Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason; so that he will revolve about himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself.

—Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction”

We must cut off by the roots a tree that has always borne poisons.

—Voltaire

Philosophy and the Principle of Criticism

Both logically and chronologically, the Praxis “critique of all existing conditions” proceeded from the critique of philosophy to the critique of politics. For the Praxis Marxists, as for Marx himself, the “criticism of religion”—in this case, the criticism of a body of once revolutionary thought, imbued with a truly religious tone by decades of institutionalization and invested with the authority of absolute Truth—was “the premise of all criticism.” But unlike Marx, for whom the Feuerbachian “criticism of religion” had provided a ready-made path to his own “criticism of politics,”¹ the Praxis Marxists were obliged to take on both tasks at once. Deeply committed to Marxism as the sole means of attaining an adequate understanding of man and his world, they realized that their first challenge would be radically to rid Marxism itself of all encrustations of dogma and to reconstitute it as a living, critical theory. To apply that theory in a critical manner to postrevolutionary socialist society, and thereby to gain insights of the same quality as did Marx with respect to capitalism, meant that they would first have to devote their critical faculties to an examination of Marxism and to purge it of all its ideological aspects. Indeed their work of the 1950s, beginning with the writings of Vranicki, Supek, and others on the thought of the young Marx and the significance of the concept of alienation, and ending with the Bled symposium of 1960, was in large part dedicated to this very purpose. Throughout the years of Praxis itself, the continual clarification and development of the Marxian philosophical system would be the cornerstone on which the entire edifice of social and political criticism would rest.

When we speak of the “ideological aspects” of Marxism, it is important to bear in mind that the concept of ideology itself was central to all of Marx's thought. It was in The German Ideology that Marx offered a theoretical framework which could even account, a hundred years later, for how his own preeminently critical theory of society eventually came to play a conservative, ideological role:

For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, put in an ideal form; it will give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.²

For Marx, the critique of capitalist society began with the critique of its false and self-perpetuating concepts, of its ideology. In fact, Marx's entire theoretical opus can be thought of as a vast labor of criticism—criticism of the speculative philosophy of Hegel, followed by criticism of Feuerbach and Left Hegelianism, a critique of the “true socialists,” of Proudhon, of an entire succession of currents of radical thought and practice, consummated in the famous “critique of political economy” which is all too often understood independently of Marx's other works. In all these cases it was Marx's object to penetrate the veil of appearance, illusion, and deception—either deliberate or unintended—surrounding statements about the human condition, to expose all fetishes and frozen principles, and to show how these fetishes exist in intimate connection with various social and historical interests in the preservation or strengthening of the existing set of social relations. This act of demystification was the essence of Marx's method of radical criticism, which proceeded from the simple proposition that while “to be radical is to grasp things by the root, . . . for man the root is man himself.”³ At all times it was a fundamentally humanistic view of the world and a positive vision of the virtually limitless capacity of man to transcend the narrow limits imposed on him throughout history by both nature and society that constituted the guiding spirit of Marx's critical work. And it was this spirit which the Praxis Marxists hoped to recapture from the Stalinist past by subjecting Marxism itself to a critical analysis.

The scope of the task of philosophical reevaluation and reconstruction which the Praxis Marxists set for themselves was formidable. In 1964, in the midst of the French Communist Party's self-conscious reexamination of Stalinism, Merleau- Ponty described this undertaking as a “Herculean task”:

To remain faithful to what one was; to begin everything again from the beginning—each of these two tasks is immense. In order to state the precise respects in which one is still a Marxist, it would be necessary to show just what is essential in Marx and when it was lost. One would have to point out the fork at which he stood on the genealogical tree if he wanted to be a new shoot off the main branch, or if he thought of rejoining the trunk's axis of growth, or if finally he was reintegrating Marx as a whole into an older and more recent way of thought, of which Marxism was only a transitory form. In short, one would have to redefine the relationship of the young Marx to Marx, of both to Hegel, of that whole tradition to Lenin, of Lenin to Stalin and even to Khrushchev, and finally the relationships of Hegelo-Marxism to what had gone before it.⁴

The actual project undertaken by the Praxis Marxists was no less far-reaching. Their revolt against a dogmatic, institutionalized theory parading the name of Marx involved a painstaking reappraisal of the origins of Marx's thought and particularly its relationship to the Hegelian dialectic. It involved bold reconsideration of current schools of philosophical thought in the West that had been reviled by the spokesmen of official Marxism but which seemed to be of particular importance to the revitalization of Marxian thought, as well as a new look at the thought of many Marxian thinkers who had been anathematized as “renegades” and “bourgeois philosophers” by regime ideologists. In all this the Praxis Marxists were not, of course, unique. Landshut and Mayer in the 1930s and Calvez in the 1940s had explicitly stressed the importance of Marx's early writings for a complete understanding of his later works. In 1960 Sartre had published his massive Critique de la raison dialectique, in which he proclaimed that he viewed existentialism as “an enclave inside Marxism, which simultaneously engenders it and rejects it.”⁵ And with regard to some of the more unorthodox Marxian thinkers, the Yugoslavs certainly have had no monopoly over the heritage of Gramsci, Bloch, and Lukács, especially since the latter two were still very much alive in the 1960s. The distinctive contribution of the Praxis Marxists lay in their persistent attempt to mobilize all these elements selectively into a systematic philosophical theory which could in turn serve as the cornerstone for the “critique of all existing conditions” in a country where Marxism has served, at least formally, as the basis of the dominant ideology.

The importance of the philosophical aspects of Marxian theory for the Praxis Marxists, moreover, was reflected in the specific mode through which they attempted to establish the “unity” of theory and practice. Indeed, the full name of their journal was Praxis: A Philosophical Bimonthly (in the Yugoslav Edition; the International Edition was called Praxis: Revue philosophique), and on balance, the bulk of their unity of theory and practice fell squarely on the side of theory. As argued in preceding pages, this “theoretical” resolution was important for Praxis as a means of institutional rationalization and self-preservation. Yet the very notion of philosophy, especially in Marxian theory, is itself replete with particularly subtle connotations which added meaning and substance of a higher order to the Praxis Marxists' “philosophical” undertaking. While some of the specific problems presented for the Praxis theorists by the Marxist concept of the “transcendence of philosophy” will be treated toward the end of this chapter, it should be kept in mind throughout the following discussion that regardless of internal differences of opinion about the role of philosophy, none of the Praxis Marxists would wholly embrace the view that philosophy is an eternally fixed entity to be valued for its own sake. Thus when I speak of the “philosophical” system of individual Praxis Marxists, I shall do so only as a shorthand for their theoretical constructions which in turn should always be thought of as a prelude to the larger work of creative social criticism. Yet as will be seen below, for some Praxis Marxists even a theoretical construction—especially under certain social and cultural conditions—may be a creative act, as the very word “construction” suggests. Indeed, without this in mind it is difficult to appreciate the significance of the “power of the word” in the life of many contemporary socialist societies.

The Return to the Revolutionary Subject

In order to locate the Praxis Marxists on the historical continuum of the development of Marxist thought over the past century, it is useful to recall the theoretical legacies of thinkers such as Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukács, and Korsch. What all these theorists shared, despite the great dissimilarities of their political histories, was the partial or total rejection of the rigid doctrines of the Second International which assigned the motive force in history to a set of universally valid laws of social development that act with the same inexorability as the laws of nature. To them, the broad impact of Eduard Bernstein's revisionism was only proof that for years a serious misconception about Marxism had been reigning in the socialist movement, a misconception of which Bernstein's “revisionism” was only a logical, if ill-conceived, consequence. Instead of devoting their efforts (as had the proponents of orthodoxy in the German Social Democratic movement) to a celebration of the historically inevitable victory of the working class and to an empty rhetoric of revolution which would only have belied the movement's reformist path,⁶ these pivotal figures sought insights into two major questions which seemed to plague the movement's very existence: How was it that the working class had thus far failed to overthrow the capitalist order; and more fundamentally, what is the role of class consciousness in the revolutionary process?

Their common conclusion was that it was no longer possible to take for granted the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat and that it was of the utmost urgency to direct all the energies of the movement toward the radicalization of working class consciousness as the best means of preparing for the revolution itself. Their ways of implementing this imperative, however, often diverged dramatically. For Lenin, the solution was to be sought in a tightly structured vanguard party with a highly restricted membership, while Luxemburg actively agitated for the general strike in the Firm belief that the self-organization of the proletariat, “the direct, independent action of the masses”⁷ and the revolutionary consciousness generated by the experience of active struggle, were constitutive of the revolutionary proletariat itself. Gramsci stressed the cultural maturation of the working class through its participation in workers' councils and later, in his prison years, emphasized the necessity of what Romano Giachetti has called a “subjective revolution” in human nature itself.⁸

Korsch and Lukács articulated their concerns in a somewhat more theoretical vein by devoting themselves to a philosophical reconstruction of Marxism, a task which was also partly undertaken by Gramsci in the development of his “philosophy of praxis.” The purpose of this reconstruction was to gain an appreciation of the active role of the historical “subject” in the changing of reality, in contrast to the dominant view of orthodox Marxism which held that “objective conditions” were always the primary factor determining both the course of historical change as well as the subjective desires of human actors. The practical implications of this new perspective were well summarized by Lukács in his History and Class Consciousness, where he asserted (reminiscent of Lenin) that

the class consciousness of the proletariat, the truth of the process “as subject,” is itself far from stable and constant; it does not advance according to mechanical “laws.” . . . The superiority of the proletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the centre, as a coherent whole. This means to act in such a way as to change reality. . . . In other words, when the final economic crisis of capitalism develops, the fate of the revolution (and with it the fate of mankind) will depend on the ideological maturity of the proletariat, i.e. on its class consciousness.⁹

