Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon (February 1968 )  11

Lenin and Philosophy (February 1968 )  23
   Appendix  68

Preface to Capital Volume One (March I969 )  71
   The Rudiments of a Critical Bibliography  102

Lenin before Hegel (April 1969 )  107

 
page 11

 
Philosophy as a 
Revolutionary Weapon 

 
page 23

 
Lenin and Philosophy 

 
 






May I thank your Society for the honour it has done me in inviting me to present to it what it has called, since it came into existence, and what it will doubtless long continue to call, by a disarmingly nostalgic name: a communication.[1]

 
1

A scientist is justified in presenting a communication before a scientific society. A communication and a discussion are only possible if they are scientific. But a philosophical communication and a philosophical discussion?

    Philosophical communication. This term would certainly have made Lenin laugh, with that whole-hearted, open laugh by which the fishermen of Capri recognized him as one of their kind and on their side. This was exactly sixty years ago, in 1908. Lenin was then at Capri, as a guest of Gorky, whose generosity he liked and whose talent he admired, but whom he treated nevertheless as a petty-bourgeois revolutionary. Gorky had invited him to Capri to

    To my knowledge, with the exception of Henri Lefebvre who has devoted an excellent little book to him, French academic philosophy has not deigned to concern itself with the man who led the greatest political revolution in modern history and who, in addition, made a lengthy and conscientious analysis in Materialism and Empirio-criticism of the works of our compatriots Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem and Abel Rey, not to speak of others.

 
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    I hope that any of our luminaries whom I have forgotten will forgive me, but it seems to me that, if we except articles by Communist philosophers and scientists, I can hardly find more than a few pages devoted to Lenin in the last half-century: by Sartre in Les Temps Modernes in 1946 ('Matérialisme et Révolution'), by Merleau-Ponty (in Les Aventures de la Dialectique ) and by Ricoeur (in an article in Esprit ).

    In the last named, Ricoeur speaks of State and Revolution with respect, but he does not seem to deal with Lenin's 'philosophy'. Sartre says that the materialist philosophy of Engels and Lenin is 'unthinkable' in the sense of an Unding, a thought which cannot stand the test of mere thought, since it is a naturalistic, pre-critical, pre-Kantian and pre-Hegelian metaphysic; but he generously concedes that it may have the function of a Platonic 'myth' which helps proletarians to be revolutionaries. Merleau-Ponty dismisses it with a single word: Lenin's philosophy is an 'expedient'.

    It would surely be unbecoming on my part, even given all the requisite tact, to open a case against the French philosophical tradition of the last one hundred and fifty years, since the silence in which French philosophy has buried this past is worth more than any open indictment. It must really be a tradition which hardly bears looking at, for to this day no prominent French philosopher has dared publicly to write its history.

    Indeed, it takes some courage to admit that French philosophy, from Maine de Biran and Cousin to Bergson and Brunschvicg, by way of Ravaisson, Hamelin, Lachelier and Boutroux, can only be salvaged from its own history by the few great minds against whom it set its face, like Comte and Durkheim, or buried in oblivion, like Cournot and Couturat; by a few conscientious historians of philo-

 
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sophy, historians of science and epistemologists who worked patiently and silently to educate those to whom in part French philosophy owes its renaissance in the last thirty years. We all know these names; forgive me if I only cite those who are no longer with us: Cavaillès and Bachelard.[2]

    After all, this French academic philosophy, profoundly religious, spiritualist and reactionary one hundred and fifty years ago, then in the best of cases conservative, finally belatedly liberal and 'personalist', this philosophy which magnificently ignored Hegel, Marx and Freud, this academic philosophy which only seriously began to read Kant, then Hegel and Husserl, and even to discover the existence of Frege and Russell a few decades ago, and sometimes less, why should it have concerned itself with this Bolshevik, revolutionary, and politician, Lenin?

    Besides the overwhelming class pressures on its strictly philosophical traditions, besides the condemnation by its most 'liberal' spirits of 'Lenin's unthinkable pre-critical philosophical thought', the French philosophy which we have inherited has lived in the conviction that it can have nothing philosophical to learn either from a politician or from politics. To give just one example, it was only a little while ago that a few French academic philosophers first turned to the study of the great theoreticians of political philosophy, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Grotius, Locke and even Rousseau, 'our' Rousseau. Only thirty years earlier, these authors were abandoned to literary critics and jurists as left-overs.

    But French academic philosophy was not mistaken in its radical refusal to learn anything from politicians and politics, and therefore from Lenin. Everything which touches

    In the last resort, and more important than all the reasons I have just evoked, this is undoubtedly why Lenin is intolerable to academic philosophy, and, to avoid hurting anyone, to the vast majority of philosophers, if not to all philosophers, whether academic or otherwise. He is, or has been on one occasion or another, philosophically intolerable to everyone (and obviously I also mean myself). Intolerable, basically, because despite all they may say about the pre-critical character of his philosophy and the summary aspect of some of his categories, philosophers feel and know that this is not the real question. They feel and know that Lenin is profoundly indifferent to their objections. He is indifferent first, because he foresaw them long ago. Lenin said himself: I am not a philosopher, I am badly prepared in this domain (Letter to Gorky, 7 February 1908). Lenin said: I know that my formulations and definitions are vague, unpolished; I know that philosophers are going to accuse my materialism of being 'metaphysical'. But he adds: that is not the question. Not only do I not 'philosophize' with their philosophy, I do not 'philosophize' like them at all. Their way of 'philosophizing' is to expend fortunes of intelligence and subtlety for no other purpose than to ruminate in philosophy. Whereas I treat philosophy differently, I practise it, as Marx intended, in obedience to what it is. That is why I believe I am a 'dialectical materialist'.

    Materialism and Empirio-criticism contains all this, either

 
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directly or between the lines. And that is why Lenin the philosopher is intolerable to most philosophers, who do not want to know, i.e. who realize without admitting it, that this is the real question. The real question is not whether Marx, Engels and Lenin are or are not real philosophers, whether their philosophical statements are formally irreproachable, whether they do or do not make foolish statements about Kant's 'thing-in-itself', whether their materialism is or is not pre-critical, etc. For all these questions are and always have been posed inside a certain practice of philosophy. The real question bears precisely on this traditional practice which Lenin brings back into question by proposing a quite different practice of philosophy.

    This different practice contains something like a promise or outline of an objective knowledge of philosophy's mode of being. A knowledge of philosophy as a Holzweg der Holzwege. But the last thing philosophers and philosophy can bear, the intolerable, is perhaps precisely the idea of this knowledge. What philosophy cannot bear is the idea of a theory (i.e. of an objective knowledge) of philosophy capable of changing its traditional practice. Such a theory may be fatal for philosophy, since it lives by its denegation.

    So academic philosophy cannot tolerate Lenin (or Marx for that matter) for two reasons, which are really one and the same. On the one hand, it cannot bear the idea that it might have something to learn from politics and from a politician. And on the other hand, it cannot bear the idea that philosophy might be the object of a theory, i.e. of an objective knowledge.

    That into the bargain, it should be a politician like Lenin, an 'innocent' and an auto-didact in philosophy who had the audacity to suggest the idea that a theory of philosophy is

 
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essential to a really conscious and responsible practice of philosophy, is obviously too much. . . .

    Here, too, philosophy, whether academic or otherwise, is not mistaken: it puts up such a stubborn resistance to this apparently accidental encounter in which a mere politician suggests to it the beginnings of a knowledge of what philosophy is, because this encounter hits the mark, the most sensitive point, the point of the intolerable, the point of the repressed, which traditionally philosophy has merely ruminated -- precisely the point at which, in order to know itself in its theory, philosophy has to recognize that it is no more than a certain investment of politics, a certain continuation of politics, a certain rumination of politics.

    Lenin happens to have been the first to say so. It also happens that he could say so only because he was a politician, and not just any politician, but a proletarian leader. That is why Lenin is intolerable to philosophical rumination, as intolerable -- and I choose my words carefully -- as Freud is to psychological rumination.

    It is clear that between Lenin and established philosophy there are not just misunderstandings and incidental conflicts, not even just the philosophy professors' reactions of wounded sensibility when the son of a teacher, a petty lawyer who became a revolutionary leader, declares bluntly that most of them are petty-bourgeois intellectuals functioning in the bourgeois education system as so many ideologists inculcating the mass of student youth with the dogmas -- however critical or post-critical -- of the ideology of the ruling classes.[4] Between Lenin and established philosophy there is a peculiarly intolerable connexion: the connexion in which the reigning philosophy is touched to the quick of what it represses: politics.

 
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3

But before we can really see how the relations between Lenin and philosophy reached this point, we must go back a little and, before discussing Lenin and philosophy in general, we have to establish Lenin's place in Marxist philosophy, and therefore to raise the question of the state of Marxist philosophy.

    I cannot hope to outline the history of Marxist philosophy here. I am in no position to do so, and for an altogether determinant reason: I should have to know precisely what was this X whose history I proposed to write, and if I knew that, I would also have to be in a position to know whether this X has or has not a History, i.e. whether it has or has not the right to a History.

    Rather than outlining, even very roughly, the 'history' of Marxist philosophy, I should like to demonstrate the existence of a symptomatic difficulty, in the light of a sequence of texts and works in History.

    This difficulty has given rise to famous disputes which have lasted to the present day. The names most often given to these disputes signal its existence: what is the core of Marxist theory? a science or a philosophy? Is Marxism at heart a philosophy, the 'philosophy of praxis' -- but then what of the scientific claims made by Marx? Is Marxism, on the contrary, at heart a science, historical materialism, the science of history -- but then what of its philosophy, dialectical materialism? Or again, if we accept the classical distinction between historical materialism (science) and dialectical materialism (philosophy), how are we to think this distinction: in traditional terms or in new terms? Or again, what are the relations between materialism and the dialectic in dialectical materialism? Or again, what is the dialectic: a mere method? or philosophy as a whole?

 
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    This difficulty which has provided the fuel for so many disputes is a symptomatic one. This is intended to suggest that it is the evidence for a partly enigmatic reality, of which the classical questions that I have just recalled are a certain treatment, i.e. a certain interpretation. Speaking very schematically, the classical formulations interpret this difficulty solely in terms of philosophical questions, i.e. inside what I have called philosophical rumination -- whereas it is undoubtedly necessary to think these difficulties and the philosophical questions which they cannot fail to provoke, in quite different terms: in terms of a problem, i.e. of objective (and therefore scientific) knowledge. Only on this condition, certainly, is it possible to understand the confusion that has led people to think in terms of prematurely philosophical questions the essential theoretical contribution of Marxism to philosophy, i.e. the insistence of a certain problem which may well produce philosophical effects, but only insofar as it is not itself in the last instance a philosophical question.

    If I have deliberately used terms which presuppose certain distinctions (scientific problem, philosophical question), this is not so as to pass judgement on those who have been subject to this confusion, for we are all subject to it and we all have every reason to think that it was and still is inevitable -- so much so that Marxist philosophy itself has been and still is caught in it, for necessary reasons.

    For finally, a glance at the theatre of what is called Marxist philosophy since the Theses on Feuerbach is enough to show that it presents a rather curious spectacle. Granted that Marx's early works do not have to be taken into account (I know that this is to ask a concession which some people find difficult to accept, despite the force of the arguments I have put forward), and that we subscribe to Marx's statement that The German Ideology represented a

 
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decision to 'settle accounts with his erstwhile philosophical consciousness', and therefore a rupture and conversion in his thought, then when we examine what happens between the Theses on Feuerbach (the first indication of the 'break', 1845 ) and Engels's Anti-Dühring (1877 ), the long interval of philosophical emptiness cannot fail to strike us.

    The XIth Thesis on Feuerbach proclaimed: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.' This simple sentence seemed to promise a new philosophy, one which was no longer an interpretation, but rather a transformation of the world. Moreover, that is how it was read more than half a century later, by Labriola, and then following him, by Gramsci, both of whom defined Marxism essentially as a new philosophy, a 'philosophy of praxis'. Yet we have to face the fact that this prophetic sentence produced no new philosophy immediately, at any rate, no new philosophical discourse, quite the contrary, it merely initiated a long philosophical silence. This silence was only broken publicly by what had all the appearances of an unforeseen accident: a precipitate intervention by Engels, forced to do ideological battle with Dühring, constrained to follow him onto his own 'territory' in order to deal with the political consequences of the 'philosophical' writings of a blind teacher of mathematics who was beginning to exercise a dangerous influence over German socialism.

    Here we have a strange situation indeed: a Thesis which seems to announce a revolution in philosophy -- then a thirty-year long philosophical silence, and finally a few improvised chapters of philosophical polemic published by Engels for political and ideological reasons as an introduction to a remarkable summary of Marx's scientific theories.

    Must we conclude that we are the victims of a retrospective philosophical illusion when we read the XIth

 
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Thesis on Feuerbach as the proclamation of a philosophical revolution? Yes and no. But first before saying no, I think it is necessary to say yes, seriously: yes, we are essentially the victims of a philosophical illusion. What was announced in the Theses on Feuerbach was, in the necessarily philosophical language of a declaration of rupture with all 'interpretative' philosophy, something quite different from a new philosophy: a new science, the science of history, whose first, still infinitely fragile foundations Marx was to lay in The German Ideology.

    The philosophical emptiness which followed the proclamation of Thesis XI was thus the fullness of a science, the fullness of the intense, arduous and protracted labour which put an unprecedented science on to the stocks, a science to which Marx was to devote all his life, down to the last drafts for Capital, which he was never able to complete. It is this scientific fullness which represents the first and most profound reason why, even if Thesis XI did prophetically announce an event which was to make its mark on philosophy, it could not give rise to a philosophy, or rather had to proclaim the radical suppression of all existing philosophy in order to give priority to the work needed for the theoretical gestation of Marx's scientific discovery.

    This radical suppression of philosophy is, as is well known, inscribed in so many words in The German Ideology. It is essential, says Marx in that work, to get rid of all philosophical fancies and turn to the study of positive reality, to tear aside the veil of philosophy and at last see reality for what it is.

    The German Ideology bases this suppression of philosophy on a theory of philosophy as a hallucination and mystification, or to go further, as a dream, manufactured from what I shall call the day's residues of the real history of concrete men, day's residues endowed with a purely imag-

 
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inary existence in which the order of things is inverted. Philosophy, like religion and ethics, is only ideology; it has no history, everything which seems to happen in it really happens outside it, in the only real history, the history of the material life of men. Science is then the real itself, known by the action which reveals it by destroying the ideologies that veil it: foremost among these ideologies is philosophy.

    Let us halt at this dramatic juncture and explore its meaning. The theoretical revolution announced in Thesis XI is in reality the foundation of a new science. Employing a concept of Bachelard's, I believe we can think the theoretical event which inaugurates this new science as an 'epistemological break'.

