The decline of orthodox Marxism, once so influential, is the appropriate occasion for attempting a revival of Marxian thought. But where to begin? Is there a virgin ‘substance’
by reference to which possible deviations can be identified? Such a substance exists only in the sense that we dispose of Marx’s texts. They are well preserved, in no less than two complete editions (Marx Engels Werke, MEW, and Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, MEGA).
But there is hardly an innocent sentence to be found in them: the legacy of more than one hundred and fifty years in the history of the reception of Marx is so powerful that one can never be sure of understanding what he meant to say without being influenced
54. MECW 3, p. 177.
55. By no means does this function have to be intentional. Karl Mannheim already thought of the ‘worldview totality’ as ‘atheoretical’ (Mannheim 1964a, p. 98). A strategic orientation may be the result of an unconscious ‘tendency’.
by one of the numerous applications of his ideas. Every author has arrived at Marx by one road or another, and they imbue what he has written with their own preconceptions.
These preconceptions are all the less visible the more commonplace they have become, but they are frequently the main obstacle to understanding Marx. What is to be done?
Instead of rushing to present a new Marx as the ‘real’ one to whom we ought to ‘return’, an approach frequently chosen and one that usually amounts to the reassertion of a tra-ditional reading, the present work follows the opposite path of engaging in a destruction of the tradition’s development [Destruktion des Überlieferungsgeschehens].56
This involves treating the various stages of reception as interpretations that build upon one another. While they may have missed the mark for a variety of reasons (includ-ing political reasons), they have, nonetheless, consolidated themselves and given rise to new interpretations. Marx is referred to only when a deviation from the meaning of his theories is evident at some nodal point in the history of his reception. Since sys-tematic remarks on Marx would stall the flow of the account, they have been appended to the relevant chapters in the form of remarks on ‘Key Elements of Marxian Theory’.
This allows for the presentation of a substantial part of Marx’s work, without forcing that work into the corset of a lustreless system. Instead, the explosive topicality that distinguishes Marxian theory from Marxism is revealed at the very points where the two diverge. This accords better with the spirit of criticism than the penning of a hermetic and antiquarian monograph.
The second and most voluminous chapter of the present work examines theoretical Marxism’s progressive self-debilitation up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It seeks to understand how Marx’s thought, which is more topical than ever, was able to exhaust itself in such a way in the course of the history of its reception. In examining the Ger-man reception of Marx – both within Marxism and on the part of its enemies – special attention needs to be paid to the mentalisations and moralisations to which Marxian theory fell victim. Marx was labelled a philosopher, a moralist and even a theologian. The course followed by Marx’s German reception shows that he was one of the hidden cen-tres of social philosophy. While there were exceptions, it remains astounding to see how frequently the function of refuting or avoiding Marx has constituted one of the nuclei around which German thought tacitly revolved.57 This is what eventually caused theo-retical Marxism to implode: it concurred with too many mentalisations. There resulted a veritable eliminatory idealism: the social sciences lost sight of their very own object of inquiry, namely ‘society’ and its concretisation ‘capitalism’. Alongside the temporary success of Marxism as a political movement, we thus find a ‘history of decline’, that of theory insofar as it was Marxist or responded to Marx. When political Marxism collapsed,
56. This expression is taken from the ‘existential interpretation’ of Martin Heidegger.
57. According to Negt, ‘the 20th century intellectual situation’ consists, in fact, of ‘footnotes to Marx’ (Negt and Kluge 1992, p. 271). Negt’s phrase alludes to a statement about Plato by A.N. Whitehead.
there was no theoretical net to break theory’s fall. We do, however, dispose of ruins that allow us to reconstruct this history.
The second chapter covers the period from the 1892 Erfurt Programme to the end of socialism in 1989. But its mode of presentation is not historical. The chapter is structured systematically, distinguishing between the discursive contexts of various disciplines that overlap temporally. Sections 2.1 to 2.6 are structured so as to draw attention to an increas-ing withdrawal from reality. It begins with the treatment Marx received on the level of political-party literature, which was concrete insofar as it was geared to practical issues (2.1, 2.2). Marx was then engaged with in increasingly abstract ways. Economic analysis (2.3) and its spinoff sociology (2.4) were still intended for concrete application, albeit in a mediated way. After discussing them, the chapter examines Marxism’s transposal to the field of philosophy (2.5) and its ultimate mentalisation, that is, its theologisation (2.6). This process of progressive abstraction involved arguments from one sphere being appropriated by another, and these arguments were not always the best. Ironically, it was theology that succeeded in preserving Marx’s ‘memory’ after socialism, and it was able to do so precisely because of its lack of concern for practical matters (3.3.2).
