Theories of the young Marx

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Wer die Ju­gend hat, hat die Zukun­ft.

— Karl Lieb­knecht

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In a civil­iz­a­tion that’s grown old, ours is a cul­ture that prizes youth. No longer as pres­age to a ra­di­ant fu­ture, but part of a per­man­ent present. Philo­sophy paints its gray on gray onto the pages of Teen Vogue, the Ar­ab Spring fol­lowed by an Is­lam­ist Winter. From Young Thug to la jeune-fille — to the fa­mil­i­ar re­frain of “I like their early stuff bet­ter” — all beauty is fleet­ing, as the pro­verb goes. A sea­son or so later, it loses its luster. Ef­forts at re­in­ven­tion or renov­a­tion more of­ten than not end up a laugh­ing stock. Worse yet: ig­nored. Mod­ern­ity thrives off the eph­em­er­al, Baudelaire no­ticed long ago, to the point that an en­tire style took youth as its theme. “Ju­gend­stil is a de­clar­a­tion of per­man­ent pu­berty,” ob­served Ad­orno, “a uto­pia that barters off its own un­real­iz­ab­il­ity… Hatred of the new ori­gin­ates in a con­cealed ten­et of bour­geois on­to­logy: that the tran­si­ent should be tran­si­ent, that death should have the last word.”

ht­tp://www.you­tube.com/watch?v=j74lQbwZFBw
ht­tp://www.you­tube.com/watch?v=Dz-1BLjQlHo

Raoul Peck’s film Der junge Karl Marx premiered last month in Ber­lin. It’s his second ma­jor re­lease already this year, the first be­ing I am Not Your Negro, a doc­u­ment­ary based on the life of the Afric­an-Amer­ic­an writer James Bald­win. Though it was nom­in­ated for an academy award, the Haitian film­maker’s ef­fort ul­ti­mately lost out to the five-part ES­PN epic OJ Simpson: Made in Amer­ica. Most of the Marx biop­ic was shot in Bel­gi­um back in 2015. While I’m al­ways wary of sil­ver screen por­tray­als of great his­tor­ic­al fig­ures, I per­son­ally can’t wait to see it. As a way of cel­eb­rat­ing its de­but, then, I’m post­ing sev­er­al ma­jor art­icles and es­says on the theme of the “young” Marx. Usu­ally, the young­er Marx is con­tras­ted with or coun­ter­posed to the older Marx, al­though the dates as­signed to each phase is a mat­ter of some con­tro­versy among schol­ars. If you don’t be­lieve me, just glance at the fol­low­ing pieces to get a sense of the wide range of opin­ions:

1. Erich Fromm, “The Con­tinu­ity in Marx’s Thought” (1961)
2. Gajo Petrović, “The ‘Young’ and the ‘Old’ Marx” (1964)
3. Louis Althusser, “On The Young Marx” (1960) and “The Evol­u­tion of the ‘Young’ Marx” (1974)
4. Ir­ing Fetscher, “The Young and the Old Marx” (1970)
5. István Mészáros, “The Con­tro­versy about Marx” (1970)
6. Paul Mat­tick, “Re­view of Marx Be­fore Marx­ism” (1971)
7. Lu­cio Col­letti, In­tro­duc­tion to The Early Writ­ings of Karl Marx (1973)
8. Michel Henry, “The Hu­man­ism of the Young Marx” (1976)

Fromm was of course an early standout of the Frank­furt In­sti­tute of So­cial Re­search, al­though he later drif­ted away from its aus­pices. He and Her­bert Mar­cuse were both in­flu­enced by the 1932 dis­cov­ery and pub­lic­a­tion of Marx’s so-called “Par­is manuscripts,” writ­ten in 1844. (Mar­cuse and Fromm would also even­tu­ally be­come es­tranged). Petrović was part of the Yugoslavi­an Prax­is school of Marx­ist hu­man­ism, and de­veloped his read­ing of these early works in close cor­res­pond­ence with Fromm. Along with his coun­try­men Danilo Pejović and Mi­hailo Marković, Petrović con­trib­uted to a block­buster 1964 volume on so­cial­ist hu­man­ism un­der Fromm’s ed­it­or­ship. In­cid­ent­ally, it was the in­vit­a­tion sent out to Althusser ur­ging him to take part in this in­ter­na­tion­al sym­posi­um that triggered the “hu­man­ist con­tro­versy.”

