1. Stalinism and the French Communist Party

Marxism was slow in coming to France.  The intellectual competitors of Marxism, Blanqui's Jacobinism and Proudhon's syndicalism, dominated the French worker's movements well into the twentieth century.  Early importations of Marx's thought by Guèsde and Jaurès failed to evoke a wide interest in the theoretical texts of socialism.  Between 1929 and 1934 a first group of intellectuals was constituted to study and propagate Marxism.  The group consisted of Georges Politzer, Henri Lefebvre, Norbert Gutermann, Georges Friedmann, Pierre Morhange, and Paul Nizan.  Closely allied to the Communist Party, this group concerned itself with refuting the dominant philosophical traditions of Cartesian rationalism and Bergsonian vitalism.  A second group, clustered around the journal La Pensée, revue du rationalisme moderne, was led by prominent scientists who were Communist Party members: Paul Langevin, Marcel Prenant, Frederic Joliot-Curie, and Henri Wallon.[1] Founded in 1939, La Pensée was openly positivist, limiting "dialectical materialism" to a method of research.  Leaning heavily on the French Encyclopedist tradition, it advertised Marxism as the only philosophy  com-

1. For an extensive discussion of the thought of the early French Marxists, of Politzer, Wallon, Langevin, and Jacques Solomon, see Roger Garaudy, Perspectives de l'homme (Paris, 1969) 270-303.  For the CP intellectuals, cf. Claude Roy, Nous (Paris, 1972).

36

The Re-Discovery of Marx

patible with scientific rationalism.[2] Both groups of French Marxists, without an economist among them, wanted to have communism bask in the radiant prestige of the progress of natural science.  Politzer, recognized by many as the most brilliant of the early Marxists, proclaimed that "materialism is no more than the scientific understanding of the universe,"[3] essentially a "continuation" of the materialism of Diderot and the eighteenth century.[4]  This positivist Marxism continued to predominate in the thought of the younger generation of Communist Party theorists after the Liberation.

Writing in 1946, at the height of the power of the Communist Party, resulting from its leadership in the Resistance, Roger Garaudy safely delineated Marxism as scientific, moral, and French.[5] The image of Marxism drawn by CP apologists like Garaudy was not of an open, critical theory that could lead to strategies for smashing oppressive institutions, but of a respectable, elevated, very French, philosophical doctrine.  The celebrated leader of the FCP at this time, Maurice Thorez, could say nothing better of Marxism than that it was a "proven, scientific theory,"[6] in the line of "potent minds" that stretched "from Rabelais to Helvétius, from Diderot to Victor Hugo, from Zola to Anatole France."[7]

Two factors determined the fate of French Marxism through the 1940s: the political context of Stalin's International and the belated introduction of the corpus of Marx's writings.  No more striking instance of the influence of politics on intellectuals can be named than the power Josef Stalin exercised over French Marxists from the mid-1930s until the mid-1950s.  The primary task of Marxist intellectuals was to defend the Soviet Union, -

2. George Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (N.Y., 1966) 153.
3. Principes élémentaire de philosophie (Paris, 1970), 21.
4. Ibid., 22.
5. "Les Sources françaises du marxisme-léninisme," Cahiers du Communisme, 23:12 (Dec., 1946) 1120-1133.  Also "Le communisme et la morale," 8-9 (June-July, 1945) 54ff.
6. Fils du peuple (Paris, 1970) 344.
7. Ibid., 360.

37
 

to twist Marxism into a theory that explained Soviet society and demonstrated its superiority over capitalism.  This situation was even more constraining because Stalin used the European Parties to suit the needs of Soviet interests so that French Marxists were compelled to argue the revolutionary role of the French Party when, in fact, Stalin was dictating a conservative role for it.[8]  In the years immediately after World War II, at a time of revolutionary fervor in France, Moscow embraced De Gaulle and the CP had to restrain its militants in favor of Stalin's policy of stability in Europe.  Marxists could not escape the understandable dilemma of supporting Russian socialism, a palpable reality, and at the same time wanting to revolutionize French capitalism.[9]  The Soviet Union was simply the homeland of socialism for intellectuals, who, enchanted by its spell, invested in it all the dreams of an emancipated humanity.10 After 1947 with the outbreak of the Cold War, the emergence of the Zhdanovist doctrine of the two camps and the exclusion of the CP from the government, it became very difficult for Party intellectuals to write critically.  Unless one were prepared to fall into the camp of the Americans with their anti-Communism-and very few French intellectuals were-Marxism had to be identified with Russian socialism without qualification.

The relation of intellectuals to the Party is difficult to understand.  The explanation by

8. David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals (N.Y., 1964) 164.  For a general discussion of the French CP during this period see Alfred J. Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party: 1941-1947 (N.Y., 1962).
9. Tbe Communist jean Desanti tried to explain this situation in "Sur les intellectuals et le communisme," La Nouvelle critique, 76-77 (June-Aug., 1956) 93-102 and 90-101.  For an unsympathetic and typically anti-Communist, cold-warrior explanation see Jules Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, trans. by J. Dégras and R. Ress (London, 1953), originally published in 1949.
10. For an example of this argument by a CP intellectual that indicates the incredible force of Stalinism see, Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Paris, 1959) 137-147.

38
 

sociological reasons, such as the disparity between working-class or peasant Party leaders and bourgeois intellectuals, fails to recognize the power of Stalinist Russia over the intellectuals and their willing submission to diamat (dialectical materialism).[11] On the other hand the Party was led by the politicians, and the role of intellectuals was entirely subordinate.  To the degree that the praxis of the Party was guided by theory it was the theory of Stalin, who was considered the true interpreter of Marx and Lenin.  Yet the attitude of the Party toward intellectuals did vary in the post-war years.  At times, usually when the Party was courting intellectuals, published works were not carefully scrutinized for orthodoxy and some degree of open debate was possible.  In the main, for CP intellectuals it was not possible to apply Marx's ideas to the concrete history and direction of Western European societies.  It took several decades before Marxism could be extricated from its identification with the Soviet Union, before the Soviet Union itself could be analyzed critically.

In addition to being constrained by the necessity of apologizing for Stalin's "socialism in one country," Marxists were hamstrung by the philosophical pretentions of Stalin.  In the CP, Marxism was presented as a finished philosophy, known as diamat, consisting of seven theses, three principles and four traits, and Communist intellectuals were encouraged simply to repeat and apply these "truths."[12] Under the aegis of Russia's philosopher-king, Marxism became a closed system of ideas.  French Trotskyists, like Pierre Naville, who were critical of Stalin's Russia, were themselves

11. This is a common error of historians and political scientists.  See, for example, Richard Johnson, The French Communist Party vs. the Students (New Haven, 1972) 4.
12. Roger Garaudy, "Les manuscrits de 1844 de Karl Marx," Cahiers du Communisme, 39 (March, 1963) 120.  For examples of diamat from the French, see R. Garaudy, La Théorie matérialiste de la connaissance (1953); Guy Besse and Maurice Caveing, Principes élémentaires de philosophie.