    Marx founds a new science, i.e. he elaborates a system of new scientific concepts where previously there prevailed only the manipulation of ideological notions. Marx founds the science of history where there were previously only philosophies of history. When I say that Marx organized a theoretical system of scientific concepts in the domain previously monopolized by philosophies of history, I am extending a metaphor which is no more than a metaphor: for it suggests that Marx replaced ideological theories with a scientific theory in a uniform space, that of History. In reality, this domain itself was reorganized. But with this crucial reservation, I propose to stick to the metaphor for the moment, and even to give it a still more precise form.

    If in fact we consider the great scientific discoveries of human history, it seems that we might relate what we call the sciences, as a number of regional formations, to what I shall call the great theoretical continents. The distance that we have now obtained enables us, without anticipating a future which neither we nor Marx can 'stir in the pot', to pursue our improved metaphor and say that, before Marx,

 
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two continents only had been opened up to scientific knowledge by sustained epistemological breaks: the continent of Mathematics with the Greeks (by Thales or those designated by that mythical name) and the continent of Physics (by Galileo and his successors). A science like chemistry, founded by Lavoisier's epistemological break, is a regional science within the continent of physics: everyone now knows that it is inscribed in it. A science like biology, which came to the end of the first phase of its epistemological break, inaugurated by Darwin and Mendel, only a decade ago, by its integration with molecular chemistry, also becomes part of the continent of physics. Logic in its modern form becomes part of the continent of Mathematics, etc. On the other hand, it is probable that Freud's discovery has opened a new continent, one which we are only just beginning to explore.

    If this metaphor stands up to the test of its extension, I can put forward the following proposition. Marx has opened up to scientific knowledge a new, third scientific continent, the continent of History, by an epistemological break whose first still uncertain strokes are inscribed in The German Ideology, after having been announced in the Theses of Feuerbach. Obviously this epistemological break is not an instantaneous event. It is even possible that one might, by recurrence and where some of its details are concerned, assign it a sort of premonition of a past. At any rate, this break becomes visible in its first signs, but these signs only inaugurate the beginning of an endless history. Like every break, this break is actually a sustained one within which complex reorganizations can be observed.

    In fact, the operation of these reorganizations, which affect essential concepts and their theoretical components, can be observed empirically in the sequence of Marx's writings: in the Manifesto and The Poverty of Philosophy

 
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of 1847, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, in Wages, Price and Profits of 1865, in the first volume of Capital in 1867, etc. Other reorganizations and developments have followed, in the works of Lenin, especially in that unparalleled work of economic sociology, unfortunately ignored by sociologists, called The Development of Capitalism in Russia, in Imperialism, etc. Whether or no we accept the fact, we are still inscribed in the theoretical space marked and opened by this break today. Like the other breaks which opened up the other two continents that we know, this break inaugurates a history which will never come to an end. That is why we should not read the XIth Thesis on Feuerbach as the announcement of a new philosophy, but as that necessary declaration of rupture with philosophy which clears the ground for the foundation of a new science. That is why from the radical suppression of all philosophy to the unforeseen 'accident' which induced the philosophical chapters in Anti-Dühring, there is a long philosophical silence during which only the new science speaks.

    Of course, this new science is materialist, but so is every science, and that is why its general theory is called 'historical materialism'. Here materialism is quite simply the strict attitude of the scientist to the reality of his object which allows him to grasp what Engels called 'nature just as it exists without any foreign admixture'.

    In the slightly odd phrase 'historical materialism' (we do not use the phrase 'chemical materialism' to designate chemistry), the word materialism registers both the initial rupture with the idealism of philosophies of history and the installation of scientificity with respect to history. Historical materialism thus means: science of history. If the birth of something like a Marxist philosophy is ever to be possible, it would seem that it must be from the very gestation of this science, a quite original sister, certainly, but in its very

 
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strangeness a sister of the existing sciences, after the long interval which always divides a philosophical reorganization from the scientific revolution which induced it.

    Indeed, in order to go further into the reasons for this philosophical silence, I am driven to put forward a thesis concerning the relations between the sciences and philosophy without going further than to illustrate it with empirical data. Lenin began his book State and Revolution with this simple empirical comment: the State has not always existed; the existence of the State is only observable in class societies. In the same way, I shall say: philosophy has not always existed; the existence of philosophy is only observable in a world which contains what is called a science or a number of sciences. A science in the strict sense: a theoretical, i.e. ideal (idéelle ) and demonstrative discipline, not an aggregate of empirical results.

    Here in brief are my empirical illustrations of this thesis.

    If philosophy is to be born, or reborn, one or more sciences must exist. Perhaps this is why philosophy in the strict sense only began with Plato, its birth induced by the existence of Greek Mathematics; was overhauled by Descartes, its modern revolution induced by Galilean physics; was recast by Kant under the influence of Newton's discovery; and was remodelled by Husserl under the impetus of the first axiomatics, etc.

    I only suggest this theme, which needs to be tested, in order to point out, in the empirical mode still, that ultimately Hegel was not wrong to say that philosophy takes wing at dusk : when science, born at dawn, has already lived the time of a long day. Philosophy is thus always a long day behind the science which induces the birth of its first form and the rebirths of its revolutions, a long day which may last years, decades, a half-century or a century.

    We should realize that the shock of a scientific break does

 
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not make itself felt at once, that time is needed for it to reorganize philosophy.

    We should also conclude, no doubt, that the work of philosophical gestation is closely linked with the work of scientific gestation, each being at work in the other. It is clear that the new philosophical categories are elaborated in the work of the new science. But it is also true that in certain cases (to be precise, Plato, Descartes) what is called philosophy also serves as a theoretical laboratory in which the new categories required by the concepts of the new science are brought into focus. For example, was it not in Cartesianism that a new category of causality was worked out for Galilean physics, which had run up against Aristotelian cause as an 'epistemological obstacle'? If we add to this the fact that the great philosophical events with which we are familiar (ancient philosophy descending from Plato, modern philosophy descending from Descartes) are clearly related to inducements from the opening of the two scientific continents, Greek Mathematics and Galilean Physics, we can pronounce (for this is all still emprical) certain inferences about what I think we can call Marxist philosophy. Three inferences:

    First inference. If Marx really has opened up a new continent to scientific knowledge, his scientific discovery ought to induce some kind of important reorganization in philosophy. The XIth Thesis was perhaps ahead of its time, but it really did announce a major event in philosophy. It seems that this may be the case.

    Second inference. Philosophy only exists by virtue of the distance it lags behind its scientific inducement. Marxist philosophy should therefore lag behind the Marxist science of history. This does indeed seem to be the case. The thirty-year desert between the Theses on Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring is evidence of this, as are certain long periods of

 
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deadlock later, periods in which we and many others are still marking time.

    Third inference. There is a chance that we shall find more advanced theoretical elements for the elaboration of Marxist philosophy than we might have expected in the gestation of Marxist science, given the distance we now have on its lag. Lenin used to say that one should look in Marx's Capital for his dialectic -- by which he meant Marxist philosophy itself. Capital must contain something from which to complete or forge the new philosophical categories: they are surely at work in Capital, in the 'practical state'. It seems that this may be the case. We must read Capital in order to find out.

    The day is always long, but as luck would have it, it is already far advanced, look: dusk will soon fall. Marxist philosophy will take wing.

    Taken as guide-lines, these inferences introduce, if I may say so, a kind of order into our concerns and hopes, and also into certain of our thoughts. We can now understand that the ultimate reason why Marx, trapped as he was in poverty, fanatical scientific work and the urgent demands of political leadership, never wrote the Dialectic (or Philosophy) he dreamed of, was not, whatever he may have thought, that he never 'found the time'. We can now understand that the ultimate reason why Engels, suddenly confronted with the necessity, as he writes, of 'having his say on philosophical questions', could not satisfy the professional philosophers, was not the improvised character of a merely ideological polemic. We can now understand that the ultimate reason for the philosophical limitations of Materialism and Empirio-criticism was not just a matter of the constraints of the ideological struggle.

    We can now say it. The time that Marx could not find, Engels's philosophical extemporization, the laws of the

 
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ideological struggle in which Lenin was forced merely to turn his enemy's own weapons against him, each of these is a good enough excuse, but together they do not constitute a reason.

    The ultimate reason is that the times were not ripe, that dusk had not yet fallen, and that neither Marx himself, nor Engels, nor Lenin could yet write the great work of philosophy which Marxism-Leninism lacks. If they did come well after the science on which it depends, in one way or another they all still came too soon for a philosophy, which is indispensable, but cannot be born without a necessary lag.

    Given the concept of this necessary 'lag', everything should become clear, including the misunderstanding of those like the young Lukács and Gramsci, and so many others without their gifts, who were so impatient with the slowness of the birth of this philosophy that they proclaimed that it had already long been born, from the beginning, from the Theses on Feuerbach, i.e. well before the beginnings of Marxist science itself -- and who, to prove this to themselves, simply stated that since every science is a 'superstructure', and every existing science is therefore basically positivist because it is bourgeois, Marxist 'science' could not but be philosophical, and Marxism a philosophy, a post-Hegelian philosophy or 'philosophy of praxis'.

    Given the concept of this necessary 'lag', light can be cast on many other difficulties, too, even in the political history of Marxist organizations, their defeats and crises. If it is true, as the whole Marxist tradition claims, that the greatest event in the history of the class struggle -- i.e. practically in human history -- is the union of Marxist theory and the Workers' Movement, it is clear that the internal balance of that union may be threatened by those failures of

 
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theory known as deviations, however trivial they may be; we can understand the political scope of the unrelenting theoretical disputes unleased in the Socialist and then in the Communist Movement, over what Lenin calls mere 'shades of opinion', for, as he said in What is to be done?: 'The fate of Russian Social-Democracy for very many years to come may depend on the strengthening of one or other "shade" .'

    Therefore, Marxist theory being what it is, a science and a philosophy, and the philosophy having necessarily lagged behind the science, which has been hindered in its development by this, we may be tempted to think that these theoretical deviation were, at bottom, inevitable, not just because of the effects of the class struggle on and in theory, but also because of the dislocation (décalage ) inside theory itself.

    In fact, to turn to the past of the Marxist Worker's Movement, we can call by their real names the theoretical deviations which have led to the great historical defeats for the proletariat, that of the Second International, to mention only one. These deviations are called economism, evolutionism, voluntarism, humanism, empiricism, dogmatism, etc. Basically, these deviations are philosophical deviations, and were denounced as philosophical deviations by the great workers' leaders, starting with Engels and Lenin.

    But this now brings us quite close to understanding why they overwhelmed even those who denounced them: were they not in some way inevitable, precisely as a function of the necessary lag of Marxist philosophy?

    To go further, if this is the case, and even in the deep crisis today dividing the International Communist Movement, Marxist philosophers may well tremble before the task -- unanticipated because so long anticipated -- which history has assigned and entrusted to them. If it is true as

 
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so many signs indicate, that today the lag of Marxist philosophy can in part be overcome, doing so will not only cast light on the past, but also perhaps transform the future.

    In this transformed future, justice will be done equitably to all those who had to live in the contradiction of political urgency and philosophical lag. Justice will be done to one of the greatest: to Lenin. Justice: his philosophical work will then be perfected. Perfected, i.e. completed and corrected. We surely owe this service and this homage to the man who was lucky enough to be born in time for politics, but unfortunate enough to be born too early for philosophy. After all, who chooses his own birth date?

 
4

Now that the 'history' of Marxist theory has shown us why Marxist philosophy lags behind the science of history, we can go directly to Lenin and into his work. But then our philosophical 'dream' will vanish: things do not have its simplicity.

    Let me anticipate my conclusion. No, Lenin was not born too soon for philosophy. No one is ever born too soon for philosophy. If philosophy lags behind, if this lag is what makes it philosophy, how is it ever possible to lag behind a lag which has no history? If we absolutely must go on talking of a lag: it is we who are lagging behind Lenin. Our lag is simply another name for a mistake. For we are philosophically mistaken about the relations between Lenin and philosophy. The relations between Lenin and philosophy are certainly expressed in philosophy, inside the 'game' which constitutes philosophy as philosophy, but these relations are not philosophical, because this 'game' is not philosophical.

    I want to try to expound the reasons for these conclusions

 
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in a concise and systematic, and therefore necessarily schematic, form, taking as the object of my analysis Lenin's great 'philosophical' work: Materialism and Empirio-criticism. I shall divide this exposition into three moments:

    1. Lenin's great philosophical Theses.

    2. Lenin and philosophical practice.

    3. Lenin and partisanship in philosophy.

    In dealing with each of these points, I shall be concerned to show what was new in Lenin's contribution to Marxist theory.

 

I.  L E N I N ' S  G R E A T  P H I L O S O P H I C A L  T H E S E S

By Theses, I mean, like anyone else, the philosophical positions taken by Lenin, registered in philosophical pronouncements. For the moment I shall ignore the objection which has provided academic philosophy with a screen or pretext for its failure to read Materialism and Empirio-criticism : Lenin's categorial terminology, his historical references, and even his ignorances.

    It is a fact itself worthy of a separate study that, even in the astonishing 'in lieu of an introduction' to Materialism and Empirio-criticism which takes us brusquely back to Berkeley and Diderot, Lenin in many respects situates himself in the theoretical space of eighteenth-century empiricism, i.e. in a philosophical problematic which is 'officially' pre-critical -- if it is assumed that philosophy became 'officially' critical with Kant.

    Once we have noted the existence of this reference system, once we know its structural logic, we can explain Lenin's theoretical formulations as so many effects of this logic, including the incredible contortions which he inflicts on the categorial terminology of empiricism in order to turn it against empiricism. For if he does think in the

 
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problematic of objective empiricism (Lenin even says 'objective sensualism') and if the fact of thinking in that problematic often affects not just the formulations of his thought, but even some of its movements, no one could deny that Lenin does think, i.e. thinks systematically and rigorously. It is this thought which matters to us, in that it pronounces certain Theses. Here they are, pronounced in their naked essentials. I shall distinguish three of them:

    Thesis 1.  Philosophy is not a science. Philosophy is distinct from the sciences. Philosophical categories are distinct from scientific concepts.

    This is a crucial thesis. Let me indicate the decisive point in which its destiny is at stake: the category of matter, surely the touchstone for a materialist philosophy and for all the philosophical souls who hope for its salvation, i.e. its death. Now Lenin says in so many words that the distinction between the philosophical category of matter and the scientific concept of matter is vital for Marxist philosophy:

    Matter is a philosophical category (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, p. 130).
    The sole property of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality (op. cit., pp. 260-61).

    It follows that the philosophical category of matter, which is conjointly a Thesis of existence and a Thesis of objectivity, can never be confused with the contents of the scientific concepts of matter. The scientific concepts of matter define knowledges, relative to the historical state of the sciences, about the objects of those sciences. The content of the scientific concept of matter changes with the development, i.e. with the deepening of scientific knowledge. The meaning of the philosophical category of matter does not change,

 
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since it does not apply to any object of science, but affirms the objectivity of all scientific knowledge of an object. The category of matter cannot change. It is 'absolute'.

