The Philosophy of Marx - Étienne Balibar

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and who have now begun to shake the bourgeois order by their strikes, their ‘combinations’, their insurrections. They are, so to speak, the people of the people (le peuple du peuple), its most authentic fraction and the pre-figurement of its future. At the point when critical intellectuals, full of goodwill and illusions, are still pondering ways of democratizing the State and, to that end, of enlightening what they call ‘the masses’, those masses themselves have already gone into action; they have in fact already recommenced the revolution.

      In a decisive formula which recurs in all the texts of this period, from The Holy Family (1844) to the Communist Manifesto (1847), Marx will say that this proletariat ‘represents the dissolution in action of bourgeois/civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]’, meaning by this: (1) that the conditions of existence of the proletarians (what we would today term social exclusion) are in contradiction with all the principles of that society; (2) that they themselves live by other values than those of private property, profit, patriotism and bourgeois individualism; and (3) that their growing opposition to the State and the dominant class is a necessary effect of the modern social structure, but one which will soon prove lethal for that structure.

       Action in the present

      The words ‘in der Tat’ (in action) are particularly important. On the one hand, they evoke the present, effective reality, the ‘facts’ (die Tatsachen): they therefore express Marx’s profoundly anti-utopian orientation and allow us to understand why the reference to the first forms of proletarian class struggle, as it was beginning to become organized, is so decisive for him. The revolutionary practice of which the Theses speak does not have to implement a programme or a plan for the reorganization of society. Still less does it need to depend upon a vision of the future offered by philosophical and sociological theories (like those of the philanthropists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). But it must coincide with ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’, as Marx was soon to write in The German Ideology, explaining that this was the only materialist definition of communism.

      But here we touch on the second aspect: ‘in action’ also means that we are speaking of an activity (Tätigkeit), an enterprise unfolding in the present to which individuals are committed with all their physical and intellectual powers. This represents a significant reversal. As opponents of the philosophies of history which were always ruminating on the meaning of the past, and the philosophies of right which simply provided a commentary on the established order, Moses Hess and other ‘Young Hegelians’ had proposed a philosophy of action (and Feuerbach had published a manifesto for a philosophy of the future). But, deep down, what Marx means is this: action must be ‘acted out’ in the present, not commented upon or announced. But then philosophy must give up its place. It is not a ‘philosophy of action’, but action itself, action ‘sans phrases’, which corresponds to revolutionary demands and the revolutionary movement.

      And yet this injunction to give up its place cannot be ignored by philosophy: if it is consistent, philosophy must paradoxically see in that injunction its own realization. Naturally, Marx is thinking here, first and foremost, of that German idealist tradition with which his own thinking is imbued, a tradition which has such close affinities with the French revolutionary idea. He is thinking of the Kantian injunction to ‘do one’s duty’, to act in the world in conformity with the categorical imperative (the content of which is human fraternity). And also of Hegel’s phrase in the Phenomenology: ‘What must be is also in fact [in der Tat], and what only must be, without being, has no truth.’ More politically, he is thinking of the fact that modern philosophy has identified the universal with the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. But these principles, sacrosanct in theory, are either ignored and contradicted at every turn by bourgeois society, where neither equality nor even liberty reigns, to say nothing of fraternity; or else they are beginning to pass into reality, but in a revolutionary, ‘insurrectionary’ practice (the practice of those who are rising up together, where necessary substituting the ‘criticism of weapons’ for the ‘weapons of criticism’). It is, first and foremost, this consequence, which is somewhat hard for philosophy to take but arises out of its own principles, that Marx has in mind when he writes here of inverting idealism to produce materialism.

       The two sides of idealism

      Let us halt here, once again, and examine this point. If these remarks are accurate, it means that Marx’s materialism has nothing to do with a reference to matter – and this will remain the case for a very long time, until Engels undertakes to reunite Marxism with the natural sciences of the second half of the nineteenth century. For the moment, however, we are dealing with a strange ‘materialism without matter’. Why, then, is this term used?

      Here historians of philosophy come back into their own, in spite of the knocks they have just taken from Marx. They must explain this paradox, which also leads them to point up the imbroglio that arises from it (though, let us repeat, that imbroglio is anything but arbitrary). If Marx declared that it was a principle of materialism to change the world, seeking at the same time to differentiate his position from all existing materialism (which he terms ‘old’ materialism and which depends precisely on the idea that everything has ultimately to be explained in terms of matter – which is also an ‘interpretation of the world’ and contestable as such), this was clearly in order to take the contrary stance to that of idealism. The key to Marx’s formulations resides not in the word ‘materialism’, but in the term ‘idealism’. Once again, we must ask why this should be.

      The first reason is that the idealist interpretations of nature and history proposed by philosophers invoke principles like spirit, reason, consciousness, the idea etc … And, in practice, such principles always lead not to revolution, but to the education (if not, indeed, the edification) of the masses, which the philosophers themselves generously offer to take in hand. In Plato’s time they sought to counsel princes in the name of the ideal state. In our democratic era, they seek to educate the citizens (or ‘educate the educators’ of the citizens: the judges, doctors and teachers, by assuming their position, at least morally, at the very top of the academic edifice) in the name of reason and ethics.

      This is not wrong, but behind this function of idealism there is a more formidable difficulty. In modern philosophy (the philosophy which finds its true language with Kant), whether one speaks of consciousness, spirit or reason, these categories which express the universal always have two sides to them, and Marx’s formulations in the Theses constantly allude to this. They intimately combine two ideas: representation and subjectivity. It is precisely the originality and strength of the great (German) idealist tradition that it thought this combination through systematically.

      Clearly, the notion of ‘interpretation’ to which Marx refers is a variant of the idea of representation. For the idealism criticized here, the world is the object of a contemplation which seeks to perceive its coherence and its ‘meaning’ and thereby, willy-nilly, to impose an order on it. Marx very clearly discerned the interdependence between the fact of thinking an ‘order of the world’ (especially in the social and political register) and the fact of valorizing order in the world: both against ‘anarchy’ and also against ‘movement’ (‘Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes’, as Baudelaire was to write)* … He also saw very clearly that, from this point of view, the ‘old materialisms’ or philosophies of nature, which substitute matter for mind as the organizing principle, contain a strong element of idealism and are, in the end, merely disguised idealisms (whatever their very different political consequences). This enables us to understand why it is so easy for idealism to ‘comprehend’ materialism and therefore to refute it or integrate it (as we see in Hegel, who has no problem with materialisms, except perhaps with that of Spinoza, but Spinoza is a rather atypical materialist…). Lastly, he saw that the heart of modern, post-revolutionary idealism consists in referring the order of the world and of ‘representation’ back to the activity of a subject who creates or, as Kantian language has it, ‘constitutes’ them.

      We then come to the other side of idealism, where it is not

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