Jacques
Maritain Center
1 Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, in Karl Marx, Selected Works, ed. V. Adoratsky, English ed. C. P. Dutt, New York: International Publishers, s.d., Vol. I, p. 453. Cf. Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873) of Capital, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954, Vol. I, pp. 11-20. The figure of speech used here is itself Hegelian in origin. Hegel had written, for example, in the Phenomenology of Mind (trans. J. B. Baillie, New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931, pp. 87-88; London: Allen and Unwin, 1931): "For the naive consciousness, to give itself up completely and straight away to science is to make an attempt, induced by some unknown influence, all at once to walk on its head. The compulsion to take up this attitude and move about in this position is a constraining force it is urged to fall in with, without ever being prepared for it and with no apparent necessity for doing so"; and in the Philosophy of History (Section III, chapter III, trans. J. Sibree, revised ed., New York: The Colonial Press, 1899, p. 447), speaking of the French Revolution: "Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man's existence centres in his head, i.e. in Thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality."
Let us note that if the words "dialectical materialism" were not employed by Marx himself, yet they are clearly a description of the "turning-over" pointed out by Engels, and the Marxist school has quite properly adopted them as the stock formula to designate the doctrine of Marx - Engels.
There is a rather detailed discussion of Marxist realism in H. B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch, London: Cohen and West, 1955, chap. I.
2 In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin was to distinguish rightly between "matter" in the sense of the physicist and "matter" in the sense of the philosopher; but as a faithful disciple of Marx and Engels he was to define matter in this second sense as that which [210]
exists independently of our consciousness, and so from the very beginning confuse the concept of matter and that of extra-mental reality. "The concept of matter . . . epistemologically implies nothing but objective reality existing independently of the human mind and reflected by it." (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, New York: International Publishers Co., Inc., 1927, p. 268.)
There is no "third way" possible, half-way between idealism and realism. In this sense, the criticisms that certain Marxist authors like Georges Lukacs (Existentialisme ou Marxisme, Paris: Nagel, 1948), inspired by Lenin's polemic against Mach, direct against the phenomenologist Wesenschau or against existentialism, are perfectly well-founded. But they confuse everything by saying matter instead of reality, and by pretending that materialism is the only conceivable realism (Lenin, op. cit., p. 128), which is a serious error simply from the point of view of the history of philosophy: neither Aristotle nor St. Thomas Aquinas was a materialist. Moreover, Marxist philosophy abstains completely, and with reason, from asking itself any questions concerning the nature of knowledge as such (that is dangerous ground -- knowledge implies immateriality), and contents itself with speaking as Engels did of "reflections of objective reality in consciousness" (Lukacs, op. cit., p. 263), without defining the precise activity of knowing.
Let us add that the work of Lenin mentioned here furnishes a curious example of dialectical mystification. We are told that the relative or approximative character of scientific truths -- partial and in a process of perpetual renewal -- concerning the "essence" (the rationally established laws) of things is in harmony with the absolute character of the total truth towards which we are thus progressing and which embraces the cosmic ensemble of all "Immediate phenomena". These views have nothing of the dialectical in them but derive from ordinary, even very ordinary, philosophical reflection; but they are quickly translated into the idea that the relative is a moment of the absolute, and offered as a triumph of the dialectical method (cf. Lukacs, op. cit., pp. 272-292).
1 See our work, Humanisme intégral, nouvelle edition, Paris: Fernand Aubier, 1946, p. 53. There is an English translation of this work under the title True Humanism, New York: Scribners, 1938 (London: Bles, 1939), with later reprintings.
1 Marx, The German Ideology, Parts I & III, ed. R. Pascal, New York: International Publishers, 1947, pp. 14-15 (Marxist Library, Vol. VI). Cf. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone, Chicago: C. H. Kerr and Co., 1904, Author's preface, pp. 11-12: "The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness"; A World Without Jews, trans. Dagobert D. Runes, New York: Philosophical Library, 1959, p. 3: "Respective are as different stages in the evolution of the human spirit, as successive snake skins shed by history -- man being the snake that bore them all".
2 Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx, l'homme et l'oeuvre. De l'hégélianisme au matérialisme historique (Paris: Alcan, 1934), Introduction, p. 1.
Cf. Henri Chambre, Le Marxisme en Union Soviétique (Paris: Seuil, 1955), pp. 33-34: "The economic is therefore primary and essential in the thought of Marx. Politics comes back finally to the economic, and sociology is reducible to it. It was this reduction of the social to the economic that was to vitiate the whole analysis of Karl Marx. It is not accidental. It is to be found in Capital as well as in German Ideology and the Economico-philosophical Manuscripts of 1844."
3 Humanisme intégral, pp. 58-59. The views presented in this work and those we are proposing here on the philosophy of Marx are complementary.
1 We use the word "Marxian" when we are thinking of Marx himself more than of his school, and the word "Marxist" when we are thinking of his school as much as or more than Marx himself.
1 Philosophie der Religion, ed. Lasson, I, p. 53 (in Werke, XII). Philosophie des Rechts, # 270, Addition (Ed. Lasson, Werke, VI, p. 354).
1 Cf. A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, pp. 110, 272-282. This is why the Hegelian sage "limits himself to understanding all, without ever denying or modifying anything". Ibid., p. 561.
2 Isaiah, III, 10.
3 "German idealism . . . has but given a transcendental sanction to the rules of existing society." Marx, "Capital Punishment -- Mr. Cobden's Pamphlets -- Regulations of the Bank of England," New York Daily Tribune, Friday, February 18, 1853, p. 3, col. 5.
1 On the atheism of Feuerbach and its relation to the atheism of Marx, cf. Henri de Lubac, Le drame de l'humanisme athée, Paris: Spes, 1945, chap. I (English trans.: The Drama of Atheist Humanism, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949; London: Sheed and Ward, 1949).
2 "Der Volkstribun Redigiert von Herman Kriege", in Marx - Engels, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. N. Riazanov and V. Adoratski (Berlin-Moscow: Marx - Engels Verlag G.M.B.H., 1927-1935), Abt. I, Band 6, p. 7, note. (Hereafter, MEGA).
1 Cf. our study "L'Eglise Catholique et Ic progr~s social", in Raison et raisons, Paris: Egloff, 1947, pp. 289-326; and our book Christianity and Democracy, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945.
