Reflecting on Marx’s self-critique of 1848 (Part II)
The need for reflecting on Marx, passing through Marx beyond Marx and actualizing Marx requires to respond to the question “Why Marx?”. Political economy is the substance of capitalism and an anti-capitalist revolution is impossible without the theoretical and practical critique of political economy. Marx established the question of revolution within the critique of political economy to which he dedicated his whole life. It is impossible to contain or transcend Marx without facing him. This is our response to the question of “Why Marx?”
The left (especially in Turkey) has read Marx through Lenin. Within the imperialist era, Marx has been representative of the competitive era. It was told so and hence we have known it to be so. The second official dictate has been the distinction between non-scientific Marx and scientific Marx. This distinction has led to the de-emphasizing of Marx other than that of in the introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Capital Vol.I. Like The Grundrisse, The German Ideology was published as late as 1933. This led to two consequences. Firstly, the political critique of Marx has been inhibited. Secondly, Marx’s critique of those who have turned Marxism into a state ideology, and party into state, and state into a means of domination over labor has been inhibited. These two consequences that contradict each other have served to what was expected. As a matter of fact, neither Marx would have been criticized nor they would have been criticized by Marx himself. And Marx has been effaced. In this way, the left has lost its intellectual power and effectiveness as being constricted within a narrow conception of practicality. In fact, Marx is representative of not the competitive era, but our very present. Life continues to claim for an anti-capitalist and communalist revolution. And Marx speaks on communism in his distanced “non-scientific” works before Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
In order to clarify the point, we’d like to mention two examples from interpretations on non-scientific works of Marx. What is interesting is that these interpretations can be found in the prefaces and introductions of these non-scientific works. Auguste Cornu contributes to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts where he states: “What determines the semi-idealist and also utopian character of this work is determined by the fact that in this work a speculated future confronts against the malicious age of the past.” Jacques Milhau in his preface to The German Ideology states, “However they have not been Marxists yet. The development of their conception in theoretical terms remains dependent upon the problematic rising from the Kantian question of “What is human being?”… In this respect, although Marx and Engels have succeeded at investing the humanism inherited from Feuerbach with social-political dimensions and replacing his moral idealism with revolutionary missions, they could not avoid being trapped by speculative human science”. Many other similar examples can be given. However there is no need to whelm the text with so many quotations as the purpose of this text is not to reflect on the works of Marx. Well, then when has Marx become Marxist? When Marx and Marxism become scientific. However, while Marx had not been “scientific”, he stated: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.
Before he became Marxist and hence when he was “Marx”, Marx had already distanced himself from idealism or semi-idealism, and speculative thinking. This is what constitutes his distance from Hegel. This is to disengage Hegel’s philosophy standing on its head from idealism and speculativeness and to constitute a materialist historical conception standing on its feet. The underlying fact in Marx’s overall polemic against Hegel is the critique of “speculativeness”. It is not that thought determines material life, but material life determines thought. Marx has never been engaged with speculative thought. After completing his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx did not concern himself particularly with Hegel. Feuerbach has already overturned Hegel and distanced himself from him. What identifies Marx is not his critique of Hegel, but his critique of post-Hegel philosophy. Marx has based his thought on the critique of left-Hegelians that have based themselves on the abstract human being detached from history and sociality, and vulgar materialism, and egalitarian, communitarian and utopian communism and Feuerbach. For Marx, Feuerbach withdraws from history when he is materialist, and is no more materialist when he takes history into account. Marx is materialist faced with Hegel, and historicist faced with Feuerbach. Marx is the founder of historical materialism.
Non-scientific Marx has been represented as a philosopher, a legist and a historian. Has not Marx considered history as a science? Then, is it political economy, which makes Marx scientific? While Marx was working on The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he was well aware of the significance of political economy. For Marx, the essential point is civil society, and political economy represents the anatomy of civil society. 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology are sound critiques of political economy. 1844 Manuscripts is also known to be called 1844 Manuscripts, Political Economy and Philosophy.