What emerged from Lukàcs's reexamination of the philosophical structure of Marxism was a fundamentally new theory of human existence in society, “new” at least in the sense that it had heretofore been lost in the still undiscovered manuscripts of the young Marx. Lukàcs's conceptual point of departure was not, accordingly, the young Marx's theory of alienation, but instead the theory of commodity fetishism set forth by Marx in the first volume of Capital; his method consisted in analyzing the subject-object relationship as it had developed in classical German idealism from Kant to Hegel and its metamorphosis in Marx's theory of human praxis. It was this kind of Marxism, Lukács stressed, that was alone capable of recognizing the dialectical unity of subject and object and that could be considered truly “orthodox” in the sense of its authenticity to Marx. For Lukács “vulgar materialism,” by which he referred to both orthodox and “revisionist” understandings of Marx's work, grasped only the reified illusion produced by capitalist society itself that economic relations, the relations between things, are constitutive of the ultimate causes governing human behavior in society. Lukács argued that the “objective” forms assumed by economic categories only “conceal the fact that they are the categories of the relations of men with each other,” and that it “is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality.” And to see the world from the standpoint of totality meant to understand “objective conditions” as existing in intimate relationship with the active human subject who transcends these conditions through historical praxis. Lukács tried to capture this subjective dimension of human action by positing a rather stark opposition between it and a cold, “natural,” objective world:

Man finds himself confronted by purely natural relations or social forms mystified into natural relations. They appear to be fixed, complete and immutable entities which can be manipulated and even comprehended, but never overthrown. But also this situation creates the possibility of praxis in the individual consciousness. Praxis becomes the form of action appropriate to the isolated individual, it becomes his ethics.¹⁰

It was only natural that this revival of interest in the subjective aspect of the revolutionary act should have been accompanied by a reevaluation of the relationship between Marx and Hegel. Lukács and Korsch both understood the importance of establishing the link with Hegel that had been increasingly scorned by orthodox and revisionist theorists alike.¹¹ After World War II, it was Ernst Bloch who attempted to direct attention to Hegel's dialectic of subject and object in the context of the totally ossified doctrines of Stalinized Marxism and its negative and condescending attitude toward Hegel. For in the canons of Soviet philosophy, Hegel, together with German idealism as a whole, represented no more than “the aristocratic reaction to the French revolution.”¹² Bloch, in contrast, sought to stress the revolutionary dimensions of the Hegelian dialectic and to demonstrate that only a proper evaluation of the dialectic could yield a true appreciation of Marx's work.¹³ But while Lukács, Korsch, and Bloch all stressed the importance and positive value of the study of Hegel for Marxism, it would not be accurate to call them Marxian “Hegelianizers” or “Hegelo-Marxists”: Their common position was that while Marx transcended Hegel critically, he never abandoned the dialectic in its humanized form nor did he ever lose sight of the reality-constituting role of the active human subject—perhaps the most important lesson that classical German idealism had to offer.

It was in this tradition, one which concerned itself above all with the restoration of man to his rightful place in Marxian theory as the subject of revolutionary action, that the Praxis Marxists followed. To be sure, it would be an oversimplification to characterize Praxis Marxism as a whole as a mere imitation or a direct development of the idea of Lukács, Bloch, or indeed of any single school of thought. Praxis Marxism was instead the result of the independent efforts of several theorists to come to grips with the most challenging problems of Marxian theory from the perspective of often quite diverse philosophical traditions. Gajo Petrovic, for instance, first studied Soviet dialectical materialism in Moscow and Leningrad in the late 1940s and moved on to a critique of Plekhanov and British positivism in the 1950s; yet on the whole, Petrović (like his Zagreb colleagues Milan Kangrga and Danko Grlić), especially after the late 1950s, was perhaps most deeply influenced by the thought of Heidegger and German existentialism.¹⁴ The methods of British positivism and analytical philosophy have left significant traces in the work of Marković and Stojanović, both of whom spent extended periods for pre-doctoral study in British universities. The astute intellectual historian will find evidence of other schools of thought as well, including the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School, French existentialism, a touch of Kantian ethics, and even dialectical materialism.

Indeed it is tempting to make sense out of the extraordinary diversity within Praxis Marxism by searching for some convenient intellectual scheme that would enable one to undertake an orderly theoretical analysis. Howard Parsons, for instance, points to geographic distinctions among the Praxis Marxists, with the Zagreb philosophers leaning toward “humanism,” philosophical anthropology, and German existentialism, and the Belgrade contingent occupying itself more with the philosophy of science, the theory of knowledge, logic, and an attempt to “combine” these with Marxism.¹⁵ But such a simplistic characterization, while appealing, is not altogether satisfactory. Thus Gajo Petrović, from Zagreb, has devoted a great deal of attention to questions of epistemology, while the Belgrade philosopher Veljko Korać is distinctly Hegelian in orientation and his Belgrade colleague Miladin Životić is almost militantly antagonistic to all forms of logical, positivist, philosophy. Sweeping generalizations of this sort are not possible, nor are they particularly helpful in the final analysis.

To be sure, there are grounds for perceiving significant differences in orientation among the Praxis Marxists. The Czech philosopher Milan Prucha has observed that

philosophical anti-Stalinism from the very beginning was divided . . . into discussions that were not always public, but passionate just the same. How is the true significance of Marxist philosophy to be interpreted? How are the contradictions between “scientism” and philosophical anthropology to be bridged?¹⁶

It is certainly true that within the Praxis group there are some philosophers more inclined toward positivist thought than others, just as others are intellectually closer to the tradition of classical German philosophy. Over the years, these very differences have stimulated vigorous debate among the Praxis Marxists and have added to their thought a degree of depth which would have perhaps been otherwise unattainable.¹⁷ It should at least be clear from this brief exposition that what we are about to investigate cannot be approached as if it were a single closed and exclusive theoretical system. In this sense, at least, there is no such entity as “Praxis Marxism.”

But while philosophers of the Praxis group may issue from different intellectual traditions, they agree on two essential points. First, they are unified in their belief that the revitalization of Marxism can be effected only by returning to the critical theory of praxis and alienation and to the profound humanism that inspired Marx's work throughout his life; and second, they are commonly convinced that such a revitalized Marxism is the most effective tool that man has at his disposal for understanding and transforming the world in accordance with his needs. To devote undue emphasis to divergences in theory between individual Praxis Marxists is to lose sight of their binding commitment to these goals.

As the history of Marxian thought has shown, the “return to the revolutionary subject”—the rediscovery of the human actor as a being of transforming praxis—even in the realm of theory alone, has required that its proponents be prepared to confront serious obstacles in the realm of political action as well. Indeed the very effort to reexamine Marxism independently of all dogma in a socialist country is itself, it would seem, a kind of praxis bearing closely upon key questions of cultural vitality, ideological credibility, and hence even political legitimacy. In this context the practice of philosophy becomes something more than “mere” philosophy. The Praxis Marxist Danko Grlić eloquently expresses his conception of the mission of Marxist philosophy in the following terms:

For if we, Marxists, tranquilly let it be said that Marxism is what certain dogmatic chaplains serve to students in their manuals, we are working against our vocation, and this indifference will boomerang against us. . . . We cannot evade a critical attitude to these sermons, which are boring to the point of death and scholastic to the point of nausea, if we want to prevent the general compromise of Marxism, not only for the sake of our own philosophical existence. . . but also for the sake of the young generations which today, so many years after the revolution, have the right to be offered philosophical thought more profound, authentic, rich, and capable of moving and involving them. . . . And it should not be surprising. . . that students, the future protagonists of our cultural life, repelled by this vacuum of general ideas, should sometimes become voluntarily involved in an excess of anarchist ideas inspired by hooligans, or even return to the Church.¹⁸

For the Praxis Marxists, then, the vocation of Marxist philosophy has both internal and external dimensions—the transformation of Marxian theory from within, and the transformation in turn of that theory's relationship to social action and consciousness. The theory of praxis is the foundation of both.

Praxis and Alienation

“The rediscovery of the writings of the young Marx,” Albert W. Levi has written, “has had the same effect on Marxist revisionism as the discovery of Aristotle's Metaphysics had on the thirteenth century.”¹⁹ Yet the initial effect of the discovery of Marx's early works, including the Critique of Hegel's ‘Philosophy of Right,' the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and The German Ideology, can hardly be called explosive. The Soviet philosophical establishment, in the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of the 1930s, attempted to diminish the significance of the “young Marx” by driving a wedge between his “early” humanism and the “scientific Marxism” of his later years, as interpreted by those who claimed to be the legitimate heirs of Marx by virtue of the birthright bequeathed by the Party. As Petrović points out, the philosophers of Stalinism may well have seen something inimical to the very structure of Stalinism in the attempt to “revise” dogmatic Marxism by reexamining it from the standpoint of the young Marx's militant humanism: “the attempt to discredit the ‘early' works of Marx was really an attempt to prevent the understanding of his whole work, its basic intentions and guiding ideas.”²⁰ Of Stalin, it is often quipped by Marxist humanists that his sole contribution to Marxian theory was the liquidation of D. K. Riazanov—the Russian scholar responsible for discovering the “early works” in the Marx-Engels archives and bringing them to light—in the purges of the 1930s.

After the Second World War, a variety of circumstances combined to reopen the issue of the young Marx. In Yugoslavia, as described in the preceding chapter, a cautious interest in emancipating Marxism from its old and tired forms was given encouragement by the complex set of conditions and events commonly subsumed under the rubric of the “Cominform break” as well as by subsequent internal developments in Yugoslav political and cultural life. In other countries as well, scholars began to reexamine Marxism in the fresh light of Marx's early writings on alienation contained in the 1844 manuscripts, although it was not really until the 1960s that this new interpretation began to gain a significant degree of acceptance. Once it did, however, its effects were felt well beyond the narrow boundaries of Marxismusstudien, helping to bring about something of a revolution, although in some areas more gradual than in others, in the way in which social science regards itself as well as its object of study.

