Critical Theory Lecture 4: (cont) & Lecture 5:Critical Theory Version Two: The German Ideology

The Unity of Theory and Praxis

10. If this first formulation of critical theory is considered from the standpoint of strategy, an immediate problem emerges. Marx has designated the workers as the subject and bearer of the critical theory. They have the emancipatory role to practically realise socialism: they are the negation of the negation, of bourgeois alienation. However, as Marx describes the dialectics of bourgeois society, the workers are the radically dehumanised class with no real stake in this society. It is hard to see how such a group, while it might be nihilistically destructive, will have the capacity to transcend this society. If the workers are the embodiment of absolute dehumanisation, from whence comes the motives and the practical/intellectual preparations required to overcome their brutalisation. As Marx initially has a completely negative attitude to towards trade unions, he seems to have no practical political strategy to connect his theoretical account of the workers (extreme dehumanisation) with his rather idealised view of the worker’s first politico- educational associations. In other words, his initial account of strategy is disabled by the lack of immanent means to realise what appears to be a utopian goal.

Socialism

11. This problem at the level of strategy is compounded by Marx’s account of socialism. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx offers us no more than a glimpse of socialism. Nevertheless, from what Marx does say, we gain a reasonable idea of his vision of the unalienated future. He initially understood socialism along the lines of an organic unmediated totality. Despite the stress on historical development that constantly underscores his view of humanity in this work, the features of his concept of socialism expressed the idea of a utopian reconciliation of all historically experienced antagonisms and oppositions. Marx speaks of the overcoming of all oppositions: those between man and man, man and nature, freedom and necessity, the individual and the species. This overcoming is understood as the realisation of an anthropological teleology. Socialism is the ‘riddle of history solved’. Of course, there is some difficulty in accurately interpreting precisely what Marx meant with these fairly vague and general ideas. But this image seems to invoke a radicalised Hegelian style ‘end of history’ in as much as he implies the elimination of all sources of serial conflict. In opposition to conditions of alienation where the wealth of the species is opposed to the deprivation of the individual, socialism seems to posit social conditions in which each and every individual would actually be able to assimilate and realise the totality of socially and historically created human abilities and needs. There would exist a real identity between the individual and society and such an identity corresponds to the idea of the realisation of the species.

12. In adopting this view of socialism as ‘the riddle of history solved’ Marx seems to foreclose the historical process and lapse into a teleological conception of history like the one he castigated in Hegel. In place of Hegel’s spiritual essence, Marx posits an anthropological teleology in terms of human species essence. The historical realisation of this essence means the reconciliation of all historical tensions (both social and natural). In a word, the culmination of the total historical process and the attainment of a universal perspective. So despite a general tendency to move towards a growing theoretical realism emphasising the finitude of human subjectivity against the idealist tradition, his practical vision reasserts utopianism in terms of a cessation of the historical tensions that sustain historical development and human unfolding. This view of socialism will undergo quite substantial changes in the later versions of Marx’s critical theory.

13. The shortcomings of this formulation of the idea of socialism was probably not the reason that Marx soon abandoned the version of critical theory presented in the Manuscripts. This is better explained in terms of a generally maturing outlook as he consolidated the main outlines of his standpoint. Also the internal polemics amongst the surviving Young Hegelians determined Marx to formally distance himself from philosophy and especially all teleological views of history and of human essence.

Lecture 5: Critical Theory Version Two: The German Ideology

1. If one compares the German Ideology to the E and P Manuscripts probably the most noticeable transformation is the striking change in Marx’s attitude to philosophy. In the E and P Manuscripts, Marx mounted a philosophical critique of the political economists using a philosophical notion: alienation. In the German Ideology Marx appears to quite consciously discard this understanding of critical theory as philosophical critique. He states very directly that critique is the empirical science of history. In the first pages of the text it is stated: ‘We know only a single science, the science of history’. This new positive understanding is accompanied by a full-scale critical onslaught and caricature of philosophy, its abstract method and terminology. Is this change a manifestation of Althusser’s famous “epistemological break”: the abandonment of humanist philosophy for the science of history or something else? What are the motive, meaning and significance of this change?

2. The first obvious thing is that concepts that Marx had favoured and made central to his articulation of critique in the E and P Manuscripts are repudiated and caricatured. The terms “human essence”, “species being” “alienation” are lampooned and rejected in the German Ideology. However, despite this polemical attack on philosophy and its method, Marx’s critical remarks are not directed at his own previous use of the concepts in the manuscripts. This is confirmed by a close look at the German Ideology. Marx may have abandoned the terms themselves but he continued to employ the concepts in the same or only slightly modified ways. For example, the concept of “alienation” continues to be present in the German Ideology:

And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. (Tucker p.160)

It is no longer the basic term of analysis that explains social relations by indicating the contradiction between human essence and the social situation of the particular individual. In the German ideology, alienation is the result of a long historical process mainly determined by other developments - the division of labour being the crucial one. This changing role of the concept undoubtedly involved a change in Marx’s view of the relation between social theory and economics.

