Introduction

THE THEORY OF MARX’S TEXTS

No philosopher has had more influence than Marx; none has been more misunderstood. The reasons why Marx’s philosophical thought has remained plunged in almost total darkness up to the present day are numerous, and yet they are all related to Marxism and in a certain way are inseparable from it. Marxism is the interrelated set of misinterpretations that have been given concerning Marx. This situation—the gradual divergence, which becomes decisive at an early stage, between, on the one hand, Marx’s own thought and, on the other, the required set of theoretical and practical postulates which constitute what can be called Marxism or Marxisms—did not come about by accident. Certainly, Marxism claims to speak in the name of Marx. What characterizes it, however, is that, since it is directed essentially toward political action and its attendant problems, Marxism has retained of the original work only what might stimulate this action and, in the urgency of a given situation, make it more effective. Theory, of course, has not been entirely neglected, since it becomes a force once it has penetrated the masses, but it is precisely this very theory, itself a more or less lengthy résumé in the service of “revolutionary praxis,” which is substituted for the philosophical content under the pretext that it displays what is “essential” therein. In the preface to the second German edition of the Communist Manifesto, written in the spring of 1883, after Marx’s death, Engels declares, “. . . the fundamental proposition, which forms its nucleus, belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction and class struggles.”¹

What is remarkable about this passage, and others like it, is not only that Marx’s “fundamental proposition” is reduced here to an overly simplistic, if not fallacious, formulation but also that this summary, which claims to contain what is essential and what will, in fact, become one of the dogmas of revolutionary Marxism, is made on the basis of a political text. Now, the political texts (it would be better to say the historico-political texts)— The Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Class Struggles in France, The Civil War in France, etc.— do not contain their principle of intelligibility in themselves, the concepts they develop are not the basic concepts, and their basis is neither expressed in these texts nor even indicated therein. To consider only Engels’ above-cited summary, it must be admitted that this text muddles everything completely. “Economic production” is not for Marx real production and cannot, as such, constitute “the basis upon which . . . political and intellectual history [are built].” Despite the restrictive brackets placed around Marx’s teaching, the reflections on history which are supposed to form the logical sequel to the text tend to make one believe that the being of history is constituted by class struggle, so that the classes themselves would be at once the driving force and the “explanation” of history. What is passed over in silence in this external summary is the origin of the classes, the fact that, far from constituting a principle on the level of being or of knowledge, they are themselves founded on and refer to a productive principle (naturans), and one of the accomplishments of Marx’s philosophy was precisely to bring this relationship to light. The now classical interpretation of history as “the history of class struggle” is not just an overly general approximation; it is purely and simply mistaken if, as we shall show, in Marx the concept of class is foreign to the “fundamental” theory of history. The concepts which enter into the political texts have, therefore, only a limited significance, relative to the function they serve in these texts. Philosophically, they refer to their own proper theory, formulated explicitly by Marx. We shall term philosophical those texts that contain this ultimate theory and that define it. Marx himself indicates the outer bounds of the significance attaching to the political writings when, in reference to his participation in the first Geneva Congress, he writes to Kugelmann on November 9, 1866: “I neither was able nor did I want to go, but I wrote the program for the London delegates. I purposely limited it to points that would meet with immediate agreement and would allow a concerted action on the part of the workers, points that reply directly to the needs of class struggle and to the organization of the workers into classes, and that stimulate them to do so.”²

Let us add that the political texts are addressed to a wide public and that here Marx once again returns to being a writer: Hegelian rhetoric flourishes once more, all the more freely as these texts were hastily written. This is notably the case for The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written for an American newspaper. Here we find more than simply the writer’s tics of Hegels’s most brilliant student, and yet these are Hegelian concepts which then make their reappearance. And this not without reason. Indeed, insofar as what is at issue is history—and not the theory of history—what matters are social formations. And the concepts used to formulate them—which have in every instance as their object a general reality, its structural formation, its distinctions and internal oppositions—belong philosophically to an ontology of the universal to which they secretly refer. It is on this basis that the strange analogy which appears between the political writings and the early writings is founded. In this way one can explain the fact that after the decline of scientific positivism a certain type of Marxism was able to envisage basing itself conjointly on both sets of writings. From Hegel to Marxism the genealogy is then only too blindingly obvious; in each we find the same primacy of the universal, of the general, of the political or social essence, of the dialectic, of negation and revolution, of the internal movement—of being or of society—itself understood as a unique essence at work at the heart of all things.