The French philo­soph­er later re­called:

The “hu­man­ist con­tro­versy” began as peace­fully as could be ima­gined. One sum­mer day in 1963, at a friend’s house, I happened to meet Adam Schaff, a lead­ing mem­ber of one of our Com­mun­ist parties. (Charged by the lead­er­ship of the Pol­ish Com­mun­ist Party with re­spons­ib­il­ity for the “in­tel­lec­tu­als,” Schaff is both a philo­soph­er known for his books on se­mantics and the prob­lem of man in Marx­ism, I and a high-rank­ing party lead­er es­teemed for his cul­tiv­a­tion and open-minded­ness. He was on his way back from the United States, where he had giv­en talks on Marx to large, en­thu­si­ast­ic aca­dem­ic audi­ences). Schaff told me about a project un­der the dir­ec­tion of Erich Fromm, whom he knew well and had re­cently met in the USA. Be­fore the war, in the 1930s, Fromm had been con­nec­ted with a Ger­man Marx­ist group with ul­tra-left tend­en­cies that aired its views in an eph­em­er­al journ­al. the Zeits­chrift für Sozi­ai­forschung. It was in this journ­al that [Theodor] Ad­orno, [Max] Horkheimer, [Franz] Borkenau, and oth­ers first made a name for them­selves. Nazism drove Fromm in­to ex­ile, as it did many oth­ers. He has since be­come fam­ous for his es­says on mod­ern “con­sumer” so­ci­ety, which he ana­lyses with the help of con­cepts de­rived from a cer­tain con­front­a­tion between Marx­ism and Freu­di­an­ism. Fromm had just re­leased, in the United States, a trans­la­tion of se­lec­tions from texts by the young Marx [Marx’s Concept of Man, 1961]; eager to gain a wider audi­ence for Marx­ism, he now had plans to pub­lish a sub­stan­tial col­lect­ive work on “so­cial­ist hu­man­ism,” and was so­li­cit­ing con­tri­bu­tions from Marx­ist philo­soph­ers from coun­tries in the West and the East. Schaff in­sisted that I par­ti­cip­ate in this project. I had, moreover, re­ceived a let­ter from Fromm a few days earli­er. Why had Fromm, whom I did not know, writ­ten to me? It was Schaff who had brought my ex­ist­ence to his at­ten­tion.

I wrote my art­icle im­me­di­ately. Just in case, and with an eye to the pub­lic that would be read­ing it, a pub­lic I did not know, I made it very short and too clear, and even took the pre­cau­tion of sub­ject­ing it to a “re­write,” that is, of mak­ing it even short­er and clear­er. In two lines I settled the ques­tion of the early Marx’s in­tel­lec­tu­al de­vel­op­ment with no ifs, ands, and buts, and in ten wrapped up the his­tory of philo­sophy, polit­ic­al eco­nomy, and eth­ics in the sev­en­teenth and eight­eenth cen­tur­ies; I went right to the point, with tol­er­ably un­re­fined ar­gu­ments and con­cepts (a sledge­ham­mer op­pos­i­tion of sci­ence and ideo­logy) that would, if they did not quite man­age to con­vince, at least hit home. I went so far as to in­dulge in a bit of the­or­et­ic­al mis­chief — flat­ter­ing my­self that it would fall in­to the cat­egory of Anglo-Sax­on hu­mor and be per­ceived as such — by put­ting for­ward, in all ser­i­ous­ness, the pre­pos­ter­ous concept of a “class” hu­man­ism. I had my art­icle trans­lated in­to Eng­lish by a com­pet­ent friend who, I knew, would be all the more me­tic­u­lous be­cause his ideas were as far from mine as they could pos­sibly be; and I pos­ted this short ad hoc text without delay. Time was of the es­sence: dead­lines. I waited. Time passed. I kept on wait­ing. It was sev­er­al months be­fore I re­ceived an an­swer from Fromm. He was ter­ribly, ter­ribly sorry. My text was ex­tremely in­ter­est­ing; he didn’t ques­tion its in­trins­ic value; but, de­cidedly, it had no place in the project… Pro­fes­sions of grat­it­ude, ex­cuses. My law of the dis­place­ment of the dom­in­ant had failed to come in­to play. The same went for the hu­man­ist-there­fore-lib­er­al syl­lo­gism: all a mat­ter of the con­junc­ture. One more reas­on for think­ing that between hu­man­ism and lib­er­al­ism on the one hand, and the con­junc­ture on the oth­er, there ex­is­ted something like — as, moreover, my art­icle said, in black and white — a non-ac­ci­dent­al re­la­tion.

