![\"\"](\"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/640px-Karl_Marx_bust_-Highgate_Cemetery_London_England-25May2009.jpg\" "\\"640px-Karl_Marx_bust_-Highgate_Cemetery,_London,_England-25May2009\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nAgainst Badiou<\/h2>\n
ALAIN BADIOU’S RECENT BOOK (2010) is titled with the phrase promoted by his and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek\u2019s work for the last few years, \u201cthe communist hypothesis.\u201d[1]<\/a> This is also the title of the Badiou\u2019s 2008 essay in New Left Review<\/em>[2]<\/a> <\/em>on the historical significance of the 2007 election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency.[3]<\/a> There, Badiou explains his approach to communism as follows:<\/p>\n What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto<\/em>, \u201ccommunist\u201d means, first, that the logic of class \u2014 the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity \u2014 is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.[4]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Badiou goes on to state that,<\/p>\n As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts \u2014 the slaves led by Spartacus, the peasants led by M\u00fcntzer \u2014 might be identified as practical examples of this \u201ccommunist invariant.\u201d With the French Revolution, the communist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity.[5]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Badiou thus establishes \u201ccommunism\u201d as the perennial counter-current to civilization throughout its history.<\/p>\n Badiou divides what he calls the modern history of the \u201ccommunist hypothesis\u201d into two broad periods, or \u201csequences,\u201d from 1792\u20131871 and from 1917\u201376. The first, from Year One of the revolutionary French Republic through the defeat of the Paris Commune, Badiou describes as the \u201csetting in place of the communist hypothesis.\u201d The second, from the October 1917 Revolution in Russia to Mao\u2019s death and the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, Badiou calls the sequence of \u201cpreliminary attempts at .\u00a0.\u00a0. [the] realization [of the communist hypothesis].\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n The two periods remaining in this historical trajectory sketched by Badiou, 1871\u20131917 and 1976 to the present, Badiou describes as \u201cintervals\u201d in which \u201cthe communist hypothesis was declared to be untenable,\u201d \u201cwith the adversary in the ascendant.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n But the period from 1871\u20131917 saw the massive growth and development of Marxism (alongside and indeed bound up with the last great flowering of bourgeois society and culture in the Belle \u00c9poque<\/em>[8]<\/a>), and culminated in the crisis of war and revolution, which Badiou\u2019s account avoids \u2014 or, more precisely, evades. That is, this period raises the question of Marxism as such, and its significance in history.<\/p>\n A very different set of historical periodizations, and hence a different history, focused on other developments, might be opposed to Badiou\u2019s. Counter to Badiou\u2019s \u201ccommunist hypothesis,\u201d which reaches back to the origins of the state in the birth of civilization millennia ago, a \u201cMarxist hypothesis\u201d would seek to grasp the history of the specifically modern society of capital, the different historical phases of capital as characterized by Marx\u2019s and other Marxists\u2019 accounts, beginning in the mid-19th century. But, as the Nietzsche scholar Peter Preuss put it, \u201cthe 19th century had discovered history and all subsequent inquiry and education bore the stamp of this discovery. This was not simply the discovery of a set of facts about the past but the discovery of the historicity of man.\u201d[9]<\/a><\/p>\n Marx is the central figure in developing the critical recognition of history as an invention of the 19th century.[10]<\/a> (The other names associated with this consciousness of history are Hegel and Nietzsche; relating these three thinkers is a deep problem, long pondered by Marxists.[11]<\/a>)<\/p>\n The Marxist hypothesis is based on Marx\u2019s theoretical and political engagement with the problem he articulated throughout his life, from the Communist Manifesto<\/em> to Capital<\/em>, and includes the political thought and action inspired by and seeking to follow and develop upon Marx. This problem is the historical specificity of capital \u2014 and hence of history itself. For the Marxist hypothesis is that capital is the source of what Kant called \u201cuniversal history.