With regard to the divorce intervening between Marx and Marxism, there is a deeper reason than the primacy accorded to the historical texts or to political action and which, although purely accidental, will prove to be decisive: it is the extraordinary fact that Marxism was constituted and defined in the absence of any reference to Marx’s philosophical thought and in total ignorance of it. Plekhanov, Lenin, Stalin and so many others had no knowledge of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, nor in particular of The German Ideology, which were not published until 1932, that is to say at a time when “dialectical materialism” had already been presented as a finished doctrine. Let us go even further: Engels, who signed, we might say, The German Ideology with Marx, remains in fact totally unrelated to the fundamental philosophical content which unfolds in this explosive text. To be convinced of this one has only to compare the original with the summary Engels gives of it after Marx’s death in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: the two texts have nothing in common. On the one hand, Engels’ summary includes extremely serious historical errors, since he reverses the order of Feuerbach’s and of Stirner’s influence on Marx, which alone is sufficient to render unintelligible the internal development of Marx’s thought during these critical years. Further, we see how in place of the brilliant and decisive intuitions of The German Ideology, which overturn the concept of being as it has dominated Western thought since ancient Greece and unsettle the philosophical horizon within which this thought has always moved, Engels substitutes an exasperatingly dull, banal discourse, which, at the very most, marks a return to the immediate and superficial past, to the materialism of Feuerbach and to that of the eighteenth century. And yet even this materialism, just as the idealism which is naïvely opposed to it, is presented in such an external form that any possible philosophical sense is lost. Here we find statements like the following: “Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of the spirit to nature [is] the paramount question of the whole of philosophy. . . . The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature . . . comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.”³ These lines would not be worth citing—in any event, there is no statement corresponding to them either in The German Ideology or in Marx’s entire corpus—if they had not been quoted by Lenin in his article on Marxism, where they are followed by assertions of this sort: “After 1844—45—this was the period when his ideas were being formed—Marx was a materialist and, more particularly, an adept of Feuerbach whose weaknesses later appeared to Marx to reside solely in the lack of rigor and in the insufficient scope of his materialism. The ‘epoch-making’ worldwide historical importance of Feuerbach stemmed precisely, according to Marx, from his break with Hegel’s idealism and from the affirmation of materialism. . . .”⁴ Far from extending Feuerbach’s materialism, The German Ideology in 1845 rejects the basic concept of this materialism in the very act by which it opens up the new dimension that Marx henceforth specifies as the domain of reality and, at the same time, of all the problems that will constitute the exclusive theme of his reflection.

The immense philosophical blank left for almost half a century at the heart of Marx’s work has had numerous theoretical consequences. Not only was materialism, which the problematic of The German Ideology had placed outside its reach, to provide the title under which the entire work was henceforth to be classified, but as it was still necessary to distinguish this materialism from that of Feuerbach—Engels had published his “Theses on Feuerbach” at the same time as his Ludwig Feuerbach —it was decided that Marx’s materialism was opposed to the earlier materialism in that it was “dialectical.” In this way a second absurdity was added to the first: the dialectic—the concept of action as it is defined within the ontological presuppositions of Hegelianism—is just what The German Ideology and the “Theses on Feuerbach,” which are intelligible only in relation to the former work, had rejected along with materialism; in both cases, this was due to the actualization of a single fundamental intuition, that of praxis. By presenting itself as “dialectical materialism” Marxism claimed to be constructed out of the union of the two elements which found in The German Ideology the principle of their decomposition. A union such as this could only be a “synthesis”: each element, secretly undermined by Marx’s critique, referred to the other. Marxist materialism, and it is in this that it differs “fundamentally” from the others, is “dialectical”; Marxist dialectic, and it is in this that it differs “fundamentally” from that of Hegel, is “materialist.” The two absurdities are not just added onto one another; each calls upon the other to save it. But is this synthesis possible? The question posed by idealist philosophers—for example, Gentile in Italy—whether materialism is compatible with the dialectic, and vice versa, dominates the intellectual debate in the USSR for over a quarter of a century. This question is of doubtful interest if materialism and the dialectic are equally alien to Marx’s thought. What is more, placing the basic concepts of “dialectical materialism” out of reach in this way must be understood to carry with it the force of a thematic exclusion inasmuch as the intelligibility of praxis is to be acquired only by way of a radical critique of the dialectic and inasmuch as materialism, in Capital, is to reveal itself to be incompatible with the presuppositions which found the economic analysis and make it possible.

