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2.  
Elements of  
Self-Criticism  

 

 
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Foreword 

 






The reader will find two previously unpublished essays here.
    The first dates from June 1972. It was to be included in the Reply to John Lewis, thus adding to the elements of self-criticism to be found there, which in fact, it may be remembered, were limited to a rectification of the definition of philosophy. But in the end it could not be included in that text, which had to be kept to the length of what was actually only a magazine article, and also because I wanted to preserve the unity of the same text when it was published in French.
    In this essay there can be found, for the first time, a critical examination of the positions I took in For Marx and Reading Capital -- positions which, two years after the publication of these works, in the Preface to the Italian edition of Reading Capital, I characterized as affected by a "theoreticist tendency".
    I have taken the opportunity of adding to these Elements of Self-Criticism, as a supplement, an earlier essay (from July 1970), which deals with the development of the young Marx, and indicates in what direction I was then working. This self-criticism, whose "logic " and internal arguments I present here, in the form in which they came to disturb our course of thought on the subject, is naturally not a purely internal phenomenon. It can only be understood as the effect of a quite different, external "logic", that of the political events which I referred to in the Reply to John Lewis.

 
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    The reader will work out for himself the necessary relation between these two "logics ", without forgetting the primacy of practice over theory -- that is, the primacy of the class struggle in economics and politics over the class struggle in theory.

May 20, 1974 

 
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Elements of 
Self-Criticism 

 





I really think that, after John Lewis has given his point of view on my essays (which are now between seven and twelve years old, since the first article collected in For Marx dates from 1960), after so many critics, indeed, have given their points of view, that I should now present my own.
    I have never disowned my essays: there was no good reason to do so. But, in 1967, two years after their publication, I admitted (in an Italian edition of Reading Capital, as well as in other foreign editions) that they were marked by an erroneous tendency. I pointed out the existence of this error, and I gave it a name: theoreticism. Today, I think I can go further, and define the special "object" of the error, its essential forms and its reverberations.
    I should add that instead of talking about an error it would be better to talk about a deviation. A theoreticist deviation. You will see why I am suggesting a change of terminology -- that is, in this case, a change of category -- and what is at stake philosophically and politically when I stress this nuance.
    The whole thing can be summed up in a few words.
    I wanted to defend Marxism against the real dangers of bourgeois ideology: it was necessary to stress its revolutionary new character; it was therefore necessary to "prove" that there is an antagonism between Marxism and bourgeois ideology, that Marxism could not have developed in Marx or in the labour movement except given a radical and unremitting break with bourgeois ideology, an unceasing struggle against the assaults of this ideology. This thesis was correct. It still is correct.

 
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    But instead of explaining this historical fact in all its dimensions -- social, political, ideological and theoretical -- I reduced it to a simple theoretical fact: to the epistemological "break " which can be observed in Marx's works from 1845 onwards. As a consequence I was led to give a rationalist explanation of the "break", contrasting truth and error in the form of the speculative distinction between science and ideology, in the singular and in general. The contrast between Marxism and bourgeois ideology thus became simply a special case of this distinction. Reduction + interpretation: from this rationalist-speculative drama, the class struggle was practically absent.
    All the effects of my theoreticism derive from this rationalist-speculative interpretation.
    Thus, to straighten things out, I must re-examine the situation from a critical perspective: not in order to introduce new subjects of discussion (which would create a diversion), but in order to come back to that departure point, to that special "object", on which my theoreticist tendency took the opportunity to fix itself -- in short, to the question of the "break", to that extraordinary political-theoretical adventure which took form and developed, from 1845 onwards, in Marx's work -- so that I can show how I interpreted it when I carried out this reduction.

 
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event as the "opening of the Continent of History", or (and) of the irruption, of the sudden appearance of the Continent of History within scientific theory.
    In fact, something radically new -- though in an often very unstable form, clumsy in working out its new object and terminology,[2] or even still trapped in the old philosophical category,[3] and yet terribly anxious to make its appearance in the world -- really did arrive on the theoretical scene: it had never been seen before, it was in fact unprecedented, and, as we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, it was destined to remain there.
    This thesis, which my critics have not spared, I maintain. It is of course very schematic, both in the form in which I originally had to present it and in the form in which I now take it up again. It would need to be backed up by lengthy research and analysis, for which it is only the hypothesis. But none of the objections which have been raised to the thesis, even among the more or less serious ones, seems to me to have weakened it in principle. Because, bare and schematic as it was, it did in the last resort simply register a fact.
    What I said was that it is possible to locate, even among the ambiguities and hesitations of The German Ideology, a set of fundamental theoretical concepts, which cannot be found in Marx's earlier texts, and which present the special characteristic of being able to function in quite another manner than in their prehistory. I will not enter here into a study of these new concepts, whose novel organization gave them a quite new meaning and function: mode of production, relations of production, productive forces, social classes rooted in the unity of the productive forces and relations of production, ruling class/oppressed class, ruling

 
    2. Cf. the term "Verkehrsverhältnisse ", which, in The German Ideology, is the theoretical centre around which all the new concepts gravitate: yet which itself "turns" around a so far absent concept, which has not yet been produced in its definitive form: the concept of relations of production.
    3. Cf. the "division of labour", which, in The German Ideology, in fact functions as a substitute for the concept of alienation. Thus the theory of the individual, of the human "personality" and of communism which is found in this text.

 
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ideology/oppressed ideology, class struggle, etc. To take only one example, which can be proved beyond doubt by a process of comparison, I repeat that the theoretical system of the 1844 Manuscripts rested, in contrast, on three basic concepts: Human Essence/Alienation/Alienated Labour.[4] And it should be noted that the "mode of functioning" of this new system or

 
    4. John Lewis, like so many other critics, may well object that one can find in the 1844 Manuscripts most of the concepts of Classical Political Economy -- for example: capital, accumulation, competition, division of labour, wages, profit, etc. Exactly. These are concepts of Classical Political Economy, which Marx borrows just as he finds them there, without changing them one iota, without adding to them any new concept, and without modifying anything at all of their theoretical organization. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx actually speaks of the Economists as having said the last word on Economics. He does not modify their concepts, and when he criticizes them, he does so "philosophically", therefore from outside, and in the name of a philosophy which admits its inspiration: "Positive criticism [of political economy ] owes its true foundation to the discoveries of Feuerbach ", author of a "real theoretical revolution ", which Marx then considered decisive (Cf. the 1844 Manuscripts, Moscow 1967, pp. 19-20).
    To measure what we might call the difference, we need only to consider the break with Feuerbach which took place a few months later (see the Theses on Feuerbach ), and to note this fact: nowhere in the Manuscripts does the entirely new triadic conception appear, which forms the basis of the hitherto unknown theoretical system that begins to come into view in The German Ideology -- Mode of Production, Relations of Production, Productive Forces. The appearance of this new system produces, from the moment of The German Ideology, a new arrangement of the concepts of Classical Political Economy. They change their place, and also their meaning and function. Soon, the "discovery" (Engels) of surplus-value, placed in the centre of the theory of the capitalist mode of production (surplus-value = capitalist exploitation = class struggle) produces a complete upheaval among these concepts. A quite different form of the critique of Political Economy then appears, which bears no relation to the (Feuerbachian) "philosophical critique" of the Manuscripts, a critique based not on "Feuerbach's great discoveries", but on the reality of the contradictory process of the capitalist mode of production and of the antagonistic class struggle of which it is the site, that is, both cause and effect. The Critique of Political Economy (sub-title of Capital ) now becomes a denunciation of the economism of Classical Political Economy, of political economy as such (which does not take account of relations of exploitation and class struggle) -- and at the same time it becomes an internal account of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, a critique of the capitalist mode of production from the standpoint of its own tendential laws, which announce its future disappearance under the blows of the proletarian class struggle. All this can be proved, textually.

 
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conceptual apparatus proved to be quite simply different (without any relation in its "nature", without either a continuity or an "inversion") from the "mode of functioning" of the earlier systems. Because what we are seeing here is a "change of terrain" (I proposed, early on, the use of this important metaphor), therefore a "new terrain" on which the new concepts, after much elaboration, can lay down the foundations of a scientific theory, or (another metaphor) "open the road" to the development of what will, irresistibly, become a science, an unusual science, a revolutionary science, but a theory which contains what we recognize in the sciences, because it provides objective knowledge [connaissances objectives ]. As a matter of fact, it is possible on this new terrain to pose, little by little and for the first time, by using the new concepts, the real problems of concrete history, in the form of scientific problems. It is possible to produce (as Marx does in Capital ) proven theoretical results, that is, results which can be verified by scientific and political practice,[5] and are open to methodical rectification.
    Now, the historical appearance[6] of this new Scientific Continent, of this new apparatus of fundamental theoretical concepts, went together -- as you can see empirically in Marx, even if the process is clearly contradictory -- with the theoretical rejection of the old basic notions and (or) of

 
    5. This little "and" (scientific and political practice) naturally poses important problems which cannot be dealt with here. The problems and their solution can be ascribed to what is called the "union" or "fusion" of the Labour Movement with Marxist theory: Lenin, Gramsci and Mao have written crucial texts on these questions.
    6. A moment ago I drew a contrast -- in order to bring home the "reduction" which I had made -- between the simple "theoretical fact" of the "break" [coupure ], and the "historical fact" of the break [rupture ] between Marxism and bourgeois ideology. But, considered in itself, the break is also an historical fact. Historical: because we have the right to speak of theoretical events in history. Historical: because it is a case of an event of historical importance, of such great importance that we could, supposing that such a comparison makes any sense, talk of Marx's discovery as the greatest event in the history of knowledge since the "appearance" of mathematics, somewhere in Greece, associated with the name of Thales. And we are as yet far from having appreciated the full importance of this theoretical event and of its political consequences.

 
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their organization, which were recognized and rejected as erroneous.
    Caution: we have reached a very sensitive theoretical and political point.
    This process of explicit rejection begins in 1845 in The German Ideology, but it is disguised by its very general and abstract form, which contrasts "positive science ", dealing in empirical realities, with the mistakes, the illusions and dreams of ideology, and very precisely of philosophy, which is at this time conceived of simply as ideology: better, as ideology par excellence. But in 1847, in The Poverty of Philosophy, the "settling of accounts" takes place directly on the new scientific terrain, and it is the pseudo-scientific concepts of Proudhon -- who three years earlier, in The Holy Family, had been celebrated as the scientific theoretician of the proletariat -- which now have to pay the price.
    What is decisive in all this is the manner in which the accounts are settled. We no longer have a philosophical "critique", which works in part, or can in case of need work by "inversion";[7] we have instead the scientific denunciation of errors as errors, and their elimination, their removal pure and simple: Marx puts an end to the reign of conceptual errors, which he can call errors because he is advancing "truths", scientific concepts. This very special way of "settling accounts" is repeated again and again. It reappears throughout Marx's work, in Capital and later (cf. the showers of

 
    7. Self-criticism on the question of the "inversion". In my first essays I tended to reduce philosophy to science, and, in consequence, I refused to recognize that the figure of the "inversion" had its place in the history of philosophical relations. I began to rectify my position in an article of February 1968, "Marx's Relation to Hegel" [contained in the collection Politics and History, NLB, 1972; Translator's note]. It must be said, however, that philosophy is not (a) science, and that the relation between philosophical positions in the "history" of philosophy does not reproduce the relation between a body of scientific propositions and their (pre-scientific) prehistory. The "inversion" is one of the necessary forms of the internal dialectic between philosophical positions: but only in certain well defined conditions. For there exist many other forms of the same relation, given other conditions. To recognize only one form ("inversion") is to be caught in speculative idealism. Materialism takes very seriously the plurality of forms of relation, and their determinate conditions.

 
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criticism directed at the Social-Democratic leaders for their theoretical errors, contained in the Gotha Programme, and at Wagner for the Hegelian theoretical nonsense which he talked about the concept of value and its "division" into exchange-value and use-value). It is repeated in Lenin (polemic with the Narodniks, the "romantics", with Rosa Luxemburg over Capital, with Kautsky on the State and Imperialism, etc.), in Gramsci (polemic with Bukharin over historical materialism, etc.), and in Mao. It never comes to an end. A science (Lenin repeats it again and again when he talks about historical materialism) never comes to an end.
    But every science[8] begins. Of course, it always has a prehistory, out of which it emerges. But it does emerge, in two senses: in the ordinary sense, and in another sense, its own special sense, which distinguishes it above all from the philosophy with which it coexists within theory, but also from other realities, like the practical and theoretical ideologies.
    It emerges in the ordinary sense: this means that it is not born out of nothing, but out of a process of labour by which it is hatched, a complex and multiple process, sometimes brightened by a flash of lightning, but which normally operates blindly, in the dark, because "it" never knows where it is headed, nor, if ever it arrives, where it is going to surface. It is born out of the unpredictable, incredibly complex and paradoxical -- but, in its contingency, necessary -- conjunction of ideological, political, scientific (related to other sciences), philosophical and other "elements ", which at some moment[9] "discover ", but after the event, that they needed each other,

 
    8. What follows should not be understood as a relapse into a theory of science (in the singular), which would be quite speculative, but as the minimum of generality necessary to be able to grasp a concrete object. Science (in the singular) does not exist. But nor does "production in general": and yet Marx talks about "production in general", and deliberately, consciously, in order to be able to analyse concrete modes of production.
    9. Not necessarily at any precise moment (though, in exceptional circumstances this just could be: certain scientists, following Pascal, talk about their "night", that is, about the sudden proof which comes at "daybreak", when they are suddenly blessed with "sight"), but at a moment which can still be roughly fixed in historical time and its periods.

 
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since they come together, without however recognizing one another, in the theoretical shape of a new-born science. This is the first sense in which a science emerges from its prehistory, like everything that comes into the world, from atoms to living things and to men, including the code for their genetic reproduction.
    But a science also emerges from its prehistory in its own special way: in quite another manner which, at least in theory, is proper to itself, since it distinguishes it, among other things, from the way in which a philosophy "emerges" from its history. In this second sense, you can almost say that a science emerges from its prehistory in the same way as Marx emerged from the room of the Communist Weitling, with the famous remark: "Ignorance will never be an argument!", taking hold of the door and slamming it. Rejecting all or part of its prehistory, calling it erroneous: an error. And, at least in the very beginning, it is not too bothered with the "detail". It hardly matters that its judgement is, strictly speaking, "unjust" -- it is not a question of morality. And it hardly matters -- on the contrary! -- that ideologists arrive on the scene much later, when it is clear that this fatherless infant can no longer be got rid of, and provide it with an official genealogy which, in order to conjure the child away,[10] looks into its prehistory, chooses for it and imposes on it The father who had to have this child (to keep it a bit quiet). It hardly matters -- or, on the contrary, it matters very much! -- that genuine scholars, rather heretically of course, come on the scene very much later to re-establish the existence of lines of descent so complex and so contingent in their necessity that they force the conclusion that the child was born without a (single-identifiable) father : but one must

 
    10. Thus the bourgeois ideologists: they have discovered that Marx is nothing else than Ricardo, that Capital is nothing else than the chapter of Hegel's Philosophy of Right on Sittlichkeit (family apart): Civil Society + State, inverted (of course). "Find the lady", says the conventional Wisdom of detective novels. When the slogan is "find the father", it is obviously out of interest in the child: in order to make it disappear. Lenin, at all events, without going into detail, said, as if in passing, that Marxism had three "sources", no less! -- a way, which has hardly been understood, of rejecting the question of THE father.

