Marxism in The Twentieth Century - Garaudy, Roger - Volume 0, 1970 - New York, Scribner - Anna's Archive

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MARXISM IN THE
TWENTIETH
CENTURY
Roger Garaudy
MARXISM IN THE
TWENTIETH
CENTURY
Translated by Rend Hague
Charles scribner’s sons

NEW YORK
English Translation
Copyright © 1970 William Collins Sons 8c Co. Ltd.
French language edition

© Editions La Palatine 1966
All rights reserved. No part of this book

may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.
A-i.7i[c]
Printed in the United States of America
SBN684-71783-2
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 70-106527
'Por eso no me espero de regreso
No soy de los que vuelven de la luzd
Pablo Neruda. ‘ Sonata Critica’,

Memorial de Isla Negra
Contents
Introduction page 9
1 The Terms of the Problems in this Last Third

of the Twentieth Century 21
2 From Dogmatism to Twentieth-Century Thought 38
3 Marxism and Ethics 76
4 Marxism and Religion 106
5 Marxism and Art 1 64
Postscript 198
Acknowledgements 213
Index 2 15
Introduction
It is sometimes much more difficult to state a problem cor¬

rectly than it is to find a solution for it.
In this last third of the twentieth century the pace of
development in human relationships, in man’s knowledge
and power, is such as to produce a profound change in the
ancient ‘data’ of our problems.
In Apocalyptic times there can be no set rules to govern
our thought.
We must therefore, as Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in
1 944, ‘take the risk of saying things that are open to dispute,
provided that vital problems are thereby raised.’
This fundamental consideration is particularly essential for
Marxists precisely because Marxism is not one of a number
of philosophies but an awareness of the underlying move¬
ment that governs our history, the Promethean enterprise
of taking control of the process of development and of de¬
liberately building up the future. The fact that Marxism is
the sense of our century imposes a personal responsibility on
every Marxist.
Marxism has given proof of its fruitfulness and creative
effectiveness in countless practical fields. It has transformed
the economic and social life of vast countries; it has allowed
millions of men, enslaved for thousands of years, to have
access to culture and to win for themselves living conditions
that are at last human. How then is it that, in this tem¬
pestuous world of the twentieth century, Marxist philosophy,
like the sleeping beauty, has been wrapped in slumber for the
last twenty-five years?
It got off to a flying start. Marx and Engels made man
9
INTRODUCTION
sharply aware of his creative potentialities and gave the

working class a programme for building up a society that
would allow man to attain the fullness of his development;
and with it, they gave a technique which is both a fighting
technique and a scientific technique for establishing this
society.
This teaching had begun to organise the class war of the
proletariat throughout the world, and to inspire complete
confidence in the victory of the labour movement; but as
early as 1 890, during the period of a relatively peaceful devel¬
opment of the capitalist world, this current, with the new
impetus it gave to thought and action, first began to stagnate
in an opportunist dogmatism that was contaminated by the
prevailing positivism and scientism.
Lenin restored to Marxism its revolutionary vitality both
by a return to fundamentals which brought out the essence
of Marxism, a concept of the world which provides the basis
for a methodology of historical initiative, and by a scientific
analysis of the real nature of his time : scientific, precisely
because it did not try to interpret events as though they
were no more than the fulfilment of a scenario written fifty
years earlier, but rather to comprehend what was new in
them.
In his opposition to all forms of dogmatism, which lead to
a fatalistic view of history, to ‘economism’ and ‘spontaneity’,
Lenin redisclosed the fundamental inspiration and the living
soul of Marxist thought. ‘The essential point in Marx’s doc¬
trine is that it has brought out the universal role in history
of the proletariat as the creator of socialist society,’ wrote
Lenin at the beginning of his study of ‘the historic destinies
of the teaching of Karl Marx.’
Against all interpretations of Marxism that, under the pre¬
text of objectivity, confuse ‘scientific’ history with a history
in which the future is already laid down and from which man
is absent, Lenin put forward the authentically Marxist con¬
cept of historical initiative.
10
INTRODUCTION
In a preface written in February 1907 for the Russian

edition of Marx’s letters to Kugelmann, Lenin first refers
to Marx’s illusions about the 1848 revolution, and then casti¬
gates ‘the pedants of Marxism who think that all this is a load
of moralistic nonsense, romanticism, lack of realism. No,
gentlemen,’ answers Lenin, ‘it is the union of revolutionary
theory with revolutionary politics’ without which one falls,
in company with the Plekhanovs and the Kautskys, into a
concept of ‘objectivity’ which is a theoretical justification of
opportunism. ‘That theory is not Marxist which passes from
observation of an objective situation to justification of the
existing state of affairs.’
Lenin contrasts Plekhanov’s position when, after the Rus¬
sian revolution in December 1905, he said that they should
not have taken up arms, with Marx’s attitude to the Com¬
mune in Paris.
In September 1870, more than six months before the
Commune, Marx, in his address to the International, warned
the French workers against the nationalist illusions that
threatened to start 1792 over again, and showed that the
rising had no hope of success. But when it actually began in
March 1871, he did not try (Lenin tells us) ‘to lecture his
Proudhonian or Blanquist opponents who were at the head
of the Commune.’ He did not grumble, ‘I told you so, you
should not have taken up arms.’ ‘No, on 12th April 1871 he
wrote an enthusiastic letter to Kugelmann, a letter which one
would like to see pinned up on the wall of every Russian
Communist, of every worker who can read . . . He is full of
praise for these heroic Parisian workers following the lead of
the Proudhonians and Blanquists. “What historical initiative
and what a capacity for sacrifice they showed.” ’ And Lenin
goes on to say that what Marx values above all is the historical
initiative of the masses. ‘Ah, how they would laugh at Marx,
our present-day “pundits” of Marxism, our “realists”, who
denounce revolutionary romanticism in the Russia of 1906-7.
How, in the name of materialism, of economism, of the
11
INTRODUCTION
struggle against utopia, they would ridicule the man who so

admired this attempt to storm the heavens.’
Marx himself made a close study of the technique of revolu¬
tion. Instead of repeating, like the dogmatic Plekhanov, that
there should have been no armed rising, he urged offensive
action. ‘There should have been an immediate march on
Versailles.’ And a few days later he said that the Central
Committee of the Commune surrendered its plenary powers
too soon.
When Kugelmann expressed his doubts to Marx, spoke of
a hopeless enterprise, and opposed realism to romanticism,
Marx immediately answered (on 17th April 1871), ‘World
history would indeed be very easy to make if the struggle
were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable
chances’ (.Selected Works, p. 681).
This sharp awareness of what is fundamental in Marxism
and of what is new in history enabled Lenin to undertake and
carry through the October revolution, which was not only
the beginning of hope for the oppressed of the whole world
but also, for all those whose hearts and minds are set on the
future, the greatest spiritual event at the dawn of the
twentieth century.
The Leninist enterprise bore such rich cultural fruit that
it was distinguished by an outburst of dazzling works. The
twenties witnessed the appearance of the poems of Alexander
Blok and Maiakovski, the paintings of Kandinsky and Male-
vitch, the novels of Gorki and Alexis Tolstoi, and the films
of Eisenstein.
People who came to manhood in the period between the
two world wars and were awake to what was then being
born, lived in an exhilarating atmosphere: the Bolsheviks’
struggle against the attack of fourteen nations ended in vic¬
tory; in the course of a few years the epic of the five-year
plans transformed an economically and technically back¬
ward country into one of the leading world powers. Later,
facing the flood of the Nazi onslaught, this heroic people
12
INTRODUCTION
alone stood free while nearly the whole of Europe was en¬
slaved, and at Stalingrad saved the world from reverting for
a thousand years to barbarism. And then again there came
the rebuilding of thousands of towns that had been destroyed,
and man’s first achievements in space as he burst out into the
cosmos.
That story contains the solid foundation on which to base,
the enduring landmarks within which to contain, our critical
judgment.
To this must be added all the hopes born of this new life:
the Spanish war which made of that people the first of the
patriotic resistances against Hitlerian fascism, and the out¬
standing part played in the struggle for freedom against
Nazism by the Communist parties: the Long March and the
triumph, in the middle of the century, of the Chinese revolu¬
tion, and, at the other end of the world, Cuba, whose
revolutionary romanticism linked hands with Marxism-
Leninism.
Faced with what was in process of birth and development,
the world was entering an agonising era: the 1914-18 war
had already challenged many values; the Versailles treaties
were creating new hotbeds of war; the horror of colonialism
was reaching — in the inter-war period — its culminating point ;
the 1929 crisis swept away the last illusions about an econ¬
omic order that allowed the law of the jungle to prevail in
a world of iron.
This total crisis was ultimately overcome only by a ‘total

war’, a concept that was first hammered out by Ludendorff,
and of which Hitlerism was the most complete, though by no
means the only, expression. The final abandonment of any
distinction between civil and military was inaugurated at
Guernica and asserted at Hiroshima.
1
The capitalist system, in its most 3 typical, richest and most
powerful expression, that of the U.S.A., failed to prove that
it could ensure prosperity, even for a single nation, without
a policy of armament and war, without the exploitation of
INTRODUCTION
whole continents such as that of Latin America. It failed to

prove that it was capable of realising a democracy, from the
MacCarthy-ist inquisition to the racialist pogroms of Los
Angeles, from Guatemala to Vietnam.
We were fighting absolute evil: how, then, could we not
feel that our cause was the cause of absolute good? So we
came to accept this Manichean view of the world; on the
one side, the whole of evil and, in virtue of a world-embracing
concept of decadence, the denial of any possibility of seeing
the birth of the least human value, even artistic, from a world
that was in fact going rotten ; on the other side, the whole of
good, without shades or half-tones, and, in the name of party
spirit, the rejection of any critical perspective. So much so,
indeed, that without its even being imposed on us, we en¬
thusiastically welcomed Stalinist dogmatism.
The entire system was synthesised in twenty dazzling pages
which were held to contain the whole of philosophical wis¬
dom. After ‘Latin without tears’ we had ‘instant Greek’ ; we
had philosophy brought within every man’s reach in three
easy lessons. Ontology: the three principles of materialism.
Logic : the four laws of dialectics. Philosophy of history : the
five stages of the class war.
So long as this concept prevails, there is no Marxist
philosophy; all there is, is a sort of scholasticism which
claims to answer all questions without knowing the nature
of any of them, running from biology to aesthetics by way
of agriculture and chemistry. Such success as was achieved,
was not due to, but rather in spite of, this theology. In
physics the ‘philosophers’ were silenced so that the scientists
could get on with their work in disciplines whose practical
demands, most fortunately, were sufficiently insistent to over¬
rule the anathemas of this scholasticism — as, for example, in
the case of cybernetics, which was initially classed as a
‘bourgeois science’. Far from being a guide to research, this
concept of dialectics and of philosophy in general acted as
a brake upon it.
H
INTRODUCTION
Nevertheless, the building up of socialism was carried on

in accordance with the general plan laid down by Lenin,
and political life was only partially deranged by this mis¬
taken theorising; a first reason for this was that the practical
demands of the class war and the national traditions of the
proletariat in European countries led to heroic and clear-cut
struggles, and these called for a breaking down, in fact, of
the dogmatic scheme which affected its essential points.
Lenin, for example, had taught that the very activities of
the militants would have no meaning nor basis if the coming
of socialism was already guaranteed by some external neces¬
sity. As against the theories of ‘economism’ and ‘spontaneity’,
he emphasised the importance of the ‘subjective element’,
that is of consciousness, in revolutionary action.
The fight in the French Communist party against fatalistic
dogmatism was a permanent feature in the work of Maurice
Thorez, who in 1934 wrote, ‘There is nothing inevitable in
the crushing of capitalism’ (Oeuvres , Vol. VI, p. 12). Again
in 1950, ‘War is not inevitable’ ; ‘Destitution is not inevitable’,
he wrote in 1956, in his studies on pauperisation, in which he
contests ‘the concept of an iron law, of an inevitability that
is a dead weight on the working class’ (Cahiers du Com-
munisme, 1957, No. 5, p. 685). It was this that made possible
the great historical initiatives of his life, such as the Popular
Front, and the ‘outstretched hand’ offered to Christians, the
Front frangais, whose soundness was to be vindicated in the
Resistance, the liberation and the renascence of France.
It nevertheless remains true that, while the movement was
able, in essentials, to pursue its course, it was at the cost of
a terrible human wastage : it meant the eclipse, for a quarter
of a century, of the fundamental, critical and practical, that
J5
is to say scientific, inspiration of Marxism, in favour of a
concept of the world and of knowledge that had become
dogmatic and theological — and for this a heavy price had
to be paid in millions of human lives.
Inquisition is the daughter of dogmatism.
INTRODUCTION
As soon as one abandons the indivisibly scientific and

humanist attitude and accepts the myth of an absolute truth,
transcending the men who live it and create it in the day-to-
day activities that make up their history, murderous and
authoritarian methods are the inevitable fruit of the necessity
to impose that truth from above.
Violations of democracy in the party and the state neces¬
sarily stem from this theological concept of the world, of
historical development and of human thought.
For a long time a combination of historical circumstances
delayed the realisation of this cardinal error. The Soviet
Union was an entrenched camp. The regimes of the jungle,
with their thirst for plunder, which were responsible for the
wholesale slaughter of the first world war, and for the col¬
onialist annihilation of the peoples and civilisation of three
continents, were waging a military, economic and ideological
war to the death against the U.S.S.R.
We had no choice. Unless we passionately defended the
hope springing from the October revolution, we were in¬
evitably playing into the hands of all the forces that were
destroying man. Millions of men gladly and manfully offered
up life or liberty in this battle, and not one of them can regret
his sacrifice. Tfit had to be done again,’ said Peri, ‘I’d retrace
the same road.’ And every one of us, I believe, can say the
same. Those of us who survived the maquis, the prisons or
the concentration camps, would be ready, even with a per¬
fectly clear awareness of the conditions in which socialism
was established, to take up the same attitude in the face of
the same enemy; and we would reject with equal vigour his
condemning in socialism a violence that contradicts the
principles of socialism, whereas that violence is the internal
law of development of the capitalism which fights it.
As for those who give their anti-communism a spiritual
motivation, they would do well to consider the real meaning
of a one-track spirituality which is silent when confronted
with Batista’s massacres and yet raises a cry of persecution
16
INTRODUCTION
under Fidel Castro, which tries to rouse the passions of

Christians by telling them about the ‘silenced churches’, and
yet has nothing to say about, or even gives its blessing to, the
terror and the tortures of the highly ‘Christian’ regimes of
Salazar or Franco.
We were aware of all this, and we had to face it. In the
end the implacable logic of battle identified the necessity for
international solidarity with unconditional acceptance, en
bloc, of what issued from our camp. We came to distinguish
no longer between the violence necessary to counter the
enemy’s violence and violence blindly exerted against our
own men and our own ideas. The same inexorable logic led
us to reduce the necessary class and party spirit to a single
one of its components: the spirit of discipline, which becomes
an abstraction as soon as it is divorced from the spirit of
initiative and of criticism. Science became a matter of dis¬
cipline, instead of discipline being a matter of science.
And what about the position today?
The twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the
U.S.S.R. marked the beginning of a tragic but vitalising
awakening.
By drawing up a balance sheet of what had been gained
and won, and of the prospects opening up for the future,
but also by showing in what conditions this had been effected,
it made possible a new departure.
Whatever the mistakes later made by Nikita Kruschev,
and in spite of his tendency to repeat mistakes whose origin
and disastrous consequences he had nevertheless made clear,
he had this unprecedented merit: that at last he fundamen¬
tally challenged, in the eyes of the whole world, a concept
and methods that had led a socialist regime to rob itself of
the unique treasure represented by the personal historic
initiative of millions of citizens and fighters, to shed their
blood in violation of the rules of democracy in party and
state, and even to use dogmatised theory as an ideology to
justify this crime against socialism.
INTRODUCTION
Confronted by these revelations, and not for a moment

forgetting the prospects for the future they at the same time
opened up, it happened that I re-read, as though it were a
message addressed to me personally, Hegel’s sombre passage
in his Phenomenology of Mind (tr. J. B. Baillie, 1931, p. 237):
‘This consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element
or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid
for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign
master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost
soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that
was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it.’
For a soul, the fear of death is the fear of losing its motives
for living and acting : and there is no reason why one should
not admit that for a moment, on the morrow of the twentieth
Congress, one understood just what this utter vital bewilder¬
ment could be. This was something one had never experi¬
enced in prison or concentration camps.
It was when we had passed this ‘nightmare turning point’
that we set out to reconquer our certain beliefs; not in a
mood of scepticism or disillusionment, not with our minds
made up to believe no longer, but determined to believe no
longer except with our eyes open. As Pushkin wrote, ‘The
blows of the hammer shatter glass and forge iron.’
This test of the twentieth Congress, far from destroying
our hopes and certainties, had the opposite effect of making
possible a third flowering for Marxist philosophy.
It is not, however, by turning over the page too quickly
and so neglecting to expose all the roots of evil, nor by thus
failing correctly to apportion responsibility or to demand a
profound analysis of the causes that produced the former
blindness, that this fresh start can be made possible.
For my own part, I have for the last ten years been
experiencing this gnawing need exactly to assess my res¬
ponsibilities, both theoretical and practical. Throughout this
book, accordingly, I am speaking not in the name of the
Political Bureau of the French Communist Party, but in my
18
INTRODUCTION
own individual name : it is only my own self that I am com¬

mitting, even though I am writing with an acute sense of
my duty, as a philosopher, to my Party and its Political
Bureau, of which I have the responsibility and honour of
being a member.
For to accept uncritically Stalin’s concepts in philosophy
(as I did, for example, in my thesis on the materialist theory
of knowledge), with all the consequences it entails for the
sciences from genetics to chemistry, for the arts from music
to painting, was more than an error in theory: approval of
condemnations issued in the name of official dogmas facili¬
tated, by giving them an international warrant, the task of
those who prevented some particular person from writing,
painting, or even living.
If we are to make it impossible for this to happen again,
we must make a collective, and hence a public, effort fully
and frankly to expose the roots of error, and to rediscover,
at a new stage in history, the fundamental inspiration of
Marxism.
It is the aim of this book to make a contribution, on the
theoretical plane, to this effort.
19
'
CHAPTER ONE
The Terms of the Problems in this Last Third

of the Twentieth Century
*
Cultural problems present themselves today in new historical

conditions that call for a great creative effort.
During these last two decades the rhythm of history has
accelerated in a way that has no precedent.
Three massive facts dominate this situation :
1. The staggering developments of the sciences and
technology.
2. The building-up of socialism on the road to becoming
a world-wide system.
3. The decolonisation of two continents, Asia and Africa.
It is no longer a question of a quantitative change: of a
number of further discoveries, of some further advances in
socialism, of some colonies achieving independence. Since
the second world war there has been a qualitative change.
This means that we are faced by problems that have
never arisen before, and we have to appreciate the scale of
the effort that must be made if we are to bring Marxism
up to the measure of such requirements.
Our awareness lags behind history. If we wish to find a
way of catching up on this delay we must be fully conscious
of it; only so will Marxism be able successfully to construct
the new synthesis, the demand for which is expressed in all
the great currents of thought today. Everyone feels that there
is a gap between historical reality and our awareness of it.
The need for an ‘ aggiornamento’ , for bringing things up to
date, is not confined to Catholics alone; it is a general
phenomenon.
21
MARXISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Starting from the three great facts enumerated above, how

do the problems present themselves?
*
Man’s power over nature has increased more in twenty

years than it did during the last twenty centuries.
A number of scientific and technical discoveries are the
basis of this revolution.
The most spectacular fact is the manufacture of the atomic
and thermonuclear bomb. At Hiroshima in 1945 it amounted
to no more than a means of destruction more violent than
others, but ten years later a qualitative change was effected.
With the stocks of bombs now in existence, it has become
technically possible, if they are methodically distributed, to
wipe out every trace of life on earth. The epic story of man,
which began a million years ago, could well draw to a close.
The second consequence of these discoveries is equally
important: human history has opened up for itself prospects
to which there are no limits. Only thirty years ago it was
possible to foresee the time when our planet’s stocks of energy
— coal, oil — would be exhausted. Now, with the extension
of the disintegration of matter, it will no longer be possible
to assign any limits to man’s power and wealth.
A third consequence of these discoveries concerns the
global destiny of mankind. The cooling of the sun and the
earth used to make it possible to envisage a term to the life
of the human species on a globe that would become un¬
inhabitable. The first steps in cosmonautics and the energy-
potentials of the disintegration of matter now allow us to
dismiss that prospect. In virtue of its conquests, our species
can dream of a real immortality.
A new science, born from the synthesis of the study of the
phenomena of autoregulation and the calculus of probabilities
was inaugurated about 1949 with the publication of Norbert
Wiener’s book on cybernetics; and in hardly a decade this
has found far-reaching applications.
22
THE TERMS OF THE PROBLEMS
What we have witnessed is not a mere quantitative change,

no more than one further stage in mechanical development.
Hitherto, from the discoveries of fire and the chipping of
stone to those of steam, the internal combustion engine and
electricity, the object of the tool and later of the machine,
whatever improvements they underwent, was to increase
man’s physical strength, to take the place of manual work, to
make it quicker and more efficient.
From now on, the change is qualitative: it is a question
of finding a substitute for certain forms of man’s mental
work.
For example, in order to control the course of a satellite,
it is necessary to calculate its trajectory at every moment.
These operations would require dozens of highly qualified
mathematicians working for months on end : and when they
had finished, the satellite would be miles away and their
work would be useless.
Electronic computers can carry out, with complete accuracy,
millions of complex operations a second, and the unit of time
has become the ‘nano-second’ (io-9 second, one thousand
millionth of a second).
The electronic computer is not the super-market’s cash
register with simply an improved calculating machine. No: it
screens the solutions and even informs the scientist if he has
expressed the problem incorrectly at the start.
Its application is being extended in every field.
In the U.S.A. the electronic device ‘Geda’ automatically
controls the production and distribution of electric power
from nine generating stations ... It monitors the quantity
of electricity used ; it works out the cost of coal per factory,
the heat- value of the coal and its relative degree of humidity,
the characteristics of the electric mains, etc.
In January 1964 an electronic 23 computer was used in
Moscow to determine the best technical variation for the
erection of a building. In March 1964 a device was under
construction in the naval ship-yard at Leningrad which
would automatically lead ships to the fishing grounds and

control the operations of catching and processing the fish.
A qualitative change has similarly been effected in com¬
munications and telecommunications.
For close on 2,000 years there was little change. It took
Julius Caesar and Napoleon almost the same time to travel
from Paris to Rome. Their rate of progress was determined
by the speed of a horse and the organisation of relays. Steam
and the railways brought no more than a quantitative change ;
the journey was made three or four times as quickly.
Aviation effects another quantitative change, with a seven
or eightfold increase in speed. With the space rocket, how¬
ever, we move into a new scale, that of the movement of the
stars. The speed of a satellite is far greater than that of the
earth’s rotation. At one step we have a multiplication not
by three or four, by seven or by nine, but by a hundred or a
thousand.
Aviation has made man capable of a planetary life. He is
now beginning a new career, that of a cosmic destiny.
For a long time the communication of information kept
pace with human communication. The mail travelled at the
speed of the horse. Today, not only is there the technical
possibility of an instantaneous presentation of news over the
whole world, but it has become a mass phenomenon through
the extremely rapid increase in the last ten years in the
number of radio and television receivers : Eurovision, world-
vision via Telstar, and, already, photographs taken on the
moon.
This system of disseminating information has produced a
profound revolution in the conditions governing political
propaganda, as it has in education and culture.
In biology there have been more24 new discoveries in ten
years than in the whole period from Hippocrates to Claude
Bernard.
Discoveries that entail a qualitative change have been
made since 1954.
At the beginning of this century Loeb thought that science’s

long-term targets were:
the synthesis of life;
control of the evolution of species.
Now, with the synthesis of nucleotids capable of reproduc¬
ing themselves, begun in 1954 by Ochoa and Kornberg, and
the controlled modifications of these chains of nucleotids
effected by Watson and Crick, these targets are in process of
being achieved.
Many indications justify us in thinking that discoveries in
biology are going to be made in the last third of this century
which will be no less important than those made in physics
during the first two thirds.
Man is now becoming not simply ‘evolution conscious of
itself’ but evolution master of itself; he is becoming one of the
agents of evolution. He is becoming capable of modifying
heredity and biologically steering man’s potentialities. This
is raising a problem within science itself, a moral problem,
a problem of ends; on the ground of what values shall we
choose the aptitudes to be developed?
These are but a few examples of the changes that have
been introduced.
They raise in an acute form the problem of education, of
assimilation, of the diffusion and control of what has been
gained.
To emphasise no more than the breadth of the questions
raised, we should recall three facts:
at the present moment there are as many creative scientists
living as the total number that have existed since the be¬
ginnings of mankind (Auger Report to the scientific research
section of Unesco) ;
the quantity of human knowledge has doubled in the last
eight years (in the volume of scientific
25 publications, works
of research, learned periodicals, leaving out of account
popular presentations) ;
the time-lag between a basic discovery and its mass practical
application is being fantastically cut down: in the case of

photography it was 1 1 2 years, of the telephone 56, of trans¬
istors 5.
These facts bring out the breadth of the problems.
A philosophical problem. Engels said that materialism must
change its form with every great discovery that marks a new
epoch in the history of the sciences. Lenin made a gigantic
effort to think in terms of the science of his day. Consider,
then, what an infinitely greater effort we shall have to make
today if we are to bring Marxist philosophy up to the
present level of scientific development.
A political problem. This staggering increase in our technical
mastery of nature entrusts to a few handfuls of men a fund
of knowledge and an organisation that gives them a terrifying
power. This technocratic cleavage between the managers and
the masses is the law in monopolistic regimes in which the
concentration of resources is a class matter. In fundamentally
different conditions, the objective difficulties created by this
situation raise problems for the development of a true socialist
democracy.
An educational problem. If the sum total of knowledge has
doubled in eight or ten years, the addition of one chapter to
the curriculum of school-leaving forms is not enough to give
young people even a summary knowledge of what is being
created. There must be a fundamental re-thinking of the
curricula, and the problem of extra-scholastic culture takes
on a new urgency.
*
The establishment of socialism created the conditions for

an unprecedented flowering of culture and the arts.
In the first place, because with the struggle of the working
class, guided and directed by a Marxist-Leninist party, the
divorce between work and culture began to be overcome.
Secondly, because the victory of the working class and the
dictatorship of the proletariat make it possible to put an end
26
to a regime which turns cultural values into commodity

values.
Finally, because socialist democracy offers every man, and
every child, the means fully to develop the human riches he
contains within himself, and thereby the possibility of attain¬
ing an understanding of, and the power to create, works of
culture.
If culture begins with work and develops with it, then
every great change in the organisation of social labour and
production-relationships entails a profound change in culture
and the conditions of its development.
One of the principal characteristics of socialism is that,
unlike capitalism, because of its class nature, because of the
abolition of private ownership of the means of production, it
becomes possible, for the first time in human history, to have
a real planning of social labour.
When plans are no longer both directed by profit and
hampered by it, when they are no longer inspired by the
interests of a few individuals (the owners of the means of
production), but by the real needs of all men, a great cultural
and moral change begins to be produced in mankind : for the
first time man can be conscious of the aims that are being
pursued. Man can take over evolution, whose driving force
is no longer nature, the brutish confrontation of conflicting
interests, but culture, the knowledge of the ends and means of
human development.
Communism makes it possible to go beyond the limited
projects of the succession of exploiting classes, and to con¬
ceive a universal project: with communism, that is to say
when production relationships and state relationships have been
overcome, it will be possible for properly human relation¬
ships to come into being. Everyone will be able to live the
life of all the others and, for the first
27 time, one human world
will form a ‘totality’.

Such is the theoretical line of development — the ‘dotted
line’ drawn by Marx and Engels.
The real historical development of the Soviet Union and

of the countries that are building up socialism has had a
decisive effect on the future of culture all over the world.
The confidence of millions of men in the possibility of re¬
building human relationships, of conceiving human rela¬
tionships other than those of capitalism and other class
societies — in a word, the possibility of socialism — has become
a widely accepted certainty, even if, for many people, the
idea of socialism is still vague and blurred.
However, the real historical development of socialism
has proved to be more fruitful than its theoretical trajec¬
tory.
In particular, in what relates to the organisation of social
labour, planning problems are infinitely more complex today
than they were forty or even twenty years ago.
In the Soviet Union, for example, the problem in planning
was initially the creation of the technical and economic
foundations of socialism.
At first, a backwardness in comparison with capitalist
countries had to be overcome : from the point of view both
of the end and of the methods and means, the plan was in a
way moulded or taken as a blueprint from the development
of the big industrialised countries.
The end was the creation of means of defence and possi¬
bilities of consumption.
The means, the giving of an absolute priority to heavy
industry; to the production of the means of production in
order to meet the demands of defence and future consump¬
tion.
These demands entailed an ethic, an aesthetic, and a
pedagogy. Everything that contributes to the achievement of
this great end is right and proper.
In the first place, a high-minded morality, based on self-
denial, discipline, sacrifice, the gift of self, which found ex¬
pression on all the fronts in the civil war and the fight
against intervention, and later in the work put into the great
28
construction yards of the five-year plans, and then again in

the war against Hitlerian fascism.
In aesthetics, the greatest works of the period were those
which extolled the same end and contributed to it: from
Chapaiev to Gladkov’s Cement, from Alexis Tolstoi’s Road to

Calvary to Fadeiev’s Young Guard, from Makarenko’s Road
to Life to Sholokov’s The Virgin Soil Upturned.
The pedagogy corresponding to this period was that which
at the same time was founded on this ethic of discipline and
sacrifice, and was centred on the rapid assimilation of natural
sciences and technical skills.
It is in no way paradoxical that it was after the twentieth
Congress, that is to say after it was possible to draw up an
impressive balance sheet of the victories won, that difficulties
made themselves felt in the socialist world.
It would be a mistake to believe that it was the denunciation
of Stalin that raised the difficulties, it was, on the contrary,
the importance of the victories that had been won.
The raising of the standard of living in the countries that
were building up socialism, the rapid extension of education,
the very progress of socialisation in institutions and man¬
ners — in one word, it was the success of socialism which had
created new demands.
The central theoretical problem, starting from which the
problems of social organisation of work and planning are re¬
thought, is the problem of the role of commodity relationships and of
the operation of the law of value in the socialist economy.
The method for making proper allowance for this consists
in starting from the very principle of the socialist regime and
from the totality of the conditions in which it is realised.
The starting point is the fact that socialism is a transition
regime between capitalism and communism.
29
In the capitalist regime commodity relationships control
practically all human relationships, and the blind working
of the law of value is the driving force behind development.
In a communist regime commodity relationships between
men have disappeared, and the law of value is no more than

an instrument of national accountancy.
In a socialist regime there is a contradiction between these two
extreme terms: between the project of a direct and central¬
ised planning at the end of which all human relationships
will become free and open, and commodity relationships
which are still objectively subject to the law of value.
Starting from this over-all analysis of the nature of socialism,
Professor Sik, of Prague, has shown that the reason for the
existence of commodity relationships in a socialist regime is
precisely this contradiction between the fundamental social co¬
operation made possible by the coming of socialism, and the
character of work and consumption: this gives rise to
interests and incentives shared by individuals and groups
that are not yet identified with the general interest of society
as a whole.
In this period commodity relationships and the operation
of the law of value make it possible to reconcile the interests of
groups asserting themselves within the framework of a plan¬
ned social co-operation.
Following this course, two systematic errors were possible:
on the one hand the sectarian error which consists in ex¬
pecting every citizen in the socialist society to behave as
though he were already a citizen in the communist society,
for whom conscience and the moral incentive are determin¬
ing forces, and in considering the material incentive as a
mere survival from the old capitalist society;
on the other hand, the opportunist error: it is true that in
a socialist regime work has not yet become the individual’s
first requirement, and in consequence the direct and prime
incentive to work is the interest of the workers in satisfying
their material and cultural needs; this does not mean, how¬
ever, that these needs are always of the same scope and
nature and do not evolve historically.
The difficulty consists in being alive to the living dialectic
of material incentives and moral incentives instead of setting
them in opposition to one another: it is only by constantly

orientating the material interests of individuals and collective
works by means of a distribution according to the work done,
and so guiding socialist commodity relationships towards the
interests of society, that socialist morality is developed.
Historical experience has thus imposed the idea of a plur¬
ality of ‘models’ of this construction. The abolition of private
ownership of the means of production, which is a first and
essential condition for the social revolution of our day, is not
in itself sufficient to do away with every form of man’s aliena¬

tion. Historical experience has shown that while a system
of centralised planning, in the administration of collective
ownership, can be absolutely necessary in certain historical
conditions (particularly in the first stages of construction),
at the same time it can produce technocratic and bureau¬
cratic distortions in the concept of the State and even of the
Party, and bring about new alienations of class in relation
to Party and of Party and State in relation to the person of
the administrator. On the other hand, while the transitory
necessity of making very considerable allowance for the law
of value and commodity relationships in a regime based on
collective ownership of the means of production, and the
system of ‘auto-administration’, make it possible to inaugurate
a permanent ‘auto-criticism’, an immediate economic and
political democracy, yet they come up against the problem
of co-ordinating initiative from below and technical demands
of national planning.
Whatever ‘model’ is used, according to the conditions
proper to each nation, tension between the two demands
still persists.
In this field, one can neither fall back on spontaneity , which
would lead to an anarchical confrontation of group interests,
nor on the dogmatic claim to determine from above the needs
and appetites of the whole body of workers.
In the first case, we lost sight of perspective, in the second
of reality.
The private interests of groups of producers cannot be

reconciled with the general interests of society, unless one
confronts the former with the interests of other workers who
consume their products; and this cannot be done except
through the medium of commodity relationships, of the law
of value, and of prices.
Does this mean a return to the principles, in fact, of
capitalism?
By no means : in the first place, in a socialist regime, the
operation of the law of value is limited in its field of applica¬
tion.
The soil, for example, is in essence excluded from the
circulation of commodities. Nevertheless there still remains
in a socialist regime a distant equivalent of differential rent
according to the quality of the soil, the climate, etc. In the
immensely wealthy collective farms of Armenia and Georgia,
the standard of living is very different from that of those in
Siberia.
Labour, or rather labour-power, has ceased to be a com¬

modity: nevertheless, the remuneration of the different cate¬
gories of workers is not automatically determined by the
quantity and quality of the work. It can vary appreciably
according to circumstances and the need of the moment.
The very principle of planning is different in a socialist
and a capitalist regime.
A conscious and deliberate control of the economy is not
possible in a capitalist regime. At the most, certain forces
can intervene to guide the economy not towards a single end,
but towards a number of different ends, since it is the often
divergent ends of large capitalist groups which direct invest¬
ments; the ‘plan’ which is produced is the resultant of a
relationship between antagonistic forces. In a socialist regime
planning is not at the mercy of such cleavages, since it is
determined not by a balance between competing appetites
for profit but by the general needs of the whole of society.
This planning becomes increasingly difficult when socialism
has made it possible to provide for the immediate needs of the

great masses. The plan is then no longer drawn beforehand
in outline by the need to supply urgent necessities. When we
reach a time when every citizen can be given three pairs of
shoes a year, the target can no longer be the provision of six
or a dozen pairs.
We then meet the problem of ends, and with it come
problems of quality, of proportion, of balance and choice.
We can no longer believe blissfully in an ‘objective law of
harmonious development’ in the sense in which Stalin meant
it. Harmony has to be won in a day-to-day quest, and ends
can no longer be determined exclusively from above.
Allowance must be made both for the real needs of the
masses, effectively expressed in their lives, and for the econ¬

omic possibilities that tend to allow more importance to
questions of profitability. This in no way means a return to
capitalist norms of profit, since in a socialist regime there is
no possibility of private appropriation of surplus-value.
In a socialist regime, to take into account profitability is to
ensure the continued accumulation of socialist resources, and
to meet non-productive expenses (defence, social assistance,
education, etc.).
Here again, commodity relationships and the operation of
the law of value make it possible to determine profitability,
to estimate socially necessary working hours, to overcome
contradictions between the individual and the demands of
society, between the short-term and the long-term, between
the material incentive and the moral incentive.
Economic problems, then, and planning problems in par¬

ticular, no longer appear in the same form as they did in the
heroic era of the first five-year plans. Whether in the deter¬
mination of ends or in that of methods of administration and
harmonisation, they have become infinitely more complex.
This change in infrastructures calls for a change in super¬
structures.
For example, the fact of becoming alive to the objective
33
necessity of making allowance for commodity relationships

over a long period, implies and requires a greater participa¬
tion by the masses in the working out both of economic plans
and of political decisions, in the administration of economic
and political affairs. A new Soviet constitution is in course
of preparation.
This situation raises new problems.
In philosophy it is not by chance that problems of human¬
ism and alienation are assuming a central importance: they
express the concern to make a break with all forms of positiv¬
ism and scientism which lead to taking as an end what is only
a means (whether it is a question of the system of planning
and administration, of the form of the State or the structure
of the Party).
In the human sciences Marxist sociology is developing
more as an independent science, the more the necessity be¬
comes apparent of concentrating more concretely on the
study of the objective laws of socialist reality.
In political economy, new planning requirements have
brought about the inclusion of studies that were formerly
treated as ‘bourgeois’, such as econometrics and cybernetics.