    The consequences which Lenin draws from this distinction are crucial. Firstly, he re-establishes the truth about what was then called the 'crisis of physics': physics is not in crisis, but in growth. Matter has not 'disappeared'. The scientific concept of matter alone has changed in content, and it will always go on changing in the future, for the process of knowledge is infinite in its object itself.

    The scientific pseudo-crisis of physics is only a philosophical crisis or fright in which ideologists, even though some of them are also scientists, are openly attacking materialism. When they proclaim the disappearance of matter, we should hear the silent discourse of their wish: the disappearance of materialism!

    And Lenin denounces and knocks down all those ephemerally philosophical scientists who thought their time had come. What is left of these characters today? Who still remembers them? We must concede at least that this philosophical ignoramus Lenin had good judgement. And what professional philosopher was capable, as he was, of committing himself without hesitation or delay, so far and so surely, absolutely alone, against everyone, in an apparently lost cause? I should be grateful if anyone could give me one name -- other than Husserl, at that time Lenin's objective ally against empiricism and historicism -- but only a temporary ally and one who could not meet him, for Husserl, as a good 'philosopher', believed he was going 'somewhere'.

    But Lenin's Thesis goes further than the immediate conjuncture. If it is absolutely essential to distinguish between the philosophical category of matter and every scientific concept, it follows that those materialists who apply philosophical categories to the objects of the sciences

 
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as if they were concepts of them are involved in a case of 'mistaken identity'. For example, anyone who wants to make conceptual use of categorial oppositions like matter/mind or matter/consciousness is only too likely to lapse into tautology, for the 'antithesis of matter and mind has absolute significance only within the bounds of a very limited field -- in this case exclusively within the bounds of the fundamental epistemological problem of what is to be regarded as primary and what as secondary [i.e. in philosophy]. Beyond these bounds [i.e. in the sciences] the relative character of this antithesis is indubitable' (op. cit., p. 147).

    I cannot go into other very wide-ranging consequences, e.g. into the fact that from Lenin's point of view the distinction between philosophy and the sciences necessarily opens up the field of a theory of the history of knowledges, or the fact that Lenin announces in his theory the historical limits of all truth (sc. all scientific knowledge) which he thinks as a theory of the distinction between absolute truth and relative truth (in this theory a single opposition of categories is used to think both the distinction between philosophy and the sciences, and the necessity for a theory of the history of the sciences).

    I would just ask you to note what follows. The distinction between philosophy and the sciences, between philosophical categories and scientific concepts, constitutes at heart the adoption of a radical philosophical position against all forms of empiricism and positivism : against the empiricism and positivism even of certain materialists, against naturalism, against psychologism, against historicism (on this particular point see Lenin's polemical violence against Bogdanov's historicism).

    It must be admitted that this is not so bad for a philosopher whom it is easy to dismiss as pre-critical and pre-

 
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Kantian on the grounds of a few of his formulations, indeed, it is far rather astonishing, since it is clear that in 1908 this Bolshevik leader had never read a line of Kant and Hegel, but had stopped at Berkeley and Diderot. And yet, for some strange reason, he displays a 'critical' feeling for his positivist opponents and a remarkable strategic discernment within the religious concert of the 'hyper-critical' philosophy of his day.

    The most amazing thing of all is the fact that Lenin manages the tour de force of taking up these anti-empiricist positions precisely in the field of an empiricist reference problematic. It certainly is a paradoxical exploit to manage to be anti-empiricist while thinking and expressing oneself in the basic categories of empiricism, and must surely pose a slight 'problem' for any philosopher of good faith who is prepared to examine it.

    Does this by any chance mean that the field of the philosophical problematic, its categorial formulations and its philosophical pronouncements are relatively indifferent to the philosophical positions adopted? Does it mean that at heart nothing essentially happens in what seems to constitute philosophy? Strange.

    Thesis 2.  If philosophy is distinct from the sciences, there is a privileged link between philosophy and the sciences. This link is represented by the materialist thesis of objectivity.

    Here, two points are essential.

    The first concerns the nature of scientific knowledge. The suggestions contained in Materialism and Empirio-criticism are taken up, developed and deepened in the Philosophical Notebooks : they give their full meaning to the anti-empiricism and anti-positivism which Lenin shows within his conception of scientific practice. In this respect, Lenin must also be regarded as a witness who speaks of scientific

 
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practice as a genuine practitioner. A reading of the texts he devoted to Marx's Capital between 1898 and 1905, and his analysis of The Development of Capitalism in Russia is enough to show that his scientific practice as a Marxist theoretician of history, political economy and sociology was constantly accompanied by acute epistemological reflections which his philosophical texts simply take up in a generalized form.

    What Lenin reveals, and here again, using categories which may be contaminated by his empiricist references (e.g. the category of reflection), is the anti-empiricism of scientific practice, the decisive role of scientific abstraction, or rather, the role of conceptual systematicity, and in a more general way, the role of theory as such.

    Politically, Lenin is famous for his critique of 'spontaneism', which, it should be noted, is not directed against the spontaneity, resourcefulness, inventiveness and genius of the masses of the people but against a political ideology which, screened by an exaltation of the spontaneity of the masses, exploits it in order to divert it into an incorrect politics. But it is not generally realized that Lenin adopts exactly the same position in his conceptions of scientific practice. Lenin wrote: 'without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement .' He could equally have written: without scientifc theory there can be no production of scientific knowledges. His defence of the requirements of theory in scientific practice precisely coincides with his defence of the requirements of theory in political practice. His anti-spontaneism then takes the theoretical form of anti-empiricism, anti-positivism and anti-pragmatism.

    But just as his political anti-spontaneism presupposes the deepest respect for the spontaneity of the masses, his theoretical anti-spontaneism presupposes the greatest respect for practice in the process of knowledge. Neither in his

 
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conception of science, nor in his conception of politics does Lenin for one moment fall into theoreticism.

    This first point enables us to understand the second. Materialist philosophy is, in Lenin's eyes, profoundly linked to scientific practice. This thesis must, I believe, be understood in two senses.

    First in an extremely classical sense which illustrates what we have been able to observe empirically in the history of the relations which link all philosophy to the sciences. For Lenin, what happens in the sciences is a crucial concern of philosophy. The great scientific revolutions induce important reorganizations in philosophy. This is Engels's famous thesis: materialism changes in form with each great scientific discovery. Engels was fascinated by the philosophical consequences of discoveries in the natural sciences (the cell, evolution, Carnot's principle, etc.), but Lenin defends the same thesis in a better way by showing that the decisive discovery which has induced an obligatory reorganization of materialist philosophy does not come so much from the sciences of nature as from the science of history, from historical materialism.

    In a second sense, Lenin invokes an important argument. Here he no longer talks of philosophy in general, but of materialist philosophy. The latter is particularly concerned with what happens in scientific practice, but in a manner peculiar to itself, because it represents, in its materialist thesis, the 'spontaneous ' convictions of scientists about the existence of the objects of their sciences, and the objectivity of their knowledge.

    In Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin constantly repeats the statement that most specialists in the sciences of nature are 'spontaneously' materialistic, at least in one of the tendencies of their spontaneous philosophy. While fighting the ideologies of the spontaneism of scientific

 
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practice (empiricism, pragmatism), Lenin recognizes in the experience of scientific practice a spontaneous materialist tendency of the highest importance for Marxist philosophy. He thus interrelates the materialist theses required to think the specificity of scientific knowledge with the spontaneous materialist tendency of the practitioners of the sciences: as expressing both practically and theoretically one and the same materialist thesis of existence and objectivity.

    Let me anticipate and say that the Leninist insistence on affirming the privileged link between the sciences and Marxist materialist philosophy is evidence that here we are dealing with a decisive nodal point, which, if I may, I shall call Nodal Point No. 1.

    But precisely in this mention of the spontaneous philosophy of the scientist something important is emerging which will bring us to another decisive nodal point of a quite different kind.

    Thesis 3.  Here, too, Lenin is taking up a classical thesis expounded by Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, but he gives it an unprecedented scope. This thesis concerns the history of philosophy conceived as the history of an age-old struggle between two tendencies: idealism and materialism.

    It must be admitted that in its bluntness, this thesis runs directly counter to the convictions of the great majority of professional philosophers. If they are prepared to read Lenin, and they will all have to some day, they will all admit that his philosophical theses are not so summary as reputation makes them. But I am afraid that they will stubbornly resist this last thesis, for it threatens to wound them in their most profound convictions. It appears far too crude, fit only for public, i.e. ideological and political, disputes. To say that the whole history of philosophy can be reduced in the last instance to a struggle between

 
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materialism and idealism seems to cheapen all the wealth of the history of philosophy.

    In fact, this thesis amounts to the claim that essentially philosophy has no real history. What is a history which is no more than the repetition of the clash between two fundamental tendencies? The forms and arguments of the fight may vary, but if the whole history of philosophy is merely the history of these forms, they only have to be reduced to the immutable tendencies that they represent for the transformation of these forms to become a kind of game for nothing. Ultimately, philosophy has no history, philosophy is that strange theoretical site where nothing really happens, nothing but this repetition of nothing. To say that nothing happens in philosophy is to say that philosophy leads nowhere because it is going nowhere : the paths it opens really are, as Dietzgen said, long before Heidegger, 'Holzwege ', paths that lead nowhere.

    Besides, that is what Lenin suggests in practice, when, right at the beginning of Materialism and Empirio-criticism, he explains that Mach merely repeats Berkeley, and himself counterposes to this his own repetition of Diderot. Worse still, it is clear that Berkeley and Diderot repeat each other, since they are in agreement about the matter/mind opposition, merely arranging its terms in a different way. The nothing of their philosophy is only the nothing of this inversion of the terms in an immutable categorial opposition (Matter/Mind) which represents in philosophical theory the play of the two antagonistic tendencies in confrontation in this opposition. The history of philosophy is thus nothing but the nothing of this repeated inversion. In addition, this thesis would restore a meaning to the famous phrases about Marx's inversion of Hegel, the Hegel whom Engels himself described as no more than a previous inversion.

    On this point it is essential to recognize that Lenin's

 
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insistence has absolutely no limits. In Materialism and Empirio-criticism, at least (for his tone changes on this point in the Philosophical Notebooks ), he jettisons all the theoretical nuances, distinctions, ingenuities and subtleties with which philosophy tries to think its 'object': they are nothing but sophistries, hair-splitting, professorial quibbles, accommodations and compromises whose only aim is to mask what is really at stake in the dispute to which all philosophy is committed: the basic struggle between the tendencies of materialism and idealism. There is no third way, no half-measure, no bastard position, any more than there is in politics. Basically, there are only idealists and materialists. All those who do not openly declare themselves one or the other are 'shame-faced' materialists or idealists (Kant, Hume).

    But we must therefore go even further and say that if the whole history of philosophy is nothing but the re-examination of arguments in which one and the same struggle is carried to its conclusion, then philosophy is nothing but a tendency struggle, the Kampfplatz that Kant discussed, which however, throws us back onto the subjectivity pure and simple of ideological struggles. It is to say that philosophy strictly speaking has no object, in the sense that a science has an object.

    Lenin goes as far as this, which proves that Lenin was a thinker. He declares that it is impossible to prove the ultimate principles of materialism just as it is impossible to prove (or refute, to Diderot's annoyance) the principles of idealism. It is impossible to prove them because they cannot be the object of a knowledge, meaning by that a knowledge comparable with that of science which does prove the properties of its objects.

    So philosophy has no object, but now everything fits. If nothing happens in philosophy it is precisely because it has

 
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no object. If something actually does happen in the sciences, it is because they do have an object, knowledge of which they can increase, which gives them a history. As philosophy has no object, nothing can happen in it. The nothing of its history simply repeats the nothing of its object.

    Here we are beginning to get close to Nodal Point No. 2, which concerns these famous tendencies. Philosophy merely re-examines and ruminates over arguments which represent the basic conflict of these tendencies in the form of categories. It is their conflict, unnameable in philosophy, which sustains the eternal null inversion for which philosophy is the garrulous theatre, the inversion of the fundamental categorial opposition between matter and mind. How then is the tendency revealed? In the hierarchic order it installs between the terms of the opposition: an order of domination. Listen to Lenin:

    Bogdanov, pretending to argue only against Beltov and cravenly ignoring Engels, is indignant at such definitions, which, don't you see, 'prove to be simple repetitions ' of the 'formula' (of Engels, our 'Marxist' forgets to add) that for one trend in philosophy matter is primary and spirit secondary, while for the other trend the reverse is the case. All the Russian Machists exultantly echo Bogdanov's 'refutation'! But the slightest reflection could have shown these people that it is impossible, in the very nature of the case, to give any definition of these two ultimate concepts of epistemology, except an indication which of them is taken as primary. What is meant by giving a 'definition'? It means essentially to bring a given concept within a more comprehensive concept. . . . The question then is, are there more comprehensive concepts with which the theory of knowledge could operate than those of being and thinking, matter and sensation, physical and mental? No. These are the ultimate, most comprehensive concepts, which epistemology has in point of fact so far not surpassed (apart from changes in nomenclature, which are always possible). One must be a charlatan or an utter blockhead to demand a 'definition ' of these two 'series ' of concepts of ultimate comprehensiveness which would not be a 'mere repetition': one or the other must be taken as primary (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, p. 146).

 
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    The inversion which is formally the nothing which happens in philosophy, in its explicit discourse, is not null, or rather, it is an effect of annulment, the annulment of a previous hierarchy replaced by the opposite hierarchy. What is at stake in philosophy in the ultimate categories which govern all philosophical systems, is therefore the sense of this hierarchy, the sense of this location of one category in the dominant position, it is something in philosophy which irresistibly recalls a seizure of power or an installation in power. Philosophically, we should say: an installation in power is without an object. An installation in power, is this still a purely theoretical category? A seizure of power (or an installation in power) is political, it does not have an object, it has a stake, precisely the power, and an aim: the effects of that power.

    Here we should stop for a moment to see what is new in Lenin's contribution with respect to Engels's. His contribution is enormous if we are really prepared to weigh up the effects of something which has to often been taken for a mere shade of opinion.

    Ultimately, although Engels has strokes of astonishing genius when he is working on Marx, his thought is not comparable with Lenin's. Often he only manages to juxtapose theses -- rather than managing to think them in the unity of their relations.

    Worse still: he never really rid himself of a certain positivist theme from The German Ideology. For although he recommends its systematic study, for him philosophy has to disappear: it is merely the craftsman's laboratory in which the philosophical categories necessary to science were forged in the past. These times have gone. Philosophy has done its work. Now it must give way to science. Since the sciences are scientifically capable of presenting the organic unitary system of their relations, there is no longer

 
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any need either for a Naturphilosophie or for a Geschichtsphilosophie.

