Moreover, since Engels tentatively—but never definitively—made the case that Marxism was a worldview [Weltanschauung], hardly anyone has adequately clarified the context, meaning and consequence this claim has had for Marxists operating in philosophy, let alone the relation this has to “truth” claims. On the one hand, the Weltanschauung has often been denied in the name of science or philosophy or equated with them. Yet, there is no clear Marxist Weltanschauung to hold onto. On the other hand, some Marxists remain dogmatically fixed on Engels’s enunciation expecting philosophical closure without taking into consideration the new practices of philosophy that came after him.
The worst response perhaps, is that Marxist philosophy has been reduced to a set of competing belief-systems propagated by state-apparatuses and parties that function with totalitarian and self-reproducing ideological systems, each telling themselves their own stories. Each of these options, in its own way, is a clear abdication of a distinctly philosophical practice—one committed to criticizing ideological illusions by conceptual means. However, if Marxist philosophy does not exist as such, this is, paradoxically, why Marxist philosophical practice remains necessary.
Still, in the absence of a complete philosophy, Marx’s scientific developments nonetheless stand. To move beyond this seeming impasse between the missing elements of Marxist theory and the abundant presence of Marxist content, an elementary distinction needs to be made between the materialist conception of history [materialistische Geschichtsauffassung] and historical materialism [Historischer Materialismus]. This distinction allows us to see that a materialist conception is not itself a systematic scientific doctrine of universal history but a guiding thread of concrete research and analysis.
Without such a distinction, “historical materialism” often takes the form of an uninterrogated premise. To have certainty of belief in historical materialism—anti-dogmatic protestations aside—is to problematically assume an already established doctrine of science, a philosophy of history or a confused synthesis of both. On this basis, but also in a nagging recognition of the need to shore up such confidence, it then seems desirable to provide a secure philosophical foundation.
In the absence of such a foundation, Marxists who operate in philosophy need to come to terms with the distinct nature of their philosophical objects. Care is needed here for a couple of reasons. Despite any youthful words to the contrary, Marx and Engels did not recognize a single science, a “science of history.” At the very least, Capital is a systematic-scientific critique of political economy, not a science of history; at best, history features as the modern history of bourgeois societies, not as history in general. The idea that philosophical objects are not reducible to the sciences and politics does not mean philosophy is unconcerned with the objects of science and politics. Quite the reverse, in fact: the spectrum of Marxists in philosophy from Labriola of the Second International to Adler, Lukács, and Korsch, onwards through Adorno and Althusser, and more recently Bensaïd, shows that philosophical efforts interpret Marx’s scientificity and class struggles (from the Russian and German Revolutions through to May ’68). This claim, however, presupposes the existence of a specific philosophical discourse that is not reducible to science or politics.
If the objects of politics, science, and philosophy are distinct, then conflating them risks producing fantasies about whether and how Marxism has the ability to explain, from theoretical physics to the class struggle, everything under the sun. Worse, such conflation risks the classically idealist illusion that the totality of reality can be derived from the pains of thought alone. The results risk a dogmatism that is as practically unhelpful as it is overconfident in its power and range. One common expression of such dogmas is the use of the term “theory,” implying a false confusion between science, philosophy, and politics, and with such an expansive notion of “theory,” an evasion of the consequences of their distinctions.
Althusser was entirely correct to suggest that every great philosophy “thinks itself in a specifically philosophical object and in its theoretical effects” and that “these objects have no theoretical existence outside the domain of philosophy whatsoever.”7Louis Althusser, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx : politics and history (London: Verso, 1982), 113. Philosophy involves the production of philosophical objects and the immanent necessity of their conceptual effects; its forms of thought move in circular configurations that can never come to finality. Thinking is an ongoing activity of object-production. By contrast, science proceeds by way of the proposition, even if it deploys analytic and synthetic, logical or dialectical devices. Scientific theorizing comes to conclusions, to relatively final propositions. It is in this sense that Marx discovered new knowledge about a real object: the capitalist mode of production. Marking a distinction between the object, the object of thought, and, crucially, the manner of relating the two is crucial if we are to respect the distinction between philosophy and science.
If Marxists take seriously the claim that philosophy has its own definite objects, then this changes the way Marxists can relate to the systems philosophers build, particularly systems that put a claim on the “whole.” How sure are Marxists that we can helpfully think the concept of the “whole” and its “system”? How sure are we that the goal ought to be the construction of a metaphysical-ontological system of being in general? To what extent is it a problem that such a system requires decomposing the materialities of social practices in thought in order to recompose them into the stability of a completed logical appreciation of a system of domination? Marxist philosophers who want a priori foundations want the last word, to dictate a finality and closedness of their structured objects and ultimately to use philosophical thinking to put an end to thought.
Of course, Marxist philosophers have the task and duty to elaborate and construct their arguments as systematically, clearly and absolutely as possible. Yet doing so provides for only a subjective completeness because a single subject, or perhaps, at most, the intersubjective community of similar thinkers does the thinking. For this reason, individual Marxist thinkers not only inevitably fail to reach the kind of completeness a scientific theory can reach, they also labour under an illusion of what is possible when they attempt to produce an objectively valid philosophical system.
The illusion of the closed system is apologetic-traditional philosophy’s basic move when they play their game. Adorno’s identification (following the Enlightenment thinker d’Alembert) of the distinction between the systematic spirit and the intellect, on its own, hoping to form a system is key here.8Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). The difference between the systematic spirit and the spirit to form a system draws a line of demarcation that helps to avoid the confusion of the two, which has emerged historically as the difference and conflict between individual specialization and system-building. Marx and Engels severely disagreed with the spirit to form closed and final systems whenever they encountered them. It was a popular practice among the university professors in Germany at the time. On the other hand, a systematic spirit is required for any theoretical philosophical, scientific explanation, which is why one can refer to Marx and Engels and many subsequent Marxist philosophers as working in a systematic manner. Nevertheless, once the limits of any individual’s thinking capacities are marked, however systematic they may be, there is no reason a Marxist in philosophy needs to take on a dominant form of bourgeois philosophizing.
This crucial recognition of one’s limited capacities allows a conflict between what may be thought of as apologetic-traditional philosophy on one side and critical-revolutionary philosophy on the other to come into view. Throughout his work Marx is deeply keyed into the antagonism between traditional-apologetic philosophy which fails to mark its limits and what we can think of as his critical-revolutionary philosophy which does. Writing in the second German edition of Capital Marx held that a materialist dialectic “lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.” The dialectic’s materialism—that is, what makes it both critical and revolutionary—consists in its insistence on its own program of development and at least implicitly a refusal to let grand pretensions to system and completeness close its continuous work. It is revolutionary because it is critical both in the sense that it criticizes bourgeois thought’s over-extensions and in the sense that it refuses to make the same error.