The Marxian Legacy

The question to be addressed here is not that of the adequacy of this or that particular theory in accounting for, or acting on, a given context of social relations. I am not concerned whether, for example, the theory expressed in The Accumulation of Capital is adequate to account either for the conditions of the period in which it was formulated or for our present conditions; nor, a fortiori, am I concerned with whether that theory conforms to the edifice of Marx’s Capital. To judge a theory in terms of its adequacy to supposedly real conditions implies a latent conservatism and positivism; theory is then treated as an analysis of ‘facts’ about a world that itself is taken as pre-given and fixed. Such an approach implies a dualism—on the one side, the theory; on the other side, the ‘facts’ which it is to reflect—that makes it fundamentally undialectical. Moreover, the point, after all, is not to understand a given positive world, but to change it! And this intention implies a very different notion of theory.

In order to situate Bloch and his Marxism, it is necessary to move beyond the history of ideas to enter into the concerns and choices of a real movement aiming at changing the world. This orientation presents a double difficulty that arises from trying to understand a thinker who has been an actor in this movement for the past 70 years and at the same time trying to cast some light on this movement itself. The difficulty is multiplied by the fact that Bloch considers himself not simply a philosopher but a Marxist philosopher for whom Marx’s Aufhebung of philosophy proposes the elimination of the bad, contemplative philosophy of the past, but not the destruction of philosophy itself. As a result, the facts of history and the choices made by Bloch cannot explain the movement of his action or thought; it is necessary to philosophize with the philosopher-Marxist in order to illuminate his contribution as it was at the time and as it remains.

I contrasted Ernst Bloch’s concrete philosophical attempt to appropriate Marx creatively through the notions of concrete phantasy, labor, and the futurity of the present with the Critical Theory of Max Horkheimer. Since my concern was with Bloch, for purposes of exposition I did not treat the nuances in Horkheimer’s text. I now want to show that Horkheimer’s writings as well as the influence exercised through his self-declared ‘dictatorship of the director’ are more probing than they first appeared; the result is a concept of Critical Theory that is a research program with practical implications. Looking first at Horkheimer’s own explicit program will make clear that he fits clearly into the search for the Marxian legacy. However, as his project deepened philosophically, its socio-political concerns widened in the dark days of exile and war; the reflections that Horkheimer published in 1942 under the laconic title ‘Authoritarian State’ mark a turning point in his debate attempt to appropriate Marx for Critical Theory. The path toward pessimism opened; the vision of revolutionary politics dimmed before it disappeared.

The sharp rupture that appeared in May 1968 threw into question not only the functional machine of modernizing French capitalism; the spontaneous creativity it revealed was also so much sand in the smoothly oiled machinery of orthodox Communist practice and Marxist theory. Neither the Gaullist victory at the polls in June nor the promise of the electoral Common Program of the socialist and communist parties deceived anyone: the specter of May had replaced the ‘specter of communism’ announced in The Communist Manifesto. The New Left specter has not achieved an institutional identity, and this makes it all the more dangerous to the established order while at the same time preserving its explosive force. The discovery and self-discovery symbolized by May was in fact a rediscovery of that unfinished work and elemental hope that Ernst Bloch showed to be not just the driving force but as well the arché and logos of revolution. More prosaically, it could be suggested that the nineteenth-century bourgeois revolutions, followed by bitter proletarian struggles, achieved only one of the three emblems that adorned the banners of 1789—equality—and that May 1968 represented the forms of liberty and fraternity that remain to be realized. This was expressed most emphatically in Cohn-Bendit’s iconoclastic insistence that ‘Tu fais la révolution pour toi’; the insistence on the role of pleasure and desire in the festive atmosphere of fraternization and communality turned the revolt into a positive affirmation. Underground, surfacing only in occasional and punctual actions, the specter of May, like that ‘old mole’ whose image captured the imagination of poets and philosophers alike, is digging away and undermining the structure of bureaucratized capitalist daily life.

The name of Maurice Merleau-Ponty conjures a multitude of images, refracting against one another in ways that continually surprise. There is first of all the phenomenologist. Under his pen, phenomenology becomes less than a method to be applied and more than an attitude: the phenomenological analyses emerge on their own from the materials in which they were embedded, those of science, of culture, and of the everyday. His studies of expression in art and literature are of a piece with the sure hand that guides his interpretations of the so-called hard sciences. The philosopher was part of a generation that lived through war, occupation, and the unanswered challenges of creating a post-war. The same manner of cleaving to the world is present in his political choices and critical analyses. He seemed to accept the reality of Cold War political dualism (in Humanism and Terror) before challenging its apparent common sense in a denunciation of what he called ‘Sartre’s Ultra-Bolshevism’ in his study of the Adventures of the Dialectic. The speculative moment of his phenomenology reappears in the unfinished ontology in The Visible and the Invisible where the reader has a sense that a poetic layer of mystery overlain with Heideggerian echoes weighs down the articulation of his philosophical lucidity. Each rereading, particularly in light of the fact that his work was cut short prematurely, offers new possibilities of interpretation, poses new questions, even at times suggests new practical political-historical understandings.

The reader of this volume may wonder why some thinkers were included while others are absent. The answer lies in the concept of a legacy and in the politics of its inheritance. The wordplay is important. Designating the legacy as Marxian suggests that Marx and those Marxists who claim to be his heirs have no monopoly on the theoretical definition or practical realization of radical politics. By refusing to accord Marx the sole paternity of the political search for what classical philosophers called ‘the Good Life in the City’, it becomes possible to rethink political theory and the light that it casts on contemporary political choices. My principles of inclusion and exclusion can be explained by this broader goal. As for Marx himself, to whose work I have returned several times during the years since the first edition of The Marxian Legacy, he is also best understood within the context constituted by his legacy, which has practical as well as theoretical, as the title of this chapter suggests.