    What is left for philosophy? An object: the dialectic, the most general laws of nature (but the sciences provide them) and of thought. There thus remains the laws of thought which can be disengaged from the history of the sciences. Philosophy is thus not really separate from the sciences, hence the positivism that insinuates itself into certain of Engels's formulations, when he says that to be a materialist is to admit nature as it is 'without any foreign admixture', despite the fact that he knows that the sciences are a process of knowledge. That is why philosophy does have an object for all that: but paradoxically, it is then pure thought, which would not displease idealism. For example, what else is Levi-Strauss up to today, on his own admission, and by appeal to Engels's authority? He, too, is studying the laws, let us say the structures of thought. Ricoeur has pointed out to him, correctly, that he is Kant minus the transcendental subject. Levi-Strauss has not denied it. Indeed, if the object of philosophy is pure thought, it is possible to appeal to Engels and find oneself a Kantian, minus the transcendental subject.

    The same difficulty can be expressed in another way. The dialectic, the object of philosophy, is called a logic. Can philosophy really have the object of Logic for its object? It seems that Logic is now moving further and further away from philosophy: it is a science.

    Of course, at the same time, Engels also defends the thesis of the two tendencies, but materialism and dialectics on the one hand, tendency struggle and philosophical advance exclusively determined by scientific advance on the other hand are two things very hard to think together, i.e. to think. Engels tries, but even if we are prepared not to take him literally (the least that can be asked where a non-

 
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specialist is concerned) it is only too clear that he is missing something essential.

    Which is to say that he is missing something essential to his thought if he is to be able to think. Thanks to Lenin we can see that this is a matter of an omission. For Engels's thought is missing precisely what Lenin adds to it.

    Lenin contributes a profoundly consistent thought, in which are located a number of radical theses that undoubtedly circumscribe emptinesses, but precisely pertinent emptinesses. At the centre of his thought is the thesis that philosophy has no object, i.e. philosophy is not to be explained merely by the relationship it maintains with the sciences.

    We are getting close to Nodal Point No. 2. But we have not got there yet.

 

2.  L E N I N  A N D  P H I L O S O P H I C A L  P R A C T I C E

In order to reach this Nodal Point No. 2, I shall enter a new domain, that of philosophical practice. It would be interesting to study Lenin's philosophical practice in his various works. But that would presuppose that we already knew what philosophical practice is as such.

    Now it so happens that on a few rare occasions, Lenin was forced by the exigencies of philosophical polemic to produce a kind of definition of his philosophical practice. Here are the two clearest passages:

    You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: it is sufficiently 'indefinite' to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but at the same time it is sufficiently 'definite' to enable us to draw a dividing-line in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner between ourselves and fideism and agnosticism, between ourselves and philosophical idealism and the

 
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sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant' (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, p. 136).
    Of course, we must not forget that the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea completely. This criterion too is sufficiently 'indefinite' not to allow human knowledge to become 'absolute', but at the same time it is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight on all varieties of idealism and agnosticism (op. cit., pp. 142-3).

Other passages confirm Lenin's position. These are clearly not rash or isolated formulations, but the expressions of a profound thought.

    Lenin thus defines the ultimate essence of philosophical practice as an intervention in the theoretical domain. This intervention takes a double form: it is theoretical in its formulation of definite categories; and practical in the function of these categories. This function consists of 'drawing a dividing-line' inside the theoretical domain between ideas declared to be true and ideas declared to be false, between the scientific and the ideological. The effects of this line are of two kinds: positive in that they assist a certain practice -- scientific practice -- and negative in that they defend this practice against the dangers of certain ideological notions: here those of idealism and dogmatism. Such, at least, are the effects produced by Lenin's philosophical intervention.

    In this drawing of a dividing-line we can see the two basic tendencies we have discussed confronting one another. It is materialist philosophy that draws this dividing-line, in order to protect scientific practice against the assaults of idealist philosophy, the scientific against the assaults of the ideological. We can generalize this definition by saying: all philosophy, consists of drawing a major dividing-line by means of which it repels the ideological notions of the philosophies that represent the opposing tendency; the

 
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stake in this act of drawing, i.e. in philosophical practice, is scientific practice, scientificity. Here we rediscover my Nodal Point No. 1 : the privileged relation of philosophy to the sciences.

    We also rediscover the paradoxical game of the inversion of terms in which the history of philosophy is annulled in the nothing it produces. This nothing is not null: since its stake is the fate of the scientific practices, of the scientific, and of its partner, the ideological. Either the scientific practices are exploited or they are assisted by the philosophical intervention.

    We can thus understand why philosophy can have a history, and yet nothing occurs in that history. For the intervention of each philosophy, which displaces or modifies existing philosophical categories and thus produces those changes in philosophical discourse in which the history of philosophy proffers its existence, is precisely the philosophical nothing whose insistence we have established, since a dividing-line actually is nothing, it is not even a line or a drawing, but the simple fact of being divided, i.e. the emptiness of a distance taken.

    This distance leaves its trace in the distinctions of the philosophical discourse, in its modified categories and apparatus; but all these modifications are nothing in themselves since they only act outside their own presence, in the distance or non-distance which separates the antagonistic tendencies from the scientific practices, the stake in their struggle.

    All that can be truly philosophical in this operation of a null drawing is its displacement, but that is relative to the history of the scientific practices and of the sciences. For there is a history of the sciences, and the lines of the philosophical front are displaced according to the transformations of the scientific conjuncture (i.e. according to the state of the sciences and their problems), and according

 
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to the state of the philosophical apparatuses that these transformations induce. The terms that designate the scientific and the ideological thus have to be re-thought again and again.

    Hence there is a history in philosophy rather than a history of philosophy: a history of the displacement of the indefinite repetition of a null trace whose effects are real. This history can be read profitably in all the great philosophers, even the idealist ones -- and in the one who sums up the whole history of philosophy, Hegel. That is why Lenin read Hegel, with astonishment -- but this reading of Hegel is also a part of Lenin's philosophical practice. To read Hegel as a materialist is to draw dividing-lines within him.

    No doubt I have gone beyond Lenin's literal meaning, but I do not think that I have been unfaithful to him. At any rate, I say simply that Lenin offers us something with which we can begin to think the specific form of philosophical practice in its essence, and give a meaning retrospectively to a number of formulations contained in the great texts of classical philosophy. For, in his own way, Plato had already discussed the struggle between the Friends of the Forms and the Friends of the Earth, declaring that the true philosopher must know how to demarcate, incise and draw dividing-lines.

    However, one fundamental question remains: what of the two great tendencies which confront one another in the history of philosophy? Lenin gives this question a wild answer (une réponse sauvage ), but an answer.

 
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3.  P A R T I S A N S H I P  I N  P H I L O S O P H Y

The answer is contained in the thesis -- famous, and it must be said, shocking to many people - of partisanship in philosophy.

    This word sounds like a directly political slogan in which partisan means a political party, the Communist Party.

    And yet, any half-way close reading of Lenin, not only of Materialism and Empirio-criticism, but also and above all of his analyses in the theory of history and of the economy, will show that it is a concept and not just a slogan.

    Lenin is simply observing that all philosophy is partisan, as a function of its basic tendency, against the opposing basic tendency, via the philosophies which represent it. But at the same time, he is observing that the vast majority of philosophers put a great price on being able to declare publicly and prove that they are not partisan because they do not have to be partisan.

    Thus Kant: the 'Kampfplatz ' he discusses is all right for other, pre-critical philosophers, but not for critical philosophy. His own philosophy is outside the 'Kampfplatz ', somewhere else, whence it assigns itself precisely the function of arbitrating the conflicts of metaphysics in the name of the interests of Reason. Ever since philosophy began, from Plato's to Husserl's philosopher as 'civil servant of humanity', and even to Heidegger in some of his writings, the history of philosophy has also been dominated by this repetition, which is the repetition of a contradiction: the theoretical denegation of its own practice, and enormous theoretical efforts to register this denegation in consistent discourses.

    Lenin's response to this surprising fact, which seems to be constitutive of the vast majority of philosophies, is simply to say a few words to us about the insistence of these

 
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mysterious tendencies in confrontation in the history of philosophy. In Lenin's view, these tendencies are finally related to class positions and therefore to class conflicts. I say related to (en rapport ), for Lenin says no more than that, and besides, he never says that philosophy can be reduced to the class struggle pure and simple, or even to what the Marxist tradition calls the ideological class struggle. Not to go beyond Lenin's declarations, we can say that, in his view, philosophy represents the class struggle, i.e. politics. It represents it, which presupposes an instance with (auprès de ) which politics is thus represented: this instance is the sciences.

    Nodal Point No. 1 : the relation between philosophy and the sciences. Nodal Point No. 2 : the relationship between philosophy and politics. Everything revolves around this double relation.

    We can now advance the following proposition: philosophy is a certain continuation of politics, in a certain domain, vis-à-vis a certain reality. Philosophy represents politics in the domain of theory, or to be more precise: with the sciences -- and, vice versa, philosophy represents scientificity in politics, with the classes engaged in the class struggle. How this representation is governed, by what mechanisms this representation is assured, by what mechanisms it can be falsified or faked and is falsified as a general rule, Lenin does not tell us. He is clearly profoundly convinced that in the last resort no philosophy can run ahead of this condition, evade the determinism of this double representation. In other words, he is convinced that philosophy exists somewhere as a third instance between the two major instances which constitute it as itself an instance: the class struggle and the sciences.

    One more word is enough: if Nodal Point No. 1, the instance of the Sciences, is to be found in Engels, Nodal

 
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Point No. 2, the instance of Politics, is not, despite his mention of tendency struggles in philosophy. In other words, Lenin is not just a commentator of Engels; he has contributed something new and decisive in what is called the domain of Marxist philosophy: what was missing from Engels.

    One more word and we are through. For the knowledge of this double representation of philosophy is only the hesitant beginning of a theory of philosophy, but it really is such a beginning. No one will dispute the fact that this theory is an embryonic one, that it has hardly even been outlined in what we thought was a mere polemic. At least these suggestions of Lenin's, if accepted, have the unexpected result that they displace the question into a problem, and remove what is called Marxist philosophy from the rumination of a philosophical practice which has always and absolutely predominately been that of the denegation of its real practice.

    That is how Lenin responded to the prophecy in the XIth Thesis, and he was the first to do so, for no one had done it before him, not even Engels. He himself responded in the 'style' of his philosophical practice. A wild practice (une pratique sauvage ) in the sense in which Freud spoke of a wild analysis, one which does not provide the theoretical credentials for its operations and which raises screams from the philosophy of the 'interpretation' of the world, which might be called the philosophy of denegation. A wild practice, if you will, but what did not begin by being wild?

    The fact is that this practice is a new philosophical practice: new in that it is no longer that rumination which is no more than the practice of denegation, where philosophy, constantly intervening 'politically' in the disputes in which the real destiny of the sciences is at stake, between the scientific that they install and the ideology that threatens

 
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them, and constantly intervening 'scientifically' in the struggle in which the fate of the classes is at stake, between the scientific that assists them and the ideological that threatens them -- nonetheless stubbornly denies in philosophical 'theory' that it is intervening in these ways: new in that it is a practice which has renounced denegation, and, knowing what it does, acts according to what it is.

    If this is indeed the case, we may surely suspect that it is no accident that this unprecedented effect was induced by Marx's scientific discovery, and thought by a proletarian political leader. For if philosophy's birth was induced by the first science in human history, this happened in Greece, in a class society, and knowing just how far class exploitation's effects may stretch, we should not be astonished that these effects, too, took a form which is classical in class societies, in which the ruling classes denegate the fact that they rule, the form of a philosophical denegation of philosophy's domination by politics. We should not be astonished that only the scientific knowledge of the mechanisms of class rule and all their effects, which Marx produced and Lenin applied, induced the extraordinary displacement in philosophy that shatters the phantasms of the denegation in which philosophy tells itself, so that men will believe it and so as to believe it itself, that it is above politics, just as it is above classes.

    Only with Lenin, then, could the prophetic sentence in the XIth Thesis on Feuerbach at last acquire body and meaning. (Until now) 'the philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it'. Does this sentence promise a new philosophy ? I do not think so. Philosophy will not be suppressed: philosophy will remain philosophy. But knowing what its practice is and knowing what it is, or beginning to know it, it can be slowly transformed by this knowledge. Less than ever can we say that

 
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Marxism is a new philosophy: a philosophy of praxis. At the heart of Marxist theory, there is a science: a quite unique science, but a science. What is new in Marxism's contribution to philosophy is a new practice of philosophy. Marxism is not a (new ) philosophy of praxis, but a (new ) practice of philosophy.

    This new practice of philosophy can transform philosophy. And in addition it can to some extent assist in the transformation of the world. Assist only, for it is not theoreticians, scientists or philosophers, nor is it 'men', who make history -- but the 'masses', i.e. the classes allied in a single class struggle.

February 1968 

 

APPENDIX

To avoid any misunderstanding of the meaning of this condemnation of philosophy teachers and of the philosophy that they teach, attention should be paid to the date of the text and to certain of its expressions. Echoing Dietzgen, Lenin condemns philosophy teachers as a mass, not all philosophy teachers without exception. He condemns their philosophy, but he does not condemn philosophy. He even recommends the study of their philosophy, so as to be able to define and pursue a different practice than theirs in philosophy. A triple observation, therefore, in which in the end the date and circumstances change nothing of substance.

    1. Philosophy teachers are teachers, i.e. intellectuals employed in a given education system and subject to that system, performing, as a mass, the social function of inculcating the 'values of the ruling ideology'. The fact

 
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that there may be a certain amount of 'play' in schools and other institutions, which enables individual teachers to turn their teaching and reflection against these established 'values' does not change the mass effect of the philosophical teaching function. Philosophers are intellectuals and therefore petty bourgeois, subject as a mass to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology.

    2. That is why the ruling philosophy, whose representatives or supports the mass of philosophy teachers are, even in their 'critical' freedom, is subject to the ruling ideology, defined by Marx from The German Ideology on as the ideology of the ruling class. This ideology is dominated by idealism.

    3. This situation, shared by those petty-bourgeois intellectuals, the philosophy teachers, and by the philosophy they teach or reproduce in their own individual form, does not mean that it is impossible for certain intellectuals to escape the constraints that dominate the mass of intellectuals, and, if philosophers, to adhere to a materialist philosophy and a revolutionary theory. The Communist Manifesto itself evoked the possibility. Lenin returns to it, adding that the collaboration of these intellectuals is indispensable to the Workers' Movement. On 7 February 1908, he wrote to Gorky: 'The significance of the intellectuals in our Party is declining; news comes from all sides that the intelligentsia is fleeing the Party. And a good riddance to these scoundrels. The Party is purging itself from petty bourgeois dross. The workers are having a bigger say in things. The role of the worker-professionals is increasing. All this is wonderful.' Gorky, whose cooperation Lenin was asking for, protested, so Lenin replied on 13 February 1908: 'I think that some of the questions you raise about our differences of opinion are a sheer misunderstanding. Never, of course, have I thought of "chasing away the

 
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intelligentsia" as the silly syndicalists do, or of denying its necessity for the Workers' Movement. There can be no divergence between us on any of these questions.' On the other hand, in the same letter, the philosophical divergences persist: 'It is in regard to materialism as a world outlook that I think I disagree with you in substance.' This is hardly surprising, for Gorky was pleading the cause of empirio-criticism and neo-Kantianism.