The absence of Marx’s philosophy during the entire period when Marxist doctrine was being formed had another, no less disastrous, consequence, namely the belief that Marx had come to toll philosophy’s death knell. The theme of the death of philosophy, borrowed from Feuerbach, has in Marx only a very limited significance and is aimed solely at Hegel. But when all substantive philosophical content seemed to have disappeared from his work, of which only the political and economic texts were known, since the philosophical works were then as yet unpublished, strange misunderstandings arose and were perpetuated. The break Marx made with regard to Western philosophy was held to consist precisely in this farewell to philosophy, and this in the name of political action on the one hand—this is how the ninth Thesis on Feuerbach is hastily interpreted—and in the name of science, especially of economics and of sociology, on the other hand. This affirmation is a constant in Marxist authors, in Marcuse for example. “The transition from Hegel to Marx is, in all respects, a transition to an essentially different order of truth, not to be interpreted in terms of philosophy. We shall see that all the philosophical concepts of Marxian theory are social and economic categories, whereas Hegel’s social and economic categories are all philosophical concepts. Even Marx’s early writings are not philosophical. They express the negation of philosophy, though they still do so in philosophical language.”⁵ Mandel, taking up in his turn this unexamined presupposition of Marxism, declares that Marx’s starting point is not the “concept of alienated labor” but “the practical ascertainment of working class poverty,” that his thought will “henceforth be rigorously socio-economic” even if “philosophical scoria” subsist within it, and that, finally, it is to be interpreted as a transition to action: “its conclusion is in no sense a philosophical solution. . . . The call to revolutionary action—to be carried out by the proletariat—has already been substituted for the abnegation of a ‘philosophy of labor’.”⁶

Far from belonging to conceptual analysis, these insipid declarations are but the result of the sorry history of Marxism at the end of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century. Here again, Engels’ responsibility is overwhelming. Although he was the one who contributed to directing Marx’s attention to the condition of the workers and to all the related problems, and who, after Marx’s death, accomplished such a precise and remarkable task in classifying and publishing the economic manuscripts out of which he carved what we now call books two and three of Capital, Engels himself was not a philosopher. His correspondence, as Riazanov notes, “reveals to us that he retained a keen interest in the study of coloring agents (which is explained by the fact that Engels ran a textile business) as well as in chemistry, physics and the natural sciences in general, which had been his strong subjects even in high-school. In Manchester, with his friend Karl Schorlemmer, a well-known chemist, he continued to study the natural sciences. When he moved to London, he gave himself over to this work with great zeal.”⁷ In this way is explained the strange essay on “phlogistic” chemistry which Engels decided to place right in the middle of his preface to book two of Capital. Or again, we might mention the addition to the above-cited preface to the second German edition of the Manifesto, an addition which had already appeared in the preface to the English edition: “This proposition [regarding the class struggle which reaches the point where it is about to liberate all of society] . . . , in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology. . . .”⁸

Considerations such as these, which appear to be only incidental, contain the premises of the subsequent evolution of Marxism. Not only do we see the dawning of the decisive role played by Darwinism, with which Marxism will strive to agree, as is shown, for example, in this text by Enrico Ferri: “What is this famous ‘class struggle’ which Marx revealed as the positive key to human history if not the Darwinian law of the ‘struggle for life’ transferred from individuals to collectivities?”⁹ More than the emergence of a science or of particular scientific theories, however, what is remarkable in Engels’ indications (as in the subjects and titles of some of his manuscripts: “Dialectic and Natural Sciences,” “Mathematics and Natural Sciences,” etc.) is the fact that the very knowledge that Marx had come to establish was not only in agreement with the positive results of the various sciences but itself constituted in reality one science among others and was, precisely for this reason, “scientific” knowledge. The theory of history in Marx’s sense is comparable to biology, and the progress it achieves with the development of the concept of class struggle is comparable to and is actually compared with the progress made by Darwin in the natural sciences. What is signified by this substitution of scientific knowledge for philosophical knowledge and, in the instance with which we are concerned, for Marx’s philosophy is not, in the absence of the philosophical texts, simply unknown and ignored, it is denied.

This collapse of Marx’s thought into pseudo-scientific positivism affects this thought internally in its substantive content when it is no longer limited to establishing a comparison or an analogy with the existing sciences but concerns the specific object of its investigation, material production and the social forms related to it. To the extent that these forms are involved, Marxism, as science, designates nothing other than a sociology and, of course, a—or rather the— “scientific sociology.” Durkheim was simply looking at Marxism through the lenses of his own presuppositions and making it his own when he wrote in December 1897 in his review of Antonio Labriola’s Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire for La Revue philosophique: “We find fruitful the idea that social life is to be explained not through the conception that those who participate in it may have of it but through the deep causes which escape conscious reflection, and we think that these causes are to be sought primarily in the manner in which the associated individuals are grouped together.” To the extent that it includes material and, as it is called, “economic” production, Marxism is precisely only an economic theory, a “scientific” and rigorous one through its contrast with the conceptions of the English school, which remained ideological. In this way, Marcuse’s thesis, according to which “the concepts of Marxist theory are social and economic categories,” is verified. Thus Capital is reduced to a treatise on economics. In this way, Marx’s thought as such is lost, since, far from being able to be confused with one or—mysteriously—several factitious sciences, it constitutes, inasmuch as it is philosophy, a foundational theory: the theory of the foundations of history—and not just a simple historical science; the foundational theory of social formations—and not just simple sociology; the theory of the transcendental foundation and the internal possibility of the market economy and of economics in general—and not simply one economic doctrine among others, destined, as they are, to represent only the relative truth of a transitory phase in scientific development.

