to begin interpreting the world again – particularly the social world – to lapse back into the ambit of philosophy, since there is no third way between philosophy and revolution. At the outside, it may therefore mean condemning oneself to silence.
But the harshness of this alternative reveals its other side: if ‘saying is doing’,6 then, on the other hand, ‘doing is saying’ and words are never innocent. For example, it is not innocent to posit that the interpretations of the world are various, whereas the revolutionary transformation is, implicitly, one or univocal. For that means there is only one single way of changing the world: the one which abolishes the existing order – the revolution – which cannot be reactionary or anti-popular. Let us note, in passing, that Marx was very soon to retract this thesis: as early as the Manifesto and, a fortiori, in Capital, he was to note the power with which capitalism ‘changes the world’. And the question of whether the world cannot be changed in several different ways and of how one change can fit into another – or even divert it from its course – would become crucial. Moreover, this thesis would mean that this single transformation also provides the ‘solution’ to the internal conflicts of philosophy – and ‘revolutionary practice’ would thus realize an old ambition of philosophers (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel …) better than they could!
The critique of political economy
The expression ‘critique of political economy’ figures repeatedly in the title or programme of Marx’s main works, though its content constantly changes. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are themselves a draft of a work which was to have been entitled Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, a title later given to the work published in 1859 as the ‘first part’ of a general treatise and used as the subtitle of Capital (of which Volume 1, the only volume published by Marx himself, appeared in 1867). To these we may add a great many unpublished pieces, articles and sections in polemical works.
It seems, then, that this phrase expresses the permanent modality of Marx’s intellectual relation to his scientific object. The initial objective was the critique of political alienation in civil/bourgeois society, as well as the ‘speculative subjects’ the organic unity of which philosophy claimed to express. But a fundamental shift occurred at a very early stage: ‘criticizing’ law, morality and politics meant confronting them with their ‘materialist basis’, with the process by which social relations are constituted in labour and production.
In his own way, Marx thus discovered the dual meaning of the term critique: on the one hand, the eradication of error; on the other, knowledge of the limits of a faculty or practice. But what conducted this critique, for Marx, was no longer merely analysis, but history. This is what enabled him to combine ‘dialectically’ the critique of the necessary illusions of theory (‘commodity fetishism’), the development of the internal, irreconcilable contradictions in economic reality (crises, the antagonism between labour and capital, based on the exploitation of ‘labour-power’ as a commodity) and, finally, the outline of a ‘political economy of labour’, opposed to that of the bourgeoisie (‘Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association’, 1864). The fate of Marx’s critique is dependent on the ‘two discoveries’ he claimed: the deduction of the money form from the necessities of commodity circulation and the reduction of the laws of accumulation to the capitalization of surplus value (Mehrwert). Both are related to the definition of value as an expression of socially necessary labour, in which is rooted rejection of the viewpoint of the abstract homo oeconomicus, defined solely by the calculation of his individual ‘utility’.
For an account of the technical aspects of the critique of political economy in Marx, see Pierre Salama and Tran Hai Hac, Introduction a l’économie de Marx (La Découverte, Paris, 1992).
But there is more to it than this: it was not by chance that this formula coined by Marx, this injunction which is already, in itself, an act of ‘departure’, acquired its philosophical renown. If we search our memories a little, we can very soon find a profound kinship not only with other watchwords (such as Rimbaud’s ‘changer la vie’: we know that Andre Breton, among others, made this connection),7 but with some equally lapidary, philosophical propositions, which are traditionally considered ‘fundamental’ and which take the form, at times, of tautologies and, at others, of antitheses. All these formulations, different in content or opposed in intent as they may be, share a common concern with the question of the relation between theory and practice, consciousness and life. This is true from Parmenides’s ‘Thinking and being are one’ to Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, via Spinoza (‘God is nature’), Kant (‘I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’), and Hegel (‘The rational is real and the real is rational’). And here is Marx ensconced not just at the heart of philosophy, but at the heart of its most speculative turn, in which it strives to think its own limits, whether to abolish them or to establish itself on the basis of a recognition of those limits.
Let us keep in mind this profound ambiguity (which we must be careful not to turn into an insurmountable contradiction, but which we must not make into a sign of unfathomable profundity either, since this would soon lead us back to that ‘mysticism’ the roots of which Marx is, in fact, seeking out here …) and let us examine more closely two key questions implied in the Theses: that of the relation between ‘practice’ (or praxis) and ‘class struggle’; and that of anthropology or the ‘human essence’.
Praxis and class struggle
The Theses speak of revolution, but they do not use the expression ‘class struggle’. It would not, however, be arbitrary to register its presence here between the lines, on condition that we clearly specify what is meant by the term in this case. Thanks to the work of scholars in the field of German studies, we have for some years now been better acquainted with the intellectual environment that gave rise to these formulations, which Marx articulated in terms that are particularly striking, but which were not absolutely his own as regards their content.8
The revolution Marx has in mind clearly refers to French traditions. What the young radical democrats wish to see is the revival of the movement which had been interrupted, then reversed, by the ‘bourgeois’ establishment of the republic after Thermidor, by Napoleon’s dictatorship and, finally, by the Restoration and the Counter-revolution (in any case, by the State). To be even more precise, the aim was to bring the revolutionary movement to fruition on a European scale, and to render it universal by recovering the inspiration and energy of its ‘left wing’, that egalitarian component of the Revolution (represented principally by Babeuf) from which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of communism emerged.9 Marx would be very emphatic that this was not a speculative conception, implying an ideal or experimental community (like Cabet’s ‘Icarie’), but a social movement with demands that were merely a coherent application of the principle of Revolution – gauging how much liberty had been achieved by the degree of equality and vice versa, with fraternity as the end result. All in all, what Marx and others come to recognize is that there is no middle way: if the revolution is halted in its course, it can only regress and reconstitute an aristocracy of owners who use the – reactionary or liberal – State to defend the established order. Conversely, the only possibility of completing the revolution and rendering it irreversible is to give it greater depth, to make it a social revolution.
But who will bring about this social revolution? Who are the heirs of Babeuf and the Montagnards? One has simply to open one’s eyes to what is currently going on in Europe, to listen to the cries of alarm of the possessing classes. They are the English ‘Chartist’ workers (whom Engels has just described in his Condition of the Working Class in England of 1844, a book which can still be read with admiration today and which had an absolutely crucial effect on Marx); they are the Canuts of Lyon, the artisans of the Parisian faubourgs and of the caves of Lille which Victor Hugo described, the Silesian weavers to whom Marx devoted long columns in his Cologne-based Rheinische Zeitung. In short, they are all those now called (from