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NEWS & LETTERS, February - March 2007EssayThe Theory of Revolution in the Young Marxby Eli Messinger The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx by Michael Löwy, Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2003 This study of the development of Marx’s theory of revolution--using Marxism as its method--focuses on the formative years of 1842-1848. It is unusual and especially valuable in drawing connections between Marx’s theoretical concepts and his deepening involvement in this early, ideologically vibrant period of European working class activity. Michael Löwy successfully shows how Marx’s distinctive theory of revolution--the self-emancipation of the working class--crystallized, at least in part, out of his actual interactions with workers and their organizations, in conjunction with Marx’s profound critique of Hegel’s philosophy and of other Young Hegelians. Löwy’s THE THEORY OF REVOLUTION IN THE YOUNG MARX was originally published in French in 1970. It has only recently been translated into English (the translator is not named) as part of the HISTORICAL MATERIALISM BOOK SERIES sponsored by the London-based quarterly of that name. This publication is timely in light of the growing, international movement that urgently seeks an alternative to capitalism. At least some in that movement have put revolution back on the agenda after decades in which it was scornfully dismissed as poppycock. Löwy makes it abundantly clear that the kind of revolution Marx came to conceptualize is a social revolution, which goes far deeper than a political grab for power. Michael Löwy is a well-known sociologist in France. He was born in Brazil and his work is widely discussed in Latin America as well. This book is a well-constructed, lucid, readable, largely chronological account of the events, persons and ideas in Marx’s milieu, and how they affected the course of Marx’s thought. In the process, Löwy introduces us to writings by the young Marx that are rarely cited but deserve to be. Löwy views Marx’s actual meetings with workers, starting in late 1843 when he arrived in Paris, and his increasing involvement with revolutionary socialist associations, as major formative experiences in his theoretical-political evolution. Löwy’s monograph fills in the gap between strictly biographical studies of Marx, which give little attention to his thought, and, conversely, studies that treat his intellectual/political growth apart from the workers’ movements of that day. Marx was caught up in the swirl of intellectual and political currents that were bred by the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and Hegel’s philosophical revolution. From these seemingly disparate elements, Marx, in the remarkably short space of a few years, was able to develop what Raya Dunayevskaya called “a new continent of thought” (PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, p. 53). UPRISING OF SILESIAN WEAVERS Löwy examines the consequences for Marx’s political thinking of his theoretical separation between the state and civil society: Marx voiced vigorous support for the 1844 revolt of the Silesian weavers. Marx’s comments, called “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’ by a Prussian’” were published in August 1844, in the Paris newspaper VORWÄRTS. For Löwy, the “Critical Notes” are not yet appreciated as “the point of departure for the intellectual journey that led to the THESES ON FEUERBACH and THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY... in which his theory of the revolutionary self-emancipation of the proletariat took shape” (p. 91). On what basis did Löwy make that judgment? What is needed, Marx contended, is not so much political revolt as social revolution involving “the standpoint of the whole because it is a protest of man against dehumanized life.” He wrote, “The state is based on the contradiction between public and private life, on the contradiction between general interests and private interests.... Indeed, confronted by the consequences which arise from the unsocial nature of this civil life, this private ownership, this trade, this industry, this mutual plundering of the various circles of citizens, confronted by all these consequences impotence is the law of nature of the [state] administration” (Marx and Engels, COLLECTED WORKS, [hereafter CW], Vol. 3, p. 198). Marx’s very positive attitude toward the uprising of the Silesian weavers can serve as an example of Löwy’s methodological point that the significance and meaning of an objective event will be determined, in large part, by the theorist’s ideological “receptivity.” What of the thought of the weavers themselves? Marx wrote “that not one of the French and English workers’ uprisings had such a theoretical and conscious character as the uprising of the Silesian weavers.... The Silesian uprising begins precisely with what the French and English workers’ uprisings end, with consciousness of the nature of the proletariat” (CW 3, p. 201). He concluded that the weavers’ revolt had implicitly announced its opposition to the society of private property. On what basis