\u201d[12]<\/a><\/p>\n By contrast with Badiou\u2019s history of the \u201ccommunist hypothesis,\u201d a history of the \u201cMarxist hypothesis\u201d will be complicated, layered, not quite linear, and non-evental. It is divided into the different periods in the history of Marxism: from 1848\u201395, the publication of Marx and Engels\u2019s Communist Manifesto <\/em>to Engels\u2019s death, to 1914\u201319, the crisis of Marxism in war and revolution; and from 1923\u201340, post-Bolshevik Marxism, to 1968\u201389, the \u201cNew Left\u201d and the collapse of \u201cCommunism.\u201d These are periods in the history of Marxism, which are conceived as the history of what Marx called \u201ccapital.\u201d This is the history of capital and its potential overcoming, as expressed in the history of Marxism.[13]<\/a><\/p>\n Such history is motivated by the need for what Karl Korsch called, in his 1923 essay \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d the historical-materialist analysis and critique of Marxism itself, or a Marxist history and theory of Marxism.[14]<\/a> This would be a history of the emergence, crisis, and decline of Marxism as expressing the possibility of getting beyond capital, as Marx and the best Marxists understood this. Today, as opposed to Korsch\u2019s time in 1923, this would include consideration of the possibility that the potential Marxism expressed missed its chance, and has carried on only in a degenerate, spectral way, until passing effectively into history. That such an account is possible at all is what motivates the fundamental \u201chypothesis\u201d of Marxism, or the Marxist hypothesis \u2014 the hypothesis that Marxism, as a perspective and politics, could be the vital nerve center of modern history. For Marxism is the grandest of all Grand Narratives of history, with reason. Today, the question is what was<\/em> Marxism?<\/p>\n For most Marxists in the 20th century (and hence also for Badiou), the period of Marxism from 1871\u20131917, which saw the foundation and growth of the parties of the Second International, was the era of \u201crevisionism,\u201d in which Marxist revolutionary politics was swamped by reformism. But this was also the period of the struggle against<\/em> the reformist revision of Marxism by Marx and Engels\u2019s epigones, such as Bebel, Bernstein, Kautsky, and Plekhanov. This struggle against reformism was conducted by the students of these very same disciples of Marx, and involved a complex change, itself an important historical transition, in which the students were disappointed by and came to surpass their teachers.[15]<\/a><\/p>\n The greatest achievement of the struggle against reformism in the Second International was the Bolshevik leadership of the October Revolution, followed by the (however abortive) revolutions in Germany, Hungary and Italy, and the establishment of the Third \u201cCommunist\u201d International.[16]<\/a> The world crisis of war and revolution 1914\u201319 should be regarded properly as the G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung <\/em>of Marxism, which raised the crisis of capital to the realm of politics, in a way not seen before or since. The crisis of Marxism 1914\u201319 was a civil war among Marxists. On one side, the younger generation of radicals that had risen in and ultimately split the Second International and established the Third International, most prominently Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, led the greatest attempt to change the world in history. They regarded their division in Marxism as expressing the necessity of human emancipation.[17]<\/a> That their attempt must be judged today a failure does not alter its profound \u2014 and profoundly enigmatic \u2014 character.[18]<\/a><\/p>\n The stakes of the Revolution attempted by the Second International radicals, inspired by Marx, cannot be overestimated. For Marx and his followers, the epoch of capital was both the culmination of history and marked the potential end of pre-history and the true beginning of human history, in communism.[19]<\/a> As Walter Benjamin put it, \u201chumanity is preparing to outlive culture, if need be\u201d[20]<\/a> \u2014 that is, to survive civilization, as it has been lived for an eon.[21]<\/a><\/p>\n While Marx and Engels had written of the \u201cspecter\u201d of communism, today it is the memory of Marx that haunts the world. This difference is important to register: Marx and Engels could count on a political movement \u2014 communism \u2014 that they sought to clarify and raise to self-consciousness of its historical significance. Today, by contrast, we need to remember not the historical political movement so much as the form of critical consciousness given expression in Marxism. This must be traced back to the thought and political action of Marx himself.<\/p>\n If Marx is mistaken for an affirmer and promulgator of \u201ccommunism\u201d as opposed to what he actually was, its most incisive critic (from within), we risk forgetting the most important if fragile achievement of history: the consciousness of potential in capital. As Marx wrote early on, in an 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge that called for the \u201cruthless criticism of everything existing,\u201d \u201cCommunism is a dogmatic abstraction and .