"Marxism Today." Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, and Other Essays. New York: Verso, 1990. 267-280.

Can we, 130 years after the Communist Manifesto and 110 years after Capital, outline something like a balance sheet of what is called 'Marxism'? Certainly, for we have not only a historical perspective on Marxism but the long experience of its victories, defeats and tragedies. Perhaps, too, because we are henceforth living within a crisis, within its crisis - a situation conducive to dispelling all illusions and concentrating minds on the pitiless test of reality.

Today, then, what can we retain of Marx that is essential, and has possibly not always been understood?

There is, first of all, one simple fact: Marx said that he was 'not a Marxist'. This remark, which has been taken as the quip of a free spirit who required readers to 'think for themselves', actually carries great weight. Marx was not only protesting in advance against the interpretation of his work as a system, as a new philosophy of history, or as the finally discovered science of political economy - an oeuvre with the unity of a total theory ('Marxism') produced by an 'author' (Marx). Marx was not only rejecting this pretension in declaring Capital not 'science' but 'critique of political economy'. But in so doing he was changing the very meaning of the term 'criticism' or 'critique'. Upon this notion - charged with delivering the true from the false, or denouncing the false in the name of the true, by the rationalist tradition - Marx was imposing an entirely different mission, founded on the class struggle: 'such a critique represents one class ... the proletariat'. And with these words, he rejected the idea that he might, in the traditional sense, be the intellectual 'author' of such a critique.

These reflections return us to another fact: it was within the working-class movement - by participating in its practice, its hopes, and its struggles - that the thought of Marx and Engels changed fundamentally, became 'critical and revolutionary'. This is not just a simple point in the history of ideas. In the history of Marxism it has become the stake of crucially significant theoretico-political debates. When, in the full bloom of German Social-Democracy (1902), Kautsky affirmed that Marxist theory had been produced by the 'bourgeois intelligentsia', the sole guardians of 'science', and 'introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without'; when, in an entirely different context (the struggle against 'economism'), even Lenin picked up Kautsky's formulation, they were implicating Marx's thought in the most questionable kind of interpretation. A formulation is only a formulation. But it can crystallize a political tendency, as well as justify and reinforce certain historical practices. Behind this view of a scientific theory produced by bourgeois intellectuals, and 'introduced . . . from without' into the working-class movement, lies a whole conception of the relations between theory and practice, between the Party and the mass movement, and between party leaders and simple militants, which reproduces bourgeois forms of knowledge and power in their separation.

There is no question that Marx and Engels were academically trained bourgeois intellectuals, but origin is not necessarily destiny. The real destiny that defined Marx and Engels in their historical role as intellectuals of the working class was played out in their direct experience - Marx's experience of the political struggles of Communist and socialist organizations in France, and Engels's experience of working-class exploitation and Chartism in England. The stages of their progressive commitment can be tracked in the contradictions of their 'early works'; and we can even locate the 'moment' - after the dramatic confrontation of philosophy and political economy in the 1844 Manuscripts - of their 'consciousness' of the need radically to question the principles of their formation, to think in an entirely different way, to 'change terrain' and, in order so to do, to 'settle accounts with [their] former philosophical conscience'. This 'moment' begins to take shape in the striking, enigmatic sentences on the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) - only the first stage in an endless research that continued, after the political struggles of 1848-49, in The Class Struggles in France (1850), The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), the foundation of the First International (1864), then in Capital itself (1867) and in The Civil War in France (1871). We can respond to Kautsky's formula as follows: Marx's thought was formed and developed inside the working-class movement, on the basis of that movement and its positions. It was from within the working-class movement,paying its way through struggles and contradictions, that Marx's thought was diffused from the first Marxist circles to the great mass parties.

We find the same dubious interpretation in Engels's famous thesis, systematically repeated by Kautsky and invoked by Lenin, of the 'three sources' of Marxism. Marx and Engels were indeed among those intellectuals informed by German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism (our 'three sources'). To reduce Marx's thought to the confluence of these three currents, however, is to succumb to the platitude of a history of ideas, incapable of accounting for the politico-theoretical foundation that forced this encounter and transformed it into a 'revolutionary critique' of its elements. Hegel, Smith and Ricardo, Proudhon, etc., certainly constituted Marx's historical horizon - which he could not ignore, from which he had to begin - and were the raw material upon which he was obliged to work - but in order to penetrate its ideological facade, to shake up its principles, to perceive its other side, its hidden reality. To get to the other side is precisely to 'change terrain' and to adopt another position - a 'critique [that] represents . . . the proletariat'. To reduce the history of this revolution in thought to the simple confluence of 'three sources' is ultimately to see Marx as an 'author' who knew how to combine the elements that converged in him - for example, to make a 'metaphysics of political economy' by applying Hegel to Ricardo. It is to see Marx as putting each of these three elements 'on its feet' with their structures intact - constituting political economy as a science, philosophy as dialectical materialism, and the visions of French socialism as a 'materialist' philosophy of history or - the practical version of this messianism - as a scientific socialism.