With the appearance in 1932 of Marx’s philosophical texts, and in particular of The German Ideology, which contained the theory of history and of social forms along with the premises of a transcendental theory of the economy, the ideological situation created by the existence of Marxism in the form of a completed doctrine was the following: in light of the postulates required by dialectical materialism, it was impossible to grasp the content of the philosophical texts, but it was also impossible not to perceive that this content had, precisely, nothing to do with established Marxism. At the very moment when Riazanov discovered the manuscript of The German Ideology in the archives of the German Social-Democratic Party, it became immediately evident that Marxist ideology obscured Marx’s philosophical thought. On the one hand, Riazanov understood the decisive importance of the discovery he had just made, since the link that was missing between the early writings, which conformed at least in appearance to Feuerbachian humanism, and the works of maturity was at last reestablished and a new reading of Marx was now possible. This was no longer a superficial reading which confronted, from an external position, the various texts and the concepts they conveyed but a philosophical reading which grasped the movement of the thought from inside and identified with it and with its development. On the other hand, and in a striking manner, Riazanov showed us that the ideology, of which he was the high priest before then becoming its victim, prevented him from understanding a single word of the explosive manuscript he had before him. He believed that he found in The German Ideology the confirmation of the summary Engels gave of it in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy and, in the same stroke, he reduced Marx’s philosophical thought to the dismantling it underwent at the hand of the Marxism of the period 1930—40, that is, to a purely formal dialectics, the content of which was constituted by the various positive sciences.

Up to now the period which is called real humanism and the period of Marx’s and Engels’ revolutionary communism have lacked any connection, any intermediary link. Now, not only in their own intellectual evolution but in that of the entire German ideology, the transition from Hegel, by way of Feuerbach, to Marx and Engels, has remained entirely incomprehensible, unexplained and unknown. Besides, from this period on, Marx and Engels abandoned, so to speak, philosophy in general. In the manuscript in question we find indications confirming that Marx and Engels had already developed their doctrine, which corresponds to the formulations Engels provided of it later. Of philosophy, there remains only the dialectic and the formal logic. All the rest comes under the dominion of the various individual sciences.¹⁰

Whereas in Riazanov the Marxist ideology placed in contact with Marx’s philosophical texts continued naïvely to accept their content—or what seemed to be their content—an analysis of this content soon made apparent the irreducibility of the latter to the former. This is the start of a long story, the tragicomic story in which the incompatibility of Marx’s philosophical thought with Marxism is at once revealed and hidden, in which the latter does away with the former. As to the comic passages in this story, let us cite as examples the remarks made by Lucien Goldmann which were inspired by the publication date of The German Ideology. This is explained, according to our author, by the fact that, in the eyes of Engels, who was knowledgeable in such matters, this text was of no interest whatsoever: “thus Engels, at a time when he no longer had any problem having a text published, considered that The German Ideology offered no major interest for publication.” Such is the opinion of Goldmann as well, for whom Marx’s text presents “a considerable interest to all those who want to follow the genesis of the thought of the two founders of scientific socialism, but a lesser interest to those who would seek theoretical and scientific truths therein.” And this is so because “the polemic directed at Stirner occupies a disproportionate place since it alone comprises . . . more than half of the work.” “These polemics,” Goldmann continues, “are completely outdated today” and for this reason constitute just “a dull text.”¹¹ The ignorance of the decisive role of The German Ideology, and in particular of the Stirner polemic, which explains not only Marx’s explicit renouncement of Feuerbach’s materialism but also the definition of the real individual in opposition to the ideological concept of the individual found in Stirner as in classical philosophy in general—the ignorance of this role in an author who claims to be a follower of Marx, demonstrates at once the opaqueness of the ideological veil cast by Marxism over Marx’s basic texts and the secret attempt to minimize the importance of these texts, when they are not simply dismissed.