\u00a0.\u00a0. only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property.\u201d[22]<\/a><\/p>\n The potential for emancipated humanity expressed in communism that Marx recognized in the modern history of capital is not assimilable without remainder to pre- or non-Marxian socialism. Marx\u2019s thought and politics are not continuous with the Spartacus slave revolt against Rome or the teachings of the Apostles \u2014 or with the radical egalitarianism of the Protestants or the Jacobins. As Marx put it, \u201cCommunism <\/em>is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.\u201d[23]<\/a> Communism, as a form of discontent in capital, thus demanded critical clarification of its own meaning, and not one-sided endorsement. For Marx thought that communism was a means and not an end in itself.<\/p>\n So what does it mean that, today, we continue, politically, to have \u201ccommunism\u201d \u2014 in Badiou\u2019s sense of demands for \u201cradical democratic equality\u201d \u2014 but not \u201cMarxism?\u201d Badiou\u2019s periodization of the history of modern communism in the history of civilization dissolves Marxism into one of its constituent parts \u2014 or at least submerges it in this history. But Marx sought, in his own thought and politics, to comprehend and transcend the specifically modern phenomenon of communism, that is, the modern social-democratic workers\u2019 movement emerging in the 19th century, as a constituent of capital<\/em>, as a historically specific form of humanity. So, what would it mean, today, to view the history of the modern society of capital through the figure of Marx? The possibility of such a project is the Marxist hypothesis.<\/p>\n It goes a long way in making sense of the most important historical figures of communism after Marx, such as Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Luk\u00e1cs, Stalin, and Mao, among others, to evaluate them as followers of Marx. It is significant that they themselves sought to justify their own political thought and action in such terms \u2014 and were regarded for this by their political opponents as sectarian dogmatists, disciples of Marxism as a religion. But how did they think that they were following Marx? What are we to make of the most significant and profound political movement of the last two centuries, calling itself \u201cMarxist,\u201d and led by people who, in debate, never ceased to quote Marx at each other? What has been puzzled over in such disputes, and what were \u2014 and are still, potentially \u2014 the political consequences of such disagreement over the meaning of Marx?<\/p>\n Certainly, Marxism has been disparaged as a religion, and Marx as a prophet. (For instance, Leszek Kolakowski dismissed Marxism as the \u201cfarcical aspect of human bondage.\u201d[24]<\/a>) But what of Marx as a philosopher? If Marx has been widely discredited as a political thinker, nevertheless, in 2005, for instance, a survey of BBC listeners<\/a> polled Marx as the \u201cgreatest philosopher of all time,\u201d well ahead of Socrates, Kant, Nietzsche, and others. On the face of it, this does not seem like a particularly plausible judgment of Marx, either in terms of his own thinking and practice or of \u201cphilosophy\u201d as a discipline, unless Marx\u2019s philosophy is understood as indicating how we have not yet overcome the problems he identified in modern society.[25]<\/a> As far as the reputation of Marx as a thinker is concerned, we seem to have been left with \u201cMarxism\u201d but without Marx\u2019s own \u201ccommunist\u201d politics: \u201cMarxism\u201d has survived as an \u201canalysis,\u201d but without clear practical importance; \u201ccommunism\u201d has survived as an ethic without effective politics. How might we make sense of this?<\/p>\n The Marxist hypothesis is that the relation between Marx and \u201ccommunism\u201d needs to be posed again, but in decidedly non-traditional ways, casting the history of Marxism in a critical light. For it is not that communism found a respected comrade in Marx \u2014 perhaps more (or less) estimable than others \u2014 but that Marx\u2019s thought and political action form an irreducibly singular model that can yet task us, and to which we must still aspire. Hence, the continued potential purchase of \u201cMarx-ism.\u201d The question is not, as Badiou would have it, what is the future of communism, but of Marx.<\/p>\n To address any potential future of Marxism, it is necessary to revisit Marx\u2019s own Marxism and its implications.