In moral science, side by side with the values of discipline
and sacrifice, emphasis is necessarily laid on the values of
initiative and creation.
In aesthetics, it is no longer possible to maintain a polar
contrast between socialist realism and critical realism, a con¬
trast that derives from the complacent belief that socialism
is already fully achieved, and that there is accordingly no
longer any fundamental conflict between the individual and
society, and no longer any alienation. A socialist realism
which ceases to be critical founders in an idyllic irrealism.
This awareness of the great changes that have come about
helps us to avoid a certain number of errors in the cultural
field.
i . The error which consists in believing that, the economic
and social conditions of socialism being realised, the super-
34
structures necessarily derive from them, and that man is

going to be transformed automatically, as though he were
no more than the product or resultant of the conditions in
which he lives.
2. The error which consists in believing that culture is
exclusively a means for achieving the short-term ends of an
economic plan or a political project.
3. The error which consists in believing that science and
technology can solve all the problems they raise, and in over¬
looking the humanist element in culture, which is the dis¬
covery of ends.
Such are the problems with which we are faced at the
present stage in the growth of socialism.
*
The third great historic fact which profoundly transforms

the very terms of the problem is that of the decolonisation,
in less than twenty years, of two continents, Asia and Africa.
The fundamental historic significance of this new fact is
that the West — that is, Europe and North America — is no
longer the sole centre of historical initiative, the sole creator
of values, of civilisation, and of culture.
Even if the people of Asia and the countries of black Africa
have not created a technology as efficient as our own, it
would be disastrous, for the humanism of our time, not to
seek out and recognise the values created by peoples who
were halted in their initial development and robbed of their
own history by colonisation.
Marxism, which claims to be the heir of the whole culture
of the past, cannot reduce this culture to the strictly western
traditions of classical German philosophy, of English political
economy, of French socialism, of Greek rationalism, of the
technical spirit which emerged from the Renaissance.
Were it to do so, it would become purely western, and
certain dimensions of man would elude it.
It is of the essence of its universal vocation to be rooted in
35
the culture of every people. An Algerian, Islamic in culture,

can arrive at scientific socialism by other roads than those
of Hegel, Ricardo, or Saint-Simon. He has had his own
Utopian socialism in the Carmathian movement, his ration¬
alist and dialectical tradition in Averroes, his forerunner of
historical materialism in Ibn Khaldun: and it is upon these
traditions that he can graft scientific socialism. And this in
no way excludes his integrating the heritage of our culture,
just as we have to integrate his.
The reluctance to acknowledge kinship with materialism
and to establish Marxist parties in black Africa, and the
schism in Asia, are historical phenomena which raise funda¬
mental problems.
It is not a question of denying or abandoning the rationalist
and technical tradition in favour of the irrational, but of inte¬
grating all the forces of life in a rationalism that has been
enriched by these contributions and, through knowledge of
other fundamental attitudes to life, of obtaining the critical
focus necessary to avoid dogmatising our own tradition.
Still less is it a question of accepting certain inverted
racialisms which would result in stabilising peoples in their
past.
What we have to do is to work out an authentically
universal humanism, losing nothing that has been won by
reason but ready to embrace new cultural areas.
By its very nature, Marxism is capable of this universality,
and the rich experience of the battles for national freedom
fought by hitherto colonised peoples and of the construction
of socialism along roads proper to each one of them, will
make a very considerable contribution to the richness of
Marxism’s own humanism.
If Marxism is not to become ‘provincial’, it cannot develop
through monologue; it can do so only through dialogue with
all man’s creations.
The problems raised by decolonisation, in giving back their
own history to formerly colonised peoples, guide us to a re-
discovery of the living spirit of Marxism, beyond the

schematisations and simplifications that are exploded by a
wider exploration of the world.
*
Reflection on each of the three great facts of our century

leads to one and the same conclusion.
The development of the sciences and technology has
finally and permanently made obsolete the claim to possess
once and for all either the prime elements of reality or the first
principles of knowledge. As Bachelard emphasised, our
modern method of knowledge is ‘non-Cartesian’ : in every
field it substitutes dialectic for intuition.
The development of socialism in different geographical
and historical conditions, on the scale of several continents,
imposes correspondingly the notion of a plurality of ‘models’,

just as the universal process of decolonisation, by liberating
new sources of human creation that have long been denied
and held back by colonialism, forces us to widen the horizon
of a humanism that has hitherto been regarded as exclusively
western.
From whatever angle we approach the problems of the
twentieth century, dogmatism has become untenable.
We must, therefore, start from a consideration of the nature
of dogmatism.
37
CHAPTER TWO
From, Dogmatism to Twentieth-Century Thought

*
The fantastic transformation of the world and the three
great facts that characterise it have produced great con¬

fusion in philosophy.
No philosopher has yet succeeded, in these last twenty
years, in mastering these new realities, in rising up to an
over-all view comparable to the great syntheses of the Renais¬
sance, from Leonardo da Vinci to Giordano Bruno and Des¬
cartes; or comparable to that of the eighteenth-century En¬
cyclopaedists, to that of Marx a century ago, or of Lenin
fifty years ago.
In this general philosophical confusion, why is it that
Marxism can answer the questions which history and life
raise for our times?
The reason is that with Marxism philosophy for the first
time no longer claims to look down from a higher plane on
things, on men and their history, but to be the awareness and
the driving force for action by which man transforms both things
and himself and builds his own history.
Marxism, while including a factual experience which can¬
not be challenged by science because it is the very condition
that makes science possible, is a philosophy which does not
claim to constitute a complete and finished system, that is
to say a system that must soon come into conflict with a
reality that is constantly changing; for the system is always
an image of the past, which alone is finished.
Marxist philosophy is the effort to make action transparent
to thought and to forward thought by going beyond it.
Since its aim is to form one with the movement of things
FROM DOGMATISM TO THOUGHT
and with man’s action which transforms them, it is materialist

and it is dialectical.
It is here that lies the essential superiority of the Marxist
over other philosophies.
An essential superiority, because Marxism can provide the
synthesis which our century needs, but has not yet done so.
It has created the economic and social conditions for a
renaissance of culture infinitely finer than that of the earlier
Renaissance. A culture, however, is not merely the resultant
of the conditions that make it possible. New creative efforts
are necessary to bring it up to the level of the needs and hopes
that the very success of the Marxist revolutions has pro¬
duced.
It is for Marxists to demonstrate the factual truth of this
essential superiority and its practical reality at every new
moment of history, by raising their philosophical, historical,
moral and aesthetic consciousness to the level of the condi¬
tions they have themselves created. This was explicitly em¬
phasised by Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach : materialism must
necessarily take a new form with every great discovery that
marks a new epoch in the history of the sciences.
Since the time of Engels there have been many such epoch-
making discoveries. To confine ourselves simply to the natural
sciences, there have been quantum physics and relativity at
the beginning of the century, and, in the middle of the cen¬
tury, cybernetics and, in biology, the synthesis and controlled
modifications of nucleotids.
Can we say that Marxists have carried out Engels’ pro¬

gramme?
On one occasion, in 1908, they did so, and in an exemplary
way, with Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Lenin

spent three years in an intensive study of fundamental works
on contemporary physics. Of English physicists, this included
the works of Maxwell, Rucker, Ward, Pearson; of German,
those of Ernst Mach, Hertz and Boltzmann, without count¬
ing the philosophical interpretations of Cohen and von Hart-
39
mann; of French, those of Henri Poincare, Becquerel, Lange-

vin, and the interpretations of Duhem and Le Roy, not to
mention the speculations of the Russian revisionists.
If one had today to make a bibliography on this subject,
stopping at 1908 (the date when Lenin wrote his book) — one
would find that he had not left a single essential work unread.
Starting from this scientific basis, he showed what could be
the ‘new form’ of materialism corresponding to this stage of

physics. He introduced a radically new theoretical idea, that
of the inexhaustibility of matter. ‘The electron is as inex¬

haustible as the atom.’ This thesis entails philosophical con¬
sequences of capital importance, in particular that which for¬
bids us to confuse with matter itself the image of matter which
science constructs at a particular moment of its development.
That is without doubt the most fruitful conclusion that
emerges from Lenin’s book, his essential contribution to the

fight against dogmatism in philosophy.
*
Marxism is not a pre-critical, dogmatic philosophy.

In philosophy, dogmatism is, historically, the opposite of
critique in the sense which Kant first gave to the word, even
though he did so in a context outside that of history. To
simplify, we may say that the critical point of view in
philosophy is the awareness of the fact that whatever we say
about reality it is we who say it. Dogmatism, on the contrary,
is the illusion or the claim of being entrenched in things and
of pronouncing the absolute and definitive truth about them.
The most typical example of dogmatism is religious dogma¬
tism : its claim to teach, in the form of dogmas, absolute and
definitive revealed truths. These are not human pronounce¬
ments, they are God’s. They soar above men and their
history.
There are, however, other forms of dogmatism; there are
even materialist forms, such as those of the eighteenth-century
French materialists, defining matter once and for all on the
basis of the mechanistic concepts of Descartes, and from that

starting point entrenching themselves in things in order to
tell us the absolute truth about them.
Marxist materialism is by principle anti-dogmatic.

In his Theses on Feuerbach Marx already noted what was the
chief defect in all forms of earlier materialism: that they did
not see the active element of knowledge, the act by which man,
in order to know things, first goes out to meet them, project¬
ing schemata by which to perceive them and hypotheses by
which to conceive them, and then verifies in practice the
correctness of his schemata, his hypotheses, his models.
Knowledge is a construction of ‘models’ and the only criterion
of their value is practice.
Marx, Engels, and Lenin attached such importance to
this active element of knowledge worked out by Kant,
Fichte and Hegel that, materialists though they were, they
always maintained that the basic philosophic source of
Marxist philosophy is precisely German idealism: German
idealism, let me emphasise, because although Feuerbach must
be included in German philosophy it is not he who is cited
as the basic source. Engels continually insists in his Ludwig
Feuerbach that Feuerbach is ‘infinitely poorer’ than Hegel:
in his preface, in 1874, to his Peasants ’ War he declares that
‘without German philosophy, particularly that of Hegel,
scientific socialism . . . would never have come into exis¬
tence’ (trans. M. J. Olgin, London, 1927, p. 27). Again, in

1891, he says, ‘We German socialists are proud of having
as our origin not only Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, but
also Kant, Fichte and Hegel.’
All dogmatic interpretations of Marxism begin by under¬
estimating the legacy of those three philosophers and going
back to Feuerbach, to Diderot or to Spinoza.
To recognise this heritage of German idealism in no way
implies a belittling of the materialist element in Marx’s

thought. All it does is to rule out any confusion with pre-
Marxist, dogmatic and speculative, forms of materialism.
It is precisely because Marxism has abandoned the specu¬

lative and dogmatic claim of being a philosophy moving on
a higher level than the sciences and exempt from their
vicissitudes that it has become a science.
Marxist materialism is a recall to a more modest attitude :
by affirming that the world exists outside my own self and
without me, and that it has no need of me in order to exist,
but at the same time by never confusing this world with the
model of it, sometimes more complex, sometimes less, which
science constructs at each epoch of history, dialectical ma¬
terialism is conscious of the fact that the real is inexhaustible,
is irreducible to the knowledge we have of it, and that every
scientific concept is always a provisional construction, pend¬
ing the appearance of richer, more effective and truer con¬
structions.
Marxist materialism — a critical philosophy in as much as

it never forgets that everything I say about things is said by
a man and not by a God — bars us, as materialism, from the
idealist illusion of confusing, as Hegel did, our conceptual
reproduction of the world in models that are always approxi¬
mate, with its production. This idealist illusion persists
obstinately: Bachelard said that every scientific fact is a
cluster of concepts, and that is true enough so long as one
does not forget that the converse is not true. I cannot re¬
constitute objective reality from clusters of concepts or¬
ganised in accordance with the laws of logical coherence or
harmony. Reality is neither reducible to mathematics, as
Descartes thought, nor to aesthetics, as Leibniz suggested.
The materialist element of knowledge, according to Marx
and Lenin, is governed by the criterion of the practical, that
of experimental verification of our hypotheses, our models ;
for that alone can ultimately guarantee that our conceptual
construction corresponds to an objective reality. As Marx
wrote in his second thesis on Feuerbach, ‘The question

whether objective truth is an attribute of human thought is
not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove
the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the “this-sidedness”

(Diesseitigkeit) , of his thinking in practice’ (The German
Ideology, p. 197).
This dialectical materialism is distinguished from all earlier
forms of materialism in particular by the fact that it takes
into account dialectical relationships between relative truths
and absolute truths.
For a Marxist every truth is at the same time a relative
truth and an absolute truth.
Every scientific theory which accounts for phenomena
within its province is a relative truth in this sense, that it
will sooner or later be supplanted by a more comprehensive
and wider theory which will include it and reduce it to being
only one particular instance of a more general truth. At the
same time it is an absolute truth in the sense that the theory
which supplants it will necessarily include all that the earlier
theory explains and which it allows us to grasp.
This ‘relativity’, as Lenin emphasised in Materialism and
Empirio-criticism, is far from leading to relativism: for every
scientific discovery and every theory which accounts for it
constitute a definitive acquisition for science, and one that
cannot again be challenged, since it has given us for all
time an effective power in the handling of nature and in con¬
sequence an at any rate approximate reflection of its reality.
This dialectic of relationships between relative and absolute
truth plays a leading role, for, if we are not to give a false
(and fatalistic) idea of scientific socialism, we must have a
clear idea of what a scientific truth is, and we must not
believe that the only way to escape scepticism and eclecticism
is to take refuge in a dogmatic rationalism which opposes
ideology and science in the same way as the Cartesians
opposed truth and error. It is to stand outside the real line
of advance in the sciences to think that we can once and for
all establish ourselves in the concept, possess first principles,
immutable and complete, and henceforth progress from con¬
cept to concept.
43
There does exist a kernel of absolute truth won by science,

which cannot be challenged; but of this kernel of absolute
truth (that is, the sum total of the real powers of which we
dispose, and the resemblance which that entails between the
scientific models we have constructed and reality) we must
say:
1. That it is never complete.
2. That it is present within concepts, theories, models,
which are constantly subject to revision and constantly
relative.
Scientific socialism, as its name indicates, lays claim to the
same type of truth as science itself. It is a science and, like
every science,
1. It contains a kernel of absolute truth in the sense that
it enables us to grasp the phenomena it studies, the phenomena
of history, and that this mastery entails a certain resemblance
between the theory and the level of reality of which it is the
theory.
2. This kernel of absolute truth is undergoing continual
growth.
3. This growth is not produced by mechanical addition,
but by an organic development which at each stage calls for
an overall reorganisation of concepts.
To confer on Marxism the prerogative of an ‘absolutely
absolute’ truth (which would not be at the same time both
relative and absolute), to allow it to be free from the vicissi¬
tudes of scientific progress, would be to rob it of its character
as a science and give it the immutability of a dogma; for
the characteristic proper to religious dogmatism is that it
rules out the dialectic of absolute and relative truth. Marxism
cannot at the same time class itself as a science and claim a
status of truth that could only be absolute, the (illusory)
status of metaphysics and theology.
As an illustration of this idea, let us take a simple example :
the materialist theory of reflection in knowledge.
44
Lucretius presented it in a primitive form: particles of

matter, atoms, are emitted by the object. Their impact on
this other aggregation of atoms which constitutes ourselves,
produces in us a reflection of those things and so gives birth
to knowledge. Naive though it is, this ‘model’ nevertheless
contains a kernel of absolute truth : there can be no reflection
without an object that is reflected. There we have one of the
foundations of materialism. One could say as much of the
materialism which emerged from English empiricism or
eighteenth-century France.
Nevertheless, it is a relative truth, since the dialectical
materialism of Marx, integrating the rich contribution of the
German idealist tradition on the ‘active side of knowledge’,
makes it clear that the reflection is not present initially. It is
formed in a succession of approximations, by means of
hypotheses which are constructed by a man who acts, and
are invalidated or confirmed by practice. This richer con¬
cept, however, preserves and renders more fruitful the kernel
of absolute truth in the earlier materialism: the priority of
the thing to consciousness, a definitive acquisition, and one
that cannot be challenged by science since it is the condition
that makes science possible.
Thus it remains true that knowledge is, by its nature, a
reflection, in the sense that it is the knowledge of a reality
which is not our own work, and that it is at the same time,
by its method, a ‘ construction ’.

The notion of ‘model’ allows us to retain the two essential
elements of the Marxist theory of knowledge: the materialist
element of the reflection which saves us from the idealist,
Hegelian, illusion which confuses the conceptual reconstruc¬
tion of reality with its construction, and the active element,
the element of construction, which saves us from the dog¬
matic illusion which confuses this provisional model with
an absolute and complete truth.
*
45
All the errors that have been made in philosophical discussion

of the sciences during the last twenty-five years arise from a
dogmatic failure to recognise this dialectic of relative truth
and absolute truth; and this applies as much to the concept
of materialism as it does to that of dialectic or of historical
materialism.
For example, if we accept as absolute and complete truth
the form assumed by materialism at one moment in its
history, in virtue of a certain image of matter that science
presents, then, as soon as science modifies that image we
shall be obliged, as Lenin showed in his Materialism and
Empirio-criticism, either to challenge materialism itself, by
speaking of a ‘vanishing of matter’, simply because the new
image does not correspond with the earlier; or to reject as
idealist a physical or chemical theory on the ground that
the new image it presents of matter or of determinism does
not correspond with the earlier.
The same error can be made with dialectics. If we take as
absolute and complete truth a certain number of laws of
dialectics which are in fact at each period the balance sheet,
always provisional, of what has been won by reason — an
absolute truth, that is, as a balance sheet of conquests in the
past, but a relative truth as an introduction to conquests still
to come- — and if we claim to judge the truth or falsity of a
scientific theory by its agreement or non-agreement with the
already known laws of dialectics (as has happened with
biology in particular), then a Marxism conceived in this
way cannot carry out its emancipating and fructifying role
but becomes a brake on research.
The same error can be made with historical materialism :
if we take as absolute and complete truth the scheme of the
five stages of historical development which has been con¬
structed on the basis of our experience of the development
of western societies, and if we seek at all costs to include in
this scheme the development of African or Asian societies,
for example, then we leave behind scientific methods and
return to a speculative and dogmatic philosophy of history;

moreover, we mutilate the thought of Marx, who had raised
this problem in connexion with the ‘asiatic method of pro¬

duction’. Marx and Engels were already writing with refer¬
ence to these five stages: ‘Viewed apart from real history,
these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever.
They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical
material . . . but they by no means afford a recipe or schema,
as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history’

(The German Ideology , pp. 38-9) .
Marxism is a scientific concept of the world, and as such,
it is an instrument of scientific research: not in the sense
that it will allow us, on the ground of philosophical principles,
to forestall scientific experiment, except as a mere working
hypothesis or hypothetical basis for research, but precisely in
this sense, that on principle it puts us on our guard against
the dogmatism of every theory which claims to be exclusive
and definitive.
The opposite of dogmatism is the recognition of the neces¬

sity for a plurality of scientific hypotheses: subject to the
condition that this pluralism is not understood in a meta¬
physical or relativist sense.
To give it a metaphysical sense would be to consider it
outside of history, that is as a definitive, unsurpassable limit;
and this would lead to scepticism and relativatism by recog¬
nising as an inevitable necessity a number of irreducible
truths and in consequence no truth at all; while valid
pluralism, as the driving force in scientific development, is
a factor that is constantly provisional but constantly super¬
seded and constantly reborn. Pluralism constantly requires
a synthesis, but this synthesis, in its turn, is seen to be not a
final term but a stage starting from which a new pluralism
is born, which again will call for a new synthesis, and so on.
To give pluralism a relativist sense would be to place on
the same footing all the working hypotheses that confront
one another : whereas at every moment one of them is finally
47
seen to be capable of integrating and going beyond all the

others.
It is this that distinguishes dialectical from ‘sophistical’

reasoning.
Sophistics confines itself to an abstract view, to a single
aspect of the movement of thought, by asserting that in every
error there is some portion of truth, without seeking, or being
able to distinguish the importance of that portion. By con¬
trast, while dialectics involves the necessity of a critical
assimilation, of an integration of all the partial truths found
in the pluralism of hypotheses, it calls for an effort to over¬
come it: the truest hypothesis being ultimately that which is
seen to be capable of integrating all the others.
It is important, however, to remember:
1. That it is not a privilege which can be accorded a
priori from a starting point in past certainties; it must be
won in practice.
2. That it never constitutes a definitive victory upon
which one can rest permanently.
*
Socialism does not become scientific simply by a transition

from idealism to materialism, but by a transition from specu¬
lation to criticism, from Utopianism to the experimental
method.
A materialism can perfectly well be speculative, as were
the speculations of Lucretius about atoms, or those of Des¬
cartes on the application of mechanics to biology, or, nearer
our own time, those of Stalin when he used philosophical
materialism not as a science capable of guiding action but
as an ideology to justify a policy. Materialist metaphysics
has no more value than idealist metaphysics.
In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels rejected ‘the
concept of nature which prevailed as much in the French
of the eighteenth century as in the work of Hegel’ (cf.
Selected Works, p. 415).
Whether in socialism, in philosophy or in history, the

scientific attitude calls in the first place for an end to the
myth of absolute knowledge (expressed in its final perfected
form by Hegel), and thereby the end, too, of the illusion of
a philosophy moving at a higher level than the sciences and
immune from their vicissitudes.
‘Ideology’ (in the pejorative sense of the word— and

Marx, Engels and Lenin do not use it always in such a
sense but often as a synonym for ‘theory’) in so far as it con¬

trasts with scientific theory, is characterised not necessarily
as error in relation to truth, as opinion in relation to concept,
as an inverted image of the real in relation to a true image,
but primarily by the fact that it is unaware of its own origins
and relativity. The ideological illusion consists in forgetting
that every ideology, like every theory, is born of a practice,
and that it is born in history. There is no absolute knowing
in which knowledge is equivalent to and identical with the
being it knows. Knowledge is a representation or a re¬
construction that aims at accounting for the real. This
reconstruction is always a function of the degree of man’s

development, of the techniques, the practice and the con¬
cepts, always provisional, which man has evolved. It is an
ideological illusion to take the reconstruction as an absolute
and definitive truth whose principles cannot be challenged
again.
Ideologies can accordingly contain extremely important
elements of truth; sometimes they can even contain ‘stupen¬

dously grand thoughts and germs of thought that every¬
where break through their fantastic covering’ (Socialism :
Utopian and Scientific in Selected Works, p. 403).
One may quote, as examples of such ideologies, the
socialist Utopias which, as Engels explains, are, like scientific
socialism, ‘the direct product of the recognition, on the one
hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today
between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists
and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing
49
in production’ {Ibid, p. 399). This ideology is in no way an

inverted or false reflection of reality. But, Engels adds, ‘Like
every new theory, modern socialism had, at first, to connect
itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand,
however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts,’ so
that, ‘in its theoretical form, modern socialism originally
appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles
laid down by the great French philosophers of the eighteenth
century . . . The French philosophers of the eighteenth cen¬
tury, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason
as the sole judge of all that is. A rational government,
rational society, were to be founded . . . We have seen that
this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealised
understanding of the eighteenth-century citizen, just then
evolving into the bourgeois’. But this historical illusion ‘also
dominated the founders of socialism. To the crude conditions
of capitalist production and the crude class conditions corres¬

ponded crude theories. The solution of the social problems,
which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions,
the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain.
Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was
the task of reason’ {Ibid, pp. 399-403).
Engels recalls that at earlier stages this demand for a new
society, rooted in the contradictions of nascent capitalism,
was attached not to ‘reason’ but to religious faith; we find

this, for example, in Thomas Miinzer at the time of the
Reformation and the Peasants’ War or, at the time of the
English Revolution, in the Levellers.
Engels was far from dismissing, with lordly disdain, this
ideological heritage, far from establishing a radical, meta¬
physical, opposition between ideology and science (he left
that to the ‘literary small-fry’ and ‘philistines’ who ‘crow
over the superiority of their own bald reasoning as compared
with such “insanity” ’, Ibid , p. 403) — on the contrary, he
adopted a truly scientific attitude towards them. In these
forerunners he looks above all for the truths they contribute,
removing from them the strictly ideological illusion that

‘socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and
justice . . . independent of time, space and the historical
development of man’ {Ibid, p. 409), a truth that is the fruit

of a divine revelation or an immutable reason. This pre-
critical belief is characteristic of dogmatic rationalism : the
Platonic theory of ‘ideas’ of which dogmatic Marxism con¬
stitutes a naturalist variant, or Spinozism, of which it is a
dynamic variant, simply substituting ‘matter in movement’
for Spinoza’s ‘substance’ but retaining the pre-critical illusion
of being able to rise to concepts which are rigorously and
definitively equated with reality.
‘To make a science of socialism, it had first to be placed

on a real basis’ [Ibid, p. 410). ‘Its task was no longer to
manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but
to examine the historico-economic succession of events from
which these classes and their antagonism had necessarily
sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus
created the means of ending the conflict’ {Ibid, p. 416).

From that starting point Engels recalls how Marx solved
this problem by ‘two great discoveries, the materialist con¬

ception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic
production through surplus value . . . With these discoveries
socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out
all its details and relations’ {Ibid).
In that we have a remarkable definition of the conditions
in which there is a transition from speculative, utopian,
ideology to a ‘socialist ideology’ which has become scientific
theory through criticism of ‘ideological illusions’ : historical
materialism makes it possible to get rid of the illusion of the
transcendence of revelation or reason, the illusion that ‘his¬
tory must always be written according to an extraneous
standard’ {The German Ideology, p. 51). ‘Men are the producers

of their conceptions, ideas, etc. — real, active men, as they are.
conditioned by a definite development of their productive
forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these’ {Ibid,
p. 37). Thus reason is re-integrated, as an historical creation

of man, in the strict immanence of global social practice.
This transition from speculation to materialist criticism or
critical materialism is the first condition of a scientific
thought.
The second condition is the transition from utopianism to
experimental method. Engels emphasises the importance in
this connexion of the discovery of surplus value as the funda¬
mental concept which accounts for what is specific to the
method of capitalist production. Socialism is not the utopian
construction of an ‘ideal’ social system. ‘Communism is not
. . . an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We
call communism the real movement which abolishes the
present state of things’ {Ibid, p. 48).