2 In another work of the same period ("Der Kommunismus des Rheinisehen Beobachters" [Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung, 12 Sept. 1847, No. 731, in MEGA. I, 6, p. 278), Marx presents a pure caricature of the "social principles of Christianity", to which, it must be admitted, a certain kind of so-called apologetic literature of the period lent itself only too well, a literature which was also responsible in part for the violence of Proudhon. Consider, for example, the Dissertation of the Rev. J. Townsend On the Poor Laws, by a Well-wisher of Mankind (1817); this minister of the Gospel, who held the stimulus of hunger in the lower classes to be a providential disposition necessary to the social order, was fair game for Marx.
3 One thinks of the often-quoted lines from a letter written after the publication of Capital, in which Marx excuses himself to a friend for not having written sooner: "I was perpetually hovering on the verge of the grave. Therefore I had to use every moment in which I was capable of work in order that I might finish the task to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness in life and my family. I hope this explanation requires no further supplement. I laugh at the so-called 'practical' men and their wisdom. If one chose to be an ox one could of course turn one's back on the agonies of mankind and look after one's own skin." Marx to S. Meyer, April 30, 1867, in Marx - Engels, Correspondence, 1846-1895, trans. Dona Torr, new edition, New York: International Publishers, 1936, Letter no. 95, p. 219.
Louis Gardet has written (in "L'homme Marxiste", Nova et Vetera, Oct - Dec. 1955, p. 259) concerning the chapters in Capital which treat of the working day of the worker: "They [these chapters] follow highly technical analyses of absolute and relative surplus - [217]
value. It would have been sufficient, for the purposes of the demonstration in question, to to give one or two examples and some statistical data. Instead, Marx describes the day (or night) of the worker and of the child laborer in British industry as it existed in his day, and one senses in these lines a kind of shudder which can come only from the heart. No doubt Marx sought thereby to convince his reader. But nothing permits us to think that he was not himself as it were carried away by his indignation and his compassion. With good reason, moreover! . . . "
1 For Marx, thought exerts no real action in the world except as it is changed into material force. "Material force must be overcome by material force, but theory too turns into material force as soon as it takes possession of the masses." "Zur Kritik der Hegelsehen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung" [Aus Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, Paris, 1844], in MEGA, 1, 1/1, p. 614.
1 Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl, New York: Harper & Bros., 1959, p. 298.
2 Ibid., p. 279. Further along (p. 304), Barth remarks, however, that the identification of God with the dialectical movement "implies a scarcely acceptable limitation, even abolition of God's sovereignty, which makes even more questionable the designation of that which Hegel calls mind, idea, reason, etc., as God. This God, the God of Hegel, is at the least his own prisoner."
3 Concerning History and time, still another typical contrast between Hegelian idealism and dialectical materialism may be noted. For the latter, it is not for Man only, as Hegel said, that the notion of History is valid, but for Nature also.
1 "The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism", in The Range of Reason, New York: Scribners, 1952, p. 105; London: Bles, 1953. This article is a translation of La signification de l'athéisme contemporain (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1949).
2 Doctoral thesis: Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie, Vorrede, in MEGA, I, 1/I, p. 10.
3 Ibid., p. 10.
4 "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung", in AIEGA, I, 1/1, p. 615. The chapter on Marx was already completed and in the hands of the publisher when Père Cattier's book appeared (Georges M. M. Cattier, L'athéisme du jeune Marx, ses origines [220]
hégeliennes, Paris: Vrin, 1959). On many occasions we would have liked to cite this work, of such superior quality historically and philosophically. Let us note at least that his analyses of the thought of Hegel and of the writings of young Marx are of special interest with regard to certain themes met in the present chapter. On the dialectic of the master and the slave and on Marxian atheism, as on the nation af Gattungswesen, with the confusion that this implies between every solicitude of the person as such and egotistical interest; on the ethico-eschatological requirement enclosed in the Marxian idea of alienation, on the definition of man by work, on the primacy of the ethical point of view in the young Marx, on all these the author's observations are particularly enlightening. We believe, moreover, that Père Cattier is quite right to translate Entäusserung and Entfremdung by kénose and aliénation respectively (Jean Hippolyte translates them by aliénation and extranéation).
1 The influence of Darwin on Marx was also very profound (Cf. Jean Hyppolite, "De la structure du 'Capital' et de quelques présuppositions philosophiques de l'oeuvre de Marx", Bulletin de la Societé française de philosophie, 42e Année, no. 6, Oct. - Dec., 1946, pp. 169 - 196. It remained secandary, however, in comparison with that of Hegel.
2 When Marx wrote in the second edition of Capital (1873) that his dialectic was the "direct opposite" of that of Hegel (Afterword to the Second German Edition, Vol. I, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954, p. 19), it was insofar as one is realist-materialist and the other idealist. But the conception of the dialectic as a method and as knowledge -- and as immanent in the real -- passed directly from Hegel to Marx. It is thus that Plekhanov can write: "the dialectical method is the most important scientific legacy that German idealism left to its heir, modern materialism", and regard Marx as the "true successor" to Hegel. (Les questions fondamentales du Marxisme, Paris: Edit. Sociales, 1950, pp. 128-129.) Cf. V. I. Lenin, "Frederick Engels" (1895) in Marx - Engels - Marxism, 2nd English edition, Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1937, p. 52: "Retaining Hegel's idea of the eternal process of development, Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist point of view." (ttalics ours.)
1 "He [Hegel] transformed the subject of the Idea into the product, the attribute of the idea. He does not explain his thought by the object, but the object following a completed thought fixed in advance and situated in the abstract sphere of Logic. It is not a question of explaining the concrete Idea of the political constitution but rather of relating the political constitution to the abstract Idea, classifying it as a link in the development (Lebensgeschichte) of the Idea -- an obvious mystification." Aus der Kritik des Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts (# 261-313), in MEGA, I, 1/1, pp. 414-415.
2 In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx continues his critique of Hegelian idealism, and insists upon it, but remains at the same time, and always, subjugated to the Hegelian dialectic. "The outstanding thing in Hegel's Phenomenology and its final outcome -- that is, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle -- is thus first that Hegel conceives the self- genesis of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as suppression (Aufhebung) of this alienation, that he grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man -- true because real man -- as the outcome of man's own labour." Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. M. Milligan, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, s.d., p. 151 (translation modified).
In the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873), at the very moment when he declares that his dialectical method is the "direct opposite" of that of Hegel, Marx will continue explicitly to refer himself to the Hegelian dialectic. "The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticized nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still in fashion. . . . The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell." (Vol. 1, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954, p. 20.)
1 Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 1, Pp. 452-453.