<\/p>\n Marx pointed out about the revolution in Germany, in which he immediately involved himself after writing the Manifesto<\/em>, that the capitalists were more afraid of the workers asserting their bourgeois rights than they were of the Prussian state taking away theirs. This was not because of a conflicting class interest between the capitalists and Junkers (Prussian landed aristocracy), but rather because of the emerging authoritarianism in post-Industrial Revolution capital, at a global scale. For such authoritarianism was also characteristic of the revolution of 1848 in France, in which Napoleon\u2019s nephew Louis Bonaparte\u2019s rule, as the first elected President of the Second Republic (1848\u201352), and then, after his coup d\u2019etat<\/em>, as Emperor of the Second Empire (1852\u201370), could not be characterized as expressing the interest of some non<\/em>-bourgeois class (the \u201cpeasants,\u201d whom Marx insisted on calling, pointedly, \u201cpetit bourgeois\u201d), but rather of all<\/em> the classes of bourgeois society, including the \u201clumpenproletariat,\u201d in crisis by the mid-19th century.[26]<\/a> As Marx put it mordantly, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte <\/em>(1852),<\/em> bourgeois fanatics for order were shot down on their balconies in the name of defense of the social order.[27]<\/a> The late 19th century rule of Napoleon III and Bismarck \u2014 and Disraeli \u2014 mirrored each other. <\/em>Marx analyzed the authoritarianism of post-1848 society, in which the state seems to rise over civil life, as a situation in which the bourgeoisie were no longer and the proletariat not yet able to master capital.[28]<\/a> This was the crisis of bourgeois society Marx recognized. Badiou\u2019s account, on the other hand, is rather a history of ruling class power opposed by the resistance of the oppressed. As early as 1848 Marx was not a theorist of classes<\/em> but capital<\/em>, of which modern socio-political classes were \u201cphantasmagorical\u201d projections.[29]<\/a> Marx sought to situate, not capital in the history of class struggle, but history in capital,[30]<\/a> to which social struggles and their history were subordinate.[31]<\/a><\/p>\n Napoleon III and Bismarck after the French defeat at Sedan, 1870.<\/p><\/div>\n Jean-Jacques Rousseau had raised a hypothetical \u201cstate of nature\u201d in order to throw contemporary society into critical relief. In so doing, Rousseau sought to bring society closer to a \u201cstate of nature.\u201d Liberal, bourgeois society was a model and an aspiration for Rousseau. For Rousseau, it was human \u201cnature\u201d to be free.*<\/a> Humans achieved a higher \u201ccivil liberty\u201d of \u201cmoral freedom\u201d in society than they could enjoy as animals, with mere \u201cphysical\u201d freedom in nature. Indeed, as animals, humans are not free, but rather slaves to their natural needs and instincts. Only in society could freedom be achieved, and humans free themselves from their natural, animal condition.[32]<\/a> When Rousseau was writing, in the mid-18th century, the promise of freedom in bourgeois society was still on the horizon. Bourgeois society aspired to proximity to the \u201cstate of nature\u201d in the sense of bringing humanity, both collectively and individually, closer to its potential, to better realize its freedom. With Marx, communism, too, aimed for the realization of this potential. The imagination of a \u201cprimitive communism,\u201d closer to a \u201cstate of nature\u201d of unspoiled human potential, recapitulated the Rousseauian vision of bourgeois society as emancipation. But, in capitalism, bourgeois society had come to violate its own promised potential. It had become a \u201cstate of nature,\u201d not in Rousseau\u2019s sense, but rather according to Hobbes, a \u201cwar of all against all\u201d \u2014 a conception that Rousseau had critiqued. Society was not to be the suspension of hostilities, but the realization of freedom. Moreover, humanity in society exhibited a \u201cgeneral will,\u201d not reducible to its individual members: more than the sum of its parts. Not a Leviathan, but a \u201csecond nature,\u201d a rebirth of potential, both individually and collectively. Human nature found the realization of its freedom in society, but humans were free to develop and transform themselves, for good or ill. To bring society closer to the \u201cstate of nature,\u201d then, was to allow humanity\u2019s potential to be better realized. Communism, according to Marx, was to follow Rousseau, not Hobbes, in realizing bourgeois society\u2019s aspirations and potential. But, first, communism had to be clear about its aims.<\/p>\n The Marxist hypothesis is that Marx\u2019s thought and politics correspond to a moment of profound transformation in the history of modern society, indeed, in the history of humanity: the rise of \u201cindustrial capital\u201d and of the concomitant \u201csocial-democratic\u201d workers\u2019 movement that attended this change. This was expressed in the workers\u2019 demand for social<\/em> democracy, which Marx thought needed to be raised to greater self-consciousness to achieve its aims.