The whole of Marx’s works forbids us to give these expres¬
sions a positivist interpretation.
The positivist interpretation is that which consists in deal¬
ing with this ‘real movement’ without bearing in mind the
specific character of human history in relation to the develop¬
ment of physical nature or to animal evolution. It consists in
forgetting, in short, that it is men who have been making
their own history ever since they invented the tool and, by
their labour, have transformed themselves in transforming
nature. Since that time, as Marx emphasised in the passage
from Capital already quoted, their projects precede their acts
and impose themselves on them as their law. Even if these
projects and these acts are alienated, even if ‘what each

individual wants is hindered by each other individual and
what emerges is something that nobody wanted’ (as Engels

wrote to Joseph Bloch on 21st September 1890, thus likening
the movement of history right up to our own days to a move¬
ment of nature) — even so it is none the less true (letter of
25th January 1894 to Heinz Starkenburg) that ‘men make
their history themselves, but until now they have not conformed
to a collective will, to an overall plan . . . their efforts run
counter to one another, and that is precisely the reason why,
in all societies of this sort, necessity , completed and made

manifest by chance, is paramount.’
*
The primacy of practice and the critical and active concept

of knowledge enable us to set in its correct perspective the
problem of the nature of dialectic and of the dialectic of
nature.
The question has often been asked: how can a critical
philosophy, without contradicting itself, admit a dialectic of
nature?
The fundamental error of pre-Marxist, pre-critical, ma¬

terialism is its dogmatism. By its neglect of the active character
of knowledge, this has always led it to regarding as a structure
of nature ‘in itself’ what was merely the image that we are
able to construct of it, using, at each stage of development
of the sciences and technology, the materials and concepts at
our disposal. Materialism asserts that nature exists indepen¬
dently of ourselves and without ourselves, but that science
does not.
The theory of knowledge in all non-critical, non-Marxist,
materialism is based on a mechanistic concept of the reflec¬
tion; that is to say it places the reflection at the starting point
of knowledge, as though knowledge were the passive accept¬
ance of the ‘data’ provided by a nature in itself, whereas
knowledge is at the same time both reflection in as much as it
is science already formed, and projection in as much as it is
science in process of formation. Reflection — that is a repro¬
duction or representation, more correct or less correct, of
what actually happens in nature — is not a starting point (as
the English empiricists or the eighteenth-century French
materialists believed) but the fruit of a lengthy work of con¬
struction of successive ‘projects’, ‘models’, hypotheses, by
which we actively challenge things, accepting the denials
they force upon us and then changing the initial hypothesis
and completely reorganising our whole body of knowledge
53
(as Newton did in rejecting Ptolemy’s representation, or

Einstein in abandoning the physical system of Newton and
even the geometry of Euclid).
In other words, it is by an illegitimate assimilation that
one passes from the materialist affirmation of the priority of
nature to the dogmatic affirmation of the pre-existence in
nature, in the form in which they are present in our minds,
of laws or categories, of concepts or structures which repre¬
sent in our thought the fruit of a lengthy construction, of a
long historical elaboration and of a frequent challenging.
For the last quarter of a century, unfortunately, interpreta¬
tion of Engel’s Dialectics of Nature has been vitiated by this
pre-Marxist concept. Instead of seeing in this rich collection
of notes a reflection by Engels on the science of his time,
which sought to bring out the overall picture of nature which
seemed to derive from the study of the most general laws
of nature, of society, and of thought, as they appeared in the
science of this epoch , a claim has been made (notably in Stalin’s

regrettably well-known compendium Dialectical Materialism
and Historical Materialism ) to extract from it an exhaustive
catalogue of ‘laws’ or ‘characteristics’ of a dialectic which
are universally and absolutely valid.
As we have already seen, the starting point of thought is
never the bare noting of a prime datum. From the very
beginning it is an act, the production of a ‘model’ or overall

hypothesis, and thereby it includes some element of myth.
It is by this extraction from the datum, by this detachment
from the immediate, that the movement of thought begins,
by way of myth. Henri Wallon has shown that primitive
man constituted the detour through the social which is the
prelude to the birth of concept in order to act upon the real,
and so rationalise it.
Thought, initially mythical and ritual, was later to become
technique and science, and between myth and science there
is not only continuity of function but divergence of method
and opposition. Myth is the past of science, since myth does
54
not, as does scientific hypothesis, submit itself to the criterion

of practice.
Kant noted the difference between two uses of reason:
that which submits to experimental verification, and that
which claims to be emancipated from it and to operate out¬
side all experiment. Kant gave the name of dialectic to
precisely this speculative use, non-experimental and non-
scientific, of reason.
For Kant, dialectic was the contradiction between two
ideas, such as those of finite and infinite, freedom and necess¬
ity, etc. Dialectic unfolded exclusively within the subject.
Should we say no more than that dialectic lies, on the
contrary, in the encounter between the subject and what it
comes up against, and define it as subject-object relationship?
This would be to assert that only the relationship between
man and nature is dialectical. There can be no doubt but
that this relationship is indeed dialectical, but we can go
further.
Dialectic begins with this ‘splitting of the one’ by which,

as Wallon has shown, in the very rise of primitive myth,
thought creates a first cleavage between the world of im¬
mediate appearance and that of underlying reality conceived
in the form of myth.
A second contradiction arises when thought, abandoning
the transcendent illusions of myth, recognises that it is no
more than a hypothesis, and in consequence accepts con¬
frontation with reality by submitting to the verdict of prac¬
tice. If the ‘model’ it constructs does not ‘hold’, if, that is, it
does not account for the phenomena and allow us to grasp
them, to handle them, then we shall have either to make the
model more complex or to replace it by moving on to a
complete reorganisation of our knowledge. Contradiction
and totality are therefore two inseparable moments in this
dialectic of knowledge, which is at the same time a dialectic
of work, being a particular instance of the latter.
The characteristic proper to dialectical reason is therefore
55
that it proceeds from totalisation to totalisation, from one

provisional totalisation to another provisional totalisation,
the transition from one to the other being called for by the
resistance, the check, the contradiction of the real in relation
to the earlier totalisation.
The role of dialectical reason in history is relatively easy
to determine, because history is ultimately the sum of what
men have made, and in consequence the first dialectic of
work can be rediscovered in it. Marx’s Capital provides an

outstanding example of this dialectic. Instead of stopping
short, as though at ultimate truths, at what is only a human
product, Marx finds in the production of commodities, for
example, not a datum of nature but a product of culture,
a fundamental human relationship. This enables him to get
rid of the positivism of classical political economy, that is to
get back, beyond ‘given’ objects, to the human activity that

created them. In a more general way, as Marx explains in
his chapter on ‘the fetishism of commodities’, this method
makes it possible to proceed from the phenomenon to the
essence; to consider, for example, economic realities not as
things, as ‘natural’ realities existing from all eternity outside

man and without man, but as beings created by man,
whether it is a matter of products or of institutions. Thus
the dialectic of Capital becomes a dialectic of work.
The economy ceases then to be seen as a phenomenon of
nature from which man is absent, a phenomenon which will
gradually govern the whole development of politics, of
culture, and of history in general.
The economy is one, primordial, aspect of men’s relation¬

ship with nature. In the organic totality of relationships,
from which are born technology, science, philosophy, re¬
ligion and the arts, the economy plays a decisive part; even
so it never constitutes the sole driving force, after which
everything else is epiphenomenon.
The historical materialism of Marx, accordingly, is a
method neither of deduction nor of reduction. The super-
structures cannot be deduced from the base, nor can they

be reduced to it. All one can say is that both superstructures
and base are elements of one and the same organic whole,
in which the relationships of society (regarded as a system or
living whole), together with the natural context which em¬
braces it, play a major part.
We can now bring out certain characteristics of dialectical
reason which distinguish it from the reason of traditional
rationalism.
1. Dialectical reason is in the first place reason that is in
process of being formed, as opposed to an already constituted
rationality with its immutable laws, like those of formal logic.
Adapting a well-known phrase, we may say that henceforth
we know that logics are mortal.
From the Aristotelian logic of inclusion and immobile
being, we have moved on to the logics of relation and move¬
ment, from the logic of identity to that of contradiction, from
the logic of substance and attributes to that of life.
2. Dialectical reason is as much the art of formulating
questions as it is the method of finding an answer to them. For
if the real is not an immutable datum but a world in constant
genesis, the reason that endeavours to create models in its
likeness is forced once again to challenge its principles in
order at every moment to formulate the problems in terms
that correspond to the new situation. Reason has a history.
This history is not the history of successive answers given to
one and the same question, but the history of complete re¬
castings of the very formulation of the question.
3. Dialectical reason is distinct both from the classical
rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and
from the lesser rationalism of the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth centuries. The classical rational¬
ism of Descartes, Spinoza, of Leibniz and even of Diderot
held that reason, by itself alone, could determine the ends
of our action. Lesser rationalism, the rationalism of positivism
and scientism, reduced reason to being no more than a cal-
57
culation of the means for attaining a given end. From Auguste
Comte to Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl’s Ethics and Moral

Science, the positivist reason of this lesser rationalism, in
evading philosophical problems by a sort of intellectual
trickery, can only give the illusion of being able to direct
action by assigning ends for it. Positivism is inseparable
from agnosticism and opens the road to pure fideism. Start¬
ing from the correct idea that there are no final ends, this
positivism concludes that there are no ends at all and that,
in consequence, there is no philosophical method for deter¬
mining them.
Dialectical reason does not admit, with classical rational¬
ism, that reason takes the place of decision, nor with lesser
rationalism, that it authorises an arbitrary choice.
What characterises dialectical reason is that it combines a
reason which guides action without determining it, and a
responsible decision, at once rational and free, which goes
beyond, without destroying, constituted reason. Reason is
not a transcendent order but the continued creation of a
human order.
4. Dialectical reason is an element in the rational con¬
struction of reality. It is not contemplation, but construction,
of an order. The element of negativity, that of the rejection
of the already constituted order, of the rejection of the il¬
lusion of a world already fully made outside ourselves and
without ourselves, is an essential element: it is the element
by which the increasing unity of the history of nature and
of man is affirmed.
The rational, it has been said, is increasingly the opera¬

tional.
For, if nature is humanised, man is an initially natural
being and, consequently, the agreement of his thought with
the nature from which he emerged and from which his very
thought was born, is neither a mystery nor a miracle. Man,
in one and the same movement, thinks reality and realises
his thought.
Here, however, we meet a problem: how is this dialectical

reason itself constituted? Man’s thought has been obliged to
become dialectical only in order to integrate with reality
aspects of nature that are impatient of any other logic. The
primacy of practice asserts itself once again as the criterion
of the truth of thought and its at least approximate equation
with the real.
Dialectic is not an a priori scheme that one superimposes on
things and thrusts upon them by forcing them into this Pro¬
crustean bed. The laws of dialectic are not a closed system
of thought like the logical forms of Aristotle, the categories
of Kant or the logic of Hegel. The very principles of Marxism
call for a study of the laws of dialectic, not as defining the
immutable structure of an absolute Reason, but, let me re¬
peat, as a balance sheet, always provisional, of the victories
of rationality, drawn up for each great historical epoch.
From this critical point of view, we may speak of a dialectic
of nature, but not in a dogmatic sense that would entail
arbitrary belief in the possibility of an absolute spectator,
outside history.
We may speak of a dialectic of nature, for I cannot confine
myself to the affirmation of the bare existence of an original
nature, as do agnostics or pragmatists.
Materiality is not simply negation, limit, check, or resis¬
tance in relation to the act of thought or of human practice.
For this negation is not unspecified, anonymous, abstract,
always identical with itself: the ‘in-self’ (an sick) answers ‘No’
to such an hypothesis. Sometimes, too, it answers ‘Yes’. This
answer has a. practical character: nature either allows itself to
be handled, or refuses. By acting according to one particular
hypothesis my action miscarries; by acting according to an¬
other I have power over nature. It is true that the hypotheses
destroy themselves and that none of them can claim to dis¬
close an ultimate structure of being. But every dead hy¬
pothesis, simply because it has been alive, bequeaths to us
a new power over nature. This power and this knowledge
59
have survived it. The new hypothesis is the heir of the hy¬
pothesis it replaces and has destroyed. These powers, accord¬
ingly, have accumulated, and my acts of today, making use
of them in order to handle nature, carve out at any rate a
rough model of its structure, which is known to me in ever
greater detail.
The history of the sciences teaches us that the demands of
the object have in turn exploded and rendered useless the
principles of the mechanics of Descartes, Newton and Lap¬
lace, the laws of logic of Aristotle and Kant, and Euclid’s
principles of geometry.
From physics to biology, the natural sciences have con¬
tinually exerted an increasing pressure on our habits of
thought.
They have obliged those who investigate such matters to
invent other models than those of traditional logic, of Eucli¬
dean geometry, of classical mechanics.
Now, if a hypothesis to explain structure is confirmed, if
it is shown to be effective, if it enables us to grasp things
and allows us even to discover new properties in them, how
can we conceive that there is no relationship (I do not say
a relationship of identity) between the concept and the ‘in¬

self’ which it has in view?
How could a dialectical thought allow us to grasp a being
that is in no degree dialectical?
To speak of a dialectic of nature involves no arbitrary,
dogmatic (that is, pre-critical) extrapolation of knowledge
to being.
To say that there is a dialectic of nature is not to claim to
know in advance, and ne varietur, the fundamental laws of the
development of nature; on the contrary, it is, under the ir¬
resistible pressure of scientific discoveries, to see in Aristotelian
logic, in the assumptions of Euclid, or in the principles of
classical mechanics, no more than one particular case or
one moment of rationality, within a much more general and
constantly changing dialectical rationality.
60
To say that there is a dialectic of nature, is to say that the

structure and the movement of reality are such that only a
dialectical thought can make phenomena intelligible and
allow us to handle them.
That is no more than an inference : but it is an inference
founded on the totality of human practice — an inference that
is constantly subject to revision as a function of the progress
of that practice.
In that we have the fundamental characteristics of every
scientific inference.
It presents itself not as a dogma but as a working hypothesis.
At the current stage of the development of the sciences, the
representation of the real which emerges from the sum total
of confirmed knowledge, is that of an organic whole in con¬
stant process not only of development but also of auto¬
creation. It is this structure that we call ‘dialectical’ as
opposed to the mechanistic, metaphysical, concepts which
would look on the world as an accumulation of isolated,
abstract, elements whose form and movement are external
to the matter to which they apply, and in which nothing
new appears apart from a new arrangement of the pre¬
existing elements.
This concept of the world in which Marx saw a kinship
with that of Jakob Boehme, in virtue of the latter’s qualitative

view of movement, which Lenin found akin to that of Herac¬
litus, and of which cybernetics today offers us a new and
more accurate version by in some way expressing in mathe¬
matical terms the analogy of the forms of movement with
the different levels of reality — this concept can serve as a
working hypothesis and play an illuminating part in research.
From this point of view, cybernetics and the theory of
information provide the notion of the dialectic of nature
with the most striking theoretical and practical confirmation
that any scientific concept has ever received a century after
its formulation.
*
61
The Marxist concept of materialism and dialectic can today

integrate everything that in the thought of the twentieth
century has transformed the notions of the real, of truth, of
beauty or of morality.
Traditionally, truth — like beauty, too, and morality — -
used to be defined by the conformity of our actions to an
‘order’, in the threefold sense of law, of harmony or of
command.
In our day, the ‘active’, constructive, creative element

which Marx emphasised, is taking on a new value.
In our scientific representation of the world it is becoming,
we find, more and more difficult, and will ultimately be
impossible, radically to separate in the object what the
thing would be ‘in itself’ without us, and the knowledge
we have of it; in other words, to isolate the ‘thing’ from the
totality of technical or conceptual operations by which we
think and experience it. This in no way entails the idealist
landslide at the end of which we would see no more in the
object than a construction of our own mind. It is only a
question of our consciously realising this situation: at the
present stage of the sciences we cannot isolate as two terms
confronting one another the constructed reflection and the
objective fact, as we would separate a cake from the baking-
tin. Scientific laws are not a copy of an archetypal reason,
like Plato’s ideas , nor a copy of absolute laws of a nature-in-

itself whose primordial legislator is some God or other.
Scientific laws are not a copy of anything; they are con¬
structions of our mind, always approximate and provisional,
which allow us to take hold of a reality which we have not
created, and of which only practice, methodical experiment,
can guarantee us that our models correspond in some degree
to its structure, that from a certain point of view they are at
least ‘isomorphous’.
What is challenged by the present development of the
sciences is not ‘the thing in itself’; it is the traditionally
62
dogmatic concept of that ‘thing in itself’. This concept is
dogmatic when it confuses ‘the thing in itself’ with the repre¬

sentation of matter which science gives us at this stage or
that stage of its development, when it takes as absolute and
definitive truth what is no more than an approximate and
provisional model.
Paul Ricoeur, in an attack on a dogmatic concept of
transcendence from above, writes with great force (De V Inter¬
pretation, p. 159) that ‘religion is the reification and aliena¬
tion of faith.’ Defining ‘the horizon’ as ‘the metaphor of
what comes closer without ever becoming an object pos¬
sessed,’ he shows that ‘the idol is the reification of the horizon
into thing’ (p. 510).
Transposing his demonstration on dialectical theology from
transcendence from above (the transcendence of a God en¬
dowed with immutable characteristics, an anthropomorphic
and finite God) to ‘transcendence from below’ (the trans¬
cendence which postulates a matter defined from ultimate
elements and eternal laws), I would not hesitate to say that
dogmatism in philosophy begins when ‘horizon-function’ de¬

clines into ‘object-function’. Scientism is the reification and
alienation of science: it substitutes the claim to absolute
knowledge for dialectical reason which conceives ‘the thing

in itself’ as the horizon of my aims and constructions.
Contemporary arts give us a direct awareness of this in¬
version of attitude in our concept of nature : neither picture
nor novel sets out to reproduce by the methods of traditional
realism, either a nature made nature or a nature becoming
nature, whose formal norms, whose ‘canons’ or ‘golden
numbers’ we would rediscover. The artist strives, on the
contrary, to find a language which can suggest to us that
the world is always in process of being made, with man’s

participation, in a living dialectic in which the project and
63
the ‘given object’ mutually, to borrow a word from Van Lier,
‘auto-regulate’ one another.
The challenge to classical perspective and to a space trad¬
itionally, from Euclid to Newton, from Apelles to Raphael,
held to be ‘natural’ and immutable, a challenge expressed

in a movement which, from Cezanne to cubism, becomes
increasingly self-conscious, brings out the part played by
human initiative and construction in what used to be taken
as a factual ‘datum’. It is the same with the novelist’s time,

whose earlier postulates of linear continuity and irreversibility
are challenged in the latest writings of Aragon as they are in
the ‘new novel’.
The same remarks would hold good for ethics, which is
less and less seen as observation and observance of rules,
and more and more as invention of these rules: not in a
Nietzschean arbitrary decision nor in a Gide-like nihilism,
but in a rigorous discipline of construction and creation as
demanding as that of the arts — and this, too, in the continua¬
tion and supersession of a history.
The second distinguishing characteristic of this modern
humanism, in comparison with the old, is pluralism. This too
derives from the new concept of the real. Bachelard had
already characterised the contemporary theory of knowledge
of quanta and relativity as ‘non-Cartesian’, in the sense that

it has abandoned the attempt to discover ‘prime elements’
whether in nature (as for example the ‘indivisible’ atoms of
Democritus), or in thought (as for example in the concepts
of Aristotle or the ‘simple natures’ of Descartes) .
Thereby, too, is ruled out the claim to proceed by way of
univocal deduction starting from first principles, and so re¬
join, at the level of ultimate consequences, a ‘concrete’ which
has become completely transparent to thought.1
Finally, there is an end to the ambition to grasp the real
as a closed totality, in a network of concepts that constitutes a
finished system. Neither the geometry nor the mechanist
64
1 This of course in no way rules out the possibility, and even the necessity,
of the element of constructive deduction, which is a capital element in scien¬
tific thought, provided it be conceived critically (as deductive mental
construction) and not dogmatically (as participation in an essence of the
real).
physics of Laplace, nor the Newtonian heavens — and this

applies equally, moreover, to the political economy of Adam
Smith, to the atomist psychology or mechanist history of
Taine, or the sociology of Auguste Comte, and of Durkheim
—none of these has been able to stand up to the test of a
rapidly accelerating development of the natural and human
sciences which are exposing the relative, historical character
of their methodological postulates.
Scientific progress is effected not from a starting point in
immutable principles, to arrive ultimately, through linear
deductions, at a complete systematic totality, but by the way
of overall, all-embracing, reorganisations of the conceptual
field.
It may happen that different, partial, aspects of reality
are arrived at by starting from different, even indeed from
contrary, hypotheses, and by the construction of different
‘models’. That is why ‘pluralism’ of scientific and artistic
schools is a first condition of a healthy development of the
sciences and arts.
In this context, pluralism in no way leads to scepticism or
eclecticism, any more than relativity leads to relativism or
dialectics to sophistics. It is a necessary consequence of the
new concept of the real, which is no longer that of dogmatic
materialism, and of the new concept of dialectical reason,
which is no longer that of dogmatic rationalism.
Ethics again, and, more generally, our concept of relation¬
ships with others, have been profoundly affected by the same
new concept. It can no longer be a matter of some vague
‘tolerance’, purely static, negative, and always provisional.

From the dogmatic point of view, indeed, since reality is one
and already complete, and truth a faithful copy of it, the
man who refuses to see it can only be either sick or in bad
65
faith: tolerance towards his hallucinations, his errors or his
refusals, can lead only to an attitude that is pedagogic,
therapeutic, and, quite possibly, repressive.
In contrast with this ‘tolerance’, dialogue, founded on a
dialectical theory of knowledge which brings out the ‘active

element’ of knowledge in the construction of models de¬
signed to grasp the various aspects of an always plural
reality, implies that we have something to learn from the
other investigator, even if he is starting from other hypotheses
than ours. Only experimental confrontation will enable us
to integrate in a more comprehensive unitary theory, in a
more complex model, what, in our initial concepts, were
no more than partial and one-sided truths.
The third characteristic of this modern humanism, which
derives from the first two, is the paramount part played
henceforth by the notion of ‘structure’.
In the tradition of classical antiquity, from Thales to Par¬
menides, and from Aristotle to Lucretius, the prime problem
was that of Being. This problem was to persist, in the
scholastics as in Descartes.
It is only with Kant and Fichte that a philosophy of act
challenges the philosophy of being.
The present success of ‘structuralism’ may be explained

both by the fact that it is a philosophy which corresponds to
the concept of the world emerging, in the middle of the
twentieth century, from the development of the whole body
of natural and human sciences; and by the fact that there is
derived from this concept of the world a method of investiga¬
tion whose applications to the most diverse disciplines have
proved to be extremely fruitful — as, for example, in cyber¬
netics. Moreover, the fruitfulness of the method is even
greater when structuralism and cybernetics effect their con¬
junction in a dialectical perspective.
The notion of ‘structure’ in the modern sense of the term
comports a philosophy. We may call it, as a first rough
approximation: a philosophy whose fundamental category
is no longer being but relation. The connection between this
approach and the ‘operational’ character of knowledge can

readily be appreciated. If reality cannot be defined outside
the technical or intellectual operations by which we under-
66
stand it and can handle it, then the concern of knowing is

no longer to arrive at the contemplation of prime elements or
ultimate principles by which each moment takes on a mean¬
ing and a reality as a function of the part it plays within the
whole.
From the modern, operational, concept of reason, there
necessarily derives the key idea of structuralism : that of the
primacy of relation towards being, and of the whole towards
the parts. For it is no longer a question of getting back to
prime elements in order to conceive relation only as a rapport
extrinsic to and subordinate to the elements; on the contrary,
we have to recognise that what we have agreed to call the
element has no meaning or reality except through the knot
of relationships that constitute it. In all disciplines, structural¬
ism is taking the place of atomism.
Ferdinand de Saussure has expressed its fundamental
formula in connection with linguistics: ‘It is a great illusion
to regard a term simply as the union of a certain sound with
a certain concept. To define it so would be to isolate it from
the system of which it forms a part. It would be to believe
that one can begin with terms and build up the system by
adding them all up, whereas, on the contrary, it is from the
integral whole that we must start if we are to obtain by
analysis the elements it contains’ (Cours de linguistique generate,

4th edition, p. 157).
Starting from the study of language, de Saussure establishes
two principles whose scope extends beyond linguistics and
applies to all fields of culture, of science and of the arts : units
can be defined only by their relationships: they are forms
and not substances.
The science which has progressed most rapidly since the
beginning of the twentieth century 6and has most contributed
7
to transforming the traditional image of matter, is physics:
and physics provides a striking illustration of this inversion
of perspective. Nuclear and relativity physics no longer con¬
ceive matter as a collection of atoms, compact particles or
indivisible globules, in which nothing takes place and which

are linked together by external relationships — like the atoms
of Lucretius or the planets of the Newtonian universe: it sees
them as fields of energy in which forces and tensions that run
through the whole field build up and relax at individual
points, as waves rise and sink in the sea.
The triumph of this point of view sounded the death-knell
of all forms of empiricism, of positivism, of scientism, with
their dogmatic concept of fact as ‘thing’, and of ‘law’ as

constant relationship between ‘facts’.
The human sciences are receiving from the same source a
valuable stimulus in the battle against the old atomism
which is being fought both in sociology and psychology.
Marxism, whose founder laid down the basic principle
that ‘the individual is the sum total of his social relationships’
(sixth thesis on Feuerbach), was able to find in this both a
confirmation of one of its major theses and a most fruitful
development of the notion of ‘structure’ which Marx used
in his Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, where he
emphasises so forcibly the predominance of the whole over
the parts and of relationships over individuals.
Structuralism makes it possible to combat both the idealist
and metaphysical concept of an ‘essence of man’ defined

without reference to social relationships and history, and the
mechanistic and positivist concept of an essence of things
defined once and for all without reference to scientific
‘models’ which enable us to grasp the real and give it mean¬

ing as a function of a whole organic system of concepts: a
system which has a history and is subject, in the development
of that history, to overall revisions and reorganisations
which leave no principle and no element unincluded. Thus
structuralism is an excellent antidote to dogmatism.
It is an antidote, too, to the positivist temptation always to
explain the higher by the lower, the system by the element,
neglecting what, in the whole, cannot be reduced to the
parts which constitute it : and that is precisely the structure,
68
in other words the system of relationships from which each

element receives its meaning and reality.
This notion of ‘structure’ has been enriched by contribu¬
tions from other sciences, making clear its relationship with
‘Gestalt’ in psychology, with the theory of ‘sets’ in mathe¬
matics, with the notion of the cybernetic ‘model’ : with that
of organisation, too, in biology, of ‘form’ in aesthetics and
with the whole body of discoveries from those in chemistry
to those in political economy, from physics to the fine arts.
The psychology of form has already accustomed us to not
comprehending a form except in its relation to an under¬
lying foundation, to regarding it as a whole which cannot be
reduced to the sum of its parts, to conceiving the persistence
of the form through the transposition of the elements which
constitute it, this ‘invariable’ which constitutes the meaning
of a passage throughout the multiplicity of its translations,
or through musical transposition when the notes are changed
but the same intervals are retained.
In mathematics the theory of sets defines a body of un¬
supported relationships, of abstract groups which can be
‘realised’ in ‘isomorphous’ concrete sets.
The cybernetic ‘model’ can be regarded as a conceptual
or technological ‘realisation’ of a ‘structure’.
A ‘model’ is always the formal representation of a body of
relationships, of a structure. But the cybernetic model pre¬
sents dialectical characteristics which its constructor has,
consciously or unconsciously, introduced into it. It is pre¬
cisely these which make it, partially, equated with the natural
phenomena under investigation, and to this is due its effi¬
ciency as an instrument of research. To this again, conversely,
is due the ability of the model method to assist in revealing
the existence of a dialectic of nature. If dialectical models
69
are efficient instruments of research, they to some degree
justify a dialectical representation of the object under exam¬
ination. The model method thus represents an experimental
investigation of the dialectic of nature.
As M. Guillaumaud has shown in his Cybernetique et

materialisme dialectique, cybernetics, as the general theory of
the properties of auto-regulating systems, by constantly
operating in imitation of the living organism, offers the best
road to the research of a dialectical reason.
In the first place, this is because the fundamental notion
of ‘feed-back’ gives a concrete content to the dialectic of
contradictions: an auto-regulating system is one in which
every variation is the cause of its own negation. Servo¬
mechanism is a technical realisation of external contradiction,
too, since this resistance to the variations entails a reaction
on the whole of the system, allowing it, through constant
inversion of its relationship with the environment, to function
without variation.
A second characteristic of the cybernetic model’s implicit

dialectic is that it integrates time with logic, in the form of
irreversible relationships : when an electronic machine, as for
example, Dr Grey Walter’s tortoise, imitates the acquisition

of conditioned reflexes, stores corrections to behaviour almost
as though it were being trained, it obliges us to think of it
as we have to think of life itself: to think of it, that is, not
in an analytical way, as made up of interchangeable elements
independent of one another, but in a synthetic way, as a sum
total of relationships situated in a concrete time, and hier¬
archically disposed in an order of increasing complexity.
Here, however, we must note the boundary which divides
the most highly perfected of dialectical machines from the
living being: even though the former can maintain its
balance with the environment and even complexify its be¬
haviour by correcting it in the light of set-backs, it cannot
‘adapt itself’ in the sense in which a living species does so,
that is, by changing its own ‘structure’ and so transforming
itself into another type of organism with a new structure
and new programmes.
Thus the theory of cybernetic models, following a road
which Apostel was the first to open up, can make it possible
to give an increasingly more accurate and richer content to

the categories of dialectic: feedback providing a concrete
model of reciprocal action and of contradiction, irreversi¬
bility giving a first approximation of the process of becoming,
of physical time, structure making it possible to think of the
category of totality as a function of the new image of the
world which the sciences are giving us in this last third of
the twentieth century.
It is because of this that structuralism is not only a
philosophy, a concept of the world, but also a method.
The method which derives from this concept of the world
is in the first place a rigorous application of reasoning by
analogy. In the past reasoning by analogy has already lain
at the root of great discoveries, by transposing into new
fields, as working hypotheses, a knowledge which has been
gained in another science.
Structuralism, enriched by the mathematical theory of sets
and the cybernetic theory of models, makes it possible in the
first place to carry into a discipline the results obtained from
the study of isomorphous structures in another discipline:
this has been attempted, for example, by Levi-Strauss for
systems of blood-relationships and linguistic systems. Another
outstanding example is biological and physiological investi¬
gation which is based on cybernetic models of certain struc¬
tures and functions of elements in the nervous system.
By bringing out valid laws of correlation or development,
at different degrees of complexity and at all levels of the real,
from physics to sociology, from biology to aesthetics, the
methods of structuralism and cybernetics have given to the
notion of ‘dialectic of nature’ put forward by Engels both

its most striking confirmation and immense possibilities for
research and development.
When structuralism linked up with cybernetics, the theory
of information made it possible to enter a new stage by
giving analogy a mathematical form and providing it with
an instrument of measurement. From biology to aesthetics,
the theory of information supplies a method of calculating

increasing complexity of structures. Whether we are dealing
with the formation of increasingly more complex and more
improbable living organisms, with ever higher values of
what Brillouin calls a ‘structural negative or counter-
entropy’ (neguentropie) , or with the creation of new forms of art,
the theory of information cannot substitute a method of
calculation for a value-judgment, but it can provide value-
judgments (which ultimately derive from ends postulated by
man) with the objective basis of its method of calculation.
Thus the structural method not only enables us to meet
new facts with hypotheses of structure suggested by other
disciplines, and so to anticipate and foresee; it also invites
us to understand the meaning and reality of each fact by
re-setting it within a wider totality in virtue of which the
fact takes on a meaning and a reality. The application of
the structural method to the sociology of literature has
proved fruitful, even if the first attempts are tainted by a
certain mechanicism. Even more fruitful has been its appli¬
cation, by Pierre Francastel, to the sociology of art: Fran-
castel, reacting against the preconception according to which
a society has a structure completely determined by economics,
politics, and social life, with art having nothing to do except
to express or translate it, has brought out the role of art as
not only an expression of values but also a participation in
the creation of values. Thus he has developed a method of
deciphering works of art and, through them, the society in
which they are produced. This method rules out both the
mechanism of Taine, which reduces aesthetics to a theory of
the symbol, and the idealism of Wolfflin or Focillon, which
attributes to forms an autonomous life and development.
‘Wolfflin and Focillon have failed to take into consideration
the notion of structure,’ he writes in La realite figurative, p. 18.
Conceiving art as one of the moments of the continued crea¬
tion of man by man, the creation of new reality and new
values, Francastel does not treat it only as a superstructure,
as though the function of art was to reproduce and hallow

a pre-existing reality (after the fashion of a crude mechanistic
Marxism), but as a necessary dialectical moment of the
structure of human society as it moulds its own features.
In this he has given Marxism a source of development,
starting from a concept of the world and of man which
corresponds to the contemporary orientation of the sciences
and arts.
The prospects opened up for Marxist research by struc¬

turalism and cybernetics rule out dogmatic, mechanistic, re¬
ifying (‘chosiste ’), interpretations of materialism, and the
equally dogmatic, speculative, theological interpretations of
dialectic.
What has served to obscure this great truth has been, on
the one hand, the over-hasty attempts, of which Norbert
Wiener himself (even though he saw and pointed out the
danger) very soon provided a bad example, to apply cyber¬
netics to the handling of men in society. These attempts de¬
rived not from the principles of cybernetics but from the
technocratic ideas of some of its pioneers. This confusion has
now been cleared up.
The same cannot be said of structuralism, which is still
regarded by many Marxists with suspicion.
This is due no doubt to the fact that there is still confusion
between the essential principles of structuralism as a concept
of the world and as a method, and the way in which they
have been expressed by some of its best-known representatives.
For example, in Levi-Strauss, whose scientific work is
among the most fruitful of our time, the structural method
is brought into operation from a starting point in personal
postulates which are in no way part of this method, and
which even, to my mind, contradict its spirit.
We need do no more than quote three of these.
i. The postulate according to which all structures can
ultimately be reduced to mental structures: ‘temporal modal¬
ities of universal laws in which the unconscious activity of the
73
mind consists.’ This sort of transcendental structuralism,

which has Kantian and, ultimately, idealist echoes, in no
way derives from the principles of the method. On the con¬
trary it appears to contradict them by according a privileged
position to such structures, of which others would be no more
than the expression: an attitude, rightly denounced by Fran-
castel, which is the reciprocal of a crude mechanism and sees
in cultural works no more than an epiphenomenon of infra¬
structures.
2. The postulate (which derives, moreover, from the first)
according to which structure is not a reality but only a pro¬
gramme. For Levi-Strauss, the structure is not ‘the nucleus
of the object’ but ‘the relational system latent in the object’.
Here the problem seems to me to be wrongly expressed, since
this opposition between the object and the relations which
constitute it contradicts the very principle of structuralism,
whose great merit is to have, if not abolished, at least
dialecticised this opposition.
3. The postulate which opposes structure to history. Levi-
Strauss admits that there are not only synchronic but also
diachronic structures. ‘I do not mean to reject the notion of

process,’ he says, ‘nor to dispute the importance of dynamic
interpretations.’ Nevertheless, he introduces a radical cleav¬
age between the method of ethnology and that of history:
‘ethnology is a witness alien to the group’ whose structure

he is studying, while ‘no process exists except for a subject
involved in its own historical becoming.’ Temporality is al¬
ways lived by a subject, and history is accordingly, on
principle, tainted with subjectivity.
Without entering into an argument on the fundamentals
of the problem, it seems in no way to follow from structural¬
ism that ‘laws of development’ cannot be regarded as struc¬
tures and that they, more than other structures, are, on
principle, impatient of objective study.
To reduce history to the lived and the event-al makes it
impossible any longer to understand transition from one
74
structure to another. It would appear that Levi-Strauss’s

exclusivism is due to chance circumstances : as an ethnologist,
his studies have been confined exclusively to societies that
are no longer evolving, societies that have become stabilised
in the mere reproduction of one and the same cycle. Thus
there was no serious methodological disadvantage in study¬
ing only their ‘synchronic’ structures. But why should not
the notion of structure, valid for the anatomy of societies, be
applied to their physiology? How can one define the structure
of an organ if one leaves out of account its function? And
how can one fully study its function and structure without
studying its history? Biological evolution offers us models of
‘laws of development’; why, when we come to look at
specifically human history, should their study suddenly be¬
come subjective, while it is admitted as a postulate that one
can study objectively the synchronic structures of a society
even though the observer’s judgments of value and prejudices
may also be a confusing influence in that study? For example,
when Levi-Strauss continually finds the same mental struc¬
tures at work ‘in primitive thought’ or in the thought with
which we are familiar, surely his observation is distorted by
a Kantian a priorism which derives from the culture proper
to his own society?
If we dismiss these contingent postulates, structuralism can,
like cybernetics, be one of the ways of comprehending the
world and of conceiving man and his action, which corres¬
ponds the best to the spirit of our time, to the development
of a new humanism: this will be precisely the humanism of
which Marx was the pioneer, integrating all that was won
by Graeco-Roman humanism and Jud.aeo-Christian human¬
ism, and going beyond both in a new synthesis of nature and
man, of the external world and subjectivity, of necessary law
and liberty.
75
CHAPTER THREE
Marxism and Ethics
To rediscover the fundamental inspiration of Marxism, as
defined by Marx in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's