39
 
I. Neither Idealism Nor Materialism

wedded to the idea that the October Revolution was the realization of Marx's proletarian revolutions.[13]

French Marxists dutifully imitated Stalin's formulation of diamat.[14] Revolutionary theory was schematized into two parts: dialectical materialism, a phrase never used by Marx, and historical materialism.  The dialectic emerged as a metaphysical postulate about objective, exterior reality.  Materialism signified that "matter is primary," that mind is secondary . . . since it is a reflection of matter."[15] The two principles combined-precisely how was left unclear-constituted the "philosophy" of Marxism, from which historical materialism, the method of understanding society and providing a guide for the praxis of the proletariat, was derived.  Historical materialism meant little more than economism: the economic base determined the political, legal and ideological superstructures in a unilinear, mechanical manner. (Stalin's placing language in between the two would be an exception to this reductionism.) Since the relative autonomy and the reciprocal influence of the superstructure were denied, historical materialism ended in an abstract analysis of the economy along with a characterization of man as homo economicus.  Historical materialism limited Marxists either to empty hopes of a catastrophic upheaval or to collaborating with the Fourth Republic and De Gaulle for economic, trade-unionist benefits.  This Marxism could be seen as an ideology serving the defensive interests of Stalin's authoritarian state, which felt itself beleaguered by imperialist capitalism.  Divorced from the popular base, the state was systematically modernizing Russia, and, in its dualism and the materialism own way, diamat reflected

13. In this early period only Karl Korsch in Marxism and Philosophy, trans.  F. Halliday (London, 1970), originally published in 1923, seriously attempted a Marxist analysis of Marx.  The CP intellectual, Georges Cogniot, was still finding the USSR as "the embodiment of democracy" in 1968, Karl Marx, notre contemporaine (Paris, 1968) 162.
14. Cf. Joseph Stalin, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism," in Leninism: Selected Writings (N.Y., 1942) 406-433.
15. Ibid., 413.

40
 

the dualism of and the materialism of a society that was "conquering nature" under the leadership of a small elite.

Most intellectuals gradually saw that Marxism in its Stalinist form would never be a revolutionary theory in Europe.  In the West, a critical theory would have to account for the development of capitalism since 1900-oligopolistic concentration, the state's entry into the market, advanced technology leading toward automation, the transformation of the work force toward increasingly skilled mental labor, the direct manipulation of needs through advertising, the pacification of the traditional proletariat, and the transformation of the areas of gratification from work to consumption and leisure.  Faced with these profound transformations, French Communist intellectuals could only incant the tenets that applied in mid-nineteenth-century Europe: capitalism would collapse by itself, the workers were subject to increasing pauperization, manual laborers were the only human beings capable of a socialist revolution (ouvrièrisme), a hierarchical Leninist party alone could lead the revolution, the revolution would be an apocalyptic transformation of the world on the model of 1789 and 1917.[16] Leftist intellectuals accepted CP Marxism only as an expedient under Cold War conditions in which even bourgeois liberties were jeopardized by latent or overt fascist tendencies.

Equally significant for understanding the slow development of an open Marxism in France was the absence of most of the texts of Marxism.[17] In the nineteenth century, only Capital, The Communist Manifesto and Marx's politico historical writings were translated into French.[18] The Molitor translations began in 1927 with Marx's doctoral dissertation

16. Lichtheim, op. cit., 53-63.
17. For the introduction of socialist texts into France see Alexandre Zévaès, De l'introduction du marxisme en France (Paris, 1947) and Maximilien Rubel, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Karl Marx (Paris, 1956).
18. Zévaès, op. cit., 185-190.

41
 

and The Holy Family.  The German Ideology and the all-important Paris Manuscripts of 1844, known in France as Economie politique et philosophie did not appear until 1937 and even then it was ignored until after the Liberation.[19] The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right appeared a little earlier in 1935, but the Grundrisse, which showed the continuity of Marx's thought from the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital was not published in French until 1967.  The important works of Lenin and Engels were slow in coming: Materialism and Empiriocriticism in 1928, the Notebooks on Hegel in 1938, and Engels' Dialectic of Nature in 1957.  The most important of these texts were not even available in German: The 1844 Manuscripts and German Ideology became available in 1932; the Grundrisse in 1939.  Clearly, for political and textual reasons, which were interconnected, no real reading of Marx was possible in France until after the Second World War.

2. Lukacs and Goldmann

When French social theorists began, after World War II, re-reading Marx, particularly the young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, and reformulating Marxism around the pivotal idea of alienation, they discovered a Marxist tradition spiritually close to themselves.  This tradition, which Merleau-Ponty called "Western Marxism," bad spoken earlier in the twentieth century against a direction of Marxism that was very similar to Stalinism.

19. Many of the commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts complained about the omissions and errors in the Molitor translation.  For one thing, it came from the Landshut and Mayer edition of 1932, which had deep flaws (Rubel, op. cit., 120).  Molitor left out much of the all-important section on "alienated labor." The first adequate translation was Emile Bottigelli's, published by Editions Sociales, a CP house, in 1962.  There was one earlier appearance in French of parts of the 1844 Manuscripts. Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Gutermann, of the "philosophies" group, published sections of it in their journal Revue Marxiste, No. 1, in the mid-1920s.  They also reprinted tiny sections of it in Karl Marx, morceaux choisis (Paris, 1934).  However, in the 1940s and 1950s these publications were totally ignored.

42
 

The Western Marxists rejected positivism, a view of dialectical materialism fashioned after the sciences of nature, as well as economism.  Apparently Marxism had a tendency to become distorted in this specific direction, a tendency that has yet to be explained adequately.

The Western Marxists were primarily Germans who wrote their revisions of Marx in the 1920s and early 1930s.  The group includes Ernst Bloch, whose Geist der Utopie of 1918 emphasized the futurist, utopian element in Marxism; the Hungarian Georg Lukacs, whose Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein of 1923 foreshadowed the discussion of the concept of alienation; Karl Korsch, whose Marxismus und Philosophie of 1923 was an early attempt to bring Marxist criticism to the Marxist movement itself; and Herbert Marcuse, whose Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit of 1932 took some of its impulses from the existentialism of Martin Heidegger.  Marcuse later joined the Frankfurt School Marxists (Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, et al.), whose project of developing a "critical theory of society" was the basis of the Western Marxist tradition.  Mention was also made by the French of the Italian theorist and organizer, Antonio Gramsci, whose idea of bourgeois hegemony underscored the need to refute bourgeois ideology and develop a Marxist culture, pointing to the importance of the "superstructure."[20]

In their efforts to rethink the basic questions of Marxism, many of the Western Marxists, to a greater or lesser extent, relied on some form of existentialism,[21] with its concern with the human subject, its concept of freedom, and, above all, the primacy it gave to time or historicity as the ground of human reality.  Marcuse, for example, had  a

20. Cf., for example, Georges Cottier, "Le Néomarxisme d'Antonio Gramsci," in Du Romantisme au marxisme (Paris, 1961) 207-226.
21. Paul Breines suggested this point to me.  A similar argument is made by Walter Kaufman in his introduction to Richard Schacht, Alienation (N.Y., 1971) xviii.