 
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Preface to Capital Volume One 

 
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'correspondence and non-correspondence' between the Productive Forces and the Relations of Production in very ambiguous (because Hegelian) terms.

    Capital, a mighty work, contains what is simply one of the three great scientific discoveries of the whole of human history: the discovery of the system of concepts (and therefore of the scientific theory ) which opens up to scientific knowledge what can be called the 'Continent of History'. Before Marx, two 'continents' of comparable importance had been 'opened up' to scientific knowledge: the Continent of Mathematics, by the Greeks in the fifth century B.C., and the Continent of Physics, by Galileo.

    We are still very far from having assessed the extent of this decisive discovery and drawn all the theoretical conclusions from it. In particular, the specialists who work in the domains of the 'Human Sciences' and of the Social Sciences (a smaller domain), i.e. economists, historians, sociologists, social psychologists, psychologists, historians of art and literature, of religious and other ideologies -- and even linguists and psycho-analysts, all these specialists ought to know that they cannot produce truly scientific knowledges in their specializations unless they recognize the indispensability of the theory Marx founded. For it is, in principle, the theory which 'opens up' to scientific knowledge the 'continent' in which they work, in which they have so far only produced a few preliminary knowledges (linguistics, psycho-analysis) or a few elements or rudiments of knowledge (the occasional chapter of history, sociology and economics) or illusions pure and simple, illegitimately called knowledges.

    Only the militants of the proletarian class struggle have drawn the conclusions from Capital : they have recognized its account of the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, and grouped themselves in the organizations of the eco-

 
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nomic class struggle (the trade unions) and of the political class struggle (the Socialist, then Communist Parties), which apply a mass 'line' of struggle for the seizure of State Power, a 'line' based on 'the concrete analysis of the concrete situation' (Lenin) in which they have to fight (this 'analysis' being achieved by a correct application of Marx's scientific concepts to the 'concrete situation').

    It is paradoxical that highly 'cultivated' intellectual specialists have not understood a book which contains the Theory which they need in their 'disciplines' and that, inversely, the militants of the Workers' Movement have understood this same Book, despite its great difficulties. The paradox is easy to explain, and the explanation of it is given word for word by Marx in Capital and by Lenin in his works.[4]

    If the workers have 'understood' Capital so easily it is because it speaks in scientific terms of the everyday reality with which they are concerned: the exploitation which they suffer because of the capitalist system. That is why Capital so rapidly became the 'Bible' of the International Workers' Movement, as Engels said in 1886. Inversely, the specialists in history, political economy, sociology, psychology, etc., have had and still have such trouble 'understanding' Capital because they are subject to the ruling ideology (the ideology of the ruling class) which intervenes directly in their 'scientific' practice, falsifying their objects, their theories and their methods. With a few exceptions, they do not suspect, they cannot suspect the extraordinary power and variety of the ideological grip to which they are subject in their 'practice' itself. With a few exceptions, they are not in a position to criticize for themselves the illusions in

 
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which they live and to whose maintenance they contribute because they are literally blinded by them. With a few exceptions, they are not in a position to carry out the ideological and theoretical revolution which is necessary if they are to recognize in Marx's theory the very theory their practice needs in order to become at last scientific.

    When we speak of the difficulty of Capital, it is therefore essential to apply a distinction of the greatest importance. Reading Capital in fact presents two types of difficulty which have nothing to do with each other.

    Difficulty No. 1, absolutely and massively determinant, is an ideological difficulty, and therefore in the last resort a political difficulty.

    Two sorts of readers confront Capital : those who have direct experience of capitalist exploitation (above all the proletarians or wage-labourers in direct production, but also, with nuances according to their place in the production system, the non-proletarian wage-labourers); and those who have no direct experience of capitalist exploitation, but who are, on the contrary, ruled in their practices and consciousness by the ideology of the ruling class, bourgeois ideology. The first have no ideologico-political difficulty in understanding Capital since it is a straightforward discussion of their concrete lives. The second have great difficulty in understanding Capital (even if they are very 'scholarly', I would go so far as to say, especially if they are very 'scholarly'), because there is a political incompatibility between the theoretical content of Capital and the ideas they carry in their heads, ideas which they 'rediscover' in their practices (because they put them there in the first place). That is why Difficulty No. 1 of Capital is in the last instance a political difficulty.

    But Capital presents another difficulty which has absolutely nothing to do with the first: Difficulty No. 2, or the theoretical difficulty.

 
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    Faced with this difficulty, the same readers divide into two new groups. Those who are used to theoretical thought (i.e. the real scientists) do not or should not have any difficulty in reading a theoretical book like Capital. Those who are not used to practising works of theory (the workers, and many intellectuals who, although they may be 'cultured' are not theoretically cultured) must or ought to have great difficulty in reading a book of pure theory like Capital.

    As the reader will have noted, I have used conditionals (should not . . . should . . .). I have done so in order to stress something even more paradoxical than what I have just discussed: the fact that even individuals without practice in theoretical texts (such as workers) have had less difficulty with Capital than individuals disciplined in the practice of pure theory (such as scientists, or very 'cultivated' pseudo-scientists).

    This cannot excuse us from saying something about the very special type of difficulty presented by Capital as a work of pure theory, although we must bear in mind the fundamental fact that it is not the theoretical difficulties but the political difficulties which are really determinant in the last instance for every reading of Capital and its first volume.

    Everyone knows that without a corresponding scientific theory there can be no scientific practice, i.e. no practice producing new scientific knowledges. All science therefore depends on its own theory. The fact that this theory changes and is progressively complicated and modified with the development of the science in question makes no difference to this.

    Now, what is this theory which is indispensable to every science ? It is a system of basic scientific concepts. The mere formulation of this simple definition brings out two essential aspects of every scientific theory: (1) the basic concepts, and (2) their system.

    These concepts are concepts, i.e. abstract notions. First

 
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difficulty of the theory: to get used to the practice of abstraction. This apprenticeship, for it really is an apprenticeship (comparable with the apprenticeship in any other practice, e.g. as a lock-smith), is primarily provided, in our education system, by mathematics and philosophy. Even in the Preface to Capital Volume One, Marx warns us that abstraction is not just the existence of theory, but also the method of his analysis. The experimental sciences have the 'microscope', Marxist science has no 'microscope': it has to use abstraction to 'replace' it.

    Beware: scientific abstraction is not at all 'abstract', quite the contrary. E.g., when Marx speaks of the total social capital, no one can 'touch it with his hands'; when Marx speaks of the 'total surplus-value', no one can touch it with his hands or count it: and yet these two abstract concepts designate actually existing realities. What makes abstraction scientific is precisely the fact that it designates a concrete reality which certainly exists but which it is impossible to 'touch with one's hands' or 'see with one's eyes'. Every abstract concept therefore provides knowledge of a reality whose existence it reveals: an 'abstract concept' then means a formula which is apparently abstract but really terribly concrete, because of the object it designates. This object is terribly concrete in that it is infinitely more concrete, more effective than the objects one can 'touch with one's hands' or 'see with one's eyes' -- and yet one cannot touch it with one's hands or see it with one's eyes. Thus the concept of exchange value, the concept of the total social capital, the concept of socially necessary labour, etc. All this is easy to explain.

    The second point: the basic concepts exist in the form of a system, and that is what makes them a theory. A theory is indeed a rigorous system of basic scientific concepts. In a scientific theory, the basic concepts do not exist in any

 
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given order, but in a rigorous order. It is therefore necessary to know this order, and to learn the practice of rigour step by step. Rigour (systematic rigour) is not a fantasy, nor is it a formal luxury, but a vital necessity for all science, for every scientific practice. It is what Marx in his 'Afterword' calls the rigour of the 'method of presentation ' of a scientific theory.

    Having said this, we have to know what the object of Capital is, in other words, what is the object analysed in Capital Volume One. Marx tells us: it is 'the capitalist mode of production and the relations of production and exchange corresponding to that mode '. This is itself an abstract object. Indeed, despite appearances, Marx does not analyse any 'concrete society', not even England which he mentions constantly in Volume One, but the CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION and nothing else. This object is an abstract one: which means that it is terribly real and that it never exists in the pure state, since it only exists in capitalist societies. Simply speaking: in order to be able to analyse these concrete capitalist societies (England, France, Russia, etc.), it is essential to know that they are dominated by that terribly concrete reality, the capitalist mode of production, which is 'invisible' (to the naked eye). 'Invisible', i.e. abstract.

    Of course, this does not deal with every misunderstanding. We have to be extremely careful to avoid the false difficulties raised by these misunderstandings. For example, we must not imagine that Marx is analysing the concrete situation in England when he discusses it. He only discusses it in order to 'illustrate' his (abstract) theory of the capitalist mode of production.

    To sum up: there really is a difficulty in reading Capital which is a theoretical difficulty. It lies in the abstract and systematic nature of the basic concepts of the theory or

 
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theoretical analysis. It is essential to realize that this is a real difficulty that can only be surmounted by an apprenticeship in scientific abstraction and rigour. It is essential to realize that this apprenticeship is not quickly completed.

    Hence a first piece of advice to the reader: always keep closely in mind the idea that Capital is a work of theory, and that its object is the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production alone.

    Hence a second piece of advice to the reader: do not look to Capital either for a book of 'concrete' history or for a book of 'empirical' political economy, in the sense in which historians and economists understand these terms. Instead, find in it a book of theory analysing the CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION. History (concrete history) and economics (empirical economics) have other objects.

    Hence a third piece of advice to the reader. When you encounter a difficulty of a theoretical order in your reading, realize the fact and take the necessary steps. Do not hurry, go back carefully and slowly and do not proceed until you have understood. Take note of the fact that an apprenticeship in theory is indispensable if you are to be able to read a theoretical work. Realize that you can learn to walk by walking, on condition that you scrupulously respect the above-mentioned conditions. Realize that you will not learn to walk in theory all at once, suddenly and definitively, but little by little, patiently and humbly. This is the price of success.

    Practically, this means that it is impossible to understand Volume One except on condition of re-reading it four or five times in succession, i.e. the time it takes to learn to walk in theory.

    The present preface is intended to guide the reader's first steps in the theory.

 
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But before I turn to that, a word is needed on the audience who are going to read Capital Volume One.

    Of whom is this audience likely to be composed?

    1. Proletarians or wage-earners directly employed in the production of material goods.

    2. Non-proletarian wage-labourers (from the simple white-collar worker to middle and higher executives, engineers and research workers, teachers, etc.).

    3. Urban and rural artisans.

    4. Members of the liberal professions.

    5. Students at school and university.

    Among the proletarians or wage-earners who will read Capital Volume One, there will naturally be men and women who have obtained a certain 'idea' of Marxist theory from the practice of the class struggle in their trade-union and political organizations. This idea may be more or less correct, as one passes from the proletarians to the non-proletarian wage-workers: it will not be fundamentally falsified.

    Among the other categories who will read Capital Volume One, there will naturally be men and women who also have a certain 'idea' of Marxist theory in their heads. For example, academics, and particularly 'historians', 'economists' and a number of ideologists from various disciplines (for, as is well known, in the Human Sciences today, everyone claims to be a 'Marxist').

    But nine-tenths of the ideas these intellectuals have in their heads about Marxism are false. These false ideas were expounded even in Marx's own lifetime and they have been tirelessly repeated ever since without any remarkable effort of the imagination. Every bourgeois or petty-bourgeois economist or ideologist[5] for the last hundred years has manu-

 
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factured and defended these false ideas in order to 'refute' Marxist theory.

    These ideas have had no trouble 'winning' a wide audience, since the latter was 'won' to them in advance by its anti-socialist and anti-Marxist ideological prejudices.

    This wide audience is primarily composed of intellectuals and not of workers, for, as Engels said, even when proletarians have not grasped the most abstract demonstrations in Capital, they do not allow themselves to be 'caught out'.

    On the contrary, even the most generously 'revolutionary' intellectuals and students do allow themselves to be 'caught out' in one direction or another, since they are massively subject to the prejudices of petty-bourgeois ideology without the counterpoise of a direct experience of exploitation.

    In this preface, I am therefore obliged to take conjointly into account:

    1. the two orders of difficulties which I have already signalled (Difficulty No. 1 -- political, Difficulty No. 2 -- theoretical);

    2. the distribution of the audience into two essential groups: the wage-labouring audience on the one hand, the intellectual audience on the other, it being understood that these two groups intersect at one of their boundaries (certain wage-earners are at the same time 'intellectual workers');

    3. the existence on the ideological market of supposedly 'scientific' refutations of Capital which affect the various parts of this audience more or less profoundly according to their class origins.

    Allowing for all these facts, my preface will take the following form:

    Point I : Advice to the reader with the aim of avoiding the toughest of these difficulties for the time being. This point can be quickly and clearly dealt with. I hope that

 
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proletarians will read it because I have written it for them especially, although it is valid for everybody.

    Point II : Suggestions as to the nature of the theoretical difficulties in Capital Volume One which provide a pretext for all the refutations of Marxist theory.

    This point will inevitably be much more arduous, given the nature of the theoretical difficulties in question, and the arguments of the 'refutations' of Marxist theory which are erected out of these difficulties.

 
P O I N T  I

The greatest difficulties, theoretical or otherwise, which are obstacles to an easy reading of Capital Volume One are unfortunately (or fortunately) concentrated at the very beginning of Volume One, to be precise, in its first Part, which deals with 'Commodities and Money'.

    I therefore give the following advice: put THE WHOLE OF PART ONE ASIDE FOR THE TIME BEING and BEGIN YOUR READING WITH PART TWO: 'The Transformation of Money into Capital'.

    In my opinion it is impossible to begin (even to begin) to understand Part I until you have read and re-read the whole of Volume One, starting with Part II.

    This advice is more than advice: it is a recommendation that, notwithstanding all the respect I owe my readers, I am prepared to present as an imperative.

    Everyone can try it out in practice for himself.

    If you begin Volume One at the beginning, i.e. with Part I, either you do not understand it, and give up; or you think you understand it, but that is even more serious, for there is every chance that you will have understood something quite different from what there was to be understood.

 
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    From Part II (The Transformation of Money into Capital) on, things are luminous. You go straight into the heart of Volume One.

    This heart is the theory of surplus-value, which proletarians will understand without any difficulty, because it is quite simply the scientific theory of something they experience every day: class exploitation.

    It is immediately followed by two very dense but very clear sections which are decisive for the class struggle even today : Parts III and IV. They deal with the two basic forms of surplus-value available to the capitalist class for it to push the exploitation of the working class to a maximum: what Marx calls absolute surplus-value (Part III) and relative surplus-value (Part IV).