2 In the same way, with a similar objectivist zeal, he was to write: ". . . principles are not the starting point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to Nature and human history, but abstracted from them; . . . principles are only valid insofar as they are in conformity with Nature and history." Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Anti-Duhring), trans. E. Burns, New York: International Publishers, 1939, p. 42. However, and here the counterpart is immediately evident, with its illusory themes, "history" not only shows that a process has been realized, but it "demonstrates" that it must necessarily be realized in the future; and it is the dialectical law which finally accounts for what happens: ". . . after he [Marx] has proved from history that in fact the process has partially already occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he then also characterizes it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law." Ibid., p. 147.
3 Cf. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 237; see ibid., pp. 240, 274, 285, 359. Professor V. Adoratsky writes similarly: "Our knowledge contains an absolute (unconditional and unquestionable) truth, viz., that it reflects the external world." Dialectical Materialism, New York: International Publishers, 1934, pp. 66-67.
1 Cf. A Soviet History of Philosophy, extracts translated by William Edgerton, Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, [1950], p. 38.
2 V. I. Lenin, "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism", in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 35: "The main achievement [among those of classical German philosophy] is dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fuller, deeper form, free from one-sidedness." Elsewhere Lenin writes: "A development that repeats, as it were, the stages already passed but repeats them in a different way, on a higher plane ('negation of negation'); a development, so to speak, in spirals, not in a straight line; a spasmodic, catastrophic, revolutionary development; 'breaks of gradualness'; transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses for development, imparted by the contradiction, the conflict of different forces and tendencies reacting within a given society; interdependence, and the closest, indissoluble connection between all sides of every phenomenon (history disclosing ever newer and newer sides); a connection that provides the one world-process of motion proceeding according to law -- such are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of evolution more full of meaning than the current one." "Karl Marx" in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 28. This passage seems highly significant to us. It has the air of offering an objective or "scientific" description, derived from observation and generalization, while in reality the notion of dialectical self-movement is presupposed, as the key by means of which all of the objective material is interpreted. What appears to be simply a description of the comportment of things derived from observation and generalization remains an application of the dialectic of Hegel, which is the all-purpose weapon. "The contributors to the magazine Under the Banner of Marxism must arrange for the systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpoint, i.e., the dialectics which Marx applied practically in his Capital and in his historical and political works. . . . Taking as our basis Marx's method of applying the Hegelian dialectics materialistically conceived, we can and should treat this dialectics from all sides, print excerpts from Hegel's principal works in the magazine, interpret them materialistically and comment on them with the help of examples of the way Marx applied dialectics, as well as of examples of dialectics in the sphere of economic and political relations, which recent history, especially modern imperialist war and revolution, is providing in abundance." V. I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism", in Lenin, Selected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, Ltd., 1939, Vol. XI, pp. 77-78.
The following passage from Stalin shows very clearly how in the official orthodoxy of [224]
Marxism the sleight of hand by which the word "dialectic" jumps from logical contradictions in discourse to real contrarieties in nature is executed as something wholly natural and posing no problem, and how by the same means the essential operation -- the injection of the logical being of reason and of the movement of human discourse into the reality of nature and of matter -- is completely concealed: "Dialectics comes from the Greek dialego, to discourse, to debate. In ancient times dialectics was the art of arriving at the truth by disclosing the contradictions in the argument of an opponent and overcoming these contradictions. There were philosophers in ancient times who believed that the disclosure of contradictions in thought and the clash of opposite opinions was the best method of arriving at the truth. This dialectical method of thought, later extended to the phenomena of nature, developed into the dialectical method of apprehending nature, which regards the phenomena of nature as being in constant movement and undergoing constant change, and the development of nature as the result of the development of the contradictions in nature, as the result of the interaction of opposed forces in nature." Joseph Stalin, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism", written in September 1938 for the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (chapter IV), in Stalin, Selected Writings, New York: International Publishers, 1942, p. 407. (Italics ours.)
The essential operation that we have mentioned, however, retains all of
its importance, and it is not difficult to recognize it underneath its
"scientific" disguise. After having in a completely fallacious way
indicated the opposition between the dialectic and "metaphysics" in
terms of three points (as if "metaphysics" were not the first to point
out the universal interdependence of nature, its state of movement and
change, the qualitative leaps occasioned in it by quantitative
modifications: long before Hegel, Aristotle, in his analysis of the
category of measure, exemplified this "dialectical law" of the passage
from quantity to quality, in his theory of substantial changes and of
ultimate disposition, or in that of organic growth, or that of the
"golden mean" of virtue), Stalin goes on to a fourth point, where he
affirms (and this time it is quite exclusively a matter of dialectical
explanation) that the "internal contradictions" implied in "all things
and phenomena of nature" are "the internal content of the process of
development", and declares, following Lenin (Filosofskie tetradi
the very essence of things",
and (Selected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, Ltd., 1939,
Vol. XI, pp. 81-82) that "development is the 'struggle' of opposites".
(Ibid., p. 410.)
1 "The dialectic of the concept itself became merely the conscious
reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world." Engels, Ludwig
Feuerbach . . . in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 453. See above, p. 209, note 1, and p. 222,
note 1.
2 Cf. George M. M. Cottier, "La Philosophie de la praxis," Revue
Thomiste, LV, no. 3 (1955), pp. 582-614.
1 "The question whether objective truth is an attribute of human
thought -- is not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must
prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the
'this-sidedness' of his thinking in practice. The dispute over
the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from
practice is a purely scholastic question." "The philosophers
have only interpreted the world differently, the point is, to change
it." Theses on Feuerbach, II and XI, as an Appendix in Marx -
Engels, The German Ideology, Parts I & III, pp. 197, 199.
(Italics ours.) Cf. the common translation based on Engels' edition of
the Theses in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 471,
473.
2 It is thus that in his Ludwig Feuerbach. . . (in Marx,
Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 432-433) Engels explains that our
knowledge concerning the chemical constitution of a given coloring
matter is only verified when we are capable of producing the agent in
question, and that it was the discovery of a hitherto unknown planet,
whose position had previously been computed, which verified the
Copernican theory. He might just as well like many a "practical man"
who considers himself clever, invoke the example of Diogenes proving
the reality of movement by walking.
3 Cf. above, chap. VII, p. 133.
1 Cf. above, pp. 223-225. The way in
which Marx and Engels, each in his own manner, explain the dialectical
law of the transformations of property is a remarkable example of the
inevitable arbitrariness we are speaking of here. (Cf. Karl Kautsky,
Materialistische Geschichtsauffaussung, Berlin: 1927, I, pp.
133-134; Serban Voinea, La Morale et le Socialisme, Gand: La
Flamme, 1953, p. 301.)