3. Part of the reason for the spectacular reversal of Marx’s attitude to philosophical critique is to be found in his desire to clarify his stance towards the other Young Hegelians. To him these philosophical terms were tainted by their continued abstract and speculative employment amongst the disputing Young Hegelians. Some commentators have suggested that Max Stirner’s book Der Einzige und seiner Eigenthum (The Ego and his Own (1845)), which set out a critique of all philosophical abstractions - of God, Spirit, Reason, Man - from the standpoint of anarchism, claiming the individual as the only real actor and axis of values, forced Marx to clarify his own position and distinguishing it from all the other Young Hegelians. The crux of this critique of philosophical terminology turned on finally overcoming abstraction. For example, Marx, Hess and the later Bruno Bauer had viewed socialism as an ethical postulation corresponding to the telos of a universal human essence. But for the Marx of the German Ideology, “human essence” is not some unchanging, eternal fundament of humanity.

4. Marx’s critique of philosophical concepts was not merely cosmetic or only confined to terminology. My appraisal of the E and P Manuscripts argued that Marx’s view of socialism was utopian and teleological. The German Ideology clearly rejects all conceptions implying historical teleology. In this respect, the realistic tendency already evident in Marx’s analysis of economic alienation and his idea of finite subjectivity in the Manuscripts (his critique of idealist abstraction) is taken a step further. Marx is now specifically concerned with concrete, objective, institutionally determined relations between individuals: these impose their own independent ‘logics’ upon social actions and activity. This is a direction and a tendency, which in the course of Marx’s later development, will continue and be progressively concretised.

5. The German Ideology offers no speculations on the historical process as a ‘whole’. Marx no longer attempts to interpret the meaning of history. Aside from of that created and ascribed to it by the practices of living, concrete individuals, history has no immanent meaning.

“History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all the preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. (Tucker p.172). "

The historical process itself does not act and has no independent or inherent telos. The only real historical actors are concrete individuals. Only philosophical abstraction and its inbuilt mystification could impute some autonomous purpose to the collective results of these actions. However, Marx is not about to deny that supra-individual historical structures and processes both material and idea exist. This is the main import of his theory of alienation. Social production gives rise to economic forces which then take on a life and dynamic of their own to which individuals are subordinated: means become ends. But Marx was intent upon avoiding the philosophical inclination to give some meaning or direction to the whole of the historical process from a detached, impartial perspective somehow external to and beyond the actions of real concrete actors.

6. That Marx’s move towards an empirical science of history is deliberately framed to avoid philosophical abstractions and its various ‘spectres’, does not mean that he was now prepared to see critical theory as purely descriptive and neutral. Actually, the opposite is the case:

“ This method is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is for the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.’(Tucker p.119)"

Marx understands his ‘science’ as an organ of a real historical movement, which expresses the needs and the potential consciousness of the vast oppressed majority. Marx’s science is the theoretical expression of the historically becoming perspective of the social movement growing amongst workers. Far from succumbing to a crude empiricism that merely describing the ‘facts’ and relations of capitalist society, Marx’s science is a fusion of empirical analysis and philosophy. In this synthesis, philosophy organises and centres the empirical material around the problems and goals of the working class movement from a historically immanent perspective. It should be noted that this understanding of a science of history perfectly fits with Marx’s attack on philosophical history and its abstractions. His science is not the voice of an impartial reason lying somehow above the contradictions and struggles of ongoing historical processes. Rather it is tied to the interests of the historically developing, potentially universal class, to the real movement of concrete history. It is not the last word in history but a totalisation: a practical contribution to the self-clarification of the individual members of the class and hence to the formation of a fully conscious, collective revolutionary subjectivity.

New Methodology

7. Marx’s new understanding of critical theory as an empirical science of history also involves a new method. The phenomenology materialism of the Manuscripts is abandoned. Marx now sees that his attempt to deduce the social relations and economic categories of capitalist society from the analysis of the circumstances of its representative individuals was speculative and circular. Why concentrate on representative individuals rather than the relations, in which they exist? Social relations are just as constitutive of the totality of any organization of social production as the life-situation of representative individuals. In the German Ideology, the subject of critical theory remains concrete individuals but now “concreteness” is defined in terms of the reproducible social relations, in which they stand. Critical theory is therefore now a practical and historical analysis of the concrete relations, which determine the total life situation of individuals: a science of specific, historically determined productive social relations.