    Absolute surplus-value (Part III) concerns the length of the working day. Marx explains that the capitalist class inexorably presses for the lengthening of the working day and that the more than century-old workers' class struggle has as its aim a reduction of the working day by struggling AGAINST that lengthening.

    The historical stages of that struggle are well known: the twelve-hour day, the ten-hour day, then the eight-hour day, and finally, under the Popular Front, the forty-hour week.

    Every proletarian knows from experience what Marx demonstrates in Part III: the irresistible tendency of the capitalist system to increase exploitation as much as possible by lengthening the working day (or the working week). This result is obtained either despite existing legislation (the forty-hour week was never really enforced) or by means of existing legislation (e.g., 'overtime'). Overtime seems to 'cost the capitalists a great deal' since they pay time-and a quarter, time-and-a-half or even double time as compared with normal rates. But in reality it is to their advantage

 
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since it makes it possible to run the 'machines', which have a shorter life because of the rapidity of technological progress, twenty-four hours a day. In other words, overtime enables the capitalists to draw the maximum profit from 'productivity'. Marx showed that the capitalist class has never paid and will never pay the workers overtime rates to please them, or to allow them to supplement their incomes at the cost of their health, but only in order to exploit them more.

    Relative surplus-value (Part IV), whose existence can be glimpsed in what I have just said about overtime, is undoubtedly the number-one form of contemporary exploitation. It is much more subtle because less directly visible than the lengthening of the working day. However, proletarians react instinctively if not against it, at least, as we shall see, against its effects.

    Relative surplus-value deals in fact with the intensification of the mechanization of (industrial and agricultural) production, and thus with the resulting rise in productivity. At present it tends towards automation. To produce the maximum of commodities at the lowest price in order to get the highest profit, such is the irresistible tendency of capitalism. Naturally, it goes hand in hand with an increasing exploitation of labour power.

    There is a tendency to talk about a 'mutation' or 'revolution' in contemporary technology. In reality, Marx claimed as early as the Manifesto and proved in Capital that the capitalist mode of production is characterized by its 'constantly revolutionizing the means of production', above all, the instruments of production (technology). What has happened in the last ten to fifteen years is described in grandiose statements as 'unprecedented', and it is true that in the last few years things have gone quicker than before. But this is merely a difference of degree, not a difference of

 
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kind. The whole history of capitalism is the history of a fantastic growth of productivity, through the development of technology.

    The result at the moment, as in the past, is the introduction of more and more perfected machines into the labour process -- making it possible to produce the same quantity of products as before in one half, one third or one quarter of the time -- i.e. a manifest growth in productivity But correlatively, the result is certain effects of the aggravation of the exploitation of labour power (speed-up, the elimination of blue- and white-collar jobs) not only for proletarians but also for non-proletarian wage-labourers, including certain technicians and executives, even in the higher grades, who can no longer 'keep up' with technical progress and therefore have no more market value, hence the subsequent unemployment.

    Marx deals with all these things with great rigour and precision in Part IV (Relative Surplus-Value).

    He dismantles the mechanisms of exploitation deriving from the growth of productivity in its concrete forms. He shows thereby that the growth of productivity is never spontaneously to the advantage of the working class, quite the contrary, since it is precisely introduced to increase its exploitation. Marx thus proves irrefutably that the working class cannot hope to gain from the modern growth of productivity before it has overthrown capitalism and seized State power in a socialist revolution. He proves that from here to the revolutionary seizure of power which opens the road to socialism, the working class can have no other objective, and hence no other resource, than to struggle against the effects of exploitation produced by the growth of productivity, in order to limit these effects (struggle against speed-up, against arbitrary productivity bonuses, against overtime, against redundancies, against 'automation

 
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unemployment'). An essentially defensive, not an offensive struggle.

    I then advise the reader who has reached the end of Part IV to leave Part V (The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value) for the moment, and to move directly on to Part VI, on Wages, which is perfectly clear.

    Here, too, proletarians are literally at home since, besides examining the bourgeois mystification which declares that the worker's 'labour' is 'paid at its value', Marx looks at the different forms of wages: time-wages first of all, then piece-rates, i.e. the different traps the bourgeoisie sets for the workers' consciousness, hoping to destroy in it all an organized class's will to struggle. Here proletarians will recognize that their class struggle cannot but be opposed in an antagonistic way to the tendency for capitalist exploitation to increase.

    Here, on the plane of wages, or as cabinet ministers and their economists say, on the plane of the 'standard of living' or of 'income' respectively, they will recognize that the economic class struggle of the proletarians and other wage-earners can have only one meaning: a defensive struggle against the objective tendency of the capitalist system to increase exploitation in all its forms.

    I say a defensive struggle and therefore a struggle against the fall in wages. Of course, any struggle against a fall in wages is at the same time also a struggle for a rise in the existing wages. But to speak only of a struggle for a rise would be to describe the effect of the struggle while running the risk of masking its cause and its objective. As capitalism tends inexorably to reduce wages, the struggle for wage increases is therefore, in principle, a defensive struggle against the tendency of capitalism to reduce wages.

    It is therefore perfectly clear, as Marx emphasizes in

 
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Part VI, that the question of wages certainly cannot be settled 'by itself' by 'sharing out' the 'gains' from even a spectacular growth in productivity among the proletarians and other labourers. The question of wages is a question of class struggle. It is not settled 'by itself', but by class struggle: above all by the different forms of strike, eventually leading to general strike.

    Such a general strike is purely economic and therefore defensive ('a defence of the material and moral interests of the labourers', a struggle against the double capitalist tendency to increase labour-time and reduce wages) or takes a political and therefore offensive form (struggle for the conquest of State power, socialist revolution and the construction of socialism); all those who know the distinctions made by Marx, Engels and Lenin know the difference between the political class struggle and the economic class struggle.

    The economic (trade-union) class struggle remains a defensive one because it is economic (against the two great tendencies of capitalism). The political class struggle is offensive because it is political (for the seizure of power by the working class and its allies).

    These two struggles must be carefully distinguished; although in reality they always encroach upon one another: more or less, according to the conjuncture.

    One thing is certain, and the analysis which Marx makes of the economic class struggles in England in Volume One shows it: a class struggle which is deliberately restricted to the domain of economic struggle alone has always remained and will always remain a defensive one, i.e. one with no hope of ever overthrowing the capitalist regime. This is the great temptation of the reformists, Fabians, and trade unionists whom Marx discusses, and in a general way of the

 
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Social-Democratic tradition of the Second International. Only a political struggle can 'reverse steam' and go beyond these limits, thereby ceasing to be a defensive struggle and becoming an offensive one. This conclusion is legible between the lines in Capital, and it can be read in so many words in the political texts of Marx himself, of Engels and of Lenin. It has been the number-one question of the International Workers' Movement since it 'fused' with Marxist theory.

    Readers can then go on to Part VII (The Accumulation of Capital), which is very clear. There Marx explains that it is the tendency of capitalism to reproduce and expand the very basis of capital, since this tendency is the transformation into capital of the surplus-value extorted from the proletariat, and therefore that capital constantly 'snowballs', constantly extorting more surplus labour (surplus-value) from the proletarians. And Marx shows this in a magnificent concrete 'illustration': that of England from 1846 to 1866.

    As for Part VIII (The So-called Primitive Accumulation), which brings Volume One to an end, it contains the second of Marx's greatest discoveries. The first was the discovery of 'surplus-value'. The second is the discovery of the incredible means used to achieve the 'primitive accumulation' thanks to which capitalism was 'born' and grew in Western societies, helped also by the existence of a mass of 'free labourers' (i.e. Iabourers stripped of means of labour) and technological discoveries. This means was the most brutal violence: the thefts and massacres which cleared capitalism's royal road into human history. This last chapter contains a prodigious wealth which has not yet been exploited: in particular the thesis (which we shall have to develop) that capitalism has always used and, in the

 
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'margins' of its metropolitan existence - i.e. in the colonial and ex-colonial countries -- is still using well into the twentieth century, the most brutally violent means. --

    I therefore urge on the reader the following method of reading:

    1. Leave Part I (Commodities and Money) deliberately on one side in a first reading.

    2. Begin reading Volume One with its Part II (The Transformation of Money into Capital).

    3. Read carefully Parts II, III (The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value) and IV (The Production of Relative Surplus-Value).

    4. Leave Part V (The Production of Relative and Absolute Surplus-Value) on one side.

    5. Read carefully Parts VI (Wages), VII (The Accumulation of Capital) and VIII (The So-called Primitive Accumulation).

    6. Finally, begin to read Part I (Commodities and Money) with infinite caution, knowing that it will always be extremely difficult to understand, even after several readings of the other Parts, without the help of a certain number of deeper explanations.

    I guarantee that those readers who are prepared to observe this order of reading scrupulously, remembering what I have said about the political and theoretical difficulties of every reading of Capital, will not regret it.

 
P O I N T  I

I now come to the theoretical difficulties which are obstacles to a quick reading, and even at certain points even to a very careful reading of Capital Volume One.

    Let me remind the reader that it is by building on these difficulties that bourgeois ideology attempts to convince

 
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itself -- but does it really succeed? -- that it has long since 'refuted' Marx's theory.

    The first difficulty is of a very general kind. It derives from the simple fact that Volume One is only the first volume in a book containing four.

    I say four. Most people know about Volumes One, Two and Three, but even those who had read them usually ignore Volume Four, even supposing that they suspect its existence.

    The 'mystery' of Volume Four is only a mystery for those who think Marx was one of a number of 'historians', the author of a History of Economic Doctrines, since this is the aberrant title that Molitor has given to his translation,[6] if that word is applicable, of a certain profoundly theoretical work really called Theories of Surplus-Value.

    Certainly Capital Volume One is the only one Marx published in his lifetime, Volumes Two and Three having been published after his death in 1883 by Engels, and Volume Four by Kautsky.[7] In 1886, in his preface to the English edition, Engels could say that Volume One 'is in a great measure a whole in itself'. Indeed, when the following volumes were not available, it had to 'rank as an independent work'.

    This is not the case today. All four volumes are available, in German,[8] and in French.[9] To those who read German, I suggest that they have much to gain by referring constantly to the German text to check the French translations, not just of Volume Four (which is riddled with serious errors),

but also of Volumes Two and Three (certain terminological difficulties have not always been solved) and even of Volume One, translated by Roy, in a version which Marx personally completely revised, correcting and even appreciably expanding certain passages. For Marx, who was uncertain of the theoretical capacities of his French readers,[10] sometimes dangerously compromised the precision of the original conceptual expressions.[11]

    Knowledge of the other three Volumes makes it possible to remove a certain number of the very serious theoretical difficulties of Volume One, especially those concentrated in the notorious Part I (Commodities and Money) around the famous 'labour theory of value'.

    In the grip of a Hegelian conception of science (for Hegel, all science is philosophical and therefore every true science has to found its own beginnings ), Marx then thought that the principle that 'every beginning is difficult . . . holds in all sciences'. In fact, Volume One Part I follows a method of presentation whose difficulty largely derives from this Hegelian prejudice. Moreover, Marx redrafted this beginning a dozen times before giving it its 'definitive' form as if he was struggling with a difficulty which was not just one of presentation -- and with good reason.

    Let me very briefly give the principles of a solution.

    Marx's 'labour theory of value' which all bourgeois 'economists' and ideologists have used against him in their scornful condemnations, is intelligible, but only as a special

case of a theory which Marx and Engels called the 'law of value ' or the law of the distribution of the available labour power between the various branches of production, a distribution indispensable to the reproduction of the conditions of production. 'Every child' could understand it, says Marx in 1868, in terms which thus deny the inevitable 'difficult beginning' of every science. On the nature of this law I refer the reader to Marx's letters to Kugelmann on 6 March and 11 July 1868, among other texts.[12]

    The 'labour theory of value' is not the only point which causes difficulty in Volume One. We must of course mention the theory of surplus-value, the bête noire of bourgeois economists and ideologists who attack it as 'metaphysical', 'Aristotelian', 'non-operational', etc. Now this theory of surplus-value, too, is intelligible only as a special case of a wider theory: the theory of surplus labour.

    Surplus labour exists in every 'society'. In classless societies, once the portion necessary for the reproduction of the conditions of production has been set aside, it is shared between the members of the 'community' (the primitive or communist community). In class societies, once the portion necessary for the reproduction of the conditions of production has been set aside, it is extorted from the exploited classes by the ruling classes. In capitalist class society, in which labour power becomes a commodity for the first time in history, the extorted surplus labour takes the form of surplus-value.

    Here again, I shall go no further: I am content to suggest the principles of the solution whose proof would demand detailed argument.

    Volume One contains further theoretical difficulties, linked to the preceding ones or to other problems.

    When Capital Volume One appeared (1867), traces of the Hegelian influence still remained. Only later did they disappear completely : the Critique of the Gotha Programme

 
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(1875)[15] as well as the Marginal Notes on Wagner's 'Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie ' (1882)[16] are totally and definitively exempt from any trace of Hegelian influence.

    It is therefore of the first importance for us to know where Marx started : he began with the neo-Hegelianism which was a retreat from Hegel to Kant and Fichte, then with pure Feuerbachianism, then with Feuerbachianism with a Hegelian injection (the 1844 Manuscripts )[17] before rediscovering Hegel in 1858.

    It is also important to know where he was going. The tendency of his thought drove him irresistibly to the radical abandonment of every shade of Hegelian influence, as can be seen from the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme and the 1882 Notes on Wagner. While remorselessly abandoning all Hegel's influence, Marx continued to recognize an important debt to him: the fact that he was the first to conceive of history as a 'process without a subject'.

    By taking this tendency into account we can appreciate the traces of Hegelian influence which remain in Volume One as survivals on the way to supersession.

    I have already noted these traces in the typically Hegelian problem of the 'difficult beginning' to every science, whose striking manifestation is Part I of Volume One. This Hegelian influence can be located very precisely in the vocabulary Marx uses in Part I: in the fact that he speaks of two completely different things, the social usefulness of products on the one hand and the exchange value of the same products on the other, in terms which in fact have a word in common, the word 'value': on the one hand use-value, and on the other exchange value. Marx pillories a man named Wagner

    I note also that, unfortunately for the same International Communist Movement, Stalin made the 1859 Preface his reference text, as can be observed in the chapter of the History of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik ) entitled Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism (1938) which undoubtedly explains many of the things called by a name which is not at all Marxist, the 'period of the cult of personality'. I shall return to this question elsewhere.

    Let me add one further comment, to forestall the possibility of a very serious misunderstanding for the reader of Volume One, one which no longer has anything to do with the difficulties which I have just raised, but relates to the necessity of reading Marx's text very closely.

    This misunderstanding concerns the object which is in question from the beginning of Part II of Volume One (The Transformation of Money into Capital). In fact, Marx there discusses the organic composition of capital, saying that in capitalist production there is in every given capital a fraction (say 40 per cent) which constitutes the constant capital (raw material, buildings, machines, tools) and another fraction (in this case 60 per cent) which

 
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constitutes the variable capital (the costs of purchasing labour power). The constant capital is so called because it remains constant in the process of capitalist production: it produces no new value, so it remains constant. The variable capital is called variable because it produces a new value, higher than its former value, by the action of the extortion of surplus-value (which takes place in the use of labour power).