Like the Itali­an the­or­eti­cian and Marx­o­lo­gist Lu­cio Col­letti, Althusser was a staunch anti-Hegel­i­an, though the two agreed on little else. Col­letti was a fol­low­er of Gal­vano della Volpe when they first crossed paths, re­call­ing the en­counter years later in con­ver­sa­tion with Perry An­der­son: “When we first met in Italy, Althusser showed me some of the art­icles he later col­lec­ted in For Marx. My ini­tial im­pres­sion on read­ing them was that there was a con­sid­er­able con­ver­gence of po­s­i­tions between him and ourselves, my main re­ser­va­tion about this was that he didn’t ap­pear to have mastered the can­ons of philo­soph­ic­al tra­di­tion ad­equately.” Des­pite this prima facie af­fin­ity, there was a great deal of di­ver­gence that played out in sub­sequent texts. For Col­letti, the 1844 manuscripts and the­ory of ali­en­a­tion de­veloped therein still fall with­in the pur­view of Marxi­an sci­ence.

Plus, avowed anti-Hegel­ian­ism aside, Col­letti was at least hon­est enough to re­cog­nize that “the themes of ali­en­a­tion and fet­ish­ism are present not only in Cap­it­al, but throughout the whole of the later Marx — not just the Grundrisse, but the The­or­ies of Sur­plus Value as well, for hun­dreds of pages on end. Althusser’s ad­mis­sion of their pres­ence in Cap­it­al in fact un­der­mines his whole pre­vi­ous for­mu­la­tion of a ‘break’ between the young and the old Marx.” Col­letti’s re­con­struc­tion of Marx’s in­tel­lec­tu­al de­vel­op­ment, while im­press­ive, is un­der­cut by his gen­er­al aver­sion to Hegel­i­an dia­lectics and his sud­den shift to­ward a mod­el based upon the nat­ur­al sci­ences. Kev­in An­der­son raises a num­ber of crit­ic­al ob­jec­tions to the con­clu­sions reached by Col­letti.

Ir­ing Fetscher and István Mészáros both be­longed to the Hegel­i­an Marx­ist tra­di­tion, rather than the struc­tur­al Marx­ism of Althusser or sci­entif­ic (“hy­po­thet­ico-de­duct­ive”) Marx­ism of Col­letti. Fetscher was a stu­dent of Theodor Ad­orno, and thus part of the second gen­er­a­tion of the so-called Frank­furt School. Mészáros was a stu­dent of Georg Lukács, by con­trast, and thus part of the so-called Bud­apest School. Each is a more re­li­able in­ter­pret­er of Marx than either Althusser or Col­letti. Neither is as pre­oc­cu­pied with the “hu­man­ist” as­pect of Marx’s thought as Fromm or Petrović. The ques­tion of “hu­man­ism” is one of the more te­di­ous and mis­lead­ing Marx­o­lo­gic­al de­bates out there, something I’ve main­tained in the past. Both Fetscher and Mészáros are good at re­lat­ing rival the­or­et­ic­al in­ter­pret­a­tions of Marx to prac­tic­al di­ver­gences with­in Marx­ism, and the lat­ter in par­tic­u­lar des­troys Althusser.