 
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nevertheless accept the evidence and try to take account of this fact. Every recognized science not only has emerged from its own prehistory, but continues endlessly to do so (its prehistory remains always contemporary: something like its Alter Ego ) by rejecting what it considers to be error, according to the process which Bachelard called "the epistemological break [rupture ]".
    I owe this idea to him, but to give it (to use a metaphor) the sharpest possible cutting-edge, I called it the "epistemological break [coupure ]". And I made it the central category of my first essays.
    What a fuss I raised! The use of this expression caused a real Holy Alliance to be formed against me; it united first those -- bourgeois -- who will defend to the death the Continuity of History, of which they are the masters, and of Culture, which provides them with the facade that they need in order to believe in their empire and its uninterrupted future; it also included those Communists who know that, according to Lenin, all the resources of human knowledge are required in order to construct socialism once the revolution is made, but who think -- like the Marxists of the Gotha Programme -- that it is not worth risking the loss of their political allies for a few "displaced" scientific concepts in the unity platform; and it included too those more or less anarchist elements which, using different political arguments, accused me of having introduced "bourgeois" concepts into Marxism, because I talked about it in terms of a "break".
    But I shall continue to defend my theses, while of course rectifying them, at least until others -- better suited and thus more correct -- are proposed. I repeat: I shall continue to defend them, both for clear political reasons and for compelling theoretical reasons.
    Let us not try to fool ourselves: this debate and argument are, in the last resort, political. This is not only the case with my openly bourgeois critics, but also with the others. Who, really, is naïve enough to think that the expressions: Marxist theory, Marxist science -- sanctioned, moreover, time and time again by the history of the Labour Movement, by the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao -- would have produced the storms, the denunciations, the passions which

 
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we have witnessed,[11] if nothing had been at stake except a simple quarrel over words? This is not a debate about philology! To hang on to or to reject these words, to defend them or to destroy them -- something real is at stake in these struggles, whose ideological and political character is obvious. It is not too much to say that what is at stake today, behind the argument about words, is Leninism. Not only the recognition of the existence and role of Marxist theory and science, but also the concrete forms of the fusion between the Labour Movement and Marxist theory, and the conception of materialism and the dialectic.
    I know that it is not always easy to be fair. I agree that the ideological struggle is often confused, that the camps in this struggle are partly mixed up, and that arguments sometimes go on above the heads of the combatants. I recognize that not everyone who declares himself for one side really takes up all its positions, and that he may while trying for one result produce another. The attacks against the idea of a Marxist science may even, as a result of certain of the arguments used, knock down by ricochet certain definite errors. Let us say that public positions must always be judged against the system of positions actually held and against the effects they produce. For example, to look at only one side of the question, you may declare yourself for Marxist theory and yet defend this theory on the basis of positivist, therefore non-Marxist positions -- with all the consequences. Because you cannot really defend Marxist theory and science except on the basis of dialectical-materialist (therefore non-speculative and non-positivist) positions, trying to appreciate that quite extraordinary, because unprecedented, reality: Marxist theory as a revolutionary theory, Marxist science as a revolutionary science.
    What is really unprecedented in these expressions is the combination of the terms "revolutionary" and "theory" ("Without an objectively/revolutionary/theory there can

 
    11. Need it be recalled that these are not recent . . . That long before the arrival of Raymond Aron, Benedetto Croce (and he was not the first) denied all scientific value to Capital? That (without going back to Stirner's "anti-theoretical" reactions) the "left" critique of the idea of a Marxist science can already be found in the young Lukàcs, in Korsch, in Pannekoek, etc.?

 
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be no objectively/revolutionary/movement": Lenin), and, since science is the index of objectivity of theory, the combination of the terms "revolutionary" and "science". But in these combinations, which, if taken seriously, upset the received idea of theory and of science, the terms "theory" and "science" nevertheless remain. This is neither "fetishism" nor bourgeois "reification", nor is it a slip of the pen. Politically and theoretically, we cannot do without these words: because until it is proved otherwise, within the bounds of existing practices we have no others, and we have no better. And if Marx, Engels and Lenin, throughout their political battles and theoretical work, never abandoned them as guides and as weapons, that is because they considered them indispensable to their political and theoretical struggle: to the revolutionary liberation of the proletariat.
    We therefore have the right, and the duty, to speak (as all the classics have done) of Marxist theory, and, within Marxist theory, of a science and a philosophy: provided that we do not thereby fall into theoreticism, speculation or positivism. And, to touch immediately on the most delicate point: yes, we have the right, as far as theory is concerned, and the duty, politically, to use and defend -- by fighting for the word -- the philosophical category of "science", with reference to Marxism-Leninism, and to talk about the foundation by Marx of a revolutionary science. But we must then explain the reason for, the conditions and sense of this unprecedented combination, which brings about a decisive "shift" in our conception of science. To use and defend the word "science" in the context of this programme is a necessity, in order to resist the bourgeois subjective idealists and the petty-bourgeois Marxists who, all of them, shout "positivism" as soon as they hear the term, no doubt because the only picture they can conjure up of the practice and history of a science, and a fortiori of Marxist science, is the classical positivist or vulgar, bourgeois picture. It is a necessity if we want to resist the petty-bourgeois ideologists, Marxists or not, who like to weep over the "reification" and "alienation" of objectivity (as Stirner used to weep over "the Holy"), no doubt because they attach themselves without any embarrassment to the very antithesis which

 
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constitutes the basis of bourgeois legal and philosophical ideology, the antithesis between Person (Liberty = Free Will = Law) and Thing.[12] Yes, it is quite correct for us to speak of an unimpeachable and undeniable scientific core in Marxism, that of Historical Materialism, in order to draw a vital, clear and unequivocal line (even if you must -- and you must indeed -- continue forever to "work" on this line, to avoid falling into positivism and speculation) between: on the one hand the workers, who need objective, verifiable and verified -- in short scientific -- knowledge, in order to win victory, not in words, but in facts, over their class opponents; and, on the other hand, not only the bourgeoisie, which of course refuses Marxism any claim to be scientific, but also those who are willing to content themselves with a personal or fake theory, put together in their imagination or according to their petty-bourgeois "desire", or who refuse the very idea of a scientific theory, even the word "science", even the word "theory", on the pretext that

 
    12. One only has to open a textbook of law or jurisprudence, to see clearly that Law [Droit ] -- which, uniquely, works as one with its ideology, because it needs it to be able to "function" -- and therefore legal ideology, is, in the last instance, and usually surprisingly transparently, the basis of all bourgeois ideology. One needs a Marxist lawyer to demonstrate it, and a Marxist philosopher to understand it. As far as philosophers in general are concerned, they have not yet cut through the fog that surrounds them, and they hardly suspect the presence of Law and of legal ideology in their ruminations: in philosophy itself. However, the evidence is there: the dominant classical bourgeois philosophy (and its by-products, even the modern ones) is built on legal ideology, and its "philosophical objects" (philosophy has no object, it has its objects) are legal categories or entities: the Subject, the Object, Liberty, Free Will, Property (Properties), Representation, Person, Thing, etc. But those thinkers, those Marxists, who have recognized the bourgeois legal character of these categories and who criticize them, must still find their way out of the trap of traps: the idea and programme of a "theory of knowledge ". This is the keystone of classical bourgeois philosophy, which is still dominant. Now unless (like Lenin and Mao) we use this expression in a context which indicates where to get out of the circle, in the philosophical rather than the scientific sense, then the idea may be taken as constitutive of philosophy, and even of "Marxist philosophy", and you remain caught in bourgeois ideology's trap of traps. For the simple question to which the "theory of knowledge" replies is still a question of Law, posed in terms of the validity of knowledge.

 
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every science or even every theory is essentially "reifying", alienating and therefore bourgeois.[13]
    And I should add: we also have the right to speak about an "epistemological break" and to use this philosophical category to mark the historical-theoretical fact of the birth of a science, including, in spite of its unique character, Marxist revolutionary science, by the visible symptom of its emergence from its prehistory, its rejection of the errors of that prehistory. On condition, of course, that what are only effects are not taken for the cause -- but instead that the signs and effects of the "break" are considered as the theoretical phenomenon of the appearance of a science in the history of theory, which brings up the question of the social, political, ideological and philosophical conditions of this irruption.

 
    13. One day it will be necessary to clear up the problem of the theory which serves as a philosophical alibi for all this "reification" literature: the theory of commodity fetishism in Book I, Part I of Capital. Meanwhile it may be hoped that all those who, in spite of their aversion to the idea of Marxist science and even Marxist theory, nevertheless go out of their way to call themselves Marxists, will not satisfy themselves with the bad passages from Reich (who also wrote some good ones) and Marcuse (who did not) and others, but will take the trouble to read Stirner, a real man of the (Parisian) moment, and Marx's reply to him in The German Ideology. These are texts which, on the question of "theory", do not lack a certain bite.

 
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Now this is the very point at which I must -- since no-one else has really rendered me the service --[14] declare my theoreticist error: on the question of the "break".
    In the end, and in spite of all my precautions, I conceived and defined this "break" in the rationalist terms of science and non-science. Not openly in the "classical" terms of the opposition between truth and error (of a Cartesian type, reproducing an antithesis "fixed" from its origins, from Platonism onwards). Not in terms of an opposition between knowledge and ignorance (that of Enlightenment philosophy). But, if I may say so, worse: in terms of an opposition between science (in the singular) and ideology (in the singular).
    Why was this worse?
    Because in this way a very important but very equivocal -- and thus misleading -- notion was brought into play, based on its contrast with that of science, a notion which appears in The German Ideology, where one and the same term plays two different roles, designating a philosophical category on the one hand (illusion, error), and a scientific concept on the other (formation of the superstructure): the notion of ideology. And although The German Ideology encourages this confusion, Marx did after all overcome it, and so made it easier for us to avoid the trap. But this equivocal notion of ideology was brought into play within the rationalist context of the antithesis between truth and error. And so ideology was reduced to error, and error called ideology, and this whole rationalist game was given a fraudulent Marxist appearance.
    I do not need to say what this led to, ideologically and

 
    14. It may be that someone has done it, and that I simply have not heard. My excuses. In what I have been able to read, I have often come across absolute condemnations, very strong reservations and also some severe but correct remarks: and yet no coherent criticism which goes to the root of the matter, nothing really enlightening and convincing. But perhaps I have simply been deaf and blind . . .

 
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practically.[15] And in fact this disguise, which disguised nothing, did have its consequences. But Marxism, although it is rational, is not Rationalism, not even "modern" Rationalism (of which some of our predecessors, before the war, dreamed, in the heat of the struggle against Nazi irrationalism). And, in spite of everything which I said in another connexion about the basically practical, social and political function of ideology, because (encouraged by The German Ideology ) I used one and the same term in two senses, the importance which I placed in its first use, a philosophical and definitely rationalist one ( = the exposure of illusions, of errors) caused my interpretation, objectively, to fall into theoreticism on this point.
    Nevertheless, and even in the equivocal terms of The German Ideology, this disguise of error as ideology could take on and in fact did take on another meaning. Ideology was only the Marxist "name" for error. But even in The German Ideology, which itself carried out this reduction, you could feel that behind the contrast between "positive truth" and ideological illusion, a quite different break with the past -- not simply theoretical, but political and ideological, and on a quite different scale -- was making its appearance and working itself out. This break was the one which Marx made not with ideology in general, not only with the existing ideological conceptions of history, but with bourgeois ideology, with the dominant, reigning bourgeois conception of the world, which held sway not only over social practices but also within the practical and theoretical ideologies, in philosophy, and even in the products of Political Economy and utopian socialism. The fact that this domination was

 
    15. I will mention only one name as an example and as an exemplary case: that of Lysenko. And with it, his deceptive contrast: "bourgeois science/proletarian science". In short, two memories of a certain period (to say no more). A number of my critics, Communists and others, understood very well at the time (1960-65) when I published my first essays, that even at the very modest level at which they intervened political questions were also at stake. Certain were quite correct, at least at the time. For what is often forgotten is that the "conjuncture" has changed in the last ten years, in some of its least apparent aspects, and, in its contingent respects, the front of the theoretical struggle has moved, just like the front of the political struggle. But the basis has remained largely unchanged.

 
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not absolute, but the result of a struggle against survivals of the feudal conception of the world and against the fragile foundations of a new, proletarian conception of the world -- this too is a fact of vital importance for understanding Marx's position. For he was only able to break with bourgeois ideology in its totality because he took inspiration from the basic ideas of proletarian ideology, and from the first class struggles of the proletariat, in which this ideology became flesh and blood. This is the "event" which, behind the rationalist facade of the contrast between "positive truth" and ideological illusion, gave this contrast its real historical dimension. I certainly "sensed" that what was at stake in this debate was the break with bourgeois ideology, since I set to work to identify and characterize this ideology (in terms of humanism, historicism, evolutionism, economism, idealism, etc.). But for want of understanding at that time the mechanisms of ideology, its forms, its functions, its class tendencies, and its necessary relations with philosophy and the sciences, I was not really able to clarify the link existing between, on the one hand, Marx's break with bourgeois ideology, and on the other hand, the "epistemological break".
    This latter "break" is not an illusion.
    Behind this disguise of error as ideology, there stood a fact: the declaration of opposition between truth and error which is objectively one of the symptoms of the birth, of the appearance of a science (when this really is what has taken place). Whatever has been claimed, there is no doubt that I did not hold to a "non-dialectical" opposition between science and ideology: for I showed that this opposition was recurrent, therefore historical and dialectical, since it is only if the truth has been "discovered" and "acquired", and then alone, that the scientist can look back from this established position towards the prehistory of his science, and declare that it consists in part or whole of error, of a "tissue of errors" (Bachelard), even if he recognizes within it partial truths which he exempts or anticipations which he retains (for example: Classical Political Economy, utopian socialism). But this very exemption is only possible because the partial truths and anticipations of its prehistory are now recognized and identified as such, on the basis of the

 
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finally discovered and established truth. "Habemus enim ideam veram . . ." (Spinoza). It is just because (enim ) we possess (habemus ) a true idea that . . . that we can also say: "Verum index sui et falsi "; what is true is the sign both of itself and of what is false, and the recognition of error (and of partial truths) depends on starting from what is true.
    It is still the case, however, that in reducing and extending the "break" to this simple opposition between science and ideology -- even if I did call it recurrent, even "perpetual" and "endless" -- I uncritically adopted the point of view which "science" (in the singular) holds about itself (and, all too clearly, not only about itself!); or rather -- since this formula is still idealist -- I adopted the point of view which the "agents" of scientific practice hold about their own practice and the history of its results; or rather -- since this formula is even now still idealist -- [16] the point of view of the "spontaneous philosophy of scientists" (Lenin) who see, in the beginnings of a science, only the finished contrast between before and after, between the truth (or truths) discovered and the errors rejected. Now I have since (in a Philosophy Course for Scientists, 1967) tried to show precisely that this "spontaneous philosophy of scientists" is not spontaneous, and does not at all derive from the philosophical imagination of the scientists as such: for it is quite simply the repetition, by these scholars and scientists, of Theses of contradictory tendencies developed publicly by philosophy itself -- that is, ultimately, by the "philosophy of philosophers".
    I did, then, note the existence of the "break", but since I treated it in terms of the Marxist disguise of error as ideology, and -- in spite of all the history and dialectics which I tried

 
    16. Cf. on this subject all the ambiguities which arise -- like a bird at the footsteps of the huntsman -- from the simple use of Bachelard's formula: "les travailleurs de la preuve ", especially when they are gathered into the "cité des savants ". But the "cité des savants " only exists in the bourgeois division between manual and intellectual labour, and in the bourgeois ideology of "science and technique" which helps this division to function by approving it and justifying it from a simply bourgeois point of view. The proletarian point of view on the question is quite different: the suppression of the "cité des savants ", the "union" of the scientists with the workers and militants, and onwards to communist forms of the division of labour totally unknown and unimaginable from the bourgeois viewpoint.

 
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to "inject"[17] into it -- in categories which in the last resort were rationalist, I could not explain what was the basis of this break; and if, deep down, I sensed it, I was incapable of grasping it[18] and expressing it.
    Thus in fact I reduced the break between Marxism and bourgeois ideology to the "epistemological break", and the antagonism between Marxism and bourgeois ideology to the antagonism between science and ideology.
    This false position, like any correct one, had its consequences. It might not have done so if I had been satisfied with limiting its expression to a few phrases. But I was naïve enough (or logical enough) to make a theoretical argument out of it, and to insert it into a line of argument rigorous enough for me to have to pay the price.
    I theorized this "error" of the rationalist opposition between science (truths) and ideology (errors), in spite of all kinds of necessarily inoperative reserves, in terms of three figures which embodied and summed up my theoreticist (i.e. rationalist-speculative) tendency:

1. A (speculative) sketch of the theory of the difference between science (in the singular) and ideology (in the singular) in general.