did Marx reach such a broad and far-reaching conclusion? The Silesian workers had destroyed not only the machines but also account books and titles to property. Their struggle had thus been directed not only against the visible enemy, the factory owner, but also against the hidden enemy, the banker, and thus capital itself. Hence Marx proudly called the German proletariat “the theoretician of the European proletariat.... A philosophical people can find its corresponding practice [praxis] only in socialism, hence it is only in the proletariat that it can find the dynamic element of its emancipation” (CW 3, p. 202). Löwy uses the term “praxis” rather than “practice” in his translation. For Löwy, the decisive development in Marx’s theory of revolution was that socialism was no longer presented as pure theory, an idea “born in the philosopher’s mind,” a “philosophical communism,” but rather as praxis. Löwy remarks: “In discovering in the proletariat the active element of emancipation, Marx, without saying a word about Feuerbach or philosophy, breaks with the schema to which he had still adhered” in his critiques of Hegel’s philosophy of the state. “By this practical stand taken on a revolutionary movement the path is opened to the THESES ON FEUERBACH” (p. 95). LÖWY'S SHORTCOMING: PHILOSOPHIC DIMENSION Unfortunately Löwy overlooks Marx’s selective appropriation--a term coined by Norman Levine--of Hegel’s dialectical philosophy. This is not to deny that Löwy is a nuanced and comprehensive historian of ideas who is aware there is a philosophical dimension of Marxian thought. For instance, in his essay, “From the LOGIC of Hegel to the Finland Station in Petrograd,” Löwy demonstrated the practical impact of Lenin’s reading, while in exile, of Hegel’s LOGIC on his political thinking at the fateful moment of his return to Russia (See his ON CHANGING THE WORLD, 1993). Yet Löwy stands apart from the “Hegelian Marxists” of the 20th century such as Lukács, Korsch, Marcuse and Dunayevskaya who see in that philosophical dimension the very essence of Marx’s concept of revolution. Löwy tends to downplay the relation between Marx’s philosophical perspective and his theory of revolution. For Löwy it was an important advance in Marx’s concept of revolutionary agency--and there is much truth in this--when he gave up the idea of “philosophical communism” in which “revolution begins in the brain of the philosopher.” Revolutionary impulses and ideas, Marx said explicitly only a few years later in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, have their source in a revolutionary class, the proletariat. But it is important to keep in mind that Marx characterized the revolutionary proletariat as both independent and “self-conscious,” that is, aware of its historical role, not a thoughtless mass. Recall, too, that Marx had seen in the uprising of the Silesian weavers a “consciousness of the nature of the proletariat,” the expression of a “philosophical people” (CW 3, p. 201). Marx wrote additionally: “As philosophy finds its MATERIAL weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its SPIRITUAL weapons in philosophy” (CW 3, p. 187). According to Löwy, however, this well-known formulation is “not yet Marxist” (p. 59). I would argue that for Marx there was no contradiction between recognizing the proletariat as the agency of revolution and recognizing the philosophical dimension in revolution. THE 1844 MANUSCRIPTS It is in his treatment of the ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 that Löwy most clearly falls short in his recognition of the philosophic dimension in Marx’s theory of revolution. Löwy’s appreciation of the MANUSCRIPTS lies primarily in its economic analysis of the proletarian condition. Because Löwy tends to avoid discussing the philosophic aspect of Marx’s theory of revolution, he shrinks from many of the assertions in the manuscript, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole.” Dunayevskaya, in contrast, hailed that manuscript. She saw both its criticism of Hegel in limiting transcendence only to the realm of thought, and, at the same time, its embrace of Hegel’s dialectic method, which Marx “praises, takes over, develops.” What Hegel calls “the dialectic of negativity,” Dunayevskaya wrote, Marx affirms as “the moving and creative principle.” She insisted “that for Marx as for us today, nothing short of a philosophy, a total outlook--which Marx first called, not ‘Communism’ but ‘Humanism,’ can answer the manifold needs of the proletariat” (MARXISM AND FREEDOM, pp. 57-59). Löwy maintains that some themes of the 1844 MANUSCRIPTS “were to be flatly abandoned by Marx in his later writings” (p. 90). These themes include “positive humanism” and the idea that communism is not the final goal but “merely the ‘revolutionary moment’ beyond which lies ‘truly human society.’” (p. 90). These issues turn on the all-important concept of the negation of the negation. Löwy, again sees Marx as recapitulating Feuerbach’s line of thought by conceiving a direct parallel between religious alienation and the alienation of labor. This would transpose the goal of disalienation to atheism, on the