[33]<\/a> Marx characterized the moment of industrial capital as marking the crisis in modern society \u2014 or even, an event and crisis in \u201cnatural history\u201d[34]<\/a> \u2014 in which humanity faced the choice, as Luxemburg put it (echoing Engels) of \u201csocialism or barbarism.\u201d[35]<\/a> This was because classical bourgeois forms of politics that had emerged in the preceding era of the rise of manufacturing capital in the 17th and 18th centuries, liberalism and democracy, proved to be inadequate to the problems and tasks of modern society since the 19th century \u2014 Marx\u2019s moment. With Marx, humanity faces a new, unforeseen task. However, unfulfilled, this task has fallen into neglect today.[36]<\/a><\/p>\n In the transformed circumstance of capital, liberalism and democracy became necessary<\/em> precisely in their impossibility<\/em>, and thus pointed to their \u201cdialectical\u201d Aufhebung<\/em> \u2014 completion and transcendence through negation, or self-overcoming.[37]<\/a> Liberalism and democracy became not only mutually contradictory but each became self-contradictory in capital. It is thus not a matter of communism versus<\/em> liberal democracy \u2014 as Badiou and \u017di\u017eek take it to be. Communism was, for Marx, the political movement that pointed to the possibility of overcoming the necessity of liberalism and democracy, or the transcending of the need for \u201cbourgeois\u201d politics per se<\/em>. But this was to be achieved through the politics of the demands for the bourgeois<\/em> rights of the working class. Marx regarded the socialism and communism that had emerged in his time as expressing a late, and hence self-contradictory and potentially incoherent form of bourgeois radicalism \u2014 expressing the radicalization<\/em> of bourgeois society \u2014 but that demanded redemption. Marx sought the potential in capital of going beyond demands for greater liberalism and democracy. Subsequent \u201ccommunism\u201d lost sight of Marx on this, and disintegrated into the 20th century antinomy of socialism and liberalism.[38]<\/a> The Marxist hypothesis is that Marx recognized the possibility, not of opposition, but of a qualitative transformation, in, through, and beyond bourgeois society.\u00a0| \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n Originally published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> #29 (November 2010).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 1<\/a>. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis<\/em> (London: Verso, 2010). The book is printed in a pocket-sized red hardcover on which is emblazoned a gold star \u2014 a Little Red Book<\/em> (viz., Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung<\/em>) for our time?<\/p>\n 2<\/a>. Badiou, \u201cThe Communist Hypothesis,\u201d New Left Review<\/em> 49 (January\u2013February 2008), 29\u201342.<\/p>\n 3<\/a>. The other book to originate from Badiou\u2019s 2008 essay in New Left Review<\/em> is The Meaning of Sarkozy<\/em> (London: Verso, 2008).<\/p>\n 4<\/a>. Badiou, \u201cThe Communist Hypothesis,\u201d 34\u201335.<\/p>\n 5<\/a>. Ibid., 35.<\/p>\n 6<\/a>. Ibid., 35\u201336.<\/p>\n 7<\/a>. Ibid., 36\u201337.<\/p>\n 8<\/a>. See Theodor W. Adorno, \u201cThose Twenties,\u201d Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords<\/em>, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 41\u201348, originally published in 1961, in which Adorno stated that, \u201cAlready in the twenties, as a consequence of the events of [the failure of the German Revolution in] 1919, the decision had fallen against that political potential that, had things gone otherwise, with great probability would have influenced developments in Russia and prevented Stalinism.\u201d So, \u201cthat the twenties were a world where \u2018everything may be permitted,\u2019 that is, a utopia .\u00a0.\u00a0. only seemed so\u201d (43). Indeed, according to Adorno, \u201cThe heroic age .\u00a0.\u00a0. was actually around 1910\u201d (41). See note 13<\/a>, below.<\/p>\n 9<\/a>. Peter Preuss, Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life<\/em> (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 1.<\/p>\n 10<\/a>. See Louis Menand\u2019s 2003 Introduction to the republication of Edmund Wilson\u2019s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History<\/em> (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003), originally published in 1940, in which Menand cites Wilson\u2019s statement that \u201cMarx and Engels were the philosophes<\/em> of a second Enlightenment\u201d (xvi). Furthermore, Menand points out that,<\/p>\n Marxism gave a meaning to modernity. .\u00a0.