For Marx (Capital, Book I, vol. II, part viii, chapter xxxi,
Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954, Vol. I, pp. 761 ff.;
cf. Value, Price and Profit, VII, in Marx, Selected
Works, Vol. I, pp. 313-314), the historical and dialectical
point of departure is small enterprise, with private ownership by the
worker of his means of production. Then comes the negation (primitive
capitalist accumulation dissolves this form of private property and
replaces it with concentrated capitalist private property). Then
finally, the negation of the negation (ownership by the worker of the
means of collective production).
For Engels on the contrary (Anti-Düring, p. 151), the point
of departure is common ownership of land; then comes the negation
(transformation into private property); then the negation of the
negation (returning to common property of a superior type).
The subsequent developments of Marxism have amply illustrated this
inevitable arbitrariness of the Hegelian organon. The work of M.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique, Paris:
Gallimard, 1955, is particularly suggestive from this point of view.
2 Cf. Andrei Zhdanov, in his Speech to the Philosophers (on the
subject of Professor Aleksandrov's History of Philosophy),
Bolshevik, 16 (1947), pp. 7-23. In this address Zhadnov recalls
that, according to the teaching of Lenin, dialectical materialism
carries the party spirit with it, so to speak, obliging us in every
evaluation of events to take directly and openly the point of view of a
definite social group". Paragraph 42, quoted in "Andrei Zhdanov's
Speech to the Philosophers: An Essay in Interpretation", by J.
and M. Miller, Soviet Studies, Vol. I, no. 1 (June, 1949), p. 45, note
8.
Insisting more than Marx and Engels had done on the importance of
ideology, and on showing in the "philosophy of praxis" "the ideology of
the revolutionary workers'
[228]
movement" (H. Chambre, op. cit., p. 45), it is not surprising
that Lenin turned out at the same time to be the prophet of "party
spirit". It is in this same perspective that a Marxist author of
recognized authority could write: "Every philosophy is a 'politics',
and every philosopher is essentially a politician." A. Gramsci, Il
materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Turin:
Einaudi, 1949, p. 45, quoted by H. Chambre, op. cit., p. 44.
On the power of the Marxist method to captivate minds, once they agree
to "play the dialectical game", see the searching remarks of Louis
Gardet in "L'homme Marxiste", Nova et Vetera, Oct. - Dec., 1955,
pp. 252-254.
1 Cf. Gustavo A. Wetter, Il materialismo dialettico sovietico,
Turin: Einaudi, 1948 (there exists an English translation of a later
and much revised German edition of this work: Dialectical
Materialism, trans. P. Heath, New York: Frederick A. Praeger,
1958); Henri Chambre, Le marxisme en Union Soviétique,
Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1955.
2 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique, chapter VI,
trans. R. Dixon, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956, p.
125. This title refers to Bruno Bauer and his colleagues.
3 Poverty of Philosophy, chapter II, ed. C. P. Dutt and V.
Chattopadhyaya, New York: International Publishers, n.d., p. 98.
1 The Holy Family, chapter VI, p. 107.
2 Ibid., p. 110.
3 Ibid., p. 125.
4 Capital, Book I, vol. II, part viii, chapter xxxii, ed. cit.,
Vol. I, p. 763.
5 The Holy Family, ch. IV, p. 53. "It cannot abolish the
conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman
conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own
situation." Ibid., p. 52.
6 Marx to J. B. Schweitzer, February 13, 1865, as quoted by Marx in his
letter to Engels, February 18, 1865, in Marx - Engels,
Correspondence , 1846-1895, Letter no. 80, p. 190.
7 The Civil War in France, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol.
II, p. 504.
8 Ibid., p. 504. (Italics ours.)
9 The Holy Family, ch. IV, p. 52.
10 "Zur Kritik der Hegelsehen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung", trans. in
Bottomore and Rubel, Karl Marx. Selected Writings in Sociology and
Social Philosophy, London: Watts & Co., 1956, p. 182.
11 Ibid., p. 180ff.
12 Ibid., p. 182.
13 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p. 113.
14 The German Ideology, Parts I & III, p. 38.
1 The German Ideology, Parts I & III, p. 38.
2 It is a rationalization, effected after the fact and wholly
superficial, to seek, with Charles Andler or Sidney Hook for example,
to reconcile in Marx the inevitability of the historic process and the
essential role attached to the will of the masses and their thinkers by
saying that the inevitability in question reduces itself to that of a
dilemma or of a double possibility: either this (communism) or
that (barbarism), such that it is ethically (but only ethically)
necessary to choose this (cf. Maximilien Rubel, Pages choisies pour
une Ethique Socialiste, pp. xxii-xxix). One then disregards Marx's
faith in the rationality immanent in the movement of history. When Marx
writes (Poverty of Philosophy, ed. C. P. Dutt and V.
Chattopadhyaya, New York: International Publishers, s.d., p. 147):
le combat ou la mort, la lutte sanguinaire ou le néant
[232]
we have indicated in the text, what the Hegelian dialectic reset upon
its feet taught Marx is at once and by the same means the inevitability
of the heroic engagement itself of the proletariat in combat, and the
essential role of this willing engagement in the very inevitability of
historical movement. In the absence of any philosophical affirmation of
freedom of choice (liberum arbitrium) and of any philosophical
doctrine of moral obligation, obviously no valid theoretical solution
of the antinomy was possible. Understandably the solution for Marx was,
and could be, only practical. From the Marxian point of view, as
Maximilien Rubel correctly writes (Pages choisies . . ., p.
xxxi), "the solution of theoretical antinomies is indeed possible only
in a practical manner" and this is precisely what the theses on
Feuerbach state, notably thesis III: "The coincidence of the changing
circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can only be
comprehended and rationally understood as revolutionary
practice." As an Appendix to The German Ideology, Parts I &
III, p. 198 (cf. the translation in Marx, Selected Works,
Vol. 1, p. 472).
1 Maximilien Rubel, Pages choisies . . ., p. xliv.
2 Cf. Georges Lukacs, op. cit., p. 235.
3 Capital, Book I, vol. II, part viii, chapter xxxi, ed.
cit., Vol. I, p. 751.
1 It is curious to note that, according to Wetter (op. cit., p.
327), the way in which Soviet philosophers explain the category of
necessity (as opposed to the fortuitous) allows us to glimpse a certain
appeal to finality.
2 "The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism", in The Range of Reason,
pp. 106-107.
3 Ibid., p. 108.
1 "The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism", in The Range of Reason,
p. 112.
