he had just examined in detail as an ‘untrue’ state of latency. Thus he asserts that the current holders of political power would soon undermine themselves, had

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revealed their fear of losing power, or had long outlived their usefulness anyway. Marx’s critique of politics thus seems to contain at the same time a relativization of the significance of “performances of state” (MECW 11, p. 149) for revolutionary movements. His presentation gives the impression as if no European state power, not even a modern redesign of the monarchy in France, or the Pax Britannica based upon the suppression of internal conflicts, could stop the necessarily revolutionary course of events for much longer. At the same time and in the same texts, however, Marx identifies effective political regimes in both France and England that aim at shutting down class struggle: Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s1 empire, Marx holds, had become possible, because neither the constitution of 1848 nor the members of the national assembly had consistently pushed for a political modernization of France. As a result, Bonaparte had turned the country into a laboratory for industrial and financial experiments. By means of nationalist propaganda, bribery, and state force, he mobilized the entire population for these experiments, thus deliberately diverting attention from class issues. In England, on the other hand, Marx explains, the politically ruling aristocracy protected the economic rule of the bourgeoisie by promoting free trade and industrialization. This ruling arrangement, dating back to Charles I’s struggle with parliament and initially proving its worth in establishing Britain as a mercantile power, served the purpose of exploiting the lower classes and suppressing their demands at the same time. Marx’s diagnosis of the present should have therefore been unambiguous: Conditions could have hardly been worse for reformist and revolutionary movements. How could he, then, nonetheless speak of a “general need for revolution” that could break out at any moment? The contrast within Marx’s journalistic texts is conspicuous: Such “suggestions of certainty” (Bluhm 2015, p. 45, o.t.) stand in contrast to the diagnosis of the restorationist political situation in the Europe of the

1 It was important to Marx that the title printed in the brochure of 1852, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, not be reproduced in later printings in order to avoid the connection with the name of Napoléon I (see Hundt et al. 1985, pp. 689, 704). In contemporary historical research, the names Napoléon III or Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte are used; in the following I speak of Bonaparte, because for this study what is decisive is not the imperial or familial-traditional aspect, but rather the modernity of a form of government that is often described, with reference to Marx, as Bonapartism.

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1850s, which seamlessly follows the sobering balance drawn in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.2 So was Marx, with his revolutionary certainty, contradicting his own observations that in the most modern states of Europe, of all places, every effort was being made to systematically suppress social conflict? Is it possible that he was overstretching the liberties of a pointed journalistic style of writing in favor of revolutionary agitation that was far removed from reality? In the following, I oppose such an interpretation with the argument that the contrast between Marx’s revolutionary certainty and his analysis of what I call ‘regimes of pacification’ in England and France is not a self-contradiction, but rather the expression of his ‘materialist conception of history.’ By that, I mean that Marx attempts to understand history in terms of the way people produce their material conditions of life. Starting from the mode of production, he explains both property relations and social institutions as well as the notions people have concerning these. He sees in the development of the conditions of production a force that significantly influences and changes social life. As will be further elaborated, Marx’s view of the change of form of societies is accompanied by the assumption that, over time, in several revolutionary attempts, people approach a form of society in which production and exchange are no longer carried out, as before, on the basis of class domination, but rather are arranged consciously and rationally.3 This perspective is also always present in his journalistic commentaries. It is the real reason why he interprets the restorationist situation as an indication of a still existing potential for a revolutionary upheaval of European societies. The political 2 One could object that the available textual versions don’t really completely portray Marx’s real convictions, since some of his manuscripts were editorially revised. In the meantime, however, revised articles can be distinguished well from original contributions. In the editorial apparatus of the German MEGA2 edition, evidence of editorial intervention, Marx’s relationship to the respective editorial boards as well as their political orientations are reappraised. In cases where Marx’s or Engels’ sole authorship must be doubted, the articles are published under the rubric Dubiosa or umgearbeitete Artikel. These are not the object of this study. 3 Marx attempts to scientifically develop the substantiation of the necessity of becoming (and this is the materialist aspect of his approach) from the existing social relations themselves. He notes the fundamental considerations on this with Engels in The German Ideology, but here the language of law-likeness still substitutes for detailed research. In Capital, Marx then has found in value the independent form that necessarily drives the development of the forces of production (which he regards as the prerequisite for communism, both in terms of technics and consciousness). See Spekker 2018.

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restoration is precisely what provides Marx with the proof of the traditional elites’ fears of such social conflicts, which had only recently assumed revolutionary proportions in several European countries. Now, one might object that against the background of Marx’s own theses in the manuscripts of The German Ideology, an all too great amount of revolutionary certainty would actually be inappropriate. There, he had written with Engels just a few years earlier: [I]f these material elements of a complete revolution are not present— namely, on the one hand the existing productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass, […] then it is absolutely immaterial for practical development whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already. (MECW 5, p. 54)

The point of Marx’s materialism is precisely that social changes, since they can be neither a purely intellectual nor a purely natural process, are not initiated anywhere else than in the society that is itself to be changed. Since only communism is supposed to turn “existing conditions into conditions of unity” (ibid., p. 81), a communist journalist actually can’t anticipate the existence of appropriate conditions. Does Marx, as a commentator on political and economic events in the Europe of this restoration period thus fall short of his own dictum, launched against Karl Heinzen in 1847: “The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it”? (MECW 6, p. 337) Is he attempting, by means of counterfactual assertions, to write the revolution into existence, ignoring his own insights about how social upheavals have preconditions? Reinhard Koselleck, for example, suggests such a reading, noting that after 1848, the revolution had become for Marx a “concept of historicalphilosophical compensation,” which “taught that the failure of political revolutionary hopes was to be interpreted as a pledge of future fulfillment” (Koselleck 1984, p. 763, o.t.; see also Burrow 2000, p. 126). If one were to be guided by this interpretation in dealing with Marx’s journalistic work, then these texts would primarily appear to be an attempt to provide encouragement to defeated and dejected revolutionaries. For one thing, this ignores that this apparently unscientific textual genre, too, is borne by Marx’s claim to be able to substantiate the necessity of revolutionary upheaval precisely not only by observing the current social distribution of power, but also scientifically, through insight into historical

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laws of development. For another thing, the claim that Marx ostentatiously transfigured every defeat into a glimmer of hope as compensation for political disappointments is a denial that he took the events of his time seriously at all. But it is precisely not a premature optimism with which Marx paints a revolutionary future, but rather an expectation that he repeatedly grounds with the most current empirical facts. In this expectation, Marx brings together two movements of thought: Whereas he interprets the facts against the background of his ‘materialist conception of history,’ he in turn invokes them in order to prove the necessity of revolution, and thus the truth of his materialist approach to current events. The present study illuminates this relation between observation and interpretation, between empirical material basis and fundamental assumptions about historical development in Marx’s newspaper articles of the 1850s about England and France. I propose reading this part of his work as a concrete operationalization of his materialist mode of knowledge4 as he describes it in texts such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, the Communist Manifesto, or the Grundrisse. Marx declares the precondition of his theory to be the “actual, empirically perceptible process of development” (MECW 5, p. 37). He even claims to lend expression to a really existing social movement with this theory. Among the methodological consequences of this claim is that theory must remain in constant contact with its empirical presuppositions, indeed must specifically seek them out, not only because it pushes toward a practical change of society, but also because it is formed and developed by political and economic events in the first place. Hence Marx’s materialism does not see itself challenged by events in politics and society—even shocking ones—but rather informed and confirmed. To that extent, the press was an ideal forum for him, because here the historical-materialist premises come into play as an epistemic tool that makes it possible to recognize the “empirically perceptible” conditions as a process of development that otherwise could only be registered and recounted.

4 Eric Hobsbawm, who recognizes in Marx’s work a revolutionary contribution to the

field of history, had proposed this reading, without however demonstrating it in the material: “The articles which Marx wrote, principally as a newspaper correspondent in the 1850’s to earn his livelihood, […] are examples of the application of the materialist conception of history to the analysis of particular historical events” (Hobsbawm 1984, p. 105).

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My thesis is that precisely because of these premises, Marx is able to discern a meaning in the “performances of state.” Because of them, he is able to see more than mere power games and the execution of protocol in the actions of ruling politicians, who always stand on the thin line between “solemn mien” (MECW 8, p. 446) and “outrage” (MECW 14, p. 119). What he discerns are techniques of domination with which statesmen react to fundamental social conflicts. Monetary policy and credit system, international trade relationships and the industrialization of Europe, colonization and the raw materials market—Marx turns all of these topics not into isolated news items, but rather treats them as the background for understanding the activity of government. Because he relates economic and political occurrences to each other, he believes he is able to demonstrate that there is a dialectical interrelation between the restorationist regimes of pacification and a revolutionary intensification of class struggle. There is also a flipside to my thesis that the historical-materialist perspective is epistemic for Marx’s assessment of the governments of England and France: In some respects this perspective narrows his view. Whereas Marx detects the regimes of pacification as such, he does not take into consideration that models for future authoritarian enclosures of social antagonism might thereby emerge right before his eyes. Through his revolutionary perspective, he always sees the regimes in the light of their imminent failure. That is why he cannot imagine that holding down conflicts affecting the capitalist social order as a whole might succeed not only temporarily but also permanently. In order to understand regimes of authoritarian crisis resolution, contemporary social critique can therefore indeed draw from Marx’s insights. That is especially the case for his theses that with the talk of the ‘welfare of the nation’ is intended to create a consciousness of citizenship that is above particular interests; that in case of doubt the modern state ensures the continued existence for capitalist relations of domination even without a constitutional form of government; and that the ideological concealment of social antagonisms in politics goes hand in hand with the suppression of social conflicts as soon as they are carried on outside of state-sanctioned institutions. But if today one seeks answers to nationalist populism, the prerogative state, and other forms of authoritarian rule, then one cannot directly resort to Marx. It is first of all necessary to be clear about the historical and epistemic preconditions under which he found his answers.

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3.2 Can the Necessity of Revolution Be a Headline? My statement that Marx interpreted the events of his time in a historicalmaterialist way might initially seem rather unoriginal. But with regard to his journalistic writings, it is not entirely obvious. It is still the case that some Marx scholars exclude this part of his work from the ‘relevant’ body of text. This can be seen recently, for example, in Kurt Bayertz, who is able to discern there hardly anything more than the proclamation of “personal convictions” (Bayertz 2018, p. 258, o.t.).5 It is true that Marx’s journalistic style of writing does not always make it easy to decode the theoretical content of his texts. He easily creates the impression that he presupposes the fundamental question of whether there will be a revolution as already answered, and merely concedes uncertainty as to the when, how, and where. His observation that the governments of France and England were deliberately suppressing social conflict seems to be constantly thwarted by an unflinching confidence in a future revolutionary development. Thus, some of Marx’s comments are downright conspicuous for their lack of evidence: Why, of all things, should the empowerment of the French army in domestic affairs reveal the weakness of the Bonapartist government? (see MECW 15, p. 457). How can Marx effusively praise the speeches of a conservative lord in the British House of Commons over those of liberal Whigs? (see MECW 13, p. 321 f.). However, the fact that the revolutionary-theoretical (revolutionstheoretisch) interpretation of current events is sometimes added to their observation in an unmediated way is more a problem of form than of content. For, as authoritative as the historical-materialist perspective is for Marx’s assessment of current events, he cannot explain or justify this perspective in his articles. The typical stylistic feature of his newspaper correspondence—a cursory arrangement of the topics dealt with—testifies

5 According to Bayertz, research is best able to circumnavigate the “revolutionary wishful thinking” (Bayertz 2018, p. 210, o.t.) in Marx’s journalistic texts “the more sharply we distinguish between Marx’s theory and his personal conviction” (ibid., p. 258, o.t.). Where the latter was involved, “the predictive power of his theory was overstretched” (ibid., p. 203, o.t.). Because precisely the immanent relation between theory and conviction in Marx is beyond Bayertz’s grasp, he can think of true science only as one free of any interests.

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to the fact that the journalistic format, due to its brevity and topicality, is hardly capable of integrating philosophical elaborations or even a systematic social theory (see Krätke 2006, p. 52). The textual formats in which Marx, in his early years, had elevated the active human–nature relationship as the starting point of all historiography against idealist thought, are polemical pamphlets, manifestos, or articles under his own editorship. On the other hand, his critique— enriched and expanded over many years—of the inverted form that this relationship takes under the compulsion of the valorization of capital, would appear years later in book form. As an outside correspondent for various newspapers, which he was in the 1850s, however, he did not write in any of these formats. Neither could he concentrate here solely on establishing a new historical perspective against his philosophical and political opponents, nor was he able to provide his critique with the detail and depth of a scholarly treatise. The concision of journalistic presentation was obligatory, and the choice of topics had to be based primarily on their value as news. So while the newspaper format imposed limitations on the argumentative mediation between observation and interpretation, it also had crucial advantages to offer: It achieved broad circulation, allowed quick reactions to current events, and influenced public opinion. For Marx, who explicitly wished “to influence our contemporaries” (MECW 3, p. 143), journalism was, for almost the entirety of his period of active writing, an indispensable means of political-critical practice. It is evident from his letters of the period that this did not change even under the dependent conditions of publication during his exile in London. (See as an example MECW 38, pp. 401–404; MECW 40, pp. 407–410) Above all, however, his engagement is directly palpable in his articles: In several hundred penetrating contributions saturated with empirical material written for social reform and socialist newspapers in New York, London, Vienna, and Breslau,6 he analyzed the causes of the socialist movements’ recent political defeats, assessed their consequences, and looked for emerging opportunities. He often used the latest news from the chambers of government of the European powers as an opportunity to address fundamental social relations of domination, for example, the effects of financial and fiscal policies on the working class (see Krätke 2006, p. 88). So if journalistic writing was a performative act for Marx, then not in the sense asserted by Koselleck 6 I have discussed the scope of these works, the variety of their topics, and the importance Marx attached to journalism as a medium for political engagement elsewhere (Schönfelder 2016).

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of a sort of ‘encouraging literature’ under the sign of despair, but rather as an opportunity to demonstrate to a broad audience that bourgeois society was overripe for revolutionary overcoming, which he thought was obvious. He utilized the press as a public forum allowing him to portray the striving of European governments to restore and maintain pre-revolutionary relations of power as a defensive act; as a downright outmoded attempt by an old social order to still assert itself in the face of inevitable social modernization and long since awakened desires for emancipation.

3.3 Two European Regimes Against Class Struggle With respect to Marx’s conception of historical development, the objection is sometimes raised in Marx studies that he developed it at the expense of empirical observation. An example of such a reading is Isaiah Berlin’s critique of Marx’s “doctrine of movement in dialectical collisions,” which he accuses of following “a pattern, uncovered by a non-empirical historical method” (Berlin 1973, p. 67). But if Marx had merely wished to counterfactually assert the imminence of another revolution, he could have spared himself the detailed surveys of restorative politics in England and France that his newspaper articles of the 1850s are teeming with. What he did was the exact opposite of disregarding the facts at hand: He studied the documents, minutes, and reports from official circles in both countries to which he had access, often following the issues negotiated there over several years, in order to extensively analyze the government programs and aims. When he repeatedly concluded that all levers were being pulled there against social unrest, this does not so much reveal that Marx was concerned with spreading a notorious optimism, but rather that he wanted to make a broader public aware of the unresolved social conflict behind current events, precisely because at first glance their connection to revolution was not apparent. He seemed to see the task of a communist journalist in demonstrating to contemporaries, by expounding to them the political and economic events, that all these are to be judged against the background of class conflict and the possibility of its revolutionary intensification. That meant, first of all, tearing off the mask of revolution from the one who used it to legitimize an autocratic regime: the French emperor, who considered himself “the mandatory of the Revolution of 1789” (MECW 16, p. 404). Marx points out that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte,

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in issuing the slogans of his famous uncle—glory, liberty, and nationality—had a “fatalistic predilection for resurrecting [the empire’s] great dates” (MECW 14, p. 297) in order to endow his rule with a “theatrical show of greatness” (MECW 13, p. 217). His self-dramatization as the new Napoleon (see MECW 14, p. 272) made him a figure of identification intended to bind all French people to him regardless of their social differences. In criticizing the illusion of national unity as serving to conceal social conflict, Marx was building upon his previous analyses of Bonapartism carried out in The Class Struggles in France (see MECW 10, pp. 57 f.) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (see MECW 11, pp. 194 f.). In the 1850s, he expanded these analyses and now identified financial policy as the most important instrument of equilibrium between the classes, at the center of which was the joint stock bank Crédit Mobilier newly created under Bonaparte. This bank was intended to counter the previous system, in which the state relied on loans from the large banking houses, by centralizing the credit system and promoting the country’s industrial development. In it, Marx saw a means of realizing two of the emperor’s decisive power-political aims: first, to encourage the petite bourgeoisie, workers, and peasants to start their own businesses and make use of technical innovations by offering them favorable public loans, thus co-opting them into a project of national economic modernization (see MECW 15, p. 21). He explained to the newspaper readers that Bonaparte was building upon the doctrine of Saint-Simonism, which “deluded itself with the dream that all the antagonism of classes must disappear before the creation of universal wealth by some new-fangled scheme of public credit” (ibid., p. 15). With the aid of the Crédit Mobilier, Bonaparte presented himself to all classes as the representative of their respective interests, thus concealing the contrast between their economic situations. This objective, as Marx often recalls sarcastically, is already formulated in Bonaparte’s programmatic text Les Idées napoléoniennes from 1839. There, the emperor-to-be writes that “in order to reconstruct the nation,” one must “derive support from all classes without distinction,” and above all know how to “organize” all this (Bonaparte 1859, p. 49).7 In fact, however, Marx emphasizes that Bonaparte was providing for the ruin of the petite bourgeoisie and workers (see MECW 15, p. 21) 7 At the same time, Bonaparte explains in this text that as soon as hostile parties exist in a country, one has to ensure that they disappear. (See Bonaparte 1859, p. 36)

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as well as for the expropriation of mortgage debtors (see ibid., p. 16). For the second aim he was pursuing with the new financial policy was to enrich his regime by means of stock market speculation, Crédit Mobilier’s source of income, which was hidden behind the nationwide industrialization project. The Second Empire systematically pressed ahead with making the railroad and telegraph networks in particular more dense, as well as urban bus transport. State-owned companies built the infrastructure, such as tracks and lines, while concessions were awarded to private companies for supplying the sources of energy and constructing the machinery and buildings (see Millward 2013, pp. 21–24). Marx was keen to emphasize that the costs arising from this technical and economic modernization, as well as from wars, were to be passed on to the population. This was possible because in the Crédit Mobilier Bonaparte had a financial instrument that worked in the exact opposite way to commercial banks: Fixed capital was not temporarily unleashed by the issue of notes, bonds, etc.; rather, the liquid capital of many private individuals was fixed in industrial enterprises (see MECW 15, p. 20) “in order to speculate on the sale of the shares created to represent that capital” (ibid., p. 133; see also ibid., p. 271). The emperor was thus able “to appear simultaneously as the robber and as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes”8 (ibid., p. 14). He camouflaged this maneuver by constantly proclaiming national prosperity which was supposedly confirmed by “the appearance of an easy money market and overflowing Credit” (MECW 14, p. 534), but which in fact would prove in light of economic crisis to be a purely “factitious prosperity” (MECW 15, p. 501; also see ibid., pp. 271, 416). Marx marked this regime that sought to overcome the class antagonism by means of interventionism with the words of Charles Fourier as “Industrial Feudalism” (ibid., p. 21), or even sometimes as “Imperial Socialism” (ibid., p. 11). Unlike in the case of the French regime, where he noted a new relationship between the ruler and the population, even though it invoked traditional ideals, Marx characterized the British regime of pacification primarily in terms of its ingrained structure:

8 This argumentative figure of ‘stealing in order to make a present’ is already developed by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire; see MECW 11, p. 195 f. On the surface, the French regime was pro-worker, but it established a tax system with high levies on consumer goods to the disadvantage of the poorer sections of the population, and enacted many laws against workers and their organizations; see Price 2001, pp. 145, 213.

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The British Constitution is indeed nothing but an antiquated, obsolete, out-of-date compromise between the bourgeoisie, which rules not officially but in fact in all decisive spheres of civil society, and the landed aristocracy, which governs officially. (MECW 14, p. 53)

Since the establishment of this ruling arrangement in the Revolution of 1688, English legislation had been one long “history of concessions” (ibid., p. 54) made to the bourgeoisie (see Gurland 1981, p. 141, Fn 30). This could be seen, as Marx exemplifies, in the regular renewal of the East India Company’s trading rights, the revocation of the Corn Laws, the gradual taxation of landed property, and the linking of poor relief to service in workhouses (see MECW 14, pp. 49–54; MECW 12, pp. 148–156; MECW 11, pp. 327–332). In all of these decisions, aristocratic politicians had the contents of the laws dictated to them by bankers, merchants, and industrialists, in the hope of keeping them pacified while formally continuing to deny them participation in “the government monopoly of the aristocracy” (MECW 14, p. 31). De facto, however, this amounted to “the legislative monopoly of the bourgeoisie” (ibid.; also see ibid., p. 321), since for both houses of parliament, the concerns of the middle classes had become decisive (see MECW 12, p. 149; MECW 13, p. 642): [T]he industrial bourgeoisie, weakly represented as it is in the House, are yet the real masters of the situation, and […] every Government, whether Whig, Tory, or Coalition, can only keep itself in office, and the bourgeoisie out of office, by doing for them their preliminary work. (MECW 12, pp. 69 f.)

However, the division between legislative power without office on the one hand and office without legislative autonomy on the other couldn’t have remained balanced for almost two centuries if the interests of the aristocracy were opposed only to those of the bourgeoisie and vice versa. What essentially pushed both toward their policy of permanent compromise was their common opponent, which, Marx emphasizes, seemed far more threatening than a dispute among themselves over commercial law or tax rates (see ibid., p. 607). The bourgeoisie was prepared to do without comprehensive political power because it suspected that opening up state offices would sooner or later also awaken claims to participation by the lower classes, thus weakening its own influence. The aristocracy, on

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the other hand, knew that Britain wouldn’t be an international commercial power without its businessmen, and therefore sought to shield them from the demands of the working class, and create stable conditions for the exploitation of the latter (see ibid., pp. 249–252, 612; MECW 13, p. 196 f.; MECW 14, pp. 194–197, 367–370). The privileges of the now governing classes, and the slavery of the working classes, are equally based on the existing organization of labor, which, of course, will be defended and maintained on the part of the former by all means in their hands, one of these means being the present State machinery. (MECW 13, p. 52; see also MECW 12, p. 225 f.; MECW 14, p. 326)

The state is thus an instrument of class rule and therefore vigorously defended against demands for parliamentary reform (see MECW 14, pp. 189–197, 208–210). For both ruling classes, closing ranks against the working class was such an urgent priority that they even subordinated their respective ideological maxims to it: These same ‘gallant’ free-traders […], who profess to leave everything and everybody to the struggles of individual interest, are always the first to appeal to the interference of Government as soon as the individual interests of the working-man come into conflict with their own class-interests. (MECW 12, p. 135; see also MECW 13, pp. 575 f.)

The aristocracy, for its part, sacrificed its prerogative in matters of public administration in good time to take the wind out of the sails of even more radical demands for parliamentary reform. Marx put the way it was thus accommodating the London businessmen in the government’s mouth: “We are willing to reform the administration for you—within its traditional limits, of course. […] We ourselves must know best how far we can go without jeopardising our class” (MECW 14, p. 290; see also MECW 12, p. 51). Beyond that, however, unless compelled to do so by external pressure, members of parliament and government ministers “wisely refrain[ed] from touching any point of internal policy” (MECW 15, p. 221), since on this terrain, they would be confronted with questions of the distribution of political power between the social classes. Even if both regimes of pacification differed considerably from each other—an autocratic form of government with a national slogan on one side, a constitutional form of government with a conservative program

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on the other side of the English Channel—Marx saw a similarity, since they both placed their foreign policy decisions at the service of their respective social order. England and France proved in the Crimean War (1853–1856), in which both were involved on the side of the Ottoman Empire against Russia, that they feared nothing more than revolution. If it were up to Marx, then “war on Russia” could only “be done on a European scale” (MECW 14, p. 289), so that Russian claims to rule could be pushed back from all sides, making possible a revolutionary transformation of the whole of Europe. The Western powers, however, aimed for the exact opposite with their military actions, namely to prevent the Crimean War from taking on “European dimensions” (ibid., p. 145), since they knew that by such an expansion, a situation could quickly emerge “which will enable the proletarian class to resume that position which they lost, in France, by the battle of June, 1848, and that not only as far as France is concerned, but for all Central Europe, England included” (ibid.). England and France’s military action was thus a farce to Marx: They fought against Russia, but did so neither effectively, nor for the right reasons. Bonaparte followed “[t]he idea of a campaign designed to be a mere display of force, of a European war not to endanger the hostile power but to save one’s own prestige, of a war resembling a spectacular show” (ibid., p. 120), for which however he was at the same time not prepared at all to bring sufficient means to the theater of war (see ibid., pp. 90–93). If he tried to present himself as a great commander, but in reality did everything to limit the war locally and hardly risk any advances (see ibid., pp. 267–272), for Marx his foreign policy thus proved to be a mere diversion to establish calm in his own country. England, on the other hand, in Marx’s eyes did not conduct the war in a “foolhardy and presumptuous” (ibid., p. 145) way, like France, but instead in a “timid and stupid” way (ibid.). While at the beginning of the war the aim was to prevent Russian annexation of the countries from which England imported grain, the growing discontent of the British bourgeoisie soon forced those with political responsibility to switch to merely reluctant warfare (see MECW 13, p. 556). “[A]s soon as the effects of the war should become taxable upon their pockets, mercantile sense was sure to overcome national pride” (MECW 14, p. 143). For Marx this confirmed once again that the British government always yielded to the interests of free traders and industrialists, “who are opposed to any kind of warfare, except by cotton bales and price currents” (MECW 12, p. 202; see also MECW 11, p. 520). In the name of smooth

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international trade, they would rather prefer to accept Russia’s despotic social model achieving dominance over Europe as a whole (see MECW 12, pp. 312 f.; MECW 14, pp. 14–20) than for the war against the czarist empire to plunge further regions into turmoil.

