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Life and Death: Marx and Marxism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
On the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Marx, has not the moment come at last to render an equitable judgment, of the type which only the passage of time allows us to formulate, on the man whom we do not know how to describe— philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, politician, theoretician of the worker movement, reformer, revolutionary or prophet? And this judgment, which will take everything and examine it before putting all things in their proper place, could it not take the form of a response to the famous question: what is dead and what is still living today in that work which is as monumental as it is diverse since it touches every domain of knowledge and action?
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1984 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 L'ideologie allemande (German Ideology), in Marx, Oeuvres philosophiques, Costes, Paris, 1937, VI, p. 154; Editions Sociales, Paris, 1968, p. 45.
2 Marx, Oeuvres complètes, La Pléiade, Paris, I, p. 63.
3 L'idéologie allemande, op. cit., Costes, VIII, p. 211; Editions Sociales, p. 394.
4 Ibid., Costes, IX, p. 94; Editions Sociales, p. 480.
5 Ibid., Costes VI, p. 223; Editions Sociales, p. 92.
6 Le 18-Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bona parte), Pauvert, Paris, 1965, p. 349 ff.
7 Whatever its power, the ideological conditioning of its members by a modem society is, then, but a second phenomenon and one which is always secretly dependent on a conditioning by the way of life itself, as is proven by the inevitable fall, one day or another, of all ideologies.
8 I have shown elsewhere that this expression to which Marx's ideas about history have been roughly reduced has but an empirical and artificial significance, concerns a certain segment of humanity's past history and in no way constitutes the condition of all possible history, and even less so the principle of this history. If "historic materialism" is proposed as the principal theory of all possible history, the class struggle theory is not part of it; on this see our work in Marx, I, Une philosophie de la réalité, II, Une philosophie de l'économie, Gallimard, Paris, 1976, I, chap. III.
9 Contribution à la Critique de la philosophie du droit de Hegel (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right), in Oeuvres philosophiques, op. cit., Costes, I, p. 106.
10 Maximilian Rubel has correctly denounced the replacing of the proletariat, which for Marx signified the people, by a party and then by a State which this party takes over and to which it confers a totalitarian nature (cf. Marx, critique du marxisme, Payot, Paris, 1974). That, working from an historical, sociological and political approach, which as such differs from our own which is essentially philoso phical, this great scholar arrived at conclusions which are so often analogous to our own, particularly in this same opposition between the ideas of Marx and Marxism, is very significant.
11 Gallimard, Paris, 1972.
12 Fondements de la critique de l'économie politique, (Grundrisse), tr. into French by E. Dangeville, Antropos, Paris, 1967, II, p. 425.
13 Ibid., I, p. 108-109.
14 The two-fold nature of merchandise as usage value and as exchange value is but the consequence of this prior duplication of labor and its reflection in merchan dise.
15 In the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right there is a fierce denunciation of bureaucracy. Those regimes in which bureaucracy is permitted unbridled develop ment cannot, in this respect as well, claim to descend from Marx.