Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. Henri Lefebvre

a system. Between the works of his youth, those of his maturity and those of his latter years, there is more than diversity, and anything but a quiet plant-like development. There are fissures, gaps, contradictions, incoherencies. Take dialectics, for example, which is first of all exalted and turned against Hegel like a weapon seized from the enemy, then denied and rejected, then taken up in a renewed form that Marx never clearly explained.

      In so far as it is possible to draw a body of doctrine from a monumental work such as Capital, it refers to competitive capitalism, whose disappearance Marx foresaw and proclaimed. But why stubbornly stick to constructing an ensemble of this kind, given that the work was not completed? Why conceive it as a totality adequate to the mode of production that it analyses and explains, capitalism? It may well be that the final chapters, no less rich than the opening ones, contain discoveries that appear only by confronting them with what emerged from competitive capitalism in the twentieth century. Marx’s thought may today play a similar role as does Newton’s physics in relation to modern physics, the physics of relativity, nuclear energy, atoms and molecules: a staging post for going further, a truth at a certain level, a date – in a word, a moment – which prohibits, on the one hand, dogmatism, ‘Marxist’ rhetoric, and on the other, presumptuous discourse on the death of Marx and Marxism. Let us make this attitude clear right away; the reasons for it will appear later. It is not a question of reconsidering Marx’s thought, following the usual schema of ‘revisionism’, as a function of what has been new in the world over the last century. On the contrary: the correct and legitimate procedure consists in the determination of what is new in the world on the basis of Marx’s work. This is how changes in the productive forces, the relations of production, social structures and superstructures (ideological and institutional) manifest themselves.

      Today there are multiple Marxisms, and it is a vain effort to try and reduce them to a single ‘model’. The thought of Marx and Engels was grafted on to concepts and values that were already widespread in the countries where it penetrated. Hence the birth of a Chinese Marxism and a Soviet (Russian) Marxism, of Marxist schools in Germany, Italy, France and the English-speaking countries. Hence the diversity and unevenness of theoretical development. The graft took either well or less well. In France, the Cartesian spirit, fundamentally anti-dialectical, offered neither a terrain nor a favourable ‘mentor’; the graft only bore fruit belatedly, which did not mean these were of poor quality.

      What relationship did Marx’s thought have with that of Hegel? This question, which as everyone knows has led to a flood of ink being spilled, requires just one answer: Marx’s dialectical thought had a relationship with Hegel’s dialectical thought that was itself dialectical, which means unity and conflict. Marx took from Hegel the essentials of his ‘essentialist’ thought: the importance of work and production, the self-production of the human species (of ‘man’), the rationality immanent to practice, consciousness and knowledge, as also to political struggles, hence the meaning of history.

      It is possible to find in Hegel (as also in Saint-Simon) almost everything that Marx said, including the role of work, production, classes, etc.,¹² with the result that it is impossible to deny the continuity between the two thinkers. Yet the order and linkage, orientation and perspective, content and form, differ radically, so that the impression of a brusque discontinuity is no less striking than that of an uninterrupted continuity.

      Throughout his life, Marx struggled against Hegel, to wrest from him his ill-gotten gains and transform these by appropriating them. What was Hegel for Marx? At the same time the father, possessor of the inheritance, and the boss and owner of the means of production, acquired knowledge.

      In their struggle, there was a generational quarrel but also a class struggle. This combat went through phases with varying fortunes: highs and lows, victories and defeats, by one or other combatant. The stakes changed: either knowledge as totality or dialectic as method, or the theory of the state, etc. Contrary to Hegel, Marx used whatever he could lay hands on. He passed Hegelianism through the sieve of anthropology (Feuerbach), political economy (Smith, Ricardo), historiography (the historians of the French Restoration, especially Adolphe Thierry and the history of the Third Estate), philosophy (French materialism of the eighteenth century) and nascent sociology (Saint-Simon and Fourier). From this sieving and filtering, this critical negation, emerged a different thought and above all a different project, ‘Marxism’, built from the materials of a reprised and metamorphosed Hegelianism. This struggle ran from radical critique of Hegel’s theses on law and the state, on philosophy (the so-called Young Marx, 1842–5), to refutation of the Hegelian political strategy accepted by Ferdinand Lassalle (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875). No one today is unaware of how Marx understood and approved the Paris Commune, as destructive of the state. He opposed this revolutionary practice to the state socialism that was unfortunately coming to dominate the German workers’ movement, and would do so for a very long period, as it still persists today. In the course of this theoretical struggle, Marx never lost sight for a moment of the practical objective of the real stake, which is not the constitution of a system opposed to Hegelianism, but analysis of social practice and the modern world, in order to act and transform these on the basis of their immanent tendencies.

      Continuity and discontinuity. There is therefore a ‘break [coupure]’, a point of rupture. Where should we situate this? Drawing on both texts and contexts, we can maintain that this break was neither philosophical (transition from idealism to materialism) nor epistemological (transition from ideology to science). These two aspects are encompassed in a more complex break, richer in both content and meaning: a political break. It was not true, for Marx, that philosophy (reason and truth, fullness and happiness as conceived by the philosophers) was realized in the state and ended in a constraining system. The working class would realize philosophy by a total revolution. But this was no longer classical philosophy (abstract, speculative, systematic); the realization of philosophy is accomplished in practice, in a way of living. By superseding traditional philosophy, by superseding itself, the proletariat opens up limitless possibilities. Time (so-called ‘historical’ time) continues. Hegelian superseding (Aufhebung)¹³ takes on a quite different meaning: the state itself has to be dispensed with through the ordeal of supersession. The revolution breaks it and leads to its withering away; it is absorbed or reabsorbed in society. Thus, the political break presupposes the philosophical break (rupture with classic philosophy) and the epistemological break (rupture with ideologies, those of the dominant class) as its moments. As for reason, it has no definitive form or formula. It develops through superseding: by resolving its own contradictions (between the rational and the irrational, the conceived and lived experience, theory and practice, etc.).

      Thus, the state does not possess any higher rationality, still less a definitive one. Hegel takes it as the structure of society, while for Marx it is only a superstructure. It is constructed, or rather people – politicians, statesmen – construct it on a base, the social relations of production and ownership, the productive forces. The base then changes. So, the state has no other reality than that of a historical moment. It changes along with the base; it is modified, crumbles, is rebuilt differently, then perishes and disappears. As the productive forces advance from the use of natural riches to the technical mastery of nature (automatism), and from divided labour (alienated-alienating) to non-labour, the state cannot but be transformed. It has already changed profoundly from the feudal-military period to the monarchical period, and from this to the democratic period introduced by industrialization. Capitalism and the hegemony of the bourgeois class accommodate themselves to a democracy simultaneously liberal and authoritarian. This democracy and its state (parliamentary) are only for a time.

      History, which according to Hegel had been completed, continues for Marx. Uncompleted time does not freeze (reify) in space, the space of commercial relations, industrial production or state domination. The production of things (products) encompasses the production of social relations; this double production, too, cannot be frozen (reified) into a simple re-production of the same things and the same relations. Thus, there is no re-production of the past or the present without the production of something new. This is the original form that the Hegelian dialectic acquires with Marx. The revolutionary creation of new relations cannot be avoided, even by the use of political instruments, constraint and persuasion (ideological).