Round­ing out this se­lec­tion of texts are the Ger­man-Amer­ic­an coun­cil com­mun­ist Paul Mat­tick and the French phe­nomen­o­lo­gist Michel Henry. Without a doubt, they’re nearly total op­pos­ites: Mat­tick prefers the sober and sys­tem­at­ic cri­tique of polit­ic­al eco­nomy con­duc­ted by the Marx of Cap­it­al to the youth­ful in­tu­itions of 1844, though he main­tains con­tinu­ity from one peri­od to the next. Henry’s highly idio­syn­crat­ic in­ter­pret­a­tion stresses “the in­com­pat­ib­il­ity of Marx’s philo­soph­ic­al thought with Marx­ism,” a dis­tinc­tion Mat­tick would not have gran­ted, des­pite his clear pref­er­ence for Marx over the of­fi­cial state ideo­lo­gies set up by au­thor­it­ari­an re­gimes in his name. Mat­tick took is­sue with the im­age of the young Marx as some sort of proto-ex­ist­en­tial­ist, which was em­braced by philo­soph­ers and theo­lo­gians alike.

Writ­ing as these au­thors were in the roughly two-dec­ade span between 1956 and 1976, they dealt primar­ily with 1) the broad­er dis­sem­in­a­tion of hitherto un­known texts by Marx and 2) the mostly verbal re­pu­di­ation of Sta­lin­ism by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. Al­though dis­covered and pub­lished some time earli­er — “A Cri­tique of Hegel’s Philo­sophy of Right” and Eco­nom­ic and Philo­soph­ic­al Manuscripts both in 1927, The Ger­man Ideo­logy in 1932, then fi­nally the Grundrisse in 1939 — their im­port­ance was down­played in the stifling at­mo­sphere of So­viet dis­course. Only after Stal­in’s death in 1953 were they giv­en a fair hear­ing. Con­cur­rent polit­ic­al de­bates played them­selves out in dis­cus­sions re­gard­ing the sig­ni­fic­ance of these earli­er, un­pub­lished texts.

More re­cently, an­oth­er wave of schol­ar­ship has ap­peared try­ing to settle the ques­tion of the “young” Marx’s re­la­tion­ship to the “old.” Today the polit­ic­al stakes of the ques­tion are far lower, to be sure, with the col­lapse of “ac­tu­ally-ex­ist­ing so­cial­ism” in Yugoslavia, the Warsaw Pact, and USSR, which might be seen as an ad­vant­age over pre­vi­ous in­quir­ies: an­swers are less politi­cized, less be­hold­en to of­fi­cial state ideo­lo­gies, and more a purely aca­dem­ic af­fair. Rival schools of Marx­o­logy still ex­ist, though, so it’s not as if the field is a neut­ral one. All the same, ar­che­olo­gic­al re­con­struc­tion of Marx’s cor­pus is more com­plete than ever. Here are a few rep­res­ent­at­ive titles:

1. Pierre Macherey, “Althusser and the Young Marx” (2002)
2. Roberto Finelli, A Failed Par­ri­cide: Hegel and the Young Marx (2004)
3. Dav­id Leo­pold, The Young Karl Marx: Ger­man Philo­sophy, Mod­ern Polit­ics, and Hu­man Flour­ish­ing (2007)
4. Tom Rock­more, “Marx’s Early Writ­ings” (2008)
5. Daniel Lopez, “Ali­en­a­tion Marx’s Early Writ­ing” (2013)
6. Go­pal Bal­akrish­nan, “The Ab­ol­i­tion­ist, Part 1” and “The Ab­ol­i­tion­ist, Part 2” (2014)
7. Mar­cello Musto, “The ‘Young Marx’ Myth in In­ter­pret­a­tions of the Eco­nom­ic-Philo­soph­ic Manuscripts of 1844” (2015)
8. McK­en­zie Wark, “Althus­seri­ans An­onym­ous” (2016)

But the mat­ter of Marx’s in­tel­lec­tu­al de­vel­op­ment has al­ways been con­tro­ver­sial, since the in­aug­ur­a­tion of Marx­ism it­self. This will thus form our point of de­par­ture in ex­plor­ing the polit­ics be­hind the ques­tions: How many Marxes were there? And what should be the weight ac­cor­ded to each? Over the next couple weeks or so I in­tend to sketch the dis­cov­ery and dis­sem­in­a­tion of Marx’s early writ­ings, fol­lowed by an over­view of the vari­ous ways the “young” Marx was coun­ter­posed to the “old.”