New APPS

I’ve been working out some of the context for Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and why it might matter for a reading of Marx (one, two, three).  Last time, I looked at Althusser’s 1950 (anonymously published) critique of the use of Hegel in understanding Marx, an essay that seems to be particularly aggrieved by Hyppolite’s work of the late 1940s.  Here I want to turn to the offending Hyppolite essays, since one might want to know what Hyppolite said that was so horrible as to occasion such an acerbic response. Let’s look at a few things: (a) The line Althusser seems most bothered by – the “revision” to which Marx may be subject; (b) an instrumentalization of the proletariat; (c) Hyppolite’s priority on alienation in Marx, and (d) Hyppolite’s musings about the will to power.   I’ll look at the first two of these here, and the second pair next time.

All of these should be read against a background where Hyppolite leans into the Hegelian background of Marx; the essay on Capital begins by noting that “in order to understand Capital it is absolutely necessary to consult Marx’s philosophical works prior to his economic studies. Marx’s work presupposes an underlying philosophy whose various elements are not easily reconstructed” including Hegel and, sometimes in tension with Hegel and Darwin (Studies on Marx and Hegel, 126). And again:

“Hegel’s influence was considerable and it is not possible to understand Marx’s basic work, Capital, without a knowledge of the principal works which contributed to the formation and development of his thought, The Phenomenology of Mind, the Logic, and the Philosophy of Right” (128).

The continuity of Hegel’s influence on Marx is what the Stalin-Zhdanov reading most bluntly rejects. As go the Soviets, so goes Althusser in the PCF journal in 1950.  Some details:

(a) Revising Marx? Althusser takes the line about revising Hegel somewhat out of context.  Hyppolite is talking about the theory of surplus value and has been making reference to all three volumes of Capital (the second volume is about circulation and the third is where Marx talks about the inevitable decline of surplus value). On the law of wages – which says that the capitalist will pay the worker no more than necessary for the bare subsistence of the worker – Hyppolite notes that “there is a certain ambiguity here as to whether the quantity and quality of the necessary subsistence is determined once for all, or whether it is a variable function of the historical change in social needs. We should not forget that Marx argued from the condition of a particular proletariat, that he generalized from the case of the English proletariat of the nineteenth century” (146). The historical point is easy enough to see, now that we as a society take running water, electricity and some sort of internet/cellphone access to be basic requirements of subsistence in the US.  Hyppolite then writes:

““But if ‘the capitalist is a shrewd fellow compared to the miser,’ if he finds a way of getting more for his money than he puts in, it is because certain historical conditions could be created and developed, which have made this labor market possible; and this labor market is a fact of the same order as the existence of slavery in antiquity. Here the Marxist logic rejoins the history that it illuminates [la logique marxiste rejoint ici l’histoire qu’elle éclaire]. The basic question which Marx raises is: What made possible the English proletariat, the type of all future of proletariats? (De te fabula narratur.) Kant had posed the question: How is experience possible? And he answered it by means of the eternal categories. Marx asks: how a fact, a historical phenomenon, capitalism and the proletariat have been possible [comment un fait, un phénomène historique, le capitalisme et le prolétariat, ont-ils été possibles]? And he replies with a logic which in tum can only be solidary with history [solidaire de l’histoire; the point is the terms are tied together and dependent on one another], a history already made and a history to make. However, from a similar perspective, an absolute overtaking [depassement] of history is impossible, and today revisions can be necessary [peuvent s’imposer] that Marx never conceived.” (146; trans. revised. Original text: Études sur Marx et Hegel, 165)

In other words: Marx’s narrative about wage labor is based on the historical experience of the English proletariat.  Given that historical conditions change, we need an argument for why transcendentalizing the experience of the English proletariat – treating it as Kant treats the categories – is justified.  And since that kind of transcendental perspective is impossible, we may very well need to revise the theory in light of historical conditions. At least we should be open to that possibility.

So when Althusser says that the “utilization” of Hegel to describe conditions under capitalism ahistorically and as tragic and part of the human condition has as its “aim” “the ‘revision’ of Marx” (Spectre of Hegel, 187), well, no.  Hyppolite has said the opposite about the antecedent: a true commitment to materialist history might well entail the revision of Marx. 

(b) Instrumentalizing the proletariat? Althusser accuses Hyppolite of having said that Marx “was a utopian who wanted to realize the impossible Idea of communism, and who, to that end, used the proletariat as an ‘instrument’” (189), with ‘instrument’ footnoted to Hyppolite’s “Marx’s Critique of the Hegelian Concept of the State.”

Hyppolite pushes Marx as a historian here as well, and starts his essay by framing Marx’s critique as centering on the “disequilibrium” between Hegel’s Idea of the state and historical reality; “this concept of disequilibrium leads Marx in turn to seek for the root of the Idea in a historical reality” of the proletariat (Studies, 106).  Hyppolite then moves to Hegel’s early writings to note their “empirically grounded reflections” and that “one cannot over-emphasize Hegel’s realism” (107). In his exposition, Hyppolite basically articulates the Marxist line about Hegel:

“When, in turn, Marx criticizes Hegel for having opposed bourgeois or civil society to the State, for having arrived by deduction at the constitutional monarchy and Prussian bureaucracy, giving them an aspect of the eternal, he is simply revealing an essential tendency of Hegelian thought, which is to legitimate existing reality by conceiving it philosophically. Despite this, Hegelian thought is also dialectical and its movement is opposed to this kind of fixation …. This explains why Marx exposes the conflict between the Hegelian method, which he himself adopted, and the inadequate results which Hegel achieved with his own method.” (108).

