Marxism: Criticism and/or Action

...The bias for this exposure is Marx's unlimited hostility to mystification and his stubborn belief in the immediate possibility of a society in which, as in the communism described in The German Ideology, it will be "impossible that anything shall exist independently of individuals, in so far as things are only a product of the preceding intercourse of the individuals themselves...

...Its human content, the future that it desires...

...Contrariwise, no one is a Marxist who, in the presumed interest of working class liberation, consents to serve the powers of a new otherworld...

...They exist as an incorporation of generality...

...dominates the present...

...the formula both for his own critique of capitalism as a specific epoch in the history of human alienation, and for the impulse of the workers to revolution as a revulsion against the void within them...

...The moral issue of individual adherence (and betrayal) which has taken on so much importance in conspiratorial Marxism is irrelevant to Marx's conception of historical change...

...phantom as they are, they are inseparable from human reality...

...CONCENTRATING on the mass actors of the historical drama, Marx was not interested in the political choices of individuals but only in the accuracy with which their views and their acts mirrored the hidden movements of the social process—for instance, his well-known admiration of the royalist Balzac in contrast to his scorn for socialist litterateurs...

...This double unmasking, peeling abstraction from abstraction in order to reach the facts from which all abstractions have grown, is the innovation of materialist criticism...

...Each of these entities, in one of Marx's most characteristic phrases, "takes on an independent existence over against the individuals" and dominates human behavior...

...For instance, a social class for Marx is an "illusory community," but it arises from and embodies the most basic relations, the "materialist connection of men with one another...

...Primarily, the unique competence of this class to attain to the real arises from the utter futility of the daily acts of the factory laborers in conferring individuality upon themselves...

...Our acts as soldiers, as mechanics, as radical critics, encase us as if they moulded themselves in clay or metal upon our bodies...

...All criticism, Marx had written early, is criticism of religion, and criticism and revolution complement each other...

...Demoralized by their strangeness to themselves and by their lack of control over their relations with others, members of every class yield themselves to artificially constructed mass egos that promise to restore their link with the past and the future...

...If, as has been maintained, Christian philosophy differs from the pagan in that it centers upon a unique event of the past, the Crucifixion, Marx's historical materialism distinguishes itself equally from all other philosophies in centering on the future victory of the working class...

...Folded in the center of capitalist dynamics Marx detected a stasis in which completed being embodied itself continually...

...For Marx the ruling principle of civilized life is metamorphosis, in which nothing is real except in its transfictional state...

...For Marx the assault of criticism upon the "objective powers" is to be made effective by the revolution of a class, the proletariat...

...a progressive flattening of personality takes place, irrespective of salary categories, standards of living, bureaucratic rank...

...The weapon of criticism is undoubtedly inadequate...

...Most important, it has established as its essential activity the conversion of living human energy into spectral force—for to Marx that is just what capital is, a quasi-thing incorporating the past actions of men and women and able to control what they do now...

...For Marx's dialectics, history itself is an unmasking...

...If criticism is not to be an end in itself, it must be a means to put an end to those material conditions from which the mirage is bred—"those conditions whose life-principle has already been refuted" but which survive nevertheless as a fetter upon life...

...The single individual has emerged and has declared his independence, claiming his association with others to be the result of a free contract...

...In theory unwavering as to the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, Marx was not tempted to put criticism into a position inferior to action...

...More exactly, it is the beginning of an action...

...The answer is, definitely, No...

...In themselves," Marx complains with a note of the bore dom of the philosopher with the lag of existence, "they are not sufficiently worthy of attention but are a state of fact both despicable and despised...

...If, on the other hand, they were mere images, analysis could dissolve them like the superstitions left over from dead societies...

...The Party (and its foes) now takes on the appearance of being infinitely active, while the individual communist and the working class are found repeatedly collapsing into apathy...

...The Party as idea and as past becomes fixed in the revolutionist as his illusory character...

...the revolutions that brought it into being summoned up personages, costumes and rhetoric out of long-vanished states...

...The conqueror of classes and of class struggle must itself be one of history's collective pseudo-organisms, a class...

...If the "higher powers" that combat each other existed entirely separate from us, we could passively await their self-destruction...

...But it is not only the survival of anachronisms that he wishes to combat...

...Nor in the absence of such activities does his work pause: the proletarian mass hero must wait for favorable conditions, including his own inner development...

...It is in regard to the latter phase of attack upon the myth content of civilized life, the part that has to be carried out by others than the critic, that the great practical problems of Marx's thought arise, including those of its strategy and its ethics—and with these the related questions of the revolutionary roles of the individual, the poli tical party and the social class...