2 "As proletarian, man becomes the produce of his own product, he is
reduced to the state of a simple cog in the immense machine which is
greater than he is, and whose overall workings Marx is determined to
grasp. Capital produces itself, or rather reproduces itself and grows;
it is Capital which determines men, which determines the conditions of
reproduction, of the nourishment or life of men as a group. But a
moment comes when this alienation becomes a living contradiction. This
moment is the moment of the proletariat. In the proletariat, and
especially in the general proletarianization of society, man is no
longer anything but the inert product of his own product. Now according
to Hegel, the consciousness of man is 'absolute elasticity'. It cannot
reconcile itself to perceiving itself as a mere thing. Its final state
of inertia is therefore the condition of its own resurgence. That is
why human consciousness regrasps itself in the proletariat and in the
proletarianized Society. This class consciousness is at the same time a
human consciousness, a consciousness which becomes creative of a new
order. Communism . . . is the active negation of its negation,
capitalism, but this negation of the negation is authentically
affirmative. It is the idea realized, man deified or true man,
who grasps himself as the creator of his history and the one who
makes it." Jean Hyppolite, "Marxisme et Philosophie", Revue
Socialiste, November, 1946, pp. 548-549.
1 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p.
102.
It is on this dogmatic theme that the Marxist philosophy of history
depends -- and it is this which keeps it from being an authentic
philosophy of history. If contemporary Marxists had an authentically
philosophical view of history they would understand that all the uproar
and all the agitation concerning the advent of the communist revolution
into the world in the second half of the twentieth century only
proceeds in reality from an ideological fixation. In actual fact, their
revolution is no longer ahead of them, it is behind them, it has
already taken place -- in Russia. And having taken place
at this point in the world, it has taken place for the world,
just as, having taken place in France, the French Revolution has taken
place not only for France but for the world. No doubt the communist
revolution can be extended, as has happened in China, but this
process of extension is necessarily limited by the resistance of the
areas of noncommunist civilization whose reactions of self-preservation
have been awakened. Under these conditions, the historical process
which will really take place is that according to which the
noncommunist peoples must henceforth assimilate, each according to its
own spirit and its own structures, the effects, the recoils, and the
general results of the revolution of 1917, while the communist peoples,
on their side, must stabilize themselves and evolve new internal
structures proper to themselves.
2 Cf. G. V. Plekhanov, Les questions fondamentales du marxisme,
Paris: Editions sociales, 1950, p. 83: "In his Philosophy of
Religion, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. xii, p. 98, Hegel says:
'Die Freiheit ist dies, nichts zu wollen als sich,' that is to say:
Freedom consists in willing nothing other than oneself . . . It
would be the same for the proletariat, which would transform the means
of production into social property and organize social production on
new bases: it would will nothing but itself. And it would feel
itself completely free. . . ." (Italics ours.)
3 Cf. Georges Lukacs, op. cit., p. 183.
4 "Freedom is the appreciation of necessity." Engels,
Anti-Dühring, p. 125. The saying is taken up by Lenin --
"Karl Marx" (1914), in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 26 --
and is classic in Marxist authors.
5 Cf. above, p. 234, note 2. This "deified man", or
"true man", is what Marx called whole man ("Man appropriates his
total essence in a total manner, that is to say, as a whole man."
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p. 106) -- the
"supreme instance", as H. Lefebvre says (Le matérialisme
dialectique, Paris: P.U.F., p. 149), of communist humanism.
6 And even his absolute Knowledge: for the Hegelian Sage, who moreover
abandons his subjective individuality, "consumed like a gnat", through
the intuition of the eternal, is only the point of convergence of the
history of man and the whole of philosophy.
1 "M. Proudhon does not know that all history is nothing but a
continuous transformation of human nature." Marx, Poverty of
Philosophy, p. 124.
Marx will similarly write in Capital, that in acting on the
external world and changing it, man at the same time changes his own
nature.
2 This does not keep the essence of man, from which man is now
alienated and which he must reconquer in the end, from being an
important part of the Marxist system. But this essence (the word still
had a completely Hegelian signification for the young Marx) is not at
all a synonym of human nature: indeed it is nothing other than freedom
in the Hegelian sense, the autonomy which will be fully realized in
true man or deified man. "Freedom is the essence of man," wrote Marx in
the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842. ("Debatten uber Pressfreiheit
und Publikation der Landstandischen Verhandlungen" [Rheinische
Zeitung , 12 (May, 1842), no. 132] in MEGA, I, 1/1, p. 202.
3 Cf. The German Ideology, Parts I & III, pp. 7 ff.; Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 75-76. Some Marxist
authors will speak, for example, of the three distinctive traits of
man, which are articulated language, abstract thought, and the
fabrication of tools (cf. A. Pannekoek, Marxismus und
Darwinismus, Leipzig, 1914. Marx himself, in Capital (Book
I, vol. I, part iii, chapter vii, ed. cit. Vol. I, p. 179),
described man, following Franklin, as a tool-making animal). But these
characteristics have only a purely empirical significance for them, and
are not the properties of a nature in the philosophical sense of
that word.
Let us add that Marxism seems to be totally ignorant of the authentic
concept of nature (as an intelligible object immutable in its
specific characteristics but existing in time); he regularly
confuses this concept with that of a thing absolutely immutable
and existing above time (like a separated Platonic type, or like
the Kantian "thing in itself") and which can neither evolve, transform
itself, nor progress inside its specific limits, nor permit a
substantial transformation as a result of which the specific nature of
the descendants of an organism will be other than the specific nature
of the organism itself, as happens according to the transformist view.
In fact, when Marxist authors attack the notion of nature, they most
often appear to do so in the name of a transformism whose philosophical
import is childishly conceived.
1 I.e., Gattungswesen. Cf. Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 76, 105, 158 (and the German text in MEGA,
I, 3, pp. 87, 88); "Zur Judenfrage" [Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbuch,
August - November, 1843] in MEGA, I, 1/1, p. 584.
2 Marx to Ruge, May, 1843, in MEGA, I, 1/1, p. 562.
3 Cf. Humanisme intégral, pp. 54-55.
4 Ibid., p. 55.
1 Cf. Paul Lafargue, "Reminiscences of Marx", in Marx, Selected
Works, Vol. I, p. 84.
2 Cf. A. Cornu, op. cit., p. 346.
3 Lenin, "Frederick Engels" (1895), in Marx - Engels - Marxism, pp.
56-57.
4 Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, III, in Marx,
Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 186. Cf. Engels,
Anti-Dühring, p. 310.
5 "The first act in which the State really comes forward as the
representative of society as a whole -- the taking possession of the
means of production in the name of society -- is at the same time its
last independent act as a State. The interference of the State power in
social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and
then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the
administration of things and the direction of the processes of
production. The State is not 'abolished', it withers away."
Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 307. Cf. Engels, Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p.
182; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,
New York: International Publishers, s.d., p. 158.