The elimination of Marx’s philosophical thought in favor of the dogmatic theses of dialectical materialism as it had been constituted and defined over almost half a century in ignorance of this thought is the explicit project of Louis Althusser and the avowed aim of his investigation. Since the philosophical writings do exist, this existence is to be dealt with as a mere matter of fact, as an historical phenomenon whose principle of intelligibility is situated outside of itself, since this principle is deemed to reside in the set of postulates required by dialectical materialism. “. . . we cannot say absolutely that ‘Marx’s youth is part of Marxism’ unless we mean by this that, like all historical phenomena, the evolution of this young bourgeois intellectual can be illuminated by the application of the principles of historical materialism.”¹² Not only are the philosophical writings nothing but the writings of “youth,” those of a young German bourgeois, but the possibility that they could provide an explanation for the later work and constitute the genesis of this work is categorically excluded. Rejected on the level of the given and considered as an ideology, the philosophical work is no longer a source of enlightenment but a dead letter, opaque, capable of receiving its light only from elsewhere. Between what enlightens and what is enlightened the break is radical indeed and such that, on the one side, we find only ideological concepts and, on the other, the set of scientific concepts which constitute the “theory.” The ideological concepts are unusable; their only possible use consists in providing an object for the application of Marxist theory. Marx’s philosophy is sent to the chopping block in order to give the knife of dialectical materialist critique the opportunity to put its blade to work. If the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts form a “privileged object,” this is because they “provid[el the Marxist theory of ideology with an excellent opportunity to exercise and test its method.”¹³

Between what the philosophical manuscripts say, between their explicit immanent meaning and their “genuine” sense, the sense conferred upon them by Marxist theory and which is apparent only in terms of this theory, the split is so great that we are actually dealing with two different discourses, one of which is false and the other true. If, for example, we want to understand the evolution of Marx’s thought during the course of the tremendous theoretical labor by means of which, rejecting successively both Hegel and Feuerbach, both idealism and materialism, this thought attains its own identity through a development which is precisely that of its successive intuitions, a development which is the very movement of this thought, which it experiences, of which it is conscious and which it recognizes as such, this self-consciousness reached by Marx is here simply not what is to be taken into account or even taken seriously. Marx’s thought is considered no proof of itself, it provides no criterion, it is no judge, but instead it is judged, submitted to the criterion of an alien thought.

Of course, the quotation in which Marx himself attests to and locates this break (“we resolved . . . to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience”) in 1845 at the level of The German Ideology, [cannot] . . . be treated . . . as a proof of the existence of the break and a definition of its location. The examination of the status of this declaration called for a theory and a method— the Marxist theoretical concepts in which the reality of theoretical formations in general (philosophical ideologies and science) can be considered must be applied to Marx himself.¹⁴

The way in which the question of the evolution of Marx’s thought is to be treated is therefore only a particular case of the manner in which the entire work is to be explained:

. . . that all this critical effort, the absolute precondition of any interpretation, in itself presupposes activating a minimum of provisional Marxist theoretical concepts bearing on the nature of theoretical formations and their history; that the precondition of a reading of Marx is a Marxist theory of the differential nature of theoretical formations and their history, that is, a theory of epistemological history, which is Marxist philosophy itself; that this operation in itself constitutes an indispensable circle in which the application of Marxist theory to Marx himself appears to be the absolute precondition of an understanding of Marx and at the same time as the precondition even of the constitution and development of Marxist philosophy, so much is clear.¹⁵

Too clear: “A theory which enables us to see clearly in Marx . . . is in fact simply Marxist philosophy itself.”¹⁶ The methodological prescription of this “critical” reading of Marx then finds its precise formulation: “Let us return to Lenin and thence to Marx.”¹⁷ The so-called rereading thus does no more than to repeat what Marxism has always done. A thought of genius is to be measured by the yardstick of an elementary catechism.

We shall discover little by little the false notions to which this sort of “method” inexorably leads. Let us note straightaway a rather important discrepancy concerning this split. Although it is claimed that it is up to Marxism and not to Marx’s own thought to determine where the mutations occur, it is nevertheless insinuated that Marx himself could not have failed to recognize the “ideological” character of his philosophical writings and that it is for this reason that he decided not to publish them. This assertion is made twice concerning the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts¹⁸ and extended surreptitiously to include The German Ideology, as if the awareness attained by Marx in this work had as its conclusion the very rejection of the work itself, its abandonment without regret to the gnawing criticism of the mice. Due to the confusion surrounding the “split,” The German Ideology is no longer the principle of the liquidation of the earlier consciousness but its object, and so is itself liquidated. An interpretation such as this is not only abusive, it is categorically denied by Marx himself, when in 1859, with the distance of the intervening years, he makes the irrevocable judgment in the preface to the Critique of Political Economy by which the radical critique of German thought as well as the clear awareness of its results are attributed to The German Ideology, whose failure to be published is explicitly attributed to its rejection by the publisher: “When in the spring of 1845, he [Engels] too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. The intention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publishers in Westphalia when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances it could not be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose—self-clarification .”¹⁹