2. The category of "theoretical practice" (in so far as, in

 
    17. For the inevitable -- and inevitably negative -- results of the attempt to "inject" dialectics into all kinds of theses and theories, compare Marx's experience with Proudhon: "I tried to inject him with the Hegelian dialectic . . . " Without success. Indeed, if we take the word of The Poverty of Philosophy, criticizing The Philosophy of Poverty, we should perhaps even speak of a catastrophe! The dialectic cannot be "injected", nor, following the technical metaphor strictly, can it be "applied ". Hegel pointed this out forcefully. On this point at least we must follow Hegel. On this point -- which still leaves others to be debated -- Marx and Lenin are Hegelians. One cannot talk of the injection or application of the dialectic. Here we touch on a very sensitive philosophical point (indicated by two simple words). In philosophy "lines of demarcation" meet and intersect at points, which thus become sensitive points: an encounter at the crossroads.
    18. I say: incapable of grasping it. Because it is not possible, if you want to do serious work, to remain satisfied with general and established formulae, which, parasitic on others, give you the impression and conviction of being on the right road and of having found just the right word for the thing.

 
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the existing context, it tended to reduce philosophical practice to scientific practice).

3. The (speculative) thesis of philosophy as "Theory of theoretical practice" -- which represented the highest point in the development of this theoreticist tendency.[19]
    Of course, this last thesis on philosophy was not without its secondary effects on the Marxist conception of science,

 
    19. You only need to bring these three theses together to understand the term by which I have named my deviation: theoreticism. Theoreticism here means: primacy of theory over practice; one-sided insistence on theory; but more precisely: speculative-rationalism. To explain only the pure form: to conceive matters in terms of the contrast between truth and error was in fact rationalism. But it was speculation to want to conceive the contrast between established truths and acknowledged errors within a General Theory of Science and Ideology and of the distinction between them. Of course I am simplifying and forcing things to the extreme, reasoning them out to their ultimate conclusions -- for our analyses never actually went so far, certainly not reaching these conclusions. But the tendency is undeniable.
    It was organized, as is often the case, around the manifest form of a word, whose credentials seemed beyond doubt: Epistemology. Thus we went back to Bachelard, who makes constant use of the term, and also to Canguilhem, who, though we did not notice it, uses it very little. We (especially I) used it and abused it, and did not know how to control that use. I point this out because a whole number of our readers jumped on to this, reinforcing by their own philosophical inclinations the theoreticist tendency of our essays.
    What did we understand by Epistemology ? Literally: the theory of the conditions and forms of scientific practice and of its history in the different concrete sciences. But this definition could be understood in two ways. In a materialist way, which could lead us to study the material, social, political, ideological and philosophical conditions of the theoretical "modes of production" and "production processes" of already existing knowledge: but this would properly fall within the domain of Historical Materialism! Or in a speculative way, according to which Epistemology could lead us to form and develop the theory of scientific practice (in the singular) in distinction to other practices: but how did it now differ from philosophy, also defined as "Theory of theoretical practice"? We were now within the domain of "Dialectical Materialism", since philosophy was and is nothing but Epistemology. This was the crossroads. If Epistemology is philosophy itself, their speculative unity can only reinforce theoreticism. But if Epistemology is based on Historical Materialism (though naturally possessing a minimum of concepts which are its own and specify its object), then it must be placed within it; and, at the same time, the illusion and deception involved in the very project must be recognized. It follows (as we have since pointed out) that one must give up this project, and criticize the idealism or idealist connotations of all Epistemology.

 
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of historical materialism, not so much because of the use to which I put the distinction (correct in principle) between science and Marxist "philosophy" as because of the way in which I treated this relation (philosophy being, ultimately, treated as theory like science, made of the same stuff, with the added capital letter: Theory). Very unfortunate consequences resulted as far as the presentation of the modality of Marxist science, of Historical Materialism, was concerned -- especially in Reading Capital.
    It was no doubt on this occasion that the accidental by-product of my theoreticist tendency, the young pup called structuralism, slipped between my legs . . .

 
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and ideological conditions which determine it. And, among these conditions, the most important in certain cases, and indisputably in the case of Marx, is the intervention of class theoretical positions, or what could be called the intervention of the philosophical "instance".[23]
    In the case of Marxist theory, the event which can be called a "break", as I defined it above, in fact seems to have been produced like a "fatherless child" by the meeting of what Lenin called the Three Main Sources, or, to use a more accurate term, by the intersection or conjunction, against the background of the class struggles of 1840-48 (in which the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat was more important than the historical class struggle between the feudal class and the bourgeoisie), of lines of demarcation and of extremely complex theoretical and ideological lineages, which, aimlessly and each for itself, criss-cross in the resultant field of their intersection.
    Now it is possible and necessary to distinguish as dominant in this contradictory process what we might call the change in the class theoretical position of the historical "individual" Marx-Engels. This change of class theoretical position took place, under the influence of the political class struggles and of their lessons, in philosophy. This claim is not at all strange if, as I suggest, philosophy really is, in the last instance, class struggle in theory.
    I must insist on this point: in fact it takes me directly back to my first essays. At that time I said: the essential question is that of Marxist philosophy. I still think so. But, if I did see (in 1960-65) what the essential question was, I now see that I did not understand it very well . . . I defined philosophy as "Theory of theoretical practice", thus con-

 
    23. Again a precise example. I am indeed using the term instance intentionally. This again is a category which, until a better adapted one comes along, must be kept in use but put to work in its right place. Now recently a wind has been blowing, among Communist philosophers, strong enough to turn every instance upside-down . . . But just because some use the term "instance" on every menu, whether it has any relevance or not, we do not need to follow them. For my pan, I certainly did make a rather free use of "instances", because at the time I had nothing better; and I will now stop talking about the "economic instance", but will maintain the valuable term of instance for the Superstructure: the State, Law and Philosophy.

 
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ferring on it, by the use of the single term "theory", the same status as a science. In theoretically overestimating philosophy, I underestimated it politically, as those who correctly accused me of not "bringing in" the class struggle were quick to point out. Another proof of this is the introduction, in Lenin and Philosophy, where I did rectify the essential point of my deviation in proposing a new definition of philosophy ("politics in theory"), of the system of "double, equal representation" at the level of the Sciences and of Politics, and the Thesis borrowed, not accidentally, from Hegel: philosophy always rises when dusk has fallen, in the historical period following a unique event -- not the event of a political-ideological revolution, but the event of the birth or modification of the Sciences themselves. This was still an improvised solution, that is, a semi-compromise, which, while making some allowance for the events of the history of the sciences and for the philosophical reactions to them, did not really do them justice, because a priori it did them justice too well. If I now propose a different formula: "philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in theory", it is precisely in order to be able to give both the class struggle (the last instance) and the other social practices (among them scientific practice) their due in their "relation" to philosophy.
    On this basis, new fields of research are opened up.







 

 
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On the Evolution 
of the 
Young Marx 

 



I
If I were asked to sum up in a few words the essential Thesis which I wanted to defend in my philosophical essays, I would say: Marx founded a new science, the science of History. I would add: this scientific discovery is a theoretical and political event unprecedented in human history. And I would specify: this event is irreversible.
    A theoretical event. Before Marx, what one could call the "History Continent" was occupied by ideological conceptions derived from the religious, moral or legal-political sphere -- in short, by philosophies of history. These claimed to offer a representation of what happens in societies and in history. In fact they only succeeded in masking, within distorting and misleading concepts, the mechanisms which really do govern societies and history. This mystification was not an accident: it was linked to their function. These conceptions were in fact only the theoretical detachment of practical ideologies (religion, morality, legal ideology, politics, etc.) whose essential function is to reproduce the relations of production ( = of exploitation) in class societies. Marx "opened" the "History Continent" by breaking with these ideological conceptions. He opened it: by the principles of historical materialism, by Capital and his other works. He opened it: for, as Lenin says, Marx only laid the "corner-stones" of an immense domain which his successors continued to exploit, and the vast extent of the field and the new problems posed demand an unremitting effort.
    A political event. For Marx's scientific discovery has been since the very beginning and has become more and

 
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more the object and the stake of a fierce and implacable class struggle. When he demonstrated that human history is the history of class societies, therefore of exploitation and of class domination, and thus finally of class struggle, when he demonstrated the mechanisms of exploitation and of capitalist domination, Marx collided directly with the interests of the ruling classes. Their ideologists let fly against him, and even now are still intensifying their attacks. But the exploited classes, and above all the workers, recognized "their" truth in Marx's scientific theory: they adopted it, and made it a weapon in their revolutionary class struggle. This recognition bears a name in history: it is the Union (or, as Lenin said, the Fusion) of the Labour Movement and Marxist Theory. This Encounter, this Union, this Fusion, have never taken place spontaneously or easily. For the Labour Movement, which existed long before the appearance and spread of Marxist theory, came under the influence of petty-bourgeois ideological conceptions, like utopian socialism, anarchism, etc. A great deal of work and a very long ideological and political struggle were needed before the Union could take place and acquire a historical existence. The very conditions of its realization and existence mean that this Union cannot be a once-and-for-all victory. It does not exist in isolation from the class struggle, and must be incessantly defended in the course of a bitter class struggle against the deviations and crises which threaten it: the evidence is the treachery, yesterday, of the Second International, and today the split in the International Communist Movement.
    One fact is indisputable: for a hundred years the whole history of humanity has depended on the Union of the Labour Movement (and of the oppressed peoples) and Marxist Theory (which became Marxist-Leninist Theory). We only need to step back a little to see that, in different but convergent forms, this reality now easily dominates the scene of world history: the struggle of the proletariat and of the oppressed peoples against Imperialism. This fact is irreversible.

 
II
We could satisfy ourselves with these remarks. But if we

 
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wish (whatever our place in this struggle) to advance in the exploration of the "History Continent", or (what, in one precise respect, comes to the same thing) to arrive at an active understanding of the forms of the present-day proletarian class struggle, we must go further. We must ask ourselves: under what conditions was Marx's scientific discovery possible?
    This question may look like a detour. But it is not. It may look like a theoretical question. In fact it has political implications which are clearly vital.

 
III
When in my earlier essays I showed that Marx's scientific discovery represented a "break" [coupure or rupture ] with previous ideological conceptions of history, what did I do? What did I do when I spoke of a "break" between science and ideology? What did I do when I spoke of ideology?
    I developed a formal analysis, whose significance must now be indicated and whose limits must be traced.
    Above all, I arrived at a conclusion. I took cognizance of a fact, of a theoretical event: the appearance of a scientific theory of History in a domain hitherto occupied by conceptions which I called ideological. Let us leave aside for a moment this description: ideological.
    I showed that there existed an irreducible difference between Marx's theory and these conceptions. To prove it, I compared their conceptual content and their mode of functioning.
    Their conceptual content : I showed that Marx had replaced the old basic concepts (which I called notions) of the philosophies of History with absolutely new, unheard-of concepts, not to be found in the old conceptions. Where the philosophies of History talked about man, the economic subject, need, the system of needs, civil society, alienation, theft, injustice, spirit, liberty -- where they talked about "society" itself -- Marx began to talk about the mode of production, social formation, infrastructure, superstructure, ideologies, classes, class struggle, etc. I concluded that there was no continuity (even in the case of Classical Political Economy) between

 
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the system of Marxist concepts and the system of pre-Marxist notions. This absence of a relation of continuity, this theoretical difference, this dialectical "leap", I called an "epistemological break" [coupure or rupture ].
    Their mode of functioning : I showed that in practice Marxist theory functioned quite differently from the old pre-Marxist conceptions. It seemed to me that the system of basic concepts of Marxist theory functioned like the "theory" of a science: as a "basic" conceptual apparatus, opened to the "infinitude" (Lenin) of its object, that is, designed ceaselessly to pose and confront new problems and ceaselessly to produce new pieces of knowledge. Let us say: it functioned as a (provisional) truth, for the (endless) conquest of new knowledge, itself capable (in certain conjunctures) of renewing this first truth. In comparison, it appeared that the basic theory of the old conceptions, far from functioning as a (provisional) truth, for the production of new pieces of knowledge, actually tried in practice to operate as the truth of History, as complete, definitive and absolute knowledge of History, in short as a closed system, excluding development because lacking an object in the scientific sense of the term, and thus only ever finding in reality its own mirror reflection. Here too I concluded that there was a radical difference between Marx's theory and earlier conceptions, and I talked about the "epistemological break" [coupure or rupture ].
    Finally, I called these earlier conceptions ideological, and understood the "epistemological break", the proof of which I had established, as a theoretical discontinuity between Marxist science on the one hand, and its ideological prehistory on the other. I should specify: not between science in general and ideology in general, but between Marxist science and its own ideological prehistory.
    But what allowed me to say that the pre-Marxist conceptions were ideological? Or, what comes to the same thing, what sense did I give to the term ideology ?
    An ideological conception does not carry the inscription ideology on its forehead or on its heart, whatever sense you give to the word. On the contrary, it presents itself as the Truth. It can only be identified from outside, after the event: from the standpoint of the existence of a Marxist science

 
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of History. I repeat: not simply from the standpoint of the existence of Marxist science as science, but from the standpoint of Marxist science as the science of History.
    In fact, every science, as soon as it arises in the history of theories and is shown to be a science, causes its own theoretical prehistory, with which it breaks, to appear as quite erroneous, false, untrue. That is how it treats it in practice: and this treatment is a moment in its history. Nevertheless there always exist philosophers who will draw edifying conclusions; who will draw out of this recurrent (retrospective) practice an idealist theory of the opposition between Truth and Error, between Knowledge and Ignorance, and even (provided that the term "ideology" is taken in a non-Marxist sense) between Science and Ideology, in general.
    This effect of recurrence (retrospection) is also a factor in the case of Marxist science: when this science appears, it necessarily shows up its own prehistory as erroneous, but at the same time it also shows it up as ideological in the Marxist sense of the term. Better, it shows up its own prehistory as erroneous because ideological, and in practice treats it as such. Not only does it indicate error -- it explains the historical reason for error. Thus it rules out the exploitation of the "break" between the science and its prehistory as an idealist antithesis of Truth and Error, of Knowledge and Ignorance.
    On what principle does this difference, this unprecedented advantage rest? On the fact that the science founded by Marx is the science of the history of social formations. Because of this it gives, for the first time, a scientific content to the concept of ideology. Ideologies are not pure illusions (Error), but bodies of representations existing in institutions and practices: they figure in the superstructure, and are rooted in class struggle. If the science founded by Marx shows up the theoretical conceptions of its own prehistory as ideological, it is therefore not simply to denounce them as false: it is also to point out that they claim to be true, and were accepted and continue to be accepted as true -- and to show why this is so. If the theoretical conceptions with which Marx broke (let us say, to simplify matters: the philosophies of history) deserve to be called ideological, it is because they were the theoretical detachments of practical ideologies

 
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which performed necessary functions in the reproduction of the relations of production of a given class society.
    If this is true, then the "break" between Marxist science and its ideological prehistory refers us to something quite different from a theory of the difference between science and ideology, to something quite different from an epistemology. It refers us on the one hand to a theory of the superstructure, in which the State and Ideologies figure (I have tried to say a few words about this in the article on Ideological State Apparatuses). It refers us on the other hand to a theory of the material (production), social (division of labour, class struggle), ideological and philosophical conditions of the processes of production of knowledge. These two theories are based in the last instance on historical materialism.
    But if this is true, Marx's scientific theory itself must answer the question of the conditions of its own "irruption" in the field of ideological conceptions with which it broke.

 
IV
The great Marxists (Marx above all, Engels, then Lenin) certainly felt that it was not enough to note the appearance of a new science, but that an analysis must also be provided, in conformity with the principles of Marxist science, of the conditions of its appearance. The first elements of this analysis can be found in Engels and Lenin, in the form of the "Three Sources" of Marxism: German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
    But this old metaphor of "sources", which contains in itself idealist notions (origin, interiority of the current, etc.), must not lead us into error. What is quite remarkable about this "classical" theory is, first, that it attempts to understand Marx's discovery not in terms of individual or original genius, but in terms of a conjunction of different and independent theoretical elements (Three sources). It then presents this conjunction as having produced a fundamentally new effect in respect of the elements which entered into the conjunction: an example of a "leap" or "qualitative change", an essential category of the materialist dialectic.