    Now, the vast majority of readers, including of course the 'economists' who are, if I may say so, destined to this 'oversight' by their professional distortion as technicians of bourgeois political economy, believe that when he discusses the organic composition of capital, Marx is constructing a theory of the firm, or, to use Marxist terms, a theory of the unit of production. However, Marx says quite the opposite: he always discusses the composition of the total social capital, but in the form of an apparently concrete example for which he gives figures (e.g. out of 100 million, constant capital = 40 millions -- 40 per cent -- and variable capital = 60 millions -- 60 per cent). In this arithmetical example, Marx is thus not talking about one firm or another, but of a 'fraction of the total capital'. For the convenience of the reader and in order to 'crystallize his ideas', he argues around a 'concrete' (i.e. arithmetical) example, but this concrete example simply provides him with an example so that he can talk about the total social capital.

    In this perspective, let me signal the fact that nowhere in Capital is there any theory of the capitalist unit of production or of the capitalist unit of consumption. On these two points, Marx's theory thus has still to be complemented.

    I also note the political importance of this confusion, which was definitively dealt with by Lenin in his theory of Imperialism.[18] As we know, Marx planned to discuss the

 
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'world market' in Capital, i.e. the tendential expansion of the capitalist relations of production throughout the world. This 'tendency' found its final form in Imperialism. It is very important to grasp the decisive political importance of this fact, which Marx and the First International saw very clearly.

    In fact, if capitalist exploitation (the extortion of surplus-value) exists in the capitalist firms where wage-workers are employed (and the workers are its victims and therefore its direct witnesses), this local exploitation only exists as a simple part of a generalized system of exploitation which steadily expands from the great urban industrial enterprises to agricultural capitalist enterprises, then to the complex forms of the other sectors (urban and rural artisanat: 'one-family agricultural' units, white-collar workers and officials, etc.), not only in one capitalist country, but in the ensemble of capitalist countries, and eventually in all the rest of the world (by means of direct colonial exploitation based on military occupation: colonialism; then indirect colonial exploitation, without military occupation: neo-colonialism).

    There is in fact, therefore, a real capitalist International, which has been an Imperialist International since the end of the nineteenth century, to which the Workers' Movement and its great leaders (Marx, then Lenin) responded with a Workers' International (the First, Second, and Third Internationals). Working-class militants recognize this fact in their practice of Proletarian Internationalism. Concretely this means that they know very well:

    1. that they are directly exploited in the capitalist firm (unit of production) in which they work;

    2. that they cannot conduct the struggle solely at the level of their own firm, but must also conduct it at the level of their national production (engineering, building and

 
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transport trade-union federations, etc.), then at the level of the national set of different branches of production (e.g. in the Confédération Générale de Travail -- the General Confederation of Labour -- in France), and finally at the world level (e.g. the World Federation of Trade Unions).

    This where the economic class struggle is concerned.

    The same is naturally the case, despite the disappearance of a formal International, where the political class struggle is concerned. That is why Volume One must be read in the light not only of the Communist Manifesto ('Workers of all countries unite!'), but also of the Statutes of the First, Second and Third Internationals, and of course, in the light of the Leninist theory of imperialism.

    To say this is not at all to leave Volume One of Capital to make 'political propaganda' with respect to a book which, it would seem, deals only with 'political economy'. Quite the contrary, it is to take seriously the fact that Marx has opened to scientific knowledge and to men's conscious practice a new continent, the Continent of History, by an amazing discovery, and that, like the discovery of every new science, this discovery extends into the history of this science and into the political practice of the men who have recognized themselves in it. Marx was not able to write the projected chapter of Capital with the title 'The World Market' as a foundation for proletarian Internationalism, in response to the capitalist, later imperialist International, but the First International, which Marx founded in 1864, had already begun to write this same chapter in the facts, three years before the appearance of Capital Volume One, and Lenin wrote the continuation of it not only in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, but also in the foundation of the Third International (1919).

    All this is, of course, if not incomprehensible, at least

 
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very hard to understand if one is an 'economist' or even a 'historian', a fortiori if one is a mere 'ideologist' of the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is all very easy to understand if one is a proletarian, i.e. a wage-labourer 'employed' in capitalist production (urban or agricultural).

    Why this difficulty? Why this relative ease? I believe that I have been able to explain it by following some of Marx's own texts and the clarifications that Lenin provides in his commentaries on Marx's Capital in the first volumes of his Collected Works. It is because bourgeois and petty bourgeois intellectuals have a bourgeois (or petty-bourgeois) 'class instinct', whereas proletarians have a proletarian class instinct. The former, blinded by bourgeois ideology which does everything it can to cover up class exploitation, cannot see capitalist exploitation. The latter, on the contrary, despite the terrible weight of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology they carry, cannot fail to see this exploitation, since it constitutes their daily life.

    To understand Capital, and therefore its first volume, it is necessary to take up 'proletarian class positions', i.e. to adopt the only viewpoint which makes visible the reality of the exploitation of wage labour power, which constitutes the whole of capitalism.

    This is, proportionately speaking, on condition that they struggle against the influence of the burden of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology that they carry, relatively easy for workers. As 'by nature' they have a 'class instinct' formed by the harsh school of daily exploitation, all they need is a supplementary political and theoretical education in order to understand objectively what they feel subjectively, instinctively. Capital gives them this supplementary theoretical education in the form of objective explanations and proofs, which helps them to move from a proletarian class instinct to an (objective) proletarian class position.

 
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    But it is extremely difficult for specialists and other bourgeois and petty-bourgeois 'intellectuals' (including students). For a mere education of their consciousness is not enough, nor a mere reading of Capital. They must also make a real rupture, a real revolution in their consciousness, in order to move from their necessarily bourgeois or petty-bourgeois class instinct to proletarian class positions. It is extremely difficult, but not absolutely impossible. The proof: Marx himself, who was the scion of a good liberal bourgeoisie (his father was a lawyer), and Engels, who came from the big capitalist bourgeoisie and was himself a capitalist in Manchester for twenty years. Marx's whole intellectual history can and must be understood in this way: as a long, difficult and painful rupture by which he moved from his petty-bourgeois class instinct to proletarian class positions, to whose definitions he contributed decisively in Capital.

    This is an example which can and must be meditated upon, bearing in mind other illustrious examples: above all Lenin, the son or an enlightened petty bourgeois (a progressive teacher), who became the leader of the October Revolution and the world proletariat, in the stage of Imperialism, the supreme, i.e. the last stage of capitalism.[19]

March 1969 

 
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T H E  R U D I M E N T S  O F  A  C R I T I C A L  B I B L I O G R A P H Y [20]

I propose to distinguish between :

    I. Texts earlier than Capital Volume One (1867) which make it easier to understand both the investigatory works of Marx which led up to Capital and Capital itself.

    1. The Communist Manifesto (1847).

    2. The Poverty of Philosophy (1847): a critique of Proudhon.

    3. Wage Labour and Capital (1848): lectures to a working class audience on two key concepts of the theory of the capitalist mode of production.

    After 1850, when the proletarian risings throughout Europe had been crushed, Marx withdrew to London and decided to 'begin again at the beginning' in political economy, with which up to that time he only had an indirect and superficial acquaintance. Strenuous work in libraries on the economists, the Factory Inspectors' reports, and all the documentation available (cf. his letters in this period in Selected Correspondence ).

    4. The 'Grundrisse ', a collection of preparatory manuscripts for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which appeared in 1859. Only part of these texts went into A Contribution. The remarkable 'Introduction ' remained unpublished. In many places in the Grundrisse (published in French translation by Éditions Anthropos under the unfortunate title 'Fondements [foundations] de la critique de l'économie politique')[21] a strong Hegelian influence can be detected, combined with whiffs of Feuerbachian humanism.

    5. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), the crucial part of which (the theory of money) was incorporated in Part I of Capital Volume One. The famous Preface is unfortunately deeply marked by a Hegelian-evolutionist conception which disappears 99 per cent in Capital and completely in Marx's later texts.

    6. Wages, Price and Profits (1865). Lectures given by Marx to a working-class audience. A very important text in which the concepts of Capital are already perfectly formed.

    7. Correspondence on Capital before 1867, collected under the title Lettres sur le Capital.[22] Here it is possible to see directly how Marx learnt from that excellent 'capitalist' Engels about the labour process, the instruments of labour (machines), the organic composition of capital in a firm, the turnover of the different fractions of capital, etc. It is possible to see Marx submit his hypotheses and results to Engels, ask him questions, take note of his answers. It is possible to discover that Marx already had the essentials of Capital in his head well before 1867, not just Volume One, but also Volumes Two and Three, since he talks at length about the theory of ground rent and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (which only appeared in Volume Three, published by Engels after his death).

    II. Texts later than Capital, either by Marx himself or by other great writers (Engels, Lenin, etc.).

    These texts are doubly useful: they cast light on a number

 
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of difficult points in Capital, or greatly facilitate reading it; and they extend the investigations of the theory founded by Marx, demonstrating its fruitfulness in concrete applications.

    8. The Second Part of Engels's Anti-Dühring (1877) which gives a very clear summary of the crucial theses of Volume One.

    9. Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). Mere 'Randglossen ' (marginal notes) in Marx's hand on the joint draft Programme on which the (Marxist) 'Social Democratic Workers' Party' and the (Lassallean) 'General Association of German Workers' agreed to the organic unification of their two organizations in the German Social-Democratic Party. No notice was taken of the criticism of Marx and Engels, who thought of publicly dissociating themselves from the new organization, but decided against it since the 'bourgeoisie saw in the programme what was not there'. Marx's mere notes are invaluable. They discuss the principles which ought to have guided any policy of unification, revolution and socialism, four years after the Paris Commune. In them there is the starting-point for a theory of Law: Law is always bourgeois. It is not the 'collective ownership' (legal notion) 'of the means of production', but their 'collective appropriation' which defines the socialist mode of production. The fundamental thesis: legal relations and the relations of production must not be confused.

    The history of the misadventures of the Critique is instructive. Barred from publication by the leadership of the Social-Democratic Party, it could only appear . . . sixteen years later, thanks to Engels, who had to trick this same leadership and only obtained his objective by the skin of his teeth. The leadership of the Social-Democratic Party was radically opposed to the publication of Marx's critical notes 'so as not to damage our unity with our Lassallean comrades'. . . .

 
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    10. Marx's Marginal Notes on Wagner's 'Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie' (1882). The last text written by Marx, slightly abridged in the French translation published by Éditions Sociales (Le Capital, t. III, pp. 241-53).[23] It reveals irrefutably the direction in which Marx's thought tended: no longer the shadow of a trace of Feuerbachian humanist or Hegelian influence.

    11. The Prefaces and articles by Engels collected together into the volume On Marx's Capital (Progress Publishers, Moscow). First-rate analyses, very clear, but, as sometimes happens with Engels who had touches of theoretical genius, marred by a few weaknesses (e.g. the thesis that the 'law of value' only ceased to apply . . . in the fourteenth century).

    12. Lenin's What the 'Friends of the People' Are (Progress Publishers, Moscow) (1894: Lenin was twenty-four years old). A critique of the idealist-humanist ideology of the Populists. An exposition of the epistemological principles of Marx's scientific discovery. A categorical affirmation that Marx's dialectic has nothing to do with that of Hegel.

    13. Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899: Lenin was twenty-nine years old). The only work of scientific sociology in the world, which all sociologists should study with care. An application of the theory of the feudal and capitalist modes of production to the Russian social formation at the end of the nineteenth century, where capitalist relations of production and exchange were extending through the countryside, supplanting feudal relations of production. This work summarizes the essentials of the numerous studies that Lenin devoted to the basic theses of Capital Volume Two in texts of a gripping clarity and rigour, between 1894 and 1899, in his critique of the Populist and 'romantic' 'economists'. A text to be related to

Kautsky's Agrarian Question (1903)[24] of which Lenin had a high opinion, and above all to 'New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture' (1915: Vol. 22 of the English edition of the Collected Works ), where Lenin deals with the 'paradox' of the advanced capitalist development of small agricultural enterprises in the USA alongside big capitalist enterprises. French 'specialists' in 'agrarian questions' have every interest in reading this very actual text closely, and learning from it how official statistics should be 'handled'.

    14. Lenin's Marxism and Revisionism (1908).[25]

    15. Lenin's Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913).

    16. Lenin's The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx (1913)

    17. Lenin's Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).

    18. Lenin's State and Revolution (1917).

    I shall finish this little critical bibliography here.

    There are a large number of essays, usually critical or highly critical, devoted to the 'interpretation' of Marx's theory and in particular to Capital. The particularly sensitive point: Volume One Part I, above all the 'labour theory of value', the theory of 'surplus-value' and the theory of the 'law of value'.

    The above works can be obtained on demand in most specialist bookshops.

    In 1894, in What the 'Friends of the People' Are, Lenin, who had clearly not read Hegel, but only what Marx says about Hegel in the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, and what Engels says about Hegel in Anti-Dühring and Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, devotes a dozen pages to the difference between Marx's materialist dialectic and Hegel's dialectic! These twelve pages are a categorical declaration of anti-Hegelianism. The conclusion of these twelve pages (in a note) is, and I quote, 'the absurdity of accusing Marxism of Hegelian Dialectics ' (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 174n.). Lenin quotes Marx's declaration that his 'method is the "direct opposite " of Hegel's method ' (p. 167). As for Marx's Hegelian formulations, the very ones which occur in Capital, in particular in Volume One Part I, which

 
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Marx himself signalled as the result of his having 'coquetted (kokettieren ) with the modes of expression peculiar to Hegel', Lenin settles accounts with them by saying that they are 'Marx's manner of expression ' and relate to 'the origin of the doctrine ', adding with much common sense that 'the theory should not be blamed for its origin ' (p. 164). Lenin goes on to say that the Hegelian formulations of the dialectic, the 'empty dialectical scheme ' of the triads, is a 'lid ' or a 'skin ' and that not only can one remove this lid or skin without changing anything in the bowl uncovered or the fruit peeled, but indeed they must be uncovered or peeled in order to see what is in them.

    May I remind the reader that in 1894 Lenin had not read Hegel, but he had read Marx's Capital very closely, and understood it better than anyone else ever had -- he was twenty-four -- so much so that the best introduction to Marx's Capital is to be found in Lenin. Which would seem to prove that the best way to understand Hegel and the relation between Marx and Hegel is above all to have read and understood Capital.

    2. Second Fact

    In 1915, in his notes on the Great Logic, Lenin wrote a statement which everyone knows by heart, and which I quote: 'Aphorism: it is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!! ' (Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 180 -- Lenin's exclamation marks).