3.4

Class Struggle Cannot Be Pacified

Even if one dissects, as I have just done, Marx’s characterization of both regimes of pacification from his newspaper articles of the 1850s, there still does not emerge a picture of a hermetic situation. In his reports on the attempts by the governments of France and England to prevent social conflicts from occurring in their countries, he never sees their efforts as evidence of unrestrained power. He always interprets these efforts as defensive struggles to which politicians felt driven because they knew that the existing social balance of forces was unstable and thus the continuation of their own positions in power uncertain. “The struggle against class struggle reinforces the executive power of the state and its centralisation, which Marx reads as a reaction to an insurgent proletariat” (Tomba 2013a, p. 40). This is the case where Bonaparte is dependent on masquerade and self-dramatization and can only bring about his interventionist project with the aid of fiscal tricks; where the English government has to enter into a fragile compromise of rule in order to keep the social question at bay; and where both regimes struggle to maintain their domestic order when conducting foreign policy. Each time, in Marx’s eyes, they reveal nothing less than their inkling that an escalation of the class struggle is again possible at any time. As a contemporary commentator who wishes to establish in public opinion an interpretation of the present as potentially revolutionary, Marx thus proceeds like a detective: Precisely where the rulers resist social progress with all their might, one must suspect the latter’s greatest power. His articles can be read as a collection of evidence to suggest that the political restoration had by no means gotten rid of the causes that led to the European revolutions of 1848/1849. They are a serialized attempt to trace the presence of the class struggle precisely in its moments of pacification. The efforts of post-revolutionary governments to establish social peace prove to Marx nothing other than the impossibility of this peace under conditions of social antagonism, and must therefore be essentially understood as reaction.

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Thus, when Marx describes the strategies and instruments of pacification, he usually adds in the same article that this pacification can at best be a temporary condition. For example, he deciphers the French government’s treatment of the political opposition as evidence that it faces a challenge that could seriously endanger its power. This seems to him the only reasonable explanation for the wave of repression with which the regime reacted to the uprisings of workers in northeastern France and students in Paris in 1855, and which was extended more generally in 1856 to those who publicly criticized the reigning policy. Here, Marx perceives “a striking mark of the uneasiness and anxieties of the Government” (MECW 15, p. 135; see also MECW 14, pp. 602–604). The “Republican element”9 (MECW 15, p. 478) gaining strength among the population forced Bonaparte to recognize that “attempts to purchase the conscience of the French working classes” (ibid.), such as he had still undertaken in 1848 by building working class neighborhoods, were in the meantime no longer sufficient to guarantee social peace. The open admission of the “general aversion his rule is the subject of” (ibid., p. 467; see also ibid., pp. 457 f.) was given by the emperor in the year 1858: As a result of the attempt on his life by the Italian freedom fighter Felice Orsini in January of the same year, Bonaparte shifted, as Marx puts it, to a “system of domestic terrorism” (ibid., p. 479). As precipitous as the emperor was in publicly declaring “that the conspiracy was a national one, and that France consequently wanted ‘new repressive laws’ to keep her down” (ibid., p. 456), he was demonstrating nothing more clearly than a desperate effort to delay his own inevitable ruin. Since even the peasants, who made up a large part of the population and had supported him at the beginning of his rule, refused to applaud him, he was left with “nothing but to appeal to the army” (ibid., p. 457). This refers to the domestic authorization of the army initiated by Bonaparte in February 1858: France was divided into five military districts, each under the command of a marshal, and whose prefectures were taken over by reserve officers. With his commentary on the authorization of the army—“Bonaparte wants France to clearly understand that the imperial rule does rest not 9 Already in 1853, the regime had begun to break up socialist and democratic meetings and to bring charges of founding oppositional secret societies on the slightest of pretexts. By the mid-1850s, moreover, several republican and revolutionary groups had been uncovered; see Price 2001, pp. 156–167.

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on her will but on 600,000 bayonets” (ibid., p. 464)—Marx updates and broadens his analysis of Bonapartism. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, he had explained that the emperor had above all lacked legitimacy from the very beginning, since he had only come to power at all by means of theft, bribery, and military force (see MECW 11, pp. 180, 184 f., 192 f.). In that Bonaparte had formed an “artificial state machinery” (ibid., p. 185) out of the bureaucracy and military, which severed “[e]very common interest […] from society” and thereupon counterposed it to society “as a higher, general interest” (ibid., p. 186), the executive power in the Second Empire had been reduced to its purest expression. Thus, among the key arguments of the Eighteenth Brumaire had been that the executive, in contrast to earlier rulers, by becoming independent in no way made itself an instrument of a particular class and its interests, but rather elevated itself above all classes equally. (See ibid.) Rule by means of the military and the executive power taking on a life of its own (Verselbständigung der Staatsgewalt )—Marx links both of these elements of his critique of Bonapartism with each other in his journalism of the 1850s: “Under the second Empire the […] army is no longer to maintain the rule of one part of the people over another part of the people. […] It is to represent the State in antagonism to the society” (MECW 15, p. 465). However, he does not conclude from this military safeguarding of the state that the Second Empire had now become unassailable, but on the contrary that its dependence on the army must now become its Achilles’ heel. For when Bonaparte made the army the pillar of his regime, he inevitably had to elevate its interest to the predominant one. He thus prepared a situation in which he would find himself sooner or later again “at the mercy of the army” (ibid., p. 482). Here, Marx isn’t just describing the consequences of a coup d’état for hitherto existing French political institutions. His swan song to the form of rule of the Second Empire also resonates with very early critical reflections (see Hunt 1984, pp. 52–54)10 such as those made, for example, in 10 Wolfgang Wippermann and Heinrich August Winkler also compare Marx’s and Engels’ comments on Bonapartist state power taking on a life of its own (Verselbständigung der Staatsgewalt ) with the two authors’ earlier state theory. However, they do not see in this a recourse to already obtained insights, but rather their revision. According to Wippermann and Winkler, in the early 1840s Marx and Engels had declared the independence (Verselbständigung ) of the executive branch to be a mere illusion or a transitional phenomenon only occurring in backward countries, while in England and France the bourgeoisie already had state power. They regarded this form of state as the necessary

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his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right : The idea of the state in which Hegel sees the mediation of particular interests carried out, is actually a “deformity” or also an “illusory form” (MECW 3, p. 64) of universality, since the state exists separated from bourgeois society. This society, namely, in which the particular interest must stand in contradiction to the general interest, “is not defined as having the general as its purpose” (ibid., p. 76). Since the general concern is nowhere real in bourgeois society, “the modern state […] has invented the strange device of appropriating ‘matters of general concern’ as a mere form” (ibid., p. 65) and thus separated itself from society under the name of mediation. This illusory state mediation was now to a certain extent implemented in practice by Bonaparte when he declared himself to be the authoritarian unifier of an antagonistically divided population. With his coup d’état, he claimed the possibility of governing simultaneously for and against all classes without recognizing any of the particular class interests as generalizable. What Marx describes in 1852 and 1858 as the independence of the executive (Verselbständigung der Staatsgewalt ) can thus also be described, in his words from 1843, as the endeavor to make “the state interest become a particular private aim over against other private aims” (ibid., p. 48). Just as Marx had spoken of the state as a false universality in 1843 against Hegel, now his critique of the Bonapartist form of rule also

final historical stage before a proletarian revolution. In light of Bonapartism, however, they were forced to then consider an independent (verselbständigt ) state power to be a possible pre-revolutionary scenario, and to elaborate a “real sociological” theory of this form of rule; see Wippermann 1983, pp. 30–60; Winkler 1978, pp. 41–52. According to Wippermann, the explanatory difficulties encountered by Marx and Engels after 1848 led to a more differentiated theory of the state, whereas previously the authors had not observed so closely empirically (see Wippermann 1983, pp. 38–42, 50–57). Winkler, on the other hand, explains that Marx and Engels later dropped their 1851 insights because they ultimately gave priority to their materialist premises over empirical observation. (See Winkler 1978, pp. 52–58). For both commentators, Bonapartism was an experience that Marx could not analyze with the theory he had developed up to that point. However, they neither prove that Marx himself considered his theory an obstacle, nor that he grasped the new form of rule entirely without theoretical tools. It is precisely the strong points of his analysis, such as that Bonapartism promised to balance various social interests and should therefore be understood as a struggle against the possibility of revolution, that owe so much to Marx’s materialist premises outlined earlier. The fact that not every research method leads to such results is made clear by comparison to other contemporary critiques of Napoleon III (Victor Hugo, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Lorenz von Stein).

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revolved entirely around the notion of falsehood 11 : Bonaparte pursued a fraudulent financial policy, posed as a false Napoleon, spread the fiction of prosperity, created the appearance of socialism, and ultimately operated an “artificial state machinery.” This depiction is not just concerned with scandalizing dishonest machinations, but at the same time it is also about characterizing the French regime as the self-deformation of the modern state12 Bonaparte was driving the “abstraction of civil society from itself ” (ibid., p. 113) as Marx saw it consummated in the modern state, further toward a complete decoupling from and confrontation with society. With his new repressive laws, Bonaparte had abandoned any possible remaining semblance of unity between the antagonistic parties (see MECW 15, p. 227) and instead openly confirmed that the Empire can be perpetuated only by the very infamies through which it was produced; that all its pretensions to the more or less respectable forms of a regular Government must be dropped, and that the time of the sullen acquiescence of the nation in the rule of the Society of the perjured usurper has definitively passed away. (Ibid., pp. 456 f.)

Since the emperor had isolated himself to such an extent that he could no longer even rely on the army (see ibid., pp. 475 f.), his independence had to turn into self-destruction. So Marx believed that he had recognized, by means of political theory and philosophy, that the French regime was overripe for destruction. With his critique of the pacification regime on the other side of the English Channel, he took a quite similar approach. He also only granted it a short period of survival—but for a different reason. While he criticized the regent of the Second Empire for attempting to perpetuate the class relation under the pretense of accommodating all classes equally, he regarded the English state as an instrument, despite its constitutional 11 Elsewhere (Schönfelder 2018), I elaborate how Marx’s opposition to Bonaparte in the press throughout the 1850s hinged precisely on this motif, and what political and theoretical price he paid for giving absolute priority to this opposition. 12 A different, equally compelling interpretation is offered by Massimiliano Tomba:

With his imperial gesture, Bonaparte wished to displace France’s republican tradition, which had just been affirmed anew in 1848. As a materialist historian, Marx responded by portraying Bonaparte as a grotesque and ridiculous repetition of the figure of Napoleon I. This, Tomba argues, was Marx’s stake in the political struggle for the power of tradition that Bonaparte had inaugurated with his imperial pose. See Tomba 2013b, pp. 42–44.

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form, that the aristocracy made use of in a conventional way to assert its class interests. In contrast to the French one, this state was a completely outdated and ossified entity, whose traditional parties and antiquated, exclusive institutions could hardly meet the demands of rapidly modernizing bourgeois life in England. Consequentially, here the pacification of class struggle would necessarily fail due to the obsolescence of its trustees: “The English oligarchy have a presentiment of the approaching end of their days of glory” (MECW 12, p. 104), because they knew that their public image was tarnished. With a tone of satisfaction, Marx reported when corruption and the wangling over appointments in ministerial circles were brought to light, (see MECW 11, p. 370 f.; MECW 13, pp. 620–626), when the government’s attempts to legislate “religious coercive measures” caused mass demonstrations (MECW 14, p. 302), when the miserable provisioning of soldiers in Crimea was subject to public criticism (see ibid., pp. 128–131), and when discontent was growing in China and India over the acts of violence of the local British officials (see MECW 15, pp. 232–235, 301 f.). It was also the fact that no ministry was able to win a majority in the House of Commons for a decade that Marx attributed to a weakness of the traditional elites, manifest in “the dissolution of old parties” (MECW 14, p. 31; see also MECW 13, pp. 620–626; MECW 14, pp. 342 f., 384–388). So the English oligarchy was only “still nominally in possession of all the attributes of power and continue[d] to vegetate long after the basis of [its] existence has rotted away” (MECW 14, p. 302). The lords had simply not yet admitted to themselves “that political power is but the offspring of commercial power, and that the class to which they are compelled to yield the latter, will necessarily conquer the former also” (MECW 12, p. 70). Social reality in England, with a predominantly urban population (see MECW 14, p. 242), a “Reform movement looming in the future” (MECW 15, p. 301), and a bourgeoisie pushing into political office (see ibid., p. 567), left the ruling aristocracy with at best a reprieve until it would be forced to abdicate and reveal “the real political features of Britain’s political physiognomy” (MECW 14, p. 56). Marx sees the Whig Party, with its influential representative Lord Palmerston, as a symptom of the distress of the ruling class. The latter, as an aristocrat, had elevated to a program the pursuit of a policy to appease the middle classes. Whether as foreign minister or prime minister, in the 1850s Palmerston had always limited himself to “pleas of extension of trade, safety of British merchant- adventurers, and honor of the British

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flag” (MECW 15, p. 221). With his primary objective of defending British economic interests internationally, he figured “at home as a ‘truly English minister’” (MECW 14, p. 15), thus deliberately distracting attention from domestic policy issues, especially electoral reform. It is also in the person of Palmerston that Marx’s analyses of the two regimes of pacification intersect for once: Similar to Bonaparte, the British lord could also dispense with true political principles,13 because he simply elevated his own person as the political imperative of the hour, setting forth “the necessity of a strong executive against the empty talk and the intermeddling importunity of the legislative power” (MECW 15, p. 226; see also ibid., p. 587). With the image of a leading figure who makes decisions without recourse to clear convictions, Marx, in addition to his critique of the aristocratic-bourgeois ruling arrangement, also implies a deviation from the ‘normal case’ that he seems to see in a party landscape clearly structured according to class interests. In his eyes Palmerston and his Whig colleague John Russell were false heroes, conducting politics under false pretenses (see MECW 12, p. 275 f.; MECW 14, pp. 374 f.). Their entire party as such was primarily characterized by constantly changing its views (see MECW 14, p. 188). Marx further strengthened this accusation of a lack of profile by frequently contrasting the positions of leading Whigs with the parliamentary speeches of free trade advocates Richard Cobden and John Bright, as well as the conservative Benjamin Disraeli. As sincere representatives of the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy, respectively, these men recognized the opportunism of Russell and Palmerston and openly stated time and again that behind the slick façade of the Whigs was nothing but middleclass politics (see MECW 12, p. 274 f.; MECW 14, pp. 50 f., 224 f.). In contrast to Bonaparte’s case, however, with regard to Palmerston, Marx considerably more infrequently points out the statesman’s weakness and incompetence. When writing about the restorationist efforts of the British government, he does not criticize them as presumptuous, as in the French case, but rather as futile and hopeless. He substantiates this

13 Not having any principles was a typical contemporary accusation against Palmerston;

his declared intention was to overcome internal party conflicts by means of the primacy of foreign policy; see Metzler 1997, pp. 70–77. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte is likewise described by some historians as a contradictory and opportunistic politician because he made use of an ideological patchwork and pursued few consistent principles and plans; see Baumgart 1999, p. 207 f.

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assessment with regular references to the efficacy of precisely those conditions and movements that the regime strove to render harmless: Beneath the “dull, apoplectic surface,” in which the aristocracy and bourgeoisie still wrestled for influence, lay namely “those depths where its destructive elements are at work” (MECW 12, p. 173). In a time in which “the growing antagonism between her [i.e. England’s] wealth-producing classes, expose her social frame more than ever to spasmodic disturbances” (MECW 15, p. 302), the next “serious struggle in England” would certainly take on the character “of a class struggle waged by the poor against the rich, the people against the aristocracy” (MECW 14, p. 304), for the social situation had long since changed from that of the pre-March era. If at the time it was primarily the demands of democratic and republican forces on the continent, i.e. political conflicts, that had led to the European revolutions, now, ten years later, “a social revolution is generally understood, even before the political revolution is proclaimed” (MECW 15, p. 114), since with the economic crisis, property relations had finally proved to be unstable, which meant nothing other than that in the meantime, “the material conditions […] for the ideal tendencies of 1848” had been created (ibid.). Frequent disruptions of international trade, regularly recurring pressure on the money market, the forced throttling of industrial production, and the decline in purchasing power—all of these circumstances had been experienced and widely discussed in the 1850s as crisis phenomena (see Taylor 1996). Newspapers such as Moniteur Universel, the London Times, or the Economist, which Marx studied regularly and also cited in his own articles, interpreted the crisis measures of the European governments for the most part as the chastisement of unscrupulousness that had run rampant in merchant circles. Against this dualism of a supposedly “sound” trade and a “reckless” one (MECW 15, p. 400 f.),14 Marx repeatedly emphasized the fundamental crisis-prone nature of the entire capitalist form of society (see ibid., pp. 383, 401; MECW 16, pp. 33–34). Neither the English merchants with their “dreams of an inexhaustible market” (MECW 16, p. 13), nor the economists with their conviction

14 Already early on, Marx had criticized the notion that capitalism could be freed from its ‘unhealthy’ aspects in money-free utopias such as that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. On the similarity between Marx’s critique of Proudhon and his critique of the conflicting crisis management programs of the ‘monetary school’ and the ‘banking school’ in the late 1850s, see Bologna 1993, p. 85 f.

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of a “sound state of a trade, the healthiness of which exists on one side only” (MECW 15, p. 383) looked the fact in the eye, that the English industrial system necessarily led to domestic overproduction and overspeculation in all other countries (see MECW 13, p. 588; MECW 12, pp. 93–100). The contemporary condition, in which “every market is over-imported […] and […] the demands of Governments on their taxpaying people have been stretched to the last point” (MECW 15, p. 114) would soon clear away all illusions of a merely incidental character of the economic difficulties. Both European regimes of pacification could no longer be concerned with managing the crisis, but only with surviving it (see MECW 14, pp. 54–56; MECW 15, pp. 416 f., 453 f.). For the end of prosperity would both have the effect “to bring the French people into that state of mind in which they are wont to embark in fresh political ventures” (MECW 15, p. 463), as well as lead to a situation where “the working-men of England rise anew, menacing the middle classes at the very time that the middle classes are finally driving the aristocracy from power.” (MECW 14, p. 61)

3.5

“the need and the natural necessity of the revolution is as general…”

Such expectant interpretations of the crisis caused some researchers to emphasize the predictive aspect of Marx’s articles of journalism in the 1850s.15 Agreeing in broad strokes, they assume that Marx, from his exact knowledge of the empirical facts, and assured by his specialist economic and historical knowledge, had concluded what the future course of events would be. And it is surely the case that for Marx, it was of the upmost interest to be able to give an accurate assessment of coming events. His satisfaction when one of his predictions came to pass is evidence of this—for example, in 1854, the failure of the plan by finance minister Gladstone to lower British sovereign debt by converting the socalled “South Sea [company] Stocks” (see MECW 13, pp. 185–187), or, in 1857, the abolition of Peel’s Bank Act (see MECW 15, p. 385), and the stock market panic in New York (see MECW 40, p. 191). Nevertheless, Marx’s aim was not solely—and not even primarily—to predict 15 To name a few particular examples: Jaeck 1988, p. 117; Schultz n.d.; Taylor 1996; Krätke 2006, pp. 46, 81–85; Sperber 2013, p. 320; Bluhm 2015, p. 45; Hecker and Mori 2018.

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imminent events. Even more important than being able to boast from time to time about the accuracy of his assessment of soon-to-happen occurrences was for Marx the substantiation of this assessment: As a journalist, he seized the opportunity to demonstrate to a larger audience that knowledge of the present cannot be obtained merely by addition of the given facts, but only through subjecting these facts to a materialist interpretation. Any outlook on the future must thus all the more start from this basis. That Marx ‘demonstrated’ (vorführen) the historical-materialist mode of apprehension to his readers is to be understood in a double sense: For one thing, he showed it concretely using the empirical material in his articles on the “performances of state.” For another, he reminded the reader again and again with methodological remarks that analyses of current events are only possible “by descending from the political surface into the depths of social life” (MECW 15, p. 485; also see MECW 12, p. 247; MECW 15, p. 115). This ‘twofold strategy’ of Marx’s journalistic criticism seems to contain a paradoxical gesture: On the one hand, he is ready to discover everywhere the indications that the conditions of a revolutionary upheaval are already inherent in the existing social form, so that the presence of the class struggle in his depictions of events always seems completely obvious. He leaves no doubt that he knows himself to be in league with an objective historical potential for revolution.16 On the other hand, his active, enlightening intervention in the form of precise preparation of the material still seems required for the public to actually perceive what is supposedly spoken so clearly by the facts. This paradox of an obviousness in need of explanation points to a specific problem of presentation of Marx’s journalistic texts: Historical-philosophical (geschichtsphilosophisch) considerations are present in the background of all his articles; however, since these can’t be explained in detail in such texts, they are reflected at best in the form of aphoristic dicta. Marx’s recognition of bourgeois society as 16 To make this aspect so absolute as Jürgen Neffe does—“[Marx] relies on internal processes as if they were a matter of programmed cell death, where a living system brings itself to an end according to a built-in mechanism” (Neffe 2017, p. 328, o.t.)—is only possible if one ignores Marx’s own conviction that a certain—critical, demystified— consciousness about actual social conditions is first necessary for the emergence of a revolutionary movement. It is difficult to understand how Neffe can arrive at this assessment on the basis of the journalistic articles, of all things, a genre of text in which it is least possible to overlook the fact that Marx can’t leave the emergence of this consciousness to itself, but rather strives to form it.

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leading toward communism just happens to presuppose precisely communism as the ‘lens’ through which society can be perceived as such. In the brief newspaper format, this dialectical mode of thought, with which he claims to be able to comprehend something already that is actually just in a process of becoming, and thus not (yet) evident, simply reaches the limits of its argumentative communicability. That is why Marx always has to exemplify the speculative factor on some concrete object, while at the same time having to wrest an intrinsic connection to revolution from every empirical fact, however sobering or mundane. As is well known, Marx, in working on his critique of political economy, first tries to analyze and appropriate the empirical material in its many details, in order to subsequently, in the presentation, ‘give it back’ its life and unity. In contrast to this approach, his journalistic texts seem rather ‘untheoretical.’ Here, where concise statements are required, he cannot develop every single step of understanding. Consequently, observation and interpretation must be necessarily short-circuited. Marx, as a journalist, is thus faced with a tough task: He has to make social relations, conceived as a totality, and make their development—which he does not actually consider to be immediately perceptible—descriptive, and in a few words, demonstrate a whole historical movement by means of a few political current events. If he thinks he can demonstrate signs of a “complete revolution” even before its occurrence in the factually given, then that is because he claims to have already achieved insight into a movement inherent to economic relations and their historical development through the study of “the real, empirical history” (MECW 5, p. 130). According to Marx, by purposefully applying their forces to their environment, people increasingly perfect them and thus gradually work their way out of an unconscious relationship to nature. Yet this perfection of capabilities is not achieved by individuals in their isolation. If people were to produce in parallel in a self-sustaining manner, then they would each have to direct their forces to the same variety of basal operations. Each would largely exhaust his or her forces doing so and would hardly be able to pursue the refinement of individual activities. But since human beings work with and for each other, “to the sum of individual labour capacities is added that surplus which only exists in and through their associated, combined labour” (MECW 28, p. 452). Through the division of labor, they enable each other to concentrate on specific activities, and by in turn complimenting each other through cooperation, exchange, and the transmission

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of knowledge, they develop their forces as social forces of production. The individual expression of life is thus always at the same time “an expression and confirmation of social life” (MECW 3, p. 299). It is a key point of Marx’s theory that this development of capacities with which man gradually approaches the situation of “a being that treats the species as its own essential being” (ibid., p. 276), has until now been carried out in inverted form, namely within the framework of societies based on domination. Therein lies the reason why, for Marx, the development of the forces of production is not simply a success story; after all, it initially and only occurs in relations that aren’t consciously and carefully shaped by human beings. If he sees the intertwining of individual and social wealth as a process of development, he therefore does not mean a constant perfection of a raw but actually flawless initial situation. Rather, he substantiates with this intertwining that the shaping of nature and society can potentially be put completely at the service of human development and under the determinations of reason. Capital, in fact, despite its coercive and subjugating effects, drives individuals toward “universality,” since under its rule, they cultivate themselves “in a form as rich as possible in needs because rich in qualities and relations” (MECW 28, p. 336). In bourgeois society, then, human beings are in the process of becoming “the most total and universal social product possible” (ibid., p. 99). However, since the historically specific forms of social life through which this development takes place have all so far been characterized by class rule, progress, according to Marx, cannot be understood as the actual meaning and aim of history. It can only be the result of multiple stages of “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,” which each time emerges from “an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight” between antagonistic classes (MECW 6, p. 482). After every “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” some people are once again placed in the position of the oppressed, until they proceed to overthrow the current ruling class and put themselves in its place (see MECW 5, pp. 60 f.). If the class struggle in this way had hitherto only ever generated a change in the form and personnel of domination, a qualitative change has occurred in the epoch of the rule of the bourgeoisie: The capitalist mode of production has overridden all traditional modes of production and life and “has created […] more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together” (MECW 6, p. 489). Therefore for the first time, it is no longer the technical imperfection of the means of

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production or a local limitation of exchange that constitute the barrier to the development of human capacities and needs. This barrier is now posited by capital itself, because while it constantly increases productivity, it at the same time inhibits the workers’ capacity to consume, thus eroding the foundations of value creation (see MECW 28, pp. 349 f.). In a nutshell, Marx’s distinctive thesis is that the production of capital moves within this contradiction, of making possible “the universal appropriation of nature and of the social nexus itself by the members of society” (ibid., p. 336) but at the same time systematically blocking the realization of this possibility. According to Marx, this contradiction between the dynamics of mankind’s unfolding potentials and the inverted social form cannot continue to exist indefinitely, but rather drives toward its own sublation, for the more tangible the possibility of a “universal appropriation” becomes, the less people are still willing to accept the social barriers of this appropriation “as a sacred limit ” (ibid., p. 466). In the journalistic format, he attempts to make his readers clearly aware of this tangibility—perhaps not least in order to lead them to the limits of their own acceptance of the existing relations of domination. This can be seen, for example, when he comments in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue upon the upcoming first worldwide industrial exhibition of 1851 as a display of “the whole mass of the productive forces of modern industry, precisely at a time when modern bourgeois relations have already been undermined from every side, it is at the same time exposing to view the material which has been produced amidst these conditions of decay and is still being produced each day for the building of a new society” (MECW 10, p. 500). Scenarios of a society overripe for revolution can also be found in his articles for the New York Daily Tribune, such as in October 1856: “The whole epoch from the middle of 1849 down to the present appears, then, as a mere respite given by history to Old European Society, in order to allow it a last condensed display of all its tendencies” (MECW 15, pp. 114 f.). Such aphorisms, in which restoration appears as an anachronism, because history acts as the subject of its own realization and a new society is almost palpable due to the achieved state of development of the forces of production, result, together with his analyses of the English and French governments, in a stirring message to the newspaper audience: Although the revolutions of 1848/1849 were defeated,