one hand, and, in the case of labor, to communism. THE NEGATION OF THE NEGATION But Marx takes pains in his “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole” to distinguish his appreciation of the negation of the negation from both Feuerbach’s stunted, abbreviated concept and from Hegel’s abstract concept. Löwy notes Marx’s favorable assessment of Feuerbach for “his opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positivity based on itself.” Marx does hold onto this aspect of Feuerbach’s thinking--positivity based on itself--and goes further with it. It appears in Marx’s 1844 writings as the idea of “the creation of man through human labour...his birth through himself, of his genesis” (CW 3, p. 305). This amounts to a positive humanism based on itself, not on some other foundation. However, Marx is critical of Feuerbach’s concept of negation of the negation when it is viewed “only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself--as the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it” (CW 3, p. 329). Marx sees no need to remain with atheism which “postulates the existence of man through this negation [of God]; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence” (CW 3, p. 306). This does not mean a rejection of the Hegelian concept of negation of the negation, however. For in this 1844 “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic,” Marx also identifies Hegel’s concept of negativity as the most crucial point for his own dialectical vision. He does so early in the essay, when he refers to “the outstanding achievement of Hegel’s PHENOMENOLOGY and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle” (CW 3, p. 332). Marx affirms the real human being and practical sensuous consciousness in the following stirring passage: "Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective, essential powers as alien objects by his externalization, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective” (CW 3, p. 336). As we might expect, Marx takes Hegel to task for considering the negation of negation solely in the sphere of ideas. POSITIVE HUMANISM Yet Marx also credits Hegel with discovering the only true and positive concept of the negation of the negation. We can discern both sides of Marx’s critique of Hegel in the following: “But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation, from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it, as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and spontaneous activity of all being, he has found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history, which is not yet the real history of man as a given subject” (CW 3, p. 329). For Marx, the supersession of alienation comes about “through the supersession of the objective world in its estranged mode of being,” and most fundamentally in the alienated labor that characterizes the capitalist mode of production. Marx returns to the metaphor of religion to explain his concept of positive humanism: “atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation--which is itself, however, a necessary premise--does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being” (CW 3, pp. 341,342). Löwy sees “positive humanism” and the related notion of the limits of communism and its transcendence as ideas of the young Marx “that were to be flatly abandoned in his later writings.” He is troubled and perplexed by Marx’s assertion that "Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism 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" (CW 3, p. 306). Again, we find Löwy unappreciative of this dialectical and open-ended dimension of Marx’s theory of revolution. Löwy likewise sounds critical of the idealistic tenor of Marx speaking “even of the ‘self-transcending’ of communism and its ‘transcendence’ by consciousness” in the following passage: "It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have at the outset gained a consciousness of the limited character as well as the goal of this historical movement--and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it" (CW 3, p. 90). Did the concept of positive humanism disappear in Marx’s later writings as Löwy asserts? I think not. In CAPITAL, volume 3, to take just one example, Marx stated: "The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper.... The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity at its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite" (CAPITAL, Vol. 3, [Penguin Classics, 1981], pp. 958, 959, my emphasis). Despite these deficiencies in its discussion of the relation of Marx’s theory of revolution to dialectical philosophy, this book makes an important contribution to revolutionary Marxist thought. It does so particularly by richly documenting its thesis of an integral connection between the development of Marx’s theory of revolution and the early thinking and activity of the working class which he interacted with after his arrival in Paris in 1843. This close connection itself reflects Marx’s distinctive theory of social revolution: the self-emancipation of the working class through its own praxis. |
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