43
 

student of Heidegger.  More relevant for the French was the existentialist component in the Marxism of Georg Lukacs.  Lukacs was a student of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, and even in his early literary works took Simmel's notion of human alienation and gave it a Marxist  twist.[22] Lukacs was contemplating, during this early period, a study of the first great existentialist Søren Kierkegaard and be acknowledged the impact the Danish philosopher made on him.[23]  Once Lukacs was exiled in the Soviet Union, be conformed to the orthodoxy of Marxist-Leninism and publicly renounced his earlier work.  With History and Class Consciousness under the cloud of a Russian ban, Lukacs' public denials about his past were always received with some skepticism in the West, a skepticism partly confirmed by Lukacs' endorsement of a German republication of History and Class Consciousness in 1967 and the appearance in 1948 of his Der Jünge Hegel which be had been quietly working on while in the Soviet Union.  The final section of the book was on the suppressed topic of alienation.  Although Lukacs' reputation was somewhat tarnished by his public Stalinism, be remained the leading Marxist philosopher and literary critic in the eyes of many French thinkers.  His existential Marxism was transmitted to France by Lucien Goldmann, most notably in Kant and Recherches dialectiques (1959), and placed at the center of Western Marxism by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Aventures de la dialectique (1955).  Although History and Class Consciousness was not translated into French until 1960,[24] it was a most important influence on the direction of French Marxism after the Liberation.

In the 1967 preface, Lukacs acknowledged that his book History and Class

22. Andrew Arato, "Lukacs' Path to Marxism: 1910-1923," Telos, 7 (Spring, 1971) 130.
23. History and Class Consciousness, trans. by R. Livingstone (London, 1971) ix.
24. Histoire et conscience de classe, trans. by Axelos and Bois (Paris, 1960).  Lukacs also commented on the importance of the 1844 Manuscripts during the French debate in "Les manuscrits de 1844 et la formation du marxisme," La Nouvelle critique (June, 1955) 31-47.

44
 

Consciousness was the "first since Marx to treat alienation as the central critical category, " [25] a remarkable accomplishment because the 1844 Manuscripts, in which alienation appeared as the ground of Marxism, had not yet been discovered.  In the 1923 volume, Lukacs shifted the focus of Marxism away from the positivist study of "external" nature and society, which it had become in the hands of the later Engels, the "revisionist" Eduard Bernstein and the "orthodox" Karl Kautsky, toward a study of "the dialectical relation between the subject and the object."[26] Lukacs criticized Engels' influential Anti-Duhring for using the "methods of the natural sciences," which "reduces phenomena to their purely quantitative essence."[27]  To Lukacs, Marx's dialectics, with its heavy debt to Hegel, it relates isolated facts to the totality." Marxism united theory and practice so that "man himself" is understood as "the objective foundation of the historical dialectic?"[29] Lukacs thereby rejected the "determinism" of diamat and restored man as the subject of history.[30]

The Marxist analysis of capitalism could no longer remain merely the study of the economic base, but now centered on social relations.  Elaborating on the fetishism chapter of volume one of Capital, Lukacs defined life under capitalism through the concept of reification (Verdinglichung) by which human interactions were conceived and experienced as relationships between things.  Using the definition Marx gave for alienation, Lukacs described reification as man's own activity, his own labor, becomes something objective and independent of him, something that controls him by virtue of an autonomy alien to man . . . Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being. . . . Subjectively . . . a man's activity becomes estranged from himself;

25. Op. cit., xxii.
26. Ibid., 3.27 Ibid., 5.
28. Ibid., 16.
29. Ibid., 189.
30. Ibid., 194.

45
 

it turns into a commodity?"[31] Furthermore, the "mechanized rationalization" of the economy (Weber's notion) inhibited human freedom; the capitalist conquest of nature became the capitalist control of man, as " . . . calculability must embrace every as-
pect of life." [32]

The main thesis of History and Class Consciousness, was the need not so much to destroy the private ownership of the means of production, as to end alienation.

Reification is, then, the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society.  It can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total development. . . . What is crucial here is that there should be an aspiration to totality . . . . [33]

Lukacs still looked to the proletariat as the vehicle of this revolution because they, unlike the bourgeoisie, had a class consciousness that "aspired to totality." Beyond the bourgeois "standpoint of the individual," the proletariat by its place in the social structure could grasp the "truth" of the totality.[35]  Of course, the actual proletariat did no such thing.  With the ebbing of the proletariat's revolutionary momentum throughout Europe after 1920, Lukacs was forced into the position of distinguishing between empirical, working-class consciousness and an ideal working class that grasped the totality.  He developed a concept of an "ascribed" or "imputed" proletarian consciousness in which the proletariat saw itself subjectively exactly as it objectively existed in the structure of capitalism.  Ironically, this form of Western Marxism was but

31. Ibid., 87.
32. Ibid., 89-91.
33. Ibid., 197-198.
34. Ibid., 148.
35. Ibid., 28, 52, 69 and 163.
 
46
 

one step from Leninism: the Party could represent the ideal proletariat as the subject-object of history when the actual proletariat did not.

Lukacs, in sum, articulated a libertarian, existential Marxism that spoke of communism as the realization "authentic humanity" and man's "total personality,"[36] that saw society as a "totality" of reciprocal, mediated levels,[37] that depicted capitalism as an alienated, reified world, and that pointed to the human subject as the ground of history.  "Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming.  He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future.  Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming that belongs to him."[38] History and Class Consciousness was quickly labeled a "deviation" by the Marxist papacy in Moscow.  The leading Russian theoretician, Bukharin, berated the book for its "relapses into the old Hegelianism,[39] and Zinoviev, a politician who in this case breached the division of labor-branded it "ultra-leftism." Lukacs himself, in 1967, faulted his work for the error of "subjectivism," since it failed to enunciate the "ontological objectivity of nature," and because it equated alienation (Entfremdung) with objectification (Vergegenständlichung)...[40]

The link between Lukacs and the French was in great measure forged by Lucien Goldmann.  A pupil of Lukacs, Goldmann used the dialectic in concrete studies, demonstrating its powers as a method of research.  His studies of Kant (1952), Pascal (1956), Racine (1956), and Malraux (1964) related, in Lukacsian fashion, their "visions of the world" to the social context without reducing their thought to a reflection of econo-

36. Ibid., 136 and 319.
37. Ibid., 162ff .
38. Ibid., 204.
39. Cited in George Licbtheim, George Lukacs (N.Y., 1970) 54.
40. Op. cit., xvii and xxiv.  For a recent critical estimate of History and Class Consciousness, cf.  Gareth Stedman Jones, "The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: an Evaluation," New Left Review, 70 (Nov.-Dec., 1971) 27-64.

47

mic structures. He generalized his method in Les sciences humaines et la philosophie (1952), pointing out that only the dialectic could make literary and philosophical works truly intelligible, by revealing their importance in relation to human problems of a given epoch.  Academics were urged to study the Marxist dialectic as a better way of examining their own fields.

Goldmann's transmission of his teacher's concept of reification to France aided the development of existential Marxism.  Reification in capitalist society "masked the role of spiritual and psychic reality in the social relations between men, giving them the appearance of the natural attributes of things. . . ." [41] Thus the passivity of consciousness in economic relations, which orthodox Marxism made into a general social law, was specific to capitalism and was a consequence of its distortion of man.[42] The theoretical significance for Marxism of Goldmann's concept of reification was that it unveiled the interdependence of the superstructure and base, showing just how economic interactions mutilated consciousness and permitting a true evaluation of the autonomy and active role of consciousness.[43] Further, it led to an awareness of the importance of psychology for Marxism which Goldmann tried to develop through the use of Piaget's developmental psychology.[44]

Our main interest in Goldmann rests with his presentation of Lukacs to the French as an existential Marxist.  In his 1950 article on Lukacs, Goldmann argued that Lukacs' book The Soul and Its Forms (1910) was "an important stage in the birth of modern existential philosophy."[45]  A two-edged sword, existentialism reflected the decline of the bourgeoisie but also made for a return "to the concrete problems of living men."[46] Existentialism represented a positive theoretical advance, important for Marxists, since it cut through the reification of the subject in bourgeois thought.  For this reason, Lukacs

41. Recherches dialectique (Paris, 1959) 78.
42. Ibid., 79.
43. Ibid., 67.
44. Ibid., 118-128.
45. Ibid., 247.
46. Ibid., 248.