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the political and economic events that play out around us every day indicate that in our era, the potentials for liberation invested in human history will finally be realized! So for Marx, revolution is a necessarily imminent development, something unstoppable. If one again takes a look at the “general need and natural necessity of the revolution” quoted at the beginning of this essay against this background, it becomes evident that it does not so much contrast with his insight into the restorative politics of the 1850s, but rather, that he integrates this insight into his historical-materialist perspective. He considers the need for revolution to be general, because the revolution, as he understands it, will realize something long overdue. Correspondingly, this need is also resistant against restoration, indeed, is even confirmed by it, since restoration reveals the fear of the rulers that the days might be numbered in which they can still defend themselves against the possibility, which has finally become tangible at this historical point in time, of a “complete revolution.” One might say that Marx makes nothing less than the bold attempt to detect in all efforts to pacify the class struggle the unmistakable proof of their own opposite. Even later, after 20 years of Bonapartist rule in France, and under the impression of the suppression of the Paris Commune, he would still describe the violence of the imperial regime as a final defense against the promise of social liberation, which since 1789 had placed the appropriating classes in greater distress with each revolutionary attempt (see MECW 22, pp. 533–536). But what light does all this shed on Marx’s treatment of empirical material? Doesn’t his interpretation of the post-revolutionary decade as in reality a pre-revolutionary one ultimately have to be designated a counterfactual claim? After all, as a meticulous empirical researcher and attentive observer of the times, he was undoubtedly aware of the difficulties for revolutionary movements. The Communist League was split and many socialists and republicans had gone into exile after 1849 or were legally persecuted. The European powers cooperated in their shared interest in political stability and domestic order and imposed this interest with repression against their populations. Furthermore, in Crimea one of the most horrific wars that Europe had experienced up to that time was taking place. Many more things could be enumerated that did not necessarily make the hearts of European revolutionaries in the 1850s beat faster. In such times, how could Marx maintain his revolutionary perspective, even see it reaffirmed, when he himself had declared in The Poverty of Philosophy that the task of the communists was “only to take

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note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece” (MECW 6, p. 177)? If one adds to this the postulate formulated in The German Ideology that “[e]mpirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production” (MECW 5, p. 35), then Marx seems to have given his critique of society a radically empiricist program. Shouldn’t this come to bear as a much stronger ‘faithfulness to facts’ in his journalistic practice? One comes closer to an answer to this question if one realizes that Marx’s emphasis on the empirical is not a plea for a pure positivism or a strictly inductive epistemological method. It is true that in The German Ideology, where together with Engels he wrestles with such theological and philosophical concepts as ‘self-consciousness,’ the ‘earthly made spiritual in itself,’ or the ‘true man,’ he explicitly acts as a critic of speculative thinking. But just because he claims to be doing something completely different from Bruno Bauer and Co, who he accuses “of making the actual relations of individuals dependent on the philosophical interpretation of these relations” (ibid., p. 102), that doesn’t mean that Marx drops all speculation. With his ‘empiricist’ postulates, he seeks to underline that thought and philosophy are conditioned by “the social organisation evolving directly out of production and intercourse” (ibid., p. 89). However, he by no means turns away from historical-philosophical (geschichtsphilosophisch) considerations of any kind. For Marxian materialism takes its starting point in “real, empirical history” at all only under the presumption that nowhere else but here the conditions can be found which make a correspondence between particular and common interest— and thus also relations of production free of domination—possible. In his claim to be able to recognize something that is yet to be created by simply referring to what is, without ideals or illusions (see Morina 2017, p. 224), Marx thus manifests a comprehending relationship to the empirical: He thinks he does not have to leave the terrain of empirical data in order to be able to read from it. In this, he does not proceed like a speculative philosopher of history in the Hegelian sense, but also cannot do without speculative steps in reasoning, because the assumption that communism is possible already precedes his view of reality. Only in this way can he recognize the social relations as negative, inverted ones, in turn prefiguring communism as their determinate negation. Precisely because his revolutionary perspective is neither a bet on the future nor inductively obtained knowledge, Marx assumes that the conditions that make possible

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an “appropriation of the total productive forces by the united individuals” (MECW 5, p. 88) prepare themselves at any moment, even if this possibility is not apparent. For his journalistic practice, this means that he has to seismographically examine empirical material for conditions of an intensification of class struggle. Against this background, the assessment by some Marx scholars according to which Marx’s newspaper articles from the 1850s primarily reflect his personal hopes or predictions (concluded from the addition of individual observations), appears as an expression of the repression (Verdrängung ) which we aim to challenge with the book at hand. For with this emphasis on his hopes, not only is science displaced from Marx’s so-called ‘political writings,’ but conversely, revolution is also displaced from his critique of political economy. If one follows such assessments, then within the ‘political writings’ there would be a genre that must be denied a scientific claim; indeed, in which Marx allegedly does not advance any theoretically grounded theses at all. Such a classification of his work might be understandable in light of the fact that he hardly explains his materialist historical-philosophical (geschichtsphilosophisch) considerations in his newspaper articles. Here, as I mentioned earlier, only rarely does he make these considerations comprehensible through an argumentative mediation between observation and interpretation. But what is not explicit is far from being absent. Marx research therefore still has the task ahead of it of treating the genre of journalistic texts as an integral part of Marx’s project of a materialist critique—taking into account that this genre contains just as much theoretical substance and therefore leads to argumentative problems similar to those occurring in this project’s other genres. If we would not concede Marx’s materialist philosophy of history any share in his journalism, then we would have to presume that he suddenly, as soon as he sat down to write an article, changed his mode of thinking and approached his objects without any concepts and with arbitrary insinuations. We would also have to shun the thought of the chance that Marx must have seen in making the “performances of state” the illustrative material of a materialist perspective in front of a mass audience. When he had the opportunity “to influence our contemporaries,” it would have been absurd not to make his theory of society and history the basis of his journalistic commentaries (see Blitzer 1966, p. xxvii f.; Bochinski and Neuhaus 1982, p. 231); he would have thus not only have renounced spreading this theory among the public and convincing them of it, but also would have dropped that very mode of knowledge with

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which he fathomed social reality at all. But this is, after all, precisely the reason for Marx’s diagnostic acumen regarding current events. His articles differ essentially from “a most inadequate and banal narration of mere political events” (MECW 10, p. 254) such as he had accused the historian François Guizot and his 1850 book on the English Revolution. For where Marx sought to advance was the assessment and critique of political events, and not just, as was usual in many commentary columns, with the aid of moral or formal legal arguments. Such would merely allow the decisions and enforcements of national elites to be deplored as power-hungry, militaristic, or unlawful. Marx, however, looked for the social reasons and conditions of these elites’ actions. Of the political insights into the regimes of pacification that he arrived at in his journalistic writings, the following owe considerable debt to his historical-materialist approach. First, it is not only when the working population is denied political representation, or its organizations and protests subject to repression, that one must speak of repression of the class struggle, but also in the case of less obvious practices of pacification. For example, when the parties of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie enter into exclusive alliances of convenience with each other; when the entrepreneurial energy of the poorer strata of the population is mobilized in an interventionist manner; when the glory of bygone days is invoked by means of nationalist populism; when the leading statesmen, instead of representing political principles, make opportunistic decisions, always claiming only the best of intentions; when governments need war against other states to prove themselves to their own population; or when the army is deployed domestically. Marx interprets all of these processes as—more or less innovative—reactionary measures that governments deliberately take because they are aware of the existence of acute social conflicts in which the existing form of society was threatened. What he identifies here are practices of rule that differ from the traditional authoritarian power of rulers in their mediatedness and an authoritarian integration of broad segments of the population. This is precisely why it is important for him to explain that each of these practices may seem unspectacular on its own, but in combination, however, they are enormously powerful. There is yet another political insight that Marx arrives at when he observes European politics in the 1850s against the background of his materialist theory of history and society. Whether in the shape of a constitutional government in England or a renewed autocracy in France, whether openly repressive or subtly co-optive: It is the state itself , in its

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modern form, that defends bourgeois society, with its inherent perpetual struggle between particular interests, against all those forces that call it into question. Marx’s assumption from 1846, that “the practical struggle of these particular interests, which actually constantly run counter to the common and illusory common interests, necessitates practical intervention and restraint by the illusory ‘general’ interest in the form of the state” (MECW 5, p. 47) particularly plays a role where the reasons and aims of governmental activity are to be evaluated. This assumption is in the background of his assessment of England, according to which the bourgeoisie could, under certain circumstances, dispense with the disposition of political power, because the aristocratically governed state takes over the task of securing the continuation of the struggle of particular interests, that is: the reproduction of antagonistic class relations. It is also in the background of his observation concerning France, namely that this task is not neglected even when the state completes its separation from bourgeois society, its decoupling from the agency and will of its individual members, by taking on a life of its own against society by means of an uncontrolled executive and physical force. Thus, in short, the insight can be extracted from Marx’s journalistic commentaries that not only one particular, but several different forms of government and fabrics of state institutions are suitable for protecting the capitalist mode of production and intercourse.17 Precisely because Marx so astutely identifies the institutionalized practices of pacifying social antagonisms, it is all the more striking how little, by contrast, he considered the possibility of a permanent establishment of such practices. Convinced that in his own present “the appropriation of the total productive forces by the united individuals” is becoming more and more probable, he registered reactionary governments as simply the obligatory resistance which for the time being still opposes a revolutionary development; a development toward which, nevertheless, the contradiction between the capitalist relations of production and the developed forces of production necessarily pushes. When he sought to make the class basis of the English and French states recognizable in his commentaries, he always implied that it is not the class struggle which is in decline, 17 Engels described things in a similar way in 1866: The forms of rule in England and France represented two different ways toward the same end, that is, imposing the material interests of the bourgeoisie without involving them in government (see MECW 42, p. 266).

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but the regimes that attempt to pacify it. It seems that he considered the realization of communism to be somewhat independent of the current vicissitudes on the level of “performances of state”—and this is eventually the reason he himself limited the scope of his insight.

3.6

Declining or Modern Forms of Rule?

Today, social critics are still faced with the task of understanding modern techniques of domination intended to enforce social peace, among which populism, or the attempt to settle social crises by authoritarian means, are not the only ones. Admittedly, Marx’s work is not the first point of entry for confronting these problems, not least because the experiences of the 160 years that have since passed call for expanded and, above all, updated assessments. But recourse to Marx’s theory is limited not only by our temporal distance from his present, but also by the internal architecture of his thought. For although he was able to show that the aim of the French and English regimes of the 1850s was to pacify social antagonism, and although in identifying the means, both obvious and hidden, by which they pursued this goal he recognized elements of specifically modern forms of domination, Marx did not consider that these techniques of pacification could achieve great prominence. An expiration date is built into his diagnoses: While his assumption of the necessity of revolution makes it possible for him to recognize pacification regimes in the first place, this very assumption also forces him to stop short of thinking that such regimes could become models for the future. Hannah Arendt once noted that Marx, along with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, was one of the few contemporaries who had already grasped what was specifically modern about nineteenth-century society. However, he was himself not yet able to find a modern language for this knowledge (see Arendt 2018, pp. 485–495). I do not share Arendt’s accusation, which she builds on this observation, that Marx gave his theory a traditionalist-utopian form. Nevertheless, Arendt hits on an important point with her reference to Marx’s hesitation to articulate his own insights as insights into specifically modern phenomena: He saw the governments of England and France struggling to maintain a grip on social conditions that had been in profound and frequent upheaval since the French Revolution; the consideration, however, that they might apply equally modern methods and practices in response to modern development was precluded by his revolutionary perspective.

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When Marx criticized Bonaparte’s self-dramatization as the “patriarchal benefactor of all classes,” he was admittedly on the heels of a nationalist populism avant la lettre designed to drive class differences from perception and create a citizen consciousness detached from specific interests. Nor did he miss Palmerston’s effort to become a figure of national integration by means of a policy focused on defending ‘British interests’ abroad. But since Marx saw in this talk of the nation and its welfare above all a disguise behind which incompetence in the case of Bonaparte, and lack of profile in the case of Palmerston, are concealed, he countered such charismatic leaders primarily with exposure, but hardly with warning. He seemed to see his task as a critic fulfilled “when intrigues are shown to be superficial appearances that hide the classstruggle” (Tomba 2013b, p. 52). An ideological program that makes the state appear “as a power actually superior, actually removed from the strife among groups” (Agnoli 2004, p. 54, o.t.) promising integration and provision on the condition that the governed are willing to make sacrifices (see ibid., p. 59), was in Marx’s eyes a “loathsome” (MECW 11, p. 197), but not a promising technique of rule. Obviously, the point can’t be to demand that Marx should have anticipated the coming successes of national populists. I do not appeal to him for predictions about the future of the techniques of domination that he identified, but I problematize that Marx did not at all reckon with their modernity, and thus their future viability. To the extent that he focused—analytically as well as rhetorically—on the falseness of the figure of Bonaparte, he obscured the thought that there could be innovative potential in the latter’s ideological methods.18 According to Gareth Stedman Jones, Marx acquired this blind spot because he set out to criticize Bonaparte’s self-dramatization as a coquetry with tradition, so that subsequently he was only able to treat the regent as an anachronism. What is specifically modern about populism, namely its attraction also for the lower classes, is lost in Marx’s account because he tried so hard to exempt the proletariat from the suspicion of consenting to the regime (see 18 In the introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , Marx takes aim at religion as an “inverted world-consciousness” (MECW 3, p. 175); in The German Ideology, he criticizes the state for its ideological influence on both ruled and rulers (see MECW 5, pp. 59–61); and in the Critique of Political Economy he explains the falsity of the image of reality that arises in human consciousness from the objective falsity of reality itself. However, he does not explicitly classify the nationalist populism of Bonaparte or Palmerston in terms of the critique of ideology.

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Stedman Jones 2016, pp. 336–341).19 This remark by Stedman Jones should be supplemented to the effect that Marx sought to substantiate his observation of Bonaparte’s class-neutral ductus primarily through a refuting critique: As if it shouldn’t be possible for a politician to actually provide the common projecting surface for a wide variety of interests and thus offer quite an attractive alternative to the travails of class struggle, Marx attempted to tie Bonaparte’s success back to very specific class interests—those of the bourgeoisie and rural population. In order to leave no doubt about the reliability of the French proletariat, he then distinguished from it the amorphous mass of the ‘lumpenproletariat,’ which at the time was highly suspect anyway, and reproached it for being Bonaparte’s willing claqueur.20 Alongside nationalist populism, two other pacification practices identified by Marx that he underestimated the future viability of should be

19 In this context, Stedman Jones recalls that Marx disregarded the fact that Bonaparte owed his electoral victory of 1848 not only to the peasants but equally to the voters in Paris (see Stedman Jones 2016, p. 339; also Bluche 1980, pp. 268–276). However, in his critique Stedman Jones ultimately overshoots the mark when he claims that Marx refrains from rebuking Bonaparte “for his warrior role” (Stedman Jones 2016, p. 341) and, moreover, refuses “to think of universal suffrage as anything other than a pathological symptom” (ibid., p. 342). Apart from the fact that in the Eighteenth Brumaire, where Stedman Jones identifies a categorical rejection of universal suffrage, there are also passages that read quite differently (see MECW 11, pp. 114, 146 f., 181), such inaccuracies should not occur in his work, since he after all devotes an extensive chapter to journalism in the 1850s in his biography of Marx. Indeed, in his newspaper articles, Marx often pokes fun at Bonaparte’s attempt as a general to embody the ‘Idées Napoléoniennes’ (see for example MECW 14, pp. 118–120); he also criticizes the delay of a long overdue electoral reform in England (see for example MECW 15, pp. 219–222). 20 Bernard Moss, too, notes that “political mistake[s]” happen when Marx takes the perspective “of the revolutionary who foresees necessary solutions that are beyond the economic and political possibilities of the moment” (Moss 1985, p. 557). However, Moss sees a different kind of mistake than I do: Marx was so disappointed in the workers’ movement after the coup d’etat that he henceforth adopted a “sectarian,” almost “Leninist” (ibid.) attitude toward it. According to Moss, Marx rebuked the proletariat instead of defending it. I do not find this reading appropriate because it overlooks Marx’s justificatory (though often dissatisfied) attitude toward the workers’ movement. Moss maintains that the optimism Marx had articulated in his “passionate and involved” (ibid., p. 553) text The Class Struggles in France had to necessarily turn into pessimistic irony after the political disappointment (see ibid., pp. 555 f.). In contrast, I read precisely the ironicsarcastic account in the Brumaire as Marx’s attempt to re-format the shattering events for a communist historiography (see Schönfelder 2018; Tomba 2013b, pp. 35–59).

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mentioned: first, his diagnosis of an independent (verselbständigt ) executive in the Bonapartist state. When Marx showed that an authoritarian form of rule can serve to secure bourgeois relations of production just as well as a parliamentary government can, he was contouring something like what is today called the modern prerogative state. What kept him from believing that this form of rule has a future, however, was his legal-philosophical interpretation of the Bonapartist state. When state power is disassociated from bourgeois society, Marx sees the relationship between these two spheres, which is otherwise after all held together by their conflict, completely suspended, so that the regime can only implode as a result. Thus, he had to revise the assumption from the German Ideology after Bonaparte’s coup d’état: “The independence of the state is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes” (MECW 5, p. 90). Politically modern France in 1851 obviously proved the opposite. But because this revision affects the idea of social progress, Marx could only consummate it with reservations. Under the conditions of a developed bourgeois society, the independence (Verselbständigung ) of the executive remained an absurdity for him. For that reason, he was only able to think of it as the beginning of its own end, only as a form of rot and decay. The fact that he assumed that Bonapartism simply employs too many rotten tricks to be able to seriously persist for any length of time shows that Marx’s developmental thought sometimes impeded his political judgment. Accordingly, he found it difficult to come up with arguments for this scenario of decay. This can be seen, for example, in his almost naïve attempt (which I will return to once more) to justify the necessary failure of Bonapartism with, among other things, the lack of a legal power basis. Furthermore, there is an observation that Marx made with regard to England: Ruling arrangements between different classes can come about not only because of common values and convictions, but also as protective alliances against the intrusion of social antagonism in the state. If, in addition, such a class alliance suppresses conflicts over property relations and working conditions as soon as these take place outside statesanctioned institutions, and reaches for the gunboat if foreign markets do not ‘open up’ of their own accord, then this is a very modern constellation: Economic liberalism is protected by a state that has violence up its sleeve even when it has given itself a constitutional form. In the case of a state governed by the bourgeoisie this would be no surprise to Marx, since according to his conception “the state is the form in which the individuals

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of a ruling class assert their common interests” (ibid., emphasis mine). However, it was downright perplexing for him when he was dealing with politicians such as the aristocratic Whigs, who made themselves trustees of bourgeois society without a full development of this society being in their personal interest. When, against them, Marx applauded the ‘truthspeaking’ addresses of the opposition for straightforwardly revealing the class content of the state, he all-too-quickly excluded the possibility of eligibility as government personnel the type of ‘post-ideological’ opportunist who disregards his own particular economic position and foregoes any corresponding open declaration of struggle against the other classes, instead simply administering the functioning of the capitalist economy. In other words, for Marx it was inconceivable that within the framework of modern state rule, social antagonism could be permanently contained and normalized and thus remain latent without ever being explicitly recognized. In all of these objections, I have assumed that Marx, based on his own insights into the aforementioned techniques of domination, would actually have been able to recognize their future viability or their modern elements. This assumption is suggested by the sharpsightedness of his diagnoses itself, which is particularly evident in such phenomena that had been relatively new and hardly studied (revolutions of 1848/1849, Bonapartism, free trade, international economic crisis). But Marx was neither a policy analyst nor a sensationalist reporter, and his craft did not consist in excelling at spotting the latest ‘trend.’ Precisely because he wished to use the press to bring a historical-materialist view of things into the conversation, his newspaper articles are dominated by a thesis with which he rules out the possibility that the regimes of pacification could provide a model for the future: the thesis of the necessary downfall of these regimes. It seems to have been extremely important to Marx to convince his audience of their merely temporary existence. Occasionally this induced him to give rather far-fetched arguments for his classification of the 1850s as an era ripe for revolution. Thus he saw the “last moments of the British Constitution” as having already arrived in the wake of parliamentary and government scandals involving embezzled state funds, job patronage, and inheritance fraud. (MECW 14, p. 62) Elsewhere, Marx concluded without further ado a promising course of class struggle from the introduction of new laws releasing British factory owners from the obligation to make work on their machines less dangerous and industrial accidents actionable (see MECW 15, pp. 251–254). As I indicated

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above, at one point he tried to substantiate his expectation of an imminent downfall of the French regime by saying that the population would suddenly realize that their government was not democratically elected at all (see ibid., p. 499). This list also includes the fact that when the ultramontanist newspaper L’Univers and the moderate republican paper Le Siècle for once dared to criticize the Bonapartist regime, Marx immediately declared this the beginning of the end of the empire (see ibid., p. 551). Such fanciful arguments remained rare, and my purpose here is not to refute them pointedly. However, they can shed light on the fact that Marx’s journalistic practice was obviously concerned to a great extent with exposure and with interpretation in terms of revolutionary theory, but little with reflection on what could be done to counter the practices of domination he identified, should they prove to be successful. The fact that he was silent about their possible functionality was part of a journalistic strategy aimed at countering the European governments’ striving for restoration of the pre-revolutionary order with an image of reality as still being contested, as a mere episode in an ongoing social development. His intention to make this development appear stronger than its opponents could ever be was simply incompatible with the idea of alternative, non-revolutionary courses of events. Not only when he wrote a Manifesto or addressed speeches explicitly to socialists and communists, but also when he reported on political and economic events in Europe to a heterogeneous readership that was ideologically difficult for him to assess, Marx produced texts that defy being filtered through political science and processed into a kind of ‘comparative government.’ But they also block access from a completely different direction: access by communists who look to Marx’s commentaries on contemporary events for clues as to how authoritarian regimes of crisis resolution could be taken seriously as political opponents—not least in order to be able to oppose them. To the extent, however, that journalism was for Marx a ‘message in a bottle’ intended to bring into conversation a reconnection of events with the history of material developments, his accounts of “performances of state” always resonate with disdain for the latter.21 He treated them as superficial reflections of economic–industrial relations, so 21 Gareth Stedman Jones points out that Marx made the analysis of political institutions and modes of government difficult for himself. By always interpreting them as manifestations of social collisions, he was unable to notice many a new quality about them; see Stedman Jones 2016, pp. 280–286. To this important critique, however, Stedman Jones

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that in his articles governing politicians often seem like supporting actors in a much larger struggle.22 Because he claimed to be able to substantiate the necessity of revolution from insight into a historical process that amounts to a conscious and communal mastery of the productive forces of man, he had to declare any government action that opposed movements that advanced this process as ultimately futile. This is the reason why Marx opposed the regimes of pacification in the press primarily by exposing their pitiful representatives and their illusory efforts. What he completely omitted, on the other hand, was a warning against these regimes. A movement for social emancipation would certainly have been helped by such warnings, since this would sharpen its senses to the possibility that it might have to deal with opponents who do not give up of their own free will. For Marx, however, it seemed out of the question to warn his readers—possibly because he would have had to indirectly anticipate a possible success by the restorative regimes. As a price for this ‘ban on images,’ there remained a blind spot in his assessments of authoritarian crisis solutions where it would be a matter of strategically orienting revolutionary practice according to the concrete behavior of the reactionary forces. With Marx, therefore, there is no observation of the enemy that serves not only to delegitimize them, but also to pass on experience of their strengths. I mentioned at the beginning that Marx, interpreting political and economic events against the background of his ‘materialist conception of history’ and at the same time referring to these events in order to show the necessity of the revolution, in this way also attempted to prove the truth of a materialist approach to the events. It is possible that he had to transmit such certainty about the downfall of the regimes of pacification precisely because the class struggle is a truth condition of his critique of society. The fact that Marx can substantiate its truth with rational general concepts, but cannot prove it, no matter how much he does not add any reflections on how Marx’s interest fundamentally affects his insight; instead, he contents himself with accusing Marx of being doctrinaire. 22 In his calls for England and France to conduct the Crimean War more resolutely so that it would turn into a revolutionary war on a European scale, Marx revealed not only that his contempt for those in power sat side-by-side with his expectation for them to take proper action in an emergency. Rather, he also revealed the callousness with which he regarded Europe’s first industrially conducted war, of all things, in which only material superiority counted, as a means in the struggle for a society in which the individuals should be “rich in qualities and relations.”