6 Cf. our work Humanisme intégral, chapter 1 ("La
tragédie de l'humanisme"), pp. 16-42.
1 "The individual is the social being." Marx, Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p. 104. Cf. ibid.: ". . .
the human essence of nature first exists only for social
man; for only here does nature exist for him as a bond with man. . . .
Thus society is the consummated oneness in substance of men and
nature -- the true resurrection of nature -- the naturalism of man and
the humanism of nature both brought to fulfillment." Cf. also Theses
on Feuerbach (thesis VI): "In its reality it [the essence of man]
is the ensemble (aggregate) of social relations." As an Appendix
in The German Ideology, Parts I & III, p. 198.
2 Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx, Selected
Works , Vol. I, p. 228.
3 Cf. our study La personne et le bien commun, Paris:
Desclée de Brouwer, s.d. [1947] (English trans.: The Person
and the Common Good, New York: Scribners, 1947; London: Bles,
1957).
4 V.I. Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder,
revised trans., New York: International Publishers, 1934, p. 33 (cf.
Lenin, Selected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1947, Vol.
II, p. 594). Marx had written in Capital (Book I, vol. II, part
iv, chapter xv, section 9, ed. cit., Vol. I, pp. 487-488):
"Modern Industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes
the necessity of recognizing, as a fundamental law of production,
variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied
work, consequently the
[240]
greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a
question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production
to the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels
society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of today,
crippled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation,
and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed
individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of
production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are
but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired
powers." Cf. The German Ideology, Parts I & III, pp. 74-75;
Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 320.
1 "The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism", in The Range of Reason,
p. 107.
2 Cf. above, pp. 218-219.
3 "The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism", in The Range of Reason,
p. 107.
1 It was simply as a stylistic device and as a pure concession to
current ideas (see his letter to Engels, November 4, 1864, in Marx -
Engels, Correspondence, 1846-1895, Letter no. 71, p. 162) that Marx
employed the words moral and justice in the "Address and Provisional
Rules of the Working Men's International Association", and in the
Preamble to the statutes (in Marx, Selected Works, Vol.
II, 432-445).
2 Op. cit., especially pp. 183-186, 294-306. On p. 308 the
author writes: "Thus Marx's conception of communism, born, like that of
Hess and that of Engels, of a feeling of moral reprobation toward
social injustice, evolved from idealism toward materialism, passing
from the philosophical and moral level on which Hess operated to the
economic and social level. . . ."
3 Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1950; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1952), pp. 385-388 and 392-397, insists with great force upon the
essential role of this background of moral indignation in Marx, however
deeply he repressed it owing to his aversion to idle phrases and
moralism, and however incompatible it was with the pretension to pure
"objectivity" of a materialist "science".
Maximilien Rubel also recognizes in Marx the existence of "powerful
ethical motivations". (Pages choisies . . ., p. xv.)
1 Engels, Preface to the German Edition of 1883, Manifesto of the
Communist Party, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 193.
2 Manifesto of the Communist Party, ibid., p. 212.
3 In his article on Engels, Lenin notes that "Marx and Engels were
democrats before becoming socialists, and their democratic
feelings, which made them hate the arbitrary in politics, were
extremely strong." (V. I. Lenin, "Friedrich Engels", in Karl Marx et sa
doctrine, p. 48. -- Cf. the translation in Lenin, Marx - Engels -
Marxism, 2nd English edition, Moscow: Co-operative Publishing
Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1937, p. 57.) One would
like to know the name of this "democratic feeling" which makes one hate
"the arbitrary in politics".
1 Cf. our study The Person and the Common Good, p. 88. Toynbee
has also characterized Communism as a "Christian heresy".
2 Cf. the anthology collected by Maximilien Rubel, Pages choisies
pour une éthique socialiste, Textes réunis, traduits
et annotés, précédés d'un introduction A
l'éthique marxienne, Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1948.
3 Cf. Serban Voinea, La morale et le socialisme, Gand: La
Flamme, 1953. The author is a disciple of Kautsky.
4 Benedetto Croce, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl
Marx, chapter III, trans. C. M. Meredith, London: George Allen and
Unwin, Ltd., 1931, p. 115.
1 The absence of a moral philosophy as a particular philosophical
discipline ("l'assenza di una qualsiasi filosofia morale come
disciplina filosofica a se stante") in Soviet systematization, pointed
out by G. Wetter (op. cit., p. 237), is very significant from
this point of view.
2 "Only the marriage based on love is moral. . ." Engels, The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State, chapter II, New
York: International Publishers, s.d., p. 73. "If Marx had a horror of
the moralising verbalism of doctrinaire socialists, if he avoided
employing in his writings such words as 'justice', 'duty', 'morality',
etc. . . . -- terms which Proudhon had constantly abused -- it remains
none the less true that the most objective sequences of his thought are
embellished with value-judgments under their diverse forms. . . ."
Maximilien Rubel, Pages choisies . . ., p. xxvii. Cf.
ibid. , p. xlvi.
3 Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 307-308.
4 Marx, Capital, Book I, vol. I, part iv, chapter xiv, ed. cit., Vol.
I, p. 360; cf. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 324.
5 Marx, "Der Kommunismus des Rheinischen Beobachters" [Deutsche
Brusseler Zeitung, 12 Sept. 1847, no. 73], in MEGA, I, 6, p. 278.
Cf. Aus den Exzerptheften [Review of J. R. MacCulloch,
Discours sur l'origine, les progrès, les objets particuliers
et l'importance de l'économie politique] in MEGA, I, 3, p.
558: "The infamy of political economy . . ."; or again Capital,
Book I, vol. II, part viii, chapter xxxii, ed. cit., Vol. I, p. 762:
"The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with
merciless vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most
infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious . . ."
6 Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 1, p.
208.
1 "The critique of religion ends with the theory that man is the
supreme being for man, therefore with the categorical imperative to
abolish all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned,
despised being." Marx, "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie.
Einleitung", in MEGA, I, 1/1, pp. 614-615.
2 The Holy Family, chapter IV, p. 174.
3 Cf. Marx, "Capital Punishment -- Mr. Cobden's Pamphlets --
Regulations of the Bank of England", New-York Daily Tribune,
February 18, 1853, p. 3, col. 5.
1 The Holy Family, chapter VIII, p. 265. The remark is taken
from Fourier's Théorie des quatre mouvements et des
destinées générales.
2 Cf. H. B. Acton, op. cit., pp. 209-215, 235-236.
3 Marx, "Peuchet: vom Selsbstmord" [Gesellschaftspiegel, Bd. II,
Heft VIII (Jan. 1846), pp. 14-26] in MEGA, I, 3, p. 394.