...It is being published by Editions Lucien Mazinod with whose permission it is here printed...

...Taking for granted the growing organization, cohesion and will to combat of the proletariat, spontaneously brought about by the processes of capitalist production, Marxian criticism would act upon the proletarian revolution in two ways: 1) as the "head of passion" it would help change instinctive action into conscious action by bringing before the working men the formulation of their position and of their experience as a class...

...It is toward this motionless center from which emanate like steam from a crack the Delphic wraiths of capitalism that Capital directs its tremendously detailed, systematic analysis...

...Apart from his contempt for ideologists and Utopians, including "Marxists," who see in ideas the cause of historical happenings, Marx's entire perspective excludes the notion that an historical effect can originate with an individual or an association of individuals...

...2) as 37I the irreconcilable challenge of the mind to mystifictaion, it would provide a model of suspicion and hostility toward bourgeois society, a sentry for the class of workingmen against delusions through which they might be made a tool to defeat their own interests...

...With the loss of its metaphysical assurance, with the admission of doubt regarding the capacity of the proletariat and its destiny—a doubt upon which were founded both the absent-minded revisionist socialism of Bernstein and the elite-activism of Lenin—Marxism has seen its functions as criticism and as action split apart and enter into conflict with each other...

...Since the source of social myth is the real relations of society, the mere critic of existing forms is doomed to be the hero of a fable of frustration...

...Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bour geois epoch from all earlier ones...

...From being a repulse of the unreal, revolution becomes a surrender to a fetichism of the act—an equivalent to those other forms of vertigo in which products of the human brain and previous human relations appear as endowed with vitality and engaged in transactions with the human race...

...This distinction has a different significance at different times...

...is to be found not in its own formulas but in the liveliness of the huge shadow by its side: "The great social measure of the Commune," said Marx in The Civil War in France, "was its own working existence...

...See Marx's letter to Bolte...

...It is a philosophy suspended upon an event, a monologue in the drama of history which only the action of its mass hero can save from being a soliloquy...

...On the contrary, the products which are the substance of his being are in their transmuted form applied only to extract more labor from him.* Wrung dry on this wheel of both his past time and his living time, of both memory, and imagination, the worker exists as an "abstract individual...

...WAS THE CORRESPONDENCE between materialist analysis and working class ingression into power to be the result of the adoption by a decisive quantity of individual workingmen of Marx's theories...

...CRITICISM, then, for Marx is an action...

...It is pragmatism, however, not Marx that sees the historical protagonists as free individuals needing the stimula tion of an undetermined end in order to strive for a social form which they have chosen...

...The discontinuity of the proletariat, its rise from and relapse into nothingness, which is the pathetic basis of its experience of itself, as well as the impetus of its future freedom, is attacked by the whip of the Party leaders, for whom revolutionary politics exist as a thing...

...The dif ference," says Marx, "between the individual as person and what is accidental to him is not a conceptual difference but an historical fact...

...But no sooner does Marxism itself turn into an ideology uniting the actions of individuals, than it abandons its critical position and with it its dialectical relation to social transformation...

...The appearance of this class upon the stage of history brings new persons into the world (not molecules of a mass) , whose characters are derived from the single social activity that cannot harden into a thing, from revolution...

...Moreover, the systematic indication in Marx's writings, though from the point of view of Marx himself they cannot surmount the impotence of mere criticism, have by no means lost their pertinence so long as the processes that produce a proletariat continue to operate...

...The action of the proletariat paralleling materialist criticism was to be self-motivated as a necessary result both of the nature of the proletariat and of the objective stimuli of its revolt...

...Even the hero, Marx takes pains to demonstrate, while imagining that he follows his own will, actually sustains in his thought and feeling the mode of life, the limits and half-conscious purposes of a collective person, the class which has chosen him...

...one looks in vain in his writings for reflections on the logos of individual, party and class identification...

...If inside the economic system operated the human drama of class compulsion and resistance, inside the bodies of the classes circulated the routines by which real men kept themselves alive...

...and this victorious existence, constantly augmenting individuality, is itself socialism and the "transition to the abolition of all classes...

...For all their claims to manipulating the gears of history, and despite their tactics of ubiquitous "activation," modern revolutionary parties actually promote an enormous passivity...

...If all men belong to their respective classes only as "average individuals," with the proletarian, "average" is the whole of what he is...

...Never theless, we cannot avoid speaking of these changing creations in meta phors of the imaginary...