\u00a0. Marxism was founded on an appeal for social justice, but there were many forms that such an appeal might have taken. Its deeper attraction was the discovery of meaning, a meaning in which human beings might participate, in history itself. (xiii)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 11<\/a>. See, for example, Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964\u201365<\/em>, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2006).<\/p>\n 12<\/a>. Immanuel Kant, \u201cIdea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,\u201d trans. Lewis White Beck, in Kant on History<\/em> (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 11\u201325.<\/p>\n 13<\/a>. For instance, the title of Lenin\u2019s pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism<\/em> (1916) indicates what the historical era of \u201cimperialism\u201d meant to Lenin and other contemporary Marxists: the eve of revolution. The self-understanding of the Marxists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries grounded the history of Marxism itself in the history of capital, even if their propagandistic rhetoric had the unfortunate character of calling the crisis of capital expressed by Marxism \u201cinevitable.\u201d See note 18<\/a>, below.<\/p>\n 14<\/a>. See Karl Korsch, \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d Marxism and Philosophy<\/em>, trans. Fred Halliday <\/em>(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008). Originally published in 1923. Also available on-line at: <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/korsch\/1923\/marxism-philosophy.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 15<\/a>. See Lars T. Lih\u2019s extensive work on Lenin\u2019s \u201cKautskyism,\u201d for instance in Lenin Rediscovered: <\/em>What is to be Done? in Context<\/em> (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008).<\/p>\n 16<\/a>. In a portentous first footnote to his book What is to be Done?<\/em> (1902), available on-line at: <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/lenin\/works\/1901\/witbd\/i.htm<\/a>>, Lenin put it this way:<\/p>\n Incidentally, in the history of modern socialism [there] is a phenomenon .\u00a0.\u00a0. in its way very consoling, namely .\u00a0.\u00a0. the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [In] the disputes between Lassalleans and Eisenachers, between Guesdists and Possibilists, between Fabians and Social-Democrats, and between Narodnaya Volya adherents and Social-Democrats .\u00a0.\u00a0. really [an] international battle with socialist opportunism, [will] international revolutionary Social-Democracy .\u00a0.\u00a0. perhaps become sufficiently strengthened to put an end to the political reaction that has long reigned in Europe?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 17<\/a>. See Leon Trotsky, \u201cArt and Politics in Our Epoch,\u201d a June 18, 1938 letter to the editors of Partisan Review<\/em>, available on-line at: <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/trotsky\/1938\/06\/artpol.htm<\/a>>:<\/p>\n Not a single progressive idea has begun with a \u201cmass base,\u201d otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in its last stage that the idea finds its masses \u2014 if, of course, it answers the needs of progress. All great movements have begun as \u201csplinters\u201d of older movements. .\u00a0.\u00a0. The group of Marx and Engels came into existence as a \u201csplinter\u201d of the Hegelian Left. The Communist [Third] International germinated during [WWI] from the \u201csplinters\u201d of the Social Democratic [Second] International. If these pioneers found themselves able to create a mass base, it was precisely because they did not fear isolation. They knew beforehand that the quality of their ideas would be transformed into quantity. These \u201csplinters\u201d .\u00a0.\u00a0. carried within themselves the germs of the great historical movements of tomorrow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 18<\/a>. See Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy<\/em>:<\/p>\n [A] transformation and development of Marxist theory has been effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism. Yet it is easy to understand both the reasons for this guise and the real character of the process which is concealed by it. What theoreticians like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Lenin in Russia have done, and are doing, in the field of Marxist theory is to liberate it from the inhibiting traditions of [Social Democracy]. They thereby answer the practical needs of the new revolutionary stage of proletarian class struggle, for these traditions weighed \u201clike a nightmare\u201d on the brain of the working masses whose objectively revolutionary socioeconomic position no longer corresponded to these [earlier] evolutionary doctrines. The apparent revival of original Marxist theory in the Third International is simply a result of the fact that in a new revolutionary period not only the workers\u2019 movement itself, but the theoretical conceptions of communists which express it, must assume an explicitly