All the works of “non-scientific Marx” is immanent to the critique of political economy. Marx, in the introduction of Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy states his infamous abstraction as: “The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law; the introduction to this work being published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher issued in Paris in 1844. My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy. The study of this, which I began in Paris, I continued in Brussels, where I moved owing to an expulsion order issued by M. Guizot. The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies…”. As another striking example, one can also refer to Marx stating that: “The salient points of our conception were first outlined in an academic, although polemical, form in my The Poverty of Philosophy, this book which was aimed at Proudhon appeared in 1847”. If it is a matter of referring to Marx’s scientificism, Marx is not a political economist, but a historian. He has analyzed capitalist social history on the basis of political economy. Marx has never detached himself from history, society and political economy.
The distinctions such as young Marx, mature Marx, non-scientific, semi-idealist or speculative Marx are false distinctions. These distinctions are not real distinctions and have led to critically negative political consequences. Marx has not envisaged for himself periodical distinctions such as semi-idealist, speculative and scientific. Readings of Marx based on these distinctions mean to reduce Marx into a text, separating him from the historical relations and the conflicts of these relations, within which he existed. The history of Marx is not the history of texts or concepts. Reading Marx through the history of texts and concepts is the speculativeness itself. Marx is the product of history and the history of Marx should be read through the class struggles of his own period.
The Rupture in 1848
It is all about the distinction between Marx before his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Marx after this work. This distinction is the result of reading Marx in terms of the changes in his theoretical thinking –from speculativeness, semi-idealism and utopianism to scientificism. Marx has been always concerned with political economy and the scientific analysis of political economy. Marx put those in his mind into practice depending on political conditions and time-related problems. What has been new for those in the 20th century had already become out of date for Marx.
This reading of Marx in terms of changes in theoretical thinking was a false reading and inhibited political critique of Marx. Obviously there is a difference, however this difference is not theoretical, but political and it is a matter of the defeat of 1848 revolutions and its political effects over Marx.
The production of theoretical or scientific knowledge is the product of conflict. Before and within 1848 revolutions, Marx was a revolutionary militant of the political struggle. Predominance of the polemical side of his works before Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is representative of this fact. The non-scientific Marx was in polemic with thoughts of those people politically influential on the working class struggle before the 1848 revolutions. These subjects were the political references, their foundations lying in the post-Hegel philosophy. The Communist Manifesto written in 1847 and which still today represents the political document of the future is the product of the League of Communists and revolutionary militant Marx. If it is a matter of making a distinction, this ought to be the distinction between Marx before The Manifesto and Marx after The Manifesto. Turning Marx into Marxism is not a theoretical but a political question.
The defeat of 1848 Revolutions totally undermined the forces and thoughts with which Marx was in polemic. It was impossible for Marx not be influenced by this fact. He went through this period under this influence. This influence has not been taken into account. It was not because it had not been recognized. It was a secret ignored although it was clearly recognized. This secret has been ignored for the sake of scientificism.
Marx was able to find the necessary time and conditions for working on political economy, which he always kept in his mind but could not realize, in the aftermath of the defeat of 1848 Revolutions. After the defeat in 1848 the Communist League was dissolved and Marx moved to England. He dedicated his long years of poverty and diseases to carrying out scientific analysis of political economy. The precious works such as The Grundrisse, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Capital were produced in this period.
The consequence of the defeat in 1848
It is necessary to rethink on Engels’ substantial self-critique on the defeat of 1848 Revolution in 1895, beginning with “But history has shown us too to have been wrong, has revealed our point of view at that time as an illusion”. A revolution was expected, but it did not arrive. Marx and Engels in their evaluations did not very much emphasize class alliances and tactical positions, which the left generally has been used to, in terms of the problems of organization, form of struggle and formation of class power relations. They offered a much more essential evaluation. In 1850, in The Class Struggles in France Marx suggests an abstraction of an objective and scientific law: “Given this general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois society arc developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within bourgeois relationships, a real revolution is out of the question. Such a revolution is possible only in periods when both of these factors —the modern forces of production and the bourgeois forms of production— come into opposition with each other.” “What succumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages, results of social relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonisms.” The revolution that overturned Europe in 1848 crashed into “the results of social relationships that have not yet arrived to the point of sharp class antagonisms”. After the defeat in 1848, the interest has shifted from class power relations to the movement of objective laws. While Marx has criticized vulgar materialists for not being able to consider the subjectivity (praxis) which changes and transforms the world, as objectivity in Theses on Feuerbach and hence insisted on the notion of history, he turned to objective movement independent from subjectivity in the aftermath of 1848. In The Communist Manifesto history has been considered as the history of class struggles. In The German Ideology the motor force of history has been revolution. After the defeat in 1848, history has been rendered into the history of the development of forces of production. The famous introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy was written in 1858 as an evaluation of the 1848 Revolution. If we consider the abstraction from the introduction suggesting that “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed” together with evaluation on 1848, the significance of the evaluation on 1848 becomes more noticeable. The introduction is the “scientific” account of the evaluation on 1848.
