Preface THE collection and publication of these essays in book form is not intended to give them a greater importance as a whole than would be due to each individually. For the most part they are attempts, arising out of actual work for the party, to clarify the theoretical problems of the revolutionary movement in the mind of the author and his readers. The exceptions to this are the two essays Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat and Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation which were both written specially for this collection during a period of enforced leisure. They, too, are based on already existing occasional pieces. Although they have now beenpartly revised, no systematic attempt as been made to remove the traces of the particular circum- stances in which they were written. In some cases a radical re of truth. Thus in the essay on The Changing Function of Historical Materialism we can still hear the echoes of those exaggeratedly sanguine hopes that many of us cherished concern ing the duration and tempo of the revolution. The reader should not therefore, look to these essays for a complete scientific system Despite this the book does have a definite unity. This will be found in the sequence of the essays, which for this reason are best read in the order proposed. However, it would perhaps be advisable for readers unversed in philosophy to put off the chapter reification to the A few words of explanation-superfluous for many readers prominence given in the se pages to the presentation, interpretation and discussion of the theories of a Luxemburg. On this point I would say, firstly, that Rosa Luxemburg, alone among Marx,'s disciples, has made a real advance on his life's work in both the content and method of hi economic doctrines. She alone has found a ply them concretely to the present state of social development. Of course, in these pages, in pursuance of the task we have set ourselves, it is the methodological aspect of these questions that will be most
PREFACE HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS heavily stressed. There will beno assessment of theeconomiccontent attempt to diverge from them, to improve or correct them. The of the theory of accumulation, nor of Marx,'s economic theories as goal of these arguments is an interpretation, an exposition of Marx's such: we shall confine our discussion to their methodologica heory as Marx understood it. But this orthodoxy'does not in the premisses and implications. It will in any case be obvious to east strive to preserve what Mr. von Struve calls the 'aesthetic reader that the present writer upholds the validity of their content. integrity of Marxs system. On the contrary, our underlying Secondly, a detailed analysis of Rosa Luxemburg's thought premise here is the belief that in Marx's theory and method the necessary because its seminal discoveries no less than its errors true method by which to understand society and history has finally have had a decisive influence on the theories of marxists outside been discovered. This method is historical through and through Russia, above all in Germany. To some extent this influence It is self-evident, therefore, that it must be constantly applied to persists to this day. For anyone whose interest was first aroused itself, and this is one of the focal points of these essays. At the by these problems a truly revolutionary, Communist and Marxist same time this entails taking up a substantive position with regard ition can be acquired only through a critical confrontation to the urgent problems of the present; for according to this view ith the theoretical life's work of rosa lux of Marxist method its pre-eminent aim is knowledge of the present. Once we take this path we discover that the writings and Our preoccupation with methodology in these essays has left speeches of Lenin become crucial, methodologically speaking. It is little space for an analysis of the concrete problems of the present. not our intention to concern ourselves here with Lenins political For this reason the author would like to take this opportunity achievements. But just because our task is consciously one-sided to state unequivocally that in his view the experiences of th and limited it is essential that we remind ourselves constantly of years of revolution have provided a magnificent confirmation of Lenin,'s importance as a theoretician for the development of all the essential aspects of orthodox (i.e. Communist)Marxism. Marxism. This has been obscured for many people by his over.I The war, the crisis and the Revolution, not excluding the so-called slower tempo in the development of the Revolution and the new importance of each of his utterances for the particular moment in,i economic policy of Soviet russia have not thrown up a single which they are made is always so great as to blind some people problem that cannot be solved by the dialectical method-and to the fact that, in the last resort, he is only so effective in practice by that method alone. The concrete answers to particular practical because of his greatness, profundity and fertility as a theoretician. problems lie outside the framework of these essays. The task they His effectiveness rests on the fact that he has developed the is to make us aware of Marxist method, to throw light practical essence of Marxism to a pitch of clarity and concreteness on it as an unendingly fertile source of solutions to otherwise never before achieved. He has rescued this aspect of Marxism from an almost total oblivion and by virtue of this theoretical This is also the purpose of the copious quotations from the action he has once again placed in our hands the key