The return to the young Marx, in Yugoslavia as elsewhere, has been characterized above all by the rehabilitation of Marx's theory of alienation. It is here that the main battles over Marx's mantle have been waged. Advocates of the heterodox “one Marx” view have generally maintained that the theme of the alienation of man from his “species-being” was Marx's lifelong concern, and that while in later works such as Capital Marx may have drastically reduced his use of the term “alienation,” several of the central concepts of Capital (the fetishism of commodities, division of labor, exploitation) cannot be fully and properly understood without reference to this seminal theme.²¹ Among the Praxis Marxists this “one Marx” position is universally accepted. None of them would have any trouble in agreeing with Petrović's statement that the “theory of alienation is not only the central theme of Marx's ‘early' writings; it is also the guiding idea of all his ‘later' works.”²²

In Soviet philosophy, on the other hand, the generally accepted position holds that Marx rejected the alienation theme shortly after he wrote the 1844 manuscripts, an interpretation also embraced by the French Marxist Louis Althusser when he speaks of an “epistemological break” in which Marx abandoned the “anthropological problematic” of his so-called young Hegelian period.²³ For the Praxis Marxists, however, it is precisely Marx's humanism, the humanism which Althusser treats with such disdain, that is the very touchstone of the critical power of Marx's work. Any attempt to factor humanism out of Marxism is for the philosophers of Praxis to deprive Marxism of its critical thrust and to transform it instead into an uncritical form of ideology. Indeed Petrović views Althusser's writings on Marxism as “basically attempts to save Stalinism by giving it apparently a more ‘learned' and ‘Western' form.”²⁴

The theory of alienation, in turn, is intimately linked to a theory of praxis, and it can be argued that for Marxism it is indeed the latter which is the more fundamental. The word “alienation” indicates, literally, an artificial separation of one entity from another with which it had been previously and properly conjoined. The question then arises in the case of human alienation—alienation from what? While it might be tempting to respond with phrases such as “alienation from human nature,” “alienation of man from his essence,” or “alienation from man's species-being,” the Praxis Marxist Milan Kangrga warns that the greatest care must be taken in this regard since Marx himself constantly warned against viewing human nature as an abstract, fixed category.²⁵ Marx's own answer is hinted at in his important manuscript entitled “Alienated Labour,” where he writes:

For in speaking of private property one believes oneself to be dealing with something external to mankind. But in speaking of labour one deals directly with mankind itself. This new formulation of the problem already contains its solution.²⁶

In this passage, it is labor which Marx identifies with “mankind itself,” and this apparently independently of particular socioeconomic formations. “Labour” is defined by Marx in the same manuscript as “life activity, productive life . . . life creating life.” As distinguished from the animal, man “makes his life activity itself as an object of his will and consciousness. … It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.” Labor, or production, is furthermore that process by virtue of which nature appears to man as “his work and his reality,” as a result of which man “sees his own reflection in a world which he has constructed.” Alienation, on the other hand, is a perversion of this process, whereby the product of man's labor not only “assumes an external existence” (i.e., is objectified), but also “exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him . . . stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force.” Even the process of labor itself now becomes imposed upon man by external necessity rather than being consciously and freely willed; it is “forced labour . . . a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification.”²⁷ From all this it should be evident that in order to understand the concept of alienation it is first necessary to understand what it is that is being alienated—and for Marx, this is precisely man's capacity for production: praxis.

The category of praxis, however, includes more than “labor” in the industrial or economic sense alone. In the First Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx speaks of praxis broadly as “human sensuous activity,” while in the Third Thesis he states that the “coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice.”²⁸ Indeed it is Petrović's argument that for Marx, man's very activity as an economic animal, including his labor, is alienated insofar as it is torn out of the context of the totality of human existence. And it is precisely this point which is the very cornerstone of Marx's critique of alienated labor:

What constitutes the alienation of labour? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that, consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself. . . . It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs.²⁹

“Praxis,” then, is much broader than the sphere of what is normally defined as “productive labor” within the confines of capitalist society, where productivity is considered to be an attribute of labor power only after the products of labor have been alienated from the laborer and transformed into commodities. Praxis, as Petrović argues, is “the general structure of his [man's—css] relationship toward the world and toward himself,” “a universal-creative self-creative activity . . . by which man transforms and creates his world and himself.”³⁰ Marković, similarly, argues that praxis embraces more than material labor alone, on the grounds that not all practical activity occurs within spatial coordinates nor can it be readily observed as can industrial labor—activity such as observation, the production and interpretation of statements and emotions, the selection of values, and so on. What is definitive of praxis as a general category, for Marković, is that by means of it man purposefully changes his natural surroundings, creates various forms and conditions of social life, and creates himself precisely by changing his environment. Thus Marković defines praxis as “conscious, goal- oriented social activity,” that activity “in which man realizes the optimal potentialities of his being, and which is therefore an end in itself.”³¹

It ought to be noted at this point, moreover, that it is the concept of praxis that sets Marxian philosophy apart from other schools of thought where the concept of alienation in itself often fails to suggest such a distinction. Marxism differs most emphatically from existentialist philosophy, for instance, in that the former finds no necessary identity between alienation and human existence itself. In his early manuscripts, Marx took special care to distinguish between the objectification of essential human powers and their alienation, understanding this alienation to be the consequence of particular social formations but never a consequence of human activity alone. As the Polish Marxist Adam Schaff has pointed out, Marx investigated alienation “from the point of view of his search for ways of overcoming it,”³² not with an eye to proclaiming alienation an essential feature of the human condition. Indeed for Marx it is the very consciousness of their alienated condition that drives human beings toward a praxis that is both world-transforming and selftransforming:

The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or the affirmation of himself as a real species-being (i.e. as a human being) is only possible so far as he really brings forth all his species-powers (which is only possible through the co-operative endeavours of mankind and as an outcome of history) and treats these powers as objects, which can only be done at first in the form of alienation.³³

In this sense, Marxism may be thought of as optimistic where some schools of existentialist thought might be seen as fundamentally pessimistic; and in this sense it is instructive that the Praxis philosophers should value so highly the work of Ernst Bloch, who well merits the title “the philosopher of hope.”³⁴ In contrast to the existentialism of Heidegger, for instance, which holds alienation to be a structural element of human existence insofar as man lives “in-the-world,” Petrović finds it possible to respond that it is precisely this “in-the-worldness” that makes the transcendence of alienation through praxis a real and concrete possibility.³⁵ In the same way, the principle of praxis distinguishes the Marxian theory of alienation from fundamentally religious interpretations of alienation that see in the mind-body antinomy an eternal basis for alienation and seek a spiritual solution to the dilemma. Marx somewhat condescendingly spoke of this viewpoint as representing an embodiment of “the Christian-German principle,” the struggle by man “against his own internal priest.”³⁶ From the very beginning, it was Marx's contention that the contemplative posture would not suffice to reconcile the two warring parties, for the “internal priest” is hardly man's sole adversary in “this vale of tears.” And not only did Marx argue that spiritual struggle would not suffice—he also insisted as early as 1843 that the real struggle against alienation inheres in the revolutionary praxis of the proletariat. Thus there is no critical Marxian theory of alienation independent of the theory of praxis. Praxis and alienation exist in Marxian theory in a close, symbiotic relationship, each being a condition of the other; together, they are the heart of the Marxian dialectic.

The theory of praxis assumes in Marx an anthropocentric perspective: it is man who makes his own history. Beyond this, the theory of praxis posits a basic structure of human existence³⁷ that involves relationships between both man and nature and man and man.³⁸ The following pages will attempt to set forth a composite picture of the basic principles of this theory of praxis found in the writings of the Yugoslav Praxis philosophers. It should be kept in mind, of course, that any discussion of this sort must necessarily contain several elements of oversimplification, but that on the other hand to present in detail the several perspectives of all the Praxis philosophers would require far more space than is available in this study. Thus it will be my procedure to present (by way of an exegetical interpretation of Marx) the most representative elements of Praxis philosophy where they can be found, and to point up differences and disagreements among Praxis philosophers where I feel that such discussions would contribute to a better understanding of the matter at hand.

The relationship between man and nature is one of the most important and complex in Marx's writings and can be fully appreciated only by keeping in mind that in his later works Marx was using concepts that he had developed much earlier in his life.³⁹ To judge from the Preface to the First Edition of Capital, Marx conceived of “natural” laws of capitalist production and social development, laws which work “with iron necessity towards inevitable results.”⁴⁰ Here nature seems to be presented as an entity which “naturally” (in the Aristotelian sense) stands apart from and above man, dictating to him actions and processes that are preordained by the whole previous course of history. In the Third Volume of Capital, however, we learn that this is not a “natural” relationship at all, for in communist society, freedom “can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.”⁴¹ Indeed it is for Marx precisely the fact that man in capitalist society is governed by economic laws whose making and execution are entirely independent of him, giving way to economic crises and the misery of one part of the population at no expense to the other, that this society must be transcended and the man-nature relationship subordinated to the conscious and rational control of the producers. As Petrović states, a society in which “natural laws” of social production reign supreme is not a truly human society.⁴²

It was in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that Marx laid the philosophical groundwork for his view of nature and its relationship to man. Here Marx asserted with Feuerbach that man is a natural being, a sentient being, one that has sensuous objects existing “outside himself as objects independent of him, yet they are objects of his needs [such as hunger—css], essential objects which are indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his faculties.” Like animals and plants, man is conditioned by nature and his natural needs; thus in a sense it may be said that he, too, is an “object” that has other “objects.” What distinguishes man from other “natural” beings, for Marx, is that man “is di human natural being . . . a being for himself, and, therefore, a species-being; and as such he has to express and authenticate himself in being as well as in thought.” In Capital Marx clarified this point in an often-quoted passage: “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination before he erects it in reality.”⁴³ It is not, therefore, the simple attribute of consciousness which makes man peculiarly human, but rather the unity of consciousness and practice—the conscious objectification of human powers and needs in sensuous reality. The material for this process of objectification is provided by nature.