 
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    But Engels and Lenin do not stop there. They do not defend a purely internal, purely "epistemological" conception of the appearance of Marxist science. They recall that these three theoretical elements exist against a historical background: a material, social and political history, dominated by decisive transformations in the forces and relations of production, by centuries of class struggle pitting the rising bourgeoisie against the feudal aristocracy, and finally dominated by the first great actions of the proletarian class struggle. In a word, they remind us that it is practical (economic, political, ideological) realities which are represented theoretically, in more or less abstract form, in German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
    They are represented, but at the same time they are also deformed, mystified and masked, because these theoretical elements are by nature profoundly ideological. It is here that the decisive question arises.
    In fact it is not enough to point out that the conjunction of these three theoretical elements caused Marxist science to appear. We must also ask how this ideological conjunction could produce a scientific disjunction, how this encounter could produce a "break". In other words, we must ask how and why, when this conjunction took place, Marxist thought was able to leave ideology : or, again, what the displacement was that produced such a prodigious transformation, what the change was that could bring to light what was hidden, overturn what was accepted, and discover an unknown necessity in the facts.
    I want to propose the first elements of an answer to this question, by proposing the following thesis: it was by moving to take up absolutely new, proletarian class positions that Marx realized the possibilities of the theoretical conjunction from which the science of history was born.

 
V
This can be demonstrated by running through the main lines of the "moments" of the "evolution" of the young Marx's thought. Four years separate the liberal-radical

 
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articles of the Rheinische Zeitung (1841) from the revolutionary break [rupture ] of 1845, recorded in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, in the famous phrases proclaiming the "settling of accounts with our erstwhile philosophical consciousness", and the arrival of a new philosophy which will no longer "interpret the world" but "change it". In these four years we see a young son of the Rhenish bourgeoisie move from bourgeois-radical political and philosophical positions to petty-bourgeois-humanist positions, then to communist-materialist positions (an unprecedented revolutionary materialism).
    Let me specify the aspects of this "evolution".
    We see the young Marx at the same time change the object of his thought (roughly, he moves from Law to the State, then to Political Economy), change his philosophical position (he moves from Hegel to Feuerbach, then to a revolutionary materialism), and change his political position (he moves from radical bourgeois liberalism to petty-bourgeois humanism, then to communism). Although these changes are not completely in phase, there are profound links between them. But they should not be fused into a single, formless unity, because they intervene at different levels, and each plays a distinct role in the process of transformation of the young Marx's thought.
    We can say that, in this process, in which the object occupies the front of the stage, it is the (class) political position that occupies the determinant place; but it is the philosophical position that occupies the central place, because it guarantees the theoretical relation between the political position and the object of Marx's thought. This can be verified empirically in the history of the young Marx. It was indeed politics which allowed him to move from one object to another (schematically: from Press Laws to the State, then to Political Economy), but this move was realized and expressed each time in the form of a new philosophical position. On the one hand the philosophical position appears to be the theoretical expression of the political (and ideological) class position. On the other hand this translation of the political position into theory (in the form of a philosophical position) appears to be the condition of the theoretical relation to the object of thought.

 
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    If this is true, and if philosophy really does represent politics in theory, we can say that the philosophical position of the young Marx represents, in its variations, the class theoretical conditions of his thought. If this is true, then it is no surprise that the break of 1845, which ushered in a new science, is first expressed in the form of a philosophical break [rupture ] , of a "settling of accounts" with an erstwhile philosophical consciousness, and in terms of the proclamation of an unprecedented philosophical position.
    This astonishing dialectic can be seen at work in the 1844 Manuscripts. When you examine them closely, you appreciate the extent of the theoretical drama which Marx must have lived through in this text (he never published it, he never referred to it again). The crisis of the Manuscripts is summed up in the untenable contradiction between political and philosophical positions which confront one another in the treatment of the object: Political Economy. Politically, Marx wrote the Manuscripts as a Communist, and thus made the impossible theoretical gamble of attempting to use, in the service of his convictions, the notions, analyses and contradictions of the bourgeois economists, putting in the forefront what he calls "alienated labour", which he could not yet grasp as capitalist exploitation. Theoretically, he wrote these manuscripts on the basis of petty-bourgeois philosophical positions, making the impossible political gamble of introducing Hegel into Feuerbach, so as to be able to speak of labour in alienation, and of History in Man. The Manuscripts are the moving but implacable symptom of an unbearable crisis: the crisis which brings an object enclosed in its ideological limits up against incompatible political and theoretical class positions.
    We find the solution of this crisis in the Theses on Feuerbach and in The German Ideology : or at least we find a claim that it is solved, the "germ" of a "new conception of the world" (Engels). The change which the Theses briefly indicate is a change, not in Marx's political position, but in his philosophical position. Marx finally abandons Feuerbach, breaks with the whole philosophical tradition of "interpreting the world", and advances into the unknown territory of a revolutionary materialism. This new position now expresses

 
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Marx's political position in philosophy. In other words: Marx was taking a first step, but a decisive and irreversible one, towards proletarian class theoretical (philosophical) positions.
    Here again it is politics which is the determinant element: the ever deeper engagement in the political struggles of the proletariat. Here again it is, from the theoretical point of view, philosophy which occupies the central place. It is as a consequence of this class theoretical position that Marx's treatment of his object, Political Economy, takes on a radically new character: breaking with all ideological conceptions to lay down and develop the principles of the science of History.
    This is how I take the liberty of interpreting the theory of the "Three sources". The conjunction of the three theoretical elements (German philosophy, English political economy, French socialism) could only produce its effect (Marx's scientific discovery) by means of a displacement which led the young Marx not only onto proletarian class positions but also onto proletarian theoretical positions. Without the politics nothing would have happened; but without the philosophy, the politics would not have found its theoretical expression, indispensable to the scientific knowledge of its object.
    I will add just a few words more. First to say that the new philosophical position announced in the Theses is only announced; it is not therefore given to us at a stroke or ready-made; it continues to be developed, silently or explicitly, in the later theoretical and political work of Marx and his successors, and more generally in the history of the Union between the Labour Movement and Marxist Theory. And this development is determined by the double effect of Marxist-Leninist science and practice.
    Second, to point out that it is no surprise that the adoption of a proletarian philosophical position (even "in germ") is essential to the foundation of a science of History, that is, to an analysis of the mechanisms of class exploitation and domination. In every class society these mechanisms are covered-up-masked-mystified by an enormous coating of ideological representations, of which the philosophies

 
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of History, etc., are the theoretical form. For the mechanisms to become visible, it is necessary to leave these ideologies, that is, to "settle accounts" with the philosophical consciousness which is the basic theoretical expression of these ideologies. It is therefore necessary to abandon the theoretical position of the ruling classes, and take up a position from which these mechanisms can become visible: the proletarian standpoint. It is not enough to adopt a proletarian political position. This political position must be worked out into a theoretical (philosophical) position so that the causes and mechanisms of what is visible from the proletarian standpoint may be grasped and understood. Without this displacement, the science of History is unthinkable and impossible.

 
VI.
I will add, finally, to come back to where I began, that this detour via the conditions of the appearance of the science of History is not a matter of scholasticism. On the contrary: it brings us back to earth. For what was demanded of the young Marx is still, and more than ever, demanded of us. More than ever, in order to "develop" Marxist theory, that is, in order to analyse the new capitalist-imperialist forms of exploitation and domination, more than ever, in order to make possible a correct Union between the Labour Movement and Marxist-Leninist Theory, we need to stand on proletarian positions in theory (in philosophy): to stand on such positions, which means to work them out, on the basis of proletarian political positions, by means of a radical critique of all the ideologies of the ruling class. Without revolutionary theory, said Lenin, there can be no revolutionary movement. We can add: without a proletarian position in theory (in philosophy), there can be no "development" of Marxist theory, and no correct Union between the Labour Movement and Marxist Theory.

 
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3.  
Is it Simple  
to be a Marxist  
in Philosophy?  

 

 
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The following text contains the main arguments with which Louis Althusser accompanied his submission, at the University of Picardy, of certain of his earlier writings [1] for the degree of doctorat d' Etat.

that is in fact not rely on anything, neither on an existing State nor on an existing Prince, but on the non-existent impossibility: a new Prince in a new Principality.
    I found an echo of and a basis for this argument in Lenin. He of course, a few years after What is to be Done?, in response to certain criticisms which had been made of his formulae, replied in the form of the theory of the bending of the stick. When a stick is bent in the wrong direction, said Lenin, it is necessary if you want to put matters right -- that is, if you want to straighten it and keep it straight -- to grasp it and bend it durably in the opposite direction. This simple formula seems to me to contain a whole theory of the effectiveness of speaking the truth, a theory deeply rooted in Marxist practice. Contrary to the whole rationalist tradition, which only requires a straight, true idea in order to correct a bent, false idea, Marxism considers that ideas only have a historical existence in so far as they are taken up and incorporated in the materiality of social relations. Behind the relations between simple ideas there thus stand relations of force, which place certain ideas in power (those which can be schematically called the ruling ideology) and hold other ideas in submission (which can be called the oppressed ideology), until the relation of force is changed. It follows that if you want to change historically existing ideas, even in the apparently abstract domain called philosophy, you cannot content yourself with simply preaching the naked truth, and waiting for its anatomical obviousness to "enlighten" minds, as our eighteenth-century ancestors used to say: you are forced, since you want to force a change in ideas, to recognize the force which is keeping them bent, by applying a counter-force capable of destroying this power and bending the stick in the opposite direction so as to put the ideas right.
    All this outlines the logic of a social process whose scope is obviously wider than any written text. But in a written text like What is to be Done? the only form which this relation of forces can take is its presence, its recognition and its anticipation in certain radical formulae, which cause the relation of force between the new ideas and the dominant ideas to be felt in the very statement of the theses themselves. If I might, in my own modest way, allow myself to be inspired

 
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and empowered by these examples, I would say: yes, I did consciously confront and deal with the relation between ideas as a relation of force, and yes, I did consciously "think in extremes" about some points which I considered important and bend the stick in the opposite direction. Not for the pleasure of provocation, but to alert my readers to the existence of this relation of forces, to provoke them in this connexion and to produce definite effects, not in function of some belief in the omnipotence of theory, for which I have been reproached by certain "headmasters" of the school of philosophy, but on the contrary in the materialist knowledge of the weakness of theory left to itself, that is, in the consciousness of the conditions of force which theory must recognize and to which it must defer if it is to have a chance of transforming itself into a real power.
    As a proof of what I have been saying, I would be happy, when the opportunity offers itself, to argue the point that this relation of force, counter-bending and bending, this extremism in the formulation of theses, belongs quite properly to philosophy, and that even if they did not admit as much, as Lenin did in passing and from behind the shelter of a common maxim, the great philosophers always practised it, whether they hid this fact behind an idealist disclaimer or brought it out into the full light of day in their treatment of the "scandals" of materialism.
    It remains true that in bending the stick in the opposite direction, you run a risk: of bending it too little, or too much, the risk which every philosopher takes. Because in this situation, in which social forces and interests are at stake, but can never be untangled with absolute certainty, there is no court of final appeal. If you intervene too abruptly you run the risk of not immediately finding the mark; if you bend the stick too little or too much you run the risk of finding yourself being pulled back into error. This, as you perhaps know, is what I publicly admitted to have happened to some extent in my own case, when I recognized in 1967 and explained more recently in the Elements of Self-criticism that my writings of 1965, which have been laid before you, were impaired by a theoreticist tendency and just a little compromised by a flirt with structuralist terminology. But

 
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to be able to explain these failings I needed the perspective of time -- not just a ten years interval, but the experience of the effects caused by my writings, of further work and of self-criticism. It has been written: you need to understand. I would add: especially to understand what you yourself have written.

 
    Before discussing the detailed argument of my essays, a word about their very general objective.
    This objective can be made out from the titles of my books: For Marx, Reading Capital. For these titles are slogans. I think that I can speak here for figures of my generation, who have lived through Nazism and fascism, the Popular Front, the Spanish War, the War and the Resistance, and the Stalin period. Caught up in the great class struggles of contemporary history, we had engaged ourselves in the struggles of the Labour Movement and wanted to become Marxists. Now it was not easy to be a Marxist and to find one's feet within Marxist theory, even after the Twentieth Congress, since the dogmatism of the preceding period lived on, now in conjunction with its counterpoint, all that "Marxist" philosophical twaddle about man. And since this twaddle was based on the letter of the works of the young Marx, it was necessary to return to Marx in order to throw a little light on ideas clouded over by the trials of history. I do not want to lay stress on the political importance of this operation; it did however have something original about it, for which I have never been forgiven, in the fact that it criticized dogmatism not from the right-wing positions of humanist ideology, but from the left-wing positions of theoretical anti-humanism, anti-empiricism and anti-economism. I was not alone in the operation: as I later found out, others -- not only della Volpe in Italy but also certain young Soviet thinkers whose writings have not been widely published -- had also, in their own manner, set out on the same path. We were attempting to give back to Marxist theory, which had been treated by dogmatism and by Marxist humanism as the first available ideology, something of its status as a theory, a revolutionary theory. Marx had

 
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expressed the hope, in the Preface to Capital, for "a reader who is willing . . . to think for himself". In order to try to understand what Marx had thought, the very least that we had to do was to return to Marx and "think for ourselves" about what he had thought.
    Thus, in opposition to the subversion to which Marx's thought had been subjected, it seemed to me indispensable to lay stress on one simple idea: the unprecedented and revolutionary character of this thought. Unprecedented, because Marx had -- in a work of conceptual elaboration which begins with The German Ideology and culminates in Capital -- founded what we might call, as a first approximation, the science of history. Revolutionary, because this scientific discovery which armed the proletariat in its struggle caused a complete upset in philosophy: not only by causing philosophy to revise its categories in order to bring them into line with the new science and its effects, but also and above all by giving philosophy the means, in the term of an understanding of its real relation to the class struggle, of taking responsibility for and transforming its own practice.
    It is this innovation, this radical difference between Marx and his predecessors, that I wanted not only to bring out but also to clarify and if possible to explain, because I considered it to be politically and theoretically vital for the Labour Movement and its allies and still do consider it vital for this difference to be grasped. To this end I had to establish myself at the level of the new philosophy, produced by Marx in the course of his scientific revolution, and in a movement of thought close to Spinoza and sanctioned by Marx to try to grasp this difference on the basis of the newly acquired truth. But to the same end I had to grasp the philosophy capable of grasping the difference, that is, I had to obtain a clear view of Marx's own philosophy. Now everyone knows that the mature Marx left us nothing in this line except the extraordinary 1857 Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and the intention, which he never realized, of writing a dozen pages on the dialectic. No doubt Marx's philosophy is, as Lenin said, contained in Capital, but in a practical state, just as it is also contained in the great struggles of the Labour Movement. I decided

 
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that it had to be extracted, and basing myself on the available fragments and examples, I tried to give it a form resembling its concept. That is why the question of Marxist philosophy naturally occupied the centre of my attention. I did not make it the centre of the world, I did not raise philosophy to the level of command, but I had to make this philosophical detour in order to grapple with the radical character of Marx's work.
    This conviction has always been with me. I would now formulate it differently than in For Marx and Reading Capital, but I consider that I made no mistake in locating philosophy as the place from which Marx can be understood, because that is where his position is summed up.

The "Last Instance . . ."