Philosophy of Right (‘to be radical is to grasp things by the
root. But for man the root is man himself’, in Early Writings ,
p. 52), is never to forget that Marxism is not a pre-critical,
dogmatic, philosophy.
The key idea of all critical (non-dogmatic) philosophy is
that human experience forms a whole. The specific charac¬
teristic of dogmatism, on the contrary, is the detaching of
one aspect of the total experience and the claim to explain
the whole in terms of one of its parts. For example, an idealist
metaphysics attributes a privileged value to ideas, and en¬
deavours to reconstruct the world as a tissue of intelligible
relationships; correspondingly, a metaphysical and mech¬
anistic materialism seeks to explain the world from the
properties of matter as conceived by science at some par¬
ticular historical stage of its development.
The critical attitude starts by rejecting these arbitrary
options. The principle that governs its method is that every
moment of total experience forms one with all others and
forms one with a history. We cannot overstep our own
shadow : we can never define once and for all either concept
or matter; and every philosophy is dogmatic which claims
to establish itself in the concept, like Plato or even Spinoza,
or to establish itself in matter, like d’Holbach or the Stalinist
interpretation of Marxism.
If we rigorously follow up the consequences of this rejection
MARXISM AND ETHICS
of dogmatism in every field, we are obliged to re-think, in

the spirit of our time, the significance of Marxism in the
theory of knowledge as in moral science, too, or in aesthe¬
tics.
Just as Bachelard established the necessity for a ‘non-

Cartesian epistemology’, just as Bertold Brecht called his
aesthetics ‘non- Aristotelian’, just as the writings of Simondon
study the significance of ‘dialectical machines’ from the point
of view of what I might call a ‘non-Laplacian technology’,
so it becomes necessary to conceive a ‘non-Platonist’ ethic:
one, in other words, which does not start from the concept,
traditional in the West since Hellenism, that man’s behaviour
is ‘right’ when it conforms to a rule, an ideal, or a pre-existing
model.
Thus the moral problem, like the problem of knowledge,
is reversed. When we ask ourselves what we must do if we
are to act rightly, we are not seeking to conform to a pre¬
existing law or to a being that is already ‘given’: we are
asking ourselves what must be brought into existence which
is not yet existing.
This ethic, which is history in process of being made, a
specifically human history and one whose scenario has not
been written by any god or any fate, nor by any abstract
dialect (whether it be the absolute mind of Hegel or the
‘inevitable progress’ of the eighteenth-century materialists) —
this ethic is the continued creation of man by man.
At no moment is this creation arbitrary, and at no moment
is it determined. Man is totally responsible for becoming not
what he is but what he is not yet and what is nowhere set
down; and at the same time he is obliged to be conscious of
the historical conditions created by man’s earlier creations,

which obey necessary laws, to neglect or make light of which
leads to fortuity and impotence.
Marx’s essential discovery in moral science lies in this,
that, first by his historical and militant rather than Hegelian
and Feuerbachian concept of alienation, and later by his
77
demonstration in Capital , he ‘liquidated’ into human acts

what had been crystallised in things and historical situations,
thus showing man that it was possible for him to revindicate
his claim to control his own destiny.
To show, as Marx did, how man’s act in continuing in

history his own creation is at the same time and indivisibly
necessary and free, was to lay the theoretical foundation of
all revolutionary action, and the theoretical foundation, too,
of all moral science, sacrificing neither objective necessity
to personal responsibility nor the element of subjectivity to
the consciousness of inflexible laws of development.
In this Marxist attitude to man and his history, the moral
problem cannot be shelved: it cannot be replaced by the
scientific and technical problem of truth, of the search for
and discovery of a true order of things and of nature which
would give to moral conduct a foundation external to man.
The study of laws of social development, the possibility even
of plotting, at least in its essentials, the trajectory of a more
or less probable immediate or distant future, does not at any
time excuse us from making ourselves conscious of our own
responsibility as subjects who act and create our own history,
and not as objects of a history in a concept that would reduce
us to being no more than the resultant or sum of the con¬
ditions of our existence.
The moral problem is not a simple problem; neither
simple as the blind acceptance of rules of conduct given to us
ready-made from outside, nor as the affirmation of a radical
freedom to determine ourselves, and by ourselves alone, our
values and ends.
In a man’s life, the moral problem is made up of contradic¬

tions that are lived and continually reborn, between the de¬
mands of the discipline that is indispensable to the effective¬
ness of our struggle, and the sense of personal responsibility
of each one of us in both the working out and the application
of the very laws which govern our fighting.
If a Marxist is to answer the question of the relationship
MARXISM AND ETHICS
between moral behaviour and society, he has to solve three

problems :
(a) He must finally and permanently break with dogmatism
by emphasising that Marxism is not a pre-critical philosophy,
and that one cannot think as a Marxist if one thinks as
though Kant and Fichte had never existed. This means that
we must not reduce the legacy of classical German philosophy
in Marxism to Hegel and Feuerbach; we must reappraise the
legacy of Kant and Fichte by setting it once again firmly on
its feet, that is to say by showing that a dialectical materialist
concept of practice enables us to develop a critical philosophy
without succumbing to the idealist illusion that our activity
engenders the reality on which it is exerted.
(b) He must work out more profoundly the Marxist theory
of subjectivity by recognising that existentialism has raised a
real problem, even if we cannot accept either the way in
which it expresses the problem or the answer it provides;
remembering, too, that the study of the problem of sub¬
jectivity is not necessarily associated with a subjectivist and
individualist conception.
(c) Fie must work out a Marxist theory of dialectical transi¬
tion which enables us to explore all the dimensions of man,
including those of interiority and of values, without falling
into alienated theological concepts, which make transcen¬
dence an attribute not of man but of God.
It goes without saying that in speaking of transcendence
there is no question of retaining either the word or the idea
in the traditional sense, which is closely linked to the ‘super¬

natural’; beneath the alienations and mystifications which
have attributed to gods the power which man possesses of
going beyond the situation imposed on him by nature or
society, we have to rediscover this constant fundamental ex¬
perience: that man cannot be reduced to the sum total of
the conditions which have produced him; as man, he exists
only by going beyond them.
These few remarks on moral science are, accordingly, in-
79
spired by the threefold concern to discover how Marxism

can develop :
a critical philosophy which is not idealist
a theory of subjectivity which is not subjective
a theory of dialectical transition which is not alienated.
*
Ethics appears in the first place as a body of laws regulating

our conduct. Every man has a moral system which has
come to him from outside, through education, in other words
in virtue of the fact that the individual belongs to a society,
to an historical and social community.
This is our experience as children, for whom what is for¬
bidden and what is allowed are imposed from outside, as a
fact. Initially, right and wrong have the same at once con¬
ventional and inexorable character as the green and the red
light.
The whole body of these rules constitutes a sort of scenario
in which a precise ‘job’ is laid down for us: all we have to

do is to put on the costume and act the part. Thus, from my
very infancy, I belong to a religion, a country, a class, a
family, a tradition and so on, of which the ends and the
means of attaining them appear to me as intangible ‘values’ ;

the problem of their basis does not arise, any more, indeed,
than that of transgression.
How is the transition to be effected from this ‘constituted’
morality to ‘constituent’ morality? From pure and simple
acceptance of social constraint to the development of con¬
sciousness of personal responsibility?
The foundation of morality does not, initially, appear as a
problem.
It is imposed in the form of myth, by a didactic story or
as something revealed by a transcendent intervention, from
the code of Hammurabi to the Mosaic Decalogue.
In a reflective form, it can still not be a problem, but rather
a justification, as is shown by the purely sociological theories
80
MARXISM AND ETHICS
whose general characteristic is to reduce value to truth, and

to claim to give, in the form of an objective description of a
human social nature, both an explanation and a justification
of obligation or contract.
This ideology of justification clothes itself in the trappings
of ‘reason’, each social class, in the course of history, having
qualified as ‘rational’ what is consonant with its own class
interests. From Menenius Agrippa’s fable of the belly and
the limbs to Herbert Spencer’s organological theories, and
from Plato’s personification of ‘Laws’ to Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right , these ideologies of justification have taken over from
myth and revelation.
How, then, are we to present the problem of the under¬
lying basis, the problem of the value of values? How can we
move from the mythical or revealed plane of the given, and
the ideological plane of justification, to the tragic plane of
questioning and responsibility?
By starting from the lived experience of contradiction.
Contradiction can be lived in many ways at a rupture-point
in history, either because there has been external conflict be¬
tween different communities and a collision with the gods of
other cities has opposed a fact to a fact, a moral system to
another moral system, or because the internal development
of a society has opened up for its members new prospects and
possibilities that make the old norms intolerable and thereby,
too, create the conditions for a rebellion or a secession. His¬
torical crisis and personal drama are then closely interwoven.
This is the Promethean moment of ethics: the moment to
which Antigone gave the tragic features of the revolt of con¬
science against the old law, the Socratic moment of doubt
and challenge of which Descartes, at the threshold of the
modern age, provided the most inflexible example.
Each of our experiences brings us back to this. The contra¬
diction that is most generally lived, for example between the
Kantian demand never to consider the individual as a means
but always as an end, and the social reality of the capitalist
81
regime which makes the wage-earning worker a means for

the production of surplus value, provides a striking picture
of the daily radical divorce of an avowed moral ideal and an
actual social reality.
We have only to take another look at Max Weber’s demon¬

stration in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to
see how each economic and social formation distils its own
morality as an ideology of justification — as Engels showed

when, in his Anti-Diihring, he analysed, inside capitalism, the
survival of a feudal morality, the domination of a bourgeois
morality and the coming into being of a proletarian morality.
Thus we find that, by personal experience of lived contra¬
diction and by the contradictory development of societies,
we are brought back to the initial antinomy of constituted
morality and constituent morality, and are again faced by
the need to establish a dialectical relationship, that is to say
a relationship simultaneously of exclusion and of mutual in¬
volvement, between these two poles. If we reduce morality to
a system of social rules, we shall inevitably fall into dogmat¬
ism ; and if we emphasise the conscious basis exclusively, we
shall inevitably fall into formalism, and ultimately into a
morality of intention.
To one who confines himself solely to the point of view of
the social rule, the individual who challenges the rule by
questioning himself about the value of these values, seems to
be already on the road to betrayal.
To one who confines himself to the point of view of the
individual conscience, and never succeeds in emerging from
his 'coguo', the rule itself already appears as an alienation.
This is the antinomy we have to overcome.
The difficulty appears as soon as a consciously critical
philosophy is built up. Kant found that he had to direct the
first preface to his Critique of Pure Reason against dogmatism
and to emphasise in his second the battle against scepticism.
The problem of the transition from freedom to law, that is,
the problem of the dialectical 82unity of the form and content
MARXISM AND ETHICS
of morality, was raised for the first time in its full force by
Fichte in his Sittenlehre. In this System of moral science the first
chapter is directed against dogmatism. Its aim is to lay down
the first principle: the freedom of the ego, ruling out all
transcendence, both transcendence from above — that of God
and his revealed commandments — and transcendence from
below, that of the thing as datum. The second chapter, by
contrast, is directed against formalism, and aims at providing
morality with a concrete content.
Fichte thus offers us an exemplary model of the effort to
keep hold of both ends of the chain, ethics and society.
The compound was so unstable that its unity was soon
broken :
with Hegel there is already a return to dogmatism, which
makes subjectivity a moment of objective morality, but one
that is so completely and definitively left behind that the
individual subject has no existence or value except as a
function of the rational and social totality.
with Stirner and also, from a very different point of view,
with Kierkegaard, it is the totality, the social totality for the
former and the rational totality for the latter, which is
abandoned : in the case of Stirner, in favour of the exclusive
affirmation of the ‘Unique’, of the individual; in the case of

Kierkegaard, in virtue of the tragic colloquy of subjectivity
and transcendence, which involves, if Christ is not to be
crucified on the cross of concept, the abandonment of the
rational, the historical, and the social.
The present issue between Marxism and existentialism can
be classified in this historical perspective. Does not Sartre to
some extent renew, in relation to Marxism or to the idea he
has formed of it, the protest made by Kierkegaard against
83
Hegel? And cannot we Marxists, inspired by Fichte’s efforts
to keep hold of both ends of the chain, interiorise and inte¬
grate Sartre’s demand and so make of it an element of our
own thought?
A Marxism which never forgets Kant or Fichte, a Marxism,
that is, which never forgets Marx or Lenin, is a critical and

non-dogmatic philosophy in this sense, first of all, that it
makes practice the source and the criterion of every truth and
every value.
This entails the consequence that experience must not be
conceived, as it is by empiricists, as an immediate contact
with being and a passive reflection of a reality which is given
ready-made once and for all; it rules out, too, the dogmatic
claim to entrench oneself in being and to be able to say once
and for all what it is. Experience is of the order of a question,
and, in consequence, the answer is necessarily a function of the
question, in other words, a function of the state of the sciences
at the time the question is asked. This emphasises the his¬
torical and always historically relative character of know¬
ledge, and makes Marxism a more consistent critical philo¬
sophy than Kant’s, whose immutable table of ‘categories’
constitutes a hang-over from dogmatism.
In other words, Marxism is not a philosophy of being, that is,
a philosophy like that of the scholastic theologians or the
mechanist materialists, in which consciousness is at the most
an image, and always (in Plato no less than in Epicurus) an
impoverished image, of the reality which produces it. Such
a philosophy, by identifying consciousness and knowledge,
leads to the suppression of subjectivity, retaining only what is
impersonal and external to consciousness; and by conceiving
truth, as St Thomas Aquinas did, for example, as identity
with being, it leads to the suppression of all real becoming, all
authentic historicity.
Marxism is a philosophy of act, that is, one which makes of
consciousness and the human practice which engenders it
and constantly enriches it a true reality, rooted in earlier
84
activity and in the real, and reflecting them, but constantly
going beyond the given and continually adding to reality by
a creative act, which is not yet given at the level of pre¬
human nature and the success of which nothing can guarantee
in advance.
MARXISM AND ETHICS
From this it follows that for us Marxists morality is not

sanctioned by nature but created by history.
How are we to relate the Marxist concept of subjectivity to
existentialism?
In the first place we may say that the merit of existentialism
is that, since Kierkegaard, it has shown that dogmatic ration¬
alism, even in its richest, Hegelian, form, has, in reducing
consciousness to knowledge, robbed itself of a dimension, the
dimension of subjectivity. Now reason, in eliminating the
false, does not eliminate th e fault.
Subjectivity is in the first place the affirmation of the im¬
possibility for consciousness of being equated with itself. Even
if consciousness can at times be equated with being, can make
it transparent to itself, it cannot be equated with its own act
by which it necessarily transcends and creates itself.
Subjectivity, therefore, is of the order not of being but of act.
Hence the emphasis laid by existentialism on the negative
experiences of error, of anguish, of check.
Hence, too, the refusal to dissociate ideas from the progress
of existence, the justified concern to link thought to a creation
of being, in the consciousness that to exist is an act, a
creation.
There could be no room for the theory of subjectivity in:
a metaphysical rationalism such as that of Plato, of Spin¬
oza, of d’Holbach or of Hegel, which by giving a privileged
position to the notion of truth (conceived as identity of
thought and being) could never grasp what is impersonal in
us.
but there is ample room for it in a critical rationalism such
as that of Kant, or Fichte, or of Marx, which is not content
to discover the idea immanent in being and reduce it to that,
but makes use of the idea in order to transform existence.
85
Existentialism is not a philosophy but an attitude towards
philosophy, one that consists in regarding philosophy not as a
picture of life but as a leavening of life.
If that were the case it would be true to say that Marxism
can and must be approached from an existential point of

view.
Existentialism raises a real problem, even if, let me repeat,
a Marxist cannot accept either the way in which it presents
the problem or the solution it offers.
Marxism makes it possible to present the problem more
correctly and to provide an answer to it.
To demonstrate that this is so, we must recall the situation
in which existentialism was born and developed.
Historically, as Gueroult showed at the Philosophical Con¬
gress in Mexico, the original source of existentialism is to be
found in Fichte.
Fichte’s work was produced at a rupture-point in history.

Gueroult has very rightly noted that Fichte is the only
philosopher by whom the French Revolution was seen as a
fact and not an idea.
Fichte’s work, then, lies at a moment in history in which

there is a collapse of traditional, that is, of feudal, values; at
a moment when there arises the problem of the illogicality
of the existing order, of the failure of faith, of conflicts be¬
tween conscience and obedience. This situation explains the
exaltation of the importance of the individual, of his radical
autonomy, of the supreme value accorded to freedom as the
mother of all values, and to responsibility.
Fichte’s first thesis was thus to be the affirmation of the
ego, postulating itself by itself. For the first time in the history
of philosophy the primacy of essence over existence was over¬
thrown. Man is not the expression of an essence defined
a priori. He is nothing other than what his own free activity
makes him; every man makes himself what he is. In the
phrase of the Fichtean Lequier, re-adopted by Sartre, ‘To

make and in making to make oneself, and to be nothing
other than what one makes.’ ‘Man is nothing but what he

makes of himself.’ That is what Sartre calls ‘the first principle
of existentialism’ (Existentialism and Humanism , trans. Philip
Mairet, London, 1948, p. 28).
86
MARXISM AND ETHICS
The second thesis is that the self can be seen in fixed con¬
ceptual terms, as showing forth the ambiguity of subject and
object, of constituent and constituted, of facticity1 and free¬
dom.
The third thesis is that the absolute ego is absolute freedom ;
but the constraint inherent in its make-up involves, besides
the existence of choice, the obligation to choose. Fichte’s
fourth thesis, from which existentialism derives, is that the
ego is project: it continually leaps ahead of itself, urged on
by the unrealisable desire to win or create what it lacks, in
other words always to be both in-self (an sich) and for-self
(fur sich) .
In short, we find in Fichte all the key themes of existential
philosophy, but within a rationalist philosophy.
Fichte can help us to keep hold of both ends of the chain.
It is on the meeting ground of Fichte’s philosophy that dia¬

logue on moral science can be most fruitful: if, that is,
Marxists learn again to integrate the theory of subjectivity
to be found in Fichte’s existential thought, and if contem¬
porary existentialists do not mutilate Fichtean existentialism
by depriving it of two fundamental dimensions: the rational
dimension and the social dimension.
This mutilation, it is true, goes back a long time. The
rational dimension was already abandoned by the irrational¬
ism of Kierkegaard, and the social dimension by the indi¬
vidualism of Stirner. Thus the existential attitude has suffered
from the parasitic activities of irrationalism, subjectivism,
and formalism.
Today we have to try to win back what has been lost.
Existentialism has played an important part in the de¬
mystification of morality, as has been shown by Wanda Ban-
87 the in-itself, hence with the

1 ‘The for-itself’s necessary connection with
world and its own past. It is what allows us to say that the for-itself is
or exists. The facticity of freedom is the fact that freedom is not able “not
to be free” ’ (Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, London, 1966:
from the ‘Key to special terminology’, p. 631).
nour in the emphasis she has given to a number of themes

in moral criticism. Their formulation can be found again in
Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘morality of ambiguity’.

‘The moral world is not a given world.’
‘There are no unconditioned ends outside of ourselves.’
‘Freedom is the source from which arise all significance
and all value.’
In his Being and Nothingness (p. 722) Sartre was already
writing, ‘The moral agent is the being through whom values

exist.’
‘. . . it is then that his freedom will become conscious of
itself and will reveal itself in anguish as the unique source
of value’ (p. 627).
‘There is serieux 1 [I would prefer alienation , but I am not
going to quibble over words, r.g.] as soon as freedom resigns
in favour of ends which are chained to be absolute. The
“serious” man questions nothing.’

‘The specific characteristic of the “serious man” is that he
regards values as things which are ready made.’ This is the
position of the child, who from the very beginning finds
himself within a constituted morality.
‘To exist is to make oneself’; it is in some way the triumph

of freedom over facticity.
All these critical and Fichtean themes are common to both
of us. No one can think and act in my place, no one can dis¬
pense me from the meaningfulness of my acts and from my
responsible decision. No God, and no authority can make
decisions for me.
It is at that point that our paths begin to diverge.
In this existentialist concept there seem to me to be two
fundamental shortcomings :
1. This concept of freedom is non-temporal and extra-
1 ‘The “spirit of seriousness” [V esprit de serieux ) views man as an object

and subordinates him to the world. It thinks of values as having an
absolute existence independent of human reality’ (Being and Nothingness,

‘Key to special terminology’, p. 634).
88
MARXISM AND ETHICS
historical : to put it briefly, it is metaphysical and speculative.

It can be formulated at any moment you please in history;
it affirms, legitimately, my right to secede, my duty to ques¬
tion. But if the source of values is extra-historical, it can
never validate an historical, that is a concrete, end.
2. It leads, accordingly, to a moral formalism; it calls us
to freedom, to responsibility, to courage, to mastery of self
— which is excellent — but it does not tell us towards what
end we are to use them.
It is perfectly legitimate to distinguish ends and values.
Here, however, they are opposed to one another, they are
isolated from one another: I confront each situation as a
pretext for the exercise of my freedom — so much so that

formalism condemns us to oscillate between the desert of
withdrawal and the intoxication of adventure. ‘They discover

at the same time,’ writes Sartre (Being and Nothingness) , ‘that
all human activities are equivalent . . . and that all are on
principle doomed to failure. Thus it amounts to the same
thing whether one is a solitary drunkard or a leader of
nations. If one of these activities takes precedence over the
other, this will not be because of its real goal, but because of the
degree of consciousness it possesses of its ideal goal’ (p. 627).

Sartre often says that his thought has developed since
Being and Nothingness and that it is wrong to base criticism of
his present concepts upon that book. In that case, however,
Sartre should tell us exactly which are the theses in Being
and Nothingness which he has now abandoned. Now, while it
is obvious that for the last twenty-five years he has realised
the shortcomings of a chapter such as that which he devoted
to ‘being for others’ (Being and Nothingness, pp. 22 iff), in

which he completely neglected the notion of class, it seems
no less obvious that the Critique de la Raison dialectique does not
8
imply the abandonment of any of 9the fundamental theses of
Being and Nothingness ; and that applies particularly to those
which, with his concept of liberty, provided a basis for that
despairing individualism which has never allowed him to
find a point at which he can insert himself in concrete history.

This freedom, emancipated from all terrestrial gravity, this
angelism, involves the temptation of purity and the tempta¬
tion of adventure.
This formalism develops into the most typical formulas of
the moralities of intention. Since Simone de Beauvoir at¬
tempted to apply these principles to moral problems, it is
from her that I shall borrow an illustration of my theme.
She writes, for example, ‘Do what you must, whatever hap¬
pens.’ ‘That is,’ she adds, ‘the result is not external to the
good will which is realised in aiming at it.’
What we have, then, is an abstract, formal, metaphysical
freedom: ‘We are free here and now and absolutely, if we

choose to will our existence in its finiteness which opens out
on to the infinite’ (Morale de Vambiguite, p. 229).

The practical consequences of such a concept are formid¬
able. Here is an example: ‘The Resistance laid no claim to a
positive effectiveness : it was negation, revolt, martyrdom. In
the moment of refusal the antinomy of action is removed,
the end and the means come together; freedom postulates
itself immediately as its own end and is realised in postulating
itself’ (pp. 190 and 217).

Thus, it was not, according to Simone de Beauvoir, a
matter of destroying the German armed forces but only of
digging a moral ditch between occupiers and occupied which
would make collaboration impossible.
Here is yet another example (p. 172): ‘Man has always

been at war and always will be.’
In such a point of view there is a radical opposition be¬
tween ethics and politics. We are a long way here from the
vitalising teaching of the French eighteenth-century mater¬
ialists : from that of Helvetius, for example, who wrote that
‘ethics would be a frivolous science if it were not identified
with politics and legislation.’ In Simone de Beauvoir we find
such expressions as this : ‘The freedom of a single man should
count for more than a crop of cotton or rubber.’ That repre-
MARXISM AND ETHICS
sents a position of strict individualism, for the crop can mean

life or death for everyone. In Cuba, for example, the sugar
crop is an event upon which the life of a whole people de¬
pends, and to sabotage it calls for summary justice and
execution.
In consequence, existentialism does not provide a solution
to our problem. With existentialism we let go of one end of
the chain. A right and proper concern to emphasise the con¬
stituent had made us lose sight of the constituted.
There can be no doubt that such a concept tends to
sharpen our sense of responsibility; but at the same time it
makes us forget that I am not responsible only to myself
but also to a society, a class, a nation.
Where, then, does the basic mistake lie?
To provide morality with a basis, one must show that
freedom cannot be divorced from the content of action : and
Sartre’s initial individualism bars him from the passage from

one to the other.
In Being or Nothingness, after having found freedom in a
rigorously solitary cogito, Sartre reduces all human relation¬
ships to ‘looking’. No doubt, in his idiom, the ‘look’ has a
symbolic value; it expresses a relationship between the self
and the other, but the specific characteristic of this relation¬
ship, of this look, is that it transforms every subject into
object.
The look of the other fixes me as an object: ‘As the other
rises up it confers on th tfor-self a being in-self in the midst
of the world, as a thing among things. This petrification by
the look of the other is the underlying significance of the
myth of Medusa’ (p. 502).

When we turn from Being and Nothingness to the Critique de
la Raison dialectique, we find no fundamental change.
Social relationships are hardly more than a multiplication
of personal relationships : that, it would seem, is the funda¬
mental postulate of the Critique de la Raison dialectique. We
build up the social by starting from the individual. Sartre
weaves the web of history from individual projects which

mutually reify one another.
Now, it is not possible to base history on a dialectical
development of the relationship between Robinson Crusoe
and Man Friday.
That, nevertheless, is Sartre’s fundamental postulate: he

writes, in his Critique de la Raison dialectique, ‘The only con¬
crete foundation of historical dialectic is the dialectical struc¬
ture of individual action.’
‘The whole of dialectic rests on individual praxis’ (p. 163).
Sartre rightly calls his concept ‘a dialectical nominalism’
(P- 32).
What he is trying to do is in some way to construct a
society from metaphysically defined individuals, to construct
history from the non-temporal, an historical materialism
without matter.
It is true that the problem of the transition from the
individual to society has been haunting the thought of Sartre
for the last twenty-five years. As early as the Liberation of
France, in L’ existentialisme est-il un humanisme?, Sartre was
trying to link freedom to a content of action. He wrote, ‘In
willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon
the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends
upon our own ... as soon as there is commitment, I am
obliged to will the freedom of others at the same time as
mine. I cannot make my freedom my aim unless I make that
of others equally my aim’ (Existentialism and Humanism , pp.

51‘2)-
In her Morale de Vambiguite Simone de Beauvoir was later
to say, ‘The existence of others as freedom ... is the condi¬

tion of my own freedom’ (p. 1 3 1 ).
‘The freedom (of the individual) can be achieved only
through the freedom of others’ (p. 225).
All this is unobjectionable, but it represents an inconsist¬
ency in relation to the initial postulates of existentialism.
The Kantian transition from my freedom to the freedom
MARXISM AND ETHICS
of others was based on a rationalist postulate : the transcen¬

dent ‘I’ is prior, or rather alien, to the plurality of subjects.
The problem of the transition to others does not arise if we
start from the transcendental ‘I’; it is impossible if we start

from the existential T’.
That is why, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre rules out the
possibility of this passage (as, moreover, he did in his 1939
article). ‘Even if I should want to act according to the
precepts of Kantian morality and take the Other’s freedom
as an unconditioned end, I would not be able to possess
the Other as object’ (p. 408).

‘Respect for the Other’s freedom’, adds Sartre, ‘is an
empty word; even if we could assume the project of respec¬
ting this freedom, each attitude which we adopted with
respect to the Other would be a violation of that freedom
which we claimed to respect ... to realise tolerance with
respect to the Other is to cause the Other to be thrown
forcibly into a tolerant world. It is to remove from him on
principle those free possibilities of courageous resistance, of
perseverance, of self-assertion, which he would have had the
opportunity to develop in a world of intolerance’ (p. 409).
In Morale de V ambiguite Simone de Beauvoir endeavours to
bridge the same gulf between freedom and concrete ends by
passing from my own freedom to that of others. The attempt,
however, is doomed to failure even before it is made, since
if I start from the individualist existential ‘I’, I am condemn¬
ing myself to insularity and solipsism.
From the point of view of Being and Nothingness there is
absolutely no justification for saying, ‘While it is true that

every project emanates from a subjectivity, it is also true that
this subjective movement in itself postulates a going beyond
subjectivity’ (p. 103).

Or again, it is impossible to say that the self-others re¬
lationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.
There is one form of the transition which is not Kant’s,
which is not a transition by rationality. In Fichte the tr ansi-
93
tion from self to others is effected not through the mediation

of the rational, but from an existential self that is already
inhabited by others.
The rigour of Fichte’s thought enabled him to effect this
transition.
He shows that the existence of others is the condition of
consciousness in itself. The presence of others is prior to the
cogito, since the ego cannot postulate itself except as limited,
and ‘a free activity cannot be limited by a thing but only
a free activity.’
by From this it follows that my autonomy has as the condition
of its freedom the freedom of the other, and, in consequence,
that I cannot envisage destroying the condition of my own
autonomy, that is, the freedom of the other.
This deduction of Fichte’s is possible only because the
starting point has not been an insular, solipsist, cogito. Fichte
asserts that ‘the first condition, which might be called the
root of my individuality, is not determined through my free¬
dom, but through my connection with another rational be¬
ing’ [The Science of Ethics, trans. A. E. Kroeger, London, 1897,
p. 234).
In Fichte the pure I is opposed to the empirical I in the
same way as the we is opposed to the 7. This has been forcibly
recalled by Gurvitch in his Dialectique et Societe, in which he
returns to the theses he had already elaborated on the moral
science of Fichte. ‘Our science of morals,’ says Fichte, ‘is
therefore very important for our whole system, since in it is
shown up how the empirical Ego arises out of the purely
genetical Ego, and how the pure Ego is altogether externalized
from the individual person. From the present point of view,
the representation of the pure Ego is the totality of rational
beings, or the communion of saints’ (op . cit., p. 270).
From this Fichte draws a conclusion of capital importance
which will rule out for ever the opposition between ethics
and politics. ‘To each rational being, all others outside him
are end; but no one is his own end. The point of view from
94
MARXISM AND ETHICS
which all individuals, without exception, are final ends, lies

beyond all individual consciousness, and is the point of view
from which the consciousness of all rational beings is united,
an object, into One; hence the point of view of God. For
God, each rational being is absolute and final end ... he is
end as a means to realise reason’ {Ibid, pp. 270-1).