Even more serious are the errors that appear in the evaluation of the transcendental history of the concepts developed in the “early writings”; by this we mean the theoretical order of their foundation, their emergence, their elaboration, their rectification, their erasure, and, finally, their replacement by adequate concepts. With respect to the most important contribution of the philosophical writings, namely the radical critique of Hegel, this is held to be worthless because it remains Feuerbachian, whereas one has only to read the 1843 manuscript, Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, to see that this critique, which is absolutely new and original and which remains unequalled in the entire philosophical literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (if we omit Kierkegaard), is autonomous. The Feuerbachian themes appear only at the end of the text in question, as a borrowed element foreign to its content and as a solution brought in from outside to a problem which Marx himself had not yet resolved. The 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts are condemned wholesale, although the third manuscript contains an implicit questioning of the first two, and although the synthesis of Hegel and of Feuerbach in the first texts, which is indicative of a stroke of genius consisting in the clear perception of their identity—of the identity of materialism and idealism—determines the critique of Hegel in the third manuscript as a critique which, precisely, can no longer be strictly Feuerbachian and which already implies the rejection of Feuerbach as the inevitable consequence of the rejection of Hegel, thus prefiguring the decisive reversal to be performed in the Theses on Feuerbach. The sense of this reversal, by which the philosophical content of Marx’s thought is acquired and defined, is lost when the crucial distinction between praxis and theory, reduced to an ideological distinction, is robbed of all importance and when one reserves the right to distort this thought completely by claiming to reduce it, and Marxism along with it, to epistemology or, better yet, to “a theory of epistemological history.”

It is quite useless to attempt to do away with the philosophical work as a whole by subsuming it in its entirety under the concept, if it may be so termed, of “humanism,” by declaring that “the philosophy of man . . . had served as his theoretical basis during the years of his youth (1840—45),”²⁰ by assimilating this foundation to the “old couple individuals /human essence,”²¹ as if the rejection of the latter meant equally the exclusion of the former and the definition of all individual reality as ideological—whereas the collapse of the ontology of the universal, of Gattungswesen, and of human essence was conveyed in 1845 by the sudden appearance at the heart of the problematic of “living individuals,” in terms of which the real presuppositions of history are defined, whereas humanism, as we shall see, is itself equivocal in the extreme, to the point of being contradictory. This contradiction persists throughout the entire philosophical work and can be considered inseparable from its intelligibility. Everywhere one and the same intention is displayed, giving rise to and comprehending the entire problematic: the quest for what is to be understood as reality and, at the same time, as a ground. It is because Feuerbach and, at the beginning, Hegel himself—in opposition to Fichte²²—appeared in the eyes of the young Marx as thinkers who reflected upon this reality that they momentarily served as his guides before being rejected for the same reason, because far from revealing or defining this reality, on the contrary, they overlooked it and let it escape them, for, as Marx understood, reality is not identifiable within an ontology of objectivity.

The singularity of Marx’s philosophical project is what confers upon all his works, and not just the philosophical ones, their extraordinary unity. The successive set of concepts and, even more so, the set of themes which are displayed there, can only be explained on the basis of this fundamental project and as the mode of its gradual realization. This is why if it is correct to recognize in Marx’s work a history of these concepts, it can be interpreted only in light of the teleology that secretly animates it. It is solely in terms of their adequacy with respect to this history that these concepts are criticized, corrected, ratified, or eliminated. The only concepts that disappear are those whose entire content is borrowed from Hegelianism—or its Feuerbachian subproduct. This is the case, for example, of the concept of man, of the first concept of history, of the primacy of the political essence, of society, and so on. On the contrary, the concepts that remain or that appear in the course of the theoretical elaboration are those that have a fundamental reference to praxis, as, for example, the concepts of the individual, of subjectivity, of life, of reality, and so on. One must therefore be extremely careful not to confuse the elimination of the Hegelian meaning with the definitive exclusion of a given concept if it is capable of receiving or acquiring a fundamental reference to reality in the new problematic resulting from the Feuerbachian reversal. Far from ending in its definitive abandonment by Marx, the critique of the concept of alienation, for example— which is announced in the third manuscript and is realized in the polemic directed against Stirner and which determines the economic investigation— marks the transition from the ideological alienation found in the neo-Hegelians and in Hegel himself, which characterizes consciousness and is defined by it, to real alienation which concerns existence and which makes existence the issue. It is not alienation but the ontological horizon from which it was taken that falls outside the field of the problematic. The same thing is true for all of Marx’s fundamental concepts: the concepts of the individual, of history and of praxis itself, which serves as the ground for future developments only when, having escaped the presuppositions of both objectivity and sensibility, it is thought in itself as such and as the innermost determination of being.

