they are of the order of ‘memoranda’, formulas set down on paper to be remembered and provide constant inspiration.
At this point, Marx was engaged in a project we can picture fairly clearly, thanks to the rough drafts published in 1932 which have since been known as the Economic and Philosophical (or 1844) Manuscripts.1 This is a phenomenological analysis (aiming to establish the meaning or non-meaning) of the alienation of human labour in the form of wage labour. The influences of Rousseau, Feuerbach, Proudhon and Hegel are closely combined in these writings with his first reading of the economists (Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Ricardo, Sismondi) to produce a humanist, naturalistic conception of communism, conceived as the reconciliation of man with his own labour and with nature, and hence with his ‘species-being’ which private property had abolished, leaving him, as a result, ‘estranged from himself’.
Now, Marx was to interrupt this work (which he would resume much later on quite other foundations) and undertake with Engels the writing of The German Ideology, which mainly takes the form of a polemic against the various strands of ‘Young Hegelian’ philosophy inside and outside the university (Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, all of whom were linked to some degree to the movement opposed to the Restoration which drew its inspiration from a ‘left’ reading of the author of the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right). The composition of the Theses coincides with this interruption.2 And it is probable that some of the theoretical reasons for it are to be found in the text. But it is also crucial to identify the exact relationship between the Theses and the arguments of The German Ideology.3 I shall return to this point below.
Louis Althusser, one of many well-known philosophers to have offered readings of the text, presented the Theses as the ‘bord antérieur’ – i.e. the front or anterior edge* – of a break, thus launching one of the great debates in contemporary Marxism. In his view, the 1844 Manuscripts, with their characteristic humanism, could be said to be works predating the break, while The German Ideology, or rather its first part, with its deduction of the successive forms of property and State, in which the development of the division of labour provides the guiding thread, could be said to represent the real emergence of the ‘science of history’.
I do not intend to enter into an exhaustive explication of this text here. The reader may consult the work by Georges Labica which studies each formulation in detail, taking the later commentaries with all their divergences as indicative of the internal problems these formulations pose.4 Labica demonstrates with perfect clarity how the Theses are structured. From beginning to end, the aim is, by invoking a ‘new’ or practical materialism, to move beyond the traditional opposition between philosophy’s ‘two camps’: idealism (i.e., chiefly, Hegel), which projects all reality into the world of spirit or mind, and the old or ‘contemplative’ materialism, which reduces all intellectual abstractions to sensuousness, i.e. to life, sensation and affectivity in the style of the Epicureans and their modern disciples (Hobbes, Diderot, Helvétius etc.).
The critique of alienation
If we refer to the debates of the period, the thread of the argument is relatively clear. Feuerbach sought to explain ‘religious alienation’, i.e. the fact that real, sensuous men represent salvation and perfection to themselves in another supra-sensuous world (as a projection of their own ‘essential qualities’ into imaginary beings and situations – in particular, the bond of community or love which unites ‘humankind’).5 By becoming conscious of this mistake, human beings will become capable of ‘reappropriating’ their essence which has been alienated in God and, hence, of really living out fraternity on earth. Following Feuerbach, critical philosophers (including Marx himself) attempted to extend the same schema to other phenomena of the abstraction and ‘dispossession’ of human existence. They sought, in particular, to extend it to the constitution of the political sphere, isolated from society, as an ideal community in which human beings were said to be free and equal. However, says Marx in the Theses, the real reason for this projection is not an illusion of consciousness or an effect of the individual imagination: it is the split or division which reigns in society, it is the practical conflicts which set men against each other, to which the heaven of religion – or of politics – offers a miraculous solution. They cannot really leave these divisions behind without a – practical – transformation which abolishes the dependence of certain human beings upon others. It is not, therefore, for philosophy to bring an end to alienation (since philosophy has never been anything but a commentary on – or translation of – the ideals of reconciliation in religion or politics); that is a task for revolution, the conditions for which lie in the material existence of individuals and their social relations. The Theses on Feuerbach hence demand a definitive exit (Ausgang) from philosophy, as the only means of realizing what has always been its loftiest ambition: emancipation, liberation.
Karl Marx: Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
I. The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity …
III. The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
IV. Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice …
VI. Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:
1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.
2. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as ‘genus’, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals …
XI. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
(Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Penguin/New Left Review, Harmondsworth, 1975, pp. 421–23).
Revolution against philosophy
The difficulties begin precisely at this point. There can be no doubt that Marx never ventured to publish a call for such an exit, or did not find an opportunity to do so. And yet he wrote it and, like a ‘purloined letter’, it has come down to us. Now, the statement in question is rather paradoxical. In a sense, it is absolutely consistent with itself. What it requires, it immediately does (employing a later terminology, one might be tempted to say that there is something ‘performative’ about it). To write: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’, is to posit a point of no return for all thinking that