revolutionary form. This is why large sections of the Marxist system, which seemed virtually forgotten in the final decades of the nineteenth century, have now come to life again. (67\u201368)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I have elaborated further on the significance of Korsch\u2019s important essay in my review of Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy<\/em> (2008), Platypus Review<\/em> 15 (September 2009), available on-line at: <http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2009\/09\/03\/book-review-karl-korsch-marxism-and-philosophy\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 19<\/a>. Adorno, in \u201cReflections on Class Theory\u201d (originally written in 1942), provides the following unequivocally powerful interpretation of the perspective of Marx and Engels\u2019s Communist Manifesto<\/em>:<\/p>\n According to theory, history is the history of class struggles. But the concept of class is bound up with the emergence of the proletariat. .\u00a0.\u00a0. By extending the concept of class to prehistory, theory .\u00a0.\u00a0. turns against prehistory itself. .\u00a0.\u00a0. By exposing the historical necessity that had brought capitalism into being, political economy became the critique of history as a whole. .\u00a0.\u00a0. All history is the history of class struggles because it was always the same thing, namely, prehistory. (Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader<\/em><\/em>, ed. Rolf Tiedemann [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 93\u201394.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 20<\/a>. Walter Benjamin, \u201cExperience and Poverty,\u201d Selected Writings<\/em> vol. 2 1927\u201334 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 735. Originally published in 1933.<\/p>\n 21<\/a>. The term used to describe this effect is the \u201cAnthropocene.\u201d Jeffrey Sachs, in the second of his 2007 Reith Lectures, \u201cSurvival in the Anthropocene\u201d (Peking University, Beijing, April 18, 2007, available online at <http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/radio4\/reith2007\/lecture2.shtml<\/a>>), characterized it this way:<\/p>\n \u201cThe Anthropocene\u201d \u2014 a term that is spectacularly vivid, a term invented by one of the great scientists of our age, Paul Crutzen, to signify the fact that human beings for the first time have taken hold not only of the economy and of population dynamics, but of the planet\u2019s physical systems, Anthropocene meaning human-created era of Earth\u2019s history. The geologists call our time the Holocene \u2014 the period of the last thirteen thousand years or so since the last Ice Age \u2014 but Crutzen wisely and perhaps shockingly noted that the last two hundred years are really a unique era, not only in human history but in the Earth\u2019s physical history as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 22<\/a>. Marx, \u201cFor the ruthless criticism of everything existing,\u201d letter to Arnold Ruge (September, 1843), in Robert Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader <\/em>(New York: Norton, 1978), 12\u201315. Also available online at: <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1843\/letters\/43_09.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 23<\/a>. Marx, Economic and Philosophic<\/em> Manuscripts of 1844<\/em>, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>, 93. Also available online at: <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1844\/manuscripts\/comm.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 24<\/a>. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism<\/em> (New York: Norton, 2005), 1212.<\/p>\n 25<\/a>. See Robert Pippin, \u201cCritical Inquiry <\/em>and Critical Theory: A Short History of Nonbeing,\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em> 30.2 (Winter 2004), 424\u2013428, also available on-line at: <http:\/\/criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu\/issues\/v30\/30n2.Pippin.html<\/a>>. Pippin wrote that,<\/p>\n [T]he dim understanding we have of the post-Kantian situation with respect to, let\u2019s say, \u201cthe necessary conditions for the possibility of what isn\u2019t\u201d .\u00a0.\u00a0. is what I wanted to suggest. I\u2019m not sure it will get us anywhere. Philosophy rarely does. Perhaps it exists to remind us that we haven\u2019t gotten anywhere. (428)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 26<\/a>. See Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848\u201350 <\/em>(1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte <\/em>(1852).<\/p>\n 27<\/a>. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire<\/em>, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>:<\/p>\n Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most insipid democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an \u201cattempt on society\u201d and stigmatized as \u201csocialism.