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looks for proofs in contemporary events, is due to the philosophical and political presuppositions of his critique: It will only become completely true with communism. Whether the option remains open within existing conditions of turning them into conditions of communism depends not least on the influence of the forces that actively foreclose this option. If it is among the tasks of critique of society to recognize such forces, to keep an eye on them, and to counteract them, it was maybe already too short-sighted of Marx to regard regimes of authoritarian crisis resolution merely as administrators on behalf of the bourgeoisie, and to think that to fight them it was sufficient to disavow them verbally and organize one’s own party along the way. Because he did not take their strengths seriously enough, it was easier for him to avert his gaze from the integrative force with which such regimes also affected those that he would have been reluctant to dismiss from the ranks of the revolutionary subject. But several more decades would pass until the German Nazis, with their organized liquidation of the individual, relieved him of the burden of proof by proving that the truth of his critique had a temporal core. The fact that Marx is of little help in the question of what it could mean when social conflicts come to a head without a step being taken in the direction of emancipation is also due to the fact that he was not yet forced to think about this scenario. Spared from sharing the experiences of the twentieth century, Marx could behave “disrespectful of the factual” (Schmidt 1971, p. 13, o.t.; translated differently in: Schmidt 1981, p. 3) with a clear conscience. It took Marx’s orthodox adepts to make the proclamation of a necessary revolutionary development into an absolute to such an extent that even those by whose help the revolution was to be accomplished had to be morally and physically subdued. For the Marxist parties of the twentieth century, the “search for a dialectical explanation to account for what has happened, to neutralize the event, as so many have been neutralized before, by situating it within a strategy of sublation capable of undoing what has been done” (Adamczak 2021, p. 24) became a dogma by which they legitimized their claim to be able to force their members to carry out measures to the point of self-sacrifice. Their loyalty to Marx was manifested in the fact that they transformed his reckoning with revolution into a faithful adherence to the approach of redemption. This belief was instrumentalized in order to repress despair over the failure of the communist movement as such, as well as despair concerning the

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overpowering external obstacles. Once the necessary victory of the proletarian revolution has become a rigid template by which the question as to who the opponents of communism are is resolved into a question of obedience, then even the declared opponents of communism are no longer distinguishable from one another. Then even a self-racializing mass movement prepared to annihilate everyone considered foreign to the people (Volk) looks no different from the clientele of the capitalist enemy class. Against such monstrosity, reference must be made to Marx himself, who insisted that the existing relations can be conceived as to be abolished only if they are posited under the determinations of communism. In doing so, he already objected to the false conclusion that was later drawn from the experience of the social catastrophes of the twentieth century: namely, the conclusion that a modern form of barbarism was the inevitable consequence of history. If, with Marx, history is to be understood as a development in which an association of free people becomes possible, then the success of authoritarian crisis resolutions is the repression of this possibility.

CHAPTER 4

Truth and Power—On the Critique of Revolutionary Subjectivation in the Work of Marx and Stirner Matthias Bohlender

4.1

Exposition: Lukács and the Communist Party

In his essay on the history of “Western Marxism” published in 1976, Perry Anderson famously put forward the thesis that as a consequence of the failed revolutions in Central and Western Europe after the First World War, a new political and theoretical formation within Marxist thought emerged (see Anderson 1976). Of concern here is that Western Marxism that Anderson attempts to define not only in terms of the commonality of biographical data between its most important protagonists, but rather above all in terms of a fundamental thematic shift. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse or Lefebvre, Sartre, and Althusser are names that for Anderson represent this new formation of Western Marxism. They may hardly be more different in their respective theoretical and methodological conceptions, but what fundamentally unites and ties them together is the more or less pronounced turn of their thought away from the revolutionary practice of Marxism. The question of revolution, the question of the timeliness of a comprehensive praxis to transform

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bohlender, A.-S. Schönfelder, M. Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17358-5_4

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society, which was still the immediate center of thought and action for the first generation of Marxism,1 experienced a peculiar displacement in relation to a new ‘center of gravity’ in the works of the authors of Western Marxism, which Anderson believes he is able to identify as fundamental questions of methodology and epistemology. Not without sorrow, Anderson depicts how Western Marxism had distanced itself from political praxis, withdrew from labor schools, and thus lost contact with the working class. The respective special philosophical languages of its authors and the academicization of Marxism had undoubtedly given a new impetus in the direction of a critique of dogmatic Soviet Marxism; at the same time, however, the link between theory and practice, between Marxist thought and a revolutionary proletariat, had been severed. One might argue over individual aspects of this thesis, but without a doubt, Perry Anderson emphasized an important juncture in the history of Marxism by considering the shift and realignment of (Western) European Marxism. In this regard, one name and one authoritative text come into the center of focus, namely Georg Lukács’ collection of essays from 1923, History and Class Consciousness. Written in exile in Vienna after the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, it fulfills a number of criteria that Anderson identified as the point of departure for the fundamental thematic shift within Marxism. In particular, the new emphasis with regard to the method of historical materialism was for Anderson a clear indication of the subsequent path trod by Western Marxism. But can History and Class Consciousness actually be read as a turn away from revolutionary practice, from class struggle, and as an act of distancing from the proletariat? Without question, its reception within critical theory contributed to the interpretation of the essay collection as a fundamental philosophical and methodological text. Above all, the renowned ‘reification essay’ was placed at the center of attention,2 with the result that a strongly social-philosophically oriented Lukács, who had recognized early on the deformation of a Soviet Marxism that had petrified into dogmatism, and developed a critical counter-conception as a corrective. However, such a lineage of reception of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness is forced to proceed extremely selectively. It must skip

1 See the study of the life histories of the first generation of Marxism by Morina (2017). 2 On this, see for example the volume edited by Plass (2015).

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a central aspect of the entire book, perhaps even a fundamental problematique. This fundamental problematique becomes especially visible in the final essay of the book, which Lukács highlights as an original contribution alongside the “reification essay.” Far from turning away from revolutionary practice, Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization brings together the fundamental thoughts of the entire book, in the form of a theory of the communist party. Lukács’ initial question is: why did the post-war revolutions and council republics fail? When the revolutions began to reveal the truth of Marxism, a defect, an inability must have crept in somewhere—with fatal counterrevolutionary consequences. Lukács’ contributions sought neither to found a Western Marxism, nor did he—a professed Bolshevik and Leninist—wish to reject and discard Marxism-Leninism. Lukács desired nothing more and nothing less than to bring to light the defect, the inability in contemporary Marxism, with the political aim of bringing the imminent struggles in Europe to a proper, revolutionary conclusion. But where exactly does Lukács locate the defect and the inability that led to the failure of the revolution? The crucial point is already named very clearly in the first few sentences: it was a lack of attention to the proper conception of the communist party, an ‘unconsciousness,’ as Lukács writes, in the conception of the organization of the proletariat. Previously, the organizational question had been treated as a purely technical one, and indeed not “as one of the most important intellectual questions [geistige Fragen]3 of the revolution” (Lukács 1971, p. 295). With a view to Lenin’s—in Lukács view, successfully carried out—revolution in Russia and its centralist party organization, Lukács criticized above all the communist parties outside of Russia for their inability to adequately understand their own role in the revolution. Namely, within the revolutionary process, writes Lukács, the organization is “the form of mediation between theory and practice” (ibid., p. 299). There can be completely different opinions within theory, that can indeed coexist peacefully alongside one another; in practice, there are also numerous complex options for 3 Lukács uses throughout the whole text the term “geistig” (geistige Fragen, geistige Verfassung etc.) which has in German a broad meaning; derived from the word “Geist” (spirit) it refers not just to cognitive or intellectual acts but signifies “mental,” “ethical,” and even “spiritual” (geistlich) capabilities as well. One can see the comprehensive meaning of “Geist” or “geistig” not only in Hegels use of these terms but also very clearly in another important source for Lukács’ thought: Max Webers famous 1904/1905 treatise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

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action. But first within the domain of the organizational does the clarity of a decision become inevitable, and it was here, in the area of central decision-making power, that the CPs had their obvious defect. But Lukács even goes a decisive step further in his determination of the organization and the party. For Lukács, the communist party is not just an entity of mediation and decision, but also “an autonomous form of proletarian class consciousness” (ibid., p. 330). It is the mental and ethical form of expression of the revolutionary subject under conditions of a total social revolution. Here, Lukács carries out a momentous but quite consistent ethicization of the communist party. What does that mean exactly? In his determination of the communist party, Lukács proceeds from a specific social constellation of revolution and an ethical constitution of the proletariat. In the future revolution, one must reckon, with regard to its social composition, that not only the class of the proletariat will be involved, but also other classes and movements (the petite bourgeoisie, peasants, oppressed nations, etc.). Through this mixed social composition of the respective actors, the revolution is always in danger of tipping over into a non-proletarian one, or even a counterrevolution. So there is an external, social–historical element of uncertainty in the proletarian orientation of the revolution. And this element of uncertainty persists within the proletariat itself, since the intellectual constitution of the proletariat—that is, its class consciousness—is massively affected by other social layers, the bourgeoisie, and the entire capitalist form of socialization. The structures of reification of capitalist commodity production influence the degree of intensity and the homogeneity of proletarian class consciousness; they produce “stages in the development of its class consciousness” (ibid., p. 326) and generate “labor aristocracies,” opportunist trade unions, individualist sects, and reformist, social democratic parties, which wait rather for an economic development to lead to revolution. The gravest and most present element of uncertainty in the revolution is therefore for Lukács the “ideological crisis of the proletariat ” (ibid., p. 310). Thus, at the moment of its actuality, the revolution stands under both of these conditions of uncertainty, and it is just the ideological crisis which in a special way makes the intervention of the communist party necessary. It has to lead not only the other classes hegemonically and orient them toward the proletarian revolution; rather, it must also prepare and develop the class consciousness of the proletariat itself. It must enable the proletariat to become a class and submit this class to a whole ethical or mental procedure of communist subjectivation, for:

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Individual proletarian strata are no more predestined to become Communists by virtue of their economic existence than the individual worker is born a Communist. Every worker who is born into capitalist society and grows up under its influence has to acquire by a more or less arduous process of experience a correct understanding of his own class situation. The struggle of the Communist Party is focused upon the class consciousness of the proletariat. (ibid., p. 326, emphasis mine)

Just as there is no simple political mechanics of revolution arising from the economic laws of capitalist society, there is no simple mental mechanics of a class conscious subject formation arising from the mere socio-economic class position of workers. In principle, the class of the proletariat remains the basis of revolution—it alone is charged with the world-historical “mission” of realizing the “realm of freedom.” But the class of the proletariat is not identical with the concrete, empirical workers standing in the middle of the class struggle and the mentioned element of uncertainty. The difference is a question of class consciousness, that is, the comprehensive mental constitution of the real workers. “Thus we must never overlook,” writes Lukács, “the distance that separates the consciousness of even the most revolutionary worker from the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat” (ibid., p. 80). This distance is determined by the communist party; it is the party that brings the class struggle into the class consciousness of the workers, in order to decrease this distance and to elevate the concrete class consciousness to the level of the imputed true class consciousness of the proletariat. For Lukács, the central role of the communist party arises from its specific position and its task of closing the gap between both conditions of class consciousness. The revolution is therefore “not just a battle waged against an external enemy, the bourgeoisie. It is equally the struggle of the proletariat against itself, against the devastating and degrading effects of the capitalist system upon its class consciousness” (ibid., p. 80). It should now have become clear why Lukács not only placed the question of organization at the center of the theory of revolution and organization, but could also essentially make it the intellectual center of Marxism as such. The communist party is not just the place in which tactically the respective orientations and actions in the class struggle are set; it’s not only the entity that takes over the political leadership of the non-proletarian classes and forges corresponding alliances; it is first and foremost a specific ethical practice of communist subjectivation. By

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means of it, under the given capitalist structures of reification, the empirical worker subjects are transformed into communist proletarian subjects; with the party it is first possible to carry out a comprehensive transformation of consciousness, a mental conversion that yields a decisive step in the direction of the “realm of freedom.” This conversion is necessary according to Lukács for the very reason that the realization of freedom is necessarily linked to the demise of the “race of men” produced by capitalist society. With an unmistakable messianic undertone, Lukács quotes Marx from The Class Struggles in France: “The present generation,” says Marx, “resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish in order to make room for people who will be equal to a new world” (ibid., p. 315). But how must a communist party be constituted, in order for it, in the course of the class struggle, to initiate this comprehensive conversion of workers into communists within capitalist society, ultimately abolishing themselves as proletarians and becoming classless subjects? One must imagine, Lukács says, the party as an organization of a “higher type,”4 not to be confused with the classical bourgeois or social democratic parties, which have institutionalized a mechanical separation between party leadership and mass membership. This separation is merely the machine-like and bureaucratically encrusted continuation of the rationalization and reification of the capitalist commodity world. Instead, Lukács determines the communist party as an ethical and—almost similar to a religious congregation—spiritual unity, an “active collective will” to which all party members must unconditionally subordinate themselves. At its center stands the well-understand “discipline” that guarantees the unity, decisiveness, and strength of leadership of the party: The unifying factor here is discipline. Only through discipline can the party be capable of becoming an active collective will […] More importantly, even for the individual it is only discipline that creates the opportunity of taking that first step to the freedom […] that works at overcoming the present. (ibid., p. 316, c.t.)

4 Lukács leans heavily on Lenin’s conception of the party. Lukács made manifest his admiration for the political “genius” Lenin only a year later, in 1924, in his brief monograph on Lenin. I will return to Lenin and the communist party at the end of my contribution.

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This discipline on the part of the individual with regard to the collective will is accordingly the first procedural form or manner of practicing for the future freedom. Lukács even speaks more clearly of “the unconditional absorption of the total personality in the praxis of the movement” as “the only possible way of bringing about an authentic freedom,” namely, every individual party member “obtain[ing] freedom for himself too” (ibid., p. 320). At this point, the reader must be careful not to hastily cast aside Lukács’ entire train of thought, because here—in the midst of the elaboration of a theory of emancipation and liberation—one witnesses a monstrous legitimation of authoritarian rule. It’s worthwhile to look at the entire argument again: on the basis of their general class situation, individual workers only possess the objective possibility of developing a proletarian class consciousness and becoming a revolutionary subject, since they are subject to their respective empirical-psychological experiences, which impact their overall personality as effects of capitalist reification. Thus, in the middle of the revolution, they can waver, become uncertain and lethargic, and even take the wrong side. Lukács refers to that as the “ideological crisis of the proletariat,” which represents the central element of uncertainty within the actuality of the revolution. Since for Lukács, even in a revolutionary situation, there are no spontaneous conversions, and since one is not born a communist, there must be a practice, an institutionalized procedure, or a dispositif that makes it possible under the conditions of capitalist socialization to empower the workers in their total personality to become a truly communist subject. The communist party is this dispositif . The party is something like a security dispositif against the “ideological crisis of the proletariat,” and at the same time a sort of pastorate, an entity of ethical leadership in a capitalist world that attacks the mental and ethical constitution of the working class.5 So far at first, then, the justification of the party’s power. But now, Lukács sharpens the argument: the struggle for proletarian class consciousness does not end at the entrance gates of the party, that is to say, the unsettling practices of capitalist reification not only affect the mental or spiritual constitution of the class, but also penetrate deep into the interior of the party itself—for example, with false notions about centralism, freedom, 5 On the two concepts borrowed from Foucault here, that of the “dispositif” and the “pastorate,” as a “government of souls,” I refer the reader fundamentally to Lemke (2019, pp. 64, 155).

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democracy, individuality, etc. But that also now means that within the party as well, as long as capitalism persists, “we must discover organisational devices and guarantees that will be able to counter the corrupting effects of this situation, that can correct them as soon as they make their inevitable appearance and eradicate the malignant outgrowths they produce” (ibid., p. 335). If the communist party was a security dispositif for the class and a specific pastoral practice, discipline now appears as the primary and superior dispositif or government technology within the party for preventing the communist subject from falling back into reified consciousness. Alongside discipline, Lukács names three further technologies: (1) the mobilization of party members “with the whole of their personality” (ibid., p. 335) for constant party activity. The communist subject develops an existentialist relationship to the collective will of the party, in that it participates in all activities in the most various phases of the class struggle; only by means of such a permanent mobilization procedure does it become a fighting, party subject. (2) A “healthy and productive self-criticism” (ibid., p. 332) is a further corrective principle, a truth procedure which should make it possible for the party subject to admit its mistakes to the collective will; only the procedure of confession leads back to the party and to subject status. (3) “Purges” (ibid., p. 338) are the final device against the penetration of the capitalist spirit into the interior of the communist collective will. This is a specific procedure of (self-)purification of the party, which must be carried out from time to time, in order to eliminate “corrupt, bureaucratized and revolutionarily unreliable elements estranged from the masses” (ibid., p. 338). By referring to these technologies and procedures that the party must establish in order to maintain the highest level of proletarian class consciousness for itself, Lukács basically admits that the initial problem has not been solved: it has merely been shifted to the interior of the party: the communist party is also from this capitalist world! And the “ideological crisis of the proletariat” is continued in a possible ideological crisis of the communist party itself and therefore at the heart of proletarian class consciousness. Just as the empirical workers under the capitalist structures of reification are fundamentally permanently impaired or distracted from forming a revolutionary class consciousness, the actual, empirical communist party stands under the sphere of influence of reified consciousness and hovers on the brink of the permanent danger of now losing the proletarian class consciousness it has developed with regard to the workers. This

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means, however, that there persists the element of uncertainty on the basis of which the party was founded as the ethico-political collective will of the proletariat, endowed with corresponding power. Indeed, what is fatal and downright monstrous about this entire argument—if one recalls the Stalinist purges of the 1930s—consists in the fact of having transformed the highest security dispositif of proletarian power into a principally insecure place. Even if Lukács now speaks of the elevated ethical requirements or higher standards that the party must apply in selecting its members, there are no guarantees that comrade Lukács, or even comrades Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, etc., will not be eliminated as “unreliable elements” in the next political purge. Lukács was certainly not the only one at the time to tightly link the truth of Marxism with the power of the communist party. But he based this linkage on the specific initial problem of an ideological crisis of the proletariat, which in turn represented the result of a thorough materialist analysis and critique of capitalist socialization. So it was a specific problematization that led Lukács to lend the communist party an exceptional status, furnishing it with corresponding procedures of truth and power. This problematization is concerned with the question of the manner in which it is possible, under the given capitalist structures of reification, to form—out of the empirical multitude of workers—a revolutionary communist class subject equipped with proletarian class consciousness . Everything depends upon not understanding this process of formation as a necessary automatism, nor as a coincidental spontaneism (mass uprising, etc.). There is a tendency for the empirical working class to transform itself from a mere object of capitalist society into the liberating subject/object of history. But that’s not enough for a successful revolution. In this entire conception, the workers must undergo a transformation, they must develop and attain a consciousness , a clarity of their own concerning what they’re doing, concerning their revolutionary subjectivity. They must first become subjects of truth of communism6 ; only then will they have the much-vaunted maturity to act as proletarians. Perhaps because he also refers again back to Hegel, Lukács poses the question of the process of formation of the subject that, from Marx to Lukács and those that followed, has the downright world-historical burden of transforming itself and society as a whole. But how is it 6 On the concept of the “subject of truth,” see Foucault (2005, pp. 15, 28) as well as Foucault (2014, p. 118).

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possible, what conditions, practices, and procedures make it possible to become such a subject of truth? And what is the price for entering into this process of formation and obtaining access to truth—so that one does not just recognize the truth, but rather enters into a condition of truth as a subject?7 What is special, radical, and also modern about Lukács is that he takes up these questions again and attempts to think them through to the end; what is fatal about it is that he ends up not only with a total subject (‘proletariat’), but also with a total institution (‘communist party’) which, with its procedures of power, its processes, and technologies, destroys precisely those supposed subjects of truth that it wishes to form and empower. The process of formation of this subject of truth, which bears the name ‘proletariat,’ does not lead to the emancipation and liberation of the working class, but rather to the construction of an apparatus that, in the historical-political execution of this process of formation, inscribes into it a series of power procedures, thereby forming an unprecedented apparatus of violence and domination. Was that the necessary price that had to be paid if critique of society and the revolutionizing of capitalist relations is linked to the formation of subjects of truth? Is there a connection between radical, revolutionary critique of society and practices of power that lead to an apparatus of domination? And furthermore: does this connection have something to do with the projection of a revolutionary subject that must transform itself at the moment it carries out a revolution of society as a whole? This bundle of questions, which I have attempted to extract here more or less by means of a (de)tour through a renewed reading of Lukács, stands at the center of my further elaborations. However, the following is concerned not so much with answering these questions completely once and for all, but rather with making them visible as a fundamental problematique of a critical social thought, which still attempts to reflect in reference to Marx and his related legacies. To that extent, it would also be too short-sighted to hold Lukács himself or History and Class Consciousness responsible for the connection between subjects of truth, procedures of power, and revolution. It would also be too short-sighted because in

7 Lukács states that “this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge” (Lukács 1971, p. 169), that accordingly recognition is not solely a cognitive or logical act of insight into a propositional truth, but an act of the subject becoming true, or truth becoming a subject.

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this way, one simply more or less facilely evades the problematique exemplified here by Lukács, and the aforementioned bundle of questions by assigning them to an author, a work, perhaps a coincidental historicalpolitical situation. In contrast, my concern is to take seriously the clarity and necessity, on the one hand, and on the other hand the fatality and danger, of Lukács’ linkage of truth, subjectivity, and power, and to pose the genealogical question: Where does this connection come from? What is its birthplace, its descent? Where is the location within the history of critical social thought where this connection takes its point of departure, and where the possible consequences in terms of the practice of domination were no longer reflected upon, or were simply dismissed? In fact, such a site—or better: historical moment—can be located: the encounter of Marx and Engels with Stirner in the years from 1844 to 1846. This is a specific situation within the birth phase of Marx’s critique of society, in which Friedrich Engels, Moses Hess, Karl Marx, and Max Stirner conduct an argument that ultimately culminates in an initial, but the decisive version of ‘historical materialism’: namely in the self-understanding of Marx and Engels—later compiled as The German Ideology—to no longer follow the path of the critical-philosophical Young Hegelians, the way of the Feuerbachian socialists, and above all else, also not to follow the critical enterprise of a “materialism of the self” (Eßbach 1982) of Max Stirner. This last rejection in particular, the ignorance of Stirner’s critique of communist subjectivation—according to the further thesis of my contribution—has consequences for Marx’s critique of society as a whole, which I wish to elaborate more precisely in the following considerations.

4.2 Development: Marx Against Stirner---A Missed Dialogue Since the groundbreaking study by Wolfgang Eßbach in 1982, we now know not only about Marx and Engels’ intensive engagement with the work of Stirner, but also about how important this confrontation was to Marx’s conception of a historical-materialist critique of society.8 The tremendous meticulousness, hatred, zeal, and parodic creativity that Marx and Engels invested in the 350 pages of the famous Chapter III. Saint

8 See Eßbach (1982). This is a study that should have been reissued long ago, and which has significantly inspired the present investigation.

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Max makes at least one thing clear: Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own was a special challenge and provocation, which Marx in particular felt compelled to respond, with all stylistic and argumentative means. But can it really be said that Marx answered Stirner: that a dialogue between both protagonists took place? Yes, and no, at the same time. If one follows the reception of this controversy,9 Stirner’s book was two things to Marx: for one thing, it was a means for Marx to depart from Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism, and for another, it was an inducement to deal with the problem of ‘ideology,’ the ‘domination of thoughts,’ and ‘consciousness.’ Stirner’s radical nominalism on one side and his no less radical idealism on the other side operated on Marx like two catalysts, in order to draft an antipodal, that is to say, a historical and materialist critique and theory of capitalist society. That is certainly correct. At the same time, however, this engagement, at this historical moment, was concerned with considerably more, namely not just with the question of in what manner a correct critique of bourgeois-capitalist society and its forms of domination is to be carried out, but also at the same time with the question of how it’s realistic and possible to overcome these bourgeois-capitalist relations of domination. The questions that stirred Marx and Engels in 1845 are not just of a theoretical or conceptual type, but rather questions concerning the socialist or communist revolutionizing of social relations. They are concerned with the “task,” as Marx and Engels formulate it with great emphasis against Stirner, “of organising society in a communist way” (MECW 5, p. 438). In light of the numerous socialist, anarchist, and communist discourses, organizations, and projects developing primarily in France and England, Marx and Engels wanted to now clarify and determine (for themselves as well) what, in their view, could be the only possible and truly revolutionary path to communism. This, if you will, immediately political-practical dimension and vehemently political revolutionary grounding of the texts by Marx and Engels dealt with here can hardly be underestimated. It reveals, namely, what’s principally at stake in the conflict with Stirner: their own communist project. The controversy with Stirner is a controversy in a political hand-to-hand fight against an opponent openly considered “anticommunist” and classified, with a new ideology-critical designation, as

9 On this, and the dispute between Marx and Stirner in general, see the impressive, detailed study dealing with the history of ideas and philosophy by Pagel (2020).

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“petit-bourgeois.”10 Accordingly, one can’t speak of a dialogue, a discussion, or an answer in the classical sense. Rather, the point is that weapons and tools have to be forged that can withstand the attacks of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois intellectuals. This battle is also concerned with the production of knowledge, critique, and truth—and the achievements of a materialist critique of social relations of domination that emerge here are without a doubt fundamental and epochal. But in the same measure, there are also blindspots, misperceptions, omissions, and strategies of invisibilization. a. The Site of Emergence: Hess against Stirner Against Hess The point of departure for the dispute between Marx and Stirner begins with Engels and Moses Hess. In a letter to Marx from November 1844, Engels reports on his reading of Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own. What first of all is certain to Engels is that Stirner merely articulates the fundamental principle of bourgeois society, egoism. But then he suddenly continues: But that’s precisely what makes the thing important, more important than Hess, for one, holds it to be. We must not simply cast it aside, but rather use it as the perfect expression of present-day folly and, while inverting it, continue to build on it. (MECW 38, p. 11)

Stirner’s Ego is, as it were, the final bulwark against communism, and must therefore be fought against; but since the book at the same time represents the theory of bourgeois society taken to the extreme, it contains a certain truth. For one thing, for Engels that’s the correct critique of Feuerbach’s humanism, the critique of “man,” which in Feuerbach’s work “is crowned with a theological halo of abstraction” (ibid., p. 12). For another thing, one can learn from Stirner “that we must first make a cause our own, egoistic cause, before we can do anything to further it—and hence that in this sense, irrespective of any eventual material aspirations, we are communists out of egoism also, and it is out of egoism that we wish to be human beings, not mere individuals” (ibid.). That seems to be a strange formulation, to be a communist out of egoism, but Engels takes aim at an important point. He is concerned 10 For a fundamental treatment of the perspective of Marx’s critique of society as a “hand-to-hand fight,” see Bohlender et al. (2018).

