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, four).  Last time, I started a look at Hyppolite’s late 1940s reading of Marx; today I want to finish that.  Last time, I looked at (a) The line Althusser seems most bothered by – the “revision” to which Marx may be subject; and (b) the instrumentalization of the proletariat. Today I want to look at (c) Hyppolite’s priority on alienation in Marx, and (d) Hyppolite’s musings about the will to power.

(c) Alienation. What emerges quite clearly in Hyppolite is that he takes alienation to be central to reading all of Marx.  Marx’s early writings talk a lot about alienation. Hyppolite thinks that alienation is at the core of Marx’s mature work as well. He writes in the essay on Capital:

“The original idea, and, as it were, the seed of all Marx’s thought, is the idea of alienation, which he took from Hegel and Feuerbach. If one takes this notion as the starting point, defining human emancipation as man’s active historical struggle against every mode of alienation of his nature, one is then best equipped to set out the Marxian philosophical system and to achieve a structural understanding of Marx’s major work, Capital” (Studies, 130).

He then traces Marx’s early engagement with the Young Hegelian (= Feuerbach) critique of religion, and Marx’s move to show that the sorts of alienation that lead to religion are best studied with reference to historical conditions.  He quotes Marx’s famous line about irreligious criticism at length:

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world [Aber der Mensch, das ist kein abstraktes, außer der Welt hockendes Wesen]. Man is the world of man – state, society [Der Mensch, das ist die Welt des Menschen, Staat, Sozietät]. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion” (Marx, Early Writings, 244; MEW I, 378).

The key passages are the central ones: “Man” is not an otherworldly essence (in a Hegelian context, “Wesen” means “essence” rather than an entity).  “Man” simply is the word we apply to the “world of men.” Or, to put things somewhat differently, the world of people is constitutive of “Man;” there is no transcendental remainder.  The passage is clearly anti-Feuerbachian.  And, to anticipate an opposition from the 1960s, it seems to me to echo Spinoza, who says (for example) that our minds, insofar as they understand “constitute the eternal and infinite intellect of God” (E5P40Sch) (this is not at all far-fetched: Marx wrote detailed notebooks on Spinoza a few months prior to writing this essay. My (old) essay on them is here).  In other words, Hyppolite does not seem to be taking too much of a hermeneutical risk when he offers of the passage:

“The preceding passage contains the essential departure of Marxian thought and its method. The conquest of human alienation is not achieved solely by denouncing it, or analyzing it speculatively. It is necessary to go further and to fight against the circumstances that make it possible and perpetuate it. Philosophy does not resolve religious alienation, for it only substitutes a speculative heaven for the heaven of religion. Such is Marx’s opinion of Hegelian idealism” (134).

On this reading, the thread tying Marx’s work together, in other words, is alienation.  Marx’s innovation is to see that alienation should be studied and fought in social circumstances, not speculatively.  In this, he shifts away from both Hegel and Feuerbach.  With a re-constituted understanding of alienation in the reading, Hyppolite does not have to then say that Marx abandoned Hegel more-or-less when he wrote the German Ideology.

It is this which leads to the proletariat, as the concrete social class that will concretely deal with alienation:

“[The proletariat] is the last product of human alienation and as such it alone is capable of completely realizing the Idea, since man cannot be reduced to the status of a mere object, to a bone or skull, as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology, but possesses that reflexiveness of self-consciousness which enables him to recoil from the most extreme state of alienation” (136).

What follows is the passage where Hyppolite talks about the proletariat as “instrument.”

(d) Will to power. I’ve suggested that Hyppolite thinks Marx is too attached to the idea of an end of history, of a final supersession of alienation, and that Hegel read correctly would help to cure him of this.  Hyppolite directly makes this argument using the Nietzschean term “will to power” at several points in the Capital essay.  For example, at the beginning, where he lists several important points to orient the reading, he writes:

“The question arises whether Marx’s explanation involves the intervention of factors that are not purely economic, in particular, a certain will to power, which one can hardly imagine will disappear with the disappearance of capital. There is a contrast here between Hegel and Marx. However, it is possible that from an objective study of Marx himself one might go beyond his own conclusions.” (127)

Similarly, in his review of Lukacs’ Young Hegel (the Lukacs book appeared in 1948 and Hyppolite’s essay in 1951), Hyppolite says that:

“By objectifying himself in culture, the State, and human labor in general, man at the same time alienates himself, becomes other than himself, and discovers in this objectification an insurmountable degeneration which he must nevertheless try to overcome. This is a tension inseparable from existence, and it is Hegel’s merit to have drawn attention to it and to have preserved it in the very center of human self-consciousness. On the other hand, one of the great difficulties of Marxism is its claim to overcome this tension in the more or less near future and hastily to attribute it to a particular phase of history. It is surely an oversimplification to imagine that this tension can be reduced to a super-structure of the economic world.” (Studies, 87)

So too, a little later on in the essay on Capital, he writes that Marx:

“does not, to our knowledge, use the expression ‘will to power.’ But he certainly has in mind a will to power when he describes the historical role of capitalist society, its need to dominate, expressed in the value set on value that inspires the capitalist and without which progress is inconceivable. One merely wonders whether this will to power will cease with the class struggle” (130).