I now suggest to you that my essays should be approached by three rough paths which travel across them and intersect.
    I will first take the path of the "last instance".
    We know that Marx and Engels argued the thesis of the determination by the economy in the last instance. This little phrase, which seems like nothing at all, in fact upsets the whole ruling conception of society and of history. Not enough attention has been paid to the figure or metaphor in which Marx presents his conception of a society in the Preface to the 1859 Contribution. This figure is that of a topography, that is, of a spatial apparatus which assigns positions in space to given realities.
    The Marxist topography presents society in terms of the metaphor of an edifice whose upper floors rest, as the logic of an edifice would have it, on its foundation. The foundation is in German die Basis or die Struktur, which is traditionally translated as base or more often infrastructure : it is the economy, the unity of the productive forces and relations of production under the dominance of the relations of production. From the base of the ground floor rise the upper floor or floors of the Überbau, in translation the legal-political and ideological superstructure.
    A simple image, it will be said, representing realities. Agreed: but it also distinguished these realities, which is

 
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very important, for example by placing positive law, which Hegel includes within civil society, in the category of the superstructure, and thus distinguishing something very different from simple realities: their efficacy and its dialectic.
    When Marx says that the base or infrastructure is determinant in the last instance, he implies that what it determines is the superstructure.
    For example: "The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element".[2]
    But the determination which Marx is thinking of here is only determination in the last instance. As Engels wrote (in a letter to Bloch): "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase."[3]
    In the determination of the topography, the last instance really is the last instance. If it is the last one, as in the legal

 
    2. Marx continues: "Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation [Gestaltung ] of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its own specific political form [Gestalt ]. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers -- a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods [Art und Weise ] of labour and thereby its social productivity -- which reveals the innermost secret [innerste Geheimnis ], the hidden basis [Grundlage ] of the entire social structure [Konstruktion ], and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the State." (Capital, vol. III, p. 772, Moscow edition, 1962.)
    3. Engels continues: "The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even then the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas, also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form."

 
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image which it invokes (court of the last instance), that is because there are others, those which figure in the legal-political and ideological superstructure. The mention of the last instance in determination thus plays a double role: it divides Marx sharply off from all mechanistic explanations, and opens up within determination the functioning of different instances, the functioning of a real difference in which the dialectic is inscribed. The topography thus signifies that the determination in the last instance by the economic base can only be grasped within a differentiated, therefore complex and articulated whole (the "Gliederung "), in which the determination in the last instance fixes the real difference of the other instances, their relative autonomy and their own mode of reacting on the base itself.
    Before drawing the consequences, I would like to underline the decisive theoretical importance of this category of the "last instance ", too often considered as a philosophical approximation or popularization. To argue for the determination in the last instance by the economy is to mark oneself off from all idealist philosophies of history, it is to adopt a materialist position. But to talk about the determination by the economy in the last instance is to mark oneself off from every mechanistic conception of determinism and to adopt a dialectical position. However, when you are working in Hegel's shadow you must be on your guard against the idealist temptations involved in the dialectic. And Marx is on his guard, because when he inscribes the dialectic within the functioning of the instance of a topography, he effectively protects himself from the illusion of a dialectic capable of producing its own material content in the spontaneous movement of its self-development. In submitting the dialectic to the constraints of the topography, Marx is submitting it to the real conditions of its operation, he is protecting it from speculative folly, he is forcing it into a materialist mould, forcing it to recognize that its own figures are prescribed by the material character of its own conditions. That this inscription and this prescription are not in themselves sufficient to provide us with the figures of the materialist dialectic in person, I agree, but they do save us from at least one temptation: that of seeking these figures ready-made in Hegel.

 
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    In this manner we come back to the themes developed in my essays, whose object was to differentiate between Marx and Hegel. I have stated elsewhere what debt Marx owed to Hegel, and also why he was constantly forced to make the detour via Hegel in order to find his own way forward.[4]
    Yes, Marx was close to Hegel, but above all for reasons which are not mentioned, for reasons which go back further than the dialectic, for reasons which relate to Hegel's critical position in respect to the theoretical presuppositions of classical bourgeois philosophy, from Descartes to Kant. To sum it up in a word: Marx was close to Hegel in his insistence on rejecting every philosophy of the Origin and of the Subject, whether rationalist, empiricist or transcendental; in his critique of the cogito, of the sensualist-empiricist subject and of the transcendental subject, thus in his critique of the idea of a theory of knowledge. Marx was close to Hegel in his critique of the legal subject and of the social contract, in his critique of the moral subject, in short of every philosophical ideology of the Subject, which whatever the variation involved gave classical bourgeois philosophy the means of guaranteeing its ideas, practices and goals by not simply reproducing but philosophically elaborating the notions of the dominant legal ideology. And if you consider the grouping of these critical themes, you have to admit that Marx was close to Hegel just in respect to those features which Hegel had openly borrowed from Spinoza, because all this can be found in the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. These deep-rooted affinities are normally passed over in pious silence; they nevertheless constitute, from Epicurus to Spinoza and Hegel, the premises of Marx's materialism. They are hardly ever mentioned, for the simple reason that Marx himself did not mention them, and so the whole of the Marx-Hegel relationship is made to hang on the dialectic, because this Marx did talk about! As if he would not be the first to agree that you must never judge someone on the basis of his own self-conscious image,

 
    4. Cf. "Marx's Relation to Hegel" (in Politics and History, New Left Books, 1972) and the Elements of Self-criticism.

 
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but on the basis of the whole process which, behind this consciousness, produces it.
    I hope I shall be excused for laying so much stress on this point, but it is the key to the solution of very many problems, real or imaginary, concerning Marx's relation to Hegel, and within Marx concerning the relation of the dialectic to materialism. In fact I believe that the question of the Marxist dialectic cannot be properly posed unless the dialectic is subjected to the primacy of materialism, and a study is made of what forms this dialectic must take in order to be the dialectic of this materialism. From this point of view it is easy to understand how the idea of the dialectic could have imposed itself on a philosophy like that of Hegel, not only because the dramatic turmoil of the French Revolution and its after-effects provided the hard lesson, but also because the dialectic was the only means of thinking within a philosophy which had very good reasons for originally refusing (even if it later transformed and reintroduced them) the use and guarantee of the categories of Origin and Subject. Of course, Hegel did not apply himself to the search for the dialectic only after rejecting Origin and Subject. In a single movement he created the dialectic which he needed to differentiate himself from the classical philosophies, and, to force it to serve his ends, he "mystified the dialectic", to use Marx's words. But that does not mean that the Hegelian mystification itself is not witness to a relation constant since the time of Epicurus, and perhaps before him, between materialism, which can only play its role by drawing a demarcation line between itself and every philosophy of the Origin, whether of Being, of the Subject or of Meaning, and the dialectic. To make the matter clearer in a few words: when you reject the radical origin of things, whatever the figure used, you need to create quite different categories from the classical ones in order to get a grasp on those notions -- essence, cause or liberty -- whose authority is drawn from this origin. When you reject the category of origin as a philosophical issuing bank, you have to refuse its currency too, and put other categories into circulation: those of the dialectic. That is in outline the profound relation linking the premises of the materialism to be found in Epicurus, Spinoza and Hegel, which governs

 
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not only everything about the dialectic but also the dialectic itself.
    It is this which seems to me important, much more than the "conclusions without premises" which are the only judgements made by Marx on Hegel and where he raises only and for its own sake the question of the dialectic. He does this, of course, in order to recognize in Hegel the merit of having -- I quote -- "been the first to express the general movement of the dialectic", which is correct and certainly a rather reserved statement, but also in order to argue, this time without any reservations, that Hegel had "mystified" it, and that Marx's own dialectic was not only not that of Hegel, but "its exact opposite". But we also know that according to Marx it was enough, in order to demystify the Hegelian dialectic, to invert it. I have argued enough in the past about the fact that this idea of inversion did not do the job and was only a metaphor for a real materialist transformation of the figures of the dialectic, about which Marx promised us a dozen pages which he never wrote. This silence was surely not accidental. It was doubtless a consequence of the need to trace a line back from the conclusions to the materialist premises of the dialectic, and on the basis of these premises to think out, in the strong sense, the new categories which they imply and which can be found in operation in Capital and in Lenin's writings, but which do not always or do not yet clearly bear their name.
    I became involved in this problem when I started to look for the difference, in their very proximity, between Marx and Hegel. It is quite obvious that if Marx borrowed from Hegel the word and the idea of the dialectic, he nevertheless could not possibly have accepted this doubly mystified dialectic -- mystified not only in the idealist attempt to produce its own material content, but also and above all in the figures which realize the miracle of its self-incarnation: negation and the negation of the negation, or Aufhebung. Because if the Hegelian dialectic rejects every Origin, which is what is said at the beginning of the Logic, where Being is immediately identified with Nothingness, it projects this into the End of a Telos which in return creates, within its own process, its own Origin and its own Subject. There is

 
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no assignable Origin in Hegel, but that is because the whole process, which is fulfilled in the final totality, is indefinitely, in all the moments which anticipate its end, its own Origin. There is no Subject in Hegel, but that is because the becoming-Subject of substance, as an accomplished process of the negation of the negation, is the Subject of the process itself. If Marx took over the idea of the dialectic from Hegel, he not only "inverted" it in order to rid it of the pretension or fantasy of self-production, but also had to transform its figures so that they should cease to produce the implied effects. Lenin made the point again and again during the years 1918-23 that if socialism does not succeed in transforming petty commodity production, then, as long as it is allowed to exist, petty commodity production will continue to give rise to capitalism. One might say, in the same manner: as long as Marxism does not succeed in transforming the figures of the dialectic mystified by Hegel, these figures will continue to give rise to Hegelian, mystified effects. Now this transformation was not to be found in my head, nor only in the future, but out in the open in the texts of Marx and Lenin and the practice of the proletarian class struggle.
    I was therefore simply trying to formulate conceptually what already existed in the practical state.
    That, to approach the matter from this direction, is why I claimed that Marx did not have the same idea of the nature of a social formation as Hegel, and I believed that I could demonstrate this difference by saying that Hegel thought of society as a totality, while Marx thought of it as a complex whole, structured in dominance. If I may be allowed to be a little provocative, it seems to me that we can leave to Hegel the category of totality, and claim for Marx the category of the whole. It might be said that this is a verbal quibble, but I do not think that this is entirely true. If I preferred to reserve for Marx the category of the whole rather than that of the totality, it is because within the totality a double temptation is always present: that of considering it as a pervasive essence which exhaustively embraces all of its manifestations, and -- what comes to the same thing -- that of discovering in it, as in a circle or a sphere (a metaphor which makes us think of Hegel once again), a centre which would be its essence.

 
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    On this point I believed that I had found an important difference between Marx and Hegel. For Hegel, society, like history, is made up of circles within circles, of spheres within spheres. Dominating his whole conception is the idea of the expressive totality, in which all the elements are total parts, each expressing the internal unity of the totality which is only ever, in all its complexity, the objectification-alienation of a simple principle. And in fact, when you read the Rechtsphilosophie, you find that Hegel is deploying, in the dialectic of the Objective Spirit which produces them, the spheres of abstract law, of Moralität and Sittlichkeit, so that each produces the other through the negation of the negation so as to find their truth in the State. There are many differences between them, but since their relation is always one of "truth", these differences are always affirmed only to be denied and transcended in other differences, and this is possible because in each difference there is already present the in-itself of a future for-itself. And when you read the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, you find the same process, one might even say the same procedure: each moment of the development of the Idea exists in its States, which realize a simple principle -- the beauty of individuality for ancient Greece, the legal spirit for Rome, etc. And borrowing from Montesquieu the idea that in a historical totality all concrete determinations, whether economic, political, moral or even military, express one single principle, Hegel conceives history in terms of the category of the expressive totality.
    For Marx, the differences are real, and they are not only differences in spheres of activity, practices and objects: they are differences in efficacy. The last instance operates here in such a way that it explodes the peaceful fiction of the circle or the sphere. It is not an accident that Marx abandons the metaphor of the circle for that of the edifice. A circle is closed, and the corresponding notion of totality presupposes that one can grasp all the phenomena, exhaustively, and then reassemble them within the simple unity of its centre. Marx on the other hand presents us with an edifice, a foundation, and one or two upper floors -- exactly how many is not stated. Nor does he say that everything must fall into

 
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these categories, that everything is either infrastructure or superstructure. You could even argue for the idea, essential to Capital, that the Marxist theory of societies and of history implies a whole theory of their incidental costs and their failures. Marx only says that you must distinguish, that the distinctions are real, irreducible, that in the order of determination the share of the base and that of the superstructure are unequal, and that this inequality or unevenness in dominance is constitutive of the unity of the whole, which therefore can no longer be the expressive unity of a simple principle all of whose elements would be the phenomena.
    That is why I talked about a whole, to make it clear that in the Marxist conception of a social formation everything holds together, that the independence of an element is only ever the form of its dependence, and that the interplay of the differences is regulated by the unity of a determination in the last instance; but that is why I did not talk about a totality, because the Marxist whole is complex and uneven, and stamped with this unevenness by the determination in the last instance. It is this interplay, this unevenness, which allow us to understand that something real can happen in a social formation and that through the political class struggle it is possible to get a hold on real history. I made the point in passing: no politics have ever been seen in the world which were inspired by Hegel. For where can you get a hold on the circle when you are caught in the circle? Formally, the Marxist topography gives an answer when it says: this is what is determinant in the last instance -- the economy, therefore the economic class struggle, extended into the political class struggle for the seizure of State power -- and this is how the class struggle in the base is linked (or is not linked) to the class struggle in the superstructure. But that is not all. In pointing this out, the Marxist topography refers any questioner to his place in the historical process: this is the place which you occupy, and this is where you must move to in order to change things. Archimedes only wanted a single fixed point in order to lift up the world. The Marxist topography names the place where you must fight because that is where the fight will take place for the transformation of the world. But this place is no longer a point, nor is it

 
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fixed -- it is an articulated system of positions governed by the determination in the last instance.
    All this remains formal, no-one will deny it, in the Preface to the Contribution to which I have alluded. But the Communist Manifesto called things by their names and Capital repeated them. Capital is full of examples of the topographical figure. It is through the use of this figure that theoretical determination can become practical decision, because it arranges things in such a way that the workers, who Marx was talking to, can seize them. The concept which is grasped (Begriff ) becomes in Marx the theoretical-practical apparatus of a topography, a means of practically grasping the world.
    It is easy to see that, in this new whole, the dialectic at work is not at all Hegelian. I tried to show this in connexion with the question of contradiction, by pointing out that if you take seriously the nature of the Marxist whole and its unevenness, you must come to the conclusion that this unevenness is necessarily reflected in the form of the overdetermination or of the underdetermination of contradiction. Of course, it is not a question of treating overdetermination or underdetermination in terms of the addition or subtraction of a quantum of determination, a quantum added or subtracted from a pre-existing contradiction, that is, one leading a de jure existence somewhere. Overdetermination or underdetermination are not exceptions in respect to a pure contradiction. Just as Marx says that man can only be alone within society, just as Marx says that the existence of simple economic categories is an exceptional product of history, in the same way a contradiction in the pure state can only exist as a determinate product of the impure contradiction.
    The effect of this thesis is quite simply to change the reference points from which we look at contradiction. And, in particular, it warns us against the idea of what I have called simple contradiction, or more exactly contradiction in the logical sense of the term, whose terms are two equal entities each simply bearing one of the contrary signs + or -, A or not-A. If I might now go a little further than I did in my first essays, but in the same direction, I should say that contradiction, as you find it in Capital, presents the surprising characteristic of being uneven, of bringing contrary

 
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terms into operation which you cannot obtain just by giving the second a sign obtained by negating that of the first. This is because they are caught up in a relation of unevenness which continuously reproduces its conditions of existence just on account of this contradiction. I am talking for example about the contradiction within which the capitalist mode of production exists and which, tendentially, condemns it to death, the contradiction of the capitalist relation of production, the contradiction which divides classes into classes, in which two quite unequal classes confront each other: the capitalist class and the working class. Because the working class is not the opposite of the capitalist class, it is not the capitalist class negated, deprived of its capital and its powers -- and the capitalist class is not the working class plus something else, namely riches and power. They do not share the same history, they do not share the same world, they do not lead the same class struggle, and yet they do come into confrontation, and this certainly is a contradiction since the relation of confrontation reproduces the conditions of confrontation instead of transcending them in a beautiful Hegelian exaltation and reconciliation.
    I think that if you keep in sight this special characteristic of Marxist contradiction, that it is uneven, you will come up with some interesting conclusions, not only about Capital but also about the question of the struggle of the working class, of the sometimes dramatic contradictions of the Labour Movement and of the contradictions of socialism. For if you want to understand this unevenness, you will have to follow Marx and Engels in taking seriously the conditions which make the contradiction uneven, that is, the material and structural conditions of what I have called the structured whole in dominance, and here you will get a glimpse into the theoretical foundations of the Leninist thesis of uneven development. Because in Marx all development is uneven, and here again it is not a question of additions to or subtractions from a so-called even development, but of an essential characteristic. Every development is uneven, because it is contradiction which drives development, and because contradiction is uneven. That is why, alluding to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality by Rousseau,