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with the question of how a “corporeal” individual can appropriate the matter of communism as a “real” human being. How does one become a communist subject? But in the end, it’s not Engels, with his questions and considerations that remained fragmentary, who would formulate the first public response to Stirner, but rather Moses Hess. In a letter to Marx he makes it clear, that his answer would probably be very much in line with Marx and Engels: When Engels showed me your letter, I had just finished an assessment of Stirner, et j’avais la satisfaction de voir, that you see the Ego very much from the same point of view. He has the ideal of bourgeois society in mind, and imagines he can despise the state with his idealistic ‘nonsense’, just as B. Bauer, who has the ideal of the state in mind, imagines he can destroy bourgeois society with this ‘nonsense’. (MEGA2 III/1, p. 450, o.t.)

The brief work that went to press in 1845 bearing the title The Last Philosophers deals with—outright anticipating The German Ideology—the trio of Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Stirner. Stirner is understood here, as in Engels’ beginning passage, as the final philosopher and idealist of bourgeois society, who declares Egoism to be a principle: “The ‘consequence’ of the ‘Unique One’ [Einzigen] rationally expressed is the categorical imperative - become animals!” (Hess 1983, p. 15) Bourgeois society is nothing other than the last point of a “social world of beasts” in which individuals fight a war of each against all and are driven by “The thirst for wealth [money] in the mercenary world” (ibid.) Bourgeois society is populated by egoists, isolated and alienated “human animals” or “beasts of prey” (ibid., p. 14) who have not yet achieved the status of human beings. In the money-driven mercenary world, egoism has found a specific expression, which Hess calls “free competition”: “The ‘free competition’ of our modern mercenary world is not only the accomplished form of rapacious robbery, but it is also the accomplished consciousness of complete mutual human estrangement” (ibid., c.t.). For Hess, the perfidy of Stirner consists in the fact that right now at the current point in history in which the “predators becoming human,” someone shows up and shouts: bourgeois society isn’t egoistic at all, and it doesn’t consist of predators; it is not an animal precursor or developmental stage toward a true, human society; it is a long since

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deeply “holy,” “human,” “religious” society! For Hess, Stirner is therefore not a simple apologist of bourgeois society, since he knows that here, Stirner is formulating a critique of bourgeois society. But in his eyes, it’s a poisoned critique, only brought into play out of self-concern: Yes, ‘anxiety’ would likely ‘fix’ something in him, and leave this prematurely old child of nature not a moment of peace! He can never fulfill his ‘determination’ as an Egoist. He must question himself every time - ‘Do I follow myself, my own determination’ if I give myself completely over to this or to that? (ibid., p. 22)

This passage is extremely symptomatic, not only because here Hess actually grasps a central point of Stirner’s critique of power. It deals with nothing less than the notion that the constitution of the subject and identity can themselves be forms of the exercise of power, and are linked in bourgeois society with practices of norming and normalizing the self . Hence the constant self-questioning of Stirner’s Ego: am I following myself , or am I just the consequence/follower of another? Hess sees this point, but at the same time, he doesn’t see it, or at least, he does not recognize in it a relevant form of critique of bourgeois society. On the contrary: he reads this critique as the justification of an essentially more deeply rooted egoism, and therefore as a subtle form of apologetic on behalf of bourgeois society. And for Hess, it’s certain: this constant not-wantingto-be-fixed, this undetermined, vagabond, non-identitarian individual without an occupation is not at all suitable for a socialist/communist project. Rather quickly after the publication of Hess’s critique of the Ego, Stirner composed an extensive reply, at the center of which stood an argument directed in principle once again against the false analysis of Hess and the Feuerbachian socialists. This false analysis concerns the estimation of bourgeois society and its principles as an expression of mere egoism: This present world, which is full of philanthropy, completely agrees with socialism in principle […] this world in which the great majority can be brought to give up their advantages in the name of sacred things and where the ideals of brotherhood, philanthropy, right, justice, the ideals of being and doing for others, etc., don’t just pass from one person to another, but are a horrible and ruinous seriousness — this world that yearns for true humanity and hopes to finally find true redemption through socialists, communists, philanthropists of every sort — this world in which socialist

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endeavors are nothing but the obvious sense of the ‘shopkeeper’s soul’ and are well-received by all right-thinking people […] this world that lashes out violently against all egoism, Hess vilifies as an ‘egoistic world.’ (Stirner 2011)

So Stirner’s argument amounts to the following: a critique of bourgeois society essentially rooted in analysis in terms of moral philosophy, that this society is an egoistic, alienated, a “predator society,” turns up empty, because it represents a critique that acts fundamentally in complete agreement with the moral self-understanding of bourgeois society. Such a critique exposes the “obvious sense” of bourgeois society and places itself more or less emphatically at the service of its realization. It operates with the moral imperative: become finally that which you always wanted to be, true human beings! Desist from greed, money, and egoism and educate yourselves to become those comprehensive and all-around active individuals which the “species” and the “history of becoming human” demand of you! Perhaps Hess wasn’t even particularly irritated that Stirner thus deciphered this form of critique as an apotheosis of bourgeois society; perhaps he also wasn’t yet able to understand Stirner’s resentment over the fact that here socialism/communism is understood not as the overcoming of the capitalist world, but rather as its completion—a completion in which the values and norms, that is, the “holy principles” of bourgeois society, are now realized. But it must have disturbed Hess and all the other “sacred socialists” (ibid.) that Stirner asserted that with the completion of bourgeois society, its mechanisms of domination and power are also completed. The bourgeois world is equipped with specific practices of domination and procedures of power, and Stirner does not recognize anywhere in Hess’s analysis and critique that these procedures of power would be eliminated in a future socialist/communist society. Thus, for Stirner, socialism/communism remains in the dominion of bourgeois society, since this completed form fundamentally wishes to be a “holy,” “religious society” (ibid.), or more exactly: it declares “society” to be sacred. Stirner provides a few examples of how socialism/communism continues and completes the procedures of power of bourgeois society. Thus he names “work, which passes for one’s lifework, for the human calling. This is the origin of the prejudice that one has to earn his bread, and that it is shameful to have bread without having worked a bit to get

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it: this is the pride of the wage. Work has no merit in itself and does no honor to anyone, just as the life of the idler brings him no disgrace” (ibid.). Work as an honor, as a virtue, as a profession and higher meaning, this form of declaring labor sacred, Stirner continues, has not only been brought about by modern economics, but “remains the mistress of sacred socialism, where, in its quality as ‘human labor,’ it is supposed to ‘develop human capacities,’ and where this development is a human calling, an absolute interest” (ibid.).11 A general meaning must be attached to all activities; this meaning is always missing as soon as one is called egoistic; for it’s not enough to labor, to love, to desire, to sing, to dance, to think, to laugh, etc. Stirner sees in all of these apparently banal activities always an additional moral imperative at the service of a higher, realer, truer interest that transcends the individual self and proves to him or her its inadequacy, his or her deficiency. Stirner deciphers the conscious and unconscious production of this deficient subject as a practice of ethical violence. For this deficient subject must first develop into a true subject: it is my task, my profession, to develop myself, Stirner writes, to realize my essence and to test myself permanently: Do I really correspond to the true essence of the human being, the citizen, the man, the woman, the worker, the patriot? “Because I am not yet I, another (like God, the true man, the truly pious man, the rational man, the freeman, etc.) is I, my ego” (Stirner 2000, p. 290). As if to defend himself once more against Hess’s accusation that he is an anti-socialist and a predator ideologist, he writes: Egoism […], is not opposed […] to thought; it is no enemy […] no enemy of critique, nor of socialism, nor, in short, of any actual interest. It doesn’t exclude any interest. It is directed against only disinterestedness and the uninteresting; not against love, but against sacred love, not against thought, but against sacred thought, not against socialists, but against sacred socialists, etc. (Stirner 2011)

11 A prime example of declaring “labor” sacred in the German labor movement is provided just a few years later by the Creed of the General German Workers’ Brotherhood (Glaubensbekenntnis der Allgemeinen Deutschen Arbeiterverbrüderung ). In the March issue of 1849 of its newspaper, one can read the “Ten Commandments of the Worker”: “First commandment: Thou shall work. Whoever does not work, should also not eat. Thus it is written. […] Second commandment: Thou shall not tolerate any idlers among you.” If you see one, idling next to you who is capable of labor, give him a leather apron and a hoe and tell him: “Now work! […]” (Die zehn Gebote der Arbeiter, p. 181, o.t.).

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But this avowal certainly could not have convinced Hess. One couldn’t do create any socialism with Stirner, definitely not one that was supposed to be a movement of the poor and workers, who strove to escape the status of economic and intellectual subjects of deficiency into which the political economy of money and the religious economy of false consciousness had brought them. “Yes,” Hess had written just shortly before, addressing this opponent of socialism, “We turn inhuman beings into men and we hope to succeed completely with it, unlike you, who want to turn men into inhuman beings, unlike you, who […] preach nothing but materialism, pleasure, egoism and avarice” (Hess 1961, p. 320, o.t.). The distance between Stirner and Hess appears to be too great for the latter, for him to recognize that “to make human” (out of “inhumans”) could prove to be just as much a practice of violence and power as the criticized “making inhumans” (out of “humans”). So let’s keep in mind once more: Stirner’s reply to Hess takes aim at a misdiagnosis with regard to the manner in which power is exercised in bourgeois society: not through God, property, and money, not through alienation, exploitation, and impoverishing people, but rather through a specific means of making people subjects of truth. However, let us now take a closer look at this specific, alternative view of the form of power and domination of bourgeois society. b. Stirner: A Different Critique of Power In his final great studies of early Christian forms and practices of leading and governing people, Michael Foucault stumbled upon a peculiar problematization of the relation between truth, power, and subjectivity. What he believes he recognizes in the texts, instructions, and teachings of the first church fathers and Christian monks is the long-term formation of a new experience of subjectivity and a new manner of exercising power, which has become firmly established in our society.12 In our society, Foucault writes, the exercise of power, i.e. governing people, is not based solely on acts of obedience and submission, but on “truth acts,” in which the subordinated subjects are at the same time, and necessarily, subjects of a “manifestation of truth.” Since the days of Tertullian, Cassian, and

12 On this, see above all the lectures at the Collège de France from 1979/1980 (Foucault 2014).

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Clement of Alexandria, there is a deeply rooted bond between the exercise of power and the obligation of the individual to speak the truth or develop the active ability to be a subject of truth: Why, in what form, in a society like ours, is there such a deep bond between the exercise of power and the obligation for individuals to become themselves essential actors in the procedures of manifestation of the truth, in the procedures of alethurgy needed by power? What is the relationship between the fact of being subject in a relation of power and a subject through which, for which, and regarding which the truth is manifested? What is this double sense of the word “subject,” subject in a relation of power, subject in a manifestation of truth? (Foucault 2014, p. 80)

I think that one can say with a certain justification that Stirner, with regard to the exercise of power in and through bourgeois society posed similar questions, and stumbled upon a similar problematique. In a key passage, where Stirner basically attempts to describe the form of domination in bourgeois society as the “rule of thoughts” or a “rule of spirit,” the “holy” and of “belief,” he comes very close to the notion that the exercise of power occurs through the formation and education of a subject that is granted the capability to actively state the truth and to confess: Fear [Furcht] makes the beginning, and one can make himself fearful to the coarsest man; already, therefore, a barrier against his insolence. But in fear there always remains the attempt to liberate oneself from what is feared, by guile, deception, tricks, etc. In reverence [Ehr-Furcht], on the contrary, it is quite otherwise. Here something is not only feared [gefürchtet], but also honoured [geehrt]: what is feared has become an inward power which I can no longer get clear of; I honour it, am captivated by it and devoted to it, belong to it; by the honour which I pay it I am completely in its power, and do not even attempt liberation any longer. Now I am attached to it with all the strength of faith; I believe. I and what I fear are one; “not I live, but the respected lives in me!” (Stirner 2000, p. 67)

Here, Stirner describes a process, a procedure, of how an individual of fear becomes a subject of reverence and of belief; he describes this procedure of power as a form of internalization, whereby the power effect does not consist solely of being dominated or oppressed by this inner power, but rather in becoming an actively believing, testifying subject of this power: I believe now means that I have now become part of the

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feared, part of power, and bear witness to it. Stirner describes here the remarkable process of a transformation, a conversion, at the end of which stands a specific self-governing subject of truth and belief. The form of power, then, that Stirner tries to grasp here and about which he believes that it is deeply inscribed in bourgeois society and its subjects, proceeds by means of subjectivation, by means of the internalization of power, by means of the determination of being a specific subject (identity)—that is, to be “possessed.” Just as important for the effectiveness of this form of domination, however, is also the consent of the subjugated individual. Stirner wishes to demonstrate that the subject that feels subordinated to power, must itself have developed a desire for this power and accordingly is itself part of this practice of subjugation, always already plays a part in it and testifies to it: Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my – conscience. (ibid., p. 66)

However, Stirner doesn’t just want to describe the general mechanism of this power (subjectivation, internalization, participation); he goes a step further and inquires into its origins. In a remarkable passage, Stirner portrays as it were the birth of modern subjectivity out of a fundamental transformation of the conception of what “truth” is: A long time passed away, in which people were satisfied with the fancy that they had the truth, without thinking seriously whether perhaps they themselves must be true to possess the truth. […] Luther […] was the first who understood that the man himself must become other than he was if he wanted to comprehend truth – must become as true as truth itself. Only he who already has truth in his belief, only he who believes in it, can become a partaker of it; only the believer finds it accessible and sounds its depths. (ibid., p. 75)

The emergence of modern subjectivity as a form of power is connected, for Stirner, to a specific notion of “being in possession of the truth.” With Luther and Descartes, according to Stirner, the recognition of truth is bound to a subject who must develop a capacity for truth, that must therefore be qualified to be in possession of the truth. Individuals cannot

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just recognize truth, they’re still missing the corresponding “organ,”13 and in rather varying contents Stirner calls this organ “spirit,” “conscience,” “consciousness,” “thought,” “thinking,” “the holy,” or “belief.” Once equipped with this organ, the exercise of power becomes considerably more subtle, but also “more intense,” “more all-embracing,” and “more all powerful” (ibid., p. 77). But how does one actually become in bourgeois society such a qualified, subject of belief and truth, equipped with the corresponding organ? What are the operations, procedures, and institutional practices that anchor truth or access to the truth in the subject in the form of “thoughts,” in the form of “belief”? If Marx would later attempt to debunk Stirner’s “reign of thoughts” as mere ideological sophistry, and elaborate his concept of ideology in direct opposition to it, then this is not least because Marx doesn’t recognize these processes, procedures, and practices, i.e. the materiality of this power of subjectivation, the materiality of structures of meaning at all.14 Since for Marx, all thoughts as ideologies arise from the social relations of production, that is, from the respective historically institutionalized forms of production, exchange, consumption, and reproduction, then is the location—not in religion, state, family, nation, school, prison, etc.—in which bourgeois society hides its subtle, comprehensive, and intensive rule. For Stirner, in contrast, bourgeois society has developed, alongside the economic regime of belief , which generates for it subjects of labor, money, competition, property, and numerous other regimes of belief. For Stirner, modern subjectivity is first and foremost still religious, that is to say, bound to procedures of religious, Christian, and more precisely: Protestant internalization and norming. The critique of religion as a regime of belief for creating subjects of belief is despite the Enlightenment, despite Feuerbach, Hess, and Marx, far from being effectively over:

13 He writes: “Only that organ of man which is able to blow can attain the further capacity of flute-playing, and only that man can become a partaker of truth who has the right organ for it” (ibid., p. 76). 14 Pierre Bourdieu has called this type of power “doxic submission,” which—in difference to “ideologies” and “the realm of representations ”—“in fact belongs to the order of belief , that is, to the level of the most profound corporeal dispositions” (Bourdieu 1998, p. 55).

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Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, “conscience,” watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a “matter of conscience,” that is, police business. This tearing apart of man into “natural impulse” and “conscience” (inner rabble and inner police) is what constitutes the Protestant. (ibid., p. 81, c.t.)

The establishment of a “conscience” is for the teacher Stirner the fundamental work of the church and schools: “priests” and “schoolmasters” provide the daily “training,” or more exactly: “the breaking and bending of the temper [Mut] down to humility [Demut]” (ibid., p. 75). “Yes, yes, children must early be made to practice piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom ‘good maxims’ have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in” (ibid.). Religion now finds its secular further use and completion through the establishment of a further organ: not just moral conscience, but also consciousness, the thought, as Stirner writes, is at the same time the scientific, philosophical continuation of the Christian regime of belief: By the “realm of thoughts” Christianity has completed itself; the thought is that inwardness in which all the world’s lights go out, all existence becomes existenceless, the inward. man (the heart, the head) is all in all. […] To the thinker his thinking is a “sublime labour, a sacred activity,” and it rests on a firm faith, the faith in truth. At first praying is a sacred activity, then this sacred “devotion” passes over into a rational and reasoning “thinking,” which, however, likewise retains in the “sacred truth” its unshakeable [unverrückbare] basis of faith […]. (ibid., p. 299)

What Stirner attempts to demonstrate here is not so much the creation of a merely submissive subject of belief and truth, but rather a male, bourgeois, self-disciplining master subject, equipped with morals, ethical life, conscience, education, training, rationality, and science, which at the same time has become a subservient subject. Modern subjectivity—as Stirner describes it here, anticipating Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Foucault—constitutes itself precisely as a consequence of this dual subjectivation that occurs equally as an empowerment and subjugation. Stirner has summarized this brilliantly in the following passage:

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Without doubt culture [Bildung] has made me powerful. It has given me power over all motives [Antriebe], over the impulses [Triebe] of my nature as well as over the exactions [Zumutungen] and violences of the world. I know, and have gained the force for it by culture, that I need not let myself be coerced by any of my appetites, pleasures, emotions, etc.; I am their – master; in like manner I become, through the sciences and arts, the master of the refractory world, whom sea and earth obey, and to whom even the stars must give an account of themselves. The spirit has made me master. – But I have no power over the spirit itself. From religion (culture) I do learn the means for the “vanquishing of the world,” but not how I am to subdue God too and become master of him; for God “is the spirit.” And this same spirit, of which I am unable to become master, may have the most manifold shapes; he may be called God or National Spirit, state, Family, Reason, also – Liberty, Humanity, Man. (ibid., p. 294)

But what happens if the ego insists upon the “self-appurtenance of me” (ibid., p. 192), when it does not defer and allow itself to be disciplined as a subject of the state (citizen), sexual subject (man, woman),15 family subject (father, mother, child), national subject (German), religious subject (Christian, Jew, Protestant, Catholic); if it resists the “voluntary

15 Since Stirner also rejects gendered identity and difference (man/woman) as a possible social fixing, Feuerbach had criticized Stirner’s Ego as nonsensory, abstract, and genderless. Ultimately, according to Feuerbach, Stirner is a “man” and his brain and body therefore shaped as “masculine.” Feuerbach’s critique is interesting, because it demonstrates how a naive materialism simply ignores the power effects of gendered norming and asserts them to be empirical reality perceived purely through the senses. In fact, in the further course of the argument, empiricism turns out to be apologetic on behalf of the heterosexual, bourgeois normal family: “But as masculine, you relate yourself essentially, necessarily, to another ‘I’ or being — to a woman [Weib]. Therefore, when I want to recognize you as an individual, I must not limit my recognition to you alone, but must extend it […] to your wife [Weib] as well. To recognize an individual is necessarily to recognize at least two individuals. Two, however, has no finality and no meaning: On two, follows three; after the woman, the child. But only a unique, incomparable child? No, love drives me foreward without stopping beyond this one” (Feuerbach 1978, p. 86, c.t.). Two is followed by three, the woman by the child (Auf zwei folgt drei, auf das Weib das Kind): Like a German nursery rhyme, Feuerbach’s species-being unfolds so simply, naturally, and obviously, and with it at the same time, the world of the senses and the empirical, normed by gender.

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servitude” (de la Boétie)?16 Then the state, the society, the family, the people, the nation, the religion, etc., mark this person as an un-man: But what concept is the highest to the state? Doubtless that of being a really human society, a society in which every one who is really a man, that is, not an un-man [Unmensch], can obtain admission as a member. Let a state’s tolerance go ever so far, toward an un-man and toward what is inhuman it ceases. […] But, although every unman is a man, yet the state excludes him; it locks him up, or transforms him from a fellow of the state into a fellow of the prison (fellow of the lunatic asylum or hospital, according to Communism). (ibid., p. 158)

The prison, the hospital, and the psychiatry are accordingly further institutional forms that bring deviant subjects of belief in particular (un-men) back onto the right path, i.e. that once again firmly establishes belief and conscience within them. However, the reference to communism in this quote is also not incidental. It demonstrates once again very concretely the thesis brought against Hess above, that socialism/communism is also reliant upon the power procedures of bourgeois society; that here, modern subjectivation is also maintained, because socialists and communists “are imprisoned in the religious principle, and zealously aspire after – a sacred society, such as the state was hitherto” (ibid., p. 111). Just as he does to liberals, Stirner poses the test question to socialists and communists: what happens in socialism/communism with those who have not allowed themselves to be transformed into proletarian subjects of labor? What price must be paid by the deadbeats, the vagabonds, “the class of the unstable, restless, changeable” (ibid., p. 102); how do things stand with “the swindler, the whore, the thief, […] the gambler”? (ibid., p. 101) What happens with the “dangerous proletariat ” (ibid., p. 102) that the bourgeoisie already warned about and against which it brought its penal codes, prisons, reformatories, and insane asylums into play? What happens, then, with those who don’t follow the subjectivation procedures of labor, the manufactory, the factory—that is, the society of work? “Weitling lays crime at the door of ‘social disorder’, and lives in the expectation that under Communistic arrangements crimes will become

16 For the connection between Stirner’s critique of subjectivation and Étienne de la Boétie’s famous tract on “Voluntary Servitude” from the sixteenth century, see Newman (2014).

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impossible, because the temptations to them, such as money, fall away” (ibid., p. 213). But, Stirner continues, Weitling also admits that there will be a “natural remainder of human diseases and weaknesses” (ibid.), which, however, can be counteracted with the appropriate remedies: The remedy or healing is only the reverse side of punishment, the theory of cure runs parallel with the theory of punishment; if the latter sees in an action a sin against right, the former takes it for a sin of the man against himself , as a decadence from his health. But the correct thing is that I regard it either as an action that suits me or as one that does not suit me, as hostile or friendly to me, that I treat it as my property, which I cherish or demolish. “Crime” or “disease” are not either of them an egoistic view of the matter, a judgment starting from me, but starting from another – namely, whether it injures right, general right, or the health partly of the individual (the sick one), partly of the generality (society). (ibid., p. 213, c.t.)

Whether Hess or Weitling, whether Owen, Cabet, or Proudhon: in all of their considerations and designs for a new human society, Stirner catches a glimpse of the tacit continuation of the regime of belief and power procedures of bourgeois society—at least, he nowhere sees a reflection upon this problematique. Stirner therefore constantly reminds these authors that a socialist or communist subjectivity either remains imprisoned within the inheritance of bourgeois institutions (family, school, church, state, people, labor, manufactory, factory, prison, etc.) and the future proletarians will once again only be docile, religious, trained, hardworking national workers, loyal to the state. Or this proletarian/plebeian class subject has broken with the regimes and procedures and is therefore the result of its own socialist/communist procedure of belief and truth (societies, associations, educational communes à la Owen, Cabet und Weitling, etc.), their own procedures and practices of healing, finishing, subjectivation. A communist class identity is not the result of a spontaneous upheaval, but rather always the conscious or unconscious work of specific apparatuses and institutions, in which the subject is made capable of possessing communist truth. A critique of bourgeois society that intends to revolutionize this society must, in Stirner’s eyes, always miss its target if it does not problematize the subjectivation he has revealed as a massive form of domination and power. But how, Hess had rightfully already asked, can one make a revolution on the basis of Stirner’s “restless self,” struggle for, and establish, another

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society? How should one even imagine at all a radical form of resistance against the domination of bourgeois society? Stirner at least distinguishes between two paths, two modes of resistance: Revolution and insurrection [Empörung] must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions […] the state or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men’s discontent with themselves, is […] a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves […] It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established. (ibid., p. 279)

With that, it’s at least clear where Stirner’s priorities are. The working forth of me out of the established, that is the practice of resistance favored by Stirner. It consists primarily of getting rid of the manifold norms, identities, and subject forms that are arranged and fixed within me and which I have made my affair, my calling, my task. The upheaval of society begins with a practice of de-subordination, of de-subjectivation, with acts of exorcising conscience, belief, and truth; perhaps even with rituals of self-purification or proto-psychoanalytical dream interpretation; and sometimes one is not rid of the suspicion that Stirner’s entire book represents such a performative act of purification. At least, for him: “A revolution certainly does not bring on the end if an insurrection is not consummated first!” (ibid., p. 281). Let us note: Stirner’s critique of power takes aim at the practices, procedures, processes, and regimes that in widely varying ways generate subjects of belief and truth, by anchoring within individuals a belief, a thought, a truth, i.e. specific structures of meaning, in such a way that the subject thus qualified and enabled now subordinates itself, desires truth, recognizes and confesses, that is, transforms itself into a part and executive organ of the power of this truth. This process is described by Stirner principally as a double power procedure of empowerment and subordination (subjectivation), but at the same time as a sort of original expropriation of that which he refers to as the “self-appurtenance of me” (Selbstangehörigkeit Meiner), that which is individual and unique to each respective self.