4 "The Cunning of Reason in Hegel and Marx", The Review of
Politics, Vol. 18 (July, 1955), pp. 269-295.
5 Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach . . ., in Marx, Selected
Works, Vol. I, pp. 446-447: "He appears just as superficial, in
comparison with Hegel, in his treatment of the antithesis of good and
evil. 'One believes one is saying something great,' Hegel remarks, 'if
one says that "man is naturally good". But one forgets that one says
something far greater when one says "man is naturally evil".' According
to Hegel, evil is the form in which the motive force of historical
development presents itself. This, indeed, contains the twofold
significance that while, on the one hand, each new advance necessarily
appears as a sacrilege against things hallowed, as a rebellion against
conditions which, however old and moribund, have still been sanctified
by custom; on the other hand, it is precisely the wicked passions of
man -- greed and lust for power -- which, since the emergence of class
antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development -- a fact of
which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for example,
constitutes a single continual proof. But it does not occur to
Feuerbach to investigate the historical role of moral evil."
1 "A really human morality which transcends class antagonisms and their
legacies in thought becomes possible only at a stage of society which
has not only overcome class contradictions but has even forgotten them
in practical life." Anti-Dühring, p. 105.
2 "Voprosy Filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), 3 (1948)",
summarized by J. and M. Miller in Soviet Studies, Vol. I, no. 3
(January, 1950), p. 227, note 20.
3 Roger Garaudy, Le communisme et la morale, Paris, 1945, p.
17.
4 Serban Voinea, La morale et le socialisme, Gand: La Flamme,
1953.
1 Humanisme intégral, pp. 61-62. A certain confirmation of
these views is to be found in the rehabilitation of "ideology"
accomplished by Lenin, and in the restitution of moral concepts (recast
in dependency on the absolute primacy of the social) which is taking
place in Soviet Russia. Although the realization of communism in Soviet
society remains extremely far from the full realization promised to the
human race by Marxism, what we have there is nevertheless a "third
phase", which "corresponds to the victory of socialism in the U.S.S.R.
It is that phase in which the conscience of Soviet men is radically
modified, in such a way that 'communist morality has become the
morality of the whole Soviet society' [V. N. Kolbanovski, O
Kommunisticeskoj morali, p. 109]." (H. Chambre, op. cit.,
p. 267.)
1 "Marxist ethics [has] objective and rigorous norms and principles
derived from a scientific understanding of society", and "ethical
relativism was important in the thought of Rosenberg and Goebbels",
wrote H. Shiskin in the Soviet periodical Voprosy Filosofii
(cited by J. and M. Miller in Soviet Studies, Vol. I, no. 3
(Jan. 1950), p. 227). "Communist morality is just, because scientific,
that is to say, founded on Marxism. It excludes all 'subjective
relativism'." H. Chambre, op. cit., p. 268 (summarizing G. M.
Gak, Voprosy etiki v marksistiko-leninskoj morali). "In the
sphere of morality, there is no duality of truth" writes Mr. Gak.
2 "L'oggetto del materialismo dialettico coincide perciò con
l'oggetto delle singole scienze positive. La differenza consiste in
ciò: che la dialettica materialistica (cioè la
filosofia), si occupa di quest' oggetto in un senso molto piu
universale . . .
"La dialettica materialistica ha un duplice oggetto: le leggi
universalissime del pensiero umano e, nello stesso tempo, le leggi
universalissime della realtà . . .
"Il materialismo dialettico è l'unità della logica, della
dialettica e della teoria della conoscenza. Principio che fu già
definito da Lenin 'della rnassima importanza'." G. Wetter, op.
cit., pp. 234-236. These pages on philosophy and the positive
sciences in the Soviet conception of philosophy are of major
importance.
3 The way in which Marxist philosophy understands the notion of essence
is very significant in this perspective. "Essence" does not belong to a
different order from "phenomenon", is, indeed, identical with it, being
nothing other than the connection and internal necessity, expressed
through the laws of science and those of dialectic, among phenomena,
which, as simple empirical data and before being treated by science,
are characterized as external, apparent, and fortuitous. Cf. G. Wetter,
op. cit., pp. 302-306 on the categories Essence and Phenomenon.
1 Cf. below, chapter XI, pp. 287-289 and
p. 288 note 1. Let us add that every
truth, from the instant it is true, is eternal in a sense, even if it
bears upon a temporary event or state. "Robespierre will be overthrown
tomorrow" is a proposition which was true one day, but which has ceased
to be true. But once the event has occurred, it will remain eternally
true that Robespierre was overthrown on the 9th Thermidor, in the year
11.
2 V. I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Youth Leagues," Speech delivered at
the Third All Russian Young Communist League, October 2, 1920, in
Lenin, Selected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1947, Vol.
II, pp. 669, 670.
3 New York: International Publishers, 1949, p. 42.
1 The German Ideology, Parts I & III, p. 22. It is likewise the
division of labor which is responsible for the concentration of
artistic talent in certain ones only, and of "the subordination of the
individual to a given art so that he is exclusively a painter, a
sculptor, etc. . . . In a communist organization of society there are
no painters; at most there are people who, among other things, also
paint." Marx - Engels, Literature and Art, New York:
International Publishers, 1947, p. 76 (from Deutsche Ideologie.
Das Leipziger Konzil, III, Sankt Max, in MEGA, I, 5, p. 373).
2 Capital, Book III, part vii, chapter xlvii, trans. E.
Untermann, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1907, Vol. III, p. 954.
On the level of work imposed by need and external necessity "freedom in
this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that
socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange
with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of
being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their
task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most
adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always
remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of
human power, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish
upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the
working day is its fundamental premise." Ibid., pp. 954-955. To
this fundamental condition another is added in the communist society of
Marxian utopia, namely, the interchangeability of functions in such a
way that "nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity", and that the
basis constituted by the realm of necessity is reduced to the fact that
"society regulates the general production". The German Ideology,
Parts I & III, p. 22, see above, pp.
250-251.
1 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p. 114.
2 Aus den Exzerptheften [Review of J. S. Mill, Elements
d'économie politique] in MEGA, I, 3, p. 536.
3 Ibid., p. 547.
4 "In my production I objectified my individuality . . ." ibid.,
p. 546.
5 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p. 104.
6 Aus den Exzerptheften, in MEGA, I, 3, p. 546.
7 Ibid., p. 547.
8 Ibid., p. 547.
9 Cf. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p. 76: "It
is just in the working up of the objective world, therefore, that man
first really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is
his active species life. Through and because of the production, nature
appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is,
therefore, the objectification of man's species life: for he duplicates
himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also
actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world
that he has created." (From MEGA, I, 3, pp. 88-89.)