It was thus, and only thus, that Fichte was able to con¬
struct a theory of subjectivity which is neither subjectivist nor
individualist. Thereby, too, he was able to pass from con¬
stituent morality to a constituted morality, to link together
personal responsibility and the social rules of concrete mor¬
ality, to bring together ethics and politics, and to respect the
autonomy of moral consciousness without lapsing into for¬
malism.
Using another road, Marxism makes this transition pos¬

sible. It is noteworthy that the Marxist classics do not confuse
the role of subjectivity and that of the individual. Without
going as far back as Marx’s criticism of Stirner, which repre¬

sented the first polemic of Marxism and its first confrontation
with a form of existentialism, we can give three examples of
this presence of others in subjectivity:
1 . In history (and in politics, which is history being made) ,
when Lenin speaks of the subjective factor, he in no way limits
this to the individual factor. He is concerned with classes and
their action.
2. In the sciences: when contemporary physics shows us
that the answers given by experiment are a function of the
questions asked, these questions are not those asked by any
unspecified individual, but those of a culture, of the ‘physicist-
city’ of which Bachelard spoke. The physicist who asks the
question is not only an individual : in virtue of this culture
the whole of past mankind dwells in him, and in virtue of
this city, the whole of present mankind dwells in him too.
3. In art: ‘To paint well,’ wrote Cezanne, ‘is in spite of
oneself to express all that is most advanced in one’s time . . .
a painter who knows his grammar, cannot but express on his
95
canvas what the best informed brain of his time has con¬
ceived or is conceiving . . . Giotto echoes Dante . . . Poussin
echoes Descartes.’ Historically, moreover, the individual

never becomes conscious of himself except within a culture,
that is, a community.
How can Marxism effect this transition from freedom to
the content of action, the transition which is the necessary
condition for laying the foundation of moral science and for
the disalienation of the world?
The crucial problem is the problem of the starting point.
The Marxist cogito is not the cogito of Descartes nor that
of Sartre.
It reinstates the cogito of Fichte, moving from speculation
to history, from idealism to materialism.
i . The primary experience is not that of solitude.
The ‘ we ’ comes first in relation to the ‘T.

Man becomes conscious of himself only in his relationships
with others. Reflection, that is, the relation of self to self, is
possible only as exteriorisation of the relationship with others.
The consciousness which addresses itself in assuming the
form of an ‘I’, takes on the function which was fulfilled by

the other consciousness.
Subjectivity is born of communication.
From the very beginning I grasp myself as an individual
resting on a foundation of community.
At no moment is my project an individual project (other¬
wise I find myself imprisoned in solipsism) .
In the first place, this is because this becoming conscious
of self — this splitting, that is— is an interiorisation of a dia¬
logue, and presupposes a language.
Secondly, because this language is the vehicle of a know¬
ledge, itself implied in work, which is always a social work.
As early as the first reflection, as early as the first project,
the whole of past and present mankind has been dwelling in
me.
MARXISM AND ETHICS
‘The individual,’ said Marx, ‘is the sum total of his social
relationships.’ Saint-Exupery (Pilote de Guerre, p. 347) was to
find the same thing: ‘Man is no more than a knot of relation¬
ships; only relationships count for man.’
Consciousness of self, with the split it involves, is already
an interiorised dialogue : it entails, within my self, a tension
between me and the other.
Kant’s mistake (already corrected by Fichte) lay in having

made of duty, of ‘duty-to-be’, a privileged experience.
‘Duty-to-be’ is implicit in all the moments of existence,
and not simply in the feeling of duty.
The act by which I become conscious of what I am, is
possible only in as much as it entails and produces a being
who is already no longer what I am now: reflection holds
within itself a genesis.
In the ‘I am’ there is infinitely more than the ‘I am’, since
the act of affirmation transcends the content of this affirma¬
tion.
Such is the antinomy of transcendence.
Reflection and act already entail transcendence, internal
duality, dialectic.
From this derives a consequence of capital importance: to
be conscious is at every moment to stand at a distance from
one’s being, in order not only to know it but to transform it.

There is thus a transcendence of mankind in relation to itself.
2. The possible and the project.

I am conscious of this I only through the presence of others
in me.
This presence shows itself in the language in which I speak
to myself and in the work in which I go beyond myself. Work,
as the going beyond being, is the first moral category.
These are two functions of the other, which are both functions
of transcendence.
This going beyond is the critical form of transcendence, it
is the specifically human dimension, which allows us to
97
emerge from animality, to break the circle of species and

instinct, to pass from biological evolution to specifically
human history. It was with this in mind that Marx said
that it is with work that man is born. Now, what distinguishes
man’s work from animal activity (that of the beaver, the ant,
the bee) is the anticipation of the act, which makes of this
project the law of its action. It is this possible, this project,
which enables man to move towards the future along an
original road that the animal was incapable of knowing, the
road that entails freedom and choice.
3. Choice and freedom
Man does not make a choice between given terms but be¬
tween possibles (projects). Freedom is born with this possi¬
bility of projecting a number of possible acts. In action we
confront the future with our possibles, just as in knowledge
we confront reality with our hypotheses.
The future enters into consciousness only through the
latter’s projects (its possibles), just as nature enters into the

consciousness of the scientist only through the question (the
hypothesis) he has already formulated.
The project is the form by the act before we have accom¬
plished it.
It is only for a free being (that is, a being who forms
projects, projecting possibles ahead of himself), that a fact
can appear upon a substratum of possibilities and have a
value.
Value, like truth, is born of this split, in other words it is
born in practice. It is born in the unity of a possible by which
our freedom is expressed, of a project in which our knowledge
is deployed, of a need which is the driving force of our action.
4. Need and valorisation.

In other words, man creates his values simultaneously with
his needs, and his needs simultaneously with his possibles (as
he transforms nature).
MARXISM AND ETHICS
That is why when Poincare said that science speaks in

the indicative and ethics in the imperative, the opposition
was based on a truncated view of man’s relationship to the
world, which makes of knowledge a radically independent
moment.
Knowledge is the development of the activity of work.
The object is not simply the system of means; it is what
meets the needs, what is adapted to human nature, not in
the anthropological sense, but to human nature such as his¬
tory has made it at one moment of its history, or rather such
as it has made its own history.
This comprehension of social necessity is the only concrete
basis of the project which reaches out to an emancipation, a
true freedom.
Need is not only individual but also social. It takes the
form of historical necessity, of revolt, of demand. Through it
is effected the transition from alienation to revolution.
5. Alienation.
I do not propose to enlarge here either on the nature of
alienation or on its genesis, which I have dealt with else¬
where, but to look at its relationship with the four proposi¬
tions put forward above.
From the point of view of the ‘we’, alienation is the split¬
ting of the ‘we’, its mutilation; alienation is what stands in
the way of world-wide participation in human culture.
From the point of view of possibles and projects, alienation
is man robbed of his specifically human dimension : the de¬
termination of possibles and projects (economic, political,
cultural, etc.). This determination becomes a class privilege:
the ruling class (the class which owns the means of produc¬
tion and the State) makes of man a means, an object.
From the point of view of choice, the ruling class arrogates
to itself, in addition to the privilege of culture, a monopoly
of decision and command.
Finally, from the point of view of needs, and the means of
99
satisfying them, Marx showed in Capital that distribution is

determined by production-relationships. Values are thereby
similarly determined.
In these conditions the proletarian revolution, from the
middle of the nineteenth century, became a fundamental
moral value and an end that is valid not as a final end or
ultimate value, but as a necessary means for the emancipa¬

tion and full development of man.
If we ask why this was so, the answer is that during that
period there was in it a coincidence of a possible, a. project, and
a need.
Revolution is the birth of a possible, a project, and a need,
and hence of a value.
(a) Birth of a possible. Scientific socialism became possible
towards the second half of the nineteenth century because at
that time, with the triumph of capitalism, alienation acquired
a true universality.
It was then that society, as a working organism, could be
comprehended as a totality.
This discovery, which was taken up again by Marx, was
the work of Adam Smith and Ricardo.
And from this possible a project could be born.
(b) Birth of a project. In a society which made work its
mode of existence and through work acquired its organic
unity or totality, awareness of this implicit, potential, totality
and action to realise it in act were one and the same thing.
Levi-Strauss’s structuralism has made us familiar with
such a concept of totality, in which the rational and the
operational are one and the same thing.
Now, if we look at Marx’s Capital as a structural study of

the infrastructures of capitalist society; if we see in it a
‘model’, in the sense in which cyberneticians use the word,
of a society on a larger scale, which can function either with
private ownership of the means of production and the contra¬
dictions which that involves, or in accordance with the prin¬
ciples of socialism, which alone can translate this totality into
ioo
MARXISM AND ETHICS
act, then it is just as though the norm and its violation were
presented to us simultaneously.
The transcending of contradictions no longer, henceforth,
comes from outside: communism is no longer an Utopia or a
moral system, but the expression of a real movement.
(c) The birth of a need. This real movement is experienced
subjectively by a social class as a need. This can be clearly
seen in the industrial revolts of the silk- workers of Lyons, the
Chartists in England, the Silesian weavers, and later the Paris
rising in June 1848.
Marxism is the theoretical expression of this coincidence of
a concrete project and a real need, of scientific socialism and
the working-class movement.
It no longer has a moral character; it is no longer an ideal
divorced from life, but is instead fundamentally the develop¬
ment of a praxis.
It was in this sense that Marx could write in The Holy
Family : ‘Communists preach no ethical system.’ Marx was

inflexible in his opposition to Weitling, who justified the
communist attitude by moral reasons, and to the Utopians,
who adopted a moral point of view. ‘Morality,’ he wrote in
The Holy Family, ‘in the sense of the morality which justifies
itself by reference to an ideal value is simply impotence put
into action.’
In point of fact every moral system has, so far, been an
alienation based on the concept of the double man, that is
of alienated man, on the concept of a dual nature in
man.
‘For us,’ wrote Marx again, ‘communism is not a stable

state which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will
have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement
which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of
this movement result from the premises now in existence’

(The German Ideology, p. 48).
History is nothing but the generation of man by man,
through the medium of social labour.
101
Within this generation, however, there are produced, as a

result of the division of labour and of private ownership, the
alienations which lie at the root of class struggles and an¬
tagonisms.
Thus at the present time, the meaning of history (and by
that I do not mean some theological necessity, some provi¬
dence or inevitable destiny, but the only meaning that we
can by our free choice attribute to history and our own life)
is the struggle of the proletariat, of the class, that is, which
suffers the most profoundly de-humanising consequences of
alienation : of an alienation which is not merely ideological
illusion but also the objective dehumanisation resulting from
alienation of labour.
In virtue of that, this class contains within itself, at a time
when a global organisation of needs, resources, and hopes
has become possible, the project of and the demand for a
total disalienation, the project of total man.
The formation of this project does not derive from any
millenarist illusion of realising a city of God, a city of the
Sun upon earth. This project constitutes the horizon of our
labour, our culture, and our fight.
This project of total man, the project, that is, of a com¬
pletely interiorised society, of a completely disalienated in¬
dividual (consciously containing society within himself in the
form of culture and the feeling of his own responsibility) — is
this project, too, an Utopia?
Does this humanism take us back again to a moral
socialism?
Can total man be a supreme value and an ultimate end
without being a transcendent ideal?
Or can there, then, be a non-alienated form of transcen¬
dence?
So far, every ethic has been an alienation, because it has
been founded on the duality of being and ideal.
Is some other dualism possible?
There is the alienated dualism of transcendence, and there
102
MARXISM AND ETHICS
is the dualism in the eyes of which the transcendent is the

tragic side of immanent development.
From this second point of view, transcendence is not a
severance but a deeper and fuller development: to put it
more exactly it is a dialectical supersession.
The problem lies in thinking of the transcendent otherwise
than as a category of exteriority; unless one can do this trans¬
cendence is simply another name for alienation, and such a
God is rightly called an idol.
Does this mean that a non-alienated conception of trans¬
cendence is necessarily negative : is it the experience of a lack,
of a tension?
Negation is, no doubt, the first picture — the first analogue

— we form of such transcendence.
The demand that governs all scientific development, the
demand for a systematic whole and for total intelligibility, is
and will always be a postulate that no experiment can verify
but which is the very condition of all experiment.
The demand that governs all ethical development, the de¬
mand for total man, is of the same order; for nothing is ever
promised to the atheists we are. Nobody is waiting for us.
Is transcendence, then, always and necessarily the experi¬
ence of an absence and not of a presence? We must always,
it is true, resist the mystical and mystifying temptation of
converting a need into a presence; nevertheless, when we
consider the movement that constantly leads us to create, in
anguish and peril, a higher reality, we can become conscious
of it as constituting what is our most profound reality, as the
reality which constitutes creative man.
This reality, we have already seen, is identified with the
presence in ourselves of others, of the totality of others, a
presence which cannot be lived as an experience of exteriority :
the other and my own self are one. This otherness is not ex¬
teriority, since I can decide to accept as governing my own
103
decision the will which was at first in opposition to me.
The tension between myself and the other, between the
finite and the infinite (that is, between the I and the totality
of others) makes possible the reciprocal involvement of trans¬
cendence and immanence. Already, for Fichte, the finite I
was an absolute, only because it included in itself, in its
activity, this affirmation of finite and infinite which Spinozist
dogmatism projected outside it into being.
We can therefore define transcendence by emptying it of
all the meaning which it contains only in virtue of an obsolete
conception of the world.
To investigate the dimension of transcendence, conceived
not as an attribute to God but as a dimension of man, is
not to start from something which exists in our world in a
vain attempt to prove the existence of what can exist only in
another world : it is simply to investigate all the dimensions
of human reality.
When I love a human being, I make a wager — I put my
money on that being — in a way that goes beyond all his acts.
The closest image, then, we can form of this transcendence
is perhaps that of the love, of the strictly human love, through
which we learn to see, or rather to postulate, in the loved
being, a quality which shares no common measure with the
contents of his acts.
In an enthralling passage on St John of the Cross, Aragon,
in Le Fou d’Elsa, gives us a poetic approximation of Pascal’s

wager, which, at the strictly human level of love, defines
transcendence.
The encounter with the transcendent, or rather the emer¬
gence of transcendence, is not a privileged experience, nor is
there in it anything theological or religious. It is not an inter¬
ruption of the natural order by a supernatural intervention ;
it is the commonest, the specific, human experience : the ex¬
perience of creation.
Transcendence is a dimension of ordinary life. It is attested
by the continual possibility of choosing to live and die for
104
others. This conscious, voluntary, free choice defines us as
man, cut off from animality and alienation.
MARXISM AND ETHICS
It is through this detachment from nature and the given,

which begins with work and attains its highest expression
when death becomes no longer simply the revenge of the
species on the individual but the individual’s gift of love to

the whole of mankind, it is through this that a transcendental,
and that values, are continually being born.
If we accept this concept, we take as our starting point in
moral criticism not a solitary cogito but praxis — we realise,
that is, that man begins with labour, that this labour is always
social, that labour, inasmuch as it goes beyond what is given
to us, constitutes the first category of ethics, and that con¬
sciousness of self is subordinate to communication with others :
thus, the concept enables us to emancipate ourselves from
individualism while at the same time respecting the autonomy
of consciousness.
It helps us to understand that man is a creator, that he is
his own creator, and it provides us with the means of over¬
coming alienation, which is the opposite of creation — of
overcoming it for all of us : it enables us, that is, to base an
indivisibly social and personal ethic not simply on its theoret¬
ical justification but on its practical realisation: an ethic
whose ultimate end creates the conditions which will make
it possible for every man to become effectively a man, that
is to say a creator.
It was in this sense that Maxim Gorky admirably defined
our concept, when he said that for communists aesthetics is
the ethics of the future.
105
CHAPTER FOUR
Marxism and Religion
In Marxism, atheism is a consequence of humanism and an

aspect of the fight against dogmatism.
It is this that distinguishes it from earlier forms of atheism.
Eighteenth-century atheism is essentially political. In their
unavoidable fight against the social and political institutions
inherited from the past, the materialist philosophers and the
Encyclopaedists came up against a Church which was at that
time an aspect of the State and which sanctioned despotism
by ‘divine right’. Their struggle against religion was a struggle

to win freedom from tyranny. Baron d’Holbach, in conclud¬
ing his Le Christianisme devoile , emphasises the political charac¬
ter of his essay in criticism. ‘Everything that has so far been
said shows with unmistakable clarity that the Christian re¬
ligion runs counter to the political health and well-being of
nations.’ ‘Religion is the art of making men drunk with
ecstasy in order to divert their attention from the evils
heaped upon them here below by those who govern them.’

Similarly, Meslier writes: ‘Ignorance and fear, these are
the two king-pins of all religion . . . The aim of those who
first gave laws to peoples was to dominate them: the easiest
way to do so was to frighten them and prevent them from
using their minds . . . The more one thinks about religious
dogmas and principles, the stronger is one’s conviction that

their only aim is to benefit tyrants and priests.’
This atheism played an eminently progressive political
part in the destruction of feudal relationships and absolute
monarchy, by unmasking the political and social use of re-
106
MARXISM AND RELIGION
liaion by the Auden Regime. In that lies is greatness. Is

limitation is that it saw in religion nothing but an arbitrary
invention, without .si : - g either what human needs it met
or what human values had been created in this religious
form.
Nineteenth-century atheism apart from Marxism was on
the whole 'scientist'. It opposed reigiots ideology as being a

pre-scientihe or non-scientific explanation of the world. This
atheism, too. played a positive part by driving from the
held all the attempS to contain God in the provisional in-
sufhcieneies of knowledge, all the superstitions that nourish
the appetite for mystery, the readiness to accept man's im¬

potence and welcome the miraculous. And once again, is
limitation was that it was exclusively negative. The most
striking example of ths is Auguste Comte's ‘law of the three

states'. According to Comte, human thought 'is obliged, both
in the individual and in the species, to pass through three
successive states: theological, metaphysical and positive." To

reduce the scientific spirit to positivism is not only to claim
that man is barred from raising the problems of ends and
meaning: it is also to justify this prohibition in virtue of an
impoverished and alienated conception of science as some¬
thing confined to 'facts' and the establishment of constant
relations between them. Philosophy, with theology and
metaphysics, is bundled into the same barrow-load of il¬
lusions devoid of content.
Marxist atheism, which is also twentieth-century atheism,
is essentially kuTnumst. It starts, not from a negation, but from
an affirmation: it affirms the autonomy of man and it in¬
volves as a consequence the rejection of every attempt to rob
man of his creative and self-creative power.
In his Eicm-i-c axd Philasop hie Macistnpfs ofiSup we already
find Marx emphasising this aspect: ‘Atheism ... is no longer
meaningful, for atheism is a negation of God and seeks to
107
assert by this negation the existence of man. Socialism no
longer requires such a roundabout method ... it is positive
human self-consciousness’ (in Early Writings, p. 167). In other

words humanism is no more to be defined by the negation of
religion (and so still by relationship to religion) than com¬
munism is to be defined as the negation of private ownership
(and so still by its relationship to the latter).
There can be no doubt but that Marxist atheism is the
heir of the battles fought for the emancipation of man and his
thought by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century atheism. It is
the heir, too, of the humanism of Fichte and Hegel, which
restores to man the powers traditionally alienated in God;
the heir, again, of Feuerbach’s humanism which sets itself up
against a religion which cuts man off from what is best in
him by projecting his hopes and virtues into God. The young
Marx summed up this humanist heritage in the foreword to
his doctoral thesis in 1841: ‘Philosophy adopts as its own,

Prometheus’ profession of faith: “I hate all the gods!” It
raises that cry against all the gods of heaven and earth that
do not recognise man’s consciousness as the supreme deity.

It brooks no rival.’
What characterises specifically Marxist atheism is that,
unlike its predecessors, it does not regard religion simply as
a lie fabricated by despots or as a pure and simple illusion
born of ignorance.
Marx and Engels studied the problem of what human
needs were, in some mystified way, met by religions. They
are, Marx observed, at once a reflection of a real distress and
a protest against it.
In so far as it is a reflection of man’s impotence and distress,
religion is seen to be an ideology that both explains and
justifies the existing order. Thus it is used, more or less con¬
stantly, as a decisive weapon which makes it possible to teach
the masses that the established order is willed by God and
that, as obedient and submissive subjects, they should resign
themselves to it. The doctrine of original sin has been used
for this purpose. In his City of God, St Augustine wrote: ‘God

introduced slavery into the world as a punishment for original
108
sin: to seek, therefore, to abolish slavery would be to rebel

against the will of God.’ The Church has constantly sanc¬
tioned all forms of class domination as being willed by God
—slavery, serfdom, wage-earning— and the most recent re¬
statements of her ‘social teaching’ still retain this basic orien¬
tation. Karl Marx summed up this undeniable historical
fact in his succinct phrase, ‘Religion is the opium of the
people.’
Accompanying, however, the element of reflection, there is
also that of protest. This latter is the element of religion in
virtue of which it is not simply an ideology — the quest for
an explanation of unhappiness and helplessness — but is an
attempt to find a way out from unhappiness : in other words,
it is no longer just a way of thinking, but a way of acting :
no longer an ideology but a faith, a way of confronting the
world and behaving in it.
Here we meet phenomena of great complexity. This faith
is expressed in a very different way in history.
Marxists do not treat ‘religion’ in general in a metaphysical

and idealist way, but as historians and materialists. They try
to find out how, in historical conditions that have to be
scientifically analysed in each case, faith can play a positive
and progressive part.
This simply means that even if the well-known phrase ‘Re¬
ligion is the opium of the people’ corresponds to an undeni¬
able historical fact, and one that is very largely confirmed even
today, the Marxist concept of religion cannot be reduced to
that phrase.
The thesis that religion as such, at all times and in all places,
diverts man from action, from working and fighting, is a
flagrant contradiction of historical reality.
Engels analysed two different examples of the role of faith
in history: in his studies of primitive Christianity, he shows
how this religious faith (before it assumed the form of an
ideology and a conservative 109
institution, in the hands of the
ruling power, with Constantine) was a protest, but an im-
potent protest. He shows how these first Christian communities

dreamed of an Apocalypse : that is to say, in most concrete
terms, they dreamed of the destruction of the dominance of
Rome which was crushing them. He speaks of this primitive
Christianity as a ‘revolutionary element’ : which is evident
enough, if one considers that public authority was suffi¬
ciently alarmed by it to organise ferocious repressive counter¬
measures — and that not simply for religious reasons, since
there was a proliferation of other alien cults which were
tolerated. Engels comments on ‘the faith of these first militant

communities,’ just as Lenin in The State and Revolution com¬
mented on the ‘democratic revolutionary spirit of primitive
Christianity’ (Collected Works, Vol. 21, New York, 1932, p.
184). Those communities were unable, however, to effect
their revolution, because there was at that time no social
force which could take over the collapsing world of Rome
and lead it into a progressive future: and the Christian
ideology itself reflected the historical impotence of slave-
revolts. So marked was this that the passionate longing for
change was transformed into a dream; it became the ex¬
pectation of the fulfilment of a promise, and, ultimately, an
ideology of escape, of flight, of resignation, which postponed
to another world what could not be realised in this world.
This compensation in heaven, built up into an ideology,
with an admixture of neo-platonic traditions, was one day
to become a marvellous opium ; and, from Constantine until
our own day, the ruling power has been able to make ex¬
tensive use of that opium to ensure the acceptance of suffer¬
ing in this world in expectation of what is promised in the
next.
The essential truth of Engel’s analysis has been confirmed

by researches into Christian origins, and the accompanying
discoveries, in which remarkable progress has been made, in
particular since the first finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls in
1947-
It would appear that from the very beginning we must
1 10
distinguish two currents in the elements that make up the

extremely complex syncretism of Christianity, the Judaeo-
Christian current and the Helleno-Christian.
The former, which was dominant in the Church of Jeru¬
salem, appeared as an offshoot of the Jewish religious move¬
ments of the first century bc. These were often revolutionary
in inspiration: they were movements of popular national
liberation directed against foreign rulers, Babylonian and
Assyrian in earlier times and later Seleucid and Roman.
They were for the most part expressed in a messianic
prophetism.
This prophetism was a protest not only against the political
and religious dominance of the foreigner, but also against the
oppression of the controlling classes, the higher Jewish priest¬
hood (the Sadducees, for example), who mostly collaborated
with the occupying power.
The tactics of these socially revolutionary movements were
those of non-violence, of exemplary purity, of preaching. The
Essene sects practised common ownership and non-violence.
That they had a great influence on the first Christian com¬
munists in Jerusalem is attested by numerous episodes in the
Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.
Side by side, however, with this waiting upon the realisa¬
tion of the Kingdom, there was also the violent activity of the
Zealots. We find evidence of this in other passages in the
synoptic gospels: the sack of the Temple, the trial of Christ,
who was condemned for having been proclaimed ‘King of

the Jews’.
This current appears to have contributed to making
Christianity a factor that worked for the break-up of the
power of Rome. There was revolutionary significance in
many of its manifestations : in the hostility to the cult of the
emperor, in the refusal to be associated with it, and, still
more, in the forbidding of Christians to serve in the imperial
army at a time when recruiting was becoming more and
more difficult and the Christian population was increasing
111
daily : a ban that was to persist until the fourth century. Thus
in the person of Christ, magnified by the collective imagina¬
tion of the first Christians and accepted as the heir of
numerous similar Messiahs (such as the Essene ‘Teacher of

Righteousness’ who was put to death by Hyrcanus II in the
first century ad), there was an undeniable revolutionary
aspect. This derives from a whole national, popular, tradition
which attains in it a universal extension, for it burst out from
the national framework in which it had been contained when
the synthesis with Hellenism was effected in the teaching of
St Paul, who refused to address himself only to the circum¬
cised.
The theme of the role of the ‘Just Man’ in the unfolding

of history was frequently to reappear in Christian tradition.
It was to underlie the controversy between St Augustine and
Pelagius, the former accepting the neo-platonic hellenic tra¬
dition and defending the proposition of predestination and
submission to the divine order, and the latter refusing to
admit the transmission by generation of original sin and
instead attributing to man’s activity its full value.

This vindication of justice and of man’s struggle will be
found again in Thomas Miinzer, at a breaking-point in history
when new social forces emerged in the sixteenth century; and
we see it looming up in our own day at a new stage in history,
when the working class is shattering the structures of the
older world and so creating the conditions for a renascence,
within Christianity, of the human values of action and com¬
bat.
This Judaeo-Christian current was soon absorbed, and
eventually almost completely submerged, by the Helleno-
Christian current.
This latter was at first the dominant current in the churches
of Asia Minor, the East, and Greece. It was the expression
of a desire to escape from the world, and to secure individual
salvation guaranteed by faith in Christ, the Pauline ‘Master’.

It derived from the break-up of the ‘guardian deity’ religions
1 12
of Greece, which assured man’s salvation within the frame¬

work of the ancient city state. Its development kept in step
with the transformation of the Greek world into a Hellenistic
world, soon to be dominated by the Roman empire. With
the collapse of the city state, and the abandonment of the
individual to his own isolation, the Helleno-Christian current
offered the road to individual salvation in an escape into the
hereafter.
Engels gives us another example from history in which, in
another encounter of social forces, faith assumed another
significance. In the sixteenth century, with the emergence of
new social forces, faith takes on a militant form and, with
Thomas Miinzer, led to an armed rising. These insurgent
peasants wished to see the will of God ‘done on earth as it is
in heaven’, and they proposed to contribute to this victory
by taking up arms. The insurgents, writes Engels, wanted
‘the egalitarian conditions of primitive Christianity to be
accepted as normal for civil society. From the equality of
men before God they deduced civil equality and, to some
degree already, equality of possessions’ (cf. The Peasant War

in Germany, trans. M. J. Olgin, London, 1927, p. 54). He re¬
calls and quotes the premises underlying the agitation of
Thomas Miinzer, the theologian of the revolution. ‘Heaven,
he taught, was to be sought in this life, not beyond; and it
was the task of believers to establish Heaven, the Kingdom
of God, here on earth’ (Ibid , pp. 65-6). For Miinzer, he adds,

‘The Kingdom of God was a society without class differences,
without private property, and without super-imposed state
powers opposed to the members of society’ {Ibid, p. 67).
When the insurrection broke out in the autumn of 1513, the
banner carried by the insurgents of the ‘Bundschuh’ bore the

legend ‘Lord, uphold thy divine justice’ {Ibid, p. 80).
One of the greatest merits of Maurice Thorez was that he
was the first in the international communist movement to
combat the tendencies to simplify and narrow down the
Marxist concept of religion, which, in France, was often
contaminated by bourgeois anti-clericalism and by the re¬

duction of Marx’s premises to those of the eighteenth century.
In his report, dated 26th October 1937, to the Assembly of
party representatives at the Palais de la Mutualite and en¬
titled ‘Communists and Catholics: the outstretched hand’
{Oeuvres, Vol. 14, pp. 159-81), Thorez referred to the well-
known passage in Engels, in which he speaks of the points
of contact between the history of primitive Christianity and
the modern workers’ movement, and went on to say: ‘The
philosophical materialism of communists is removed from
the religious faith of Catholics. Nevertheless, whatever the
opposition between their doctrinal concepts, it is impossible
not to distinguish in both the same warm-hearted ardour to
try to satisfy men’s age-old aspirations for a better life :
‘ “The promise of a redeemer sheds a glow on the first
page of human history,” says the Catholic.’
‘ “The hope of a universal city, reconciled in labour and
love maintains the effort of the proletarians who fight for
the happiness of all men,” says the Communist.’

