Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique by Daniel Bensaid & Gregory Elliott

Author:Daniel Bensaid & Gregory Elliott [Bensaid, Daniel & Elliott, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, General, Politics, Marxism, Dialectical Materialism, Dialectics
ISBN: 9781844673780
Google: BupOEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1844673782
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2009-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Consistencies of Critique

From Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel, Marx received an idea of science that was irreducible to the mere sum of the positive sciences. The dividing line was, however, displaced. With the upsurge of the modern sciences, the issue was no longer merely to disentangle philosophy from theology. The fracture now ran through the core of philosophy itself: between speculative philosophy (treated as early as The German Ideology as ideology squared) and the philosophy of praxis (which moves towards an ‘exit from philosophy’). If it is certainly no longer a question solely of interpreting the world, the exit from philosophy does not boil down to an opposition between science and ideology. Plunged into history, knowledge of the third type becomes critical theory and strategic thought.

Manuel Sacristan identifies a threefold idea of science in Marx:

• Science (positive or English);

• Critique (young Hegelian in inspiration, according to him);

• deutschen Wissenschaft.

Having become revolutionary theory, science according to Marx articulates these three dimensions in the ‘Critique of Political Economy’:56

While it is not our intention here to consider the way in which the immanent laws of capitalist production manifest themselves in the external movement of the individual capitals, assert themselves as the coercive laws of competition, and therefore enter into the consciousness of the individual capitalist as the motives which drive him forward, this much is clear: a scientific analysis of capital is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital…57

From the Paris Manuscripts to Capital, theory remains ‘critical’ throughout.

Projected as early as 1845, and conducted with exemplary tenacity, the critique of political economy remains its red thread. It betrays not a trace of residual philosophical nostalgia as it approaches the terra firma of economic science. Despite the consistency of the term, its concept varies – from a critical form of philosophy to a critical form of science; or from critique as theoretical practice of philosophy to critique as theoretical practice of communism. Laid claim to in early correspondence, the ‘ruthless criticism of the existing order’58 also has its constants – notably, the unity of theory and practice in opposition to all speculative or dogmatic knowledge. The critical turn of philosophy leads towards practice, in order to combine the arm of critique with the critique of arms. For on the conceptual battlefield, critique is a double-edged weapon, deployed against the scientistic illusion of attaining reality via the facts, and against the idealist illusion of absorbing reality into its symbolic representation.

Henceforth it will be a question of ‘ruthless criticism’, rather than ‘excommunicating’.59

The concept of critique came to Marx by way of Feuerbach.

In the article on ‘Critique’ in the Encyclopédie, Marmontel writes:

What must critique do? Observe the known facts; determine the relations and distance between them; correct faulty observations – in a word, convince the human mind of its frailty so as to make it employ profitably the little strength that it expends in vain, and thus confront whoever would bend experience to his ideas. Its vocation is to interrogate nature, not to make it speak.

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