The structure for which I have opted is meant to do justice to the fact that while the various disciplines often engage with similar issues, each functions according to its own particular grammar. If one follows Hegel in thinking of philosophy as the ‘spirit of the times’, then philosophy must look beyond its own nose. The second chapter shows that in dealing with Marx, philosophy often employed topoi adopted uncritically from the proto-philosophical disciplines. These topoi are difficult to criticise in a purely ‘philo-sophical’ way; in criticising patterns of reception, one needs to engage with the grammar of the proto-philosophical disciplines in which distortions of Marx originated, rectifying them there.
The shorter third chapter examines contemporary political philosophy. The post-mortal prolongation of the critique of philosophy beyond 1989, the moment of Marx’s
‘second death’,58 shows the German tendency to mentalise real phenomena has further waxed in strength since the disappearance of Marxism qua critical interlocutor. For as long as it faced Marxist opponents, German thought was forced not to elide social real-ity altogether. And it was confronted with the Marxist critique of philosophy, which raised the question of what made the philosophical statements advanced possible as statements. To the extent that it now lacks such a critical interlocutor (one who is at the same time its equal), contemporary philosophy has grown more grandiose, and hence more uncritical. The third chapter attempts to reconstitute the kind of critique that has been lost. In criticising some of the main currents of contemporary political philosophy (3.1–3.4), in-depth historical analysis has proven an invaluable tool. Uncovering – and hence exposing to criticism – the idealist premises of contemporary philosophy requires consideration of their theoretico-historical background. Thus ignorance of theory turns
58. Liessmann 1992.
out, in the course of analysis, to be a product of history; certain assumptions can be shown to underlie it. These background assumptions – such as the well-known claim that the welfare state has ‘settled’ class issues – usually originate in a single discipline and seldom stand up to empirical verification.
The reappropriation of Marxian thought provides the present work with a framework for criticising today’s normative social philosophy. In breaking down barriers of recep-tion, it also seeks to facilitate further productive recourse to Marx. Thus the fourth chap-ter’s systematic conclusion has no ready-made ‘new philosophy’ to present. Instead, it attempts to revive a traditional discipline, one for which the names of Marx and Kant have long stood: critique. Critique refuses to be reduced to abstract formulas – except the one that apposite criticism ought to be both concrete and substantive.59 Thus even systems theory, which takes itself to be above this world, contains central claims that depend on a specific historical constellation, one that has not existed since 1989.60
This issue, that of external consistency, is precisely the one that any critique that wants to be effective ought to treat as its point of attack. Such a critique is less in need of
‘normative’ than of valid substantive arguments. By virtue of this conclusion, a negative and critical one as far as the scope of social philosophy is concerned, the fourth chap-ter enacts a return to the meaning of philosophy as defined by Kant and Wittgenstein:
philosophy as such is unable to make substantive claims about the world. Marx already knew this; his intellectual origins lay in German idealism and he needed considerable time to disentangle himself from it.61 Philosophy after Marx limits itself to a critique of other philosophies and proto-philosophies. To do so, it must open itself up to the world and the empirical sciences without abandoning itself to them. For here lie the proto-philosophical ideologemes by which philosophies are so often deluded. As the present work makes clear, there remains plenty of work for philosophy to do.
It remains to point out some technical details. The footnotes, sometimes quite exten-sive, contain no additional arguments; they simply serve to illustrate the reflections developed in the main text. They indicate literature that contains similar reflections, as well as other passages in the present work. Some tables have been included to clarify complex economic phenomena; these tables serve no purpose but that of making the basic structure of what is being said more transparent. The term ‘economy’ always refers to the thing itself, whereas ‘economics’ refers to theories about the economy. Quotations from Marx are not intended as substantive proofs; their purpose is simply to allow the reader to verify where and in what manner Marx formulated particular claims.
59. On the criterion of substantiveness, see Lask 1902, p. 43; Carnap 1928, §7; Demmerling 1998, p. 82: Stekeler 1995, p. 282 f.
60. Luhmann 1971; see sections 2.4.6, 2.5.6.
61. MECW 1, pp. 220 f.