 
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who was the principal theoretician of alienation before Hegel, I once added as a sub-title to my article "On the Materialist Dialectic" the phrase: "On the Unevenness of Origins", signifying by the plural, origins, that there is no Origin in the philosophical sense of the term, and that every beginning is marked with unevenness.
    I have only sketched out a few themes, simply to indicate the critical importance of the thesis of the last instance for understanding Marx. And it is of course true that every interpretation of Marxist theory involves not only theoretical stakes but also political and historical. These theses on the last instance, on the structured whole in dominance, on the unevenness of contradiction, had an immediate principal objective, which governed the way in which they were expressed: that of recognizing and indicating the place and the role of theory in the Marxist Labour Movement, not just by taking note of Lenin's famous slogan, "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement", but by going into detail in order to free theory from confusions, mystifications and manipulations. But beyond this primary objective, my theses had other, more important aims, bearing on the temptations faced by the Labour Movement: the temptation of a messianic or critical idealism of the dialectic, which has haunted intellectuals in revolt from the time of the young Lukàcs and even of the old and new Young Hegelians; the temptation of what I called the poor man's Hegelianism, the evolutionism which has always, in the Labour Movement, taken the form of economism. In both cases, the dialectic functions in the old manner of pre-Marxist philosophy as a philosophical guarantee of the coming of revolution and of socialism. In both cases, materialism is either juggled away (in the case of the first hypothesis) or else reduced to the mechanical and abstract materiality of the productive forces (in the case of the second hypothesis). In all cases the practice of this dialectic runs up against the implacable test of the facts: the revolution did not take place in nineteenth-century Britain nor in early twentieth-century Germany; it did not take place in the advanced countries at all, but elsewhere, in Russia, then later in China and Cuba, etc. How can we understand this displacement of the principal contradiction of imperialism onto the

 
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weakest link, and correlatively how can we understand the stagnation in the class struggle in those countries where it appeared to be triumphant, without the Leninist category of uneven development, which refers us back to the unevenness of contradiction and its over- and underdetermination? I am deliberately stressing underdetermination, because while certain people easily accepted a simple supplement to determination, they could not accept the idea of underdetermination, that is, of a threshold of determination which, if it is not crossed, causes revolutions to miscarry, revolutionary movements to stagnate or disappear, and imperialism to rot while still developing, etc. If Marxism is capable of registering these facts, but not capable of understanding them, if it cannot grasp, in the strong sense, the "obvious" truth that the revolutions which we know are either premature or miscarried, but from within a theory which dispenses with the normative notions of prematurity and of miscarriage, that is, with a normative standpoint, then it is clear that something is wrong on the side of the dialectic, and that it remains caught up in a certain idea which has not yet definitively settled accounts with Hegel.
    That is why I think that, in order to see more clearly what makes Marx different, one must put into its proper perspective the immediate formulation in which he expressed his relation to the Hegelian dialectic. To do so, one must first consider how Marx's materialism is expressed, because the question of the dialectic depends on this. And there does exist a rather good way of dealing with this problem, which I have just tried to follow: that which uses the category of determination in the last instance.

On The Process Of Knowledge

I now want, much more briefly, to take another path across my essays in order to look at another group of theses developed there on the question of "knowledge".
    I cannot hide the fact that in this matter I depended heavily on Spinoza. I said a moment ago that Marx was close to Hegel in his critique of the idea of a theory of knowledge. But this Hegelian critique is already present in Spinoza. What does Spinoza in fact mean when he writes, in a famous

 
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phrase, "Habemus enim ideam veram . . ."? That we have a true idea? No: the weight of the phrase lies on the "enim ". It is in fact because and only because we have a true idea that we can produce others, according to its norm. And it is in fact because and only because we have a true idea that we can know that it is true, because it is "index sui ". Where does this true idea come from? That is quite a different question. But it is a fact that we do have it (habemus ), and whatever it may be that produces this result, it governs everything that can be said about it and derived from it. Thus Spinoza in advance makes every theory of knowledge, which reasons about the justification of knowledge, dependent on the fact of the knowledge which we already possess. And so every question of the Origin, Subject and Justification of knowledge, which lie at the root of all theories of knowledge, is rejected. But that does not prevent Spinoza from talking about knowledge: not in order to understand its Origin, Subject and Justification, but in order to determine the process and its moments, the famous "three levels", which moreover appear very strange when you look at them close up, because the first is properly the lived world, and the last is specially suited to grasping the "singular essence" -- or what Hegel would in his language call the "universal concrete" -- of the Jewish people, which is heretically treated in the Theologico-Political Treatise.
    I am sorry if some people consider, apparently out of theoretical opportunism, that I thus fall into a heresy, but I would say that Marx -- not only the Marx of the 1857 Introduction, which in fact opposes Hegel through Spinoza, but the Marx of Capital, together with Lenin -- is in fact on close terms with Spinoza's positions. For while they too reject every theory of the Origin, Subject and Justification of knowledge, they too talk about knowledge. And the fact that Lenin claims for Marxism the expression "theory of knowledge" is not an embarrassment when you realize that he defines it as . . . the dialectic. In fact Marx and Lenin talk about knowledge in very general terms, to describe the general aspects of its process. One must be suspicious of those passages in which Marx states such generalities. There is at least one case, among others, with respect to

 
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which he did explain himself: that of "production ". At one and the same time he outlines the general characteristics of production and yet argues that general production and, a fortiori, production in general do not exist, because only particular modes of production exist within concrete social formations. This is one way of saying that everything takes place within the concrete structure of particular processes, but that in order to be able to grasp what is happening you need the help of that minimum of non-existent generality without which it would be impossible to perceive and understand what does exist. Well, I think that the 1857 Introduction is in this vein. I think that it introduces neither a "theory of knowledge" nor its surrogate, an epistemology: I think that it only expresses that minimum of generality without which it would be impossible to perceive and understand the concrete processes of knowledge. But just like the general concept of production, the general concept of knowledge is there only to disappear in the concrete analysis of concrete processes: in the complex history of the processes of knowledge.
    In the whole of this affair I based myself as closely as possible on Marx's 1857 Introduction, and if I used it to produce some necessary effects of theoretical provocation, I think that I did nevertheless remain faithful to it.
    I was directly and literally inspired by Marx, who several times uses the concept of the "production " of knowledge, to argue my central thesis: the idea of knowledge as production. I obviously also had in mind an echo of Spinozist "production", and I drew on the double sense of a word which beckoned both to labour, practice, and to the display of truth. But essentially -- and in order to provoke the reader -- I held closely, I would even say mechanically, to the Marxist concept of production, which literally suggests a process and the application of tools to a raw material. I even outbid Marx by presenting a general concept of "practice", which reproduced the concept of the labour process to be found in Capital, and, referring back to theoretical practice, I used and no doubt forced a little Marx's text in order to arrive at the distinction between the three generalities,[5] the first

 
    5. Cf. For Marx, "On the Materialist Dialectic"; English edition, pp. 183-190 [translator's note ].

 
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of which functioned as the theoretical raw material, the second as the instruments of theoretical labour, and the third as the concrete-in-thought or knowledge. I admit that Spinoza was involved in this affair, too, because of his "three levels of knowledge", and the central role of the second: scientific abstraction.
    What interested me above all else in Marx's text was his radical double opposition to empiricism, and to Hegel. In opposition to empiricism, Marx argued that knowledge does not proceed from the concrete to the abstract but from the abstract to the concrete, and that all this takes place, I quote, "in thought ", while the real object, which gives rise to this whole process, exists outside of thought. In opposition to Hegel, Marx argued that this movement from the abstract to the concrete was not a manner of producing reality but of coming to know it. And what fascinated me in all this argument was that one had to begin with the abstract. Now Marx wrote that knowledge is "a product of thinking, of comprehension . . . a product of the assimilation and transformation (ein Produkt der Verarbeitung) of perceptions and images into concepts ", and also that "it would seem to be the proper thing to start with the real and concrete elements . . . e.g. to start in the sphere of economy with population . . . Closer consideration shows, however, that this is wrong. Population is an abstraction."[6] I concluded that perceptions and images (Anschauung und Vorstellung ) were treated by Marx as abstractions. And I attributed to this abstraction the status of the concrete or of experience as you find it in Spinoza's first level of knowledge, that is, in my language, the status of the ideological. Of course I did not say that Generalities II, working on Generalities I, only work on ideological material, because they could also be working on abstractions which are already scientifically elaborated, or on both together. But there did remain this border-line case of a purely ideological raw material, a hypothesis which allowed me to introduce the science/ideology antithesis, and the epistemological break, which Spinoza, long before Bachelard,

 
    6. Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow, 1971, p. 205 [translator's note ].

 
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inserted between his first and second levels of knowledge, and thus I produced a certain number of ideological effects which, as I have pointed out in my Elements of Self-criticism, were not free of all theoreticism.
    But, of course, since I suffer from what Rousseau called something like "the weakness of believing in the power of consequences", I did not stop there, but drew an important distinction: that between the real object and the object of knowledge. This distinction is contained in the very phrases in which Marx deals with the process of knowledge. As a materialist, he argues that knowledge is knowledge of a real object (Marx says: a real subject), which (I quote) "remains, after as before, outside the intellect and independent of it".[7] And, a little later, in reference to the subject of investigation, society, he writes (I quote) that it "must always be envisaged therefore as the pre-condition of comprehension". Marx therefore poses, as a pre-condition of the whole process of knowledge of a real object, the existence of this real object outside of thought. But this exteriority of the real object is affirmed at the same time as he affirms the specific character of the process of knowledge, which is "the product of the assimilation and transformation" of perceptions and images into concepts. And, at the end of the process, the thought-concrete, the thought-totality, which is its result, presents itself as knowledge of the real-concrete, of the real object. The distinction between the real object and the process of knowledge is indubitably present in Marx's text, as is the reference to the work of elaboration and the diversity of its moments, and the distinction between the thought-concrete and the real object, of which it gives us knowledge.
    I used this text not in order to construct a "theory of knowledge" but in order to, stir something within the world of the blindly obvious, into which a certain kind of Marxist philosophy retreats in order to protect itself from its enemies. I suggested that if all the knowledge which we possess really is knowledge of a real object which remains "after as before" independent of the intellect, there was perhaps some point

 
    7. Op. cit., p. 207, translation modified [translator's note ].

 
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in thinking about the interval separating this "before " from the "after ", an interval which is the process of knowledge itself, and in recognizing that this process, defined by the "work of elaboration" of successive forms, was inscribed precisely, from beginning to end, in a transformation which bears not on the real object,[8] but only on its stand-ins, first of all on the perceptions and images, then on the concepts which come out of them. Thus I arrived at my thesis: if the process of knowledge does not transform the real object, but only transforms its perception into concepts and then into a thought-concrete, and if all this process takes place, as Marx repeatedly points out, "in thought ", and not in the real object, this means that, with regard to the real object, in order to know it, "thought" operates on the transitional forms which designate the real object in the process of transformation in order finally to produce a concept of it, the thought-concrete. I referred to the set of these forms (including the last one) produced by this operation in terms of the category "object of knowledge". In the movement which causes the spontaneous perceptions and images to become the concept of the real object, each form does indeed relate to the real object, but without becoming confused with it. But neither can the thought-concrete which is finally produced be confused with the real, and Marx attacks Hegel precisely for allowing this confusion to take place. Once again Spinoza came to mind, and the memory of his haunting words: the idea of a circle is not the circle, the concept of a dog does not bark -- in short, you must not confuse the real thing and its concept.
    Of course, if this necessary distinction is not solidly supported, it may lead to nominalism, even to idealism. It is generally agreed that Spinoza fell into nominalism. But he did in any case take measures to protect himself from idealism, both in developing his theory of a substance with infinite attributes, and in arguing for the parallelism of the

 
    8. "That is, so long as the intellect adopts a purely speculative, purely theoretical attitude" (Marx). He distinguishes between the theoretical attitude (knowledge of the real object) and the practical attitude (transformation of the real object).

 
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two attributes extension and thought. Marx protects himself in another way, more securely, by the use of the thesis of the primacy of the real object over the object of knowledge, and by the primacy of this first thesis over the second: the distinction between the real object and the object of knowledge. Here you have that minimum of generality, that is, in the case in question, of materialist theses, which, by drawing a line between themselves and idealism, open up a free space for the investigation of the concrete processes of the production of knowledge. And finally, for whoever wants to make the comparison, this thesis of the distinction between real object and object of knowledge "functions" in a very similar manner to Lenin's distinction between absolute truth and relative truth, and to a very similar purpose.
    Lenin wrote: "You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: it is sufficiently 'indefinite' to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming dead, frozen, ossified; but at the same time it is sufficiently 'definite' to enable us to draw a dividing-line in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner between ourselves and fideism and agnosticism, between ourselves and philosophical idealism and the sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant."[9] Which means, to put it bluntly: our thesis is precise enough not to fall into idealism, precise enough to draw a line between itself and idealism, that is, correct enough in its generality to prevent the living freedom of science from being buried under its own results.
    The same is true, keeping everything in proportion, of my thesis on the difference between the real object and the object of knowledge. The stakes were considerable. It was a question of preventing the science produced by Marx from being treated "as a dogma in the bad sense of the term", it was a question of bringing to life the prodigious work of criticism and elaboration carried out by Marx, without which he would never have been able -- to put it in his way, which remains classical -- to discover behind the appearance

 
    9. Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Moscow, 1967, p. 123 [translator's note ].

 
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of things, and in diametrical opposition to this appearance, their unrecognized "intimate relations". It was a question of getting people to understand and to appreciate the unprecedented break which Marx had to make with the accepted world of appearances, that is, with the overwhelmingly "obvious truths" of the dominant bourgeois ideology. And since we were ourselves involved in the matter, it was a question of turning this truth into a living and active truth for us, because we had to break with other "obvious truths", sometimes couched in Marx's own vocabulary, whose meaning the dominant ideology or deviations in the Labour Movement had distorted. It was a question of recalling that if, as Lenin said, "the living soul of Marxism is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation", then knowledge of the concrete does not come at the beginning of the analysis, it comes at the end, and the analysis is only possible on the basis of Marx's concepts, and not on the basis of the immediate, "obvious" evidence of the concrete -- which one cannot do without, but which cannot really be understood from the marks which it bears on its face.
    Finally -- and this was not the least important aspect -- it was a question of recalling with Marx that knowledge of reality changes something in reality, because it adds to it precisely the fact that it is known, though everything makes it appear as if this addition cancelled itself out in its result. Since knowledge of reality belongs in advance to reality, since it is knowledge of nothing but reality, it adds something to it only on the paradoxical condition of adding nothing to it,[10] and once produced it reverts to it without need of sanction, and disappears in it. The process of knowledge adds to reality at each step its own knowledge of that reality, but at each step reality puts it in its pocket, because this knowledge is its own. The distinction between object of knowledge and real object presents the paradox that it is affirmed only to be annulled. But it is not a nullity : because in order to be annulled it must be constantly affirmed. That is normal, it is the infinite cycle of all knowledge, which

 
    10. Cf. Engels: "Knowledge of nature just as it is, without any foreign addition ". Cf. also the Leninist theory of reflection.

 
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adds something to reality -- precisely, knowledge of reality -- only to give it back, and the cycle is only a cycle, and therefore living, as long as it reproduces itself, because only the production of new knowledge keeps old knowledge alive. These things happen more or less as in Marx's text, which says: living labour must "add new value to materials" in order that the value of the "dead labour" contained in the means of production should be preserved and transferred to the product, since (I quote) it is "by the simple addition of a certain quantity of labour that . . . the original values of the means of production are preserved in the product" (Capital, Part III, ch. VIII, "Constant Capital and Variable Capital").
    What is at stake with regard to these theses? Let us take Marxist science and suppose that political conditions are such that no-one works on it any more, no-one is adding any new knowledge. Then the old knowledge that reality has pocketed is there, within it, in the form of enormous and dead "obvious" facts, like machines without workers, no longer even machines but things. We could no longer in this case be sure, as Lenin puts it, of preventing science "from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming dead, frozen, ossified". Which is another way of saying that Marxism itself risks repeating truths which are no longer any more than the names of things, when the world is demanding new knowledge, about imperialism and the State and ideologies and socialism and the Labour Movement itself. It is a way of recalling Lenin's astonishing remark, that Marx only laid the foundation stones of a theory which we must at all costs develop in every direction. It is a way of saying: Marxist theory can fall behind history, and even behind itself, if ever it believes that it has arrived.

Marx and Theoretical Humanism

I now want, very briefly, to follow one last path across my essays, in order to test out another provocative thesis: that of Marx's theoretical anti-humanism. I would say that, just for the pleasure of watching the ideological fireworks with which it was met, I would have had to invent this thesis if I had not already put it forward.

 
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    It is a serious thesis, as long as it is seriously read, and above all as long as serious attention is paid to one of the two words which make it up, and not the diabolical one, but the word "theoretical ". I said and repeated that the concept or category of man did not play a theoretical role in Marx. But unfortunately this term "theoretical" was ignored by those who did not want to understand it.
    Let us try to understand it.
    And, to that end, let me first say a word about Feuerbach, some of whose texts I translated. No-one will deny that Feuerbach's philosophy is openly a theoretical humanism. Feuerbach says: every new philosophy announces itself under a new name. The philosophy of modern times, my philosophy, he says, announces itself under the name "Man". And in fact man, the human essence, is the central principle of the whole of Feuerbach's philosophy. It is not that Feuerbach is not interested in nature, because he does talk about the sun and the planets, and also about plants, dragon-flies and dogs, and even about elephants in order to point out that they have no religion. But he is first of all preparing his ground, if I may put it in that way, when he talks about nature, when he calmly tells us that each species has its own world, which is only the manifestation of its essence. This world is made up of objects, and among them there exists one object par excellence in which the essence of the species is accomplished and perfected: its essential object. Thus each planet has the sun as an essential object, which is also the essential object of the planet, etc.
    Now that the ground is prepared, we can turn our attention to man. He is the centre of his world as he is at the centre of the horizon that bounds it, of his Umwelt. There is nothing in his life which is not his : or rather, nothing which is not him, because all the objects of his world are only his objects in so far as they are the realization and projection of his essence. The objects of his perception are only his manner of perceiving them, the objects of his thought are only his manner of thinking them, and the objects of his feelings are only his manner of feeling them. All his objects are essential in so far as what they give him is only ever his own essence. Man is always in man, man never leaves the sphere of man,

 
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because -- in a simple little phrase which the young Marx took over from Feuerbach, and which provoked some scholarly discussion among the participants in last summer's Hegel Congress in Moscow -- the world is the world of man and man is the world of man. The sun and the stars, the dragon-flies, perception, intelligence and passion are only so many transitions on the road to the decisive truths: man's specific characteristic, unlike the stars and the animals, is to have his own species, the essence of his species, his whole generic essence as the object, and in an object which owes nothing to nature or religion. By the mechanism of objectification and inversion, the generic essence of man is given to man, unrecognizable in person, in the form of an exterior object, of another world, in religion. In religion, man contemplates his own powers, his productive forces as powers of an absolute other before whom he trembles and kneels down to implore pity. And this is perfectly practical, because out of it came all the rituals of religious worship, even the objective existence of miracles, which really do take place in this imaginary world since they are only, in Feuerbach's words (and I quote), "the realization of a desire" (Wunscherfüllung ). The absolute object which is man thus comes up against the absolute in God, but does not realize that what he comes up against is himself. The whole of this philosophy, which does not limit itself to religion, but also deals with art, ideology, philosophy, and in addition -- a fact which is too little known -- with politics, society, and even history, thus rests on the identity of essence between subject and object, and this identity is explained by the power of man's essence to project itself in the self-realization which constitutes its objects, and in the alienation which separates object from subject, makes the object exterior to the subject, reifies it, and inverts the essential relation, since scandalously enough the Subject finds itself dominated by itself, in the form of an Object, God or the State, etc., which is however nothing but itself.
    It must not be forgotten that this discourse, of which I can only sketch the premises here, had a certain grandeur, since it called for the inversion produced by religious or political alienation to be itself inverted; in other words, it

 
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called for an inversion of the imaginary domination of the attributes of the human subject; it called on man finally to claim back possession of his essence, alienated in his domination by God and the State; it called on man finally -- no longer in the imaginary world of religion, in the "heaven of the State", or in the alienated abstraction of Hegelian philosophy, but on the earth, here and now, in real society -- to realize his true human essence which is the human community, "communism".
    Man at the centre of his world, in the philosophical sense of the term, the originating essence and the end of his world -- that is what we can call a theoretical humanism in the strong sense.
    It will be agreed, I think, that Marx, having originally espoused Feuerbach's problematic of the generic essence of man and of alienation, later broke with him, and also that this-break with Feuerbach's theoretical humanism was a radical event in the history of Marx's thought.
    But I would like to go further. For Feuerbach is a strange philosophical personality with this peculiarity (if I may be allowed the expression) of "blowing the gaff". Feuerbach is a confessed theoretical humanist. But behind him stands a whole row of philosophical precursors who, while they were not so brave as to confess it so openly, were working on a philosophy of man, even if in a less transparent form. Far be it from me to denigrate this great humanist tradition whose historical merit was to have struggled against feudalism, against the Church, and against their ideologists, and to have given man a status and dignity. But far be it from us, I think, to deny the fact that this humanist ideology, which produced great works and great thinkers, is inseparably linked to the rising bourgeoisie, whose aspirations it expressed, translating and transposing the demands of a commercial and capitalist economy sanctioned by a new system of law, the old Roman law revised as bourgeois commercial law. Man as a free subject, free man as a subject of his actions and his thoughts, is first of all man free to possess, to sell and to buy, the subject of law.
    I will cut matters short and put forward the claim here that, with some untimely exceptions, the great tradition of

 
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classical philosophy has reproduced in the categories of its systems both the right of man to know, out of which it has made the subject of its theories of knowledge, from the cogito to the empiricist and the transcendental subject; and the right of man to act, out of which it has made the economic, moral and political subject. I believe, but obviously cannot prove it here, that I have the right to claim the following: in the form of the different subjects in which it is both divided up and disguised, the category of man, of the human essence, or of the human species, plays an essential theoretical role in the classical pre-Marxist philosophies. And when I talk about the theoretical role which a category plays, I mean that it is intimately bound up with the other categories, that it cannot be cut out of the set without altering the functioning of the whole. I think I can say that, with a few exceptions, the great classical philosophy represents, in implicit form, an indisputably humanist tradition. And if in his own way Feuerbach "blows the gaff", if he puts the human essence squarely at the centre of the whole thing, it is because he thinks that he can escape from the constraint which caused the classical philosophies to hide man behind a division into several subjects. This division, let us say into two subjects, in order to simplify matters, which makes man a subject of knowledge and a subject of action, is a characteristic mark of classical philosophy and prevents it from coming out with Feuerbach's fantastic declaration. Feuerbach himself thinks that he can overcome this division: for the plurality of subjects he substitutes the plurality of attributes in the human subject, and he thinks that he can settle another politically important problem, the distinction between individual and species, in terms of sexuality, which suppresses the individual because it requires that there should always be at least two of them, which already makes a species. I think that it becomes obvious from the manner in which Feuerbach proceeds that even before him the main concern of philosophy was man. The difference was that man was divided up between several subjects, and between the individual and the species.
    It follows that Marx's theoretical anti-humanism is much more than a settling of accounts with Feuerbach: it is directed

 
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at one and the same time both against the existing philosophies of society and history and against the classical tradition of philosophy, and thus through them against the whole of bourgeois ideology.
    I would say that Marx's theoretical anti-humanism is above all a philosophical anti-humanism. If what I have just said has any truth in it, you only have to compare it with what I said earlier about Marx's affinities with Spinoza and Hegel in their opposition to philosophies of the Origin and the Subject to see the implications. And in fact if you examine the texts which might be considered the authentic texts of Marxist philosophy, you do not find the category of man or any of its past or possible disguises. The materialist and dialectical theses which make up the whole of what little Marxist philosophy exists can give rise to all kinds of interpretations. But I do not see how they can allow any humanist interpretation: on the contrary, they are designed to exclude it, as one variety of idealism among others, and to invite us to think in a quite different manner.
    But we still have not finished, because we still have to understand the theoretical anti-humanism of historical materialism, that is, the elimination of the concept of man as a central concept by the Marxist theory of social formations and of history.
    Perhaps we ought first of all to deal with two objections. In fact, we certainly ought to try, because they come up again and again. The first concludes that any Marxist theory conceived in the above manner ends by despising men and paralysing their revolutionary struggle. But Capital is full of the sufferings of the exploited, from the period of primitive accumulation to that of triumphant capitalism, and it is written for the purpose of helping to free them from class servitude. This however does not prevent Marx but on the contrary obliges him to abstract from concrete individuals and to treat them theoretically as simple "supports" of relations, and this in the same work, Capital, which analyses the mechanisms of their exploitation. The second objection opposes to Marx's theoretical anti-humanism the existence of humanist ideologies which, even if they do in general serve the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, may also, in certain

 
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circumstances and within certain social strata, and even in a religious form, express the revolt of the masses against exploitation and oppression. But this raises no difficulty, as soon as you realize that Marxism recognizes the existence of ideologies and judges them in terms of the role which they play in the class struggle.
    What is at stake here is something quite different: the theoretical pretensions of the humanist conception to explain society and history, starting out from the human essence, from the free human subject, the subject of needs, of labour, of desire, the subject of moral and political action; I maintain that Marx was only able to found the science of history and to write Capital because he broke with the theoretical pretensions of all such varieties of humanism.
    In opposition to the whole of bourgeois ideology, Marx declares: "A society is not composed of individuals" (Grundrisse ), and: "My analytic method does not start from Man but from the economically given period of society" (Notes on Wagner's Textbook ). And against the humanist and Marxist socialists who had proclaimed in the Gotha Programme that "labour is the source of all wealth and all culture", he argues: "The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labour". Can one imagine a more distinct break?
    The effects can be seen in Capital. Marx shows that what in the last instance determines a social formation, and allows us to grasp it, is not any chimerical human essence or human nature, nor man, nor even "men", but a relation, the production relation, which is inseparable from the Base, the infrastructure. And, in opposition to all humanist idealism, Marx shows that this relation is not a relation between men, a relation between persons, nor an intersubjective or psychological or anthropological relation, but a double relation: a relation between groups of men concerning the relation between these groups of men and things, the means of production. It is one of the greatest possible theoretical mystifications that you can imagine to think that social relations can be reduced to relations between men, or even between groups of men: because this is to suppose that social relations are relations which only involve, men, whereas actually

 
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they also involve things, the means of production, derived from material nature. The production relation is, says Marx, a relation of distribution: it distributes men among classes at the same time and according as it attributes the means of production to a class. The classes are born out of the antagonism in this distribution which is also an attribution. Naturally, human individuals are parties to this relation, therefore active, but first of all in so far as they are held within it. It is because they are parties to it, as to a freely agreed contract, that they are held within it, and it is because they are held within it that they are parties to it. It is very important to understand why Marx considers men in this case only as "supports" of a relation, or "bearers" of a function in the production process, determined by the production relation. It is not at all because he reduces men in their concrete life to simple bearers of functions: he considers them as such in this respect because the capitalist production relation reduces them to this simple function within the infrastructure, in production, that is, in exploitation. In effect, the man of production, considered as an agent of production, is only that for the capitalist mode of production; he is determined as a simple "support" of a relation, as a simple "bearer of functions", completely anonymous and interchangeable, for if he is a worker he may be thrown into the street, and if he is a capitalist he may make a fortune or go bankrupt. In all cases he must submit to the law of a production relation, which is a relation of exploitation, therefore an antagonistic class relation; he must submit to the law of this relation and its effects. If you do not submit the individual concrete determinations of proletarians and capitalists, their "liberty" or their personality to a theoretical "reduction", then you will understand nothing of the terrible practical "reduction" to which the capitalist production relation submits individuals, which treats them only as bearers of economic functions and nothing else.
    But to treat individuals as simple bearers of economic functions has consequences for the individuals. It is not Marx the theoretician who treats them as such, but the capitalist production relation! To treat individuals as bearers

 
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of interchangeable functions is, within capitalist exploitation, which is the fundamental capitalist class struggle, to mark them irreparably in their flesh and blood, to reduce them to nothing but appendices of the machine, to cast their wives and children into the hell of the factory, to extend their working day to the maximum, to give them just enough to reproduce themselves, and to create that gigantic reserve army from which other anonymous bearers can be drawn in order to put pressure on those who are in employment, who are lucky enough to have work.
    But at the same time it is to create the conditions for an organization of struggle of the working class. For it is the development of the capitalist class struggle, that is, of capitalist exploitation, which itself creates these conditions. Marx continually insisted on the fact that it was the capitalist organization of production which forcibly taught the working class the lesson of class struggle, not only in concentrating masses of workers in the place of work, not only in mixing them together, but also and above all in imposing on them a terrible discipline of labour and daily life, all of which the workers suffer only to turn it back in common actions against their masters.
    But in order for all this to happen, the workers must be party to and held within other relations.
    The capitalist social formation, indeed, cannot be reduced to the capitalist production relation alone, therefore to its infrastructure. Class exploitation cannot continue, that is, reproduce the conditions of its existence, without the aid of the superstructure, without the legal-political and ideological relations, which in the last instance are determined by the production relation. Marx did not enter into this analysis, except in the form of a few brief remarks. But from everything that he said we can conclude that these relations too treat concrete human individuals as "bearers" of relations, as "supports" of functions, to which men are only parties because they are held within them. Thus, legal relations abstract from the real man in order to treat him as a simple "bearer of the legal relation", as a simple subject of law, capable of owning property, even if the only property which he possesses is that of his naked labour power. Thus too

 
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political relations abstract from the living man in order to treat him as a simple "support of the political relation", as a free citizen, even if his vote only reinforces his servitude. And thus too the ideological relations abstract from the living man in order to treat him as a simple subject either subjected to or rebelling against the ruling ideas. But all these relations, each of which uses the real man as its support, nevertheless determine and brand men in their flesh and blood, just as the production relation does. And since the production relation is a relation of class struggle, it is the class struggle which in the last instance determines the superstructural relations, their contradiction, and the overdetermination with which they mark the infrastructure.
    And just as the capitalist class struggle creates, within production, the conditions of the workers' class struggle, so you can see that the legal, political and ideological relations can contribute to its organization and consciousness, through the very constraints which they impose. For the proletarian class struggle really did learn politics within the framework of bourgeois relations, and via the bourgeois class struggle itself. Everyone knows very well that the bourgeoisie was only able to overthrow the old regime, its production relation and its State, by engaging the popular masses in its struggle, and everyone knows that the bourgeoisie was only able to defeat the great landowners by enrolling the workers in its political battle, afterwards of course massacring them. Through its law and its ideology as well as through its bullets and its prisons, the bourgeoisie educated them in the political and ideological class struggle, among other ways by forcing them to understand that the proletarian class struggle had nothing to do with the bourgeois class struggle, and to shake off the yoke of its ideology.
    It is here that the last instance, and the contradictory effects which it produces within the "edifice", intervenes to account for the dialectic of these paradoxical phenomena, which Marx grasps not with the help of the ridiculous concept of man, but with quite different concepts: production relation, class struggle, legal, political and ideological relations. Theoretically, the functioning of the last instance allows us to account for the difference and unevenness between the