48

was interested in Kierkegaard.  Goldmann also said that Heidegger, in Being and Time, was deeply indebted to Lukacs.[47] With no acknowledgment on Heidegger's part, the German existentialist developed his thought with large help from a Marxist, a reversal of the usual pattern of filiation.  What Goldmann failed to recount was that Lukacs' own concept of reification, in turn, owed much to Bergson, who had had great influence in Hungary during Lukacs' youth.[48] Bergson, who was so important to Sartre in Being and Nothingness, disputed rationalism and presented consciousness in its flowing, temporal qualities.[49] Regardless of who took from whom, Goldmann attempted to work out an existential Marxism through a synthesis of Lukacs and Heidegger.[50]

3. The 1844 Manuscripts

After World War II, the Communist Party of France was shaken by a threat it could not have anticipated.  The CPF bad dealt, in its fashion, with numerous enemies in its short history: Trotskyists, Socialists, liberals, fascists, conservatives, Catholics, monarchists, all sorts of intellectuals, academics, and journalists who derived fame or pleasure from polemicizing against Marx.  Attacks were launched against Marx's character, against his philosophy, against his religious background, against his politics.  He was heartless, cruel, dogmatic, lecherous, ruthless, totalitarian, a determinist who threatened human freedom and culture, a violent, barbaric romantic, a utopian dreamer, etc., etc.  CP intellectuals looked with some disdain at these petty bourgeois red-baiters, remaining unshaken in their faith.  But now, after 1945, something more sinister was happening: in-

47. Ibid., 265 and Immanuel Kant, trans.  R. Black (London, 1971) 25.
48. Joseph Gabel, La Fausse conscience (Paris, 1962) 16.
49. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans.  F. Pogson (N.Y., 1960).
50. This attempt is most fully presented in L. Goldmann, Lukacs et Heidegger, intro. by Y. Ishaghpour (Paris, 1973).

49
 

tellectuals of every conceivable stripe were proclaiming allegiance to Marx's thought, or, at the very least, paying homage to the power and fertility of his ideas.  To the same extent that the French reading public was fascinated by existentialism, Marx's ideas triumphantly paraded through Paris to enthusiastic approval.  To the chagrin of CP theorists, petty bourgeois intellectuals had successfully advertised Marxism as a philosophy of alienation.  France was astir with chatter about alienation,[51] bandying the name of Karl Marx in a manner entirely unsatisfactory to the official Marxists of the CP.  Taken completely off balance, CP intellectuals, apart from a few ineffective rejoinders, simply ignored the question of alienation until the early 1960s.[52] Then, with the thaw of Stalinism, they tacked the concept of alienation onto their own Marxism without altering

52. To give some sense of the scope and force of concern I will merely list chronologically and selectively, giving the general orientation of the author, works that recast Marxism in the mold of the idea of alienation; in 1945, Pierre Bigo, a Catholic, Marxisme et humanisme; in 1945, Luc Sommerhausen, L'Humanisme agissant de Karl Marx; in 1947, Henri Lefebvre, a CP member expelled in 1956, Marx et la liberté, pour connaître la pensée de Karl Marx, and Emile Baas, a Christian, L'Humanisme marxiste: essai d'analyse critique; in 1948, M. Rubel, Pages de K. Marx: Pour une éthique socialiste, Henri Lefebvre, Le Marxisme as well as two prominent journals devoting special issues to the young Marx, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, an academic sociological organ, and "Marxisme ouvert contre marxisme scolastique," of Esprit, a Catholic personalist publication edited by Emmanuel Mounier; in 1949, Jean Lacroix, a personalist, Marxisme, existentialisme, personnalisme; in 1950, Henri Bartoli, an economist, La Doctrine économique et social de Karl Marx; in 1956, Jean-Yves Calvez, a Jesuit, La Pensée de Karl Marx; in 1957, Maximilien Rubel, a "marxologist," Karl Marx: essai de biographie intellectuelle and Guy Caire, in a thesis, L'Aliénation dans les oeuvres de jeunesse de Karl Marx (Aix-en-Provence); in 1959, Lucien Goldmann, a Lukacsian literary critic, Recherches dialectiques, Georges Cottier, a Catholic, LíAthéisme du jeune Marx, and Roger Garaudy, who left the CP in 1968, Perspectives de l'homme; and, in 1961, Kostas Axelos, an independent Marxist philosopher, Marx, penseur de la technique: de I'aliénation de l'homme à la conquête du monde.
52. Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (N.Y., 1966) 82.

50
 

their politics or their general world picture.[53] Not until the mid 1960s, after two decades of neglect, did some official Communists, following Louis Althusser, mount a serious campaign to criticize and dampen the charismatic force of the concept of alienation.

A peculiar aspect of this rediscovery of Marx was the prominent role played by Catholics: Sommerhausen, Bigo, Calvez, and Cottier.  Their interest in Marx began during the Resistance.  Many French Catholics were embarrassed by the Pope's relations with the Vichy government.  Interest in Marx grew also from the worker-priest movement, beginning in 1944, in which priests found themselves in a Marxist milieu.[54] Hence the studies of Marx's writings by the Catholics were an attempt to test the possibility of a reconciliation.  On the Marxist side, no overture was made until Garaudy's books of the early 1960s.

We may now turn to the French discussion of the 1844 Manuscripts.  Since the 1844 Manuscripts are by now so well known, it will not be necessary to present a detailed analysis of them in these pages.  Instead we can proceed directly to the French criticisms of Marx's concept of alienation.

4. The Objections of the French

French commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts saw in Marx's idea of alienation the basis for generating a new Marxism that could be reconciled with their own, not always Marxist, positions.  Humanists discovered a "humanist" Marxism, moralists an "ethical" Marxism and Catholics a Christian Marxism.  At the very least, Marxism was no longer simply identifiable with Soviet Marxism, or Marxist-Leninism.[55] This fundamental rethinking of Marx's writings was not, however, without its criticisms of Marx's philoso-

53. Cf., for example, Georges Cogniot, Karl Marx, notre contemporaine (Paris, 1968) 32-34.
54. Interview with Jean-Marie Domenach in Paris, September 10, 1973.
55. Lichtheim, op. cit., 81.

51
 

phy of alienation.  In a few cases these criticisms concluded in the total rejection of the position of the young Marx, and in most they led to new directions for Marxist thought and action.  A discussion of the alleged weaknesses of Marx's philosophy will bring out the tender spots in Marxism around which the debate between Marxism and existentialism flourished.

a. Economic Reductionism

Marxism had long been attacked for its supposed reductionism.  The well-known Preface to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859 could be quoted to show that Marx minimized or totally eliminated the force of the "superstructure" in history, that is, politics, law, religion, philosophy, and art.  As Marx put it,

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.  The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.[56]

56. Trans. by S. W. Ryazanskaya (N.Y. 1970) 20-21.

52
 

dialectical origins of Marxism which viewed society as a totality of levels in reciprocal interaction, without unilinear causes and effects; finally, they can refer to Engels' often-quoted "Letter to Joseph Bloch" in which the relative autonomy of the superstructure was affirmed.[57] Only "ultimately" or "in the last instance" did the economy determine the superstructure concludes Engels.