...This prediction, that capitalism must automatically develop the elements of the society that will supersede it, presents, of course, the famous "contradiction" in Marx between the inevitability of socialism and the call to revolution...

...For Marx, as we have seen, the disclosure of the material realities cloaked in political concepts, mass movements, etc., is futile if no social force is being born to change them...

...History is the action of mass—"I" 's and the command being always present, passivity is equally characteristic of the action of individuals as of their abstention from action...

...Even hesitation is an action, as in Hamlet, for Marx the typical action of the lower bourgeoisie, as the class pressed between classes, and productive of its destiny...

...By his revolutionary action the worker starts a psychic increment that makes him an individual...

...EDITORS' NOTE: The above article is the English original of a chapter in the volume Les Philosophes Celebres, edited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Professor of Philosophy, College de France...

...MATERIALIST CRITICISM is the revolutionary action of the individual...

...Le mort saisit le vif," Marx quotes in the Preface to Capital...

...Thus in the modern worker the difference between the individual person and his class has been suppressed, and with it the illusory nature of both...

...Bourgeois society was itself born out of myth, explains The Eighteenth Brumaire...

...In his letter to Wedemeyer cited above, Marx enumerates two further innovations of his thought, in addition to his explanation of classes: the idea of the necessary conquest of power by the proletariat, and that of the function of that power in ending tho class struggle by bringing to life a society of free individuals...

...No past, personal or class, no socially constructed self, stands between the factory worker and his fellows, nor between his sense of community and the reality on which it is based...

...Its political concepts and social values become ambiguous, or even appear in reverse...

...With the worker the social process of appropriating the individual's past and using it to dominate his present has been carried to its extreme...

...For him the plot of history was given, including its denouement...

...Conversely, in all social and economic questions they expose the content of class coercion and struggle...

...he arrives, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, at ethical existence...

...The new existence itself of the working men depends on their day-by-day triumph over surplus value as a social force against each...

...Man makes himself against himself...

...In a profound sense Marx's view dissolves the aura of grandeur and irrationality around historical performance responsible for revolutionary conceit...

...But by the very fact that the workingmen are through their activities constantly rendered into human nothings, Marx sees them as "put into a position to enter into relations with another as individuals" (his emphasis) and to act together in the daylight of genuine selfinterest...

...With Marx, of course, these incorporeal figures and powers have not migrated into the human sphere from nature or the supernatural...

...All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify...

...But the workers cannot act for themselves without breaking the social mechanism which transform their acts and siphons them off as capital, that is, without a revolution against the ultimate source of modern hallucination...

...A class is composed entirely of alter egos, since individuals "belong to it only as average individuals" and not as unique persons...

...By itself, without change in the situation, it can never win lasting conviction, for the "unreal" fact stands forth to deny it...

...And if the Marxist critic wills the victory of the proletariat, it is not for the sake of the future of others but from the necessity of his own present thought...

...and this deprivation of immediate, waking time is the common anguish...

...living men and women, magically bound to their service as Caliban by the wand of Prospero, act but to effect their ends...

...By demonstrating how capital, the commodity, property, are actually frozen human acts and relations, criticism dissolves these deities in the consciousness and makes them contingent on the history of classes...

...Since, however, classes and their phantom by-products both control our behavior as external powers and live in us as ourselves, our lives are the actions we take with regard to them...

...On the other hand, individuals, apart from their intellectual struggle against mystification, have no deciding role in the historical drama...

...Assuming in the form of capital a fierce mechanical vitality, the dead labor of men extends in every direction a web of abstract entities that change the world as if in obedience to a will of their own...

...MnxxisM is unthinkable apart from its premise of proletarian victory and its all-liberating effects...

...Marx's conviction of the inter-relation and the inevitable synchronization of these two processes constitutes the key to his politics and assigns to individuals and the class their different roles in it...

...In everything "the root is man...

...Every image the exasperated modern Tiresias laboriously scrapes from the brain of his auditors is restored without delay by the factories and streets...

...Only the proletariat of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity...

...We have to go back to the witch doctors or the Shakespeare of Hamlet or Macbeth to reach a world in which spectres, abstract beings, names come to life, "objective powers" play so large a part as they do in that of Marx—from that "mysterious thing," the commodity, which floats in the shadow of the physical products of modern industry, to those "personifications of economic relations," the social classes, which, according to Capital, are the protagonists of the political-economic drama...

...Since his work assumes the form of capital which is taken away from him, he is constantly drained of his "life content...