to a right understanding of Marxist method all too plentiful. But every quotation is also an interpretation. and For it is our task-and this is the fundamental conviction it seems to the present writer that many very relevant aspects of the Marxist method have been unduly neglected, above all those method and to apply it correctly. In no sense do we aspire to which are indispensable for understanding the coherent structure of that method from the point of view of logic as well as content improveon it. If or Engels'are made the object of a polemical attack this has beer As a consequence done, as every perceptive reader will observe, in the spirit of the to understand the life nerve of that method, namely the dialectic ystem as a whole. On these particular points the author believes, We cannot do justice to the concrete, historical dialectic rightly or wrongly, that he is defending orthodox Marxism without considering in some detail the founder of this method, Hegel, and his relation to Marx. Marx's warning not to treat d dog has gone unheeded e adhe Marx's doctrine
PREFACE HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNE Marxists.(The efforts of Engels and Plekhanov have also been that the 'synthetic unity of apperception, to take but one instance, all too ineffectual. Yet Marx frequently drew attention to was derived from the Critique of Pure Reason? his danger Thus he wrote of Dietzgen: It is his bad luck that he The author of these pages wishes to break with such views He believes that today it is of practical importance to return in this managed nof to study Hegel ter to Engels, 7. 11. 1868) And in another letter(dated 11.1. 1868)we read: "The gentlemen respect to the traditions of Marx-interpretation founded by in Germany ... think that Hegel's dialectic is a 'dead dog,' Engels(who regarded the 'German workers'movementas the In this respect Feuerbach has much on his conscience. In a heir to classical German philosophy), and by Plekhanov. He letter dated 14 January, 1858 he lays emphasis on the 'great believes that all good Marxists should form, benefits' he has derived for his method of procedure with "a kind of society of the materialist friends of the Hegelian dialec the Critique of Political Economy from his rereading of Hegcl's Logic. But we are not here concerned with the philological side of But Hegels position today is the reverse of Marx's own. The the relation between Marx and Hegel. Marx's view of the import as we faind them and to demonstrate that they form a coherent unity stantive significance of this method for Marxism. These state that must be preserved. The opposite is true of Hegel. The task he ance of Hegels dialectic is of lesser moment here than the sub- ments which could be multiplied at will were quoted only because imposes is to separate out from the complex web of ideas with its is significance had been underestimated even by Marxists. sometimes glaring contradictions all the seminal elements of his Too much reliance has been placed on the well-known passage thought and rescue them as a vital intellectual force for the present in the preface to Capital which contains Marx's last public state- He is a more profitable and potent thinker than many people ment on the mat tter. I am referring here not to his account of imagine. And as I see it, the more vigorously we set about the real content of their relationship, with which I am in complete task of confronting this issue the more clearly we will discern h agreement and which I have tried to spell out systematically in fecundity and his power as a thinker But for this we must add these pages. I am thinking exclusively of the phrase which talks (and it is a scandal that we should have to add it) that a greater of Airting with Hegel's'mode of expression. This has frequently knowledge of Hegel's writings is utterly indispensable. Of course misled people into believing that for Marx the dialectic was we will no longer expect to discover his achievement in his total more than a superficial stylistic ornament and that in the inter system. The system as we have it belongs to the past. Even this sts of 'scientific precision'all traces of it should be eradicated statement concedes too much for, in my view, a really incisive systematically from the method of historical materialism. Even critic would have to conclude that he had to deal, not with an otherwise conscientious scholars like Professor Vorlander, for example, believed that they could prove that Marx had airted' overlapping systems. The contradictions in method between the with Hegelian concepts 'in only two places, and then again in a third place,. Yet they failed to notice that a whole series of Hegel must not be treated as a 'dead dog, but even so we must categories of central importance and in constant use stem directly from demolish the 'dead'architecture of the system in its historical Hegel's Logic. We need only recall the Hegelian origin and the form and release the extremely relevant and modern sides of his substantive and methodological importance of what is for Marx thought and help them once again to become a vital and effective as fundamental a distinction as the one between immediacy and force in the present. mediation. If this could go unnoticed then it must be just as true It is common knowledge that Marx himself conceived this even today that hegel is still treated as a 'dead dog, and this idea of writing a dialectics. "The true laws of dialectics are despite the fact that in the universities he has once again become already to be found in Hegel, albeit in a mystical form. What is persona grata and even fashionable what would Professor vot needed is to strip them of that form, he wrote to Dietzgen. lander say if a historian of philosophy contrived not to notice in I hope it is not necessary to emphasise that it is not my intention the works of a successor of Kant, however critical and original, in these pages to propose even the sketchiest outline of a system