We know that these formulae, in this finished form, are not to be found in Marx. Rather, they belong to the history of Marxism, where, from the Second International onwards, they represented the official definition of Marxism: dialectical materialism, historical materialism, scientific socialism. Nevertheless we do find in Marx, who battled within the contradiction of having to think something which had no name, elements that license the appearance of these formulae. We find the (Feuerbachian) theme of the 'inversion' of Hegelian philosophy, of putting the Hegelian dialectic 'back on its feet'. We do find - increasingly criticized yet always present as a motif - the idea of a philosophy of history, of a meaning of history embodied in the succession of 'progressive epochs' of determinate modes of production, leading to the transparence of Communism. We find in Marx this idealist representation of the 'realm of freedom' succeeding the 'realm of necessity' - the myth of a community wherein the 'free development' of individuals takes the place of social relations, which become as superfluous as the State and commodity relations.

The latent or manifest idealism of these themes haunts not only The German Ideology (a veritable 'materialist' philosophy of history) but also the evolutionism of the 1859 Preface (the 'progressive' succession of modes of production) and the tautological finalism of the famous sentences that delighted Gramsci: 'No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed. ... Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve'. In an infinitely more subtle form, the same idealism haunts Capital itself. We have learned to recognize in Capital's 'mode of exposition', however impressive, the fictive unity imposed upon it from the outset by the requirement of beginning with the abstraction of value - i.e. with the homogeneity presupposed by the field of commensurability - without having previously posited capitalist relations of exploitation as the condition of its process.

If the question of the 'beginning' represented a burden for Marx ('Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences'); if he imposed on himself the idea of a mandatory starting point with the ultimate abstraction of value, this was also a function of a certain conception of science [Wissenschaft] - that is, a conception of the formal conditions to which every thought process [Denkprozess] must submit in order to be true (e.g. that all knowledge, and hence its exposition, must proceed from the abstract to the concrete). Clearly, Hegel is still present in this illusion of the necessary presentation [Darstellung], or exposition, of the True.

The effects of this philosophical conception of the formation of True thought can be located at precise points in Capital : for example, in the arithmetical presentation of surplus-value as the difference between the value produced and the variable capital advanced in the process of production. Imposed in this form by deduction from the order of exposition, this presentation can lead to an economistic interpretation of exploitation. Exploitation, however, cannot be reduced to this surplus-value, but must be thought in its concrete forms and conditions. That is to say, it must be thought within the implacable constraints of the labour process (extension, intensification, compartmentalization) and the division and discipline of the organization of labour, on the one hand; and the conditions of the reproduction of the labour force (consumption, housing, family, education, health, questions of women, etc.), on the other. Undoubtedly, Marx did not identify exploitation solely with the arithmetical subtraction of value. He speaks of the various forms of surplus-value (absolute, relative), just as he speaks of forms of exploitation in the labour process and in the reproduction of labour-power. But he does this in chapters that have always appeared strange, 'historical' and 'concrete' rather than abstract, and on the margin of the dominant mode of exposition - as if he had to break off or interrupt this mode in order to impart its meaning to it!

Many other examples of difficulties and contradictions might be given where Marx gets caught in the self-imposed trap of commencing with the abstraction of value. To cite just two: the thorny question of the preservation/transference of the value of the means of production in their operation by labour-power; or the question of the transformation of values into prices of production, where Marx is caught in a faulty line of reasoning - as if one did not have to go back even further to understand the point.

So we see: however consciously posed, the obvious need to 'change terrain', to adopt a position that 'represents ... the proletariat', did not in itself serve from the outset 'to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience'. The materialism advocated by Marx also applies to him: consciousness is not practice; consciousness is not even thought in its real forms. We might note as a sign of this unavoidable gap the fact that apart from the brief, enigmatic proclamation of the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx himself would never clearly explain his new positions on 'his' philosophy. He had promised Engels a dozen pages on the dialectic; he never wrote them. And he 'omitted' the 1857 Introduction - the most elaborated statement of his position - saying: 'it seems to me confusing to anticipate results which still have to be substantiated'. Everything happened in his work and in his struggle: an interminable struggle to insure the new positions against the return of the old - a battle that was always in doubt, even when it seemed won; a struggle to find words that do not yet exist in order to think what was concealed by some omnipotent words. (The struggle is also fought over words.) Witness the most profound hesitations in Capital, where 'alienation' continues to haunt the text in the theory of fetishism, the opposition between dead and living labour, the domination of the conditions of production over the worker, and the figure of Communism. Alienation: an old word, an old, all-purpose, idealist concept, manifestly there to think something else - something which is unthought, and has remained so.

Here is another example of how history, in good materialist fashion, surprised and overtook Marx. Marx is distinguished from all idealist political philosophy in that he never entertained any illusions about the 'omnipotence of ideas', his own included. (It was Lenin who, in the heat of polemic, unwisely wrote that 'the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true'.) From the Manifesto onwards, Marx's position is clear and was never to change: it is the general movement of the class struggle of the proletariat against the capitalists that will open the path to Communism as a 'real movement'. The influence of ideas is only the secondary expression of a balance of class forces.

The extraordinary thing is that Marx takes account of this materialist thesis in the position of his own ideas. This is clear in the Manifesto as well as the 1859 Preface, where the exposition takes the form of a topography. Thus Marx expounds his own ideas twice, in two very different forms. He first presents them as principles of comprehensive analysis (whether of a global conjuncture, as in the Manifesto, or of the structure of a social formation, as in the 1859 Preface). His ideas are thus present - and present in their theoretical form - everywhere, since they are the means of explaining a global reality. But Marx's ideas make a second appearance, when he situates them in a position determined and limited by this global reality - in the formula of the 1859 Preface, among the 'ideological forms in which men become conscious of [class] conflict and fight it out'. In thus situating his ideas in a (superstructural) position defined by social and class relations, Marx no longer considers them as principles of explanation of the given whole, but solely in terms of their possible effect in the ideological struggle. Therewith the ideas change their form; they pass from 'theoretical form' to 'ideological form'.

The measure of Marx's materialism is less the materialist content of his theory than the acute, practical consciousness of the conditions, forms and limits within which these ideas can become active. Hence their double inscription in the topography. Hence the essential thesis that ideas, no matter how true and formally proven, can never be historically active in person but only in the form of a mass ideology, adopted in the class struggle.

Yet by an incredible historical irony, Marx was not in a position to conceive the possibility that his own thought might itself be diverted to serve the ends of the 'omnipotence of ideas' and used as its politics. It is not a question of putting Marx on trial here and judging him on the basis of something other than his own history, upon which we must reflect. Still, we may note one piece of evidence: in all that Marx left us, there is very little concerning what he called the 'superstructure' - meaning law, the State, and 'ideological forms'. And until Gramsci (whose contribution remains limited) the Marxist tradition added nothing to what Marx left us. Moreover, it is a surprising paradox that from a theoretical point of view Marxism is still at the stage of Marx, or rather somewhere short of him. His thought has given rise to commentaries and illustrations (sometimes brilliant, most often dull) and to some applications, and it has of course been plunged into sharp conflicts of interpretation in the course of revolutionary political action. Yet for the most part Marxism has been repeated, and distorted or ossified in the process. This is an astonishing phenomenon, given that Marxism presented itself not as utopian but as scientific, and that no science in the world lives without progressing - progress which involves critically questioning its first forms of expression, its 'beginning'. Nothing of the sort occurred in the case of Marxism: only Rosa Luxemburg had the courage to attempt a critique of the reproduction schemas in Volume 2 of Capital, but that was erroneous. Up until recent years, when a movement of critical research finally seems to be taking shape, Marxist theory has never been recommenced or developed. Now, this paradox refers us not only to the incontestable effects of the class struggle and the domination of bourgeois ideology, which have kept Marxism on the defensive, theoretically; it also refers us to the lacunae in Marx, which we must be careful not to judge in the name of the Idea of a Theory in itself, something that should be 'complete', without gaps or contradictions.

The materialism of the double position of ideas in the topography, and of the subordination of ideas to the class struggle, does not actually suffice to think the effectivity of ideas in the class struggle. It is also necessary for ideas to be taken up in mass 'ideological forms', something which is not possible through pure and simple propaganda but requires organizations of class struggle. 'Workers of the world unite!' effectively means 'Organize!' Now it seems that the exigency of organization did not pose a particular theoretical problem for Marx: the whole problem was resolved in advance through the transparency of a conscious, voluntary community constituted by free and equal members - a prefiguration of the free community of Communism, a community without social relations. The idea - which the working class would have to confront in its historical experience - that every organization must furnish itself with an apparatus so as to ensure its own unity of thought and action, that there is no organization without an apparatus, and that the division between apparatus and militants could reproduce the bourgeois division of power and cause problems so serious as to end in tragedy - this was inconceivable to Marx. But his successors did not tackle it as a theoretical problem either - not even Rosa Luxemburg, who had sensed the danger. And Marx, besides having a transparent notion of organization, never abandoned his old transparent conception of ideology as 'consciousness' or 'system of ideas', and never succeeded in conceiving its materiality - that is to say, its realization in practices governed by apparatuses functioning as forms of dominant ideology, dependent upon the State. Most of Marx's successors have done nothing but repeat (i.e. gloss or interpret) Marx himself, and blindly plunged into the darkness of night: in the dark on the State, in the dark on ideology, in the dark on the Party, in the dark on politics - at the extreme, toppling Marx's thought into something utterly alien to him.

It has been said that Marxism is 'not a dogma but a guide to action' - proof that the temptation of dogma haunts its denial. Lenin himself did not hesitate to affirm that 'the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true', and that 'Marxism is cast in a block of steel'. Of course, we must remember the context in which these statements were made, and realize that Lenin deliberately 'bent the stick' in the other direction; but history transforms the context, while the words remain. Marxism was turned into an evolutionist philosophy of history (Kautsky, Plekhanov), Capital into a treatise on political economy. To fix the unity of this enterprise, some unfortunate texts of Engels's (like Ludwig Feuerbach or the Dialectics of Nature) were utilized to construct 'the' Marxist philosophy - dialectical materialism - which Lenin, conferring an absolute guarantee, declared 'the only wholly consistent philosophy'. At the end of this line of development, Marxism became a philosophy (dialectical materialism) of which historical materialism was an 'integral part' and scientific socialism the application. In Marx's name, for years and years Stalin fixed the formulae of this poor man's Hegelianism, this Absolute Knowledge without exterior, from which any topography had disappeared - and for good reason. Since 'the cadres decide everything', the definition of the True was the prerogative of the leaders, the bourgeois ideology of the omnipotence of ideas triumphed in the monstrous unity of State-Party-State ideology, the masses had only to submit in the very name of their liberation.

The influence of bourgeois ideology on the working-class movement is insufficient to account for this enormous distortion; the reproduction of its forms within the workers' movement must also be explained. Here a theory of ideology - not only in relation to the State, to its material existence in certain apparatuses, but also in relation to the Party itself - is indispensable. Marxist leaders have always been sensitive to the influence of (dominant) bourgeois ideology on political tendencies within the working-class movement. Yet they always conceived it mechanically, and invariably ultimately identified it as the sole cause of all the movement's difficulties and 'deviations'. This influence alone. Engaged in and blinded by the practical, immediate problems of the class struggle, these leaders were not advised that any organization of struggle secretes a specific ideology designed to defend and ensure its own unity. If they did indeed recognize that Marxist theory had to find mass-based 'ideological forms' in order to become politically active, they did not really take into account the fact of the difference and potential contradiction between Marxist ideology and the ideology required for the existence, unity and defence of the organization. Lacking a theory of the Party, and of the effects produced by the structure of its apparatus, they could not conceive that Marxist ideology might be deformed by the ideology necessary for the Party as such. The latter prerequisite is reflected in Lenin's formulae on the 'omnipotence' and 'steel block' of Marxism. For the Party to be unified in its organizational practice, certain of its cause and its future in a critical period, nothing less than the proclaimed guarantee of the Truth of its ideology, and of the unfailing unity of its theory and its practice, was demanded. And since the Party is an apparatus, there was a great temptation for the leadership to attribute to itself the ideological guarantee of a kind of Absolute Knowledge, to the point of no longer perceiving the ideological function of this knowledge, confused with its power, and hence its risks - even to the extent of not realizing that this unrecognized function of ideology could end up reproducing in the Party itself, in the difference between its leaders and its militants, the structure of the bourgeois State.

Yet in order to perceive that the acknowledged influence of bourgeois ideology on the working-class movement is not simply a matter of 'ideas' or of 'tendencies' but is also reflected in the materiality of organizational structures that tend to reproduce the structure of the State, a materialist theory of ideology, of the State, of the Party, and of politics would have been required. In the practice of its organizations, Marxism has constantly encountered these realities: it has had to resolve the problems posed by them, but gropingly and as if blind. This constitutes the grandeur and pathos of Lenin's work and action: that he was acutely aware of the existence of these questions and did not cease to rectify and change his thinking when confronted with the gigantic task of founding a new party and a new State, and to involve the masses in the ideological renewal of a cultural revolution. Lenin's prodigious experience in the practice of revolution as a long and contradictory process is indeed a corrective to the mythic notion of it as a total and immediate mutation, but does not lead to a theory of State, ideology and Party. This constitutes the grandeur and pathos of Gramsci: to have sensed the importance and political weight of these questions, but without being able to extricate himself from a historical research still caught up in a philosophy of history. This is what constitutes the grandeur of Mao: that he practically questioned the metaphysical idea of the dialectic by audaciously submitting the dialectic to the dialectic (in his theory of 'contradiction'), and thus broached the nature of ideological relations and put his finger on the separation and power of the party apparatus, in the ambitious project of a cultural revolution, designed to change the relation between Party and masses. Here too, however, practice did not lead to a theory.

This testimony should not be a judgement in disguise. That would be to fall back into a subtle form of the 'omnipotence of ideas', to assign responsibility for what has happened in history to the absence of a theory of ideology, State, Party, and politics. That would be to assume that a 'complete' Marxist theory could have mastered history and, beyond this idealism of historical mastery, to suppose another idealism: that a theory 'represent[ing] ... the proletariat' in its class struggle is not born out of this struggle and subject to the history of this struggle, under the power of the State and the dominant ideology, is not dependent on the structure of its organizations, and of the ideological conditions of their constitution and their struggle. In its discoveries, as in its lacunae and contradictions, Marxist theory is subject to this struggle, just as it is implicated in the deformations and tragedies of its history.

Marxism will not rid itself of the tragedies of its history by condemning or deploring them; that way lie moralism and theoretical and political abdication. It is vital for Marxism to recognize these tragedies, to take responsibility for them, put them on its agenda, and forge the theoretical means required to understand them at their roots. Nor does this have anything to do with the intellectual curiosity of illuminating an irreversible past. At stake in such a radical reflection is Marxism today : let it finally begin to know itself as it is, and it will change.

For theoretical problems do not gambol in the heads of intellectuals, who determine neither their sudden appearance, nor their position, nor their unlocking. To be materialist today, we must first of all recognize that if we can sketch a first and fragile reckoning of Marx's thought - its lacunae, contradictions and illusions - it is because the situation imposes this task upon us and enables us to acquit it. The gigantic development of working-class and popular struggles in the world and in our countries, replying with unprecedented possibilities to the imperialist offensive; finally makes the general crisis of Marxism - political, ideological and theoretical - explode in the full light of day with its contradictions, confusions, impasses and tragedies. Without going back any further, we can say that this crisis was blocked and sealed up for us in the forms of Stalinist State dogmatism, which doomed all who tried to approach the problem to condemnation and political isolation. Today - and this is a novelty, of considerable importance - the forms of this blockage are breaking up, and the elements of the crisis are - even in their dispersion - becoming visible to the popular masses. The demands of the crisis make us see what is missing in Marx, because henceforth we urgently need to see clearly into the State, ideology, the Party, and politics. We have only to read Marx and Lenin to see that Marxism, even when it was living, was always in a critical position (in both senses of the word: fighting the illusions of the dominant ideology, and incessantly threatened in its discoveries) because it was always engaged in - and surprised by - mass movements, and open to the demands of the unpredictable history of their struggles. Now more than ever, even in the midst of the worst contradictions, the masses are on the move.

Perhaps for the first time in its history, Marxism is on the verge of profound changes, of which the first signs are visible. Today Marxist theory can and must readopt Marx's old dictum - and not forsake it: we must 'settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience' - and first of all, with that of Marx. And we should realize that this is not only the business of philosophers, intellectuals, leaders - nor even of single parties. For 'all men are "philosophers"' (Gramsci). In the last resort it is the business of the popular masses in the ordeal of their struggle.