Accordingly, the man-nature relationship in Marx is simultaneously characterized by both harmony and opposition.⁴⁴ More accurately, man “opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, heads and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's production in a form adapted to his own wants.”⁴⁵ In his effort to transform nature—to create, through the application of free, conscious activity, a new nature, but now a nature corresponding to his needs—man humanizes nature and distinguishes himself from other living beings. Through praxis, man negates the alien and threatening properties of brute nature, “appropriating” it to himself and bringing it under his control. It is this process of transcending nature and human limitations imposed by nature that Marx calls “history.”⁴⁶

This process of praxis, of producing history, is not, however, undertaken by man as an individual existing in isolation from other men. “The first premise of human history,” Marx wrote in The German Ideology, “is, of course, the existence of living human individuals,” while “the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”⁴⁷ In his later writings, Marx would often ridicule the Robinson Crusoe paradigm of the isolated producer and emphasize time and again the social nature of production, pointing in part to the simple empirical fact that in nearly all existing and historical societies production has taken place in a framework of interrelated functions and a division of labor. But in order to understand fully the philosophical basis of Marx's conception of man as a social being we must return to his philosophical idea of man as a “species-being.”⁴⁸ “Activity and mind,” Marx asserted, “are social in content as well as in their origin. The human significance of nature only exists for social man, because only in this case is nature a bond with other men, the basis of his existence for others and of their existence for him.”⁴⁹ Nature itself is a bond between men because its appearance as the raw material for human labor only conceals the fact that it is passed on from one generation to another, some of it transformed already many times by human productive activity, some of it untouched. Thus when Marx later wrote that the “tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”⁵⁰ he was making a statement that could be extended to all areas of human activity. Even what is to all appearances the most isolated and individualistic act involves a bond— often unconscious—with the rest of humanity:

Even when I carry out scientific work, etc., an activity which I can seldom conduct in direct association with other men, I perform a social, because human act. It is not only the material of my activity—such as the language itself which the thinker uses— which is given to me as a social product. My own existence is a social activity. For this reason, what I myself produce I produce for society, and with the consciousness of acting as a social being.

Lest it seem that “my own existence is a social activity” merely asserted what should have been demonstrated, it ought to be emphasized that this statement was grounded in the mode of existence that Marx posited in the theory of praxis. When man objectifies his powers in the object of labor, he reproduces himself “actively and in a real sense, and he sees his own reflection in a world which he has constructed.” Thus the very act of production, the act which Marx considered the essential characteristic of man, is one in which man becomes aware of himself as an object, and as a potential object for other men. In his application of the Feuerbachian “transformational” method to Hegel, Marx argued:

For as soon as there exist objects outside myself, as soon as I am not alone, I am another, another reality from the object outside me. For this third object I am thus an other reality than itself, i.e., its object…. As soon as I have an object, this object has me for its object.⁵¹

Thus we return to the structure of man's existence in the world—praxis—as the locus of his species-being. As we shall see in the next chapter, it was in the profoundly social nature of human praxis that the Praxis Marxists found their most solid basis for constructing a critique of alienated political life.

In the previous few pages I have provided only the barest outlines of the concept of praxis in order to set forth a basic theoretical standpoint which can safely be considered to be common to all Praxis Marxists, difficult though it may be to make generalizations of this sort. Predrag Vranicki, speaking on behalf of the Praxis school, confirms this general description in the following disarmingly simple statement:

We see man as par excellence a being of practice, a being who freely and consciously transforms his own life. . . . Man exists and develops only by transforming his natural and social reality and . . . in this way he transforms himself also.⁵²

While this assertion is in fact characteristic of Praxis Marxism as a whole, there have also been several highly individual attempts within Praxis Marxism to come to terms with what was described in the programmatic introduction to the first issue of the journal as the “fundamental concept of Marx's thought.”⁵³ One of the most unique and systematic approaches to the problem of praxis is to be found in the thought of Milan Kangrga.

For Kangrga, the concept of man as an historical being— more accurately, as the historical being—takes on key significance. Kangrga's philosophical vocabulary is full of reference to time and movement in time, and in this sense is quite reminiscent of Bloch: concepts which constantly recur in Kangrga's writing such as “the existing,” “the not-yet-existing,” “the future,” obviously owe a great debt to Bloch's philosophy of hope. “The existing” (or “the present”—postojeći) is presented as the state of gross factuality, of the “given” world as it appears to man as separate from and standing over him. To appreciate the inadequacy of “the existing,” we would have to start from the question that Kangrga, assuming the centrality of the praxis-alienation nexus, poses in Kantian fashion: How is alienation possible? Alienation is inconceivable in a world that has only “the present”:

We “don't know” about alienation when and if we situate ourselves in this present as in our own single truth, meaning and possibility, or in other words if we “feel good” in it, or when (as Marx says) we have “made ourselves at home” in it.⁵⁴

Thus Kangrga argues that the praxis-alienation problematic has meaning only with reference to the future, within a framework of becoming. Here, once again, he demonstrates his affinity with Bloch and the larger movement back to the Hegelian origins of Marxism. Human existence itself is revealed as constant movement, man in the process of becoming:

Man alienates himself from this “not-yet-himself' when he ceases to want to be that which he is not yet, when he ceases to be in action, when he ceases to be authentically. But this [the “not-yet- himself'—css] is never given, and no one or nothing can ever give it (just as truth cannot be handed over whole like banknotes—as Hegel says in The Phenomenology of Spirit!): he can and must choose, produce and create it for himself as man.⁵⁵

Man, for Kangrga, is thus the being of the future. His essential life activity (his species-being) is a movement toward the future, or as Kangrga prefers to formulate it, an historical movement “from the future through the present to the past.” Praxis is the very motivating principle of this movement, “negativity following from the creative principle of negativity,” by virtue of which

man is what he is not yet, and is not what he already is or what he was, neither past nor present time but the active, practical-critical, “revolutionary” (Marx) negation of that which he is and was; a turning toward his future which he realizes and infuses with truth in his actions, today, now, here, every hour. Man as man lives and acts now: in future time, for he negates the present through the future and only in this way is he a truly and really historic being who transforms the existing (natural and social) into a human future full of meaning and potential.⁵⁶

The act of negating the present as a “mere given,” moreover, reveals new possibilities for the expression of human powers, possibilities immanent in that present but hitherto unrecognized. This recognition, of course, takes place not in the realm of contemplation alone but in the world of sensual objects, in and through a conscious effort to change that world.⁵⁷ Still, the utopian element in Marx's thought is afforded a place of great importance in Kangrga's interpretation. Indeed, the only fault Kangrga seems to find with the slogan of the French students in May 1968—“Soyons réalistes; demandons l'impossible!”—is that it was not rather: “Soyons réalistes; demandons le possible!”⁵⁸

While Kangrga's rendering of the theory of praxis can be compared within the Praxis group only to that of Petrović in terms of its internal consistency and distinctiveness, another approach worthy of note is that of Danko Grlić. In this case, the approach matches the man, placing a premium on the individualistic nature of praxis and the role of personal creativity (accordingly, Grlić's strongest area is the theory of esthetics). Indeed, instead of defining what praxis is, Grlić seems to prefer to specify what it is not:

Human practice stands in opposition to all that is passive, merely mediative, non-creative, all that is adaptation to the world and to its particular social conditions. . . . [It is] an active interference with the structure of reality. . . . It seeks to attain no ultimate and final “results,” no life of bliss in this or any other world, in paradise or some promised land.⁵⁹

In a highly provocative paper presented at the 1967 Korɩula Summer School, Grlić attempted to draw a conceptual distinction between “creativity” and “action,” the former referring to the individual personal activity of negation and praxis in the ontological sense in which it has been discussed above, and the latter designating a collective attempt by members of a group to achieve a common goal. Grlić seemed to think of these individual and social moments of praxis as mutually exclusive, especially when he argued that

the obligations that proceed from a common desire, which are often accompanied by a peculiar yet comprehensible moral pathos. . . obligations which force [on us the standard of] the success of an action, are always—in my opinion—an obstacle to individual creativity.

Not surprisingly, a few pages later Grlić turned to Nietzsche, who in his view was a philosopher who spoke preeminently for the creative power of individual human negativity, to support his argument.⁶⁰ To be sure, Grlić went on to assert that on the “social” plane (as opposed to the individual-psychological or -ethical plane), the same dilemma between creativity and action was recognized by Marx, notably in his skepticism of “public opinion” and the meaning this term had acquired in nineteenth-century England. Yet after reading the entire essay, one is still left with the impression that if Grlić's head was with the author of Capital, then at least his heart was with the lonely and angry author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

In the discussion following the presentation of his paper, Grlić came under sharp criticism from the Belgrade sociologist Vojin Milić, himself a frequent contributor to Praxis, for what Milić described as an “aristocratic attitude toward everyday human life.” The antinomy between individual and collective action, Milić argued, is not nearly as sharp as Grlić would have had it seem. For one thing, the boundaries between the two are in turn a function of historical and social factors: some societies, for instance, have valued the effectiveness of given actions, both individual and social, less highly than others, suggesting that the tension decried by Grlić between individual creativity and collective success is not a historical constant. Moreover, Milić claimed, the social ideals arising from “plebeian” movements have been historically more progressive and worthwhile than the aristocratic “nihilism” which Nietzsche and others have advocated.⁶¹ To return to Grlić's paper, however, it was precisely to the problem of radical social movements that its main thrust was directed, concealed though this may have been by the rhetoric of individual creativity. Grlić had posed the question concretely in the following way:

If a plan, an organization, or an institution always repress human freedom in some way, then must nevertheless the struggle against such institutions, and against such a plan, itself be planned and institutionalized? Must the struggle against bureaucratism itself necessarily become bureaucratized? Is the struggle against God possible—as Nietzsche would have said—without itself becoming God?⁶²

