notes to the early philosophical Marx
Christopher Cutrone
The question is what is Marxism as “philosophy,” “science” and “politics,” and how are these aspects -- if different facets -- of essentially one and the same activity?
Many have pondered this about Marx, and so it behooves Platypus to try to address it directly. As Gillian Rose put it, Marxism is a “mode of cognition sui generis.” What did Rose, as a latter-day “Hegelian,” mean by Marxism’s radically sui generis character?
The final readings from the primary Platypus reading group for the academic year, by Adorno on theory and practice, should be kept in mind as the destination to which Marx's early writings point.
Adorno himself, like Moishe Postone, et al., tends to emphasize the “mature Marx.” (This is in some contrast to those such as Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Raya Dunayevskaya, et al., who in the mid-late 20th century emphasized the early Marx, of the 1844 Manuscripts, etc.) This distinction can be misleading, however, as if the early Marx had been Romantic and philosophical (and “humanistic”), while the mature Marx was analytical and critical-theoretical -- “scientific” (as, Althusser, for one, thought). But perhaps there is reason-- of our own historical moment -- why specifically the early Marx should be considered by Platypus. Perhaps we are in an “early Marx” more than a “mature Marx” moment. Perhaps the early Marx can speak to us in ways pertinent to our moment, and we thus have the opportunity to reconsider the early Marx in new ways.
So what are the “philosophical” and critical “theoretical” -- and *political* -- assumptions for the early Marx’s writings, and how might they speak to the present?
The young Marx's writings are from the 1840s -- the period of the first global crisis of modern capital, the "hungry '40s," a decade that precipitated the revolutions of 1848, for Marx, the turning-point in the history of capital and of which the 1844 Manuscripts and the 1848 Communist Manifesto are part -- need to be understood in two respects: the disintegration of Hegelianism, and the rise of the modern socialist workers' movement. For Marx, these were aspects of a singular historical phenomenon.
Our reading from Marx's dissertation (titled in the Tucker ed. Marx-Engels Reader, "To make the world philosophical") is concerned with the relation between theory and practice in ways that anticipate our readings from Adorno at the end of the academic year, namely that theory and practice advance precisely through their antagonistic extremes.
Marx wrote in his 1839-41 dissertation that Hegel's "science in the process of becoming" was not about the "accommodation" of the world. Marx called for "specifying better" the process by which the "theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy, leaving behind mere will, and turns against reality." This Marx called "reason's immanent determination and universal historical character as a philosophy," its "course of life narrowed down to a subjective point." According to Marx, however, this is "afflicted" with "contradiction" in which "inner light has become consuming flame turned outwards." But according to Marx this contradiction entails a "double-edged demand, one edge turned against the world, the other against philosophy itself," "a demand and an action contradicting each other." For Marx, Hegel's philosophical consummation of bourgeois society's -- capital's -- emergence had entered into a period of dissolution and
"carnival," in which "the bones of its mother are luminous eyes." (This characterization compares well with Lukacs's original 1922 Preface to History and Class Consciousness, about how Hegel must be recovered in his "seminal elements.") As Marx put it,
"The division of the world is total only when its aspects [i.e., theory and practice] are totalities. The world confronting philosophy total in itself is therefore a world torn apart . . . its objective universality is turned back into the subjective forms of individual consciousness in which it has life."
But the "music" of such a philosophy in the process of self-contradiction and dissolution is that of "Aeolian harps struck by the storm," by which however one must not allow oneself to be "misled."
For Marx, ideological forms of appearance in consciousness must be pursued in their extreme contradictions.
In his letter to Ruge of 1843 (in the Tucker ed. Marx-Engels Reader, "For the ruthless criticism of everything existing"), Marx opposes what he calls the "dogmatism" of socialist utopias, in favor of what he calls "criticism." The characteristic thought figure here is the relation between the "new" and "old," and the obscure character of subjective intention of radical "revolutionary" political perspectives.
The importance of the early Marx for Platypus is salient here. When Marx says that he thinks revolution is about "carrying out the thoughts of the past," in which "humanity begins new work but consciously completes its old work," we should find great resonance with our moment. Concretely, it is also quite significance that Marx situates his own insight in the context of his contemporary reformers' extreme "confusion" about their goals, the "future" towards which they are working, in which there is more "inner difficulties" than "external obstacles." The paradox that clarification about the future can be achieved through greater consciousness of the struggles of the past leading to the present, is a precise conception of the Platypus project, the issue of "historical" consciousness in grasping the emancipatory strivings of capital.
Marx's 1845 Theses on Feuerbach continue to purse this issue of "subjectivity" in clarifying the relationship between "materialism and idealism," in which Marxism is situated. Marx's critique of Feuerbach's "materialist" critique of Hegelian idealism, Marx's recovery of the importance of "idealist" philosophy as the subjective side of practical activity, is of utmost importance for us.
At issue is the relationship of subjective idealism to historical consciousness of the objective concrete or "material" problem of the self-contradictory totality of capital, and how, as Marx put it, the world must be "made philosophical" in order to be overcome. The self-contradictory categories of bourgeois society can be overcome only by being made an effective reality, completed and transcended, realized and overcome, in thought and action, at one and the same time. This is how Marx understood the "political economic" consciousness of the socialist workers' movement, the highest subjective manifestation of capital, which Marx sought to overcome by pursuing it to completion. Marx's own theory and practice (in thought and action) is the self-contradiction of capital finding its highest expression.
This involves the bourgeois-democratic demands of the modern workers' movement under capital, or what came to be known as "social democracy," and how this expressed the crisis of bourgeois society, which had entered its "proletarian" phase -- something already recognized earlier by Hegel. For Marx, the social-democratic workers' movement was itself a symptom of the self-contradiction of bourgeois society in crisis, but this crisis needed to be raised to self-awareness. The need for proletarian social-political revolution was the need to push the crisis of bourgeois society to its extremes.
Today we live in the dim, extended shadow of the failure of this crisis to reach adequately extreme -- and potentially emancipatory -- manifestation (or, more precisely, it only found closest adequate expression in Marx). Nonetheless, perhaps the insights of a Marxist apprehension of the emancipatory potential of capital as the crisis of modern society can still allow us some grasp of emancipatory potential, however distantly (for now). In this respect the relatively preliminary or underdeveloped character of the early Marx can be fertile for us in Platypus, for re-opening the most fundamental questions of the radicalism of capitalist modernity, whose historical moment we still may yet share -- in its emancipatory possibilities.
-- Chris