    For any superficial reader, this statement obviously contradicts the statements of 1894, since instead of radical anti-Hegelian declarations, here we seem to have a radical pro-Hegelian declaration. Indeed, it goes so far that, if it were applied to Lenin himself, as the author of remarkable texts

 
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on Capital written between 1893 and 1905, he would appear as not having 'understood Marx ', since before 1914-1915, Lenin had not 'thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic'!

    I shall leave the conventional commentators to extricate themselves from this little 'contradiction', but I doubt whether they will make much progress with it, however much they declare, as good commentators on other texts of Lenin's, that 'contradiction' is the universal motor of all progress, including the progress of understanding. . . .

    For myself, I state that I subscribe word for word to this second declaration of Lenin's just as I do to the first. I shall explain this directly. Lenin was quite right to say that to 'understand Capital ', and especially, as he has the genius to point out, its first chapter, i.e. the extraordinary Volume One Part I, extraordinary because it is still Hegelian, not only in its terminology, but also in its order of exposition, it is essential to know Hegel's Logic through and through and for good reason.

    I can reduce the paradox of this second fact, of this second declaration of Lenin's straightaway by pointing out that it is preceded (a page earlier in the Notebooks ) by another very interesting formula only a few lines before. Lenin declares, in fact, that 'Hegel's analysis of syllogisms . . . recalls Marx's imitation of Hegel in Ch. 1 '. This is a re-phrasing of Marx's own diagnosis: his 'coquetting' with Hegel. If the cap fits, wear it. This is not me speaking, but Lenin, following Marx. In fact, one cannot understand Volume One Part I at all without completely removing its Hegelian 'lid', without reading as a materialist, as Lenin reads Hegel, the said Volume One Part I, without, if you will forgive the presumption, re-writing it.

    This brings us directly to my central thesis on Lenin's reading of Hegel: i.e. that in his notes on Hegel, Lenin

 
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maintains precisely the position he had adopted previously in 'What the "Friends of the People" Are ' and 'Materialism and Empirio-criticism ', i.e. at a moment when he had not read Hegel, which leads us to a 'shocking' but correct conclusion: basically, Lenin did not need to read Hegel in order to understand him, because he had already understood Hegel, having closely read and understood Marx. Bearing this in mind, I shall hazard a peremptory aphorism of my own: 'A century and a half later no one has understood Hegel because it is impossible to understand Hegel without having thoroughly studied and understood "Capital "! ' Provocation for provocation; I hope I shall be forgiven this one, at least in the Marxist camp.

    As for the Hegelians, they can carry on with their philosophical rumination in Hegel, Ruminator of all Ruminations, i.e. the Interpreter of all the Interpretations in the history of philosophy. At any rate, as good Hegelians, they know that History is over and that therefore they can only go round and round within the theory of the End of History, i.e. in Hegel.

    After all, it is not just roundabouts that go round and round, the wheel of history can go round and round, too. The wheel of philosophical history at least, which always goes round and round, and when it is Hegelian, its advantage, like the advantage Pascal attributed to man over the reed, is that it 'knows it '.

What, when, was so interesting to Lenin in Hegel's Great Logic ?

    In order to answer this question, we must first learn to read Lenin's notes on his reading of Hegel. This is a truism, but one from which, of course, hardly anyone draws the necessary, but elementary, conclusions. We have to believe that none of the commentators of the Notebooks on Hegel

 
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have ever themselves kept a book of notes on their own individual reading.

    For when one takes notes, there are notes whose function it is to summarize what one has just read, and there are notes whose function it is to assess what one has just read. There are also notes that one takes, and notes that one does not take. For example, those who are prepared to compare the text of Hegel's Great Logic with the text of Lenin's notes cannot fail to observe that Lenin almost completely ignores the Book on Being, leaving hardly any comment on it other than summarizing notes. This is surely strange, i.e. symptomatic. These same readers cannot fail to remark that the notes become abundant (and not just the summarizing notes, but also the critical notes, usually approving but occasionally disapproving) when Lenin comes to the Book on Essence, which clearly interests him considerably; and that Lenin's notes become very abundant for the Book devoted to Subjective Logic and very laudatory on the Absolute Idea, the Chapter on which Lenin, amazing though it may seem, regards as practically materialist.

    I cannot go into all the details, although they are essential, but I attach the greatest importance to a critical, i.e. a materialist, reading of Lenin's Notes on his reading of Hegel, in order, first, to say how Lenin reads Hegel, then, to say what primarily interests him in Hegel, and finally, to attempt to say why.

 
I.  H O W  L E N I N  R E A D  H E G E L.

He read Hegel, and the phrase constantly recurs, as a 'materialist'. What does this phrase mean ?

    First, it means that Lenin read Hegel by 'inverting' him. What does this 'inversion' mean? Simply the 'inversion' of idealism into materialism. But beware! In practice this means not that Lenin put matter in place of the Idea and

 
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vice versa, for that would merely produce a new materialist metaphysics (i.e. a materialist variant of classical philosophy, say, at best a mechanistic materialism), but that for his reading of Hegel, Lenin adopted a proletarian class viewpoint (a dialectical-materialist viewpoint), which is something quite different.

    In other words, Lenin did not read Hegel in order to set Hegel's absolute-idealist system back on to its feet in the form of a materialist system. For his reading of Hegel he adopted a new philosophical practice, a practice which followed from the proletarian class viewpoint, i.e. from the dialectical-materialist viewpoint. What interested Lenin in Hegel was above all the effects of this dialectical-materialist reading of Hegel, i.e. the effects produced with respect to a reading of passages from Hegel which deal primarily with what is called the 'theory of knowledge' and the dialectic.

    If Lenin did not read Hegel according to the method of 'inversion', how did he read him? Precisely according to the method he described as early as 1894 in What the 'Friends of the People' Are with respect to the reading of Capital Volume One Part I: by the method of 'laying bare '. What is valid for the reading of passages from Marx contaminated by Hegelian terminology and the Hegelian order of exposition in Capital is obviously valid a fortiori, a hundred times a fortiori, for Hegel himself. Hence the radical laying bare. A central passage in the Notebooks says this in so many words:

    Movement and 'self-movement' (this NB! arbitrary (independent), spontaneous, internally-necessary movement), 'change', 'movement and vitality', 'the principle of all self-movement,' 'impulse' (Trieb ) to 'movement' and to 'activity' -- the opposite to 'dead Being' -- who would believe that this is the core of 'Hegelianism', of abstract and abstrusen (ponderous, absurd?) Hegelianism?? This core had to be

 
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discovered, understood, hinüberretten, laid bare, refined, which is precisely what Marx and Engels did (op. cit., Vol. 38, p. 141).

    What are we to understand by this metaphor of 'laying bare', 'refining' or 'extraction' (a term used elsewhere), if not the image that there is in Hegel something like a 'rational' kernel which must be rid of its skin, or better no doubt, of its superimposed skins, in short of a certain crust which is more or less thick (think of a fruit, an onion, or even an artichoke). Hence the extraction needs to be laboriously laid bare. Sometimes, as in the Chapter on the Absolute Idea, the materialist kernel reaches almost to the surface, a mere laying bare is enough. Sometimes, the skin is thick, it is tangled with the kernel itself, and the kernel needs to be disentangled. In either case, a labour involving more or less transformation is necessary. Sometimes there is only the skin: nothing at all to retain, everything has to be discarded, there is no rational kernel. Thus in the Book of the Great Logic on Being, and in all the passages containing, directly or indirectly, what Lenin calls 'mysticism' (e.g. where logic is alienated into Nature), Lenin writes furiously: 'stupidity! foolishness! incredible!', and he rejects outright 'nonsense about the absolute. I am in general trying to read Hegel materialistically: Hegel is materialism which has been stood on its head (according to Engels) that is to say, I cast aside for the most part God, the Absolute, the Pure Idea, etc.' (p. 104).

    Thus a rather special method. The inversion is simply an affirmation of the partisan position of the proletariat in philosophy: the inversion of idealism into materialism. The real operation, the real work of materialist reading consists of a quite different operation:

    1. the rejection of a mass of propositions and theses with which nothing can be done, from which absolutely nothing can be obtained, skins without kernels;

 
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    2. the retention of certain well-chosen fruits and vegetables, and their careful peeling or the disentanglement of their kernels from their thick skins, tangled with the kernel, by real transforming work. 'One must first of all extract the materialist dialectics from it (the Hegelian galimatias). Nine-tenths of it, however, is chaff, rubbish ' (p. 154).

    What a waste! This has nothing to do with the miraculous 'inversion'.

 
II.  W H A T  I S  I T  T H A T  I N T E R E S T S  L E N I N ?

What is it that Lenin retains from Hegel and re-works?

    Here I could go on for ever. I shall group my points under the two chapter headings which are the most important in my eyes, and, I believe, in the eyes of every careful reader of the Notebooks. The first deals with Hegel's criticism of Kant, the second with the Chapter on the Absolute Idea.

    A. Hegel's Criticism of Kant

    This never fails; whenever Lenin finds a criticism of Kant in Hegel's text, he approves. And especially when Hegel criticizes the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself as unknowable. Then Lenin's approval is categorical and even lyrical:

    Essentially, Hegel is completely right as opposed to Kant. Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract . . . does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely. From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice -- such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality. Kant disparages knowledge in order to make way for faith: Hegel exalts knowledge, asserting that knowledge is knowledge of God. The materialist exalts the knowledge of matter, of nature, consigning God, and the philosophical rabble that defends God, to the rubbish heap (op. cit., Vol. 38, p. 171).

 
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Here Lenin is merely repeating Engels:

    In addition there is yet a set of different philosophers -- those who question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition of the world. To them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume and Kant, and they have played a very important role in philosophical development. What is decisive in the refutation of this view has already been said by Hegel, in so far as this was possible from an idealist standpoint ('Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy', Marx-Engels: Selected Works, London, 1968, p. 605).

    How are we to interpret this attitude? We should note carefully that when Lenin approves of the fact that Hegel criticizes Kant from a Hegelian viewpoint, he certainly does not approve of the Hegelian viewpoint 100 per cent, but he does approve 100 per cent of the fact that Kant is criticized, and, let us say, approves of a large part of the arguments behind Hegel's criticism of Kant. This is really an obvious point: it is possible for two people to be in agreement against a third party for different reasons, more or less different reasons.

    For Lenin, as for Hegel, Kant means subjectivism.[1] In a quasi-Hegelian phrase, Lenin says that the transcendental is subjectivism and psychology. And naturally we are not surprised to find that Lenin occasionally compares Kant with Mach. Hence Lenin is in agreement with Hegel in criticizing Kant from the point of view of objectivism . . . but what objectivism? We shall see.

    In any case, he delights in Hegel's criticism of the thing-in-itself. An empty notion, he says, in agreement with the Hegelian formulation, it is a myth to claim to be able to think the unknowable, the thing-in-itself is the identity of the essence in the phenomenon.

 
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    In Kant, Ding an sich is an empty abstraction, but Hegel demands abstraction which corresponds to der Sache (op. cit., p. 92).

    In this dual theme: the categorical rejection of the thing-in-itself -- and its counterpart: the existence of the essence in the phenomenon, which Lenin reads as the identity of the essence and the thing-in-itself (the essence identical with its phenomenon), Lenin is in agreement with Hegel, though the latter would not say that the 'reality' of the thing-in-itself is the essence. A shade of meaning perhaps, but an important one.

    Why is it important? Because Hegel's criticism of Kant is a criticism of subjective idealism in the name of absolute idealism, which means that Hegel does not stop at a Theory of the Essence, but criticizes Kant in the name of a Theory of the Idea, whereas Lenin stops at what Hegel would call a Theory of the Essence.

    Here we see 'in the name of what' Lenin criticizes Kant's subjectivism: in the name of objectivism, I have said. This term is too easily a pendant of the term subjectivism for it not to be immediately suspect. Let us say rather that Lenin criticizes Kant's subjectivism in the name of a materialist thesis which is a thesis conjointly of (material) existence and of (scientific) objectivity. In other words, Lenin criticizes Kant from the viewpoint of philosophical materialism and scientific objectivity, thought together in the thesis of materialism. This is precisely the position of Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

    But it enables us to reveal a number of important consequences nonetheless. Let us run through them.

    The critique of Kant's transcendental subjectivism contained in the selective reading in which Lenin 'lays bare' Hegel entails:

    1. the elimination of the thing-in-itself and its reconversion into the dialectical action of the identity of essence and phenomenon;

 
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    2. the elimination of the category of the Subject (whether transcendental or otherwise);

    3. with this double elimination and the reconversion of the thing-in-itself into the dialectical action of the essence in its phenomenon, Lenin produces an effect often underlined in Materialism and Empirio-criticism : the liberation of scientific practice, finally freed from every dogma that would make it an ossified thing, thus restoring to it its rightful living existence -- this life of science merely reflecting the life of reality itself.[2]

    This is the categorical limit dividing Lenin from Hegel in their criticisms of Kant. For Lenin, Hegel criticizes Kant from the viewpoint of the Absolute Idea, i.e. provisionally, of 'God' -- whereas Lenin uses Hegel's criticism of Kant to criticize Kant from the viewpoint of science, of scientific objectivity and its correlate, the material existence of its object.

    This is the practice of laying-bare and peeling, of refining, as we can see it at a point where it is possible : Lenin takes what interests him from his point of view from the discourse which Hegel is pursuing from a quite different point of view. What determines the principle of the choice is the difference in viewpoints: the primacy of science and its material object, for Lenin; whereas, as we know, for Hegel, science, meaning the science of the scientists (which remains in the Intellect), has no primacy: since in Hegel

anthropology. The proof: History is the Spirit, it is the last moment of the alienation of a process which 'begins' with Logic, continues with Nature and ends with the Spirit, the Spirit, i.e. what can be presented in the form of 'History'. For Hegel, quite to the contrary of the erroneous view of Kojève and the young Lukács, and of others since them, who are almost ashamed of the Dialectics of Nature, the dialectic is by no means peculiar to History, which means that History does not contain anywhere in itself, in any subject, its own origin. The Marxist tradition was quite correct to return to the thesis of the Dialectics of Nature, which has the polemical meaning[3] that history is a process without a subject, that the dialectic at work in history is not the work of any Subject whatsoever, whether Absolute (God) or merely human, but that the origin of history is always already thrust back before history, and therefore that there is neither a philosophical origin nor a philosophical subject to History. Now what matters to us here is that Nature itself is not, in Hegel's eyes, its own origin; it is itself the result of a process of alienation which does not begin with it: i.e. of a process whose origin is elsewhere -- in Logic.

    This is where the question becomes really fascinating. For it is clear that Lenin swept aside in one sentence the absurd idea that Nature was a product of the alienation of Logic, and yet he says that the Chapter on the Absolute Idea is quasi-materialist. Surprising.

    What, in fact, is the status of Logic in Hegel? It is double: on the one hand, Logic is the origin itself, that which it is impossible to go back beyond, and that with which the ulterior process of alienation begins. Hence this process of alienation does seem to have a Subject: Logic. But when