10 Deutsch Ideologie. Das Leipziger Konzil, III. Sankt Max, in MEGA, I,
5, p. 242.
11 "This last [the development of a totality of desires] depends on
whether we live in circumstances which permit our omnilateral activity
and, with that, the development of all our abilities." Ibid., p.
235.
1 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p. 107.
2 Ibid., p. 107.
3 Ibid., p. 107 (translation modified).
4 Cf. G. Wetter, op. cit., p. 238.
1 M. Rosenthal and P. Yudin, article on "Ethics", Handbook of
Philosophy, p. 41.
2 Cf. above, p. 249, note 1.
3 After having quoted this assertion from P. Kolonickil,
Kommunisticeskaja i moral' religioznaja (Moscow, 1952), p. 18:
"Everything that serves the cause of the people, the interests of the
liberation of the workers, and the building of a classless communist
society is absolutely moral," Father Henri Chambre writes: "Let us
underline this adverb bezuslovno: absolutely, without
reserve. It is repeated in the next sentence, which tells us what is
'absolutely immoral'." (Op. cit., pp. 280-281.)
4 Cf. above, p. 250.
5 Cf. above, p. 247.
6 Is such an ethical conception in incipient contradiction with Marxist
morality as Engels characterized it in Anti-Duhring, as Father
Chambre (op. cit., p. 282) maintains? We do not think so. Engels
rejects all "eternal, ultimate and forever immutable moral law"
(Anti-Duhring, pp. 104-105), but that does not mean at all that
he rejects the unconditional character of the commandment
prescribed for the individual at a given moment of development by class
morality, and therefore the absolutely immoral character of the
act in disaccord with this commandment.
1 Cf. above, p. 233.
2 Concerning this point, see the penetrating remarks of Father Henri
Chambre, op. cit., pp. 269-281.
3 In connection with another subject (the Soviet theory of Law), Father
Chambre, citing these lines from Hauriou: "An established social order
in practice always contains a certain amount of justice which is
incorporated in it", adds: "The amount of justice incorporated in the
Soviet order comes not from Marxist ideology but from the voice of
natural law which subsists in the depths of the Russian human
conscience in spite of every effort to destroy it." (Op. cit.,
p. 241.)
3 Cf. above, p. 250, notes 2 and 3.
1 Galvano della Volpe, "Originalita dell'Umanismo socialista", in
Studi filosofici, fasc. 1 (1948).
One might ask oneself if the repudiation of Stalin to which the Soviet
government proceeded after the dictator's death will not have
repercussions in the moral realm and is not the symptom of a
significant evolution in Soviet ethics. This historical condemnation of
Stalin does as a matter of fact very definitely involve questions of
the crimes and injustices of which his regime was guilty, and these
words seem to be employed in the sense in which they are normally
understood by those who believe in absolute and universal moral values.
Is this a sign that in spite of everything a rehabilitation of these
values is going to occur, in keeping with the fact (pointed out above,
p. 248, note 1) that the morality taught in the name
of the Communist Party must henceforth, in Soviet Russia, be addressed
not simply to the militant members of the proletariat in their class
struggle, but to all the members of Soviet society? It is difficult to
imagine that, under such circumstances, this morality would not tend to
pass from the state of class morality to that of simple morality, or
"human morality".
2 Hence the "absolutely moral" or "absolutely immoral" acts which were
spoken of above, p. 254, note 3.
1 Nicolas Berdyaev, The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar,
chapter V, trans. Donald A. Lowrie, New York: Harper & Bros., 1952, p.
89; London: Gollancz, 1952.
2 "The only sense in which it is possible to show that something is
good or bad, right or wrong, is by demonstrating that it accords or
disaccords with the historical process, assists it or thwarts it, will
survive or will inevitably perish." Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx,
2nd ed., London: O.U.P., 1948, p. 140.
1 It is indeed significant that despite the hopes which he had put for
a time in the Communist League, then in the Workers' International, the
"party" in the name of which Marx spoke was in his eyes not a party in
the ordinary sense of the wotd but a kind of invisible church whose
self-constituted prophets were Engels and himself (cf. Maximilien
Rubel, Pages choisies . . ., pp. xl-xliv).
"I am not a 'Realpolitiker'," Marx indignantly wrote against the
agreement which Lassalle tried to conclude with Bismarck (Marx to
Kügelmann, February 23, 1865, in Marx - Engels, Correspondence,
1846-1895, Letter no. 81, p. 197). "The honour of the workers'
party demands that it should reject fancy pictures of this kind even
before their hollowness is exposed by experience." Marx to J. B.
Schweitzer, February 13, 1865, as cited by Marx in his letter to
Engels, February 18, 1865, Ibid., Letter no. 80, p. 190.
2 Cf. Georges Lukacs, op. cit., pp. 211-212.
3 Ibid., p. 211.
4 Ibid., p.212.
1 Cf. Georges Lukacs, op. cit., p. 213.
2 Ibid., p. 214.
3 "The Marxist criterion of morality is the conformity of morality with
the actual phase of development of the society in question." Chambre,
op. cit., p. 268. "The supreme criterion of communist morality
is the struggle for communism." V. Prokof'ev, Dve morali, Moral'
religioznaja i moral' Kommunisticeskaja (Moscow, 1953), cited by
Chambre, op. cit., p. 280. All of these formulae are
equivalents.
4 Once the end is attained, there will still be history (cf. above, p. 218), but will there still be
dialectic? Must it be said that since all opposition will have
disappeared, that will be "the death of the dialectic" (cf. Chambre,
op. cit., pp. 284, 508)? We think not. For though all opposition
should have disappeared as among humans, still opposition, and
therefore dialectic, could still reappear under other forms, as between
humanity and nature, for example (particularly in view of the fact that
nature carries with it the necessity of death).
5 Cf. A. Cornu, op. cit., p. 405 (on the doctrine of Marx): "In
spite of its objective appearance, his doctrine is actually
penetrated with finality; one feels in him as in Hegel a mystical
faith which leads him to bend the fact towards the end which he assigns
to them, and, though he likes to proclaim with Hegel that the march of
history is an inevitable march, it is because he knows that this
necessity constrains the fact to realize an ideal which is his own."
(Italics ours.)
1 Cf. G. Wetter, op. cit., pp. 324-328. (But see also, in the
same work, the remarks on page 327 concerning the element of finality
which in spite of everything slips into the idea of the category of
necessity as formulated by Soviet authors.)
2 Cf. above, chapter IX, p. 206.
3 Cf. above, chapter IX, pp. 206-207.