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c. Marx and Engels: The New Communist Answer to Stirner One should not be deceived by the massive volume of the text that Marx and Engels lay out in Chapter III. Saint Max of The German Ideology, in order to confront Stirner’s Ego. The hundreds of pages that they fill with erudite meticulousness, parodic creativity, and dialectical finesse, ultimately contain, on closer examination, only few arguments. One should also not be deceived into thinking that here a serious critique or dialogue with Stirner has occurred, since such a critique presupposes that Marx and Engels understood and perceived the fundamental problematique of Stirner’s book; that’s not the case. Like Hess and previous reviewers (Feuerbach, Szeliga), Marx and Engels also see the thoroughly intellectually demanding dimension of Stirner’s project, but they do not recognize in it any real critique of bourgeois society that can be seriously adapted to the socialist and communist movement. The comprehensive critique of power presented above in Stirner’s book remains—one has to formulate it so clearly—completely closed to both authors. Instead, their extensive reconstruction of the Ego rests upon two principal, interlocking argumentative strategies: the first strategy consists in a theoretical and political trivialization of the book, in an assuaging of the reader that here, a radical gesture is made on the basis of a simply misunderstood basis of thought (“Idealism”). Connected to this is a second strategy, which consists in conducting a theoretical and political counterattack, that is, confronting the opponent (“petit-bourgeois”) with a new concept of a historical-materialist critique of society, which at the same time shows the only revolutionary path to communism.17 At the same time, one must recognize in these two strategies a movement of repulsion and awakening, which both authors start to consummate together at the beginning of the year 1845 and the provisional end of which will culminate in the Communist Manifesto of 1848—that memorable text which contains both the core ideas of the new critical communism and also functions in its entirety as a manifestation of truth of a newly formed political organization, the Communist League.18 The repulsion of both authors is not just directed at Feuerbach, Bauer, and Stirner, but considerably more importantly:

17 This strategy of argumentation is also found later in Marx’s journalistic writings; see Schönfelder (2016). 18 For a more extensive account, see Bohlender (2019).

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against the Feuerbachian socialists, against the so-called “true socialists,” whose representatives at this point in time were Moses Hess and Karl Grün, and to whom Marx and Engels had shortly before been committed. If Stirner’s book represents a form of de-subjectivation and purification, so do the texts and textual fragments of The German Ideology: in it, the dawning of a new communist project is visible, which was only accomplished through radical breaks and expulsions (of Grün’s “True Socialism,” Weitling’s artisanal communism, Proudhon’s socialist anarchism).19 This entire theoretical-political constellation must always be kept in mind with regard to the reply by Marx and Engels to Stirner; otherwise, already the starting position for the composition of the critique of Stirner remains completely incomprehensible. Actually, everything had already been said against Feuerbach, against Bruno Bauer, and even more so against Stirner. Moses Hess had taken off the kid-gloves and took up the reckoning. He had demonstrated, that these three “last philosophers,” despite their radical gestures, ultimately remained within the ideological space of thought and domination of bourgeois society. Taking up this critique again, and beginning with Stirner, could mean nothing other than that Marx and Engels thought that Hess’s critique had missed its target. But where exactly had Hess erred in his reply? What was he unable to adequately, clearly, and emphatically repudiate in Stirner’s work? In this regard, if one looks again at Stirner’s reply to Hess, one is struck in particular by the accusation that socialism/communism is nothing other than the continuation, indeed the completion, of bourgeois society, its true realization. Here, Marx read Stirner’s critique as a critique of Feuerbach’s humanism and anthropology—a reading that Engels had already proposed in his letter to Marx in November 1844. Accordingly, a humanist socialism (Grün) or philosophical communism (Hess) based upon Feuerbach would indeed be nothing other than the idealistic prolongation of that which bourgeois society (Hegel) with its specific categories had already thought about itself. This difference between this society and the coming one is no longer one of principle, but merely one of degree. Hess was unable to respond to this interjection, because he fundamentally would have had to agree. So was Stirner in fact correct? Was it necessary to drive out the last idealistic fluff from socialism/communism? Marx and Engels’ answer

19 For greater detail, see Bohlender (2016 and 2018).

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is ambivalent, because in the course of providing the answer, they actually dissolve the alliance, which until then had been well-functioning, with Feuerbachian socialism (Hess, Grün) and assert their own materialist standpoint, which is at the same time the standpoint of ‘real’ communism. The argument against Stirner is accordingly: Stirner is quite right, when he accuses humanist, “true socialism” of being trapped within the merely philanthropic space of thought of bourgeois society; he is quite right to mark it as merely a continuation of (social) liberalism. Stirner is incorrect, however, when he believes that he is thus able to expose and compromise communism: That communism is a highly practical movement, pursuing practical aims by practical means, and that only perhaps in Germany, in opposing the German philosophers, can it spare a moment for the problem of “essence” — this, of course, is of no concern to our saint. This Stirnerian “communism”, which yearns so much for “essence”, arrives, therefore, only at a philosophical category, i.e., “being-for-one-another”, which then by means of a few arbitrary equations […] is brought somewhat closer to the empirical world. (MECW 5, p. 215)

So the critique is directed on the one hand against Stirner, who here invokes the wrong communism, and the critique is directed on the other hand with full force against their allies, in particular against Hess, who in his critique of Stirner explicitly mentioned the category of “being-for-one-another” as a highly practical category of communism.20 We thus find ourselves—and that is the strategic situation of Marx and Engels—in the middle of a war on two fronts, a struggle against the last “German, petit-bourgeois ideologues” such as Stirner, and against a socialism/communism which “in Germany” was “given a petty-bourgeois and at the same time highflown ideological form …” (MECW 5, p. 232). Again, one sees here quite clearly how strongly the engagement with Stirner’s Ego is overdetermined by the entire theoretical-political constellation. Fundamentally, however, the reference to misunderstood socialism/communism does not completely dispel Stirner’s objection. Certainly, Stirner proves to be a harmless, naive, downright German,

20 Hess states: “Philosophy, which has so many ‘categories’ is not acquainted with the category ‘for-one-another’” (Hess 1983, p. 16).

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philosophy-fixated thinker, who suspects or interprets the “sacred,” “belief,” and “thought” everywhere; who therefore mixes up the “sacred socialism” of a Hess with the real, practical communism of the real proletarian movement. In the eyes of Marx and Engels, Stirner proves to be a post-Hegelian Idealist, who overextends Feuerbach’s critique of religion and goes a step too far. Namely, in all general concepts (state, law, nation, family, etc.), he sniffs out the religious, theological, and ‘canonical’ dimension, and to him, there arises out of all general concepts, thoughts, etc., an apparently material power, a spell over those who utter them. Is that not the final, most radical, and at the same time most childish form of idealism—to believe that the rule of bourgeois society rests merely upon the “domination of thoughts,” that is, merely upon the production of forms of consciousness, that is, ideologies about who I am and what I have to be? And is it not the culmination of naivete to believe one can simply chase away these “spooks” in people’s heads, that one can change the world merely by an act of will? Doesn’t this demonstrate the figure of the “German petit-bourgeois” par excellence?21 One can recognize two things in this estimation of Stirner as the last “German ideologist”: for one thing, the complete misapprehension of Stirner’s critique of power, especially the misperception of his entire analysis of power of subjectivation that proceeds by means of material procedures, institutional processes and practices, and grows into a “voluntary servitude,” an empowering submission. Marx and Engels transform Stirner’s material, institutional procedures of power into an idealistic or ideological operation of consciousness : they transform this critique of power into a speculative, i.e. idealistic critique of ideology.22 That, however, already presupposes a classical distinction: namely, that thoughts, mind, consciousness , belief in Stirner’s sense are purely cognitive, mental, in any case not material, real, empirical phenomena, but rather merely derivative, apparently independent, ideal expressions of material social relations.

21 Pagel (2020, pp. 640ff.) is able to demonstrate very well that the concept of the “petit-bourgeois” emerged directly from the confrontation with Stirner, and shows up for the first time in the manuscript III. Saint Max. 22 Here as well it becomes evident how strongly Marx and Engels, in their engagement with and rejection of Stirner’s “dominion of thought” (Stirner 2000, p. 68), develop their own materialist critique of ideology—however, they do so while misjudging the materialist dimension of Stirner’s conception. See Pagel (2020, p. 629).

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On the other hand, this makes clear that Stirner’s supposed critique of ideology is already fixed from the perspective of a new historicalmaterialist analytic and a new communist standpoint. The trivialization of Stirner as somebody who remains, like all Young Hegelians, within the idealistic paradigm of a merely speculative critique of ideology, turns into a counterattack at the moment when the question of revolution, of overcoming the mode of domination of bourgeois society, arises. And here, according to the two authors, Stirner has nothing to offer other than a sort of metaphysics of the will: one has to simply get ideology out of one’s head—that is the formulation repeatedly invoked by Marx and Engels to describe Stirner’s practice of liberation and insurrection: The liberation of people from these forces comes about, according to Sancho, by people getting out of their heads the ideas about these forces, or rather the philosophical and religious distortions of these ideas — whether by etymological synonymy […] moral postulates […] or by making monkey faces and by sentimentally comic bragging against ‚the holy. (MECW 5, p. 376)23

But this “getting out of people’s heads” of notions, ideas, thoughts, etc., is itself an illusion, as long as one hasn’t also gotten rid of the actual, real, material foundations of the bourgeois form of domination. That which Stirner attacks and criticizes is merely the ideological appearance of those social relations of production organized on the basis of the division of labor, which can be scientifically demonstrated to be the class rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, that is, on the basis of a “critical” and “theoretical communism.”24 The powers that Stirner describes and that take possession of people (morality, ethics, religion, the state, law, etc.) 23 Marx and Engels refer here to those above-mentioned self-purificating practices that

Stirner sometimes describes in an extremely obstinate way and which must have seemed downright grotesque to the “scientific” ears of Marx and Engels. Here an example “A jerk does me the service of the most anxious thinking, a stretching of the limbs shakes off the torment of thoughts, a leap upward hurls from my breast the nightmare of the religious world, a jubilant whoop throws off year-long burdens. But the tremendous significance of unthinking jubilation could not be recognized in the long night of thinking and believing” (Stirner 2000, p. 133, c.t.). 24 These are both designations that Marx and Engels use at this point in time to name their new project and distance themselves conceptually from other communisms. For example they state: “Theoretical Communist, the only communists who have time to devote to the study of history […]” (MECW 5, p. 247, c.t.).

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are merely products of a specific ideological operation (reversal, idealization, taking on an independent existence), based, however, on actual, material social relations; more precisely: on the mode in which people, in relationship to each other, produce, exchange, and distribute social wealth. These relations are, under the current bourgeois forms of domination, arranged in such a way that one class (the bourgeoisie) rules and oppresses another class (the proletariat) through specific socio-economic practices of exploitation (wage labor, private property in the means of production, the social division of labor). A real—because communist and materialist—critique of bourgeois society must accordingly aim at the heart of oppression, the capitalist relations of production, intercourse, and class; it must not fall into the trap of a purely speculative critique of ideology and count upon the metaphysics of will of the individual ; rather, it must prove from which social relations and constellations the ideas, notions, etc., of people originate; it must again and again decipher the “material source” (ibid., p. 247) of these ideological powers.25 Getting rid of these material relations, according to the rock-solid conviction of Marx and Engels, leads so to speak automatically to their elimination, to the dissolution of all ideological forms and the ideological operation as such. With this refoundation of a materialist critique of capitalist relations of production and class, Marx and Engels made a grandiose volte-face against both Stirner as well as Hess. That which Hess, with his “philosophical communism,” was unable to answer vis-à-vis Stirner, is now possible on the basis of the new conception. Is communism a continuation and completion of bourgeois society? The answer is famously: “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing precondition” (MECW 5, p. 49, c.t.). So communism is a part of bourgeois society; it is a movement within that which currently exists which is oriented toward getting rid of this society. Accordingly, communism actually does continue something which is already immanent to bourgeois society, namely a double historical-teleological movement , which Marx and Engels determine more precisely: (a) as the development of the forces of production within the bourgeois relations of production and

25 For a more extensive treatment, see Bohlender (2010).

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intercourse, which operate as a fetter and are demolished26 ; (b) as the development of a proletarian class subject, which revolutionizes the rule of the bourgeoisie and therefore class relations as a whole.27 So the answer of “real” communism to Stirner is, stated precisely: yes, we communists do continue something which has matured within bourgeois society (the forces of production, the proletariat); no, we do not remain within its form of domination (relations of production, class relations); rather, we have recognized the secret of its form of domination (wage labor, private property, the division of labor) and are therefore able to finally overthrow it. The point of the new critique of society and the new communist project consists, as Wolfgang Eßbach has correctly pointed out, in “transforming the subjective desire for emancipation into an objective historical tendency” (Eßbach 2010, p. 182), i.e. of no longer tying the will to revolution to a personal subject or individual, but rather the historical immanence of a movement that necessarily leads to a revolution of bourgeois society. Marx and Engels reject with great emphasis—against Stirner, but also indirectly against Hess—any form of a humanistic-moral or ethical dimension of the communist undertaking: Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. (MECW 5, p. 247)

26 For a more extensive treatment, see Spekker (2018, p. 175). 27 “In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces

and means of intercourse are brought into being which, under the existing relations, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which is ousted from society and forced into the sharpest contradiction to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness” (MECW 5, p. 52).

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Communism is not a moral or ethical project or one otherwise imposed on people from outside, but rather the consummation of a necessary historical movement inscribed into relations.28 But who exactly carries out this revolution? Who is the performative actor of this necessary movement? It’s notoriously the proletariat as a class which, in the immanence of capitalist society, represents the central collective subject of all experiences of oppression and exploitation and precisely for that reason can be the sole subject of revolution. But things are more complicated: the subject of oppression is not (yet) the subject of liberation. The consummation of the revolution by the proletarian collective subject cannot be understood as a blind, mechanical, unconscious process, but rather for Marx and Engels is itself a comprehensive process of formation, which by means of the capitalist acceleration of class antagonisms leads to a revolutionary communist consciousness. It is first with the formation of this communist consciousness that the revolution is one that leads to a new society. But that also means: the revolution linked to a specific capability, a specific qualification of its subject. For the capability of making a revolution doesn’t require for example an individual moral will on the part of individual subjects (“I as a proletarian want the revolution”), but rather a specific (collective- or class-) consciousness: a communist consciousness (“I am aware that as a part of the proletariat, I must be an active part of the revolution”).29 But in what manner does the collective subject “the proletariat” acquire a communist 28 This fundamental thought of the new communist project, which understands revolution not as a (collective) moral act of will, but rather as the social consummation of a necessary historical operation, is undoubtedly the reason for the apparent immunity of this conception against Stirner’s critique of ethical violence, which hit its target in the case of previous communisms and socialisms. 29 Marx already labored at this train of thought in The Holy Family from 1844/45. But there, he still writes in completely objectivist terms: “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do” (MECW 4, p. 37). In The Poverty of Philosophy from 1847 it then already becomes clear that the proletariat as a collective subject of the revolution will/must undergo a subjectivizing process of education and enablement for the revolution. The following famous passage on the transformation of the mass into a class for itself says nothing else: “Economic relations had first transformed the mass of the people into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class vis-à-vis capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have pointed out only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself” (MECW 6, p. 211, c.t.).

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consciousness? How can it be empowered to form such a consciousness and therefore to become a revolutionary subject? Marx and Engels answer in a proletarian-exuberant —not to say: idealistic—tone: the revolution itself! The revolution generates a consciousness of its own necessity! Thus the corresponding passage states: Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and enable itself to a new foundation of society. (MECW 5, p. 52, c.t., emphasis mine)

So both coincide in the revolution, in revolutionary activity30 : the process of formation of a newly enabled class subject and the process of revolutionizing society as a whole. We have now arrived at a decisive point, which reveals that the new communist project of revolutionizing society is bound to a modern subjectivity that exhibits all of the elements of a subject of truth and belief . The proletariat as a revolutionary class is empowered and enabled, that is, equipped with a communist consciousness to do what it is ultimately historically and socially forced to do. In the revolution, it undergoes a process of empowerment and subjugation at the same time, a truth and power procedure, which makes a mass of workers into a subject of truth equipped with communist consciousness and liberated from the “muck of age”—a subject of truth, however, which also submits to the historical task to carry out the revolution by participating in the revolutionary process. The central passage on this subjugation which is an empowerment is: In the present epoch, the domination of material relations over individuals, and the suppression of individuality by fortuity, has assumed its sharpest and most universal form, thereby setting existing individuals a very definite

30 Thus the corresponding formulation in The German Ideology states, not coincidentally reminiscent of the third Thesis on Feuerbach: “In revolutionary activity the changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances” (MECW 5, p. 214).

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task. It has set them the task of replacing the domination of circumstances and a fortuity over individuals by the domination of individuals over fortuity and circumstances. […] This task, dictated by present-day relations, coincides with the task of organizing society in the communist way. (MECW 5, p. 438, c.t.)

Let’s imagine for a moment that Max Stirner had been able to read this passage: what would he have replied? Dear Marx, Dear Engels, so many things are supposed to be my affair, my profession, my task! Bourgeois society wants me to be a good citizen subject, a devout Christian subject, a patriotic subject of the fatherland, a well-behaved family subject, a docile worker subject, or a competitive business subject. And now you write that bourgeois society (the domination of individuals by objective relations) now, in this historical moment, has given me one final task, namely of putting that all behind me and becoming a revolutionary communist subject! So now this bourgeois society dictates that I transform myself into a communist revolutionary, in order to get rid of this society and its form of domination throughout the entire world?

Perhaps the enormous distance between Marx and Engels on one side and Stirner on the other is most clearly recognized on this point—as well as the distance between both forms of the critique of society: a critique of domination on the basis of the analysis of capitalist relations of production, and a critique of power on the basis of an analysis of social procedures of subjectivation. It may be correct to accuse Stirner of being blind and naive with regard to the effects of domination of the capitalist mode of production; and it may be correct to reject his unshakable ontology of the “self” as well as his metaphysics of the will of “insurrection”; but conversely, one can now recognize the equally great blindness and naivete of Marx and Engels with regard to the power effects of subjectivation. If the revolution creates subjects of truth en masse; if it represents a truth procedure and a process of liberation, then Marx and Engels could have at least learned from Stirner that a subject of truth such as the “proletariat” possible can’t be generated without practices of the subjugation of proletarians. For what happens if the proletariat doesn’t fulfill its task and its calling? What happens when the individuals chosen by history and society to make the world revolution refuse to become good communist subjects? For one thing, Marx and Engels had to tangibly and painfully experience, already

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during the process of writing The German Ideology, that even the organized socialist and communist artisans and workers did not always follow the call of the “theoretical communists” and that therefore the Grünians, Weitlingians, and Proudhonists had to first be excluded from the Communist League. On the other hand, one already sees this practical process of organizational expulsion and the creation of a reliable communist proletariat reflected in the Stirner chapter, namely in the social figure of the ‘lumpenproletariat.’31 Stirner had spoken of the “dangerous proletariat” (Stirner 2000, p. 102) as that motley crew of rebellious subjects against whom bourgeois society had already brought its prisons and madhouses to bear: the vagabonds, the paupers, the thieves, the robbers, and the whores, “the class of the unstable, restless, changeable” (ibid., 102). Marx and Engels are now outraged at mixing up this “lumpenproletariat” with the real, profane, revolutionary proletariat: Hence the entire proletariat [of Stirner] consists of ruined bourgeois and ruined proletarians, of a collection of lumpen, who have existed in every epoch and whose existence on a mass scale after the decline of the Middle Ages preceded the mass formation of the ordinary proletariat, as Saint Max can ascertain by a perusal of English and French legislation and literature. […] He is consistent also in identifying the proletariat with pauperism, whereas pauperism is the position only of the ruined proletariat, the lowest level to which the proletarian sinks who has become incapable of resisting the pressure of the bourgeoisie, and it is only the proletarian whose whole energy has been sapped who becomes a pauper. (MECW 5, p. 202, c.t.)

The fallen, the ruined, the unresisting and pauperized proletarians are not capable of, not qualified to, become a revolutionary subject— or more precisely: they’ve lost their qualification. They cannot therefore fulfill the task, they can’t hear the voice of communist subjectivation, and are therefore not capable of truth. The ‘lumpenproletariat’ is without a doubt the first visible rift within the subject of truth called ‘proletariat,’ constructed idealistically—that is homogeneous and coherent—by Marx and Engels. With this morally devalued figure there appears, as it were, a new variant of the “un-man” diagnosed by Stirner (criminal, sick person,

31 See the study, very much worth reading, by Bescherer (2013), in particular Chapter 2.

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idler, sinner, etc.); and it becomes apparent that with the proletariat, Marx and Engels do not only describe a social class, but rather declare it a normative standard. For with the ‘lumpenproletariat,’ the momentous possibility is opened up for the first time in the texts of Marx and Engels that the proletariat, under the conditions of the capitalist development of the forces of production, does not take the ideal and predetermined path of the ‘profane,’ that is, truthful and revolutionary proletariat, but can deviate from it, become deviant and unresisting, even “lumpenized” and pauperized.32 There even appears to be the possibility—and the Manifesto and Eighteenth Brumaire will confirm it33 —that this ‘lumpenized’ proletariat will take the side of the rulers. During the birth of historical materialism, before any doctrine even claimed that name, before the “proletariat” could even be halfway named, we’re dealing with what Lukács had referred to as the “ideological crisis of the proletariat.” Stirner’s test question already shows the basic problem at the starting point of Marx’s critique of society: what happens if the proletarians don’t fulfill their task, and what happens with them when they don’t? Which institutional procedures and processes have to be put into place now, either to once again enable the disqualified proletariat or to finally declare it incapable of truth? For Marx and Engels, it quickly became clear that the process of revolutionary education had to occur primarily through the most important institutional apparatus of the capitalist mode of production, where the development of the forces of production of bourgeois society had reached its highest stage: the modern industrial factory. Entry or reentry into the factory appeared to them to be the unique historical condition of possibility of bringing about a revolutionary subject. There, the workers, as the Manifesto states, are degraded as “an appendage of the

32 A few years later, alongside the lumpenization of the proletariat, another deviation will be added, namely the bourgeoisification of the proletariat. The “lumpenproletariat” is now joined by the “labor aristocracy.” Thus Engels wrote to Marx in 1858, “that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat” (MECW 40, p. 344). 33 A real, materialist class analysis could have demonstrated, as Mark Traugott found out in his investigation of the June uprising of 1848, that a skilled artisanal proletariat stood overwhelmingly on both sides of the barricades, and not here a bought, down-andout “lumpenproletariat” (Mobilgarde) and there the fortified communist, revolutionary working class. See Traugott (2002, p. 34).

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machine,” “privates of the industrial army,” and mere “slaves of the bourgeois class” (MECW 4, p. 490), but it is precisely the fact that the “masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers” that should educate them in class struggle and in the end accelerate the communist unification. Marx and Engels dream of their subject of truth as a schooled, disciplined, fighting industrial proletariat.34 And they dream that the procedures of injury, subjugation, and humiliation that workers experience in the factories six days a week, ten to fourteen hours a day, will be transformed dialectically, as it were, into practices of self-organization and liberation—that those procedures of power will become procedures of truth! Stirner had already sufficiently warned that this revolutionary dream is problematic: the power procedures of bourgeois society prove namely to be more persistent than assumed, they generate structures of meaning (belief, thoughts, truth) that take the forms in the heads and bodies of people as identities, desires and needs, lifestyles and life stories; and these structures of meaning cannot simply be eliminated by an act of revolutionary purification (“the muck of ages”).35 Stirner had already pointed that out to the communists around Weitling and Cabet; and Marx and Engels could have also allowed themselves to be enlightened by Stirner: what kind of revolution will that ultimately be, what kind of society will that be, consisting of productivist subjects of labor, who believe in labor, the machine, the forces of production, the factory, and progress? Engels more or less responded in the year 1874 with a short, angry article against the “anti-authoritarians,” as he called the anarchists. In it, he explicitly emphasizes that even after the revolution, men, women, and children will be forced to work under the “authority of steam.” There will still be a “despotism” of machines, since the forces of production taken over from capitalism require authority and subjugation:

34 In a work that is extremely worth reading, Eiden-Offe (2017) demonstrates how Marx and Engels had already embarked upon the path of proletarianization in the preMarch period, and thus the pre-March openness of a proletarian-plebeian identity, as well as the resource of resistance of an anti-capitalist poetics was given up in favor of social disciplining into an industrial proletariat. 35 Hardly any other Marxist author recognized this as clearly as Antonio Gramsci,

who famously pinned the failed revolutions in the West on the persistence of what he called “civil society” (società civile), with which he designated the location in which the “structures of meaning” of bourgeois society are hegemonically worked out and subjectivated through an entire armada of media, technologies, processes, procedures, and institutions.

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We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate. (MECW 23, p. 424, emphasis mine)

Let’s note: In a movement of dual repudiation directed at Moses Hess and Max Stirner, Marx and Engels develop a new communist project, the foundation of which is a historical-materialist analysis and critique of the bourgeois-capitalist form of domination. This entire project contains a momentous linkage, which is however for both authors initially unproblematic: it irreversibly binds the analysis and critique of domination (truth) to the historical-materialist practice of eliminating the same (revolution) as well as to the existence of a subject of truth (proletariat) that will not only carry out the truth or the revolution, but can only do this successfully if it goes through a procedure of self-recognition, selfempowerment, and self-liberation—a truth procedure. When the defeat of the revolution of 1848 was finally certain for Marx, he wrote in an angry tone, addressing the workers: “‘You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and enable yourselves for the exercise of political power’ […]” (MECW 11, p. 403, c.t., emphasis mine). Now, it’s astonishing and striking that Marx and Engels completely underestimate or ignore entirely the embedded power procedures or their effects in this process of transforming society and the self, whether the power procedures that bourgeois society itself exercises upon the workers, or the possible power procedures that then set in if the proletariat doesn’t fulfill its task, if it deviates, becomes ‘lumpenized’ or counterrevolutionary. This blindness is also astonishing because Stirner’s critique of bourgeois structures of meaning as a power of subjectivation, newly developed at almost the same time, gave both communists a set of tools for making these power procedures visible.