A transcendental history is not a linear history but a genesis. Not an historical genesis but, precisely, a transcendental genesis. It is therefore no longer a matter of simply recognizing the appearance and the disappearance of concepts and of their various functions at different points in the problematic, nor is it a matter of indicating mere modifications in terminology which leave the real object intact. Marx, moreover, was aware of this himself as, speaking of the march toward reality, toward the “real material presuppositions” which constitute the teleology and the content of his philosophical reflection, he wrote in The German Ideology: “This path was already indicated in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher —in the Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegeischen Rechtsphilosophie and Zur Judenfrage. But since at that time this was done in philosophical phraseology, the traditionally occurring philosophical expressions such as ‘human essence’, ‘species’, etc., gave the German theoreticians the desired reason for misunderstanding the real trend of thought and believing that here again it was a question merely of giving a new turn to their worn-out theoretical garment. . . .”²³ A transcendental history of concepts reflects this march toward reality and presents the results in a systematic manner. Far from being restricted to ascertaining the order of the succession of the concepts, it establishes the order of their foundation and performs the radical discrimination between ultimate concepts, that is founding concepts, and those that have their foundation in the former. Concepts that accompany one another in Marx’s work, those found, for example, in the same texts, are by no means situated on the same plane; their power of theoretical explanation is different since it rests in every instance on their ontological meaning and refers to this. It is by analysis that the decisive discrimination between founding concepts and those that derive from them is performed, and, inasmuch as this ultimately consists in exposing the levels of being and in recognizing the ultimate essence of being, it is philosophical. It is the interpretation of being as production and as praxis which in the end determines the order of foundation among the concepts along with the order of their respective functions within the body of the problematic. In Capital, for example, the disassociation between, on the one hand, the opposition, characteristic of the English school, between fixed capital and circulating capital and, on the other hand, the opposition Marx substitutes for it between constant capital and variable capital in order to explain the movement of capital, that is capital itself, refers beyond the ideal realm of economics to reality itself and to its ultimate constituents.

The reason it is absurd to claim that Marx’s thought marks the end of philosophy and consists in substituting for the inoperable concepts of German philosophy concepts that are scientific, economic, sociological, and so forth is because the concepts upon which the analysis in Capital is based are exclusively philosophical concepts, and in a radical sense as ontological concepts. This is why one cannot draw “breaks” in Marx’s work along strictly chronological lines, according to the mere presence—or absence—of certain concepts in the succession of texts. And even then, this chronology must first of all be respected. When it is claimed that Marx’s work can be divided into two periods, the first of which is defined by the reign of the concepts of man, of the individual, of alienation, of alienated labor, and so on, while the second is held to witness the disappearance of the ideological concepts and the appearance in their stead of new theoretical concepts proper to Marxism, such as productive forces, relations of production, classes, and so on,²⁴ the fact is overlooked that the concepts of class and of production are present in the early writings, while, except for the concept of man, the philosophical concepts are found throughout the entire corpus. The only question of interest to a transcendental history—and not a simple history—of the concepts of Marx’s thought is the question of determining the fundamental concepts and the relation that is established between the different concepts inasmuch as it is philosophically founded. Now, what appears with respect to a question such as this is that the concepts of productive forces, of social classes, and so forth—the fundamental concepts of Marxism— are by no means the fundamental concepts of Marx’s thought. This means that just as the realities they designate are not original ones on the level of being, so too are they, as concepts, incapable of providing the premises for theoretical analysis. We then see in the economic work the reversal of the relation established between the scientific, economic, social, historical, etc. concepts on the one hand and, on the other, the philosophical concepts: far from disappearing from the problematic, the latter are presented there as foundational concepts. And this is not just by accident, if indeed the general concepts are robbed of their substance when the ontological horizon of Hegelianism falls outside the field of Marx’s thought. Productive forces and social classes are neither primary realities nor principles of explanation but instead they are, precisely, what has to be explained, mere terms to be analyzed. The entire aim of Marx is to show that the problematic of productive forces, for example, ends in their decomposition in the subjective element of individual praxis, which alone founds value and accounts for the capitalist system, while the objective element plays only an illusory and purely negative role in the history of the essence (historial)^* of capitalism. The history of the subjectivity of these forces is their own history, the history of capitalism, the history of the world. In the same way, the classes imply a productive principle, a naturans, and, consequently, a genealogy which, as we shall see, also has its origin in praxis. Situating these forces or these classes at the origin of the analysis, hypostatizing them and even the capitalist regime itself as a naturans generating all that is produced within it, is to reverse the order of explanation, to substitute for Marx’s thought its résumé by Engels and by Lenin, the old catechism which is only too familiar under the already faded colors of “structuralism.”