8. To facilitate this new approach, Marx introduces a new conceptual armoury that, in a modified form, will become the stable conceptual arsenal of historical materialism. He now refers to relations of intercourse, production forces, class divisions, class struggle, state, ideology, cultural production and so on. This new conceptual armoury is devised in order to theoretically reproduce and analyse bourgeois society as a social totality. Marx is concerned to specify precisely those reproducible social relations that constitute the basis of the capitalist society. With this emphasis, the notion of social totality moves to the forefront of his analysis. The social totality is that ensemble of interlocking socio-economic relations which constitute the social whole in the sense of an ongoing process of uninterrupted reproduction: these are the relations which structure and regulate the material life situation of all the social agents in any given society. Marx’s analysis in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts already touches upon the question of social reproduction. Marx argues that alienated labour reproduces all the other manifestations of alienation; that the worker not only produces products but also produces the capitalist and his/her relations to all others. In the German Ideology, this theme of social reproduction becomes the most central concern. The present generation inherits and, reproduces in a changed form, the sum total of social and cultural relations, which altogether comprise the social totality. But this appropriation is never passive: it is always a practical transformation from the standpoint of current needs. However much Marx wants to stress the conditionedness of all human action, he was not the technological or social determinist that he is sometimes painted as. A popular representation of Marx’s ideas is that he maintained that socialist revolution was a historical necessity according to some laws of the capitalist development in the same way that lawfulness in the domain of natural sciences have, or are posited as having, an iron necessity. A brief look at the passages in the German Ideology where Marx speaks of ‘historical necessity’ show that he generally means two things: 1. The abolition of capitalist relations is a practical necessity if the working class is to raise itself above the level of grave dehumanisation and deprivation and be able to realise the potential human wealth made possible by the current level of the productive forces; 2. Revolution was necessary simply because the possessing classes would not give up its privileges without a struggle and violence.

"Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew." (Tucker193)

For Marx, the concept of ‘necessity’ typically has a practical rather than a naturalistic meaning.

9. Behind Marx’s elevation of the problem of social totality to the centre of concern is his interest in the task of comprehending relatively stable networks of socio-economic relations as unified wholes. In other words, Marx’s focus turns to the reproduction of the sum of those social relations which pattern and direct socio-productive activity. With this focus, the emphasis of the analysis is on historical discontinuity: the distinctive logic and reproduction of specific social formations. Clearly there is a shift here to a synchronic, structural analysis of the capitalist mode of production. However, this does not mean that diachronic, historical perspective is now abandoned. Certainly it is true that for the rest of his theoretical labours the analysis and theorisation of the structural aspect of socio-economic relations as a decisive conditioning factor in the understanding of society and history will be the central preoccupation. However, Marx never discarded his theoretically immanent revolutionary standpoint, which presupposed both the long-run primacy of an historical perspective and the practical necessity of the collective revolutionary action of the oppressed social class. Perhaps we can say more precisely that Marx's notion of 'social totality' necessitates a double emphasis. After all, Marx had learnt from his critique of the Young Hegelians that a revolutionary could not simply exhort the ultimate power of subjective praxis. To assert that existing institutionalised forms of human praxis were really the products of human activity, even if true, did not bring about their overthrow. This critical position was practically impotent:

The Young Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly world-shattering” statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare that they are only fighting against “phrases”. They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and they are in no way combating the real existing world….’(Tucker N 149).

Marx now emphasised the socially sanctioned forms of ossified human labour constituted self-reproducing socio-economic formations that organise productive life. While these constellations are essentially dynamic, they also are relatively stable insofar as they represented the material interests of dominant social classes who defend them against radical change. They, therefore, form an immediate obstacle and adversarial power to the concrete social forces pressing for such radical social transformation. Here Marx obviously is at pains to stress the resistances to historical praxis.

10. However, Marx also insists that the structural relations of bourgeois society do not reproduce themselves. Social reproduction is not an automatic process. It depends on the activity of living subjects who, while conditioned by existing social relations, also transform them in their very activity. The contradictions between these living subjects - their historically expanding need structure - on the one hand, and the inherited sum of existing socio-productive relations, on the other, introduce volatile tensions and strains into the process of social reproduction. The social totality is not a static social arrangement but a dynamic ensemble of contradictory relations with its own immanent historical dimensions. As immanently historical, the social totality undergoes periods of crisis and even breakdown when social contradictions become too severe and normal reproduction becomes impossible. This is the perspective of discontinuity, which shapes Marx's understanding of capitalist reproduction.

