On Karl Marx by Ernst Bloch

Author:Ernst Bloch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

The Point of Archimedes:

Knowledge Oriented Not Only to What Is Past

but Essentially to What Is Yet to Come

For the first time, man’s mind had become this powerful; finally, it came to understand its own potentiality. This was possible precisely because man had abandoned his former being, which he frequently elevated to a false position; and because he had become a truly political melody, finally tearing himself away from what was past and from mere contemplation, and thus emerging into the present. Moreover, man emerged into the present at a time which refused to regard mind as ethereal but on the contrary used it as a material force. To understand all this it is necessary to note the point of time at which, together with the other early writings of Marx, the Theses on Feuerbach entered into this powerful light. Marx wrote about this in the Communist Manifesto somewhat later, in 1848: “The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.” This, therefore, was the source of the particular impetus (not felt by Feuerbach) which brought the new philosophy, in statu nascendi, upon the barricades. Thesis 4 had already revealed the point of Archimedes from which the old world is to be lifted out of its hinges and a new one installed—in the contemporary “secular basis”: “Therefore, the latter first must be understood in its contradiction and then revolutionized in practice by the elimination of the contradiction” (version edited by Engels). What, ultimately, had the incipient philosophy of the revolution discovered, the starting point of the Eleven Theses? Surely it was not the new proletarian mandate alone, no matter how decisively it had torn itself away from mere contemplation, and was determined not to accept things as they were, or indeed permit them to continue indefinitely. And it was not only the critical and creative acquisition and application of German philosophy, British political economy, and French socialism—no matter how necessary these three ferments (especially Hegel’s dialectics and Feuerbach’s renewed materialism) were for the development of Marxism. The ultimate achievement which finally led to the point of Archimedes, and hence to the new conception of theory and praxis, was something which had not occurred in any previous philosophy, and indeed was not yet fully apparent in Marx himself. “In bourgeois society …,” said the Communist Manifesto, “the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past.” The present dominates, together with the horizon it contains, which is the horizon of the future, that provides the fiux of the present with its specific space—the space and scope of a new and practicable better present. Therefore, the

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