4.3

Reprise: The Critique of Communist Politics That Failed to Appear

Now let’s return to the starting point. Why had Georg Lukács in the end linked his renewal of Marxism—his critique of capitalist socialization equipped with Hegel’s concept of totality and Marx’s subchapter

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on the fetish character of the commodity—to the necessary existence of a communist party, to the power of a political apparatus? The answer to this was clear: it is precisely the universal form of capitalist reification (the commodity form), which under certain historical-political circumstances leads to an “ideological crisis of the proletariat,” a deficiency in the mental and ethical constitution (class consciousness) of a subject of truth assigned the universal task of radically overcoming capitalist socialization. The communist party was a necessary pastoral power to lead the ‘proletariat’ and a security dispositif against the fatal political consequences of capitalist reification. This explosive linking of truth, power, and subjectivity is, however, not at all to be attributed solely to Lukács. About twenty years after History and Class Consciousness, another major exponent of “Western Marxism” provided a very similar justification for the necessity of a communist party. Here as well, it’s the social relations of domination that have such an effect on the consciousness and existence of the “proletariat,” that it becomes downright ‘massified,’ ‘dehumanized,’ ‘scattered,’ ‘exhausted,’ ‘atomized,’ and ‘sluggish’: in short, they make the workers a “pure product of production” (Sartre 1968, p. 98). For Jean-Paul Sartre, it is therefore the “refusal to be such” (ibid.), insurrection against one’s own false identity, which is the starting point for the proletarian revolution. This collective refusal, however, requires “unity of direction; and he, precisely, needs to believe that there is a truth. Since he cannot work it out alone, he must be able to trust his class leaders profoundly enough to believe he is getting the truth from them” (ibid., p. 127). One has to imagine the party, according to Sartre, as a kind of a spiritual congregation, “which makes order reign and which gives orders” (ibid., p. 128), which enables the confused worker or the scattered worker to enter “a new life by casting off one’s present personality” (ibid.). Even more radically than Lukács, Sartre understands the communist party not only as a pastoral power, but downright as the creator of the class itself; it is the party that arranges the conversion into a revolutionary subject, it is the party that constitutes and leads the working class; without the party, it “falls back into dust particles” (ibid., p. 130). One could ask with a certain justification what that has to do with Marx and his critique of society. Do not Lukács and Sartre too invoke a political organization of power which is exclusively the product of the twentieth century and of which Marx and Engels couldn’t even have dreamed of? Without question, Marx and Engels did not develop the concept of a

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Leninist vanguard and state party; their “communist party”—which, incidentally, was referred to for the first time in The German Ideology—is anything but a tight, centralized organization led by professional revolutionaries. But for that reason, one shouldn’t underestimate the mostly forgotten, but very concrete organizational efforts of Marx and Engels. The question of the organization of a communist party begins in 1845 with the Communist Committees of Correspondence, with the entry into communist workers education associations, and the League of the Just , which had a transnational orientation, as well as with their substantive and organizational reorientation of the Communist League. The question remains virulent in the dispute with Lassalle, and it preoccupies both authors again for many years rather tangibly in the International Workingmen’s Association and in the formation of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party. There are two interesting things about the ‘Marx party’: for one thing, the fact that almost all political organizations in which Marx and Engels participated in, partially in leadership offices and positions (CL, IWA), would split and dissolve a few years later. Even if one can admit that the failure of the Communist League is connected to the organizational inexperience of Marx and Engels and with the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848,36 that definitely doesn’t apply to the failure of the International. The hopeful beginning in 1864 ends notoriously in 1872: after the English trade unions had pulled out,37 the expulsion of the Bakuninists38 and the famous New Yorker Section 12—which had raised the issue of the emancipation of women for the first time39 —followed. However, what’s important here is not so much the repeated failure of the organizational side of the communist project per se, but rather, and more gravely, the lack of a fundamental political self-analysis of this failure. The absence of a critique of politics on one’s own account, a critical reflection of one’s own speaking position with the communist project, in short: a critique of communist politics , is not even remotely discernible. 36 A very good depiction of the failure of the Communist League is provided by Lattek (2016). 37 On Marx’s misjudgment of the trade unions as the organizational form of the coming English proletarian revolution, see Stedman Jones (2017, p. 548). 38 On the conflict between Bakunin and Marx in the First International, see, among the unmanageable flood of literature, the interest essay by Angaut (2007). 39 On the expulsion of the New Yorker Section 12, see the worthwhile work of Schrupp (1999, p. 222) and of Messer-Kruse (1998, p. 157).

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Rather, communist politics in the theory of Marx and Engels proves to be overwhelmingly a remainder category, as a sort of non-independent tool to remind the movement that’s already there of its goal, to strategically and tactically lead the class struggle that has already materialized, to accelerate the revolution that already stands at the door.40 Communist politics is a vanishing moment of history and yet at the same time a militant practice practiced repeatedly since 1845 by both authors until the end of their lives. In contrast to the capitalist mode of production, communist politics paradoxically does not have any systematic-reflective significance within the communist project. A critique of political economy was necessary, because in it ultimately the secret of the bourgeois form of domination, the ultimate aim of the real overcoming of the capitalist mode of production, was revealed. Whereas a critique of communist politics : what should that be, how should it serve a communist project? But what exactly could have been the object of the missing critique of communist politics? From today’s perspective, critics of ‘communism’ pounce on the usual suspects: conquest of political rule, dictatorship of the proletariat, and the omnipotence of the communist party. In contrast, I have attempted to demonstrate that a critique of communist politics must begin with a critique of revolutionary subjectivation. But as we can see, Marx and Engels in their debate with Stirner rejected such a criticism and regarded it as superfluous. In their communist project, they tied the revolutionary social upheaval in a downright idealistic manner to a selfidentical collective subject of truth that empowers and subjugates itself, as it were, and that in the historical moment of its deepest experience of powerlessness (‘wage slave,’ ‘soldier of industry,’ ‘servant’ of ‘large industry’)41 experiences an awareness of its almost superior, world-historical position. Why raise the question of subjectification when it is obvious that the organization of the “masses” into the revolutionary “class” takes place by itself , within the engine room of the capitalist mode of production in the form of revolutionary struggles and civil wars, victories, and defeats?

40 On this, see the study by Anna-Sophie Schönfelder in this volume. 41 In Capital, Marx then writes of “a working class which by education, tradition and

habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws” (Marx 1990, p. 899), and further of “The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker” (ibid.).

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But ultimately, this by itself is merely the linguistic indicator of a tangible, practical, and empirical gap which is then revealed when the ‘proletariat’ for whatever reason in fact doesn’t do by itself what it’s supposed to do, if it doesn’t fulfill its task, refuses, becomes ‘lumpenized’ or even ‘embourgeoisified.’ How is one then to imagine a communist subjectivation, if the dialectical automatism of the ideal truth procedure doesn’t take effect? What is to be done if we know that Marx’s doctrine is true, that it is therefore for that reason (actually) all-powerful, as Lenin formulates it, but that the truth does not, under the given conditions, subjectivate itself by itself , i.e. does not transform itself into a powerful, revolutionary subject? The gap that opens up on these issues will be dealt with in the course of the history of Marxism by a comprehensive ensemble of discourses and theories (theories of revolution, the party, of organization) of political procedures and institutions (parties, trade unions, councils, associations), of forms of examination and rituals of confession, of practice texts and professions of belief, of aesthetic and cultural programs, of psycho- and biopolitical strategies (asylums, camps), and of pedagogical measures. However, they were never able to close the gap. The omitted critique of revolutionary subjectivation could have been a way, within the materialist critique of society newly founded by Marx and Engels, of making visible the highly problematic and explosive idealism of this critique of society, and to account for the truth practices of communist politics. The set of tools for doing so was available to Marx and Engels, in any case. Both had, as I have shown, the historical possibility in the debate with Stirner and the Ego of taking up such a (self-)critique and to process it accordingly. They had the possibility, they certainly had the capacity, but they didn’t take the chance. They recognized neither Stirner’s critique of power through subjectivation, nor his analysis of ethical–political force of structures of meaning, nor his forms of resistance against the procedures of self-subjectivation and identity fixation. Instead, they rejected that as ideological and petit-bourgeois. In this form of rejection, one can at least recognize that Marx and Engels found themselves in a political hand-to-hand fight , and perhaps it was this situatedness, this thinking in oppositional, antagonistic constellations, that generated a sort of parallax view: either our materialist critique of capitalist relations of domination alone, either the communist project of a revolutionary elimination of class domination, or the idealistic-ideological continuation of a long superseded critique of religion, which in the end relies upon the fiction of a purely individualistic insurrection! Whatever the reasons and

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motives for this rejection might have been, Marx and Engels, with regard to their own communist project, threw away a (self-)critical tool; a sociocritical perspective, and they bequeathed to the heirs of their critique of society a fatal but powerful image of the uselessness and ideological nature of this critique of power.

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ˇ zek ˇ Coda: Zi and the Communist Party

God–Analyst–Party: in a remarkable commentary on selected texts by Lenin, Slavoj Žižek poses the question concerning the commonalities of this peculiar triad. All three don’t represent the great subject, the great OTHER that would proclaim and impose the objective truth on us qua external, irresistible authority; rather, they are externalized figures that are necessary in order to allow our access to truth, which help us to acquire insight into truth. All three are therefore nothing other than qualification conditions and enabling entities for the respective subject to enter the space of the true (religion, unconscious, communism). The greatness of Lenin—according to Žižek—consisted in having conceived of the communist party as such an enabling entity, and as an externality for generating the proper class consciousness, led by intellectuals: [T]he need for the Party stems from the fact that the working class is never “fully itself”. So the ultimate meaning of Lenin’s insistence on this externality is that “adequate” class-consciousness does not emerge “spontaneously”, that it does not correspond to a “spontaneous tendency” of the working class; on the contrary, what is “spontaneous” is the misperception of one’s social position, so that “adequate” class-consciousness has to be fought out through hard work. (Žižek 2002, p. 189)

Lenin’s conception of the party thus responds to an immanent problem of the working class itself: its inability, from itself, to achieve insight into truth immediately, that is, without mediation. Just as the believer requires God’s outside intervention in order to make the ‘leap of faith,’ just as the patient cannot recognize its unconscious desire without the figure of the analyst, so too does the working class depend upon the intervention of a party to ultimately realize its ‘historical mission.’ For Žižek, both Western Marxism and Soviet Marxism completely misunderstood Lenin’s genius in this respect. Instead of an authoritarian or even totalitarian apparatus of the party and force, criticized by some and affirmed by others, Lenin had

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nothing else in mind other than enabling the working class to recognize the secret of its desire (revolution) and thus itself as the subject of truth. The Cheka and Lubyanka, the terror and the purges, the repression of the Kronstadt sailors’ uprising—all just a misunderstanding? Among the most recent attempts to invoke communism as an “idea,” as a “hypothesis” or as a “horizon,”42 Žižek’s postmodern neo-Leninism is certainly the most shrill, but not the least significant voice; it lives from the defiantly provocative attitude of countering those who have always seen a totalitarian temptation in communism not with sophisticated selfenlightenment,43 but with hermeneutic and narrative exaggeration; why shouldn’t one “shamelessly” and “courageously,” says Žižek, declare Marxism to be a “secularized” religion with Lenin as its messiah (ibid., p. 187)? And why shouldn’t we admit that taking “the proletarian standpoint is exactly like making a leap of faith […], yes, the “truth” of Marxism is perceptible only to those who accomplish this leap, not to neutral observers” (ibid.)? And isn’t Brecht’s chorus in The Measures Taken correctly in reminding the young comrades that his ego (Ich) is only preserved in the we (Wir) of “the Party’s collective identity” (ibid., p. 188); that he can and must fight for the truth, but never outside of the collective truth of the party? (see ibid.). However, the fact that confession, the bullet, and the lime pit are what’s waiting for the young comrade outside of the party, that the confession, bullet, and lime pit thus belong directly to the (politics of) truth of the party, Žižek does not further narrate to the end. His (film-) scenic narratives and interpretations often end where Lenin’s politics of truth (ibid., p. 176), reasserted with great verve against “postmodern multiculturalists,” becomes ugly and bloody: namely, where the emphatic politics of truth and truth procedures turn into practices of power and violence against those not in possession of the truth. Žižek’s attempt to re-actualize communism in the twenty-first century, supplemented by Lacan and Hegel, also remains stuck in the fundamental problematique as presented. As with Lukács and Sartre before him, the communist project and the project of a critique of society once developed by Marx and Engels is transformed into the apotheosis of a communist

42 See especially Badiou (2011) and Dean (2012). 43 See the most recent works by Bini Adamczak, in particular Adamczak (2021).

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party endowed with all truth and power to fulfill the task of empowering/subjugating revolutionary subjects. Perhaps it’s not necessary these days to quote Stirner in order to explain this metamorphosis of Marx’s project, but Stirner is and remains the genealogical point of departure for the critique of this metamorphosis. As with Marx, with Stirner a new language of critique of society comes into the world, still important in our present; and just as Marx unceasingly reminds us even today that the capitalist form of socialization exercises domination in the form of the exploitation of people by people, Stirner with his radical critique of power reminds us what price the subject must sometimes pay in order to obtain access to truth; he reminds us that our societies have formed another form of exercising power: subjugation through subjectivation.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, and Matthias Spekker

This book is not a contribution to (re)establishing an orthodoxy in matters of theory of revolution. Nor does it—as the reader will have noticed by now—attempt to correct Marx’s supposedly partly flawed critique and ‘update’ it for today’s conditions, that is, make it fitting and usable according to standards alien to it. The former would be ahistorical, the latter hubris. But hopefully, it has also become clear that our meticulous research into Marx’s work is neither the expression of pure Marxological contemplation, nor does it pursue the questionable aim of banishing Marx’s thought to the nineteenth century, thereby robbing it of its bite.1 But to what end then the enterprise of delving once again into Marx’s work and illuminating in detail in three studies the interrelation between Marx’s scientific research and his communist motives, the interrelation between truth and revolution in his understanding of scientifically substantiated critique of society? What we wished to contribute to with 1 This is the case, for example, with Jonathan Sperber’s biography of Marx, whose subtitle “A Nineteenth-Century Life” is symptomatic in this respect.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bohlender, A.-S. Schönfelder, M. Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17358-5_5

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our studies is the urgent (renewed) reflection of materialist critique of society on its own theoretical and practical conditions of possibility, on the preconditions of the validity of its claim to truth, and on the latter’s actual consequences. To do so, one must return to the site of emergence (Entstehungsherd) of materialist critique of society itself, since here one finds its entire thematic as well as methodological basic problematique, while at the same time serious problems become visible which necessarily arise from this form of critique itself, as do equally serious problems which the further course of history has ultimately confronted materialist critique of society with. Such a reflection is therefore also not the same as a reconstruction of Marx’s theory. Of course, in light of the history of the reception of Marx’s theory characterized by massive distortions, truncations, and falsifications, and especially in light of the actual political implementations of ideologies concocted on that basis, the conscientious reconstruction of Marx’s argumentations was and is an urgent matter the practical importance of which can hardly be overestimated. And obviously our studies are also based to a considerable extent on such a work of reconstruction. However, if left at that, such conscientious reconstruction also invites one to treat the ‘pure doctrine’ thus purged of all misinterpretations, as can not infrequently be observed, as the universal answer to all questions in a similarly ahistorical and dogmatic manner as the criticized Marxist ideologues. With such an approach, the temporal core (Zeitkern) of Marx’s critique and its truth would be completely overlooked. One cannot become aware of this temporal core solely by precise exegesis of the argumentative steps in Capital and by analysis of its mode of presentation, as important as both are. By means of an additional genealogical look behind the finished scientific presentation, on the other hand, and by means of reflection upon the epistemic preconditions of Marx’s critique as well as the methodological peculiarities it gives rise to, not least becomes the powerlessness comprehensible to which materialist critique has largely been condemned since the failure of the revolutions around the end of the First World War and, at the very latest, since the triumphant advance of Fascism and National Socialism. It is such a reflection upon the immanent relation between truth and revolution in Marx’s thought that makes it possible to discuss this problem, instead of having to suppress it, as the dogmatism of both Marxism and Marxology do. ‘What problem? Why powerlessness?’, many Marxologists will ask. ‘The scientific nature of Marx’s critique has nothing to do with his political

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motives, but rather stands on its own. In fact, science must be separated even more clearly from this revolutionary-theoretical ballast external to it.’ And the dogmatic Marxists will ask: ‘What problem? Why powerlessness? The revolutionary movement has suffered considerable setbacks, but Marx nevertheless proved scientifically that the capitalist forces of production and class antagonism must advance to the point where they will necessarily trigger a communist revolution.’ But as soon as one examines the very understanding of truth that underlies Marx’s scientific critique, the nonchalance with which both Marxologists and Marxists reassure themselves of the self-evidence of Marx’s science cannot be sustained anymore. We have shown that truth for Marx is neither simply the correct description of individual facts nor the simple theoretical duplication of society as it is. What’s more: In that we demonstrate how or as what Marx understands the existing relations, it becomes clear that such a mere reproduction, that is, a positivist concept of this world, is a fallacy. Marx understands the capitalist relations as an inverted totality: as relations, in which the social nexus has hitherto only realized itself in an autonomous way through the selfdividedness and antagonistic split of the human species, and in which the dispositions and potentialities of the human beings only unfold in inverted form, that is, people have not yet appropriated them as their common species capabilities, and not yet placed the world under their rational determinations. For Marx, the latter, the sublation of the capitalist form of society, is communism, which is necessarily generated as a determinate negation, as the “riddle of history solved,” by this inverted form of society itself. Truth, accordingly, is in an emphatic sense something that must be achieved historically, the “true resolution” (MECW 3, p. 296) of untrue social relations, and a scientific presentation is only true if it manages to conceptually grasp the historical transcendence of such relations. However, the recognition and presentation of the capitalist relations as an inverted, not yet rational society do not simply result from their mere empirical observation, but presuppose epistemically quite specific fundamental philosophical assumptions about and a specific interest in communism. That should not at all be misunderstood as epistemic relativism, and truth for Marx correspondingly as something actually merely subjective. Since the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts at the latest and up to the elaborated critique of economic forms in Capital, Marx’s scientific critique is suffused with the claim of systematically presenting the

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capitalist relations of production as ones that generate communism as “the real movement that sublates the present state of things” (MECW 5, p. 49, c.t.). So in the scientific presentation, those epistemic presuppositions are virtually recovered as objective ones. But the problem is: In the end, the burden of proof lies with the practical realization of communism, for otherwise the argumentation would remain circular. This problem is also reflected in the second Thesis on Feuerbach, according to which ultimately it is “not a question of theory but […] a practical question” whether such an argument can claim validity. “Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice” (ibid., p. 3). Now, by that, Marx did not seek to relativize his own theories but, on the contrary, criticized all those ‘philosophical communists’ and ‘true socialists’ of a Feuerbachian complexion who in the pre-March period had, in his opinion, only held up from outside abstract principles against the political and social conditions of that time. Marx’s self-understanding here is thus that his thought converges with the practical movement that is actually historically taking place at the time. But precisely here lies the temporal core of his critique: In this historical constellation of real revolutionary struggles, such an assumption still had a certain plausibility, and correspondingly, it was conducive to knowledge and historically indeed appropriate to conceptualize the capitalist formation of society methodically in the light of this assumed communist tendency as an inverted, not yet rational form of human relations that produces communism as its determinate negation, as something in becoming (Werdendes ) that emerges from it. That is what we call the immanent relation between truth and revolution in Marx’s scientific critique. But how is the truth claim of this critique affected when such a historical constellation doesn’t exist anymore, when that “real movement” has become so precarious and improbable, that the convergence of materialist theory and revolutionary practice assumed by Marx can no longer be seriously asserted, and the objection of the second Thesis on Feuerbach must now also be directed against Marx’s critique itself? This problem already becomes apparent in Marx’s work itself, as can be traced notably in his journalistic analyses of the European regimes of restoration of the 1850s: Marx presents authoritarian forms of rule such as those of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte not as the expression of the boundless striving for power or individual qualities of leadership, but rather explicitly in class-theoretical terms as a counter-revolutionary defense against the potential of revolutionary class struggles increasingly

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growing in bourgeois society. So here as well he grasps the political facts in light of the possibility of communism, a possibility which is only (erst ) historically unfolded by the relations themselves. Proceeding in this vein, he analytically comes considerably closer to events than other political commentators. At the same time, however, it’s astonishing the certainty with which Marx paints authoritarianism and the paralysis of revolutionary action as merely transitional phenomena that must be followed by an even stronger revolutionary movement which a Bonaparte cannot permanently keep in check. Here once again the epistemological problematique of Marx’s scientific critique becomes clear: The revival of a communist development that is only temporarily halted from the outside also bears the practical burden of proof for Marx’s materialism. That Marx never considered the actual possibility of a permanent suspension of class struggle, be it through authoritarian practices of rule or the permanent consolidation of the bourgeois status quo, is thus not merely an expression of the fact that in his time the extent and thoroughness with which the possibility of a liberated society would ultimately be put into question in the twentieth century had obviously not yet been reached by far.2 Rather, it belongs to the immanent disposition of materialist critique of society that it is necessarily reliant on the hidden reason within its object, the criticized society, and must therefore assume it: The scientific recognition of the irrational totality—and that is capitalist society—is not possible other than as critique, but the latter’s own standard can only lie in this inverted, and therefore sublatable society itself—not in an anthropological substance supposedly untouched by it, something authentically (eigentlich) human, or similar ideological constructs. In other words, capitalist society can only be meaningfully conceptually grasped under the determinations of reason, because and above all if it also practically develops the possibility of its rational— according to Marx’s understanding, communist—sublation as its own becoming. In light of the experiences since the 1930s at the latest, however, the continued unwavering progress of such a development can no longer be seriously asserted: Up to then, every historically powerful attempt to sublate the capitalist form of domination and create an association of free human beings in Marx’s sense had failed due to the superiority of 2 After all, revolutionary struggles flared up again later in France—albeit not until after two decades of Bonapartist rule.

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capitalist society and of Reaction. The political reasons and sometimes also historical coincidences taking immediate practical effect are certainly manifold, but at a more fundamental structural level, an increasing ideological and psychological integration of the subjects and an increasing ‘loss of transcendence’ of the existing capitalist relations of production can be observed since the beginning of the twentieth century. In capitalism, being a subject capable of acting, and maintaining this precarious status in the face of the constant threat of individual downfall that emanates from the mute compulsion of this form of society increasingly demands of people—across all class boundaries—such a high degree of self-conditioning and active adaptation3 that they are less and less able or even willing to think about overcoming these relations. This has by no means led to a decrease of suffering from these relations, but people are less and less able to work on it rationally—too strong has become the objectively necessary identification with the logic of these relations. Rather, this suffering regularly turns pathologically outward as persecutory mania and can assume the most monstrous dimensions. Instead of liberation, the twentieth century thus put forward mass crimes and an antisemitic mania for extermination in the form of Fascism and National Socialism, and its culmination point Auschwitz. Materialist critique of society, which attempts to conceptualize the social relations in light of the possibility of a species united in a rational association of free people, generated by these relations themselves, has, in view of the actual historical development, necessarily become anachronistic and powerless. Because dogmatic traditional Marxism never grasped this inner disposition of materialist critique, but instead believed that Marx had irrefutably proved capitalism’s necessary heading for its communist overthrow, it has—despite its followers’ hands-on resistance against Fascism and National Socialism, and despite all the sacrifices they’ve made—hardly ever grasped the entire scope of the actual historical development, nor contributed substantially to its understanding: Whoever thinks the ‘laws of history’ are always on their side must regard even world war and genocide ultimately as merely a temporary stumble, a painful way station on

3 In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno emphasize the genealogy of bourgeois man accordingly: “Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self – the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings – was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 26).

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the vouchsafed course of history. In order to be able to continue maintaining this notion, any reformist political movement, no matter how small,—and not infrequently, clearly reactionary and regressive movements as well—is transfigured as anticipation of the red dawn, and the development of the productive forces is invoked again and again, hopefully at some point really shattering the system. In reality, communism is thereby only postponed ad calendas graecas. In academic Marx research, in contrast, the act of repression that can frequently be observed, by which the temporal core of Marx’s critique and its specific relation between truth and revolution is made to disappear, is of a more systematic nature: Everything reminiscent of ‘unscientific’ statements about revolution or even of the philosophy of history, is split off as ‘exoteric,’ in order get to the supposedly scientific ‘core’ of Marx’s critique. That Marx’s scientific knowledge of capital necessarily lives from the presumed possibility of its determinate negation by the association of free people can then no longer even be thought. The advantage of this ‘solution,’ meanwhile, is that one has simply relieved Marx’s science of the problem of the actual course of history and can engage with it without spending a thought on the fact that it is fundamentally affected in its inner disposition by the massive contestation of all hopes for emancipation since the twentieth century and by the transformation of the inverted society into total barbarism. Only by reflecting upon how in Marx’s critique truth and revolution are related to each other in an indissoluble nexus, that is, only by reflecting upon why materialist critique is possible only under the assumption that the inverted capitalist society, due to its inner dynamic, produces the practical possibility of its sublation—and thereby the standard of this critique—does the massive crisis to which materialist critique must succumb when this assumption can no longer be maintained—except by denying reality—really become graspable. In view of its by now so rigorous closure against its own transcendence and even more in view of its structurally inherent potential for antisemitic and racist fury which historically has already been unleashed, capitalist reality has increasingly eluded materialist critique, which must necessarily assume that its object already contains the potential for emancipation in inverted form. So the crisis of critique here does not arise from an error to be corrected (or split off). On the contrary, materialist critique becomes anachronistic because history itself has fallen into crisis and capitalist relations have cemented their own untruth.