11. Marx's double perspective on the bourgeois social totality is of central significance in his understanding of historical materialism. He sees history as a process of continuity and discontinuity. But he does not superimpose this conception on the concrete historical totality. Rather, the ideas of continuity and discontinuity are internal to the concepts that he uses to analyse concrete societies. These basic terms in the conceptual armoury of historical materialism are (1) productive forces (2) relations of production. For Marx, both (1) and (2) undergo historical development and progress but it is the former which is the real axis of historical continuity and the measure of historical progress. The productive forces designate that which is growing through continuity - through the accumulation of inherited advances both technological and subjective. The objective results of human productive activity both in the areas of instruments, technology and human subjective skills accumulated in history. These productive forces ascribe man's relation to nature in terms of a growing technical mastery, which, according to Marx, can be empirically determined. This is an index for the measure of human historical progress. The relations of production (what Marx in GI calls 'relations of intercourse') designate the discontinuous historical socio-productive relations which, at various times, must be overcome in order to liberate new social and productive forces. The relations of production signify those sanctioned socio-productive forces, which regulate man's relation to man in any specific society. Marx's historical materialism views the antagonism between (1) and (2) as the great source of social dysfunction, which generates class struggle. But it is important to note that, for Marx, only class struggle implying the growing consciousness of the limitations placed on (1) by (2), is sufficient to actually bring about decisive historical change.

12. Essential to Marx's revolutionary standpoint and his critical approach was the conviction that the totality of these socio-productive relations must always be theorised from the dynamic perspective of its immanent future social and human possibilities. This is the meaning of the theoretically immanent revolutionary standpoint. However important it was for Marx to understand capitalist society as a self-sustaining and self-reproducing system of relations, he nevertheless views this totality from the negative, critical perspective of its inherent future social possibilities. This is why the diachronic historical perspective remains dominant. Even as a 'science of history', Marx's critical theory was articulated from the revolutionary standpoint of the historical transcendence of the present.

13. While it is necessary to re-emphasise the priority of the historical perspective in Marx's understanding of 'social totality' even in the German Ideology, it is still fairly obvious from the text itself that Marx is intent upon distancing himself from all the philosophical conceptions of history dominant in German cultural circles. This is strikingly evident when we see the weight Marx gives to empirical elements in shaping his concrete understanding of history. For Marx, the historical process is not just a critical construct whereby the theorist arranges the empirical material in a manner that reveals immanent possibilities and the present direction of historical movement. The new ingredient is Marx's emphasis on the palpable, extensive empirical manifestations of historical dynamism.

"This transformation of history into world history is by no means a mere abstract act of self consciousness, the world spirit but a quite material, empirically verifiable act".

History can no longer simply be construed as the serial unfolding of some philosophically ascribed human or spiritual absence. Marx is also clearly aware of historical contingency. He asserts: "World history didn't always exist; history as world history is a result". This assertion expresses the insight that even the possibility of conceiving history as 'world history' has very real empirical preconditions. World history exists all around the contemporary European: in the cosmopolitan manners and tastes of bourgeois reality, which was sucking in commodities and artefacts from the entire world. But more important than these was the ever expanding world commercial system itself. This world system of commerce interlocked the fortunes of different nations, cultures and societies into the all-encompassing intercourse of the bourgeois world market. In this most palpable sense, world history was a product: the result of bourgeois society and its thirst for markets, its expansionary competitive economic system and its extended division of labour. Such a profound unification with its scale and depth was quite unimaginable in pre-capitalist times. In these times, history was and could have been, only local, provincial, confined to the narrow horizons of relatively isolated peoples and races. In comparison to this situation, bourgeois society with its commercial market activity had, in the space of one hundred years, spread over the entire world and incorporated even the remotest areas into a single economic system:

It (bourgeois competition) produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. (Vol 5 P73) Tucker N 185 - Communist Manifesto 475.

This empirical dimension supplied Marx's view of world history with both a material and a spatial dimension. While Marx never overlooked the brutality of European colonisation and conquest, he clearly recognised that this incorporation of the entire known world into a complex network of mutual need satisfaction, not only dissolved the physical isolation of disparate native peoples and cultures but it also brought about a convergence of histories and historical destinies. The reality of a number of parallel but distinct histories in the pre-bourgeois epoch increasingly gave way to world history as every independent, local culture was incorporated into the world commercial system and subordinated to the tyranny of occidental values. While Marx could view this development in absolutely positive terms as a real historical progress, today we have to struggle with the thorny issue of separating Euro-centric and truly universal values.