It was thus that Maurice Thorez extracted from the crimes
of the institution and the mystifications of the ideology the store
of warm-hearted ardour that can, in certain determined
historical conditions, be found in faith; and so, to the great
indignation of those whom he was later to describe as ‘the

fanatical bigots who raise the cry of “Unity but no priests”,’
he commented, in the same address (to quote his actual
words), on ‘the progressive role of Christianity.’ Of this he

distinguished, in past history, two aspects:
the progressive role it has played in its fight to make human
relationships more just and more peaceful.
the progressive role it has played in its contribution to
culture and the arts.
The French Communist Party has remained true to this
line.
On 13th March 1966, when the Central Committee had
finished its work on these problems, Waldeck-Rochet first
recalled the constant elements in Marxist policy in relation

to religion, as follows :
on the historical plane, a class war against the factual soli¬
darity of religious institutions and the reactionary forces
which they sanction and justify.
on the philosophical plane, an ideological war against every
tendency to gloss over the opposition between materialist
philosophy and the principle on which every religion is based.
He then went on to give a definition of sectarianism which
is of cardinal importance for the future of dialogue and co¬
operation between Christians and Marxists: ‘We reject,’ he
said, ‘every limited, sectarian, interpretation of the religious
fact . . . We do not form our impression of religious thought
by looking at it from one side only, noting in it only that
aspect by which it is an obstacle to human progress and a
brake on it.’
What is of capital importance in what Waldeck-Rochet
said is that, in contrast with all earlier forms of atheism,
Marxism can integrate all the human aspirations which are
to be found, in a mystified form, among believers.
*
By bringing out what, in religion, is a reflection of real distress

and what is a protest against it, Marx suggests a method for
analysing the real human content which is mystified in the
form of religion : the method is, starting from an examination
of from what real social relationships the imaginative reflection
is formed and the protest born, to study at the same time in
each particular historical case the active phase of the demand
to go beyond these relationships (even if this demand is mis¬
directed, diverted from the point at which it should be
applied socially and militantly and aimed at the heaven of
personal salvation).
Marx himself embarked on this analysis as early as 1844
in The Jewish Question. In this series of articles he raised the
problem of the human ‘core’ of religions, his starting point
being a criticism of Bruno Bauer’s views on the emancipation

of the Jews.
Marx approves and praises Bauer’s initial approach, which

he sums up as follows: ‘As soon as Jew and Christian come
to see in their respective religions nothing more than stages
in the development of the human mind — snake skins which
have been cast off by history and man as the snake who
clothed himself in them — they will no longer find themselves
in religious opposition, but in a purely critical, scientific and
human relationship’ (in Early Writings, p. 5).
He then goes on to a fundamental criticism of Bauer’s
analysis of the conditions for Jewish emancipation. ‘It was
by no means sufficient to ask: Who should emancipate? Who
should be emancipated? The critic should ask a third ques¬
tion: What kind of emancipation is involved?’ {Ibid, p. 7).
Lacking critical sense, Bauer ‘confuses political emancipa¬
tion and universal human emancipation’ {Ibid, p. 8).
With Bauer, Marx accepts the Hegelian thesis that the
different religions are no more than ‘different degrees of the

development of the human mind, “snake-skins sloughed by
man’’ ’ (p.
5).
With Bauer, Marx accepts Feuerbach’s thesis that religion
is the recognition of man in a roundabout way, through a
mediation, through a mediator (p. 1 1), and that it is because
of that that it is an alienation.
In opposition, however, to Bauer, and carrying the criti¬

cism of religion very much further than did Hegel and
Feuerbach, Marx discloses the roots of religious alienation
in the real world of history.
He reproaches Bauer for not having made a ‘radical’

criticism, a criticism, that is, which gets right down to the
roots; the concrete man.
‘Political emancipation represents a great progress. It is

not the final force in human emancipation’ (p. 10). In fact,
by abolishing privilege and proclaiming political equality,
the French Revolution (bourgeois democracy in general)
1 16
allowed the survival, outside the sphere of the State, of

economic inequalities, with the exploitation and oppression
they produce.
In such a (bourgeois democratic) State, man will continue
to live a double life, a life of heaven and a life of earth.
This division of man between his life which is abandoned
to the jungles of capitalism and his illusory life as an ‘abstract

citizen’ of an abstract community in which he finds ersatz
‘species-being’, is characteristic of both political and religious
alienation.
Marx explains in Capital that the Christian religion is par¬

ticularly adapted to the requirements of an individualist
commercial society, in which man, isolated as an individual,
looks for a heavenly compensation for this solitude in ‘the

cult of the abstract man . . . The religious complement which
is most suited’ to societies of this type. It is this that Marx,
in a passage in which he sums up the main theses of historical
materialism, calls the ‘ earthly nucleus of the cloudy concepts of

religions’.
In the democratic bourgeois state we find a secularised
expression of this split-up of man : it expresses ‘in a human

and secular form, in its political reality, the human basis of
which Christianity is the transcendental expression’ (The

Jewish Question, in Early Writings , p. 16). In this democratic
bourgeois state, ‘the human core of religion is realised in a
profane manner’ [Ibid, p. 17). It is there realised with all its
illusions.
With all its illusions, because, says Marx in The Jewish
Question, ‘the existence of religion is the existence of a defi¬

ciency’ (Ibid, p. 9), of a lack, which is sanctioned by the
bourgeois democratic state. What happens is that man,
abandoned to the self-centred isolation of the jungle of the
commercial economy, and dominated by alien forces which
threaten and crush him, lives1 the ‘split-up’ which charac¬
terises religious life: in his real17life he is an individual, cut
off from properly human life, which, in Marx’s words, is the

life of a ‘species-being’ ; and he seeks a heavenly compensa¬

tion for this lack, this shortcoming. His ‘species-life’, which
is his properly human life (as opposed to the self-centred
individualism entailed by capitalism and, more generally, by
the commercial economy), he projects into heaven, where
love reigns and man recognises himself as a species-being
(living and dying for the whole of mankind) : But this, as
Marx says, he does in a roundabout way, through a mediator,
Christ — not, that is, in real life, but in an ‘illusory compensa¬

tion’, by an alienation.
Thus, in every commercial society,1 religion expresses
everything that is lacking in this world, ‘its solemn comple¬
ment, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is
the fantastic realisation of the human being, inasmuch as the
human being possesses no true reality’ (Marx, Critique of

Hegel's Philosophy of Right, in Early Writings, p. 43).
The bourgeois democratic state sanctions this split: that
of the individual’s real life in civil society (as Hegel and the
young Marx said) and of the ‘citizen’s’ abstract life in a
community in which he exercises absolute sovereignty. ‘It
can dispense with religion, because in this case the human
core of religion is realised in a profane manner’ (Early

Writings, p. 17).
Parting company with Bauer, Marx shows that this political
emancipation, however, is not the universal human emanci¬
pation which he defines at the end of his The Jewish Question.
This is effected when ‘the conflict between the individual,
sensuous existence of man and his species-existence is abol¬
ished’ {Ibid, p. 40). ‘Political emancipation is a reduction of
man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an inde-
U am referring here to the commercial societies of which Christianity,

Marx says, is the most suitable complement. Were it my intention to
write a history of the religions, it would be necessary, as Marx suggests,
to study the conditions in which ‘the closeness of men’s relations either
with one another, or with nature are ideally reflected in the ancient
national religions'
Il8
pendent and egotistic individual, and on the other hand to a

citizen, to a moral person.
‘Human emancipation will be complete only when man
. . . has recognised and organised his own powers as social
powers so that he no longer separates this social power from
himself as political power’ [Ibid, p. 31).
From this historical point of view the concepts of humanism
and of religion which we find in Marx take on their true
materialist and dialectical significance.
Religions are born, live, and die in determined historical
conditions. To confine ourselves to the example of Christianity,
Marx, we have seen, showed in Capita/ how it was particularly
well adapted to a commercial economy in which man is split
up into a self-centred individual in his real life, and a ‘moral
person’ in the heavenly compensation he seeks for the lack of
species-life. What is significant in this is the Kantian abstrac¬
tion of the ‘citizen’ who postulates the ‘ideal’ of a ‘kingdom
of ends’, in which every ‘person’ must be treated as an end
and never as a means, at the very moment when the uni-
versalisation of the laws of capitalism, with its rivalries and
class exploitations, makes every man into a means and every
object into a commodity.
The emancipation of the whole man, of which Marx
speaks at the end of The Jewish Question (Early Writings,
p. 40), abolishes conflict between man’s individual and sen¬
suous life and his species-life, and so ends the divorce be¬
tween the real individual and the ideal ‘person’. In a
society in which there is no longer any division into classes,
the individual shares fully in all mankind’s earlier conquests,
through his culture, and in the continued and conscious
creation of mankind by itself, through his personal responsi¬
bility towards the whole, his real (and not illusory) solidarity
with all, and his certain knowledge that there is no limit to
the creative power of men.
What happens to religion, then? As religion, it disappears;
and what Marx, as early as the stage of political emancipa-
tion (in the bourgeois democratic state) called its ‘human

core’ is realised in a secular way; it is now realised, that is,
not in an illusory and abstract form, which leaves religious
alienation intact, but in a real and practical form.
What was this human core? It was, in the first place, as
Marx emphasized, the ‘lack’, the ‘deficiency’, in which can
be seen in the isolated individual — fragmented and mutilated
by the commercial economy — the absence of the species-life,
the specifically human life, the life, that is, which shares in
all that has been won in history by mankind. Religion is both
a reflection of this lack, this deficiency, and a revolt against it,
even if the revolt remains purely subjective. Primitive Chris¬
tianity was not a slave-revolution but a slave-religion. This
does not prevent Engels, after condemning ‘the baldly ra¬
tionalist point of view’ according to which ‘one type of super¬
stition is just as foolish as another’ (On Religion, p. 313) from
seeing in Christianity ‘a completely new phase in the evolu¬
tion of religion, destined to become one of the most revolu¬
tionary elements in the history of the human mind’ (Ibid,
p. 322). Emphasising the element of ‘protest’, Engels draws
a parallel with socialism and adds that in primitive Chris¬
tianity ‘there is the feeling that man is fighting against a
whole world and that he will emerge as the victor from that
fight: a militant ardour and a certainty of winning which
have completely disappeared in the Christians of our own day
and are to be found only at the opposite pole of society, in
the socialists’ (p. 323). Such is the first aspect of this human
core, this consciousness of a lack and this protest against it :
even if the protest sometimes takes a purely moral utopian,
and mythical, form.
This ‘human core’ in Christianity is not confined to the

‘protest’ against what man lacks. What man, what the alien¬
ated individual lacks in the world of commodities, is the
possibility of living his species-life, as the young Marx said ;
and it is to this that religious alienation provides an answer
by promising that this irrepressible aspiration is indeed satis-
120
fied, but in another world, in a boundless community in

which a law of love reigns supreme.
Here we have another central aspect of the ‘human core’

of Christianity, which gives a mystified answer to a real
question, an illusory satisfaction to an authentic demand.
Herein, too, we have ‘a common denominator’, on the
strictly human plane, between Christians and communists.
This was a point forcibly emphasised by Maurice Thorez as
it was, earlier, by Engels (cf. above, p. 114).
Every Marxist who does not ludicrously impoverish dia¬
lectical materialism and the concept of man which derives
from it, must necessarily rediscover this thesis. Thus, Aragon,
for example, criticising his own earlier ideas, in which ‘the

primitive materialist I then was condemned the Christian
supernatural,’ wrote (from hiding in occupied France), ‘The

relation which is born from the negation of the real by the
supernatural is essentially ethical in character, and the super¬
natural is always the materialisation of a moral symbol which
is violently in opposition to the ethic of the world from the
midst of which it arises.’ He commented on ‘the generous,
human element in this divine faith . . . which is a concept of
man that the communist and the Christian can have, but
never the Nazi’ (De V exactitude historique en poesie).

Aragon, too, tries to define this ‘common denominator’ in
certain aspects of our ‘concept of man’. He finds in St John
of the Cross the highest expression of love, and relates it to
its ‘human core’ :
John of the Cross, you are but the name the Christian gives
to all who in their love
write their own doom.
And I, as you whose passion knows no bourne,
I pass by the bed on which, beyond the love of God, you mourn.
For from this world must come the answer to the question that is me:
And he who casts away this world is lost: he finds,
As he cuts short his road,
121
but the dizzy cliff that runs beside the path:

For of this world is the answer,
Of this world the love and the high deed
Of this man John, who bears the name of the Cross.
(.Le Fou d'Elsa, p. 355.)
The Marxist concept of alienation, therefore, in no way leads

to a method of reducing man and his mind to the historical,
economic and social conditions in which they are born, nor
to a deductive method which starts with those conditions.
For Marx and Marxists, alienation is not a moral but an
historical category: the subjective contradictions within man
are not separable from his social contradictions. If we con¬
sider man independently of society, alienation is necessarily
treated in an abstract way, whereas for Marx, as a materialist,
alienation is not simply a theory based on illusion, but is in
the first place alienation from real life and, with that as its
starting point, it entails for him the study of the illusions
which this fundamental alienation produces.
In our own day, the building up of socialism in numerous
countries enables us to develop more deeply Marx’s teaching,

in this as in all other spheres.
In Capital, Marx not only eliminated from the notion of
alienation (and both the word and the concept are to be
found in Capital) all that is contained of idealist speculation
in Hegel and of metaphysical anthropology in Feuerbach,
but also studied scientifically a particular form of it to which
he gave the name of ‘the fetishism of commodities’.

He showed that in a capitalist regime the principal source
of alienation is the exploitation of man by man, with all the
machinery for the crushing of man which is entailed by this
class antagonism and class domination. From this it follows
that the inauguration of socialism by putting an end, through
collective ownership of the means of production, to the funda¬
mental phenomenon of class exploitation, tears up the
strongest roots of man’s present alienation.

122
To conclude, however, that this means that with the com¬

ing of socialism all possibility of alienation is removed,
would be to forget in the first place that Marx holds that,
quite apart from specifically capitalist class relationships and
even from the various forms of division of society into classes,
the ‘fetishism of commodities’ derives from these commodity
relationships themselves. Thus, this fetishism is found even
before the appearance of slavery, with the birth of the first
commodity relationships; and it will continue to have an
objective foundation so long as a profit economy remains, so
long as the law of value still operates as the accompaniment
of commodity relationships, profoundly transformed though
they may be in the conditions of a socialist regime. Inter¬
human relations will still not be ‘transparent’ since they will
pass through the mediation of commodity production.
Alienation, moreover, has other social roots, in particular
those that are linked with the existence of the State. Here
again, the new class relations which come in with socialism
will no longer, it is true, necessarily produce the forms of
‘bureaucracy’ which are closely connected with class privi¬
lege and are characteristic of the machinery of State in a
capitalist regime; nevertheless, the fact that the State must
necessarily still exist during the building up first of socialism
and then of communism, produces (as historical experience
has shown) specific forms of bureaucracy, with all that en¬
tails for the individual’s attitude towards the socialist State.
To deny the possibility and the reality of certain forms of
alienation in a socialist regime, not only makes it impossible
to explain the persistence of the phenomenon of religion, by
denying the existence of the objective conditions of its de¬
velopment and treating it as no more than a survival: it is
also to adopt an apologetic attitude towards the building up
of socialism which hinders its development; it is to foster
what can truly be called ‘socialist
123 irrealism’ in art and ethics,
and to rob the building up of socialism of the leaven provided
by the critical spirit.
Marx’s materialist analysis was never the victim of such

illusions. ‘The religious reflection of the real world can, in
any case, only then finally vanish when the practical re¬
lations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly in¬
telligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow-men and
to nature’’ (Capital , Vol. I, p. 79).
This concept of transparent and reasonable relations with
his fellow-men and with nature enables us to see more deeply
into the Marxist concept of the roots of religion. Nothing
can be perfectly ‘transparent and reasonable’ for man unless

he has made, constructed, created it himself. That is why
mathematics, for example, has always been regarded as a
model of intelligibility.
Now, while Marx was constantly showing that man,
through labour (in its specifically human form) is his own
creator, and while on countless occasions he pointed out that
man creates his own history, he always combated the illusion
that man is also the creator of nature, or even the arbitrary
creator of a human history which does not have to take into
account the necessities of nature, and even those of this
‘second nature’ (humanised, indeed, but none the less objec¬

tive) which man has moulded in the actual course of his
history.
In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx comments
ironically on ‘the supernatural creative power’ attributed

to human labour by economists who pass over the fact that
‘labour depends on nature’ and that ‘it is only in so far as

man treats nature as belonging to him’ that his labour be¬
comes a source of wealth (in Selected Works, p. 319). This
idealist mystification has a class character : it serves to mask
the very principle of capitalist exploitation: to become the
owner of the object is to enslave the subject.
Marx’s materialist position 1is24accordingly perfectly clear :

labour is the creative act which creates not nature, but man
and his history in his encounter with nature.
Thus, before the division of society into classes, before even

the appearance of relations of production, and quite apart
from what Lenin calls the ‘social roots of religion’, there is in
the consciousness of men a reflection (based on fantasy) of
external powers. ‘In the beginnings of history,’ says Engels,
‘it was the forces of nature which were first so reflected’
(.Anti-Diihring , p. 353) ; and later he was to add (in his letter
to Conrad Schmidt dated 27 October, 1890) that it would be
‘pedantic to try to find economic causes’ for these first
religious representations.
Side by side, then, with the social roots, there are (as Lenin
said) other roots, in religion as in idealism, which spring
from the very movement of knowledge — gnoseological roots.
Lenin emphasises that knowledge ‘is not a reflection in a mirror
but a complex act . . . which includes the possibility of an
imaginative flight from life; and, even more, it includes the
possibility of a transformation of the abstract concept into
an imaginative fantasy (which ultimately =God). For even
in the most elementary generalisation there is a certain
imaginative content. And vice versa it is absurd to deny
the role of imagination even in the most exact science’.

Here Lenin forcibly restates one of the major themes in
the Marxist theory of knowledge. Marx, we have seen,
showed that it was from labour that was born every form of
specifically human activity, whether in technology, in re¬
ligion or in art, all of which are forms of activity that exist
in no other animal species. Now, what characterises specifi¬
cally human labour is that its end pre-exists in the conscious¬
ness of man and constitutes the law which guides his action.
It is this active presence of the future, this anticipation, this
project, which is characteristic of man. This imaginative
or conceptual projection lies at the root of all human
activity.
The emphasis laid on the ‘active side’ of knowledge is one

particular case of this. 125
A project is an anticipation of the real. Starting from con-

ditions in which it is born, and as a function of them,

consciousness projects its own ends. This projection is initially
imaginative and mythical. Even when mythical, the project
is a way of severing oneself from the immediate given, of
transcending it, and anticipating the real, either in order to
justify the existing order (reflection), or in order to rebel
against it (protest) and endeavour to change it.
Religion is a project by man, but a mystified project.
‘In primitive man,’ writes Henri Wallon (De L'acte a la
pensee, pp. 106-8), ‘the attempt to explain the visible by the
invisible is not a sort of aberration that leads him away from
the real ... It is the condition indispensable to every intel¬
lectual effort, if its aim is to transcend the data provided by
experience that is simply lived, and, to discover, behind the
effects in which our activity is involved, the causes from
which they result, and from which it will be possible to
derive procedures enabling us to act upon them other than
by reacting to them immediately through sensori-motor
means alone. Thus there is a similarity of function in both
myth and science : they are both the world of causes, under¬
lying and involved in the world of sensible effects.’
Ritual is a first technique, as myth is a first science. ‘On
the day when man’s, activity was guided in the satisfaction
of his needs, by something other than his automations, on the
day when it was subordinated to rituals that were distinct
from the thing itself, when it sought to give reality to images
that transcended its sensible appearances, on that day there
began the great speculative adventure’ {Ibid, p. 1 15) by which

our species has been qualitatively differentiated from the
animal kingdom.
‘The occult,’ Wallon goes on to say (p. 1 15), ‘is a category

or rather the matrix of categories through the medium of
which man has endeavoured, in order to act upon the uni¬
verse, to conceptualise and know it, taking it as being distinct
from the simple situations which belong to crude immediate
experience, assuming it to possess a deeper reality than is
126
found in ephemeral appearances, looking in it for something

other than a mere occasion for his own activities (whether
impromptu or the fruit of habit), attributing to it constancy
of principles, and identifying it with lasting powers, influences
that have to be submitted to or dominated, and reasons that
can be foreseen with certainty.’

We would be greatly mistaken in concluding that this
genetic analysis of knowledge tends to obliterate the frontier
between concept and myth, science and religion.
Wallon brings out in the different stages of the child’s
development, the complex dialectic by which the fusion of
thought and reality is effected in a series of hypotheses which
are shown to be untrue and operations which have to be
corrected. Thought is defined as reflection, but the reflection
is not present for us at the beginning; it is built up actively
and progressively.
This conception leaves no room either for idealism, or for
agnosticism, but involves a dialectical materialism ‘which is
not belief in an immediate identity between the crude im¬
pression things make on us and their essence, but is, on the
contrary, the certainty that there is progress and change in
what we know and that, at every period, this is a witness
to the laws and structures that our technical advances
enable us to discover and bring into action in nature’ (pp.

120-1).
Henri Wallon has studied in minute detail the transition
from immediate practical understanding to that which uses
rituals and myths as a starting point for its development into
science.
Knowledge of the world progresses dialectically by over¬

coming the contradictions between the ever wider approxi¬
mations of techniques and hypotheses and the recalcitrance
of a reality which is not immediately identical with the image
we form of it, and only gradually lends itself to the techniques
127
by which we try to comprehend it.
Henri Wallon’s researches in this field follow on the tradi-
tion of classical rationalism, that of Descartes, Spinoza, Leib¬

niz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx, and not that of the minor
positivist, scientist, dogmatic, and limited rationalism of the
end of the nineteenth century.
Again, we would be mistaken if, pushing our inquiry into
the roots of religion beyond its social roots, right back to
those which derive from man’s relations with nature, to those
which derive from the very act of knowledge, we then attri¬
buted eternal life to religion. All we are showing, following
Lenin, is that the religious attitude is not without foundation
in knowledge itself. As he says, it is ‘a barren flower, but a

barren flower that has bloomed on the living tree of man’s
living knowledge.’
We cannot, therefore, avoid reflecting on the future of this
‘great speculative adventure’ of which Wallon writes, and

seeing how what man has for countless centuries dreamed of
in a religious form will develop in a non-mystified form, in
an authentically scientific thought. Einstein has expressed
with great clarity this problem of the relations between
science and religion in our time. ‘What,’ he asks, ‘are the
feelings and needs that have led man to religious thought and
belief in the widest sense of the words?’ (The World As I See

It, trans. Alan Harris, London, 1935, pp. 23-4).
After speaking of primitive man’s fears as he confronts the
forces of nature, and then dealing with the social roots of
religion, he adds that beyond these anthropomorphic con¬
ceptions there is what he calls a ‘cosmic religious feeling’ . Man
‘wants to experience the universe as a single significant
whole’ (p. 25). This ‘cosmic religious feeling is the strongest
and noblest incitement to scientific research’. It is ‘a deep
conviction of the rationality of the universe’, a ‘rapturous
amazement at the harmony of natural law’ (p. 28). And of
this ‘cosmic religious feeling which as yet acknowledges
neither dogmas nor God,’ he adds, ‘it is the most important
function of art and science to awaken it and keep it alive’
(p. 26).
128
This is not to say that religion will never die : it means the
determination to lose no part of the human riches that have
been won through mankind’s religious experience, and to

develop all those dimensions of man which for so many
thousand years have been explored in the mystified form of
divine attributes.
What contribution, then, has Christianity, which has played

so large a part in our area of civilisation, made to our concept
of man?
The fundamental and constant characteristic of the ancient
Graeco-Roman wisdom is that it situates and defines man
in relation to a totality of which he is a phase or part, whether
it be the cosmos or the city, the order of nature or the con¬
ceptual order.
From Thales to Democritus the world is conceived as a
being that is given. Man can know it in its ultimate reality
and through this knowing he can attain the highest dignity
open to man: the consciousness of his own destiny, and
happiness.
From Plato to the Stoics, it is again knowing which eman¬
cipates and leads to mastery of self and happiness, even if
it is through different conceptions of ultimate reality, which
can be sensible or intelligible, of the order of nature or of
the conceptual order.
Standing at the watershed between these two great currents
of ancient thought, Socrates, more than any other thinker,
made knowing, which is the keystone of ancient humanism,
the supreme end of man: the moment when, regaining pos¬
session of himself from his starting point in nature, he comes
to realise that this rationality of the world is the very law of
his own mind; the moment when the essential thing becomes
precisely this consciousness of self, this discovery of meaning,
129
that is, of the rational order.
This knowledge of self, if one taught, with Protagoras, that
man is the centre and measure of all things, might lead to

individualism and a retreat into the isolated self; but with
Socrates, in the dramatic presentation of the Laws, for ex¬
ample, it remains a profound awareness that the presence in
man of reason is possible only because this man belongs to
the city and this city dwells in him.
In this philosophy of being, man is greater the more he is
what is, through his consciousness of this being, through his
participation in this order, the order of the cosmos and of
the city.
At first Christianity represents a break-away from this
Hellenic concept of the world. As a continuation of Judaism,
it substitutes a philosophy of act for a philosophy of being: in
this philosophy of act, which is dominated not by the notion
of ‘logos’ but by that of creation, man’s value consists in
having consciousness not indeed of what is, but of what he is
not, of what he lacks.
With St Augustine, man is measured not in relation to the
dimensions of the earth or the stars, nor according to the
laws of the city or of any universal. He exists, not as part of a
totality of nature or of concepts, but in his particularity, as
subjectivity, as interiority, in virtue of the intervention of the
God who dwells in him and removes him from every given
‘order’. ‘We overstep the narrow limits of our knowledge’

writes St Augustine (De Anima, IV, 6, 8), ‘we cannot take
possession of ourselves, and yet we are not outside our¬
selves.’
In its violent reaction against pagan wisdom, primitive
Christianity readily sacrificed, for this conquest of subjectivity
and interiority, the rationality so patiently won by the aes¬
thetic and rational humanism of Greek thought. In the fourth
century, Lactantius (Divinae Institutiones, II, 5) argues for the
will of God, against the fatalism of the Stoics and their con¬
cept of order and the rational.
The world is seen no longer as the inevitable unfolding of
a rational law, but as a gift of love.
130
From this new conception of the world is derived a new

conception of man: his goal is no longer the grandeur of
being equated, by knowledge , with the eternal order of the
cosmos and the sovereign law of the city. His infinite value
is that he in turn is, in the image of God, creator with the
capacity for gift and love, facing an absolute future which is
not a logical extension of the past or a phase in a given
totality, but the possibility of beginning a new life : to this
he is called by a God who is no longer totality, nor concept,
nor harmonious and completed image of the human order,
but both a personal God and a hidden God, whom no
knowledge can give us, and to whom only faith can open
the road — always, however, in suffering and uncertainty.
Thus Graeco-Roman antiquity on the one hand, and
Judaeo-Christian antiquity on the other, brought to light
(but separately and in radical opposition to one another)
two demands of humanism: the demand for a rational
mastery of the world, and that for a specifically human
historical initiative.
In the western tradition the problem and programme of
humanism was henceforth to be the keeping hold of both
ends of the chain even if we should be torn apart in so doing.
This the Renaissance did not succeed in doing: for at that
time there appeared again with humanism — and once again
separately — all the Graeco-Roman ambitions for a mastery,
at once rational and mathematical, technical and experi¬
mental, of the world; and, with the Reformation, all the
agonising Judaeo-Christian doubts, which derive from man’s

divine and infinite vocation and his own irreparable limita¬
tion, and came back with the theology of sin and grace in
Luther and of predestination in Calvin.
The greatest minds stated the problem without finding a
solution to it. Pico della Mirandola, in his De Magnitudine
Hominis, gave paradoxical expression, in Christian terms, to
the claim of Prometheus: ‘We have given you, Adam, no
form and no determined place in the world; but we have
given you eyes with which to see it, and hands with which
to mould it, so that it may depend on you alone whether
you degrade yourself to the lower level of the brute beasts or
raise yourself to the higher level of the divine beings.’ In this

wonderful promise of a great humanism we find side by side,
but unconnected, the Greek sense of freedom, which is know¬
ledge and power, and the Christian sense, which is gift, since
for the Christian this freedom of knowledge and power is
granted by God to man. The same unresolved dualism is still
to be found in Descartes, forging the rational and mathe¬
matical tools which are to enable men to become masters and
owners of nature, and at the same time asserting that even
mathematical truths are such only by an arbitrary decree of
God.
This uneasy equilibrium was to be upset immediately after
Descartes and to give, on the one hand, in Leibniz’s Mona-

dology, the classic theory of the person — every soul is an image
of the universe and every mind an image of God, ‘every mind
is a little divinity in its own sphere’ — and on the other hand,
over against this God-filled world, that of the eighteenth-
century French materialists, a world empty of God and
promising man, within a naturalist conception of necessity,
absolute mastery of the universe, of society, and of himself.
The first attempt at the great synthesis came from the
classical German philosophy, and notably from Kant and
Fichte, who brought together the two ends of the chain in
the concept of autonomy, the necessity of the rational law with¬
out which there is no science and no world, and the freedom
of man’s creative act, without which there is no moral in¬

itiative and responsibility and no history.
Once again, however, the chain broke, for the synthesis
was never effected. Kant tried in vain to bring about the
unity of reason and freedom of science and ethics, of pure
reason and practical reason, in a theory of art which he him¬
self realised rested on the postulate of an ultimate harmony.
The ageing Fichte moved from a ‘doctrine of science’, based

132
on a free act of reason, to a mysticism in which science and
reason are ultimately subordinated to faith, and man’s free

creation to an assent to the will of God.
Goethe’s Faustian equilibrium of knowledge and freedom

still remained a dream and a promise, the finest of humanity’s
dreams and promises, but still a dream, always recurring and
always postponed.
The divergence is found again in Hegel’s majestic rational
system of nature and history on the one hand, and on the
other in Kierkegaard’s insistence on both subjectivity, radical

in its particularity, and transcendence.
Christianity in fact raised the problem of transcendence,
and with it, moreover, that of subjectivity; indeed, even the
way of approaching the problem of subjectivity is specific
to Christianity. Transcendence is a dangerous word, for it
is burdened with a weighty past history of confusions and
mystifications. Traditionally, the notion implies belief in the
beyond, in the ‘supernatural’, with all that those notions

contain of irrationality, of the miraculous, of mystery, and
ultimately, of deception.
Does this mean that when we look at this central aspect
of the religious attitude, we must not ask ourselves to what
need, to what question, to what experience, this faith in
transcendence corresponds?
Under the appeal to transcendence lies this real experience,
that while man belongs to nature he differs from things and
animals and that, with his capacity continually to outstrip
himself, he is never a completed being.
As Marx explains, when, with the appearance of specifi¬
cally human labour — of labour, that is, which has as its law
the end or project aimed at — man raises himself above all
the other animal species and begins an historical develop¬
ment whose rhythm is incommensurable with that of bio¬
logical evolution, then we come up against a qualitative leap,
133
a true supersession, a transcendence (in the strictly etymo¬
logical sense of the word) in relation to nature. Man is part
of nature, but with man, through culture, a higher level of

nature begins to emerge. This is the real human core of this
notion of transcendence : transcendence is the alienated ex¬
pression of the leap beyond nature effected in culture. That
the very creature who crossed this threshold, man, should
have been so astounded by what he did that he imagined
another order of reality than that of nature, a super-nature,
a beyond, filled with promises and threats, that is the typical
reaction of alienation. To work out a concept of dialectical
supersession that is not alienated, is therefore to show — and
dialectical materialism enables us to do this — that this pos¬
sibility of initiative and creation is not an attribute of God :
it is, on the contrary, the specific attribute of man, and the
attribute which distinguishes him from all the other animal
species.
This concept of transcendence enables us to bring out an¬
other aspect of the Christian contribution : the sense of sub¬
jectivity. While for Greek humanism man is a fragment of the
universe and a member of the city, Christianity, following
Judaism, emphasised the possibility for man of beginning a
new future; it stressed the element of subjectivity in man’s life.