The Secret: The Change in the Theory of Crisis
History is production and reproduction of the material life on the basis of the production of means of subsistence. The character of social relations is dependent upon the production of that society, what and how it produces. The forces of production are representative of the means of production that renders labor efficient, the formal character of the labor producing these means and the general welfare accumulated through social history. Marx calls it as “general intellect” in The Grundrisse. And the relations of production are determined by the character of the property relations. The forces of production function within relations of production; that is, property relations. Material production and reproduction of social life is dependent upon the tension between the forces of production and the relations of production.
The most essential dynamic of the forces of production is the character of labor. In the capitalist society, the character of labor is signified by “waged labor”. Labor is classified in the form of “waged labor” by capital. Classification of labor in the form of “waged labor” represents constitution of private property. The problem is about the transformation of forces of production that produce and reproduce the relations of production (that is, relation of private property) into a subversive power. Labor turns into a subversive power against relations of private property resisting with de-classification against being classified in the form of “waged labor”. In this sense, transformation of forces of production into subversive power is immanent in the development of forces of production. In terms of the dialectic of capital’s self-affirmative practices, classification of labor in the form of “waged labor” represents development of forces of production. Labor is capitalized in the form of “waged labor”. In this case, for capital there is no antagonism between “waged labor” and “capital”. In terms of the dialectic of the capital’s self-affirmation, there is no antagonism between capital and waged labor, but there is contradiction. While capital’s practice of self-affirmation functions dialectically, labor’s practice of self-affirmation does not function in a dialectical manner! In terms of labor’s practice of self-affirmation there is no contradiction, but an total antagonism between “labor” and “capital”. For non-scientific Marx, Marx before The Communist Manifesto and Marx before 1848, the theory of crisis is based on the antagonism immanent to the self-affirmative practice of labor. The subversive power of labor is immanent to the development of productive forces. Subjectivity is objectivity in terms of subversive power. The problem is to transform this opposition into social antagonism. This is completely a political matter. Leninism is immanent to the labor’s practice of self-affirmation. Non-scientific Marx constitutes communism politically in opposition to private property. Communism represents the political practice itself that would destruct capitalism. In other words, communism is identical with “revolutionariness”, which is the essential question.
The scientific Marx expresses detachment of the theory of crisis from labor’s practices of self-affirmation to be constituted within capital’s practices of self-affirmation. “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed.” Capitalism would not be destroyed unless capital does not achieve classification of labor under “waged labor” at a worldwide level. This conception has led to foundation of labor’s struggle for social emancipation onto the “contradiction” between “waged labor” and “capital” until the closure of the dialectic of capital’s practice of self-affirmation. This is exactly what Hegel’s dialectic means. German Marxism has also followed this path. Scientific Marxism is detachment of the subversive character of labor from its immanence to development of productive forces. As follows, communism has come to be considered as the moment of historical development when capital would dissolve itself automatically rather than as the subversive political practice against private property. Now social antagonism is emptied of its political character and confined within capital’s practice of self-affirmation. Evaluation and self-critique on 1848 represents the return to Hegel through dialectic. The state as the alienated power to be destroyed turns into regulatory and planning state within German Marxism, and with the October Revolution into a form of property; that is “state property” that would develop productive forces, meaning “waged labor”. Thus, social life is turned into “State”. And the state is deepened through militarization of society. In Hegel, everything culminates in the holy “State”. Social life constitutes the tissues of State. The October Revolution turned the society into State rather than destroying the State. As a manifestation of history, we actualized Hegel while criticizing him. This is our shame and we undertake it. It is our burden to undertake this shame in the name of our dignity.
OTONOM, No. 12 (March-May 2006)