...Behind the system of "independent existents"—the commodity, money, the market—it exposes the processes by which expended labor is converted into the economic plasma which is the source of capitalist vigor and the drama of class coercion, spiritual poverty and revolt that accompanies that conversion...

...We hesitate to call "myth" this system of constructs which are not merely mental but the specific forms of the human world...

...yet this community of doubles is the individual's exclusive ground of self-realization...

...Within this half-formed world of real spectres, Marx's criticism of modern industrial society as centered on the proletarian void offers at least a conceptual foothold...

...Communism could not be for him a school of self-effacement nor of self-definition, and the meditation, to be or not to be a Communist, is never addressed by him either to himself or to others...

...If he begins to act for himself, his act will be a genuine self-expression, at the same time that it will be an act for all...

...they are offspring of men's own activities, and precisely of the most practical...

...An ever-mounting pressure, ever more closely confined—and which is reflected in the tensions of the classes, their preparations, their strategies...

...The Communists, whether consisting exclusively of Marx and Engels, or of an association that multiplies the Marxian voice, were not, according to The Communist Manifesto, to form a separate group competing with other working-class parties for control of proletarian action...

...When he himself takes part in organizational activities, it is exclusively as the promoter of his own conclusions...

...Whenever a crisis of capitalism reproduces the vacuity of the proletariat as physical hunger and the direct threat of death, the final revolution is on the order of the day...

...The restoration of alienated labor would destroy these persons, in destroying their freedom...

...Marx's major work sets itself the task to translate these magical excrescenses back into their human matter...

...under these circumstances, they may even be indispensable for an understanding of the situation presented by proletarian non-action...

...and he is lifted or cast down according to its condition...

...In place of resistance to deprivation converting itself into political action through an expansion in self-consciousness, inter-communication and comprehensiveness of program, acceptance of the Party leaders' decisions by individual workers becomes the basis of working class unity...

...In history, as in the dream, past actions be come incarnated and continue to incarnate themselves in effigies of living events...

...If Marx's proletarian solution to alienation turns out to be a mirage, if this promise in his thought must be cancelled, Marxism is dead, however possible it may still be to discover in his conception clues for novel strategies of power resting upon an apathetic proletariat (e.g., neo-Bolshevism) . But Marxism or no, what remains valid in Marx's analysis is the negative force of its example in persistent social unmasking, precisely the force of which hallucinatory Communism deprives it...

...the uncovering of reality takes place not in the mind alone but through an actual corporeal stripping of the social and historical "integument"—another characteristic expression—which makes the human fact what it is...

...With the expanding social appropriation of work in all fields, with private accumulation increasingly more rare particularly in the more dynamic industrial nations, with the growing dependence of the individual and with it his inner isolation, the condition of the factory worker has, regardles of occupational statistics, become more and more the rule throughout society...

...one that demands completion by social trans formation...

...Personalities, parties, ideas, become all at once prodigies of history-making and responsible day by day for the destiny of man...

...At the same time, working class revolt, since it is no longer a reflex of the worker's situation, ceases to serve as a revelation of the internal processes of society, so that revolutionary criticism is deprived of the data by which to correct itself...

...Nowhere is there any hint in Marx of a wish to change himself nor to add ethical density to his existence through revolutionary commitment...

...The Party as the association of Marxian professionals stands as an independent power over and against both the class of laborers and its own individual members...

...Without the tragic enactment, criticism is only an opinion...

...So LONG as it assumes that it is operating in the presence of rising proletarian revolt, Marxian criticism is an action that remains criticism...

...his acts produce no accretion of individuality, not even an illusory one...

...In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor in bourgeois society therefore the past...

...His intellectual effort is a resistance to the shapes of nightmare, a resistance which the conviction that waking is near does not weaken...

...No one is a Marxist who does not anticipate the proletarian transformation of society and strive to bring it about as the means for putting the demons to flight...

...In turn, by demonstrating how social classes are actually compounded out of changing modes of producing subsistence, criticism destroys the illusion of the independence of these collective egos and makes them contingent on economic behavior and the material world...

...In Marx's own terms, which allow for no point of individual contemplation and decision outside the drama of history, the so-called contradiction is meaningless...

...their free action as such can begin only at the end of history and with the vanishing of class...

...Or is it necessary to prove that these phenomena have something to do with that process of depersonalization through one's calling described as "proletarianization...

...Who on that account would choose to surrender it...

...Marx is not slow to celebrate the tremendous physical onslaught of capitalism against all traditional forms and institutions, as well as the scientific criticism it has applied to ancient superstitions...