Why would we expect relations of domination to go away, when capital does? Once you open the box of historical research, you may find that you have to revise your initial assumptions as events change. The constitution and structure of the proletariat has changed, and this puts additional pressure on question of whether the proletariat can do the job assigned it:

“In view of the changes that have occurred in the conditions of production that Marx was unaware of, and that have led to a specialization and diversification of the so-called universal class, it is questionable to what extent the proletariat has or will accomplish the mission assigned to it by Marx. Finally, one wonders whether that phenomenon of a will to power that Marx perceived in the origins of capitalism and generally in the struggle between classes would disappear with the proletariat. To our mind these are essential questions and it seems likely that a commentary on Marx’s work, along with an analysis of events posterior to it in particular, a certain persistence of the phenomenon of nationalism in a strange combination with the class struggle-would help us frame questions more adequately, if not to solve them” (137).

The initial signs aren’t promising. Consider nationalism, which divided the workers’ movement prior to World War I, with the German Social Democrats of the II International supporting the war effort on nationalist grounds and the Bolsheviks under Lenin opposing it.  In the first of a series of denunciations, Lenin declares in 1914 that “the conduct of the leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party, the strongest and the most influential in the Second International (1889-1914), is sheer betrayal of socialism” (LCW 21, 16).  Lenin attributes this failure to bourgeois opportunism:

“The betrayal of socialism by most leaders of the Second International (1889-1914) signifies the ideological and political bankruptcy of the International. This collapse has been mainly caused by the actual prevalence in it of petty-bourgeois opportunism, the bourgeois nature and the danger of which have long been indicated by the finest representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of all countries. The opportunists had long been preparing to wreck the Second International by denying the socialist revolution and substituting bourgeois reformism in its stead, by rejecting the class struggle with its inevitable conversion at certain moments into civil war, and by preaching class collaboration; by preaching bourgeois chauvinism under the guise of patriotism and the defence of the fatherland, and ignoring or rejecting the fundamental truth of  socialism, long ago set forth in the Communist Manifesto, that the workingmen have no country” (LCW 21, 16).

Shortly after Lenin’s death, Bukharin’s “Lenin as a Marxist,” dedicated to proving that Lenin was a “genius theoretician” declared that the entire II International was tending toward a “degeneration of Marxism, the tendency of adaptation, in the worst sense of the word, to new social conditions which sprung up in Europe and which were peculiar to this period of European development,” colonial imperialism in particular (12).

The nationalist question had divided the proletariat; why should we think either that the proletariat could maintain its unity or that power relations would go away when it took over.  And if power relations won’t go away, why would alienation?  And, in any case, Bukharin says, making the first half of Hyppolite’s argument for him, the Marxism of Lenin “cannot be simply a repetition of the Marxism of Marx, because the epoch in which we are living is not a simple repetition of the epoch in which Marx lived” (17-18). Bukharin of course does not read Marx through alienation, but (with Lenin) emphasizes instead the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Then he has this to say:

“How did Marx approach this question [of the “commencement of the epoch of working-class rule”]? Let me remind you of the Marxist formula which I already quoted: ‘My teaching and its substance do not amount to being a question of the class struggle, but to the fact that it inevitably leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ That was the boundary line. When this dictatorship of the proletariat is already a fact then it becomes perfectly natural that in proceeding further we must cross this boundary. The substance of Marx’s teachings is that there is an inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat and it is only here that there can be a pause.  In that historical epoch it could not be otherwise, since the proletarian dictatorship was not presented as a real fact” (21).

All of which is to say that Hyppolite’s position on Marx deeply conflicted with the version emanating from Moscow via Althusser.  Superficially, it can be read (at least, retrospectively, after Althusser’s work in the 1960s) as having to do with prioritizing the early or late works of Marx.  That question had a lot to do not just with the status of Hegel, but the question of what Marx took from Hegel.  And that depended on figuring out what Hegel was saying.

Next time, I’ll look at what Hyppolite thinks Hegel is saying.