The Marxist tradition as a dialectical anthropology

Abstract

This journal is a significant episode in a wider effort to resurrect and redefine the Marxist tradition, and constitutes the beginning of a comprehensive critique of the anthropo? logical aspect of academic social science. But it is neither difficult nor particularly courageous to destroy the pretensions of academic social science. There is more at issue here than that. The goal is to re-evaluate the whole tradition and here I must speak for myself, in the hope that I express the common sense of the endeavor of which Marx became the critical cutting edge. That tradition gathers social force in the eighteenth century, in the paradig? matic and wide-ranging work of Rousseau, pauses among the Utopian socialists in bour? geois post-revolutionary Europe, and is trans? formed into a conscious revolutionary under? taking by Marx several decades later with the inception of industrial capitalism.* The under? taking is critical and dialectical, both with reference to method and praxis. Its purpose is the revolutionary reconstruction of contem porary Western civilization in all its basic, related aspects; the dialectical method and the deep historical perspective illuminate the need for, while contributing to, that end. The tradition which Marx inherited, trans? formed, and furthered is the only significant context for radical thought and action. And it has so saturated the modern consciousness that even bourgeois apologists, wittingly or un? wittingly, are prone to use its language, and sometimes plagiarize its concepts, while bowd lerising its intention. No other modern thinker has been so quoted and misquoted, appropriated and misappropriated, rejected and embraced, invoked, in the religious, or better, magical sense. This sort of reification is entirely con? trary to the spirit of Marx which needs to be rescued from the compulsive attentions of the official and unofficial fetishists. Marx is no more responsible for the crimes committed in his name than Freud is for the excesses of custodial psychiatry, or primitive Christianity for the Crusades, the Inquisition, or the Index. It is a sign of the desperation of the modern consciousness, of the rage to believe against the ground of despair, that so many people and so many political establishments converge to so few seminal ideas, trimming and manip? ulating them to their own ends. The distortion of Marxism is a result of its incorporation into dominant power structures, and the consequent reduction of its method to a tactic, of its perspective and purpose to an iconography. Marxism, then, must be distinguished as a critical instrument from the ideological Marxism which has become a rationalization * Engels understood this continuity well: "Already in Rousseau, therefore, we find not only a sequence of ideas which corresponds exactly with the sequence developed in Marx's Capital, but that the correspondence extends also to details, Rousseau using a whole series of the same dialectical developments as Marx used: processes which in their nature are antagonistic, contain a contradiction, are the transfor? mation of one extreme into its opposite; and finally, as the kernel of the whole process, the negation of the negation. And though in 1754 Rousseau was not yet able to use the Hegelian jargon, he was certainly, twenty-three years before Hegel was born, deeply [involved in the S.D.] dialectics of contradiction. . .