...The consequence of the failure of the proletariat in the face of the advancing socialization of production could, for Marx, be nothing else than "barbarism" the proliferation of a modern Darkest Africa of unreal beings, sacred apparitions, secular cults, illusory unions...

...Will anyone deny that the bad dream and farce have become commonplaces of the public life, to say nothing of the private...

...Their revolutionary function was to carry on the double unmasking of materialist criticism: "in all political movements they bring to the front as the leading question in each the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time," showing changes in the relations of production to be at once the means and the end of the transformation of society...

...Needless to add, the critical activities of individuals, the only historical initiative possible to them as such, are put to sleep...

...They are concretions of behavior as it has been given its shape within the social whole...

...the critic need not wait: his exposures are the intellectual equivalent of the situation as it happens to be and as the crisis will define it...

...This daring concept, whatever be its scientific validity, is a pre-condition for thinking as a Marxist...

...The process by which labor is converted into capital also holds the secret of capitalism's future wreck: using its transportable energy, capital, it continually augments both the class of wage-workers and the productive power of labor by creating a constantly widening interplay of men and tools, at the same time that, through the accumulation and centralization of wealth, it narrows the slit through which this growing force must pass in order to be changed into capital...

...SINCE THE EFFIGIES of the unalive rule both inside the mind and in the physical organization of society, they can be expelled only if their independent existence, and with it their superhuman power, is destroyed in both...

...Since a man's intellectual products, like any others, stand against him as an alien force, Marx does not seek in his ideas a clarification of himself and, as noted above, "Marxist" is to him a derogatory term...

...The tyranny of, the done causes our very skills to betray us, like that knife thrower of De Maupassant's so expert he could not miss his target by a hair's breadth even when he wanted to...

...In the proletariat capitalism has created the very personification of self-loss through social behavior, those "newfangled men," as Marx called them, who, like the machine, are "an invention of modern times" and are multiplied automatically with the accumulation of capital...

...Capitalism, however, has not broken the siege of the past upon the present...

...The evolution of class struggles, Marx wrote to Wedemeyer in 1852, had been described by others before him, as well as the economic physiology of classes: his own contribution, he said, rested on three propositions, the first of which was: "that the existence of classes was tied up with certain phases of material production...

...The aim of materialist analysis is not to continue an endless practice of unveiling particular examples of animated death but to help eliminate all of them by laying bare their common social cause to a stroke of force...

...His time is a wage-rate, his product not a self but an interchangeable commodity...

...For Marx, therefore, the socialist revolution is immanent in the nature of the proletarian class and the need of its components to achieve individuality...

...Members of all other historical classes, split by the division of labor, have achieved their real existence in the masquerade of types compounded by society out of their activities of yesterday...

...revolutionary activity is the materialist criticism of the working class...

...We need no desired outcome to induce us to fight the class struggle—the struggle fights us...

...Abstract man multiplies...

...To qualify the working class for its meta-critical role, Marx, evoked the negative process of capitalism which, in denuding the proletariat of illusory being must cause their revolutionary action to come forth as an accurate expression of their situation and to guide them with ever-deepening clarity...

...History is like the tragedy of the Greeks: behind the present fact on the stage there exists the hidden fact, which is coming out and will be recognized through its inevitable enactment...

...Instead of the self-creating revolt of nothings at the base of society, history appears to hold out a horror-Utopia of universal de-individualization headed by leaders who are their masks...

...Where, however, its intellectual attack against society no longer takes for granted the parallel movement of the victim class, a terrifying confusion besets Marxism, particularly with regard to historical roles of individuals and classes...

...It has banished religious fetiches only to succumb to a process of fetich-making of its own...

...With the lifeless discipline of the machine and the appropriation of his action extended into the political realm, the worker remains set fast in his abstractness, a personification of nullity with Marxist slogans as his ideal content...

...Hence the choice stated by Marx—"The working class is either revolutionary or it is nothing"—is at the same time • Capital in describing this process resorts to melodramatic language: "Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more the more labor it sucks...

...The present is displaced by these residues...

...At the heart of Marxism is its contention that its criticism and the revolutionary action of the working class have the identical objective, revolution by the second being the material equivalent of the first and supplying its positive social content...

...It is they who supply both the actors and the props for the stage of history...

...hence the condition of their survival is the "revolution in permanence...

...In the explosion which is inevitable, unless truly popular forces create the means for bringing about socialization by stages, the cave of illusions vanishes and labor is left in the open air of the free cooperation of individuals...