The same controversy re-emerged in France after 1945 in relation to the 1844 Manuscripts.  In the Phenomenology, Hegel had connected alienation with self-consciousness; there was an alienation of consciousness when it objectified itself.  Marx had refused to attribute alienation to this "natural" process, saving alienation for those moments only when the objectification was "lost." He then argued that work activity was the source of alienation and that the other functions of man, politics, religion, and so forth, were secondary elaborations of alienated labor.  This implied that abolishing economic alienation would be the precondition for the end of other alienations and that no alienation could be overcome until work was humanized.  It implied that non-economic social structures had no legitimacy.  With the abolition of alienated labor the state would wither, religion would vanish; would art and philosophy also disappear?

Of all the commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts, the Catholic philosopher Jean Calvez most fully developed the arguments against Marx's stress on labor.[58] Relentlessly Calvez dissected Marx's concept of alienated labor, arguing that it oversimplified the possibility of liberation.  Calvez's critique was typical in that it forced Marx's concept of alienation to explain questions that Marx answered only weakly.  From the 1844 Manuscripts Calvez probed Marx's thought to see if it offered "a coherent

57. Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis Feuer (N.Y., 1959) 397-398.
58. Op. cit., 326-332 and 597-628.

53
 

conception of the world,"[59] rather than an analysis of specific phenomena.  Marx's concept of economic alienation could then be shown to fail to account fully for other modes of alienation, like psychological alienation."[60] Marx had developed an analysis of economic alienation, which Calvez accepted, and had outlined the links of this alienation with other aspects of social alienation.  Clearly this focus on labor was a limitation of Marx's method, but a limitation is not necessarily a cause for rejection since all theories have limits in scope.  By asking Marx's concept of alienation to explain every instance of alienation Calvez easily demonstrated that Marxism was not "complete." Calvez rejected Marx where be might have called for new concepts to be integrated into Marxism.  In this way, be could accuse Marx of "reducing" all alienation to economic alienation.[61]

A Catholic, Calvez presented his argument against economic reductionism, at bottom, because this allowed him to raise the question of Marx's "naturalism" or atheism.[62] For Marx, alienation could be completely overcome, and man could become fully human without help from God, from a transcendent absolute.  The dangerous conclusion, for Calvez, of Marx's concept of alienated labor was that man was the subject of history, that transcendence was eliminated from human reality, and that the absolute was immanent.[63] To Calvez, without God man could not distinguish human reality from natural reality and, as the whole development of Marxism indicated, history would be understood to follow the same blind, unconscious movement that characterized nature.[64]

In opposition to Calvez and other Catholic writers, Marxist commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts founded "economic" alienation on "human" alienation. Henri Lefebvre, a CP
 
59. Ibid., 596.
60. Bigo, op. cit., 214.
61. Op. cit., 327.
62. Ibid., 618-621.
63. Ibid., 623; cf. also, Bigo, op. cit., 151.
64. Ibid., 330-332.  Cf. also Baas, L'Humanisme marxiste (Paris, 1947) 92-93.

54

member always suspect to the leadership, Maximilien Rubel, an independent social theorist, and Kostas Axelos, a Marxist philosopher, all tried to answer the charge of economic determinism.

For Rubel, Marx discovered his "ethical vocation" while in Paris in 1844, founding a new "ethic" with his doctrine of the "total man."[65] Rubel confirmed that economic alienation was the base upon which rested "all other alienations of man," but economic alienation itself rested on Marx's it ethic," which be defined as the imperative to end alienation, to appropriate man's "universal being."[66]  What Calvez and indeed the orthodox Stalinists forgot was that "Marx did not create and had no intention of creating a new system of political economy. . . . Now that we have come to know the unpublished works, we can no longer misconceive the true nature of Marxism."[67] The great achievement of Marx for Rubel was to bring to the study of political economy his questionable ethical conception of alienation.[68]  Rather than "economic" determinism, Marxism was a "human" determinism which provided the framework for a new "sociology" with an "ethic" and a "true practice."[69] Basic to the idea of alienation was not the power of the economy over politics and religion, but the power of man to realize his humanity.  The feverish excitement over the reading of the young Marx in France grew, to a large degree, from the revelation of this "humanist passion" in Marx, rooted in an anthropological theory of man as "conscious, free, activity."[70] For Rubel, Marxism was now a coupling of scientific sociology and salvational ethics.  Rubel forgot that ethical action came from autonomous individuals, whereas Marx's notion of praxis referred to

65. Karl Marx: essai de biographie intellectuelle (Paris, 1956) 114 and 12 1.
66. Ibid., 138.
67. Ibid., 444.
68. Ibid., 126.
69. Ibid., 13, 135 and 445.
70. Luc Sommerhausen, L'Humanisme agissant de Karl Marx (Paris, 1946) xiii and 27.

55
 

groups without originating a concept of group ethics.

Lefebvre, by far the best interpreter of Marx in France, broadly supported Rubel's sociological and ethical picture of Marx.[71] The primary critical principle of Marxism, for Lefebvre, which he found most clearly enunciated in the 1844 Manuscripts, was the concept of "total man." This concept was in direct contradiction with "economic man" of bourgeois society, which was the real base for all notions of economic determinism.[72] The concept of total man refuted all partial views of man (Christian man and economic man).  "What is the total man?  Not physical, physiological, psychological, historical, economic or social exclusively or unilaterally; it is all of these and more, especially the sum of these elements or aspects; it is their unity, their totality their becoming.  Marxism, for Lefebvre, made no attempt to "reduce" religion to economics; it allowed the alienated character of religion to be comprehended as a distorting expression of alienated social relations.  It was the special character of religious myths to have their own force, their own power, their own alienating effects.  Lefebvre explained how one form of alienation, fetishism, could attain such prominence as it had in history:

Fetishism properly so called only appeared when abstractions escaped the control of the thought and will of man.  Thus commercial value and money are only in themselves quantitative abstractions: abstract expressions of social, human relations; but these abstractions materialize, intervene as entities in social life and in history, and end by dominating instead of being dominated.  The natural and objective process then takes on a new meaning.  The history of money, of capital is only in one sense the history of an abstraction . . .  [74]

56
 

Furthermore, Marx's naturalism did not lead to "economism," as both Catholic and -Stalinist interpretations of Marx asserted, but to an awareness of the human foundation of nature through man's historical struggle against nature.[75] Alienation in the economic structure did not linearly "determine"' alienation in other structures, but all were reciprocally interrelated within the movement of the historical totality.[76]  When "causal determinisms" appeared in history they were themselves human "productions" and indicated the sectors man did not control.[77] Fundamentally, history was the introduction of human finality, human purposes, replacing chance and causal determinism in society and nature.  To Lefebvre, the humanization of society and nature was at the same time the humanization of man: the conscious, human control of society and nature accompanied, mutatis mutandis, the coming into consciousness of human potentials.  Thus, far from being a determinist philosophy, "Marxism is a practical philosophy of freedom.  " [78]

In contrast to Lefebvre and Rubel, Axelos was unwilling to wipe out in one stroke all the difficulties of the primacy of the economy in Marx's concept of alienation.  He was worried that Marx at times seemed to "identify the totality of relations of production with the totality of society, thus identifying a 'part' with a 'whole.' "[79] Nevertheless, Axelos rejected the contention of Calvez and others that Marx's concept of alienation collapsed all the levels of society to the economy.  Behind economic alienation and economic man lay human alienation and the total man.  "At the heart of all the various dimensions of alienation (economic, political, ideological) is situated human alienation properly so called, alienation of human being . . . .It is this man that Marxist humanism

75. Ibid., 63.
76. Le Marxisme, op. cit., 68 and Dialectical Materialism, op. cit., 145-148.
77. Dialectical Materialism, op. cit., 136.
78. Introduction aux morceaux choisis de Karl Marx (Paris, 1934) 12.
79. Marx, penseur de la technique (Paris, 1961) 79.