Between action coming from the external world and man’s
action going out to meet the external world in order to deal
with this threat, lies consciousness at its various levels: pain
and effort, quest and dream, hope and love, danger and
decision. That is what subjectivity means. Christianity has
accumulated a rich store of experience on this plane, from
St Augustine to Kierkegaard, from Pascal and Racine to
Claudel, while elaborating, in its adoption of the neo-platonist
themes of renunciation of the external world, the doctrines of
fatalism and resignation.
With transcendence and subjectivity, love is one of Chris¬
tianity’s most undeniable contributions to the figure of man.
When the Christian speaks of the*34transcendence of love, when
he thinks of it and even lives it in an alienated way, that is,
in terms of exteriority (as Marx showed in The Holy Family
in connection with ‘Fleur de Marie’1) we have to find out

what need, or suffering, or hope, can have brought him to
this alienation. If we have not first mutilated man by ruling
out all subjectivity and all true interiority and so reducing
him to being nothing but a product of social structures, com¬
pletely determined by them; if, instead, we have shown, with
Marx, that what is stifled and crushed by the structures of
capital is precisely a human reality constantly developing in
history but not created in its entirety by the structures of the
time, and so capable of being a protest against them — then
we shall be able to understand how this or that impotent
protest has led to the projection outside this world, into an¬
other world, into a hereafter, of a love which is this iron
world’s ‘other’. It is only right to remind, as Marx did in

Capital, those who have constructed this dream in all honesty
that those who talk most about charity and love of one’s
neighbour, have more often than not used those fine words
as a hypocritical excuse for perpetuating a social system
whose law is the opposite of love: permanent violence against
the worker and the perversion, by the very law of the regime,
of all human feelings; we should point out, too, as Engels did
in The Origin of the Family, what conditions must be realised
for a just and sound relationship between, for example, men
and women: in other words, socialism.
Nevertheless this criticism, just and necessary though it is,
must not be exclusively destructive; it must lead to the recog¬
nition of the existence of a real problem. It is a fact that even
within feudal or capitalist social relations it has been possible
for exemplary instances of love — even if they have come up
against sometimes fatal obstacles — to emerge and develop, to
find forms of human relationships which, while deeply rooted
XA character in a story by Eugene Sue, a serial-writer immensely popular

in the 1830’s and 1 840’s. ‘We come across Marie surrounded by criminals,
135 In this debasement she preserves
a prostitute, a serf in a criminals’ tavern.
a human nobleness of soul and a human beauty . . . that win for her the
name of Fleur de Marie’ (The Holy Family, p. 225).
in the physiological relations, relations of production, and

political relations from which they are born, cannot entirely
be reduced to them.
This love has found admirable forms of artistic expression,
from courtly poetry to Tristan and Iseult, from St Teresa of
Avila to Racine, from Marceline Desbordes-Valmore to
Aragon’s Le Fou d’Elsa, from Eluard to Claudel’s The Satin
Slipper.
Conversely, we have henceforth historic proof of what
Marx and Engels foresaw in theory when they recognised
the relative autonomy of superstructures: it is not enough for
socialism to establish new social relations if it is automatically
to produce new human relations. Forms of sensibility and
conceptions of love that are still feudal or bourgeois in type
can still continue to exist in a socialism regime: sometimes
perverted, as in the old regimes, sometimes, too, retaining
the same human beauty as that which characterised what
were its finest expressions in those regimes. It is still difficult
to make out the features of a new human physiognomy of
love: quite apart from the underestimating of the relative
autonomy of superstructures which led, in films or novels, to
lovers’ conversations about productivity, it is a fact confirmed

by experience that in the most successful works, in Sholokov
or in La Ballade du Soldat, it is difficult to see what, in the
poems or on the stage, differentiates the finest sentiments
from those expressed in the great romantic or epic works of
the past. A Christian feels perfectly at home in them. Here
again we meet a problem, a problem of theory, which we
cannot evade.
If we turn aside from this aspect of living reality, if we
confine ourselves to the just and necessary critical denuncia¬
tion of what, in the very law of a class regime, prevents the
full flowering of a completely human love, then the Christian
(even if he considers our demonstration perfectly just) will
continue to recognise that this regime (though he may well
call it, more inexactly and metaphysically, ‘this world’) de-

136
grades love, and so he will dream of ‘another world’, a ‘here¬

after’ in which this aspiration for love will be satisfied.
*
Moreover, the specifically Christian attitude to love cannot

be confused with a variant of Platonism which contrasts ‘the
other world’ or ‘the hereafter’ with this world, and calls on
us to cut ourselves off from this world, to turn our backs on
it and emigrate to the ‘other’ world, to the hereafter, to

God.
This dualism, idealism, disincarnation is, on the other
hand, characteristic of heresy, from Docetism to the Cathars;
while the essential Christian teaching, even if it has often
been host to the parasite of Hellenism or gnosticism, is based
on incarnation, and entails very different relations with
the other man, our ‘neighbour’. It means treating every be¬

ing, no matter who, as though he were Christ, as though he
were the living God, standing before us. The love of man is
one with the love of God. That, moreover, is why the mystics,
following a tradition that is as old as the Song of Songs, speak
of the love of God in images appropriate to human love : as
can be seen, in particular, in St Teresa of Avila.
It is important to stress this cardinal aspect of the Christian
heritage, because — so long as we distinguish the true contri¬
bution of Christianity from all that it can sometimes be con¬
verted into by what Nietzsche called ‘a Platonism for the
masses’ — the new dimensions and significance given to love
by Christianity are the richest contribution it has made to
the continued creation of man by man. At the same time, it
is what can be most fully integrated in the Marxist concept
of man and the world.
To show that this is so, one has only to compare the
Christian conception of love with the loftiest definition of
love given by the great humanism of Greece: to compare
1
Plato’s ‘eros’ with the Christian37 ‘agape’.
The Platonic concept of love or eros, in the Symposium or
the Phaedrus, is characterised by a movement which raises us

up towards the supreme Being and the supreme good, by
detaching us from the terrestrial world. In an ascending dia¬
lectic which carries us from love of the beauty of the body to
love of the beauty of the mind, and so to love of beauty ‘in

itself’, love (eros) takes us outside this world, outside other
men, outside time. It is a desire that can be satisfied by
nothing in the real world, a desire that is incompatible with
the daily world of men. The other being, accordingly, is
loved not for what it is but for that which it evokes of another
reality. In this love there is no ‘neighbour’. The other being

is no more than opportunity to rise up towards a reality that
is incommensurable with it. Thus everyone loves the other
only from a starting point in himself: or rather, what he loves
is not another being but love itself.
Before the teaching of Christianity entertained the para¬
sitic growth of Hellenism, of Platonism, of gnosticism, and
long before the centuries-old adulterations ranging from the
Imitation of Christ to certain forms of courtly love which it
inspired, right up to the modern and still current versions of
a hypocritical condemnation of the flesh or a contempt of the
world that was simply a form of self-interest, what was most
radically new in Christianity was quite the opposite : it was
its transition, through the central experience of the Incarna¬
tion, of the God-man and the man-God, from the love of love
to the love of the other. It was that, through incarnate love,
it gave an absolute value to the other man and to the world.
In the fundamental (that is, the Christo-centric) Christian
tradition, to turn to God in no way implies turning away
from the world, since the living God can be met in every
being. This is what Cardinal Bellarmine in the sixteenth
century called ‘the ascent to God by the ladder of created

beings’, and what in the twentieth century Pere Teilhard de
Chardin calls ‘transcending by passing through’ : in ‘the
evolution of chastity’ he writes that ‘it is by carrying the
world with us that we advance into the embrace of God,’ and
138
teaches us ‘to find in the faith of Christ a leaven for natural

activity.’
To give a concrete picture of Christianity’s new contribu¬
tion in the matter of love, even for those who have ceased
to be Christians, we can contrast, in our own day, Platonic
love with that of two of the greatest contemporary poets,
Claudel and Aragon.
What is most striking in Claudel’s love is precisely the force

with which the reality of the other being is asserted. In his fine
book, Le drame de Claudel, Jacques Madaule writes that ‘the

communion of saints sums up the whole of Claudel’s drama.’
Now, the communion of saints is not expressed in the abstract
idea that the life of every man has repercussions on that of all
other men. Claudel’s ‘poetic art’ is founded on this certain
belief that every being, in its own singularity, has need of all
the others: each individual being calls for its complement,
and this complement is nothing less than the entire universe.
This is the profound significance of love, of a love that is
indistinguishably both human and divine. For woman con¬
stitutes for man, and man for woman, the necessary comple¬
ment. Spirituality cannot develop fully except in the couple.
‘What are you, my daughter,’ says Anne Vercors to Violaine,
‘but the full flowering of what is feminine in me?’ (cf. The
Tidings Brought to Mary, trans. L. M. Sill, London, 1916, p.
51)*
In every being, love is a witness to the impossibility of
living in isolation. In Claudel, no doubt, as in all religious
tradition, what lies before man as his task is to be found
behind him, as his origin. This vast human project, always
growing greater and always held up, of constructing and
realising the unity and plenitude of man, is then seen, by an
inversion which in our eyes is alienation, as a return to a
primordial unity, as though the end of love were the re¬
construction of our lost Paradise.
But what is still true, apart 1from
39 this mystification, is that
love of the other as other, in his radical otherness, calls us
to emerge from ourselves, to break through our own limits
and transcend ourselves. It is through love that ‘the drop of

water feels that the whole ocean is ever crying out for it’
{Cent phrases pour un eventail ). Thus every being finds in an¬
other the key to its own self, finds its own meaning. That is
to say the revelation of the part it can play in a vaster totality.
Love is initiation into the passion of the universe.
‘/ was awaiting an answer, but in my soul and my body I

received
More than an answer, the drawing out of all my substance,
As the secret locked in the heart of the planets, the true bond
That links my being to a greater being. ’
It is thus that Violaine speaks, and this is the language of
love, too, which always points beyond itself. Physical desire
takes on a new meaning in man. Religious mystification be¬
gins with the belief that this meaning has already in some
way been impressed upon nature by a God; whereas for us
Marxists the meaning does not exist at the level of nature
but comes in only with the emergence of man, from the
moment when, with work and the anticipation of ends which
defines it as specifically human, in relation to this end or
project, everything takes on meaning, and value can be born.
For us, specifically human love is man’s creation, not a gift

of God. It is, for us, a decision of man’s, a human initiative
and responsibility, and not ‘the inexorable summons of the
wondrous voice’.
Love belongs to the order not of nature but of culture : for a
value cannot be given ‘from outside’, even though the giver

be a God. Nature precedes meaning. Only a human initiative
can give meaning to that which precedes meaning: nature.
In man, love, even physical love, is a fact not of nature but
of culture. The victory of love is no more written beforehand
into a providential plan than is any other victory, and if we
are to conquer we cannot be dispensed from fighting.
Otherwise — and this line of thought is particularly signifi¬
cant in Claudel’s last writings — every mind enters into a
140
direct dialogue with God, without passing through the other

being, and human love is no more than a phase that is super¬
seded, as subjectivity was in Hegel’s ‘absolute knowledge’.
Claudel’s Christophe Colomb is The Satin Slipper without Dame
Prouheze; his Jeanne <T Arc is still The Satin Slipper, this time
without Rodrigue de Manacor, and Tobie et Sarah is no longer
the human dialogue of love but the language of allegory
called in to evoke a higher reality, separate from the real
couple.
One of the most striking characteristics of Aragon’s work
is its power of integrating, in a materialist and dialectical
point of view, what is deepest in Christian love. This alone
would suffice to give his work an exemplary character. More¬
over, Aragon in no way disguises this attempt by atheism
to recover the divine. In his Entretiens on Le Fou dPElsa he
returns to a theme to which he had already referred : ‘Marx

turned the dialectic of the idealist Hegel the right side up
again, and I want to try to do more or less the same with
mysticism.’ He gives an example of this ‘reversal’. ‘One of the

greatest Arabic mystics, Ibn Arabi, said, “In reality, a being
loves nobody but his creator”: should one not reverse this
proposition and say: he who loves me, creates me? This is
the mystic’s proposition expressed the right way round . . .

For me this means, without any doubt, that the principle by
which I am created is to be found in the very object of my
love. At all events, here we have mysticism, diverted from
God to woman, and in it I find an explanation of what poetry
is ... In Le Fou, poetry appears as mysticism put back on its
feet, that is to say, as the source from which mysticism derives
its strength . . . mysticism has changed its meaning: it has
become poetry.’
It would be easy to make a mistake here, and liken Ara¬
gon’s position to Feuerbach’s, who substitutes for ‘God is
love’ the phrase ‘love is God’.
Just as the ‘reversal’ of Hegel by Marx cannot be likened
to the ‘reversal’ of Hegel by Feuerbach, so the inversion of
141
Christian mysticism in Aragon cannot be likened to Feuer¬

bach’s inversion of Christian love. Just as Marx was not satis¬
fied to invert Hegel’s system by saying ‘matter’ where Hegel
said ‘mind’, so Aragon is not satisfied to say ‘love of Elsa’
where the mystics say ‘love of God’.
The inversion affects not the system but the method.
Here again, the meaning of love is not already written into
nature by a God : the meaning is a specifically human creation.
Aragon is vividly conscious of this. In the trial of Elsa’s mad¬

man, when the Mejnun says of Elsa, ‘I have given you the
place reserved for God’, and the judges raise a cry of sacrilege
because in so doing he ‘is offering an obscene worship to a
woman who is visible’, ‘My son,’ says the old man, ‘how
could man be sacrilegious when the whole law resides in him
alone?’
Here we see the radical difference between Aragon’s atheism
and the Christian concept, even in the secularised but still
‘naturalist’ form given to it by Feuerbach.
Bearing that in mind, it still remains true that it is to
Christian love that love owes, in Aragon, its being rooted in
so great a depth of being.
In this connection, the poem to St John of the Cross, in
Le Fou d’Elsa, is illuminating.
‘John of the Cross , I ask you
What is man , and what is love . . .
John of the Cross, you are but the name the Christian gives to
all who in their love write their own doom .’
Surrealism saw in love the metaphysical experience of the
marvellous, the most intimate form of man’s relations with
the world. For Aragon, it was the first stage of the ‘reversal’,
corresponding to the Feuerbachian stage of Marx’s reversal
of Hegel.
Aragon’s encounter with Marxism enabled him to go be¬

yond this phase, integrating it with a loftier conception.
Since Les Cloches de Bale, love acquires an historical and
social dimension. Just as Marx defined the individual as the
142
sum of his social relations, so all the contradictions and all

the lacerations of an age and a society are condensed in the
pair of lovers, as though in a microcosm. That is why, in
this torn-asunder world, ‘there is no such thing as happy

love’. In the fate of each couple, Berenice and Aurelien,
Cecile and Jean, Louis and Elsa, the whole fate of our century
is reflected, is concentrated and bonded into one.
At the same time, however, love displays the specifically
human dimension of history: poetry and love disclose man’s
transcendence in relation to each of his provisional realisa¬
tions. This transcendence is the only transcendence known to
atheists: the future. In this profound sense, ‘woman is man’s

future’. With love, a new dimension is added to the world:
Elsa’s love is the promise and warrant of a fully human
future.
In virtue of Berenice’s experience, who dares to ‘pursue in

this being of flesh the quest for the absolute,’ Aragon tells us,
‘there is but one passion so devouring that no words can
describe it ... it is the hunger for the absolute.’
Thereby all idolatry is transcended: ‘From the God who
is negated, a new God is born.’ All opposition, too, between
master and slave, being and having: ‘Love is a place in
which is developed this knowledge which is never possession.’
‘Poetry is the being which carries knowledge beyond having.’
Swept along in such a movement towards the other in his
particularity which insists that we detach ourselves from
impersonal totality, Aragon can thus exclaim :
‘Listen to me, you people of Christ, we too have loved.’

Love is a privileged experience of the profound truth that
the genesis of mind takes place through and not outside
matter, that mind is not the opposite of nature but the
information of nature.
Just as the moral value of actions is in proportion to the
energy with which they inspire us, so the quality of a love
is judged by the richness of 14the
3 thoughts and actions it
stimulates in us, by the dormant energies it arouses.
It may well be that through love we grasp being itself in

its working, in its creative future, and that we can see it in
that force which Pere Teilhard had in mind when he wrote,
‘Some day, after harnessing the winds, and the tides, and
gravity, we shall harness, for God, the energies of love. And
then, for the second time in the history of the world, man
will have discovered fire.’
*
Doubts are sometimes cast on the possibility of Marxism’s

integrating in its concept of the world and of man, the
essential element in Christianity’s contribution to the figure
of man. This leads, for example, to contesting the ability of
Marxism to provide a theoretical basis for the recognition of
the absolute value of the human person.
Two recent studies, by Christian writers who at the same
time have an excellent knowledge of Marxist philosophy and
a particular understanding of communism, provide evidence
of this difficulty. These are Pastor Gollwitzer’s Atheisme marx-
iste et foi chretienne and Fr. Girardi’s studies on Umanesimo
marxista ed umanesimo cristiano.
The fundamental objections raised by these two writers
may be reduced to three.
1. Pastor Gollwitzer writes: ‘In Marx the human species
is substituted for the absolute spirit of Hegel. In both cases,
in Marx as in Hegel, if the individual has no meaning or
reality except in relation to the totality which gives them
to him, then the realisation of the individual means his total
absorption in the process of realisation of the species. The
right of the species destroys the right of the man as person.’
2. Fr. Girardi starts by offering a variation of the above
objection. He says: for Marxism, the absolute is not man but
humanity. By this subordination to this higher end, man
has no value other than that which he receives from his
144
end.
3. Fr. Girardi more or less sums up all these objections
in a single one : the Marxist conception of praxis and revolu¬

tion as absolute value and as the criterion of value does not
appear to be reconcilable with the principle of the absolute
value of the person.
These objections are based on a conception of Marxism
which confuses it either with Hegelianism or with pragma¬
tism; underlying them, is a threefold confusion.
1 . The erroneous assimilation of Hegel's absolute spirit and the

human species in Marx. Marx, we have seen, was not content
to reverse Hegel’s system by saying matter where Hegel says

spirit. It was Hegel’s method he reversed (a different problem
with which we are not here concerned), and he did not
reverse but entirely rejected Hegel’s system and even the

Hegelian concept of it. Marx postulates neither absolute
knowledge nor an end to history. Therein lies the whole,
and capital, difference between a closed system and an open
method of endless creation.
Marx does not conceive a closed totality which assigns to
each of its parts its own place. (That was later to be the
totalitarian, fascist, and even racialist interpretation of the
human species or the nation, in which the individual has no
significance and reality except by virtue of the whole to
which he belongs.) What Marx did conceive was a continued
creation of man by man. Communism is not the end of his¬
tory but the end of man’s brutish pre-history, and the begin¬
ning of a strictly human history, made up of all the initiatives
of each human person, now become the centre of creation in
all domains, from economic life to culture. In the Communist
Manifesto Marx defined communism as ‘an association in

which the free development of each is the condition for the
free development of all.’

2. Confusion between the pragmatic conception and the Marxist
conception of the criterion of practice.
For a Marxist, the practice which is ultimately the criterion
145
of truth is not an individual or individualist practice. It is the
practice of the collective body to which man belongs, with
all the culture which that society brings with it. But it has
above all an historical character. Thus its effectiveness is not
defined simply by the immediate result and the profitability
of an action which at every moment is an absolute beginning.
The act and its value are judged first in terms of a human
history whose meaning is not patient of arbitrary revision
at every moment. From man’s simplest project by which he

releases himself, through the tool, from the immediate given
situation, to the power to transform the planet by a con¬
certed use of nuclear energy, human societies have created
their history; and it is possible to determine the position of
each stage and evaluate it in terms not of a final goal but
of the degree of mastery over nature, over society and over
himself, that man has won. Ultimately, the criterion of prac¬
tice cannot be defined if we leave out of account this ascend¬
ing curve of the conquest of a real freedom. This rules out
all forms of pragmatism, from that of the individualist thruster
to that of the political adventurer, placing the mystification
of the masses on the same level as their awakening to con¬
sciousness of the laws of historical development. For a Marxist,
the criterion of practice cannot be reduced to the criterion of
immediate success, whether it be individual or collective. It
is a function of the realisation of the fundamental human pro¬
ject, that which starts from the definition of man as creator
and aims to make of every man a creator.
3. This, again, gets rid of the third confusion on which
these objections are based: the confusion of the end and the
means.
For a Marxist, the social revolution is not an end in itself
nor an ultimate end. The ultimate end of all our actions and
all our battles as militant communists is to make every man
a man, that is to say a creator, a centre of historical initiative
and of creation on the economic and political plane, on the
plane, too, of culture and love, on the spiritual plane — to
use an idiom that is not ours. (That idiom, however, is not
ours precisely because people too often when speaking of the
146
spiritual disregard the material conditions that are necessary

for the free development of spirituality.) It is true enough
that while the social revolution — that is, the abolition of the
regime based on private ownership of the means of produc¬
tion— is not the ultimate end and the criterion of all value, it
is at the same time an absolutely essential means for the free
development of the person; and all sermonising about spiri¬
tuality that neglects this prime condition of its realisation,
and all theorising about ends that has nothing to say about
means, is a deception : it is an hypocritical alibi which exalts
the human person while helping to perpetuate the historical
conditions of its degradation.
What then, from a Marxist point of view, is the theoretical
basis of the absolute value of the human person?
The misunderstanding with the Christian interpreters of
Marxism originates in Marx’s sentence: ‘A being does not
regard himself as independent unless he is his own master,
and he is only his own master when he owes his existence
to himself’ (Manuscripts of 1844, in Early Writings, p. 165).

This, according to Pastor Gollwitzer, is an impoverishing
conception of man and of freedom, since it cuts man off both
from the world of things and from that of men, and abandons
us to bare solitude.
This objection is based on a mistaken reading of Marx.
Such a definition of freedom cannot be interpreted in the
sense that would be attributed to it either by the idealist
Hegel or by the individualist Stirner.
Unlike Hegel, Marx, being a materialist, does not hold
that the world of things is the product of our own mind.
Marx, therefore, does not postulate a subject who creates
the world, in the Hegelian way, nor a subject who maintains
the relations with the object which were conceived by Car¬
tesian dualism. Marx, on the contrary, emphasises the con¬
stant reciprocal action between man and the beings found in
147
nature, external to him and independent of him.
An objective being, he says, is a being which has its nature
‘outside itself’. It creates, it postulates objects, only because

it is itself postulated by objects, because in its origin it is
nature.
Hunger, for example, ties it to an object outside itself which
can satisfy that need.
Thus no natural being can exist nor be conceived outside
the network of reciprocal actions upon which it depends and
which, to some degree, depend upon that being.
When Marx speaks of man’s autonomy and independence
we should not, therefore, understand them in the sense they
were understood by the idealist Hegel, for whom the isolated
subject constructed its object in its entirety.
Marx does not confuse objectivation and alienation : the ex¬
ternal world is not for him a simple alienation of the subject,
nor a radical creation of the object by the subject.
For Marx, the materialist, the subject endeavours actively
— that is, by a series of hypotheses, theories, models — to re¬
construct this world of objects which exists without him and
does not need him in order to exist.
The resistances offered by reality to the subject’s models — -

continually more complex though they are— are, as Lenin
showed, an ‘inexhaustible’ source of enrichment, and it is
this alone that makes it possible to account for the history
of knowledge, which, from the idealist point of view, is al¬
ways a false and apparent history.
This is even more true when we are concerned not only
with other things but with other men.
Unlike the individualist Stirner, Marx defines the indi¬
vidual (in the theses on Feuerbach) by the ‘sum of his social
relations’.
There could be no greater mistake than to interpret this
sentence in a mechanistic sense : the individual is not a mere
product or resultant.
No greater mistake, again, than to believe that man does
not exist for Marxism, that what does exist is a sum of social
relations; that men are not the subject of history but only the
148
effects and the props of a sum of social relations; that in

Marx there is no centre, no subjects who create meaning, no
men who make history — an idea that has for a long time
been disseminated by the opponents of Marxism and has to¬
day been brought up again in a new form, based on a cer¬
tain interpretation of structural linguistics and Freudism, by
ideologists who claim to follow the Marxist tradition.
Marx explicitly rules out this interpretation: he emphasises
on the contrary the contradiction, characteristic of every class
regime, between the personal life of man and the economic
and social system which tends to make of him a mere support
for production relationships.
In The German Ideology, he stresses ‘the contradiction be¬

tween the personality of the individual proletarian and the
conditions of life which are imposed on him’ (p. 288). ‘In the
course of historical development,’ he adds, ‘with division of
labour a distinction becomes apparent between the life of
every individual as a personal life and as being subordinated
to a particular branch of labour.’ Marx was never to vary
his views on this point, and what he has to say about it in
Capital is as explicit as it is in The German Ideology.
It is precisely this that distinguishes Marxism from earlier
materialism, which led to a misunderstanding of subjectivity
which amounted to seeing in it nothing but a passive reflec¬
tion of an external world, presented ready-made in its mech¬
anistic structure. In the third of the theses on Feuerbach,
Marx already stresses this distinction. ‘The materialist doc¬

trine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing
and that, therefore, changed men are products of other cir¬
cumstances, forgets that it is men who change the circumstances ’
(in The German Ideology, pp. 665-6).
On this point, again, Marx was never to vary; he con¬
stantly recalls, from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
to Capital, that it is men who make history. ‘It is man, the
149
real, living man, who is the maker, the possessor, the fighter.
It is not history that uses man to become real: history is
simply the activity of man pursuing his end’ (cf. The Holy
Family, trans. R. Dixon, London, 1957, p. 125).
This shows how wrong it would be to interpret in a mech¬
anistic or positivist sense the phrase that Engels borrowed
from Hegel, ‘Freedom is the recognition of the inevitable.’
This should be understood in the light of another of Marx’s
definitions: ‘Freedom is the consciousness man has of himself
in the element which is at work in practice. In other words
it is the knowledge man has of another man as his equal’

(cf. Ibid).
Here we reach the heart of the problem, the problem of
freedom, of Marxist humanism; it is the problem both of
subjectivity and of man’s relations with another man and

with the world.
For man, the driving force of history is not the abstract
subject, the spirit of Hegel.
Nor is this man, the driving force of history, the self-
centred and isolated individual extolled by the anarchist
Stirner. After having written ‘Freedom =power’ in The Holy

Family, Marx adds, in The German Ideology. ‘It is in the com¬
munity that the individual acquires the means of developing
his faculties in every direction: it is only in the community
that freedom of the person becomes possible.’

What, then, is the human person for Marx, if it is neither
Hegel’s abstract subject nor Stirner’s isolated individual?

For Marx, the individual is defined by the sum of his social
relations, just as the object is defined by its relations with the
sum total of other objects, continuing inexhaustibly into in¬
finity.
The reality with which the physicist deals, coming to grips
with inanimate matter, is already (as Lenin said) ‘inexhaust¬
ible’. How much more inexhaustible, then, is this matter
which has crossed countless other thresholds of complexity,
with its transition into life, into consciousness, and society.
Let us simply combine the thesis that matter, at all its
levels, is inexhaustible, and the thesis that with work there
emerged a radically new form of material being, in which the

future, through the end pursued and the project, plays an
active part and creates possibilities up to infinity. Let us add
to this that these nuclei of being, of which each one thinks
and creates, and which react upon one another, do not exist
fully except in mutual exchange and dialogue, and so endlessly
enrich one another; we shall then understand the richness of
the Marxist concept of humanity, and appreciate the basis
of its recognition of each man as an active and creative
being.
It is wrong, therefore, to assimilate Marxism with some
sort of Messianic belief, and then to say that it undermines
the foundations of its own humanism, on the ground that it
cannot justify the respect due to each human person because
the only meaning it gives to each man’s life is that it serves
to realise the ends of the species. It is wrong to say that
Marxism evades this problem and that to attach the function
of the individual life to the service of the species is a contra¬
diction of the humanist spirit. It is only a positivist distortion
or a mechanistic interpretation of Marxism that is open to
such a criticism; and I recognise, indeed, that too many such
‘anti-humanist’ distortions and interpretations have been
found and can still be found in writings that claim to
represent Marxism.
Conversely, however, the just concern to look at men one
by one as individuals, with respect for their person and its
absolute value, cannot paralyse our efforts to win a more
human organisation of social relations.
This is a battle that must be fought, and the problem of
means is exactly the same for Christians as it is for Marxists.
Christians cannot evade it: we are never free to choose be¬
tween violence and non-violence. We are already committed,
and our abstention, equally with our engagement, plays its
part in this confrontation of forces. To condemn the violence
of the slave who revolts, is to become an accessory to the
permanent violence of the enslaver. And that is why, if
151
Christians accept military service (and this they have never

refused since the time of Constantine), why should they not
fight for the Resistance or as military revolutionaries? If they
refuse to do so, it is not the means they refuse— since, as
soldiers, they accept violence — it is the revolutionary end
itself.
History has taught Marxists to distrust the specifically
religious component in anti-communism. It derives from the
confusion of ethics with logic and from the claim to be able
to deduce forms of political or social order directly from faith,
without recognising the autonomy of the secular world and
the fact that the mediations of purely scientific knowledge
are indispensable for a judgment on a system of social rela¬
tions or a political regime.
What a communist hates in the religious institution is
what makes it hand in glove with the counter-revolution.
He cannot be certain that the Church rejects communism
primarily because it is atheistic. He suspects that it is much
more because it is revolutionary. No true dialogue can be
established until being a Christian does not necessarily mean
being a defender of the established order.
As soon as Christians cease to reject all violence — -by
accepting military service and engaging in war — then to
refuse to share in the violence that is essential to the battle
that is fought in the name of respect for the human person,
for the liberation of man, comes uncommonly close, in fact,
to making that respect an excuse for, and a factual participa¬
tion in, the hidden violence that maintains the existing
order and oppression. The dialectical tension between the
individual and the totality, between the end and the means,
which is the tragedy of all action, is just as real for the
Christian as it is for the Marxist. To contrast Christianity
as it should be with communism as it is, is a false evasion of
this tension. It is the same with the tension between the
present and the future. It is not a question of sacrificing a
whole contemporary generation to some vague future Utopia,
152
which will turn out to be a Moloch. What gives meaning and

beauty and value to life, for Marxists as for Christians, is the
unstinting gift of self to what the world, through our sacrifice,
can become in the future.
Pastor Gollwitzer distorts the terms of the problem when
he repeats Koestler’s question: ‘What consolation can the
unclouded happiness of future generations of sheep be to the
sheep driven to the slaughter house?’
Nevertheless, there are fine things in his book, and one
cannot but read with emotion — since a Marxist can recognise
in them a tone of real fraternity — the pages in which he
comments on the text from the Epistle to the Romans (8.24) :
‘For in this hope we were saved.’ Rejecting a debased Chris¬
tian Platonism, he shows that this should not be interpreted
in a sense which postpones man’s fulfilment to another world,
but rather in the sense that this hope transfigures our life
here and now.
As a Marxist, I would add : provided that this hope is only
the interior side of a real fight, of a militant and combatant
life, in a man who is conscious of containing within himself
the future in embryo.
It is not by chance that in our own time communism,
which makes revolutionaries not for revenge but in order to
obtain fullness of life, has produced the greatest number of
witnesses, for whom the Greek word is ‘martyrs’.
It is in those martyrs that we find this presence of the
future in embryo, which gives meaning and beauty to a life
and death, and with it the feeling that this future is not an
abstract idea, but the lived presence of all other men, each
with his irreplacable unique personality, and with the power
to add to each other man his inexhaustible richness: it can
be seen in every line of the letters written by those who faced
the firing squad, in the letters of Lacazette or Peri, in that
of the young Greek communist Yannis Tsitsilonis, who was
shot at the age of twenty, writing
153 lovingly to his mother,
‘When the day of freedom comes, when the bells ring out
their message of joy and victory, you will say to yourself,
that it is your son Yannis who is ringing them.’

It is not a matter of sacrificing the freedom of each man,
his life and its meaning, to the Moloch of an abstract future,
but, in Eluard’s words, of ‘moving from one man’s horizon to

the horizon of all men.’
It is not right to say, as Pastor Gollwitzer does, that
Marxism cannot understand ‘the relation between religion
and the problem of the meaning of existence’ (p. 145), and
that, for the Marxist, that problem is shelved in favour of the
positivist scheme which sees the individual and the future
society of communism standing in the relation of means to
end.
The living, concrete, community of other men, of which
each man, let me repeat, is an inexhaustible centre of rich¬
ness and interrogation for each other centre, is so profoundly
the fundamental reality that, in the Marxist humanist point
of view, each individual — or rather each person— can de¬
velop freely and fully only if he is immersed in that com¬
munity and so draws from it warmth and life. But at no
time can we forget that in every class regime the effect of
relationships of exploitation and oppression, with all the
forms of alienation they produce, is precisely to nullify this
human communication. Our first objective, as militants, is
the battle against those obstacles. As Marx wrote, ‘The real,

active orientation of man to himself as a species-being . . .
is only possible in so far as he really brings forth all his
species-powers, which is only possible through the co-opera¬
tive endeavours of mankind and as an outcome of history’
(.Manuscripts of 184.4. Early Writings, pp. 202-3).
In a communist regime, ‘the question of the meaning of
existence will still be raised, and there will still be depths to
be sounded in the heart of man.’
This, however, also means I5that we must fight against
4
everything which, in our class regimes, impoverishes and
mutilates man by alienating him. And we shall never win
that battle unless the fighting is shared by all who have the
future at heart.
*
If we do not want to end up with a mechanical confrontation

of two closed futures, we must somehow realise, both Chris¬
tians and Marxists, that we cannot have mutual knowledge
of one another without both becoming different.
This presupposes in the first place that we must not regard
ourselves as possessing a truth given once and for all, definitive
and ready-made.
It is of the very nature of Marxism to think of itself in this
way, in historical terms. Engels emphasised that materialism
would necessarily have to assume a new form with every
epoch-making discovery in scientific history. On countless
occasions Lenin recalled the necessity of this constant re¬
fashioning. ‘We by no means take Marx’s teaching as
something complete and untouchable. On the contrary, we
believe that all it has done is to lay the corner stones of the
science which socialists must push forward in every direction
if they are not to lag behind life’ (Works, Vol. IV, pp. 217-18).
Every attempt to imprison Marxism in a closed system of
principles or laws is contrary to its very essence.
Contemporary theology, too, seems to be moving towards
the idea that the original conceptualisation of the faith in
the forms of Greek thought is no more than one of its possible
cultural forms.
The same massive facts of our century as oblige us to think
Marxism in the spirit of our time, have led Christians to
reflect deeply on the significance of their faith and the his¬
toric forms of its expression.
1. The building of socialism on a global scale, a major reality
of our time, raises completely new problems both for Chris¬
tians and for Marxists.
:55
For every Christian who can distinguish, in the building
of socialism, what derives from the actual principles of
Marxism, and what is the result of the historical conditions

peculiar to each country, this building raises problems which
are such as to make it possible to dissociate the Christian
faith from social or political doctrines which bear the stamp
of an age that is past.
(a) In the first place the possibility has been proved of
new social relations which are not founded on a hierarchy
of classes, sanctioned by the Church as being a consequence
of sin.
(b) Secondly, the experience of new forms of social owner¬

ship makes it possible to re-think, in a new historical per¬
spective, the postulate that private property, including
private ownership of the means of production, constitutes a
guarantee of the freedom of the human person. Millions of
Christians now think along these lines, and their ideas came
out into the open at the Vatican Council; and although the
problem has not been solved, it has at least been raised.
2. The movement of national liberation for peoples who have
been for many years colonialised, and their attainment of
independence, have disclosed sources of values other than
those of a civilisation known as ‘western and Christian’ and
for long regarded as a model.
This vast movement of decolonisation has obliged Chris¬
tians to revise their idea of the Church’s ‘missionary’ function.
All the problems have asserted themselves simultaneously:
the political problem of the dangerous alliance of the mis¬
sionary and the colonialist, the moral problems of the pater¬
nalist concept of missions, and finally the theoretical problem
of the recognition of forms of spirituality and of values which
do not originate in Christianity. In the case of the religions of
Asia and Africa, and of Islam, it is not only the crusading
spirit that is challenged but the very spirit of conversion.
The Council’s decisions on freedom of religious belief, on
the recognition of the non-Christian and secular world as a
world to be reckoned with, of pluralism, and of the necessity
of dialogue, mark a decisive step in this conscious realisation.
156
3. Finally, the acceleration , unprecedented in history, of the

rhythm of scientific and technical development, and the very form it
is taking, now no longer merely cumulative and quantitative
but effected by a series of global reorganisations of the whole
of the conceptual field, is bringing about a fundamental re¬
thinking of our concepts of the world in a humanist and
critical outlook.
For Christians, this is expressed in an effort made by those
of them who see things most clearly, to dissociate what is
fundamental in their faith from the obsolete conceptions of
the world in which that faith is traditionally expressed.
This movement can be seen in the attempt at demytholo-
gising for which, as early as 1941, the Protestant theologian
Bultmann called, in his contribution to a book (Kerygma and
Myth) which inaugurated a new era of religious thought.
Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s admirable Letters and Papers from
Prison follows the same line and is itself also a sign of the times.
In a more general way the problem is that of the relation¬
ship of science and faith, a problem that arises today in a
form not met with before, through the recognition of the
radical autonomy of scientific thought, which means that we
must no longer try to fit faith into the misconceptions, con¬
stantly open to revision, of knowledge.
This change of attitude towards science entails a reversal
of attitude towards the secular world as a whole, considered
as autonomous and of major importance.
It is becoming progressively more difficult not to accept
the distinction between religion as ideology and conception
of the world, as the cultural form assumed by faith at a
particular period of historical development, and faith itself.
This has already been stressed: a Protestant philosopher,
Paul Ricoeur, can say today, ‘Religion is the alienation of
faith’ (De V interpretation, p. 159). Defining the ‘horizon’ as
the ‘metaphor of what comes closer without ever becoming
157
an object of possession’ {Ibid, p. 505), he believes that ‘the
idol is the reification of the horizon into thing.’
The same problem of the distinction between faith and the

historical, provisional, cultural forms into which it has settled
down, is forcibly raised by a Catholic philosopher, Leslie
Dewart, who restates, at a new historical stage, Pere Laber-
thonniere’s theses on ‘Christian realism and Greek idealism.’
Leslie Dewart recalls in the first place that the condition
for the universalising or catholicising of Christianity, from
St Paul to St Augustine, was its Hellenisation. The new con¬
ception of man’s relations with the world which was born
with Christianity from a starting point in Judaism, flowed
into a pre-existing cultural form; that of Greek thought,
which introduced into Christianity its own ideal perfection,
stability. Hellenisation thus led to the petrification of dogma.
Centuries later, the rediscovery of Aristotle reinforced still
further this tendency, with medieval scholasticism, in whose
idiom the Christian faith has, for the most part, been ex¬
pressed until our own times.
The Christian concept of God has always been more or less
contaminated by Parmenides’ concept of being, by Plato’s