\u201d .\u00a0.\u00a0. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned .\u00a0.\u00a0. in the name of property, of family .\u00a0.\u00a0. and of order. .\u00a0.\u00a0. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms .\u00a0.\u00a0. the \u201csaviour of society.\u201d (602\u2013603)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 28<\/a>. Engels summed this up well in his 1891 Introduction to Marx, The Civil War in France <\/em>(1871), in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>, 620.<\/p>\n 29<\/a>. See Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy<\/em>, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 165.<\/p>\n 30<\/a>. See my \u201cCapital in History: The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left,\u201d Platypus Review<\/em> 7 (October 2008), available on-line at: <http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2008\/10\/01\/capital-in-history-the-need-for-a-marxian-philosophy-of-history-of-the-left\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 31<\/a>. See Platypus Historians Group, \u201cIntroduction to the History of the Left: Changes in the meaning of class struggles,\u201d Platypus Review <\/em>3 (March 2008), available on-line at: <http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2008\/03\/01\/introduction-to-the-history-of-the-left-changes-in-the-meaning-of-class-struggles\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 32<\/a>. See Rousseau, The Social Contract<\/em>, Ch. 8 \u201cCivil Society,\u201d trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1968), 64\u201365. Originally published in 1762.<\/p>\n 33<\/a>. See Marx, \u201cFor the ruthless criticism of everything existing.\u201d<\/p>\n 34<\/a>. See note 21<\/a>, above. See also Adorno, \u201cThe Idea of Natural History\u201d (originally written in 1932), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Telos<\/em> 57 (1985): \u201c[I]t is not a question of completing one theory by another, but of the immanent interpretation of a theory. I submit myself, so to speak, to the authority of the materialist dialectic\u201d (124).<\/p>\n 35<\/a>. See Luxemburg, The Crisis in German Social Democracy<\/em> (AKA The Junius Pamphlet<\/em>, originally published in 1915), available on-line at: <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/luxemburg\/1915\/junius\/index.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n 36<\/a>. See Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy<\/em>:<\/p>\n [Marx wrote, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy<\/em> (1859), that] \u201c[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence.\u201d This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch. (58)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 37<\/a>. On this point, see some of Marx\u2019s earliest writings, which provided the points of departure for his more mature work, such as \u201cContribution to the Critique of <\/em>Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Right<\/em>\u201d (1843), \u201cOn [Bruno Bauer\u2019s] The Jewish Question<\/em>\u201d (1843), <\/em>and The Poverty of Philosophy <\/em>(1847).<\/p>\n 38<\/a>. But, for Marx and Engels, there was no necessary contradiction between the freedom of the individual and that of the collective, or, in this sense, between liberalism and socialism: \u201cIn place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all<\/em>\u201d (Manifesto of the Communist Party<\/em>, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>, 491, also available on-line at: <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1848\/communist-manifesto\/ch02.htm<\/a>>).<\/p>\n For further discussion of this antinomic degeneration and disintegration of the original Marxian perspective, see my \u201c1917\u201d in The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a theory of historical regression<\/em>, Platypus Review<\/em> 17 (November 2009), available on-line at: <http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2009\/11\/18\/the-decline-of-the-left-in-the-20th-century-1917\/<\/a>>. See also: Platypus Historians Group, \u201cFriedrich Hayek and the legacy of Milton Friedman: Neo-liberalism and the question of freedom (in part, a response to Naomi Klein),\u201d Platypus Review <\/em>8 (November 2008), available on-line at: <http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2008\/11\/01\/friedrich-hayek-and-the-legacy-of-milton-friedman-neo-liberalism-and-the-question-of-freedom\/<\/a>>; and my \u201cObama and Clinton: \u2018Third Way\u2019 politics and the \u2018Left\u2019,\u201d The Marxist hypothesis<\/h2>\n
The specter of Marx<\/h2>\n
\u201cMarx-ism\u201d<\/h2>\n
Marx in 1848<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Capitalism, communism, and the \u201cstate of nature\u201d<\/h2>\n
Communism: not opposed to, but in, through, and beyond the bourgeois society of capital<\/h2>\n
\n