xlvii AND CLASS of dialectics. My aim is to stimulate discussion and, as it were, it. Hegel's statements about this problem of terminology in the to put the issue back on the agenda from the point of view of preface to the Phenomenology are thus even more true than Hegel himself realised when he said: Just as the expressions unity of ence at every opportunity attention has been drawn as concretely as possible both to those points at which Hegel subject and object, of finite and infinite, of"being and thought,, categories have proved decisive for historical materialism and etc, have the drawback that object and 'subject bear the same also to those places where Hegel and Marx part company. In meaning as when they exist outside that unity, so that within the this way it is to be hoped that material and, where possible, unity they mean something other than is implied by their expres- direction has beer cry necessary discussion sion: so, too, falsehood is not, qua false, any longer a moment of this problem. These considerations have also determined in part truth. "In the pure historicisation of the dialectic this statement the detailed account of classical philosophy in Section II of the receives yet another twist: in so far as the false' is an aspect of chapter on reification.(But only in part. For it seemed to me thetrue it is both false andnon-false'. when the professional equally essential to examine the contradictions of be demolishers of Marx criticise his lack of conceptual rigour' thought at the point where that thought received it and his use of image rather than'definitions', etc, they cut hical express sorry a figure as did Schopenhauer when he tried to expose Discussions of the kind contained in these pages have the in- Hegels logical howlers'in his Hegel critique. All that is proved evitable defect that they fail to fulfil the-justifiable--demand is their total inability to grasp even the ABC of the dialectical for a completely systematic theory, without offering any com- method. The logical conclusion for the dialectician to draw from this failure is not that he is faced with a confict between different pensation in the way of arity. I am only too aware of this failing. This account of the genesis and aim of these essays is scientific methods, but that he is in the presence of a social pheno- offered less as an apology than as a stimulus-and this is the true menon and that by conceiving it as a socio-historical phenomenon aim of this work-to make the problem of dialectical method the he can at once refute it and transcend it dialectically. focus of discussion as an urgent living problem. If these essays Vienna. Christmas 1922. provide the beginning or even just the occasion for a genuinely profitable discussion of dialectical method, if they succeed in making dialectics generally known again, they will have fulfilled While dwelling on such shortcomings I should perhaps point out to the reader unfamiliar with dialectics one difficulty in. herent in the nature of dialectical method relating to the defini tion of concepts and terminology. It is of the essence of dialectical method that concepts which are false in their abstract one- idedness are later transcended (zur Aufhebung gelangen). The process of transcendence makes it inevitable that we should perate with these one-sided, abstract and false concepts. These concepts acquire their true meaning less by definition than by ded in the totality. Moreover, it is even more difficult to establish fixed meanings for concepts in Marx's improved version of the dialectic than in the Hegelian original. For if concepts are only the intellectual forms of historical realities then these forms, one-sided, abstract and false as they are, belong to the true unity as genuine aspects of
What is Orthodox Marxism? The philosophers have only interpreted the orld in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. Marx: Theses on feuerbach i THIs question, simple as it is, has been the focus of much dis- i cussion in, both proletarian and bourgeois circles. But among g intellectuals it has gradually become fashionable to greet any profession of faith in Marxism with ironical disdain, Great disunity has prevailed even in the'socialist' camp as to what con titutes the essence of Marxism, and which theses it is permissi to criticise and even reject without forfeiting the right to the tle of Marxist. In consequence it came to be thought increas- ingly unscientific'to make scholastic exegeses of old texts with a the facts. These texts, it was argued, had long been superseded by modern criticism and they should no longer be regarded as the sole fount of truth : 9. If the question were really to be formulated in terms of such a rude antithesis it would deserve at best a pitying smile. But in fact it is not(and never has been) quite so straightforward. Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx's individual theses Even if this were to be proved, every seriousorthodox'Marxist ould still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marxs theses in toto without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the'beliefin this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of sacred book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific convic tion that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or improveit have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism