Revolutionaries (28 page)

C'est alors que nous pouvons nous souvenir de ce terme hautement symptomatique de la ‘
Darstellung
', le rapprocher de cette ‘machinerie', et le prendre au mot, comme l'existence même de cette machinerie en ses effets: la mode d'existence de cette mise-en-scène, de ce théâtre qui est à la fois sa propre scène, son propre texte, ses propres acteurs, ce théâtre dont les spectateurs ne peuvent en être, d'occasion, spectateurs, que parce qu'ils en sont d'abord les acteurs forcés, pris dans les contraintes d'un texte et de rôles dont ils ne peuvent en être les auteurs, puisque c'est, par essence, un théâtre sans auteur (
Lire le Capital
, vol. 2, p. 177).

But the pleasure of reading an intelligent and original thinker ought not to blind us to his weaknesses. M. Althusser's approach to Marx is certainly not the most fruitful. As the above discussion has suggested tactfully, it may even be doubted whether it is very marxist, since it plainly takes no interest in much that Marx regarded as fundamental, and – as his subsequent writings, few though they are, make increasingly clear – is at loggerheads with some of Marx's most cherished arguments. It demonstrates the new-found post-stalinist freedom, even within communist parties, to read and interpret Marx independently. But if this process is to be taken seriously, it requires genuine textual erudition such as M. Althusser does not appear to possess. He certainly seems unaware both in
Pour Marx
and
Lire Le Capital
of the
famous
Grundrisse
, though they have been available in an excellent German edition since 1953, and one may even suspect that his interpretation has preceded his reading of some of the texts with which he is acquainted. To this extent he still suffers from the after-effects of the stalinist period, which created a gap between the older generation of enormously learned Marx-scholars and both the political activists and the younger neo-marxists.

Moreover the revival of marxism requires a genuine willingness to see what Marx was trying to do, though this does not imply agreement with all his propositions. Marxism, which is at once a method, a body of theoretical thinking, and collection of texts regarded by its followers as authoritative, has always suffered from the tendency of marxists to begin by deciding what they think Marx ought to have said, and then to look for textual authority for the chosen views. Such eclecticism has normally been controlled by a serious study of the evolution of Marx's own thought. M. Althusser's discovery that the merit of Marx lies not so much in his own writings, but in allowing Althusser to say what he ought to have said, removes this control. It is to be feared that he will not be the only theorist to replace the real Marx by one of his own construction. Whether the Althusserian Marx or other analogous constructs will turn out to be as interesting as the original is, however, quite another question.

¹
Louis Althusser,
Pour Marx
, Paris, 1960.

²
Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière and Pierre Macherey,
Lire Le Capital
(Vol. 1); Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar and Roger Establet,
Lire Le Capital
(vol. 2), Paris, 1960.

³
Althusser has since pushed the frontiers of the ‘pre-marxist' Marx steadily further forward, until little before 1875 is acceptable as properly non-Hegelian. Unfortunately this eliminates the bulk of Marx's writings.

⁴
Maurice Godelier,
Rationalité et irrationalité en economie
, Paris, 1966.

The search for a viable post-stalinist marxism has tended to be at the same time a search for viable pre-stalinist marxian thinkers. There is no logical reason why this should be so, but the psychological motives which lead men (especially young men) to seek not only truth but also its teachers, are very strong. In any case we owe to it the rediscovery – one might almost say the discovery – of several interesting writers. Karl Korsch (1886–1961) is the most recent of these. A number of circumstances conspired to maintain him in obscurity during his lifetime. Though a communist for the first half of the 1920s, his writings were not attached to any ‘deviation' of substance, or were in their time lumped with the heterodoxies of the Lukács of
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein
unjustly, though not without some plausibility. He thus had no chance of surviving the Stalin era as the guru of any organized body of marxists, however small. The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, to whom he was drawn, were not a body likely to transmit, or even to understand, a theorist who was nothing if not sophisticated, and who belonged to a highly developed academic tradition. Hitler's victory buried his writings of the 1920s, Hitler's bombs the surviving stock of his
Karl Marx
published in London in 1938 in the Chapman and Hall series on
Modern Sociologists
, and which had in any case barely been noticed in the atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon marxism of those days.

The unexpected revival of interest in marxism among West German intellectuals in the 1960s has restored him to life.
Marxismus und Philosophie
(1923–31) was published in 1966 with a long introduction by Erich Gerlach and some minor texts of the 1920s;
¹
Karl Marx
, in a full scholarly edition by Goetz Langkau, in 1967.
²

At first sight the interest of Korsch seems to lie in the fact that he brought to marxism the comparatively rare combination of a German academic – he achieved the uncomfortable distinction of a professional chair at the ultra-right-wing university of Jena – of an active politician, Thuringian minister and Reichstag deputy, and of a passionate revolutionary. However, what is more important is his membership of that ‘central European left' which was formed, in the years before and during the first world war, as a theoretical resistance movement to the Kautskyan orthodoxies of the Second International, and for a more or less short time, merged with ‘bolshevism' after the October revolution. Korsch shared with most of this remarkably able generation of thinkers the conviction that German Social Democracy had justified its political passivity with a version of marxism which, in effect, turned it into a form of nineteenth-century positivist evolutionism. The left must turn from the politically misleading determinism of the natural sciences to philosophy (i.e. to the philosophic Marx of the 1840s), if only because marxist orthodoxy had lightly pushed this aside. The object was not to close marxism as a metaphysical ‘system', but to open it. It was to oppose the constant – and hitherto uncompleted – philosophical critique of reality and ideology (including that of marxism itself) to the sterile certainties of positivism.

It is a matter of debate how far this return to a marxist
philosophy was achieved at the cost of a systematic ‘re-Hegelianization' of Marx, such as was common elsewhere on the central European left. At all events the convergence between Korsch and Lukács proved to be only temporary. For from the start Korsch seems to have differed from his contemporaries in some important respects. His original pre-marxist critique of orthodoxy, developed in London before 1914, had asked not so much for revolution as for a positive content in socialism, such as he discovered both in syndicalism and, curiously enough, in the Fabian Society which he had then joined. Syndicalism he saw as an authentic proletarian conception of socialism, perhaps the inevitable form of such a conception. The Fabians, he thought, introduced a voluntarist element into socialism by their insistence on the socialist education of the people and a ‘positive formula for socialist construction' by their discussions about the control of industry.

Though this line of thought differed from those of other anti-Kautskyans, it converged with them. All the left-wing rebels called for activism and planning and rejected historical determinism, all of them denied that Marx's ‘man sets himself only such historical tasks as he can solve' meant that the solution of these tasks would be as automatic as their solubility. On the other hand Korsch differed from what we may call the east European wing of this new left in as much as he concentrated entirely on the problems of capitalism in the advanced industrial countries. Indeed, it is arguable that his rediscovery is due to this fact. For there has never been much difficulty in knowing, or at least in proposing, what marxists should do in underdeveloped countries. The problem ever since the later nineteenth century has been to suggest what they should do in countries of stable industrialism and no visible revolutionary perspectives. Korsch concentrated on this problem though unfortunately he had no solution for it.

Korsch's ‘western' orientation accounts for the consistent
theoretical critique of bolshevism which made him, even in his communist period, far less committed to the Russian (as distinct from the desired western) revolution than, say, Rosa Luxemburg, and led him rapidly to abandon any positive judgement of the Soviet Union. At this point he diverged from his friend and admirer Bertolt Brecht, and for that matter from many others on the central European left. For him leninism was as wrong as Kautskyanism, and for the same reasons. Indeed, he acutely pointed out that crucial concepts of leninism, such as the view that socialism enters the proletarian movement through intellectuals, could be derived from Kautsky. Philosophically Korsch's points against
Materialism and Empiriocriticism
were well taken. In concentrating on the defence of ‘materialism' (which was not a serious issue), Lenin directed his fire against the unreal enemy of ‘idealism' and left undisturbed the real danger, a ‘materialist conception coloured by natural science'. This had been the fundamental current of bourgeois thought in philosophy, the natural and social sciences, and formed the major model for the vulgarization of marxism itself. Hence Lenin's perfectly sincere desire to remain a Hegelian was idle; he was forced back on to a simplified, indeed a pre-Hegelian, view of the opposition between materialism and idealism, which in turn led to an oversimplified view of what Marx's ‘standing the Hegelian dialectic on its feet' meant, a vulgarization of the concept of the unity of theory and practice. Ultimately he was led to a position which was to inhibit the ability of marxism to contribute to the further development of the empirical sciences of nature and society.

He admitted that Lenin had not so much claimed to practice philosophy, as to criticize philosophical tendencies which appeared to him to be noxious for various reasons of party policy. But could marxists deal with philosophy or any other field of thought exclusively in terms of its usefulness or harmfulness in politics? They could not.

The criticism of Lenin is in many respects just, but Korsch dismissed the factors which made leninism not merely another version of Kautskyan theory, but an entirely different historical phenomenon, a revolutionary theory for the underdeveloped world. He admitted that it was such a theory, though reluctantly. He denied that it formed ‘an adequate theoretical expression for the practical needs of the present phase of the class struggle'. Indeed after his expulsion from the German Communist Party he increasingly assimilated the Soviet Union to fascism. Both were aspects of the
étatiste
and totalitarian counter-revolution which followed the short-lived upsurge of the revolutionary movement in 1917–23 and sought to prevent its recurrence. Historically absurd, such a view is plausible only on the assumption that bolshevism was a ‘flight from the theoretical and practical demands of the industrial proletariat', reflecting the situation of the ‘backward east' which still faced the problem of making its bourgeois revolution. Korsch made this assumption. He observed the revolutionary movement of the underdeveloped world and dismissed it as an irrelevance to the industrial proletariat of the industrial countries.

The difficulty of this position was that it left him without a revolutionary alternative for the west, once the tide of postwar rebellion had receded. Indeed, it left him with no concrete political perspective at all, after the failure of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. There are signs that, like other long-frustrated and disappointed revolutionaries, Korsch began to feel that the future was slightly less black after 1956, but since he wrote nothing of substance in his final years, we need not speculate how he might have modified his views.

Inevitably, as disillusion increased, the process of ‘developing' marxism turned into one of criticizing it; or rather of shedding so much of it that it was doubtful, in spite of Korsch's disclaimers, that the remainder could still be properly called marxism. Dialectics, for instance, was not a ‘superlogic' to be handled
like ordinary logic – a reasonable point – but the way in which during a revolutionary era, classes, groups and individuals produced new ideas, dissolved existing systems of knowledge and ‘replaced them with more flexible systems, or better still, with no system at all, but with the wholly unconfined and free use of thought applied to the constantly changing process of development'. If we combine this with the rejection of most of Marx's actual propositions about the real world as what Mr Gerlach calls the ‘dogmatization of the result of marxist research which have historically limited validity, the speculative instead of empirical derivation of development', not much of the actual corpus of Marx's writings was left. What remained was a method for an empirical social science, which derived from Marx chiefly a welcome refusal to identify itself with the natural sciences, and a proletariat, organized as a party, which could use this method for its purposes. There was no clear reason why marxism should be, or tend to become, the form of consciousness of the proletariat, and in future it would at best be one of the elements in proletarian theory, if indeed the revolutionary movement in its revival could be confined to the proletariat. Marx himself would be seen ‘merely as one among many precursors, founders and developers of the socialist movement of the working class'.