Hyppolite’s problem with Marx (and this is also what the “will to power” lines in the essay on Capital are about; more on this in a bit) is that he thinks Marx is too much of a finalist about history, that communism will put a stop to the sorts of conflicts that he correctly identifies in the Hegelian state:

“May we expect that with the end of the class struggle, there will be an end to the dualism of the private individual and the citizen, each suffused in the other, at first under communism and later in anarchy? At least, it should not be forgotten that at one point Hegel was almost a Marxian before’ Marx and that he abandoned the possibility of a complete conquest of alienation, not only because he was or became more conservative, but for reasons inspired by events which he witnessed and others more profound which are integral to his system.” (111)

One thing that might happen, to anticipate Althusser’s own theoretical development later (as I noted last time), is that you might end up with retrograde elements of the superstructure thriving despite the appearance of a new economic base.  In other words, you might want to revise your understanding of dialectics toward “overdetermination.” Another thing that could happen is that you might want to abandon dialectics altogether in favor of historical contingency, as Foucault was to do.  You could also argue that the last-instance economic determinism is the problem, as Resnick and Wolff did much later, using Althusser as a starting point. In any case, the issue now is precisely who is subject.  That question is particularly pressing because Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness had articulated a Hegelian position according to which the proletariat was the universal subject of history, a view whose Hegelian provenance the Soviets had roundly condemned.  Hyppolite writes, clearly reading the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and its discussion of the “species being [Gattungswesen]:”

“Marx’s entire critique of Hegelian idealism is contained in the reversal of its inverted conception of the State. The truly concrete subject, the bearer of predicates, is man as a social being, who belongs to what Hegel called bourgeois society, and the State, which Hegel mistakenly took for the Subject, as Idea, is in fact a predicate of man’s social nature. The Idea-in reality, the product of man’s social activity-appears in Hegel as the authentic subject which results in ‘a mystery which degenerates into mystification,’ as Marx puts it.” (112).

The problem is that “Marx is not immune to the notion of a final state of life in which the real subject of history – and the whole problem lies in knowing just what is the real subject – transcends itself immanently” (113).  Marx’s first pass at the idea is “an existential transcendence that is the authentic fulfillment of generic man … as a real democracy,” like Feuerbach taking “generic man” as the real subject of history.   In this, Marx (unlike Hegel) “looked forward to an end of history” (116).

With that as background, we can look at the Hyppolite’s discussion of Marx’s use of the proletariat in the “Introduction” to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.  Hyppolite writes:

“Marx believes that the future revolution in Germany cannot arise in a particular class that for a moment identifies with the Idea but only through the complete breakdown of all the classes of bourgeois society. Only such a decomposition can make possible a genuine revolution, one that will end once and for all the dualism of Society and the State, of Reality and the Idea”

The relevant Marx text refers to the proletariat as the “dissolution of society as a particular [besonderer] state” (Early Writings, 256).  The proletariat is a “class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering” (256).  Marx contrasts the proletariat with “every particular [besonderen] class in Germany [which] lacks not only the consistency, the sharpness, the courage, the ruthlessness [Rücksichtslosigkeit] which would be able to stamp it as the negative representative of society.” (254).  The proletariat, by contrast, claims “no particular justice … because no particular injustice, but injustice simply [schlechthin] is practiced on it” (256). He then writes that “just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy” (257). 

Hyppolite says:

“What, then, will be the instrument that will realize this idea – an idea of social man that, we repeat, Marx does not fully elucidate – and thus will completely put an end to human alienation? Marx gives this instrument a distinct name, that of the proletariat. The proletariat is not a particular class among the other classes of bourgeois society. It is the class which arises from the decomposition of bourgeois society …. Marx discovers the instrument necessary for the ‘non-alienation’ of man [Marx trouve le levier nécessaire pour ‘désaliéner’ l’homme] in the proletariat whose conflict expresses the contradiction of all bourgeois society. Thus it is by means of the proletariat that the Idea becomes an actuality. Marx, therefore, has not altogether abandoned Hegelian philosophy” (123-4; trans revised from Études, 140-1).

It is difficult to object to this as a reading.  It scans better as an objection to the early Marx and his inheritance of Hegel, as the proletariat is basically the abstract negation of the bourgeois class system.  But even here, there is a problem: Hyppolite is also raising an objection, or at least a question, in his repeated prodding about whether Marx is ultimately ahistoric in that he thinks that it is possible to completely put an end to the historical process of alienation.

But that is the early Marx, which Althusser is famous for saying we should discount.  One suspects the problem for Althusser is that Hyppolite also strongly implies that Marx carries this understanding of the proletariat forward into Capital.  Hyppolite writes in the essay on Capital:

“But it is the proletariat, in a condition of extreme alienation produced by the capitalist system, that embodies as a universal class the idea of human emancipation and through this act of consciousness is able to negate its alienation and create a new history. Thus we return full circle to our starting point in Marx’s philosophical studies of alienation and the historical role of the proletariat. Unfortunately, Capital ends at this very point where Marx intended a deeper analysis of social class as a result of his foregoing study of the capitalist system” (148).

Whether or not Althusser’s critique of Hyppolite is fair, it’s worth noting again that the idea that the proletariat is the universal subject of history was of course also to be found in Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, which had been heavily criticized by the Soviets as a confusion of Hegel and Marx.  It is also worth noting that Althusser in his later work is at pains to understand history as a “process without a subject.”  In any case, Hyppolite is advancing a reading of Marx that both (like Lukacs) thinks Marx takes the proletariat to be the universal subject of history, and (unlike Lukacs) finds this troubling.

Next time I’ll continue with Hyppolite.