It was thus the vital historical problem of the institutionalization of revolutionary movements that Grlić was in fact addressing in his paper. In this context, the theoretical antinomy that he drew between individual creativity and collective action was, if overstated, readily understandable. It was, after all, to be the goal of the socialist revolution to guarantee “the all-round development of the individual.”⁶³ But what kinds of institutions are consistent with that goal? Is it not the very nature of institutions that they seek to Fix, order, preserve, and routinize certain human relationships and faculties and to prevent the development of others? We may conclude that when Grlić so radically opposed the individual and the collective he was doing so not as an incorrigible pessimist, but rather as a social critic who had formulated the problem of the revolutionary movement in its sharpest and most unmistakable philosophical form. Although Grlić did not attempt to provide a clear answer (beyond broad references to the principle of self-management) to the question of what specific institutional form is appropriate to the socialist revolution, he did state the minimal condition that such an institution would have to satisfy: it must be an institution free of dogma. Dogma, for Grlić is the very antithesis of praxis:

Practice is . . . opposed to everything established, dogmatic, rigid, static, once-and-for-all determined, fixed, standard: to everything which has become dug into the past and which has remained hypostatized. . .. Man cannot. . . have the ambition to transform the world if he does not at the same time transform his own ideas and principles.⁶⁴

Grlić's philosophical individualism, although perhaps extreme, is hardly unique among the Praxis Marxists. Indeed one of the primary goals of “socialist humanism” throughout Eastern Europe has been to demonstrate that seated in the very foundations of Marxism is a profound concern for the human individual and to advocate a society where the “free development of each” is truly a necessary condition for the “free development of all.” While Lukács had emphasized the epistemological importance of the category of “totality” for Marxian social analysis, asserting that “facts” neither exist in isolation nor stand in simple isolated relationships with each other, the Praxis Marxists additionally find an ontological principle of totality pervading Marx's writing on the human individual, the cornerstone of all societies. “Totality,” writes the Belgrade Praxis philosopher Miladin Životić, “is not a demand for knowledge of the existing structure of facts but a programmatic totality, a demand for the conquest of the authentic world, i.e., the world of authentic man.” Vranicki, moreover, draws an intimate link between the category of totality and the theory of praxis:

Not one of man's activities exists by itself and for itself alone. Not one can be understood without taking into account whole historical epochs, man's historical experience as a whole, the integrity and polyvalence of his fundamental existence as a being of practiće.⁶⁵

Of all the Praxis Marxists, Rudi Supek has most comprehensively elaborated the ontological principle of totality in all its ramifications for the study of the human individual. Marx, he stresses, conceived of the individual as “the ideal totality of society.” Conscious of the Hegelian origins of this concept of totality, Supek here refers not to a simple static entity but instead to the dialectical interaction of moments of a single whole which is constantly in the process of becoming. In this sense the human individual is to be conceived as a “concrete universal” of his generic species-being, as suggested by the following passage from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

Though man is an unique individual—and it is just his particularity which makes him an individual, a really individual communal being—he is equally the whole, the ideal whole, the subjective existence of society as thought and experience. He exists in reality as the representation and the real mind of social existence, and as the sum of human manifestations of life . . . The particular individual is only a determinate species-being and as such he is mortal.⁶⁶

This “species-being,” the social existence of man, is the vital link between the individual and the larger totality of society. Thus Supek claims that for Marx there are “two totalities standing in a concrete dialectical relation to each other, and whose nature can be determined only by the science of society.”⁶⁷ Neither totality, however, is historically static or eternal; rather, each is a function of the existing social relations of production and the possibilities which they offer for further human development. In revolutionary praxis, the individual engages in an act of “totalization” and “universalization”: he seeks to reach beyond his actual determination and the limitations imposed on him by the existing structure of society to possibilities offered by that same society for the full development of his powers as a complete human being. In this sense, indeed, man as a “totality” is what Supek has referred to elsewhere as “man without social measure,”⁶⁸ the being of praxis. Without this category of totality, as Supek argues, “the entire theory of alienation is meaningless.” The theory of alienation, he explains,

above all presupposes a determinate “individual nature,” a certain individual and social psychology, and Finally a definite social structure in which that individual nature becomes apparent, is realized, objectified, and also reified or alienated. In other words, man is a social being but also a socialized being, and between man as a social being and man as a socialized being there is a certain dialectical relationship which Marx expressed in his theory of alienation.⁶⁹

It is precisely the category of totality that Supek finds in a completely different form in the Stalinist mind. Here, he asserts, “the individual as ‘total man' or ‘the ideal totality of society' does not exist.”⁷⁰ The totality of society, as hypostatized in the existing structure of the party-state and its highest organs—and ultimately in the person of a single man—demands the total obedience of the individual to an external authority and cannot tolerate the existence (even if dialectical in form) of the individual as a rival “totality.” With reference to Hegel, Marx once wrote that “it is above all necessary to avoid postulating ‘society' once again as an abstraction confronting the individual.”⁷¹ But the Stalinist conception of totality, Supek points out, goes beyond even the Hegelian rational unity of the individual, particular, and universal, where “the unity of the person with the other must essentially be examined not as a real limitation of the individual, but as his prolongation.”⁷² Thus the ideology of Stalinism, in rejecting the theory of alienation, finds itself attracted to a kind of distorted super-Hegelianism when it ventures to make even the most basic statements about society. As Supek and many of his Praxis colleagues⁷³ have argued, the basic shortcoming of Stalinism is that it fails to understand the crucial role played by the human individual in making society itself a living reality.

From Marx to Stalin: The Reification of the Dialectic

In the decades between the publication of Capital and the popularization of Marx's early works, the chief concerns of Marxist philosophy centered not on the concepts of praxis, alienation, and totality, but rather on the nature of the dialectic: Is it materialist or idealist? Is it directly applicable to the natural sciences? What consequences does it have for the theory of knowledge? These questions, furthermore, arose not in an isolated academic framework but in the context of the development of Marxism as an ideological system for a series of organized social movements. And in the view of the Pram Marxists, this reformulation of the fundamental issues of Marxist thought had fateful consequences for Marxism's ability to perceive both the world and itself in a critical manner. Hand in hand with the progressive institutionalization of the revolutionary movement went the process of the reification of the Marxian dialectic of praxis, and this theoretical revision—a “revisionism” whose roots lay deep in the revolutionary experience—could not fail to have a profound reciprocal effect on the nature of revolutionary practice.

Marx insisted that the Hegelian dialectic had to be liberated from its existence as a pure form of thought and given substance by linking it essentially with the social existence of man. Indeed Marx even suggested a basic affinity between the Hegelian dialectic, which in and of itself was only “a concealed, unclear and mystifying criticism,” and the actual structure of human praxis:

. . . in so far as it [the Hegelian dialectic] grasps the alienation of man (even though man appears only as mind) all the elements of criticism are contained in it, and are often presented and worked out in a manner which goes far beyond Hegel's own point of view. . . . The outstanding achievement of Hegel's Phenomenology—the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle—is, First, that Hegel grasps the self-objectification of man as a process, objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and transcendence of alienation, and that he, therefore, grasps the nature of labour, and conceives objective man . . . as the result of his own labour.⁷⁴

Thus the locus of the dialectic in Marx's understanding was none other than man himself, and the “dialectic of negativity” nothing but the real act of negation and transcendence in which man engages as a being of praxis. Any conception of the dialectic which considers the dialectic to be a form existing independently of and above man must therefore be viewed as a departure from Marx's own intentions and a misunderstanding of the humanist core of Marx's thought.⁷⁵ Even in the very same Afterword to Capital where Marx approvingly quoted the words of the enthusiastic Russian reviewer who had likened Marx's social science to a natural science of rigid laws, Marx invoked (but now more obliquely) the same understanding of the dialectic that he had put forward some thirty years before. Here he again credited Hegel with discovering and presenting the form of the dialectic, but insisted that it “must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” This “rational kernel” was precisely the theory of praxis that Marx had elaborated in a more abstract form in the early manuscripts, and that he was now endowing with living substance in his massive study of the capitalist system. Only because the very structure of praxis is one that involves human negativity and creativity, alienation and its transcendence, could Marx state with full confidence that the dialectic is “in its essence critical and revolutionary.”⁷⁶

Over the years, however, this human and profoundly critical content of the dialectic gradually gave way to another, more impersonal dialectic which stressed above all the disembodied form of dialectical “laws” and sought to apply them to the most diverse phenomena, both natural and social. Engels particularly comes to mind in this regard with his illustrations of the working out of the dialectical “laws,” using examples such as the grain of barley, the orchid, the butterfly, the geological history of the earth and the calculus, only followed by illustrations from social history. The “negation of negation” for Engels was much more than one of the component principles of human praxis, Finding its meaning precisely as part of the structure of praxis. For him it was rather “an extremely general . . . law of development of Nature, history and thought; a law which, as we have seen, holds good in the animal and plant kingdoms, in geology, in mathematics, in history and in philosophy. . .”⁷⁷ It was Engels' concept of a “dialectic of nature,” furthermore, that Lukács categorically rejected, inducing him to differentiate sharply between nature and society and the applicability of the dialectic to each.⁷⁸ On the surface, Lukàcs's objections seemed quite persuasive: the dialectic of nature “in itself' is a fantasy, a reification brought about by a profound misunderstanding of the human essence of the dialectic; hence, the dialectic should be restricted in its application to the study of society alone. The implications of this man- nature distinction were of great consequence for the philosophy of science in general, since it suggested that human history differs in some essential way from natural history, and that therefore as objects of study they must be approached from quite different perspectives and with different tools. While social science may thus outwardly resemble natural science in some respects, Lukács seems to have suggested, the study of man must still have its own categories in order to be adequate to its object.⁷⁹

At no point, however, would it seem that the Praxis philosphers wish to posit concepts of man and nature as mutually exclusive as they were for Lukács. For Marković, for instance, the dialectic of nature and the dialectic of human history are “one and the same dialectic,” in the sense that the link between nature and man is necessarily presupposed by the theory of praxis, which establishes the unity of the world as an object of human activity (but not, as in diamat, as “pure matter”). Nature and man do not exist as separate entities “in themselves”—nor, in Marković's view, did Engels really suggest that this was the case. Where Engels may have erred was in neglecting, as Lukács himself stated, to treat explicitly and systematically “the dialectical relation of subject and object in this historical process,” without which “the dialectical method ceases to be a revolutionary method.”⁸⁰ Far from stating that natural objects exist independently of man, Engels, as Marković notes in his defense, most eloquently stressed that “nature as such” can have little meaning for man beyond his practical relationship to nature, as in the following passage:

But it is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought, and it is in the measure that man has learned to change nature that his intelligence has increased.⁸¹

While the theory of praxis may indeed presuppose objects initially existing independently of man, Marković suggests that this fact is immaterial and even logically incapable of being substantiated, since

everything that we can say about them [such objects], and everything that we in fact say about them in ontology and the particular sciences, is knowledge about them as products of practical activity. . . . Our knowledge about them is the result of our practical experience, the result of description and explanation that developed from that experience.⁸²

Thus while Engels, in Marković's view, might justly be accused of having diminished the significance of human praxis in his considerations of the form of the dialectic, Marković finds little else with which to fault Engels on matters of substance. Indeed, the general tendency of Praxis Marxism is to find the roots of the degeneration of the dialectic not in Engels himself⁸³ but in a much larger and more far-reaching problem of revolutionary praxis: the institutionalization of the revolutionary movement.

Among the Praxis Marxists the strongest case for this connection between revolutionary theory and praxis is made by Miladin Životić. Životić argues that there was a natural affinity between the dialectic of nature, which he characterizes as a “conversion of a humanistically engaged dialectic into a positive science of the existing world order,” and “bureaucratic motives of maintaining the existing world.”⁸⁴ Indeed the posture of bureaucracy (as the end result of institutionalization) toward the world surrounding it is one which apparently differs sharply from the idea of praxis. Where the latter involves the simultaneous transformation of the external world as well as a transformation of self, bureaucracy adopts a purely manipulative attitude toward the world and an uncritical attitude toward itself. It does not question its own existence, having persuaded itself that it performs a necessary and vital function for society. This world-view is characteristic not only of fully developed bureaucracies, but also, although perhaps to a lesser degree, of revolutionary organizations that may be only partially bureaucratized. The ideological legitimacy of such institutions often depends on the extent to which they can claim to possess correct knowledge of the existing state of affairs; under such circumstances, the “unity of thought” takes on as much importance to the revolutionary movement as the “unity of action.” This development of an intra-institutional ideology, particularly in Marxist movements, has had important epistemological consequences as well. As Životić contends, in an atmosphere where a heavy premium is placed on the truth-value of organizational knowledge, dialectics are transformed into “ontological categories which only help to ‘learn' (and not to destroy revolutionarily and critically) the most general structure of the world. According to Marx's view we can know reality to the degree that we change it.”⁸⁵ Rather than seeking ways of changing the world, the revolutionary movement begins to look for evidence of stability and permanence in the world surrounding it; it becomes concerned with the search for “eternal truths.” Thus, according to Životić, did the workers' movement beget a theoretical framework which ultimately hindered its ability to perceive the world in a critical and revolutionary manner.

The new needs of the institutionalized Marxist movement were reflected in its theory in the purely secondary position which practice acquired in relation to the act of cognition. Ironically, the thesis of the primacy of matter over consciousness adhered to by the proponents of “diamat” seemed to result in the primacy of the knowledge of truth over practice and thereby in a step backward from Marx's revolutionary theory of praxis to the contemplative stance of German idealism. Petrović Finds this problem as having First arisen with Engels, who in his essay on Feuerbach posed too strict a dichotomy between materialism and idealism, matter and consciousness, with the questions: “Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality?” Petrović observes:

The formulation of the question clearly indicates Engels' reply. The theory of reflection belongs to dialectical materialism not only because it was endorsed by Engels and Lenin but also because it seemed to be the most adequate complement to the materialist primacy of matter over consciousness.⁸⁶

Practice, Petrović suggests, entered into Engels' thought about the truth or falsity of human knowledge only as an a posteriori criterion of truth, as the most adequate and certain mode of verification of knowledge which is acquired prior to that practice on the basis of sense-perception. The principle of practice was thus relegated to a position where practice is merely a means of attaining more certain knowledge, rather than being a constitutive element of knowledge itself, while cognition took on the appearance of being an essentially passive activity. Whereas Marx (and the early Engels) had ascribed to cognition an active and even normative character,⁸⁷ in the later Engels there were signs of a reversion to what Vranicki calls “a pre-Marxian theory of reflection which totally vulgarized the entire problematic.”⁸⁸ The idea of practice as the criterion of truth, moreover, was most amenable to institutions whose legitimacy was based, partially or wholly, on a claim to true knowledge of the world. It also tended, as Stojanović points out, to be self-perpetuating and self-serving. One might well ask, with Stojanović, how practice can be a neutral arbiter of truth where “the evaluation of practice is subjected to the hierarchical principle,” and where the organization claims to exercise by right a monopoly over the revolutionary practice of the movement.⁸⁹

It was with Lenin, however, that the question of cognition became vitally and explicitly linked with that of the fate of the communist movement. In his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin insisted on the existence of an objective reality completely independent of man and his perceptions, with a corresponding objective truth which can only be approximated by human knowledge. Lenin cast these doctrines as articles of faith for all Marxists and went on to describe a cognitive theory of reflection further elaborating this view of reality. Paraphrasing Engels, Lenin stated that “the basic question for materialism . . . [is] the question of the existence of things outside our mind,” while

the materialist theory, the theory of reflection of objects by our mind, is here presented [in Engels' Introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific] with absolute clarity: things exist outside us. Our perceptions and ideas are their images. Verification of these images . . . is given by practice.⁹⁰

Lest there be any doubt in the minds of his readers about the centrality of the theory of reflection, Lenin made this ex cathedra pronouncement:

From this Marxian philosophy, which is cast from a single piece of steel, you cannot eliminate one basic premise, one essential part, without departing from objective truth, without falling prey to bourgeois-reactionary falsehood.⁹¹

Why was Lenin so adamant on this point? As Kangrga pointed out in the 1960 discussion at Bled, the very question of the objective existence of an external world independent of man is religious in tone and rests ultimately on a theological solution (as in Descartes), demanding faith rather than knowledge:

This is not at all a question! For Marx this was not at all a philosophical question. . . . For the existence of the external world presupposes religion as well; God created the world. Therefore the world exists.⁹²

The “religion” which Kangrga seemed to have in mind here was that of the Leninist vanguard party, whose authority ultimately rested on the degree of correctness which its adherents attributed to its pronouncements about social reality. This especially held true for the workers, whom Lenin took to be incapable of conceiving of the class struggle within a framework more general than that presented by their immediate experience.⁹³ Lenin's theory of reflection described in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, furthermore, closely corresponded to this conception of the formation of class consciousness—if one derives consciousness only from “reflections” of the external world transmitted to the mind through sensual contacts with that reality, then the scope of individual consciousness is inevitably limited by the very finiteness of human existence; it is the responsibility of the Party, as a collective thinker and the vanguard of the working class, to endow the movement with a more general perspective by drawing on its multifaceted experience in all areas of the workers' struggle. As Petrović observes, Lenin eventually came to realize the inadequacy of a simple reflection theory when he stated in his Philosophical Notebooks that “man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, it also creates it.”⁹⁴ Still, Lenin's earlier formulated cognitive theory remains an integral part of traditional Marxist philosophy in the USSR and Eastern Europe to this day. As the Bled debates and subsequent polemics between the Praxis Marxists and their adversaries have shown, it is this conception above all on which Marxist dogmatists have stubbornly refused to yield and to whose sanctuary they have always desperately returned when under attack.

It was under Stalin, however, that the dialectic in its reified form reached its zenith. Here again, there was an important connection between philosophy and social history. In the words of Životić (who in the following passage evidently has in mind specifically the Stalinist “victories” in philosophy in the early 1930s)^:

Everything that happened to philosophy was a reflex of what happened to the working class as the subject of history: it was when a particular stratum of people, who had abandoned the ideas of social self-government and who had raised themselves above the [working] class, took over the historical mission of that class that historical materialism was transformed into an organicist positivism prohibiting criticism of the global social structure.⁹⁵

With the advent of Stalinism and the simultaneous total subordination of Soviet philosophy to the immediate goals of the Party and ultimately of one man, the dehumanization of the dialectic became complete. In Stalin's famous “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” Chapter IV of the History of the All-Union Communist Party (b): Short Course, we find a scholastic and eclectic synopsis of the most unfortunate pronouncements of Engels and Lenin on the dialectic presented in an extremely dogmatic fashion. Here there is no room for doubt: there are but four “features” of “the Marxist dialectical method” (the interrelatedness of all phenomena; the doctrine of continuous motion and change in nature; the change from quality to quantity; the struggle of opposites) and three “features” of “Marxist philosophical materialism” (the unity of nature in matter; the existence of nature as “an objective reality existing outside and independent of our mind” and the primacy of matter over consciousness, which is but a reflection of matter; the possibility of having true, objective knowledge of the world and its laws).⁹⁶ These properties of the dialectic seem, in this version, to exist independently of man or even of any specific natural referents in the pure form in which they are described; instead they are “illustrated” by examples from nature and “extended” to the study of society. The truth of Petrović's observations about the conceptions of Engels, Plekhanov, and Lenin is ever more certain with Stalin:

Dialectics . . . is neither only a method nor only a logic or theory of knowledge, but also ontology. Its essential aspect or element is the conception that there are certain most general, “dialectical” laws according to which everything that exists changes and develops.⁹⁷