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On the other hand, however, Marx’s understanding of scientific critique holds another problem, having become increasingly tangible since the beginning of the twentieth century at the latest, which is already structurally inherent to this critique, and the reasons for which of all things cannot be blamed on changed external factors. The talk is of revolutionary subjectivation, that is of how, according to Marx’s scientific understanding of capitalist totality, the emergence of a subject can be conceived that executes the sublation of this totality and thus historical truth. Already in The Holy Family, Marx and Engels argued against German philosophical communism that the point isn’t “what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today” (MECW 4, p. 37). In the manuscripts for The German Ideology, this thought culminates inter alia in the pithy determination that communism, the world-historical action of the proletariat, is “the real movement which sublates the present state of things” (MECW 5, p. 49, c.t.). In particular against Stirner’s critique that communism is ultimately based upon quasi-theological determinations of the human being, Marx argues that it is solely the capitalist relations themselves that, quite independently of any ideological justifications, historically necessarily bring forth communism. In this way he is able to elegantly evade Stirner’s attacks—which by all means hit some weak spots of ‘true socialism’ that also Marx combated—while at the same time portraying Stirner’s defense of the ego as a ‘petit-bourgeois’ ideology whose arguments can’t be taken seriously. Although in the reception of Marx the validity of the materialist critique of Stirner’s epistemologically relativist individualism drifting into babble has always been correctly emphasized, it has never been recognized that Marx’s counterattack at the same time threw the baby out with the bathwater. For Stirner—long before Nietzsche, before Freud, before Critical Theory, and before Foucault—explicitly poses the question of what force and what procedures of power are actually necessary to turn people into bourgeois, and, not least, communist subjects. Marx ultimately simply evades this problem, and the possibility for this evasion also lies in the methodological disposition of his materialist critique itself. For if one wishes to explain the possibility of communist revolution with

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conceptual necessity as a determinate negation from the dynamics of the capitalist structure itself, then this encompasses a corresponding understanding of the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity. One must be able to understand and present the communist subjects as the objective result of historical development. That—and not just any random movement that can be empirically ascertained—is what Marx, who very consciously makes use of Hegelian concepts here, understands by a real movement of sublation. The problem that comes to light here is fundamentally inherent to materialist critique of society. Capitalist society can be presented as a whole to be sublated, as an inverted totality, only by means of universal and necessary concepts, and only in this mode can critique also grasp the immanent dynamic of sublation of this society and thus the emergence of a movement that will ultimately place the world under its practical determinations in a consciously rational way—and thus also according to universally applicable and necessary principles. Only in this mode— through the conceptual unfolding of the false society—can a revolutionary movement, the subject of historical truth, be plausibly thought. But what if the actual people, above all the proletarians according to Marx’s understanding, simply don’t want and do what they’re supposed to be historically “compelled to do” “in accordance with [their] being,” as it is convincingly and objectively presented by materialist critique? This question is fundamentally outside the horizon of scientific, materialist critique of society, for between its general determination of revolutionary subjectivation and the activity of concrete human beings, between scientific critique and actual practice, there exists a real problem of mediation, and this problem can’t be solved at all solely by means of theoretical thought, that is, according to the standards of universality, objectivity, and necessity immanent to it. This problem represents a chasm that can only be bridged practically, and precisely here is where Stirner sticks his finger in the wound: If in reality people obviously don’t simply become, in the course of an objective development, ‘subjects of truth,’ then they must be made into just such subjects, or identified and excommunicated as counterrevolutionaries. This consequence can to some degree already be observed in Marx himself, for example when he attempts to by and by bring the League of the Just into line through expulsion campaigns, or when he tries to separate the ‘lumpenproletariat’ from the circle of the ‘real’, potentially revolutionary proletariat. The validity of Stirner’s critique of

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subjectivation obviously can’t just be wiped away by the scientific determination of the ‘real’ dynamic and movement of capitalist society toward its sublation. It ultimately fell to Bolshevism, with its inexorable logic of the cadre party as the ‘guardian’ of the revolutionary truth, to reveal the entire potential for violence inherent to the scientific determination of revolutionary subjectivity if the latter’s methodological status is not reflected upon, but rather that chasm between scientific critique and the terrain of practice is closed by using all means available to adapt subjects to their ‘true determination’ and the ‘objective course of history.’ Caught up in this non-reflective dogmatism, authoritarian party communism—which by no means began with Stalin—had to take action in the name of ‘historical truth’ all the more blindly against any supposed deviation the more actual history didn’t simply run according to its once conceived scientific concept. Thus, the fanatical search for culprits and the struggle against alleged domestic and foreign enemies of the revolution gradually turned the latter into a mass grave. Obviously none of that is the direct logical consequence of the materialist critique of capitalist totality. There are compelling reasons for the “absolutism of truth” (Marcuse) that necessarily inheres in this scientific critique and its determinations; the latter isn’t even possible without the former. In the concrete form of his engagement with Stirner and in the fundamental absence of a materialist critique of communist politics in his work, however, it can be seen that Marx did not take seriously enough the theoretically insoluble problem of mediation between the explanatory claim of materialist critique and the contingent practice of actual people. It would be absurd to draw a direct line from Marx’s understanding of revolutionary subjectivation to the unleashed violent practice of the Bolshevik cadre party—not to even speak of the once again fashionable affirmation of Leninism as the solution to this problem of mediation. However, it also doesn’t do justice to the matter to simply position the literalistic retelling of Marx’s theory against later Marxist practice, thus demonstrating that Marx—“Tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne suis pas Marxiste”—really wasn’t responsible for the practice of his epigones. Rather, materialist critique is forced again and again to reflect upon itself and on the problem of mediation necessarily immanent to it, in order to contain the dangers arising from it. With our studies of Marx’s understanding of truth we’ve not formulated a Marxist instruction manual for action, nor created the foundation

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for a now really true Marxism applicable to the present. Rather we have attempted to indicate a fundamental dilemma: Scientific critique of society that really grasps its object is—as can be traced in Marx’s work—only possible as a materialist one; its truth and the possibility of revolution stand in an immanent, indissoluble interrelation. But only if one reflects upon this interrelation and takes it seriously will one be able, or rather: be forced to understand at the same time, to what serious extent the object of materialist critique has eluded this very critique since the twentieth century and has turned it into an anachronism. Materialist critique draws its standard and its criterion of truth from the real and recognizable possibility of a liberated, truly human future. This possible future, in light of the actual course of history, can no longer be seriously grounded in the present; it can only be remembered as a past future that never became real. The fact that party-Bolshevism in particular also massively contributed to killing off this future, because it was able to build upon Marx’s lack of reflection on the indissoluble problem of mediation between materialist critique and revolutionary practice, and simply resolved this problem in a murderous way, constitutes the distinctive drama of this course. Precisely because, in the face of the almost total closure of capitalist society against its own rational sublation, it has become anachronistic, Marx’s materialist critique must be adhered to, for within it, the thought of a liberated, truly human future, which was once determinable in reality but was then thrust into the past by further history, is systematically preserved as something still pending. With our return to its site of emergence, however, we have also tried to pave the way for realizing that if materialist critique does not incorporate reflection upon its necessarily immanent blind spots and its fundamental contestation by barbarism that had become real, then it’s pointless.

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Index

Explanatory note: Some major concepts and names are not listed in this index as they don’t just occur sporadically in the book but are its main object, thus being present explicitly or implicitly throughout the whole text (e.g. Marx, truth, revolution, proletariat, etc.). A academic Marx research, chapter 1, 35, 38, 42, 185. See also Marxology, Marxological Adorno, Theodor W., 53–55, 78, 131, 152, 184. See also Critical Theory alienation, estrangement, 24, chapter 2.2, 58, 76, 144, 148 Althusser, Louis, 22, 31, 38, 42, 50, 53, 54, 131. See also structuralism anachronistic, 184, 185, 189. See also antiquatedness Anderson, Kevin B., 19, 90 Anderson, Perry, 131, 132 antiquatedness, 86, 87. See also anachronistic anti-Semitism, antisemitic, 27, 184, 185

Arendt, Hannah, 21, 86, 122 Aristotle, 72 Arndt, Andreas, 45, 58 Arthur, Chris, 24 association of free human beings, association of free people, 13, 27, 68–71, 73, 85, 86, 130, 183–185 Auschwitz, 78, 86, 184 authenticity (Eigentliches ), authentic, 14, 21, 51, 52, 76, 77, 135, 137, 183. See also Heidegger, Martin authoritarianism/authoritarian, 17, 18, 28, 32, 95, 107, 120, 122, 125, 127–130, 137, 175, 182, 183, 188 automatic subject, 78, 79 B Badiou, Alain, 13, 21, 176

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bohlender, A.-S. Schönfelder, M. Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17358-5

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barbarism, 43, 78, 87, 130, 185, 189 Bauer, Bruno, 59, 60, 118, 144, 157, 158 Benjamin, Walter, 16, 20, 110 Bensaïd, Daniel, 14, 15 Bidet, Jacquet, 28, 29 Bolshevism, 4, 12, 133, 188, 189. See also Soviet Marxism; Soviet Union Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon, 16–18, 20, 91, 92, 98–100, 103–108, 110, 123–125, 182, 183. See also Bonapartism, bonapartist; emperor; regent Bonapartism, bonapartist, 18, 32, 91, 96, 99, 106, 107, 117, 125–127, 183. See also Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon Bonefeld, Werner, 21–23. See also Open Marxism Breuer, Stefan, 78 Britain, 91, 102, 109. See also England Bruhn, Joachim, 43, 77, 78, 84. See also ISF (Initiative Sozialistisches Forum)

C Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 4, 17, 21, 23, 26, 31, chapter 2.1, 2.4, 2.5, 114, 119, 123, 173. See also Grundrisse Carver, Terrell, 14, 15, 17, 18 Chattopadhyay, Paresh, 19, 27, 81 Christianity, 58, 69, 71, 148, 151–153. See also Protestantism; religion circulation, 15, 79, 97 class struggle, 3, 4, 8, 11, 20–22, 91, 98, 104, 111, 113, 115, 121, 123, 124, 126, 128, 132, 135,

136, 138, 169, 173, 182, 183. See also social conflict intensification of, 95, 98, 119 pacification of, 32, 95, 100, 102, 104, 105, 108–110, 112, 117, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128 repression of, 120 Class Struggles in France, The, 99, 124, 136 Communist Committees of Correspondence, 8, 172 Communist League, 8, 117, 157, 167, 172 Communist Manifesto, The, 7, 15, 19, 64, 94, 157 consciousness, communist/revolutionary, 3–21, 23–26, 28, 30–33, 35, 37, 41–47, 49, 52, 55, 56, 61–70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 83–85, 90–95, 98, 103–105, 113, 115, 117, 118, 121–124, 127–129, 131–139, 142–146, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160–175, 179, 181–184, 186–189 counterrevolution, counterrevolutionary, 33, 87, 133, 134, 170, 182, 187 Crédit Mobilier, 99, 100 crisis, 32, 85, 95, 111, 112, 127–130, 185 economic, 100, 111, 126 “ideological crisis of the proletariat”, 134, 137, 138, 168, 171. See also Lukács, Georg Critical Theory, 21, 42, 60, 66, 132, 186. See also Adorno, Theodor W.; Horkheimer, Max; Marcuse, Herbert critique of communist politics, 28, 29, chapter 4.3, 188

INDEX

Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , 53, 63, 107 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction to the, 90, 123 D Dean, Jodi, 27, 28, 176 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 21 determinate negation, 8, 16, 26, 31, 66, 68, 73, 75, 83–85118, 181, 182, 185, 186. See also negation of the negation determinism, deterministic, 26, 36, 83 dialectic, dialectical, 24, 26, 38, 41, 42, 51, 54, 56, 63, 75, 95, 98, 114, 129, 157, 169, 174 dispositif, 8, 29, 33, 137–139, 171 domination, 3, 7, 11, 19–21, 29, 54, 57, 65, 72, 76, 92, 115, 118, 127, 140–142, 146, 148, 158, 160, 161, 164, 166, 170, 174, 177. See also rule forms of, 5, 7, 33, 122, 142, 149, 150, 155, 161–163, 166, 170, 173, 183 relations of, 6, 31, 85, 95, 97, 116, 118, 142, 143, 171, 174 techniques of, 95, 122, 123, 126 E Eßbach, Wolfgang, 141, 163 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 22, chapter 2.2, 58–62, 65, 76, 78, 94, 181 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The, 16–18, 20, 92, 99, 100, 106, 124, 168 emperor, 98–100, 105, 106, 108. See also Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon Empire, 90, 91, 99, 104, 108, 127 British, 53, 90

211

French, 98 Second, 20, 100, 106, 108 empiricism, 53, 65, 85, 153 engagement, 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 31, 58, 97–98, 113f16, 118, 124f20, 120–128, 129–130, 141, 142, 159, 160, 185, 188. See also journalism; press England, 18, 19, 31, 32, 64, 90–92, 94–96, 98, 103, 104, 106, 109, 111, 112, 120–122, 124, 125, 128, 142. See also Britain epistemology, epistemological, 6, 7, 9, 15, 22, 25, 31, 39, 46, 50, 54, 118, 132, 183, 186 esoteric/exoteric, 38, 83, 185 eurocentrism, 19 executive, 104, 106, 107, 110, 121, 125, 156. See also government; state Existentialism, 22, 78, 138 exploitation, 7, 22, 29, 80, 82, 102, 148, 162, 164, 177 F Fascism, 16, 180, 184 fetish, fetishism, 36, 37, 65, 67, 70, 73, 74, 171 Feuerbachian socialists, 141, 145, 158, 159. See also Feuerbach, Ludwig; true socialism/socialists Feuerbach, Ludwig, 9, 11, chapter 2.2, 2.3, 71, 73, 141–145, 151, 153, 157–160, 165, 182 forces of production, productive forces, 26, 59, 61–64, 69, 76, 78, 80, 81, 92, 93, 115, 116, 119, 121, 128, 162, 163, 168, 169, 181, 185 Foucault, Michel, 29, 29, 137, 139, 148, 149, 152, 186

212

INDEX

on truth, power, and subjectivity, chapter 4.2 b, 171 France, 17, 20, 31, 32, 64, 90–92, 94–96, 98, 99, 103–106, 108, 117, 120–122, 125, 128, 142, 148, 183 free trade, 91, 102, 103, 110, 126

G genealogy, genealogical, 6, 60, 141, 177, 180, 184 German Ideology, The, 25, 31, chapter 2.3, 74, 78, 92, 93, 118, 123, 125, 141, 144, 157, 158, 165, 167, 172, 186 Chapter III. Saint Max, 60, chapter 4.2 c government, 6, 28, 31, 89–91, 95–98, 101–105, 108–112, 116, 120–122, 125–128, 137, 138. See also executive; state Gramsci, Antonio, 169 Grundrisse, 39, 69, 74–77, 94 Grün, Karl, 11, 60, 158, 159 Gunn, Richard, 21, 23. See also Open Marxism

H hand-to-hand fight, 6, 9, 14, 142, 143, 174 Hegel, G.W.F., Hegelian, 15, 24, 31, 40–42, chapter 2.2, 58, 63–65, 79, 81, 107, 118, 133, 139, 141, 158, 160, 161, 170, 176, 187 Heidegger, Martin, Heideggerianism, 21, 78. See also authenticity (Eigentliches ) Heinrich, Michael, 22, 43, 44, 50–53, 54, 68, 71

Hess, Moses, 11, 44, 59, 60, 141, 143–148, 151, 154, 155, 157–160, 162, 163, 170 on Stirner, chapter 4.2 a Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation, The, 36, 75, 82, 83, 85 Holloway, John, 22, 23, 75, 77, 78. See also Open Marxism Holy Family, The, 164, 186 Honneth, Axel, 5, 12 Horkheimer, Max, 1–5, 11, 42, 51, 56, 66, 131, 152, 184. See also Critical Theory human essence, 21–23, 47–51, 57. See also species-being humanism, 38, 49, 50, 143, 158

I idealism, idealist, German idealism, 2, 10, 40, 42, 49, 51, 53–56, 58, 59, 63, 85, 97, 142, 144, 157, 158, 160, 161, 165, 167, 173, 174 ideology, ideological, 1, 4, 26, 33, 50, 60, 95, 102, 110, 123, 126, 127, 134, 137–139, 142, 147, 151, 158–162, 168, 171, 174, 175, 180, 183, 184, 186 critique of ideology, chapter 2.3, 37f4, 74f55, 123, 160–162. See also Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph; Smith, Adam individual, individuality, 2, 6, 11, 25, 32, 35, 36, 40–42, 46, 50, 51, 53, 55, 57, 61, 62, 65–72, 74, 76, 77, 80–82, 84, 86, 100, 102, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121, 125, 128, 129, 132, 135–138, 143–147, 149, 150, 153, 155, 156, 162–166, 181, 182, 184

INDEX

International Workingmen’s Association, 8, 172 inversion, inverted, 7, 8, 16, 22, 26, 31, 41, 43, 49, 52, 53, 57–59, 66, 70, 71, 73, 76–79, 82, 83–86, 97, 115, 116, 118, 123, 181–183, 185, 187 ISF (Initiative Sozialistisches Forum), 78. See also Bruhn, Joachim

213

M Mäder, Denis, 51, 52 Manifesto of the Communist Party. See The Communist Manifesto Marcuse, Herbert, 4, 11, 42, 46, 52, 53, 57, 85, 131, 188. See also Critical Theory Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, 5 Marx-Engels-Werke, 64

J journalism, 9, 59, chapter 3. See also engagement; press

L labor, 3, 8, 15, 16, 24, 33, 39, chapter 2.2, 58, 61, 65, 67–70, 72–74, 78–82, 84, 102, 114, 132, 147, 151, 154, 155, 161–163, 168, 169 abstract (human) labor, 15, 24, 40, 46, 49, 54, 70–73, 74, 76, 78, 147 associated labor, 114 division of labor, 50, 61, 62, 65, 72, 78, 114, 161–163 large-scale industry, 36, 61, 62, 81 League of the Just , 60, 172, 187 Lenin, W.I., Leninism, 4, 12, 13, 27, 28, 30, 33, 124, 133, 136, 172, 174–176, 188 Lindner, Urs, 38 Lukács, Georg, 28, 33, 131–141, 168, 170, 171, 176. See also crisis: “ideological crisis of the proletariat” lumpenproletariat, 11, 33, 124, 167, 168, 187 dangerous proletariat, 154, chapter 4.2 c

Marxism, traditional Marxism, 4, 7, 26–28, 30, 49, 61, 131–133, 135, 139, 170, 174, 176, 180, 184, 189. See also Soviet Marxism; Western Marxism Marxology, Marxological, 36, 38, 86, 179, 180. See also academic Marx research materialism, materialist, historical materialism, 14, 16–18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28–30, 32, 33, 38, 40–42, 45, 48, 53, 54, 56–59, 62–64, 66, 77, 78, 83–85, 92–96, 107, 108, 113–120, 126, 128, 132, 139, 141–143, 148, 153, 157, 159–162, 168, 170, 174, 180, 182–189 methodology, methodological, 24, 26, 41, 74, 94, 113, 131, 132, 180, 186, 188 money, 22, 24, 54, 70–72, 74, 76, 79, 100, 111, 144, 146, 148, 151, 155, 163 movement, 3, 4, 6, 8–11, 19, 39, 43, 47, 49, 50, 54, 57–61, 64, 66, 70, 77–79, 84, 85, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 109, 111, 113, 114, 117, 124, 128–130, 134, 137, 147, 148, 157, 159, 160, 162–165, 170, 173, 181–183, 185–188

214

INDEX

N nationalism, 32, 91, 95, 120, 123, 124 National Socialism, 180, 184. See also Nazi nature, naturalism, 2, 12, 15, 16, 23, 29, 37, 41, 46, 48–50, 52–54, 58, 66, 67, 69, 75, 76, 97, 111, 114–116, 145, 153, 175, 180, 185 Nazi, 129. See also National Socialism negation of the negation, 47, 48, 52, 53, 75. See also determinate negation Neue Marx-Lektüre, 42. See also Heinrich, Michael; Schmidt, Alfred Neue Rheinische Zeitung – Organ der Demokratie, 8 Neue Rheinische Zeitung – Politisch-Ökonomische Revue, 90, 116 New York Daily Tribune, 8, 116 O On the Jewish Question, 54 Open Marxism, 21–23. See also Bonefeld, Werner; Gunn, Richard; Holloway, John; Psychopedis, Kosmas Otechestvenniye Zapiski, 36, 75, 81 P Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 109, 110, 123 Paris Commune, 89, 117 party, 3, 9, 11, 27, 28, 33, 64, 110, 129, 133–138, 171, 172, 174–177, 188, 189 communist party, 27, 29, 33, 131, 133–140, 171–173, 175

petite bourgeoisie, 11, 99, 134 philosophy of history, historical-philosophical, 2, 16, 36, 37, 43, 51, 63, 74, 86, 93, 113, 118, 119, 185 political economy, political economists, bourgeois economists, economists, 4, 10, 15, 17, 22, 23, 26, 31, 36–43, 47, 48, 50, 51, 58, 65, 67–69, 74, 77, 78, 81, 86, 111, 114, 119, 148. See also Ricardo, David; Smith, Adam populism, 17, 32, 95, 120, 122–124 positivism, positivist, 41, 57, 74, 118, 181 postmodernism, postmodern, 14, 15, 27–28, 60, 85, 176 Postone, Moishe, 23–25, 27, 43 Poverty of Philosophy, The, 9, 61, 69, 74, 117, 164 press, chapter 3, 144. See also engagement; journalism Protestantism, 69, 71, 73, 152. See also Christianity; religion Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, Proudhonism, 11, 57, 61, 65, 74, 107, 111, 155, 158, 167 Psychopedis, Kosmas, 21–23. See also Open Marxism R rational, 10, 26, 37, 40–42, 44–46, 53, 54, 57, 65–67, 69, 73, 75, 79, 83–86, 128, 147, 152, 181–184, 187, 189. See also reason reaction, reactionary, 20, 21, 54, 56, 64, 97, 104, 120, 121, 128, 184, 185 reason, 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 28, 31, 32, 35, 39,

INDEX

40–42, 44–46, 52–57, 62, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 83–87, 92, 103, 108, 115, 120–122, 125, 128, 136, 164, 172, 174, 183, 186, 188. See also rational regent, 108, 123. See also Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon religion/religious, 32, 37, 45, 49, 59, 60, 69, 71, 109, 123, 136, 145, 146, 148, 151, 152–155, 160, 161, 174–176. See also Christianity; Protestantism; theology restoration/restorative, 93, 98, 104, 116, 117, 127, 128, 182 Results of the Immediate Process of Production, 75, 76 Revolutions of 1848/49, 8, 32, 67, 93, 104, 111, 116, 126, 170, 172 Ricardo, David, 48, 81. See also political economy Robinsonades, 67–69, 71, 72 rule, 4, 9, 32, 54, 61, 99, 101–108, 115, 117, 120–123, 125, 126, 149, 151, 160–163, 168, 173, 182, 183. See also domination aristocratic, 91, 109, 110 authoritarian, 18, 95, 120, 125, 137, 182 Bonapartist, 32, 107, 117, 125, 183 bourgeois, 9, 91, 101, 110, 115, 125, 149, 151, 161, 162 Russia, 81, 103, 104, 133

S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 131, 171, 176 Schmidt, Alred, 37, 38, 42, 49, 57, 63, 74, 129. See also Neue Marx-Lektüre

215

Smith, Adam, 39, 48, 55. See also political economy social conflict, 21, 32, 43, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 104, 120, 129. See also class struggle Soviet Marxism, 4, 132, 175. See also Bolshevism; Marxism, traditional Marxism; Soviet Union Soviet Union, 103, 133. See also Bolshevism; Soviet Marxism species-being, (species) capacities/capabilities, species life, 23, 45–52, 54–56, 58–60, 62, 71, 76, 77, 81, 83, 115, 146, 153, 181, 184. See also human essence speculation, speculative, 47, 48, 53–55, 57, 58, 63–66, 100, 114, 118, 160–162. See also Hegel, G.W.F. Stalin, Josef, 4, 12, 13, 188 Starosta, Guido, 23–28 state, 1, 13, 15, 20, 21, 27, 29, 38, 44, 51, 54, 58, 59, 66, 71, 72, 74, 75, 84, 90–92, 95, 99–102, 104–109, 112, 113, 116, 119–123, 125–127, 144, 149, 151, 153–156, 160–162, 165, 168, 172, 182, 186. See also executive; government Bonapartist, 106, 125 modern, 92, 95, 107, 108, 126 prerogative, 32, 95, 125 Steckner, Anne, 43 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 17, 18, 44, 123, 124, 127, 172 Stirner, Max, 28, 32, 33, 59, 60, 141–164, 166–170, 173, 174, 177, 186–188. See also subjectivation critique of power, chapter 4.2 b

216

INDEX

structuralism, 38, 78. See also Althusser, Louis subjectivation, 28, 32, 33, 141, 150, 152, 154–156, 160, 166, 167, 170, 174, 177, 187, 188 subjectivity, 23–27, 150–152, 155, 161, 165, 188 revolutionary, 8, 21, 23–25, 30, 32, 129, 134, 137, 139, 140, 165, 167, 168, 171, 174, 177, 187, 188 subject of truth, 32, 139, 140, 149, 150, 165–167, 169–171, 173, 176 sublation, 31, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47–50, 54, 61, 62, 65, 66, 116, 129, 181, 183, 185–189

T Taylor, Miles, 18, 19, 111, 112 temporal core, 16, 30, 86, 129, 180, 182, 185 temporality, 15, 16 terror, 4, 12, 13, 176 theology, 2, 118, 143, 160, 186. See also religion Theories of Surplus Value, 72, 81 Theses on Feuerbach, 26, 54, 56, 84 Tomba, Massimiliano, 15, 16, 20–22, 77, 104, 108, 123, 124 totality, 23, 28, 41, 54, 57, 61, 62, 65, 70, 78, 114, 170, 181, 183, 186–188 transcendence, transcend, 37, 83, 147, 181, 184, 185 true socialism/socialists, 11, 60, 64, 158, 159, 182, 186 twentieth century, 5, 7, 16, 26–29, 33, 42, 43, 48, 78, 86, 87, 129, 130, 171, chapter 5

U universalism, universality, universal, 10, 18, 26, 40, 42, 44, 53–55, 61, 64, 71–73, 76, 77, 81, 82, 84, 85, 99, 107, 115, 116, 124, 165, 171, 180, 187 Utopia, Utopian(s), 3, 10, 11, 51, 61, 64, 111, 122 V value, 15, 16, 22, 24, 36, 39, 40, 64, 67–75, 77–81, 92, 97, 116, 125, 146 exchange value, 72 surplus value, 36, 79, 81 use value, 16, 72 value-form, 36, 70, 79 W war, 100, 103, 104, 117, 120, 128, 144, 159 wealth, 49, 50, 51, 69, 75–77, 81, 82, 84, 99, 111, 115, 144, 162 Weitling, Wilhelm, 11, 154, 155, 158, 169 Wendling, Amy, 17, 19, 22 Western Marxism, 131–133, 171, 175 Y Young Hegelians, 44, 45, 52, 53, 59, 141, 161 Z Zasulich, Vera, 81 Žižek, Slavoy, 12, 27, 28, 33, 175, 176 on Lenin and the Communist Party, chapter 4.4