57
 

wishes to disalienate."[8]0 By recalling the human genesis of alienation, Marxism compre-
hended social structures in a non-positivist, critical manner.  It did not invoke the economy as a metaphysical cause of everything else, but revealed how noneconomic levels of alienation were possible.  For Axelos, ideological or religious alienation arose under conditions of an "under-developed technology." Without techniques to ameliorate the noxious effects of nature, helplessly vulnerable to the least variation in natural conditions, mankind surrounded itself with mythologies that bore the taint of its weaknesses.[81]

Axelos, nonetheless, admitted a dilemma in Marx's concept of alienation that was also the core of the existentialists' reservations.  Marx denied all assertions of an original golden age before alienation, affirming the alienated character of all previous history.  Since all historic social formations were alienated and alienating, man was not the conscious subject of history but the unconscious, stumbling maker of his past.  The actual character of human experience was blindness, so that social structures tended to have the quality of natural forces and human subjectivity, in practice, took an entirely secondary place.[82]  In effect, then, history happened without man; at best, man was its secret, its hidden, obscured force, not its overt creator.

b. The End of History

Equally disturbing to some commentators on Marx's concept of alienation was his apparent conviction that with the abolition of alienation through the triumph of communism, history would come to an end.  Marxism became self-contradictory, these critics maintained, when it prophesied a total turnabout in human affairs: from the tragic darkness of alienation, man was seen emerging in full brilliance with all his potentialities realized at the end of time.  The eschatological quality that Marxism always bore was only intensified, not at all clarified, by the "naïve" hopes presented in

80. Ibid., 124.  Cf. also 91 and 130.
81. Ibid., 152 and 157.
82. Ibid., 80.

58
 

in the 1844 Manuscripts.[83] Instead of toning down the strident Prometheanism of Marxism, the young Marx only made matters worse.  Assuming the abolition of private property and alienated labor, would history end, would all other alienations disappear as well?  When philosophy was realized, as Marx put it, would there be no more philosophy?

Again, Jean-Yves Calvez was the most comprehensive critic in revealing the lofty, misguided pretentions of Marx's concept of the end of history.  He was impatient with Marx's prognostications.  After following Marx's careful and illuminating examination of the complex mediations of man, nature, and society, in which he unfolded convincingly level upon level of alienation, in which every construction of man was shown to be partial and incomplete-after all this we were expected to believe that in one thrust all imperfections would be swept off the earth.[84] Even the sympathetic personalist, Jean Lacroix, could not abide Marx's vision in which the temporal dialectic, which moved only by internal contradiction, would be arrested in some end of history.[85] How could Marx, a dialectician, Calvez queried, possibly maintain a state in which alienation was permanently ended? [86]

Reflecting his displeasure with Soviet communism, Calvez would not allow the simple solution that the proletariat, suffering from alienated labor, would turn against their oppression, eliminate it at its source, and carry mankind to the threshold of a de-alienated world.  The class struggle might well end in a dictatorship of the proletariat, and, as Stalinist Russia demonstrated, this short transitional phase on the road to pure communism had "its own complexity," its own political struggles.  There was nothing to convince Calvez that the proletariat in power would not behave exactly like previous

83. Bartoli, op. cit., 403.
84. Op. cit., 526.
85. Op. cit., 47.
86. Op. cit., 528.

59
 

ruling classes and erect a state apparatus that would alienate political power as efficiently if not more so, than in the past.[87] In fact, Bigo, another Catholic, contended, there was a necessary connection between Marx's notion of the end of history and the "totalitarianism" of Bolshevik Russia.[88] Calvez warned his readers that the nonsense" of the end of history must be extracted from Marxism before Catholics could profitably synthesize the two doctrines.  Marx's expectation that religion would vanish with the onset of a classless society was ultimately rooted in his "unverified" projection into "the future experience of the total man. [89]

Even those commentators less encumbered by religious presuppositions than Calvez and Bigo had reservations about Marx's futurology.  Given the failure of the proletariat to vindicate Marx's dreams, François Chatelet, for instance, cautioned against the dialectic of alienation in which "temporal unhappiness" contained its own internal remedy.[90] In the eyes of Axelos, this visionary strain in Marx, could only be understood as "Jewish prophetism." [91] Reflecting his anti-technological, Heideggerian proclivities,

87. Ibid., 522.  Both Bigo, op. cit., 215 and Axelos, op. cit., 283 and 101 spoke of man's "will to power" as independent of economic alienation.  They here returned to abstract arguments about "human nature":  "But does not this forget a fundamental element of human psychology: the will to power" (Bigo, op. cit., 214).  Put in this way, the argument is a mystification.  The Marxist reply is that where one cannot identify a specific social structure leading to a specific alienation, the question of the human nature of the phenomenon must remain open and not become an ideological obstacle to eliminating those social structures which are known to be alienating.  Lefebvre's answer to the alleged universality of the will to power is the best: "Marx was not an egalitarian; he recognized the fact of different capacities and the need for command in industry.  Alienation did not come from this but from the fixing of directing functions.  The functions become controlled by ruling classes and the state is formed which separates itself from other functions" (Le Marxisme, op. cit.,92-93).

88. Bigo, op. cit., 151-157.
89.  Ibid., 553.  Cf. also Bartoli, op. cit., 386.
90. Cited in Caire, op. cit., 116.
91. Op. cit., 74 and 217.

60
 

Axelos found alienation "more basic to history" than Marx thought.  Against Marx's prediction of a "happy end" to history be forecast a residual continuing alienation originating from "modern technical machinery." [92] Communism might well abolish some aspects of alienated labor but "where Marx becomes truly difficult to go along with is where he speaks of the suppression of the division of labor." [93] Axelos dismissed Marx's Fourierist dream of people laboring at diversified tasks in flagrant violation of the division of labor as "touching in its idyllic naivete." Since "the gigantic and universal development of productive technique ends in a reality much more problematical than . . . hunting, fishing and criticizing, according to one's pleasure and time." [94]

What Axelos perceived behind Marx's vision of the end of history was a new metaphysics.  Only the metaphysical value Marx attributed to "technique" allowed him to envision the end of alienation through the perfection of technique.  "Prolonging all Western metaphysics . . . Marx wants to transcend radically philosophy as the search for truth, as thought, theory and knowledge . . . it is the productivity of men which makes nature and totality being and becoming for man. . . . The human collectivity . . . as the foundation of a planetary technique, becomes the producer of all that is." [95] It would not be enough for man to reappropriate his creative labor in order for history to end in his total mastery of nature.