What Petrović finds most characteristic in Stalinist Marxism is that it has no explicit philosophy of man; instead, it is “a combination of ‘dialectical materialism,' an abstract philosophical ontology-gnoseology, and ‘historical materialism,' an unphilosophical, economistic understanding of history.” Petrović argues that the concept which Stalin's philosophy does hold implicitly of man is purely one of man as an economic animal who is totally subject to certain absolute laws of social development.⁹⁸ This theory is diametrically opposed, in Petrović's view, to the Marxian theory of man as a free, creative being of praxis: They are simply “two different conceptions, which neither logically complement each other, nor are simply indifferent to each other, but at least in certain essential points are mutually exclusive.”⁹⁹

Other Praxis Marxists find similar faults with the Stalinist philosophical system. Supek contends that the very structure of Stalinism, from Stalin's first venture into theory in “Anarchism and Socialism” to Chapter IV of the Short Course, is such that the human individual, his personality and his needs, are totally subordinate to the demands of society as an abstract entity confronting him externally. The thesis of man's existence as a social being is distorted beyond recognition in Stalinist Marxism into an “organicist positivism” more characteristic of the classical conservatism of the French eighteenth-century thinkers De Maistre and De Bonauld and the positivism of Comte than of any genuine element of Marxian theory.¹⁰⁰ Another deficiency commonly mentioned by Praxis Marxists is that in Stalin's essentially metaphysical setting forth of the features of the dialectic, one “feature” is totally absent which even Engels had mentioned explicitly—the negation of negation.¹⁰¹ The reasons for this omission, it would seem, stem from Stalinism's completely uncritical attitude toward itself as a social system. Supek suggests that at the root of Stalinism's failure to understand the humanist essence of the dialectical in theory is precisely the same aversion to real, substantive self-criticism:

Why can this Marxist orientation not tolerate the theory of alienation? The reasons are quite simple: the theory of alienation contains within itself a humanistic critique of statism, in addition to a critique of the positivistic subordination of the personality to the mass or to society. Stalinism, however, can tolerate neither!¹⁰²

The rearguard action of Soviet philosophy against the theory of praxis and alienation, which at times even assumed the form of an offensive against Praxis itself, has been waged on two fronts. One type of objection is political, consisting of an effort to restrict the analytical-critical category of alienation to bourgeois society; elaboration of this side of the question is best left to the next chapter of this study. The philosophical objections of “diamat” to the theory of praxis are of a different order. First, the claim is often made that the anthropological approach to alienation, with its talk of “human nature” and “human essence,” elevates alienation to the level of an abstract theoretical category devoid of any social and historical content.¹⁰³ Proponents of this view see “philosophical anthropology” as closely akin to the ideas held by Feuerbach on human nature which Marx criticized in the Theses on Feuerbach, tending moreover to identify any theory of alienation with modern existentialist philosophy. If Praxis Marxism were to consist solely of theoretical musings on human nature, these might indeed be valid observations; but the fact is that there is no lack of social content in the writings of the Praxis thinkers, as will become evident in subsequent sections of this study. Indeed it might be said that the disdain with which discussion of “human nature” is treated by Soviet philosophers testifies only to their own static, undialectical concept of “nature.” Thus the Stalinist heritage of the reification of human activity and its products reappears in the manner in which Soviet philosophy relates to other schools of thought.

In explicating other theoretical objections of Soviet philosophy to Praxis Marxism, at least one Soviet philosopher is reasonably accurate in her allegations:

They see Marxist philosophy not as the science of the most general laws of the development of nature, society and human thought, as a method of scientific knowledge and the revolutionary transformation of the world, but as a philosophy of “free creative activity”. . . . It is formally possible in such a case not only that the very existence of the objective world might be negated, but also that the primacy of the material over the ideal might even lose its principal, root significance, and that the problem of philosophy be reduced above all to the knowledge of the internal, anthropological essence of man.¹⁰⁴

Certainly this characterization is reasonably close to the facts. That it should be intended as criticism only speaks of the rigidity of Soviet philosophy itself. And that “revolutionary transformation” should be seen as being at odds with “free creative activity” only substantiates Petrović's statement quoted earlier, that what is involved here is the confrontation of “two different conceptions, which . . . at least in certain essential points are mutually exclusive.” Indeed, they would seem to be irreconcilable, for according to Marković, “the basic question of philosophy according to Marx is not the relationship between matter and mind, but the relationship of man toward the world.”¹⁰⁵

“The dialectic,” Vranicki writes, “is eminently critical and that is its absolute characteristic. Any retreat from its critical nature means abandoning the essence of the dialectic.”¹⁰⁶ The Praxis perspective on Soviet philosophy might reveal the converse to be true as well: any retreat from the essence of the dialectic—which is at base humanist in character and which derives from the very structure of human activity—means abandoning its critical nature. To be sure, the “material” forces behind the loss of the capacity for genuine self-criticism have carried far more weight than mere deviations in theory. It seems clear, however, that the reification of the Marxian dialectic—its radical divorce from the process of human praxis, alienation, and the transcendence of alienation through praxis—has also contributed toward depriving the dialectic of its critical cutting edge which it found in the works of Marx, and at the very least seems to represent a reasonably good measure of the degree to which “Marxism” has become entrenched in many countries as the ideology of the ruling political institutions.

The Transcendence of Philosophy: Philosophy as Praxis?

The same spirit that builds philosophical systems in the brain of the philosophers builds railroads in the hands of the workers. Philosophy does not stand outside the world any more than man's brain is outside him because it is not in his stomach; but philosophy, to be sure, is in the world with its brain before it stands on the earth with its feet, while many other human spheres have long been rooted in the earth and pluck the fruits of the world long before they realize that this world is the world of the head.

—Karl Marx, “Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölmsche Zeitung”

In the preceding pages the term “philosophy” has been used rather loosely, giving the impression that for the Praxis Marxists “philosophy” is understood as virtually synonymous with “theory” or with conventional philosophy and its various subdisciplines, such as ontology and epistemology. Neither the Praxis philosophers nor Marx himself, for that matter, speak of philosophy in such simple terms. The former are quite aware that at the very core of Marx's revolt from Hegel and his maturation as an autonomous thinker lay his rejection of the contemplative attitude of Hegelian philosophy, its passive faith in the “cunning of Reason,” and its illusion that “it could realize philosophy without abolishing it.”¹⁰⁷ Unlike Marx, however, the Praxis Marxists' attitude toward philosophy has been conditioned by their need to arrive at a definition of philosophy that is not inconsistent with their vocation as philosophers. Indeed at the hands of the Praxis Marxists, the “abolition of philosophy” has taken on connotations which Marx might have found difficult to anticipate.

Marx himself, in fact, seems to have had mixed feelings about philosophy.¹⁰⁸ While he felt that philosophy is capable of presenting only an inverted, warped view of the real world, on the other hand he did not proclaim philosophy or its insights to be without value; philosophy and its language, he wrote, are in a certain sense “manifestations of actual life,”¹⁰⁹ although to be sure not simple “reflections” of an external reality. When Marx discussed German philosophy in the context of German social history, for instance, he did not simply dismiss the former as irrelevant banter, but instead viewed it quite seriously as an important part of the entire complex of German social relations. The “German philosophy of the state and of right” Marx called not an “original but . . . a copy,”¹¹⁰ yet a copy with enough plausible resemblance to the original that Marx devoted not only this essay but the much longer Critique óf Hegel's Philosophy of Right to demonstrating how and why the copy was misleading. Marx saw the distortions inherent in philosophy as a consequence of the need of the ruling classes for elaboration of an ideological picture of the world, the division of labor, and especially the “exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and philosophers.”¹¹¹ In this sense philosophy is a form of alienation, a fragmentation of the real world:

The philosophical mind is nothing but the alienated world-mind thinking within the bounds of its self-alienation, i.e., conceiving itself in an abstract manner. . . . The philosopher, himself an abstract form of alienated man, sets himself up as the measure of the alienated world.¹¹²

It is not so clear, however, what Marx meant when he spoke of the abolition of philosophy—especially when at the same time that philosophy was to be made worldly, the world was to be made “philosophical.” For if Marx's claim that “you cannot abolish philosophy without realizing it”¹¹³ is to be taken seriously, then it must mean that philosophy will remain—in some form, although perhaps not in its “alienated” form—as a standard by which reality may be judged. Rudi Supek points in the direction of a possible answer to the dilemma when he asserts that Marx was referring specifically to the abolition of philosophy as a mystification, specifically the mystification of social reality inherent in the “bad consciousness” of the Hegelians and Young Hegelians alike. Clearly, then, if philosophy is to remain as a criterion of the real world it must lose its ethereal and purely contemplative character, abandoning its posture of remoteness from the actual problems of humanity and planting its feet firmly in the world in which man lives. “Actually,” writes Markovic of this problem,

what is at issue is the abolition of that particular form in which philosophy has existed in class society as a particular, isolated theoretical sphere of social consciousness, the object of the attention of a particular profession—the profession of pure thinkers who are in no way linked with practice.

Petrović, too, emphasizes the practical implications which the abolition of philosophy had in Marx's view. While the abolition of philosophy is impossible without its realization, Petrović states in an inverted aphorism characteristic of Marx's own style that “there can be no realization of philosophy without the realization of socialism, nor can socialism be achieved without the help of philosophy.”¹¹⁴

What kind of philosophy can fulfill this role of remaining philosophy while being more than “mere” philosophy? Marković gives one indication in his general definition of philosophy, which is evidently as programmatic as it is descriptive: “philosophy is the total, rational, and critical consciousness of man about the world in which he lives and the basic goals of his activity.” The possibility of philosophy, in Marković's view, derives from the fact that man is “the only being who can have an ideal”; accordingly, Marković asserts that in addition to representing a “synthesis of knowledge” (to which orthodox “diamat” simplistically reduces all philosophy once it has been cleansed of “idealist” impurities), “philosophy is the theoretical expression of the human ideal of an entire historical epoch . . . an effort to give meaning to human life as a whole.” In this sense philosophy is “a project of what man desires to create, of what, in his opinion, he ought to be.”¹¹⁵ For Marković, then, philosophy is, or can be, not merely speculative and passive toward the world, but can assume an active role in the sense that it formulates and gives expression to the ideals of human existence. It is also historically concrete, since—as indeed with Hegel's “spiritual quintessence of the age”—the ideals which it formulates are those of a particular historical period. Unlike Hegel's phenomenology, however, “true” philosophy for Marković gives expression to ideals that are simultaneously calls to action based on a critical analysis of concrete forms of human existence in society.

