ultraleftist groups, or grupúsculos, throughout much of Europe and Latin America. One of the early titles for the main text in Dialéctica de la conciencia hinted precisely at this secondary aspect of the crisis of Marxism: La locura brujular del marxismo en México (ensayo ontológico sobre los grupúsculos marxistas).21 This ambitious plan to arrive at a dialectical ontology of group formations, which is much indebted to Sartre’s project in his own unfinished Critique of Dialectical Reason (the first volume of which is significantly subtitled Theory of Practical Ensembles), obviously did not come to full fruition in Revueltas’s notes for Dialéctica de la conciencia. But the reader will find long passages in which the internal crisis of critical consciousness, as explained through the notion of thought’s self-alienation and disorientation, is tied to the proliferation of extreme left-wing groups, all proclaiming their fidelity to an hyper-ideological form of Marxism.
Let us look in more detail at a brief instance of this self-reflexive critique of Marxism. As a starting point, the theoretical activity of consciousness can be situated on two levels, or as two kinds of act: “To put this in the most general way, theory functions by way of two acts that belong to the same process of knowledge. First, in those who think theory and confront it with itself as abstract thought; and, second, concretely, as praxis, when it adequately, that is, in ways consistent with itself, transforms the object proposed to it.”22 Whenever this regime of consistency is interrupted, the inner necessity of the concept, from being a moving restlessness, turns into the baleful objectivity of the practico-inert. For Revueltas, it is in this gap, in this “no man’s land” between a sequence of thought and its logical consequences, that the “false consciousness” of so-called vulgar or uncritical Marxism finds its niche. In a passage that is worth quoting extensively, if for no other reason than to give a sense of his idiosyncratic style, Revueltas continues:
The internal contradictions of knowledge that are unresolved (that do not resolve themselves) in their immediate becoming, in different ways, give way to certain inevitable fissures between a proposed (that is, not yet given) sequence and its consequence within the process, which establishes a provisionally empty space, a kind of “no man’s land,” which interposes itself between the prefiguration of the concept and the objective reality that has not yet been conceptualized. Thus, in a true act of usurpation of the rights of rationality, “false consciousness” with its hosts occupies this “no man’s land” of knowledge and declares over it its absolute dogmatic sovereignty. Such is the point where, under the protection of said sovereignty, this concrete self-sufficient form of being flourishes, self-absorbed and impermeable to questioning, that represents the false consciousness of vulgar Marxism. Hence, the examination of contradictions will allow us to clarify the fact—hidden underneath all kinds of demagogic and leftist phrases—that practice without praxis is nothing but a maddening sense of disorientation, a loss of the magnetic pole of knowledge—which defines, however, in essence, the activity of “Marxist” groupuscles and of vulgar Marxism as a whole, from which fatally follows an objective deformation of the revolutionary processes, with the correlative succession of the great historical defeats suffered by the working class during the last decades in Mexico.23
We can thus observe how it is through a dialectical theory of the inherent contradictions between consciousness and its other, as well as of their transformation into their opposites, that Revueltas seeks to reconstruct the crisis of Marxism based on his own readings of Marx from the time of the latter’s split with the Young Hegelians.
The Dialectic Revisited
Everything in this context ultimately depends on our understanding of what is meant by dialectical thinking. “The point is to be clear about the subject of the dialectic,” Badiou also writes: “The dialecticity of the dialectic consists precisely in having a conceptual history and in dividing the Hegelian matrix to the point where it turns out to be essentially a doctrine of the event, and not the guided adventure of the spirit. A politics, rather than a history.”24 Thus, when Revueltas wrote to his daughter Andrea, “We must return to Hegel’s Phenomenology, whether we want to or not,”25 or when he wrote to her in another letter, “We have to go back openly to Hegel, to the young Marx and to political economy ‘beyond’ Capital, that is to say, to the ‘ignored’ Marxism, the Marxism that was bracketed for over fifty years and not only by Stalinism,” his aim was still to come to a concrete understanding of the notion of the dialectic: “All the contradictions of Marxism in Mexico can be summed up as resistance to, and ignorance of, the dialectic.”26 How, then, does Revueltas define the dialectic?
Right from the beginning of Dialéctica de la conciencia, Revueltas may very well have seemed to echo Sartre’s position, in the latter’s polemic with Heidegger, that it is above all a question of man—that is, a question not of being but of the human being. In his case, however, the affirmation “Ante todo se trata de la cuestión hombre” is immediately followed by the question “Pero, en fin, ¿qué es el hombre?”—to which the author of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is allowed to reply: “Karl Marx proposes to us an illuminating answer. ‘Man is the world of men,’ he says. The world of human beings—in other words, society, its modes of production, religion, the state: a changing world which has never been the same throughout its history.”27 It is at this point that the otherwise traditional, humanist, or idealist image of Hegel’s method is displaced by the search for a materialist dialectic of society as a concrete and contradictory totality. How, then, can we come to know this apparently unknowable totality that constitutes the proper object of dialectical reason? Revueltas does not answer this last question in any straightforward manner. Instead, in the remaining pages of the full draft of his essay, he weaves the discussion in and out of three examples, which he prefers to call “cognitive anecdotes,” derived respectively from the postal system, from archaeology, and from architecture.
The essential determination of society as an object of thought cannot be discerned in the immediate knowledge of the senses: “You should not look for it in the direct and immediate report of the senses but in a vast and complex set of internal relations and correlations.”28 This much larger horizon, however, remains as invisible or unknowable to our everyday thoughts and habits as the complete functioning of the postal system is for the individual who absentmindedly drops off a letter in the mail:
Our individual has written a letter, he has “worked” on it, but he ignores the fact that this whole vast set of activities (writing, sealing the letter, buying stamps and attaching them, depositing the letter into a postbox) is inserted within a mass of human work that is common, general, total, constant, active, past, present, and historical in the most plastic sense of the word, this invisible matter in which the lines of communication are drawn and draw themselves, from the time when one of them discovered himself in “the others” and succeeded in inventing and emitting the first “signs of identity,” a first scream, a first smoke signal, a first letter. The postal system reveals nothing to our individual, even though it allows him at least to be this human being in whom he does not yet perceive himself, but in whom he no doubt will one day come to perceive himself as soon as he assumes consciousness of it.29
What Revueltas is after in this, as well as in the other two passages, is not so much an orthodox, Lukácsian or Kosikian, totality as the identical subject-object of history, but rather something more along the lines of a cognitive map, or a situational understanding of the system, as defined in more recent years by Fredric Jameson.
If we turn now to the second case, in which an archaeologist decides to employ a group of local bricklayers to help him with the task of digging up the objects on his site, a split immediately sets apart the manual labor of the diggers from the larger cultural and intellectual knowledge regarding the objects of their labor. The diggers are thus deprived of the consciousness involved in their very own labor. Revueltas insists, however, in this case even more so than in the brief example of the letter-writer, that these bricklayers now turned into anthropological laborers, too, are perhaps on the verge of a special kind of consciousness:
Nevertheless, what happened to them in the passage from one job to the other has an extraordinary meaning. The “world of men” placed them socially as “anthropological laborers,” in a situation where they were “on the verge of” realizing a true human form of labor, “on the verge of” converting themselves into real human beings and not