The arguments against Axelos and Calvez that substantiated Marx's notion of the end of alienation underscored the ahistorical position of the skeptics.  From the standpoint of the Communists Desanti and Lefebvre, the critics of the theory of the end of alienation spoke from a position of the contemplative philosopher who was not oriented toward praxis.[96] Indeed, Axelos explicitly proclaimed his contemplative stance, wishing only to
 

92. Ibid., 122.  
93. Ibid., 231.
94. Ibid., 232.
95. Ibid., 223.
96. Desanti, cited in Caire, op. cit., 117 and Lefebvre, Pour connaître la pensée de Karl Marx (Paris, 1947) 80.

61
 

present Marx's thought as a philosophy." [97]    Quite necessarily, if one made Marxism a pure philosophy, it would have all the characteristic faults of previous philosophy, what Axelos called its "metaphysical" character, its tendency to privilege one aspect of reality over the rest.  But, argued Lefebvre, Marx's privileging of technique derived from the actual situation during the industrial revolution.  Only from within contemporary developments did Marx voice his critical concept of alienation.  In the practice of technology the prospect of ending work and, to the degree that history was the history of work, of ending history was posited historically.  Marx argued that the alienating form in which industrialization developed would have to be abolished before the human potential for self-determination could be realized.  To the extent that previous history suppressed this potential, that "history" would be ended if the suppression were ended.[98] The famous passage where Marx spoke of Communism as the riddle of history solved does not imply the end of all contradictions" or human woes. In Lefebvreís words:

The organization of the human community will not put an end to history, but rather to man's "pre-history," his "natural history," before be became fully differentiated from the animals. It will inaugurate the era of an authentic humanity, in which man will control his own destiny and try at last to resolve the specifically human problems: those of happiness, knowledge, love and death.  He will have been freed from the conditions that made these problems insoluble.[99]

97. Op.  cit., 9.
98. Lefebvre, Le  Marxisme, op. cit., 44.
99. Dialectical Materialism, op. cit., 162-163.

62
 

disturbed by this because their own mode of thinking was inured to concepts of absolute beginnings, i.e., God's creation of the world.  For Marx, however, the question of the origin of the world, like that of the origin of alienation, was false and nondialectical.  In an amusing passage, Marx beckoned the philosopher of the beginnings of things to recall that in order to think the beginning one bad to abstract from all existing phenomena, which put one in the somewhat awkward position of hypothesizing one's own non-existence:

If you ask about the creation of nature and man, you thus abstract from man and nature.  You assert them as non-existent and yet want me to prove them to you as existing.  I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question.  Or if you want to maintain your abstraction, be consistent and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, think of yourself as non-existent as you too are nature and man.  Do not think, do not question me, for as soon as you think and question, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man makes no sense. Or are you such an egoist that you assert everything as nothing and yet want yourself to exist.[100]

But if we have no knowledge of a past, non-alienated social structure, how can we be sure that we know what alienation is?  If we cannot isolate alienation from the social structure, hold it constant, how can we test it as a dependent or independent variable in specific historical contexts?  Marx's answer to this question derived from his rejection of positivism and its corollary, analytical reasoning.  Dialectical procedure aimed not to

100. Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 313-314.
101. Ibid., 408ff.

63
 

"isolate" phenomena and then "test" them, but to grasp them within history, to comprehend their mediations and relations within the totality.  Certainly [102] did not derive from scientific procedures, but ultimately only from action; [103] the concept of alienation provided Marx with a critical tool that could specify the concrete structures of society which caused men to lose power over their own existences.  To some French Marxists, the idea of alienation did not yield the absolute knowledge of idealism or the probable knowledge of positivism; rather it revealed the nature of the world in such a way that -men and women could make the world and themselves more human.

C. Homo Economicus
 
The third major objection to the idea of alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts was again one that had troubled Marxism from its inception.  Even if one granted that economic alienation was not reductive and that the "end of history" was not an eschatological mythic paradise, Marx was still open to the charge that his anthropology, his concept of man, reduced human value to economic value, human interactions to instrumental or technical interactions,[104] human experience to work experience.

Some commentators, notably Axelos, insisted that there was an ambiguity in the historical task of human emancipation as posed by Marx.  Marx's "romantic," expansive vision of the new man who developed all sides of his personality remained in contradic-

102. Cf. Jean T. Desanti, "Le jeune Marx et la métaphysique," Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 52 (1947) 382ff.
103. Cf.  "Theses on Feuerbach," in Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 401: "The question whether human thinking can reach objective truth is not a question of theory but a practical question.  In practice man must prove the truth, that is, actuality and power, this sidedness of his thinking.  The dispute about the actuality or non-actuality of thinking-thinking isolated from practice-is a purely scholastic question." Marx's emphasis.
104. The newest theorist of the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, continues to make these claims.  Cf. Toward a Rational Society trans. by J. Shapiro (Boston, 1970) 114-120.

64

tion with his "positivism," his "admiration for technical progress." [105] Because liberation depended above all else on the development of the technology, Marx reduced human subjectivity to "productive" subjectivity.[106] "Modern technique" was the secret motor force driving history toward communism, toward a "planetary technique," a prospect that reduced all values to technical values, creativity to productivity, leaving Marxism with but one thought, technology. [107]

The fear of technology in Axelos' commentary on the 1844 Manuscripts rested on the assumption that mankind could not at the same time build an automated technology that would liberate man from toil while discovering the springs of non-economic creativity.  In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx had dismissed the political economist's image of homo economicus by asserting that "beauty" was the principle of human production, by depicting Communist man as a fully integrated, all-round, somewhat Hellenic species, not as a utilitarian petty-bourgeois shopkeeper.  Still, for Axelos, the very project of technical development, and the value Marx did indeed place on it, evoked a nightmare of soulless technicians and organization men.  Against Rubel who saw Communist society as the "renaissance of the archaic rural commune," Axelos envisioned only a sterile, bland, technical wasteland.[108]

Marx made his position clear about economic man in 1843 in his essay "On the Jewish Question." [109] The egoism of economic man was dissected as a false consciousness, striving for autonomy, thinking itself free when in fact it was shaped and distorted by the laws of the market, by the split between public life and private life, and by the fetishism of money.  To economic man the structures of society appeared as natural facts

105. Op. cit., 81.
106. Ibid., 299.
107. Ibid., 264-299.
108. Ibid., 67.
109. Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 216-248.

65

and he conceived his own pursuit for gain as "rational" when in fact his pecuniary behavior constrained and fragmented his consciousness.  None of this reasoning was particularly original; Hegel bad made similar arguments in the Phenomenology, in the sections on utilitarianism and "noble and base consciousness," to which Marx referred explicitly in the 1844 Manuscripts.  It must not be forgotten that Marx defined his positions on labor and the self in terms of the Hegelian tradition; from the outset be was opposed to the "homo economicus" of English and French political economy.

The discussion in the 1844 Manuscripts of human value and labor was framed as a modification of Hegel's position.  Marx argued that Hegel was correct in the importance he placed on labor in the dialectic of consciousness, but that be conceived labor and the product of labor only in their abstract" sense as the "thought of the product." On the positive side, "The great thing in Hegel's Phenomenology and its final result? is simply that Hegel . . . grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work." [110] Marx wanted to define man as an "objective" being whose self-realization was possible only through the process of objectification, of work.  To Marx, the value of work did not reduce itself to that of the product but inhered in the human value of self-realization.  Man creates himself in the process of work.