 
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forms of the class struggle, from the economic struggle to the political and ideological struggle, and thus for the interplay existing between these struggles and for the contradictions existing in this struggle.
    Marx's theoretical anti-humanism, as it operates within historical materialism, thus means a refusal to root the explanation of social formations and their history in a concept of man with theoretical pretensions, that is, a concept of man as an originating subject, one in whom originate his needs (homo oeconomicus ), his thoughts (homo rationalis ), and his acts and struggles (homo moralis, juridicus and politicus ). For when you begin with man, you cannot avoid the idealist temptation of believing in the omnipotence of liberty or of creative labour -- that is, you simply submit, in all "freedom", to the omnipotence of the ruling bourgeois ideology, whose function is to mask and to impose, in the illusory shape of man's power of freedom, another power, much more real and much more powerful, that of capitalism. If Marx does not start with man, if he refuses to derive society and history theoretically from the concept of man, it is in order to break with this mystification which only expresses an ideological relation of force, based in the capitalist production relation. Marx therefore starts out from the structural cause producing this effect of bourgeois ideology which maintains the illusion that you should start with man: Marx starts with the given economic formation, and in the particular case of Capital, with the capitalist production relation, and the relations which it determines in the last instance in the superstructure. And each time he shows that these relations determine and brand men, and how they brand them in their concrete life, and how, through the system of class struggles, living men are determined by the system of these relations. In the 1857 Introduction Marx said: the concrete is a synthesis of many determinations. We might paraphrase him and say: men in the concrete sense are determined by a synthesis of the many determinations of the relations in which they are held and to which they are parties. If Marx does not start out from man, which is an empty idea, that is, one weighed down with bourgeois ideology, it is in order finally to reach living men; if he

 
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makes a detour via these relations of which living men are the "bearers", it is in order finally to be able to grasp the laws which govern both their lives and their concrete struggles.
    We should note that at no time does this detour via relations estrange Marx from living men, because at each moment of the process of knowledge, that is, at each moment in his analysis, Marx shows how each relation -- from the capitalist production relation, determinant in the last instance, to the legal-political and ideological relations -- brands men in their concrete life, which is governed by the forms and effects of the class struggle. Each of Marx's abstractions corresponds to the "abstraction" imposed on men by these relations, and this terribly concrete "abstraction" is what makes men into exploited workers or exploiting capitalists. We should also note that the final term of this process of thought, the "thought-concrete", to which it leads, is that synthesis of many determinations which defines concrete reality.
    Marx thus placed himself on class positions, and he had in view the mass phenomena of the class struggle. He wanted to aid the working class to understand the mechanisms of capitalist society and to discover the relations and laws within which it lives, in order to reinforce and orient its struggle. He had no other object than the class struggle; his aim was to help the working class to make revolution and thus finally, under communism, to suppress the class struggle and classes.
    The only more or less serious objection which can be made to the thesis of Marx's theoretical anti-humanism is, I must be honest enough to admit it, related to those texts which, in Capital, return to the theme of alienation. I say purposely: the theme, because I do not think that the passages in which this theme is taken up have a theoretical significance. I am suggesting that alienation appears there not as a really considered concept but as a substitute for realities which had not yet been thought out sufficiently for Marx to be able to refer to them: the forms, still on the horizon, of organization and struggle of the working class. The theme of alienation in Capital could thus be said to function as a substitute for a concept or concepts not yet formed, because

 
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the objective historical conditions had not yet produced their object. If this hypothesis is correct, it becomes possible to understand that the Commune, in answering Marx's expectations, rendered the theme of alienation superfluous, as did the whole of Lenin's political practice. In fact alienation disappears from Marx's thought after the Commune, and never appears in Lenin's immense work.
    But this problem does not just concern Marxist theory; it also involves the historical forms of its fusion with the Labour Movement. This problem faces us openly today: we shall have to examine it.

 
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Something New

 






The following remarks constitute Althusser's contribution to the public discussion in L'Humanité on the draft resolution presented to the 21st -- Extraordinary -- Congress of the French Communist Party, held in October 1974. The resolution as finally adopted by the Congress can be read in Cahiers du communisme, no. 11, November 1974.

    By instinct, Communists have understood that the resolution put forward for consideration by the 21st Congress contains something new, which could be important.
    It is obviously not a question of a change in line. But, within the same line, the Resolution provides more exact formulations, and rectifications and innovations.

1. The political line is defined with a new precision. The objective of the present class struggle is, in the short term, "democratic change", a "new democracy" which will apply the "democratic reforms" contained in the Common Programme, around which the Union of the Left has been sealed. The motor of democratic change will be the "Union of the French People", who can be "gathered together" into a "large majority". The present struggles prove that this union is "under way".
    Where are the innovations? Essentially they concern two points:
(a) Who will be in power in the "new democracy"? Not the United Left alone, but the "alliance of all parties and organizations interested in democratic change". Of course

 
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the Union of the Left will remain the heart of this Broad Alliance.
(b) Just as the 20th Congress put the accent on "Popular Union", the Resolution puts the accent on the "Union of the French People".
    But, first of all, why this extra notion? Does it not duplicate the notion of the Broad Alliance? The Resolution is not very clear on this important point (cf. paragraph 24, chapter IV).
    What difference is there in principle between the Union of the Left and Popular Union? Between the Broad Alliance and the Union of the French People? The difference which exists between a union concluded between organizations and a union forged among the masses. The first is a minority, the second can be a "large majority".
    There is of course a dialectic operating between the political union of organizations and union among the masses. When the Union of the Left was concluded, its effects were felt far beyond the ranks of the supporters of the Left, among the masses. The same will be true of the Broad Alliance, when it is concluded. But -- and this is the decisive point -- what is it that has made possible, necessary and inevitable the union between the French Communist Party, which has been fighting for it for years, the Socialist Party and the Left Radicals? The unprecedented development, in May 1968 and since, of the class struggle of the masses of the people, therefore the union of the masses in action.
    The development of the union of the masses in the class struggle: thus the agreement between organizations; thus the further development of the union of the masses; thus the broadening of the alliance between organizations, etc. That is the dialectic of the movement, in which it is the union of the masses in the class struggle which plays the determinant role.
    One must therefore clearly distinguish between the alliance between organizations and the Union of the French People, so as to be able to grasp their dialectic, and also so as not to give the term "majority" a purely electoral sense. Because, once the elections are won, the alliance in power will only be able to govern against the monopolies if it can depend on

 
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the power of a people united in the class struggle to come.
    By definition, the Union of the French People can only be realized at the base. How? "Around the reforms proposed by the Common Programme." But what are the means to this end? The explanations given by the militants of the Party and of the other allied organizations, and their diffusion. Discussions, therefore. Now all this is true. But more is needed: Marxists know that at the level of the masses ideas are only really exchanged in action and through action.
    One must therefore be explicit. The Union of the French People is the union of working people, democrats and patriots around the working class ; it is a union, at the grass roots, of the masses of the people in protest and struggle: workers, peasants, employees, artisans, tradesmen, intellectuals, women, soldiers, etc. The union of political, trades union and other organizations is both the effect and the condition of the struggle: but it is the Union of the French People which is the decisive motor of the struggle.
    This union is under way. But it must continually gain strength and especially cohesion if it is to win victory. It is not enough to count on "the crisis" and the general discontent, nor to pile up "sectional" actions. To think that these actions are going to "converge" by themselves would be to fall into the illusion of spontaneism. This discontent and these actions have to be welded together in a common political will. Now what is capable of really bringing and welding these actions and protests together? The working class and its organizations, and in the front rank of these, the Party. That is why the Union of the French People can only be constructed around the working class.
    I should like the Resolution to say: (1) the Union of the French People is the decisive motor of the coming political transformations; (2) the Union of the French People must be welded together around the working class; (3) the Union of the French People will be welded together by the action of the masses and action among the masses: the role of the Party is essential in this.
    These clarifications are all the more necessary because the Resolution makes an innovation in comparison to the 20th Congress by talking about the Union of the French

 
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People. Why? The idea here is to unite around the working class not only democrats but also patriots (e.g. the Gaullists) who are concerned about France's independence and future. An "electoral manoeuvre", it will be said. A way of gaining votes to cross the famous "barrier".
    Communists will never fall into electoral cretinism. They know that electoral relations of force can (here it is the case) obscure the relations of class forces.
    When the Resolution defines the French people which it is calling on to unite -- "the whole people, with the sole exception of the feudal barons of big business" -- it tells the truth, but in the form of a slogan.
    It is true that objectively, and in the long run, only the monopolists and their agents (plus: world imperialism) have a real interest in the maintenance of the dictatorship of the monopolies in France.
    But it is equally true that if this fraction of monopolists has been able to maintain itself in power up to the present day, it is because it has been able and clever enough to represent "the general interest of the bourgeoisie as a class" (Marx), and it could only do this because it had a mass base : not only in the bourgeoisie, but also in the petty bourgeoisie and even in a part of the working class. Thus the electoral "barrier" which has caused so many surprises.
    What "obstacle" did the electoral drive of the left come up against? Precisely the present frontier of the mass class base of the bourgeoisie, dominated by its monopolist fraction.
    To reduce this "barrier" to nothing but prejudice, or simply to the anti-communist offensive (that is, to "ideas") is idealism. There is of course "tradition": but this is constituted and maintained by concrete links, not only ideological (ideology is something different from just "ideas") but also material, between the ruling class and its mass base. These relations are complicated, but always precise and varying according to social category. The monopolists are not stupid: they know how to use existing relations, to let events develop or to intervene with such-and-such a measure to preserve these relations, through which they "hold on to" the different elements of their mass base (just two examples in a hundred: they know how to close their eyes to tax frauds

 
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among a certain social category; they "hold on to" some working people by the DPO, etc.).
    To win these elements for the Union of the French People, propaganda ( = ideas), though indispensable, is not enough. In each case you must study the material and ideological nature of these relations. Only thus can you find the correct response, therefore the correct forms of explanation, propaganda and action. Only thus can you wage a correct ideological struggle, relevant to the masses where they are, as they are: otherwise you will miss the mark. Have the difficulties which L'Humanité is facing also been looked at from this point of view?
    In fact the need is for the Popular Union to become the Union of the French People, by winning over the majority of the mass base of the bourgeoisie. Here too you cannot count on any miracles of spontaneity, even stimulated by the crisis (in the past crises have opened the way to fascism). The need is for a political victory, the result of political action, whose centre is the working class and whose means are its organizations of class struggle. If this victory is brought off, then, and only then, will the enemies of the French people be reduced to the monopolists and their agents alone. That is why the definition of the French people by the Resolution has the truth of a slogan, which needs both detailed concrete analysis and action if it is to become real.

2. The Resolution contains theoretical rectifications, which, politically, all tend in the same direction.
    It is no longer a question of defining "advanced democracy" in terms of the notorious formula: "Replace the logic of profit" (capitalism?) "by the logic of needs" (what?). The 20th Congress had already toned this formula down, but it kept the essential terms. At that time Paul Laurent said: the "logic of needs" alludes rather to communism ("From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" -- Marx; a formula which moreover defines communism by its relations of distribution and not by its relations of production) -- "its use should not be extended". In fact, since advanced democracy is not even socialism, what was this vague allusion to communism doing there?

 
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    It is true that the Resolution still talks, for some reason, about a "policy for man" and a "policy of reason" (sic ). But it rectifies itself in several places: what matters is to satisfy popular demands. In using this latter kind of language it is possible to avoid falling into utopianism, that is, into political idealism, and raising excessive hopes, thus causing disappointments -- and to avoid the temptation of trying to outbid everyone in spiritualism (cf. an article in La Nouvelle Critique, February 1973, on the Common Programme, centred on the "needs of the human person"!).
    The Resolution does not repeat the old formula of an "advanced democracy opening the road to socialism ". On the contrary, it puts the accent on "new democracy", "democratic change". In fact, democracy cannot be qualified by any adjective (authentic, true, advanced) which measures a given real democracy against an "essence" of democracy -- but only by one which measures it against its class content: in our case, democracy for the people. Likewise, the Resolution puts the accent on "limited democratic reforms". That does not mean that socialism is forgotten! Nor that a policy of reforms necessarily falls into reformism. Communists know that every victory in the class struggle is, in the more or less long term, a step forward towards socialism. It is not a question of a tactical manoeuvre, aimed at others : "Socialism frightens them? Then we shall keep quiet about socialism! And let us guarantee that this is not the thin end of the wedge!" On the contrary, it is a question of rejecting utopianism and its dangers.
    Because it is true, and for us first of all, that there is no "thin end of the wedge". That means: you cannot programme revolution, whether peaceful or otherwise. Lenin said so often enough: it is not enough that revolution (the transition to socialism) should be "on the agenda". The "situation" must also be "revolutionary", which presupposes the accumulation and welding together of a considerable number of national and international contradictions. Finally, the "subjective conditions" (the organizations of class struggle of the masses) must be abreast of the objective conditions.
    None of this can be programmed. None of it resembles the "thin end of a wedge". But there is a definite political

 
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consequence: you need a mass political line, strong enough and flexible enough to prepare the Party, even when the revolution is still far off, not only to cope with the "revolutionary situation" when it is opened up, but first of all, right now, to prepare it, to help it mature -- without knowing in advance either when or how it will prevent itself.
    The danger of the utopian-idealist formulae which the Resolution abandons or rightly rectifies can be seen. These formulae may deliver militants and the Party over to the illusion of the spontaneity of history, or to the idealism of the omnipotence of "ideas" -- and divert them from their revolutionary task, which before the revolution does not consist in phrasemongering about Revolution, its antechambers and open doors, but in really preparing one-self to make it when the time is right.
    As regards reformism, the matter is clear: a policy is reformist when it negotiates reforms which hinder revolution; it is revolutionary when it fights for reforms which prepare revolution.
    I think that the Resolution should lead to the rectification or re-examination of a certain number of other utopian idealist formulae (e.g., on the State, Law, and "State Monopoly Capitalism") which in recent years have flourished in the shadow of the slogans which the Resolution has correctly given up.

3. A few words, finally, on the Party.
All the measures proposed lead in the same direction. It is a question of making the Party into a vanguard party which is a mass party : through a bold recruitment policy, the promotion of the young militants linked most closely with the masses (the best in the factory, "the most popular"), and the appeal to the initiative of all militants.
    These measures outline the image of a great mass party, armed with Marxist-Leninist theory, and cleared of the remains of dogmatism and sectarianism.
    The watchword has been given: we are talking about a "New Party" or, to put it schematically, the accent is no longer placed on the cadres (cf. Stalin: "The cadres decide everything") but on the masses.

 
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    It necessarily follows that a heavier responsibility falls to the base of the Party: to the branches. The reason is simple: it is through its base, the branches, that the Party can become a mass party, applying a mass line in mass actions. A party must have many members before it can become a mass party, but that by itself is not enough: what makes it a mass party are its links with the masses, the mass actions in which it takes part, and above all the mass actions in which it can take the initiative "one step ahead of the masses, and one step only" (Lenin).
    In these last years some Party militants have had to jump into a moving train, or have even got left on the platform. Why? Because they did not understand in time what was happening among the masses; they did not pay sufficient attention to their needs and reactions, nor did they make a detailed analysis of these, in order to give them shape, by proposing suitable united actions. The appeal to initiative, like G. Marchais' appeal to "get thinking", is addressed to every militant, but above all to the Party branches.
    There can be no mass line (the Union of the French People) without a mass party: but there can be no mass party without clear initiative from "the base of the Party" (article XV of the Statutes ), the branches, which are at the heart of the masses.
    I therefore propose that the Resolution should specify, after paragraph 14, chapter V:
    "In order properly to fulfil its vanguard role, the Party must thus become a great mass Party, capable of applying the mass line of the Union of the French People. The Party must greatly increase its membership: but to do that, and because it does so, it must be linked to the masses, to their responses and aspirations, in order to give these a shape and to initiate necessary actions, 'one step ahead of the masses, and one step only' (Lenin). This mass line places a heavier responsibility on the Party base, on the branches, and especially on the factory branches, because they are at the heart of the masses."

Louis Althusser 
(Paris - V) 

 
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