but to a permanent oscillation between ‘falling short of’ and ‘going beyond’ philosophy. By falling short of philosophy, I mean stating propositions as ‘conclusions without premisses’, as Spinoza and Althusser would have put it. One example is the famous formula from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte which Sartre, among others, considered the central thesis of historical materialism: ‘Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.’2 By going beyond philosophy, on the other hand, I mean a discourse which shows that philosophy is not an autonomous activity, but one determined by the position it occupies in the field of social conflicts and, in particular, in that of the class struggle.
Dialectical materialism
This term was used to refer to philosophy in the official doctrine of the Communist parties, and it has also been employed by a number of critics of that doctrine (see Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (1940) trans. John Sturrock, Cape, London, 1968. It was not used by either Marx (who spoke of his ‘dialectical method’) or Engels (who uses the expression ‘materialist dialectic’), but seems to have been invented in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen, a socialist worker who corresponded with Marx. It was, however, on the basis of Engels’s work that Lenin developed this theory (in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, 1908) around three guiding themes: the ‘materialist inversion’ of the Hegelian dialectic; the historicity of ethical principles in their relation to the class struggle; and the convergence of the ‘laws of evolution’ in physics (Helmholtz), biology (Darwin) and political economy (Marx). Lenin thus takes up a position between a historicist Marxism (Labriola) and a determinist Marxism, akin to ‘Social Darwinism’ (Kautsky). After the Russian Revolution, Soviet philosophy was divided between the ‘dialecticians’ (Deborin) and the ‘mechanists’ (Bukharin). The debate was settled by General Secretary Stalin who, in 1931, issued a decree identifying dialectical materialism with Marxism-Leninism (cf. René Zapata, Luttes philosophiques en URSS 1922–31, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1983). Seven years later, in the pamphlet Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), he codified its content, enumerating the laws of the dialectic – the foundation of the individual disciplines and of the science of history in particular, as well as the a priori guarantee of their conformity to the ‘proletarian world-view’. This system, known as diamat for short, was to be imposed on the whole of intellectual life in the socialist countries and, with varying degrees of resistance, on Western Communist parties. It was to serve to cement the ideology of the party-State and control the activity of scientists (cf. the Lysenko affair, studied by Dominique Lecourt in Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko, trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London, 1977). However, we should add two correctives to this monolithic picture. Firstly, as early as 1937, with his essay ‘On Contradiction’ (in Four Essays on Philosophy, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1966), Mao Tse-Tung had proposed an alternative conception, rejecting the idea of the ‘laws of the dialectic’ and stressing the complexity of contradiction (Althusser would later draw on this in his ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969; first French edition, 1965). Secondly, at least one school of thought – that led by Geymonat in Italy – made dialectical materialism the starting-point for a historical epistemology that is not without its merits (cf. André Tosel, ‘Ludovico Geymonat ou la lutte pour un matérialisme dialectique nouveau’, in Praxis. Vers une refondation en philosophie marxiste, Messidor/Éditions Sociales, Paris, 1984).
Yet let us repeat that these contradictions, these oscillations in no sense represent a weakness on Marx’s part. They bring into question the very essence of philosophical activity: its contents, its style, its method, its intellectual and political functions. This was true in Marx’s day and is probably still true today. It might therefore be argued that, after Marx, philosophy is no longer as it was before. An irreversible event has occurred, one which is not comparable with the emergence of a new philosophical point of view, because it not only obliges us to change our ideas or methods, but to transform the practice of philosophy. Marx is certainly not the only writer in history to have produced effects of this kind. In the modern age alone, there has also been Freud, to mention but one, though he operated in a different field and had other aims. However, comparable examples are, in fact, very rare. The caesura effected by Marx has been more or less clearly acknowledged, more or less willingly accepted; it has even given rise to violent refutations and strenuous attempts at neutralization. But this has only caused it to haunt the totality of contemporary philosophical discourse all the more and to work on that discourse from within.
This anti-philosophy which Marx’s thought at one point intended to be, this non-philosophy which it certainly was by comparison with existing practice, thus produced a converse effect to the one at which it was aiming. Not only did it not put an end to philosophy, but gave rise within it to a question which is now permanently open, a question from which philosophy has since been able to draw sustenance and which has contributed to its renewal. There is in fact no such thing as an ‘eternal philosophy’, always identical to itself: in philosophy, there are turning-points, thresholds beyond which there is no turning back. What happened with Marx was precisely a displacement of the site and the questions and objectives of philosophy, which one may accept or reject, but which is so compelling that it cannot be ignored. After this, we can at last return to Marx and, without either diminishing or betraying him, read him as a philosopher.
Where are we to look, in these conditions, for the philosophies of Marx? After the remarks I have just made, there can be no doubt as to the answer: in the open totality of his writings and there alone. Not only is there no distinction to be made between ‘philosophical’ and ‘historical’ or ‘economic’ works, but that division would be the surest way to fail to understand anything of the critical relation in which Marx stands to the whole philosophical tradition, and of the revolutionary effect he has had upon it. The most technical arguments in Capital are also those in which the categories of logic and ontology, the representations of the individual and the social bond, were wrested from their traditional definitions and re-thought in terms of the necessities of historical analysis. The most conjunctural articles, written at the time of the revolutionary experiences of 1848 or 1871, or for internal discussion within the International Working Men’s Association, were also a means of overturning the traditional relationship between society and State and developing the idea of a radical democracy which Marx had first sketched out for its own sake in his critical notes of 1843, written in the margins to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The most polemical of his writings against Proudhon, Bakunin or Lassalle were also those in which the discrepancy between the theoretical schema of the development of the capitalist economy and the real history of bourgeois society appears and forces Marx to outline an original dialectic, distinct from a mere inversion of the Hegelian idea of the progress of Geist …
In fact, each of Marx’s works is simultaneously imbued with philosophical labour and ranged confrontationally against the way the tradition has isolated and circumscribed philosophy (which is one of the driving forces of its idealism). But this gives rise to a final anomaly which, in a sense, he experienced within himself.
A break and ruptures
More than other writers, Marx wrote in the conjuncture. Such an option did not exclude either the ‘patience of the concept’ of which Hegel spoke, or the rigorous weighing of logical consequences. But it was certainly incompatible with stable conclusions: Marx is the philosopher of eternal new beginnings, leaving behind him many uncompleted drafts and projects … The content of his thought is not separable from his shifts of position. That is why, in studying him, one cannot abstractly reconstruct his system. One has to retrace his development, with its breaks and bifurcations.
In the wake of Althusser, discussion in the nineteen sixties and seventies was greatly preoccupied with the ‘break’ or ‘rupture’ which he saw as occurring in 1845, with some writers supporting his arguments and others contesting them. That break, contemporaneous with the emergence of the concept of ‘social relation’ in Marx, was seen as marking a point of no