[Man] creates and establishes only objects because [he] is established through objects, because [be] is fundamentally part of nature.  In the act of establishing, this objective being does not therefore descend from its "pure activity" to the creation of the object, but its objective product merely confirms its objective activity, its activity as that of an objective, natural being.[111]

110. Ibid., 321.
111. Ibid., 325.

66
 

Hegel's notion of consciousness because it rooted man in nature, centered attention on his sensuous reality, and thus grasped humanity "concretely." Every one of man's activities included the exercise of some capacity or the recognition of some need as well as a relation to an external phenomenon.  The mode in which man connected his needs and capacities to the world defined the structure of society.  Marx altered Hegel's notion of self-realization by including the dialectic of self-consciousness within the wider dialectic of labor.  He called this position "naturalism or humanism," as against "idealism and materialism." If concrete man in contemporary society was actually homo economicus, that was a specific realization of man open to criticism.  To Lefebvre and others, nothing could be further from Marx's intention than reducing human value to the value of the products of the proletariat, of reducing the self to the bourgeois self, and of reducing human interactions to the reified instrumental relations of market society.  To them, Marx's concept of labor grasped labor as "man's act of self-creation."[112] Man was not reduced to a "tool-making animal," but "tool-making" was viewed as a human process, however distorted its historical forms, as deeply human as praying or philosophizing.

5. Two Marxes or One

With the significance of Marx's idea of alienation for a critical comprehension of contemporary society established, the commentators faced a question that was new, at least in its importance, in the Marxist tradition.  With the appearance in French of the 1844 Manuscripts, as well as The Holy Family and the German Ideology, the nature of Marxism appeared entirely changed.  One could now more easily rethink all of Marx's writings, down to Capital, in the light of the idea of alienation.  But it could also be argu-

112. Ibid., 332.

67
 

ed, as the Communist Party did in the late 1940s and 1950s and the structuralists did in the 1960s, that the idea of alienation was only central to Marx's youthful, pre-communist, Hegelian period, that the "mature" Marx of the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s rid himself completely of his early "romanticism." In this case, there were two Karl Marxes, not one; a scientific, revolutionary, Old Marx the founder of socialism, and a philosophical, confused Young Marx, lost in the maze of Hegelian speculation and romantic inspiration.

The question of the two Marxes was shaped to some degree by the political situation in post-Liberation France.  The mood in France was one of great expectations for social reconstitution mingled with fears of a bi-polar world dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, in which France, and even all Europe, would be overshadowed and forgotten.  It was urgent, for the Left, to articulate a direction for France that everyone, from Christian democrats and socialists to the CP, could approve.  To Jean Lacroix, writing in Esprit in May, 1945, France needed a new definition of socialism that would be an "integral humanism.  "The role of France is to be the nation of reconciliation between Soviet planism minus dictatorship and Anglo-Saxon democracy less capitalism. [113] The "old socialism" would have to be "transcended." [114] In this political context, the idea of alienation could provide a pivot for debate.  But the, French had not yet related the idea of alienation to the concepts of worker self-management, the new working class, and advanced technological society.  More immediately, the unity of the Left disintegrated shortly after 1944, largely because of the centripetal pulls of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

As the Communist Party took on an increasingly defensive posture, a Marxist theory centering on the idea of alienation looked more like an anti-Communist threat to the Soviet Union than the source for a new Popular Front.  In this way the concept of alienation became a political question in itself, with Communists favoring an Old Marx

113. "Socialisme humaniste?" Esprit, 6 (May, 1945) 864.
114. Ibid., 863.

68
 

shorn of the idea of alienation, and anti-Communists ("humanists") preferring an exclusively Young Marx who dealt with "man" and not with "economics."

Almost unanimously the commentators on the 1844 Manuscripts, from the Communist Lefebvre to the Catholic Calvez, took the position that there was but one Marx and that the concept of alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts was the fulcrum of all Marx's thought.  For Calvez, "it was impossible to separate the young Marx from the old"; [115] for Bigo, the idea of alienation was at the base of all Marx's works, even Capital;[116]  for Hyppolite, the 1844 Manuscripts contained perhaps the meaning and foundation of his entire philosophy . . . "; [117] Cornu called them a "decisive turning-point in the development of Marx's thought;"[118] for Rubel, the "ethic" of the 1844 Manuscripts was that of Capital; [119] in the words of Axelos, the 1844 Manuscripts were "the touchstone of Marxian thought"; [120] for Roger Garaudy, they were "the act of birth of Marxism" [121] and "there was no rupture between the mature works and the youthful, critical reflections . . ."; [122] for Georges Gurvitch, they "defined for the first time his complete sociological and philosophical position." [113]

Hegelianism too was seen not as something incidental to Marx, something he forgot later on.  The commentators recognized that the concept of alienation received serious philosophical consideration first in Hegel's Phenomenology and that it was, after all, Hegel who developed the dialectic, which Marx admittedly transformed but was still in-

115. Op. cit., 316.
116. Op. cit., 139 and xxxix.
117.  Studies in Marx and Hegel, op. cit., 128.
118. Marx et Engels: Marx à Paris (Paris, 1963) in, 172.
119. Op. cit., 138.
120. Op. cit., 28.
121. "A propos des Manuscrits de 1844," Cahiers du Communisme, 39 (March, 1963) 108.
122.  Perspectives de l'homme (Paris, 1969) 4th edition, 269.
123. "La Sociologie de jeune Marx," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 4:3 (1948) 19.

69
 

debted to. The arguments over the precise connection between Hegel and Marx were extremely intricate.  Oversimplified, the filiation looked like this: Marx rethought Hegel's Phenomenology in composing the 1844 Manuscripts and used Hegel's Science of Logic in structuring Capital.[124] Although Marx's last youthful work was generally accepted as the German Ideology of 1846, the "materialized" Hegelian problematic continued to inspire Marx throughout his writings.  Only after the role of the 1844 Manuscripts was fixed in French thinking did the study of the Grundrisse of 1857-1858 demonstrate Marx's continuing, "mature" dependence on Hegel.[125]

In sum, the 1844 Manuscripts left the French with a new Marx for whom history moved on several levels simultaneously: the "forces of production" were progressively developed with the inner contradiction of private ownership and socialization; the "relations of production" engendered the contradictions of the class struggle; but underlying the whole drama of human history was the increasing alienation of human powers that dialectically prepared the ground for emancipation, for a humanization of man, in which nature was to be transfigured in a higher symbiosis of man and nature.  It was this Marx who became the center of the debate with existentialists and who was later exported from France to Eastern Europe, especially to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and in a psychologized form, to the United States.

Even with the concept of alienation, Marxism contained in any problems.  The concept of alienation itself remained abstract in the 1844 Manuscripts and would have to be applied to the specific conjuncture of the mid-twentieth century.  Also, Marx's epistemology, in which theory depended praxis, was undeveloped and did not explain
 
124. Caire, op. cit., 128 and cf. Dick Howard, The Development of the Marxian Dialectic (Carbondale, 1972).
125. Cf. Martin Nicolaus, "The Unknown Marx," New Left Review, 48 (March-April, 1968).

70
 

the relative autonomy of theory such that it could distinguish between science and ideology.  Further, the concept of alienation relied heavily on a philosophical anthropology that came very close to the abstract anthropology of bourgeois thought.  For existentialists, even the revised Marxism did not account for the immediate experience of alienation, for the interiority of men in an alienated world.  Above all, Marxism did not account for the apparent lack of a revolutionary working class in the West.  Since Marxism was theoretically dependent on the praxis of the working class, this absence was exceedingly embarrassing, to say the least.
 
71