The preceding indications are intended to serve only as a rough outline of our approach: no theory of texts could ever precede a reading of the texts in question as their condition but instead can only result from this reading. The épochè† of Marxism is but the negative condition of this reading. On the positive side, an understanding of Marx’s thought consists, as we have suggested, in repeating the intuitions and the fundamental evidences^* found there. Repeating in this way is reactualizing the meanings which together form Marx’s work. In the course of this reactivation, the evidences and their actual^† phenomenological content are not simply presented anew to the gaze of philosophical reflection; instead they lead into one another along the paths that are marked out within them and that constitute their systematic explanation. Thus, they serve mutually to situate one another in accordance with the relations of analytical implication and, ultimately, of their essential foundation. Then, due to the apodictic nature of the evidence displayed in these relations, the fundamental texts and concepts can be recognized, not those which are declared fundamental by virtue of an arbitrary or whimsical interpretation but by reason of the essential, that is to say founding, character of their content. Those texts and concepts are fundamental which explain the others and cannot in turn be explained by them.

A method such as this, certainly, is not without its presuppositions. In brief, it implies that Marx’s thought not be treated as an ideology, that is to say, that it is to be grasped in and through itself, through its own intuitions and evidences, precisely in the act of repeating these and not in the form of a causal explanation, that is, a set of theoretical propositions external to the intrinsic content of this thought and different from it. What makes Marx’s thought a philosophy is the fact that it accounts for itself and constitutes for itself its own theoretical foundation. This means, once again, that none of its fundamental propositions is established on the basis of another order of knowledge and that the thesis of the dissolution of philosophy in Marx into the various positive sciences is decidedly absurd. The status ascribed to Marx’s philosophy here naturally does not conflict with his ideology critique, any more than it secretly leads back to Hegelianism. To say that the content of the fundamental evidences is given only in the act of the intuitive grasp and in its concrete realizations is not to make the content depend on such an act; and, consequently, in line with the essential thesis of the critique of German idealism, thought is powerless. Thought, in Marx, is the vision of being, whose internal structure is irreducible to the internal structure of this vision, irreducible to theory; it is praxis.

So we shall be taking Marx seriously here. For us Marx is not some patient stretched out on the analyst’s couch, someone whose babblings would serve simply as hints or as symptoms in discovering the truth. It is not through the lacunae, the silences or the blank spots in his discourse that we shall claim to learn more than what Marx himself said or to reach another level of knowledge, another discourse which would have been concealed under the apparent discourse and which would come to us only through his lapses or his shortcomings. This would-be “symptomatic” reading of Marx not only faces, in this case, the ridicule of appearing presumptuous, it itself relies on an only too obvious mode of psychoanalysis if it merely attempts to re-create, under its “manifest” content, the latent content of Marxism.

The philosophical repetition of Marx’s thought does not simply project once more the content of its decisive evidences, organized according to the tie of their fundamental interconnection, into the sphere of phenomenological actualization. With a tie such as this, the hidden principle of their unity is, ultimately, wrested out of the inexpressed domain in which all thought finally reposes and brought closer to the light. It is in this way that, as Kant and Heidegger have dared to say, the philosophical interpretation of the thought of philosophers is finally always directed toward “what they intended to say.”²⁵ That this aim and this final intention of a given thought inevitably serve as its unifying principle is attested to by the fact that, grasped within the field of intelligibility opened up by this principle, all of the written statements of a given thinker have, despite their apparent contradiction or their diversity—despite even the heterogeneity of the conceptual systems they develop or to which they address themselves— one and the same meaning. This becomes strikingly apparent to any understanding of Marx’s thought which is achieved through the mode of repetition. Through this internal understanding we are able to perceive how, through the various “periods” and their philosophical presuppositions, through Hegel, Feuerbach, and their reversal, through the essential discovery of praxis and the new problematic set up on the basis of praxis, what Marx meant takes shape, emerges and is finally rigorously determined.

A word, finally, about the usefulness or the timeliness of “Marxology.” Of what good are all these scholarly expositions when men are dying of hunger? But the drama of the twentieth century is not only the result of the fact that poverty persists in the modern world. It also strikes those regimes that were built in the name of Marx and, so it is said, in light of his thought. And what if the principles of this thought— living individuals—were to explain the failure of these regimes, the abstraction upon which they have claimed to be established, the inflexible law of their deprivation and their horrors?

Let us, then, allow Marx his turn to speak.

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*By the term historial, with its Heideggerian overtones, the author refers to an internal history, to an unfolding of essential determinations (in this case, those essential to capitalism), which also involves the notion of destiny.—TRANS.

†The phenomenological term épochè means putting in parentheses, bracketing.—TRANS.

*Evidence(s) is to be taken in the phenomenological sense of that which is brought into the clear light of consciousness, given in itself.—TRANS.

†The author's terms effectif/effectivité have been rendered throughout by actual/actuality. —TRANS.