To an even greater degree than Marković, Petrović stresses the activist nature of philosophy and its intimate link with practice. He defines philosophy as

a separate form of mental activity through which a man not only discovers his own essence and his place in the world, his capabilities for changing the world and for enriching his own nature, but also stimulates the deed of transforming the world, and participates in it in a creative way.

In another passage (where his use of the term “philosophy” evidently presupposes the reader's understanding of this term as denoting the philosophy of praxis), Petrović establishes a fundamental connection between philosophy and revolution by means of a series of questions—and in so doing, suggests in passing that the question is in fact the basic form of philosophical discourse:

Is not revolution the most developed form of creation, the most authentic form of liberty?. . . . Is not revolution the “essence” of existence itself, of being in its essence? And if revolution is existence itself, is not philosophy, by virtue of this very fact . . . the thought of revolution? . . . Can philosophical thought be content to reflect upon revolution without participating in it? . . . In short, is true philosophy only the thought of revolution, or is it thought-revolution?¹¹⁶

It is this identity between philosophy and revolution, which is in fact no less than an identity between philosophy and praxis, that is one of the most intriguing features of Petrović's thought. It is easy enough to see why “true philosophy,” i.e., philosophy which has as its object man as a being of praxis, should be thought of by Petrović as a precondition of praxis itself under certain circumstances, particularly where human alienation has proceeded so far that it is necessary simply to bring man back to a consciousness of himself as an integral and creative being.¹¹⁷ But in what sense is philosophy in itself “thought-revolution?” Is this not inconsistent with Marx's own attitude toward philosophy, as expressed in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it”? It would seem that this is where Petrović parts ways with Marx. Indeed, Petrović has gone so far as to challenge the first half of Marx's dictum. “Is not,” Petrović asks, “every philosophical interpretation necessarily a certain change and even a creation of the world?” Later he argues:

An interpretation of the world that does not change the world is both logically and empirically impossible. When man interprets the world, by this very fact he changes at least his conception of the world. In changing his conception of the world he cannot help changing his relationship to the world as well. And in changing his conception and his behavior, he influences the conception and actions of other people with whom he is in different relationships. . . . Is he [man] in the world only when he eats, sleeps, and carries out his animal functions, and outside the world when he thinks and interprets the world?¹¹⁸

But Petrovićć suggests that this line of argument is a departure from Marx only if it is supposed that Marx held a simple reflection theory of consciousness—which in Petrović's view, he did not.¹¹⁹ To make clearer what Petrović leaves only implicit, it might be pointed out that Marx conceived of thought itself as a form of production, as one of the several forms of appropriating the “object,” and hence of appropriating human reality.¹²⁰ To become conscious of an object is to put oneself into a relation with it and to transform something that may once have been dumb matter into a potential object of further human labor. It may also mean to become conscious of an object as an artifact of man where previously it was mistakenly (perhaps as a result of ideological motivations) perceived merely as being part of brute nature and therefore immune to human control. Both acts of consciousness are in fact acts of creation; but the second, in particular, is an act of demystification which is an organic part of the process of transcending human alienation: the discovery by man of his products as his own. Philosophy—more specifically, the philosophy of praxis—thus has as its most fundamental task criticism, which is nothing more than the discovery of alienation and of the possibilities of transcending it, and above all of making man aware of himself as a being of praxis.

An important difficulty remains with the idea of the identity of philosophy and praxis. As we have argued, this thesis can be understood as implying a special mission for philosophy itself. Is the revelation of society to man as a being of praxis and of the alienated state of human existence to be reserved by right to philosophy and its practitioners, even if this philosophy is Marxist-humanist in character? Is philosophy—because of its broad scope, its professional concern for the general problems of human existence, and indeed its very remove from the immediate practical problems confronting man in society—in some way better suited to inform men of their condition than are other spheres of inquiry, or indeed than are those men themselves through their own self-activity? Is the philosopher's role, then, analogous to that of the Leninist vanguard—to bring consciousness to the workers of their own condition from without, on the basis of its superior insight? Petrović and several of his colleagues would seem to disavow such a conviction and instead to claim, with Marx, that “reality must also strive towards thought,”¹²¹ which for the Praxis philosophers seems to mean no less than that all men must become philosophers;¹²² or, to rephrase Rousseau, that one must make man a philosopher in order to make him a man!¹²³ In reply to this criticism, most Praxis Marxists would seem to assert that with the transcendence of philosophy, philosophy would lose its character as a special sphere of social existence divorced from other spheres; it would henceforth be possible, according to Branko Bosnjak, only to speak of a “mode of philosophical existence” which “is not a privilege of professional philosophers but an intellectual relationship to reality which can be applied by those who are not concerned specifically with philosophy.” The philosophy that would remain, in Petrović's words, would be “the critical thought of man about himself . . . a form through which he achieves the wholeness of his personality.”¹²⁴ As Gramsci had put it, the first task of a reconstituted philosophy must be “to demonstrate that ‘everyone' is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing a scientific form of thought into everyone's individual life, but of renovating and making ‘critical' an already existing activity.”¹²⁵ The duty of the philosopher, then, is to awaken in the human individual his latent faculties and to encourage him to define himself in a critical way toward the surrounding world.

Petrović does recognize some limits, if perhaps of a temporary nature, to his program of what might be called the “universalization of philosophy.” At the very minimum, he suggests, the transcendence and universalization of philosophy has important implications for the mode of philosophical discussion:

This does not mean that all people can or must become great philosophers, but it does mean that philosophy must break its narrow limits, that it must turn to the essential human questions of its time and develop through broad, free, and equal discussion among all those who think about these questions.

Not only does this mean that philosophers must cease to be concerned solely with their own thinking, but also implicitly that philosophy as a preeminently critical field of inquiry will tolerate no authoritative dicta “from above” on either the form or content of philosophical activity. Just as Petrović asserts, “I do not think that political acts could or should be prescribed by any philosophy or philosophical forum,”¹²⁶ he stipulates the same relationship in reverse on the part of the political forum toward philosophy.

Does this signify, then, that a “division of labor” between philosophers and politicians, which as we have seen earlier in this study was an important factor in the appearance of Praxis Marxism itself, is acceptable to the Praxis Marxists at least in the short run as a matter of principle? This was always one of the most difficult issues for the Praxis Marxists to resolve, even among themselves. For while as a collective they may have actively shunned conventional political involvement, many of them, as leading individuals in their profession and widely respected, well-connected figures in society at large (and even in the Party), regarded it as sheer folly to renounce every vestige of public life and to accept total, self-imposed political isolation as the price of integrity. On the other hand, there were those such as Životić who argued in highly convincing terms for the need to preserve the chastity of philosophy from the encroachments of politics:

To believe that politicians will become philosophers . . . is a beautiful illusion . . . but one which should be destroyed, for it can only commit us to seek the impossible. The philosopher should even less desire to be himself occupied in immediate practical politics. Insofar as he undertakes this, he ceases to be a philosopher. All who have tried this, who have become integrated into the institutionalized forms of social life, have ceased to be philosophers . . . by the very logic of the relationship of philosophy to practice. This logic, the existential position of philosophy in society, must commit philosophy to preserve its own manner of thought lest it cease to be philosophy.¹²⁷

Under minimal conditions, as we have suggested, the “universalization” of philosophy implies free and open dialogue among philosophers and even between philosophers and politicians. Yet it would seem that to maintain the kind of essential distinction that Životić draws between these two spheres of activity bears the danger of reinforcing and legitimating the particular standards which each sphere sets for itself. A politician who would address philosophers about “philosophical” matters would naturally be expected to satisfy certain standards of philosophical discussion, such as clear, public, and rational argumentation. But does this convention mean, by the same token, that when philosophers address politicians about “political” matters, the former become subject to whatever criteria—no matter how crassly pragmatic and “unphilosophical”—which the latter may demand of philosophers or indeed of their own performance in the execution of their political duties? The balance between philosophy and politics under such conditions must be a very fragile one indeed.

In any event, the Praxis Marxists have not hesitated to speak to Yugoslav society about itself, and this must be seen as their distinctive mixture of theory and practice—one in which, to be sure, theory confronts practice on its own territory. There are of course good reasons for the location of the field of battle in the realm of theory, reasons which stem as much from the philosophical vocation of the Praxis Marxists as they do from the cultural legacy of Stalinism, which even today has not yet disappeared from the Yugoslav social scene. It should be sufficient to note, however, that the appearance of the journal Praxis coincided with the increasingly urgent feeling shared by several Yugoslav Marxist thinkers, regardless of whether they defined themselves professionally as philosophers or sociologists, that Marxian philosophy must reach beyond the traditional concerns of philosophy in order to merit Marx's name. What was perhaps the most important passage in the editorial introduction to the first issue of Praxis read as follows:

But if contemporary philosophy aspires to contribute to the solution of the contemporary world crisis, it cannot be reduced to the study and interpretation of its own history; neither can it be a scholarly construction of encyclopaedic systems, much less the analysis of the methods of modern science or the description of the modern usage of words. If it desires to be the thought of revolution, philosophy must orient itself toward the essential human concerns of the modern world and of modern man; if it desires to reach the essence of the everyday, it cannot hesitate to extend itself in appearance, plunging into the depths of “metaphysics.”¹²⁸

All this is to say, in Henri Lefebvre's enigmatic words, that the “truth of philosophy . . . is discovered in politics.”¹²⁹ To what extent, on the other hand, the truth of politics can be discovered by philosophy seems to be largely a function of the way in which philosophy relates both to man's life in society and to itself as the “ideal expression” of that social existence.