Idea of the Good, by Aristotle’s first cause and prime mover,
or the One of Plotinus.
To take but one example: all the attempts of theologians
and Christian philosophers, decade after decade, to refurbish
the ‘proofs of the existence of God’, have failed to detach the
‘ontological argument’ from its origins. The very way in
which the problem is expressed derives entirely from the
postulate of Parmenides, asserting the identity of being and
intelligibility. The scholastics were satisfied to distinguish, in
creatures, essence and existence, but at the same time held
that in God the two were identified.
Removed from this typically Greek form of expressing the
problem, the ontological argument is meaningless.
This expression of the problem, however, no longer corres¬
ponds to anything in living contemporary thought.
Hence, side by side with the attempts to construct a non-
Cartesian theory of knowledge, a non-Platonic ethic, and a
158
non-Aristotelian aesthetic, we have the attempt, constantly

renewed in the twentieth century, to think in terms of a non-
Hellenic theology.
Maurice Blondel, at least in the first version of Action, was
perhaps the first pioneer of this new apologetics; but the
most general tendency to escape from the Greek conception
of the relationship between being and intelligibility was ex¬
pressed in the attempts to theologise the philosophies of exis¬
tence : the resurrection of Kierkegaard, and the flowering of
‘dialectical theology’ that started with Karl Barth, the theo¬
logical variants of Jaspers and Heidegger, Bultmann and Fr.
Karl Rahner, are evidence of this effort.
However, this was not in itself sufficient to lay the ghost
of the Greek concept of being, which, by contaminating the
Christian concept of God, caused the threat of the docetist
heresy to become endemic in Christian thought, with its
emphasis on the divinity of Christ at the expense of his
humanity.
The root of the problem is that Greek philosophy offers no
way of expressing what is the very heart of Christianity, the
Incarnation.
The most Greek thought succeeded in doing, with Aristotle,
was to conceive the transition from potency to act, while what
our age needs above all is a philosophy based on creative
development.
It is this, no doubt, that accounts for the impact of Pere
Teilhard de Chardin on so many Christian minds. It is some¬
times said that Pere Teilhard was not a theologian. I am no
judge of that. Others say that his scientific works, and still
more his extrapolations, are open to criticism. That may well
be so. Others again say that what he offers is not a philosophy.
This I can believe, because in our time there can be no pre-
critical philosophy and still less any philosophy of nature.
None of this can alter the fact that Teilhard de Chardin
presented his Church, *59 further, all men
and, even of our own
time, with a fundamental problem— the fundamental pro-
blem of our century, the very problem which Marx raised

for the first time a hundred years ago, and for the solution
to which he provided the first elements : how are we to think
of what is emerging for the future and control it?
This discovery by Marx is at the root of the most profound
transformation of the world known to history. The question
raised by Pere Teilhard for Christians demanded from them
nothing short of a reversal of their attitude to the world. He
recalled a fundamental aspect of Christianity which has often
been obscured by a latent Platonism, that to progress towards
God does not mean that one must turn one’s back on the
world: on the contrary, each man shares fully in his own
transformation and construction, with all that is clearest in
his thought, most urgent in his action, and most powerful in
his passion.
From such a point of view God is no longer a being nor
even the totality of being, since no such totality exists and
being lies entirely open to the future which has to be created.
Faith, then, is not the possession of an object by knowledge.
St John of the Cross was already saying that faith does not
meet an object, it meets ‘nothing’. He spoke of the ‘experi¬

ence of the absence of God’ and added in his Ascent of Mount
Carmel : ‘It is by this that one can recognise whether someone
truly loves God, or whether he is satisfied with something
less than God’ (cf. Works, trans. E. Allison Peers, London,

19 34, Vol. I, p. 373). God’s transcendence implies his con¬
stant negation, since God is beyond all essence and all exis¬
tence; he is constant creation.
A faith that was no more than an affirmation would be
mere credulity.
Doubt is an integral part of living faith.
The depth of a believer’s faith depends on how strong is

the atheist in him — for it is that which protects him from all
idolatry. ‘They call us atheists,’ wrote Justin. ‘Indeed, we
admit it, we are the atheists of these self-styled Gods’ (I
Apology, 6.1).
160
Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was undoubtedly, in the middle

of the twentieth century, one of the pioneers of this return to
fundamentals. Christian theology, he thought, has always
been a form of religion, a form of man’s expression, which

is a function of history; and he asked this question: ‘If religion
is no more than the garment of Christianity — and even that
garment has had very different aspects at different periods —
then what is a religionless Christianity?’ {Letters and Papers from
Prison, Fontana edn., p. 91).
Following what is nevertheless a very different road from
Teilhard’s, Bonhoeffer coincides with Teilhard’s central ex¬
perience : ‘Religious people speak of God when human per¬
ception is (just from laziness) at an end, or human resources
fail . . . always, that is to say, helping out human weakness
or as a support in human failure ... I should like to speak
of God not on the borders of life but at its centre, not in weak¬
ness but in strength, not, therefore, in man’s suffering and
death but in his life and prosperity’ (p. 93).
‘The fundamental principle of the Middle Ages is heter-
onomy in the form of clericalism . . .’ (p. 121) but ‘it calls
for a great evolution to lead the world to its autonomy.’
‘This is the decisive difference between Christianity and
all other religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his
distress to the power of God in the world . . . The Bible,
however, directs him to the powerlessness and suffering of
God ... To this extent we may say that the process we have
described by which the world came of age was an abandon¬
ment of a false conception of God, and a clearing of the decks
for the God of the Bible, who conquers power and space in
the world by his weakness. This must be the starting point
for our “worldly” interpretation’ (p. 122).

Bonhoeffer also says, ‘I am giving much thought to the
outward aspect of this religionless Christianity ... It may
be that on us in particular, midway between East and West,
there will fall an important responsibility’ (p. 93).

Here the dialogue is set at the highest level, that of the
161
integration, by each one, of the negation contained in the

other as such.
For, just as we said that, for the believer, the depth of his
faith depends on the strength of the atheist in him, so too, we
may say that, for the atheist, the depth of his humanity
depends on the strength of the believer in him.
In the development of this essential dialogue, as Lombardo-
Radice has said, ‘Co-existence does not mean living side by
side, but growing together,’ and in that dialogue the greatest
tragedy that could occur would be for the class positions
adopted by the hierarchy of the Church to make it impossible
for the masses who are fighting for freedom from exploitation
and oppression, to appreciate the richness and beauty of the
Christian message.
When the encyclical Quadragesima anno (1931) says that
‘the capitalist system is not intrinsically evil’, and when a

few years later (1937) Divini Redemptoris insists that ‘com¬
munism is intrinsically a perversion’, is this said in the name
of theology and the faith, or is it a political and class option?
Recent statements from the most authoritative sources in
the Church in France and the universal Church, confirm the
Church’s attitude in allying itself with the privileged classes

and their power, and giving its moral and doctrinal sanction
to the privileged state and regime. This attitude was first
adopted in the fourth century in the Church’s relations with

the Emperor Constantine, and in 1966 this Constantinianism
is still by no means dead.
The least mistakes of communists are forcefully denounced.
The worst crimes of the capitalist world from Spain to
Portugal, from Los Angeles to Vietnam, are passed over in
silence.
The Church that really deserves the name of ‘the Church

of silence’ is the Church that is silent in the face of crime.
One great hope remains, common to millions of Christians
in the world and millions of communists : the building up of
the future without losing anything of the heritage of human
162
values that Christianity has been contributing for the last

two thousand years. And yet we see this message obscured
by class positions which hide and contradict the values con¬
tained for us in Christianity.
So long as this is so, there will be a great danger that once
again, because of this class solidarity, the political and social
liberation of man will be effected in opposition to Christian¬
ity. To rebut the charge of being ‘the opium of the people’,
in which Marx and later Lenin summed up an irrefutable
historical experience, is more than a matter of theory : it is
a matter of political and social practice. And it is for Chris¬
tians and their Church to give this practical proof.
If this is not done, then irreplaceable human values will
be for a time compromised, and we shall be faced by the
dreadful but unavoidable choice which Jaures expressed in
sombre and exalted words: ‘Even if the socialists extinguish
for a moment all the stars in the heavens, I am ready to
march with them along the dim road that leads to justice,
the divine spark which has the power to rekindle all the suns
in all the furthest depths of space.’ Here, perhaps, we have
one of the most acute problems of our century. Shall we be
forced to make this choice? Speaking as brother to brother,
but with all the force that comes from our agony of anxiety,
we warn Christians and their Church that it would be so
much time lost for mankind.
CHAPTER FIVE
Marxism and Art
It is from the creative act of man, we have said, that Marxism

starts.
It is there, too, that it ends up : making of each man a man,
that is a creator, a ‘poet’.

Where, then, does artistic creation stand in the develop¬
ment of the human act of labour, of the continued creation
of man by man?
How can myth be a component of action to transform the
world ?
We have already emphasised that in passing from Utopia
to science, socialism has not destroyed the dream. All it has
done is to provide a scientific and technical basis for its
realisation.
‘We must dream,’ said Lenin, who knew that myth is life
in action.
From this humanist point of view, myth lies at the level of
man’s creative art, neither above nor below.
Just as we do not believe, with Berkeley, that nature is the
symbolic language spoken by an infinite mind to finite minds,
so we do not believe, with Cassirer, that myth is the Odyssey
of the consciousness of God, with Gusdorf that it is immersion
and metaphysical reintegration in reality, or with Dumery
that it is a ‘sensing’ of pre-existing values; nor, again, do we

think, with Jung, that the ‘archetype’ or ‘primordial image’
is the matrix of the idea. Myth 1is not a foothold in the sacred,
64
nor in an initial nature.
If it speaks the language of transcendence, this transcend-

MARXISM AND ART
ence cannot be thought of in terms of exteriority or presence.

It is neither the transcendence from above of a God, nor the
transcendence from below of a nature given to us ready¬
made.
Myth is not participation but creation.
Myth, for Marx, is not, as it is for Freud, even a sublimated
expression of desire, but a phase of labour.
The difference is fundamental, for desire is a continuation
of nature, whereas labour transcends it.
To make labour the matrix of myth — as, moreover, of all
culture as opposed to nature — allows us already to draw the
dividing line between the dream-symbol and the myth-
symbol. The former is the expression of desire, the latter is
a phase of the continued creation of man by man, in a form
that is poetic, prophetic and militant, but always forward-
looking.
This removes the confusion between myth properly so-
called and what is wrongly given that name. If myth is the
phase of labour in which the emergence of man asserts itself
with the new dimension of being what realises the future, then
we cannot give the name of myth to what is a mere survival
of the past, the indolent and superseded reason of allegory or
etiological fables. Nor is it mere reproduction or preservation
of the present by a master-concept, an image which becomes
the norm of behaviour. This social stereotype, watered-down
by propaganda and publicity, is illusion and alienation. Its
tendency is not to advance history but to halt it by simply
giving a recognisable form to desire, and leaving man to re¬
volve within the closed circle of instinct. This stereotype takes
a great number of different forms, from Hitler’s racial propa¬

ganda or eroticism as a means of advertising, to the debased
substitute for the mythical hero we find in the ‘idol’ which

offers youth the compensating illusion of an alienated life, of
a vicarious life, through the inflation of the myth : Soraya for
165
Berenice, Brigitte Bardot for Aphrodite.
There are myths which do us no service, or which do us a
disservice. They lead nowhere. There are others which direct

us to the creative centre of ourselves, which open up con¬
tinually new horizons and help us to go beyond our own con¬
fines. There are closed myths, and open myths, which latter
are the only truly authentic myths.
We shall confine the name of myth to every symbolic story
which calls man back to his true nature as creator, as being,
that is, defined in the first place by the future he constructs
and not by the past of the species, which urges him on simply
by instinct and desire.
Such myths are not necessarily the products of a primitive
mentality. There are contemporary myths which are the pro¬
duct of reason.
From its very beginning, myth is the language of trans¬

cendence, and that in its humblest form: man’s transcendence
in relation to nature.
It entails a double severance from the given: from external
nature and from our own nature. Here Wallon’s analysis (see
above, pp. 55-6) coincides with that of Van der Leeuw: it is
‘a return to the fundamental: the man who “stands on his
own feet” and can say “no” about what is given to him as
reality’ (Vhomme primitif et la religion, p. 199).
Marx asks us to explain in this way the enduring fascina¬
tion through the centuries of the great myths of Greece, as
expressing the healthy infancy of man, refusing to define
reality solely by the ananke of the order existing in nature or
society, whether it be Prometheus, Icarus, Antigone or Pyg¬
malion.
In every great myth, whether poetic or religious, man re¬

gains his own transcendence in relation to every given order.
This, moreover, is based on the specifically human dimen¬
sion of labour: the presence of the future as the leaven of
the present.
If, from this point of view, we wish to conceive the relation
of myth to time, we cannot do so as Mircea Eliade does, who,
in his essays on magico-religious symbolism, speaks of what
166
MARXISM AND ART
he calls ‘escape-from-time techniques’ in the Indian myths.

The characteristic of the great myths as an ‘opening into
transcendence’ is more mastery of time than escape from time.
The ‘golden age’ of myth allows man to relive the dawn of
the world, the moment of creation ; it allows him to compre¬
hend himself not simply as a fragment of the cosmos, caught
up in the web of its laws, but as capable of transcending the
cosmos and intervening in it as creator.
Prometheus or Antigone (just, moreover, as the prophets
of Israel or the gospel narratives) tell us that a new start is
possible; I can begin my life over again and change the world.
In this lies what is most valuable, as Paul Ricoeur says, in
the ‘power of interrogation’ which the myth possesses. Here

we cannot contrast myth and kerygma. Myth is necessarily
the language of kerygma. When Bultmann, in his Primitive
Christianity (Das Ur-Christentum im Rahmen der antiken Religio-
nen ), endeavours to read the essential message of Christ, he
shows that, unlike the Greek conception of the ‘cosmos’ of

which man is a fragment and a moment, Christ comes to
reveal to each man that the present is not the necessary link
between the past and the future in the woven fabric of a
destiny: ‘The present is the time of decision.’ Transcendence
is the possibility of an absolute beginning. Speaking at the
Strasbourg meeting from the Catholic point of view, Fr. Karl
Rahner came very close to Bultmann’s position on this point,
when he defined Christianity as ‘the religion of the absolute
future.’
If I try to interpret what Bultmann or Rahner says, speak¬
ing as a Marxist — as someone, that is, who believes that
transcendence is not an attribute of God but a dimension of
man — then I find in every myth the reminder of this trans¬
cendence, and the summons, addressed to man, to exert his
power of historical initiative.
The meaning of history was born with the first man, the
167
first labour, the first project. This meaning is enriched by all
human projects. There always remains a task and a creation
to be accomplished. It is this that distinguishes the Marxist

conception of history from that of Hegel; for the latter the
meaning of final history is already present from the very
start, and so the whole of human history is changed into a
false history, being no more than -the more or less conscious
quest for this fulfilment.
Myth, therefore, is not a technique of escape from history,
but rather a reminder of what is specifically historic in history :
the act of human initiative. Aristotle suggested this in his
Poetics (1450b, 1453a) in connection with tragedy: tragedy
is not the imitation of just any action, but of an action which
is at the same time a paradigm or ordered and completed
whole, and has its own time-quality. (This, perhaps, is the
precise opposite of what has come to be called ‘the new novel’
— but that is another matter.)
The mythical hero is the hero who is conscious of a question
put to man by an historical situation, and sees in it its human
significance (that is, transcending the situation), and whose
victory or even failure makes us realise that we are respon¬
sible for solving the problems of our own time : this is the case
with Hector or Ulysses, as it is with Pantagruel, Don Quixote,
Faust, or Jean-Christophe.
We cannot, then, say, as Freud does in Totem and Taboo ,
that mythology is to the group as the dream is to the indi¬
vidual. The dream is only the expression of a pre-existing
reality, the myth is a summons to overstep our confines. It
is what Baudelaire said of the work of Delacroix : ‘An educa¬
tion in greatness’ (Bibliotheque de la PHiade, Paris, 1961,
p. 1 1 17)-
Paul Ricoeur has tried to restore a new, forward-looking,
dimension to Freud’s conception, a tension towards the fu¬
ture; this he does in his dialectical theory of interpretation
whose opposite poles, he says, are ‘archaeology and teleology’

(p. 476) : of these interpretations, one is directed towards the
re-disclosure of archaic significations, and the other towards
the emergence of representations which anticipate our spirit-
168
MARXISM AND ART
ual adventure (p. 498). However, for all the generosity of

mind shown in the attempt to look beyond Freud’s retrogres¬
sive analyses and find in him, at least in a latent form, the
progressive and forward-looking movement of Hegel’s Pheno¬
menology of Mind , we still come up against the real limits of
Freud’s naturalism. Paul Ricoeur himself puts this in the
most pregnantly significant terms when, in appraising the
pros and cons of his double interpretation, he writes, ‘It is
with images originating in unsatisfied desire that we give
form to our ideals’ (p. 479).
So long as we look for the matrix of myth in desire and
not in labour, we shall never be able to progress beyond this
point of view.
To my mind, it is a misunderstanding of the mythic symbol
in relation to the oneiric.
While Ricoeur maintains the thesis of the functional unity
of dream and creation (p. 499), he emphasises, it is true, that
the work of art is not the mere projection of the artist’s con¬
flicts. He brings out at least two differences : the work of art
is a dream that conveys social values, and it calls for the
mediation of the craftsman’s work.
The difference goes further: there is no functional unity
between dream and creation.
In creation, labour does not come in as a second mo¬
ment, exclusively in the form of the craftsman’s work. It
plays the leading and constituent part in the genesis of the
myth, which is one moment of it. Animal work is based
purely upon the continuance of desire and the needs of the
species, but what characterises specifically human labour is
the emergence of the project, the creation of a model , which
becomes the law of action.
What constitutes the specific nature of the mythic symbol
in relation to the oneiric, is just this emergence of the model.
Levi-Strauss writes that ‘the1 object of the myth is to pro¬
69
vide a logical model for the solution of a contradiction,’ and
he adds, ‘one day we shall perhaps discover that the same
logic is at work in both mythic and scientific thought.’ When

he says this, I am disturbed by only one word in his defini¬
tion, the word ‘logic’ ; for this suggests that the model can be
reduced to the concept, whereas the ‘muthos’ cannot be re¬
duced to the ‘logos’.
With this reservation, however, we must be grateful to Levi-
Strauss for emphasising the functional unity of the myth and
the scientific hypothesis, in the notion of the ‘model’ which
includes them both. At the conclusion of his fine book on
the Greek gods (Les dieux de la Grece) Andre Bonard sets in
their correct perspective the creations of Homer, Hesiod, or
Aeschylus. ‘The poet,’ he says, ‘does not invent; he has no
right to invent the stories of the gods entirely out of his own
head. At the same time we cannot say that he invents no¬
thing. He invents in the same way as a scientist formulates a hy¬
pothesis. He imagines in order to account with accuracy for
reality as he apprehends it’ (p. 159).
Hector or Oedipus Rex, like the stories of the gods, are
questionings about the meaning man can discover in his life
or give to it. They are not only an expression of what he is;
they also ask him what he can achieve and summon him to
go further.
Psychoanalysis has exhausted its virtue when it leads us to
consciousness of self, whereas the myth is creative of self.
That is why myth can no more be reduced to Hegel’s
phenomenology than it can be to Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Even if a certain functional unity can be found in the
mythic model and the scientific hypothesis, the former is a
model whose specific character is defined by its language. In
my view, it is the failure to recognise this specific character
of myth which limits Hegel’s aesthetic, as it does his philo¬
sophy of religion.
The exclusive privilege accorded to the concept which, in
absolute knowledge, will make man and his history perfectly
transparent and complete, leads to reducing religion and art
to no more than inferior modes of knowledge, expressing in
170
MARXISM AND ART
images what philosophy will exhaustively express in con¬

cepts.
Provided we distinguish myth from allegory, which has
an illustrative but not a creative or interrogative role, what
myth tells us in symbols cannot be reduced to a story ex¬
pressed in concepts. This difference is fundamental.
Pavlov distinguished a first system of signalling constituted
by sensorial stimuli, the signal in this case being simply the
part for the whole, like the smoke for the fire. What he called
the second system of signalling was language, constituted by
words, and reaching its full development in the concept. We
might call the symbol, after the sensorial signal and the word,
‘the third system of signalling’.
This, too, expresses a form of man’s relation to the world.
It entails an enrichment of the conception of the real : reality
is more than a nature that is given to us, with its own neces¬
sity or ananke\ it is this second nature created by man, by
technology and art, and also all that does not yet exist; it is
the constantly shifting horizon of the human potential.
For a Marxist, the myth cannot be conceived solely as a
relation to being ; it is also a summons to making. The symbol does
not send us back to an all-embracing being in which we
live and move and have our being. It is the language in
which a need is expressed. It reveals to us not a presence but
an absence, a lack, a void which it calls upon us to fill.
This third system of signalling is essential ‘poetic’ in the
strongest sense of the word : the continued creation of man
by man.
It is in this sense that a Marxist interprets the great myths
both of art and religion as the language of existence.
These myths testify to the active, creative, presence of man
in a world that is continually being born and growing. Every
great work of art is one of these myths. From Cervantes to
Cezanne, or from Paul Klee to Brecht, what is called in
them ‘distortion’ of the real is in fact mythical image of the
real.
When a still-life by Cezanne or one of Paul Klee’s works

gives us the feeling of an equilibrium that is on the point of
collapsing and is only maintained on the edge of catastrophe
by man’s major act — artistic composition — we have there
the plastic expression of the inexhaustible truth that the real
is not something given to us ready-made but is a task that
has to be accomplished. It is a reminder or an awakening of
responsibility, a reminder of what man is. This is the meaning
of Stendhal’s saying, ‘Painting is simply a construction of
ethics’ (Histoire de la peinture italienne, p. 338).
Thus, at the level of this third system of signalling, that of
the symbol, of the language of need and absence, transcen¬
dence and creation, man effects a conversion that is even
more profound than the earlier; the transition from the first
to the second system, that is from the lived to the concept,
called for a ‘de-centration’ of man, the abandonment of the
sensible and lived point of view in order to attain, with the
concept, a progressively more de-centred vision of the uni¬
verse. The pictures of the world presented in turn by Ptolemy,
Copernicus, and Einstein, provide us with striking illustra¬
tion of the ‘de-centration’ which is thus effected by scientific
thought.
The transition, however, from the concept to the symbol
is even more demanding : it is a challenge to every order that
is finite in the sense of finished, and the consciousness that
it is finite only by comparison with the infinite. In this case
we meet conversion in the strict sense of the word : until then
we were orientated, through our senses or our concepts, to¬
wards what is already made, but now the myth calls on us
to turn towards what still has to be made. It tells us that
we must not be merely makers of things or calculators of
relationships, but must be givers of meaning and creators of
the future. The symbol demands this detachment from being,
this transcending of being in meaning and creation.
The third signal-system forbids us to be unthinkingly
attached to what already exists. To define myth as the
172
MARXISM AND ART
language of transcendence is in no way a negation of reason ;

it means going beyond it dialectically in a reason which is
conscious of always transcending itself in the provisional
orders it has already established.
It will, perhaps, seem surprising that such cardinal import¬
ance should be attributed in this book to the role of myth in
aesthetic creation and religious experience.
If, when reading the word ‘myth’, one follows the usual
tendency, that is sufficient to cause one to confuse the mythi¬
cal with the unreal, and myth with mythology, and both with
arbitrary and puerile fable-mongering.
At this point I can already hear the Catholic integrist — in
the exact sense defined earlier — exclaim at this attack on his
faith. Nevertheless living theology from Pere Laberthonniere
to Karl Barth, has sanctioned the making of the necessary
distinctions, and, following Bultmann, has allowed us to
show that the required ‘demythologising’ of faith could not
lead either to its relegation to mythology (confusing it with
the religious — cultural or institutional— forms in which it
may have been clothed), or to the exclusion of myth, but
rather to the apprehension of its true nature. Mythology is
the dogmatic corruption of myth, just as scientism is the
dogmatic corruption of science. Mythology is the claim to
retain only the letter of the myth, and not its spirit, the
matter of the symbol and not its meaning. Antigone would
make little impact upon us if she were no more than her
obstinate determination to carry out Polynices’ funeral rites,
and the Resurrection of Christ would not have been revolu¬
tionising men’s lives for the last two thousand years if it
involved no more than a problem of the physiology of cells
or of re-animation.
The myth, freed from mythology, begins where the concept
leaves off, that is, with knowledge not of given being but of
the creative act. It is not the reflection of a being but the
173
setting up of an act as an objective: and it is expressed not
in concepts but in symbols.
It is the creative act apprehended from within, by the

intention which inspires it. This knowledge, or this level of
knowledge, has for its object, not the universal, but the
personal and the lived. It gives meaning to creation and
sets the creative act in motion. It is summons, it is act, and
it is person. Neither Antigone, nor Hamlet, nor Faust can
be confined within concepts; they can only express themselves
in a manner of personal behaviour through a reactivation of
the historical initiative of the hero.
Myth, then, in its highest sense, lies at the level of poetic
knowledge and of man’s free and responsible decision. It is
only at that level, the level at which the creative act is grasped
and choice is made, that the meaning of life and history can
first be determined and disclosed. For we cannot be satisfied
by discovering this meaning in the same way as we see a
landscape from the top of a mountain : it is one and the same
thing to receive this meaning through knowledge and to give
it through action; to live it in myth, as awareness and res¬
ponsibility; through understanding of past history, to survey
the whole panorama of earlier development, and to share in
the practical, militant, realisation of this meaning. In myth,
order is manifest, in the twofold sense of harmony and com¬
mand.
Conceived in this way, myth is not the opposite of concept,
but its birth.
Since, through the construction of myth, art is an exemp¬
lary form of the creative act of man building his future, the
working out of an aesthetic is not supererogatory for a
Marxist.
Nevertheless, it is a difficult task, for the founders of
Marxism, Marx and Engels, never systematically worked
out the principles of an aesthetics. All one can find in their
writings is limited judgments on this or that particular work
of art, and a number of incidental
174 comments on method.
These are indeed valuable material, but in order to construct
a Marxist aesthetics we must do more than just string them
MARXISM AND ART
together. To adopt the purely scholastic way of accumulating

quotations which are connected by deductions made in ac¬
cordance with the laws of formal logic, would not enable us
to find our way at the present stage of development of the
arts.
We must therefore, follow a different procedure, if we are
to allow Marxism to develop creatively in the domain of the
arts.
A brief indication of Marx’s tells us no more than that in

order to initiate a systematic study of this problem it was
his intention to start from Hegel’s aesthetic, applying to it

the same critical method as he applied to Hegelian philosophy
in general.
The starting point of our thinking can only be the principles
of Marxist philosophy, and what we have to do is to find out
where an enquiry into aesthetics can be fitted into them.
We are concerned here not with a subordinate question,
but with a consideration of the very spirit of Marxism; and
our conclusions are of capital importance for its fundamental
interpretation.
The problem of art is above all the problem of creation,
and that is why any mechanistic or idealist distortion, and
any dogmatic conception of the creative act, will have conse¬
quences in aesthetics that will be immediately perceptible.
Thus the conception of aesthetics is the touchstone of the
interpretation of Marxism.
*
Two analogies can guide us in our search for the starting

point of a Marxist aesthetics: the method worked out by
Marx in Capital, which is his ‘classical logic’ applied to the
particular case of political economy, and the method which
he developed under the name of ‘historical materialism’, of

the application of which he gave some brilliant examples,
175
notably in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
At the outset of a study of an historical phenomenon, Marx
emphasises that it is men who make their own history, but

that they do not do this arbitrarily.
Marx’s starting point, accordingly, coincides with that of

German philosophy, and above all with that of Kant, Fichte
and Hegel.
This classical German idealism had the merit of bringing
out the ‘active aspect’ of knowledge and, more generally, the

role of man’s creative act with such emphasis as to see the
whole of history as a continued creation of man by himself.
In contrast with this, Marx conceives this creative act in a
new and materialist way. He stresses the constant reciprocal
action between men and the beings existing in nature ex¬
ternal to and independent of him, and he tries to discover
how freedom emerges from nature at the level of human
labour.
Thus while Marx parts company radically with idealism
by ceasing to conceive labour solely in its abstract form as
creation of concepts, he is also radically distinguished from
mechanistic materialism which, failing to recognise the active
aspect of knowledge and man’s creative role, reduced know¬

ledge to being no more than a passive reflection of being, and
man to no more than a resultant or product of the conditions
in which he has been formed and develops.
We find in aesthetics a transposition of these different forms
of the theory of knowledge. Objective idealism led to a trans¬
cendent conception of beauty : for Plato, beauty was a charac¬
teristic of ideas or essences, transcendent in relation to man.
Subjective-idealism in some of the romantics, Novalis for
example, made beauty a product or projection of the subject
alone, and even a ‘magic’ creation of the individual.
Mechanistic materialism, in Diderot and, more generally,
in the eighteenth-century French materialists, made beauty
a property of things, and led to a naturalism which reduced
the work of art to being an imitative reflection of reality, its
sole concern being to choose and reflect what in nature has
an elevating value as an example.
176
MARXISM AND ART
There is a radical distinction between Marxist aesthetics

and these three conceptions, which derive from idealism,
subjective or objective, or mechanistic materialism.
Rather, however, than define it by contrast, in an attack
on these attitudes, it is better to start from what is central
in the Marxist conception of man and the world, from the
methodology of historical initiative and the creation it im¬
plies.
If art was born of labour, how has it come to have an
independent existence?
Art is one aspect of man’s activity as transformer of nature,
that is, as worker.
Marx showed how man, in the process of labour, produced
things to satisfy his needs. The sum of these things, which
have no existence and meaning except for and through man,
constitutes a ‘second nature’, a world of technology and of
culture in the widest sense of the word : that world, for all
that, is still a nature but a human nature, one that has been
remade in accordance with human planes.
New relations are thus created between man and this
nature which has been constituted from human products and
institutions.
In transforming nature, man transforms himself. The crea¬
tion of new objects corresponds to the creation of a new subject.
Here we are a long way removed from the idealist conception,
Fichtean, for example, of the relations between subject and
object, which saw the subject alone as creator; we are equally
removed, too, from the concept of dogmatic materialism —
d’Holbach’s — which believed that the object is something
‘given’, ready-made and immutable, of which the subject is
no more than the passive reflection.
In fact, as man multiplies the means of satisfying his needs,
so he creates new needs; and these, as Marx emphasised in
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, constitute
the true human richness of man. 177 The more man creates for
himself needs which are specifically human, the more he

raises himself above his original animality. These needs do

more than express the immediate and unilateral relation
with nature which characterises the animal level — the satis¬
faction of hunger or the repelling of aggression. They multiply
man’s relations with the world, and make possible an im¬
mediate form of knowledge, the form we have in science; and
this can develop only to the extent that man is no longer
hemmed in by immediate demands : he must be able to give
himself some elbow-room in coping with his need. This makes
possible the detour which uses the route of imagination, it
allows the conscious operation of projects and devices for
realising them, and finally the way round through the con¬
cept.
The conquest of the artistic, as of the scientific, dimension
of human labour, calls in just the same way for a standing
apart which interrupts the direct circuit between the need
and the immediate object of its satisfaction. It is only then
that a contemplation becomes possible, in which man sees in
the object not only its content of utilitarian significance — for
his nourishment or clothing, for his labour or self-defence —
but also the expression it contains of man’s creative act. The
aesthetic attitude begins when man, to his delight, finds in
the object he has created something more than a way of
satisfying a need, when he sees it as a witness to his creative
act. In the Manuscripts of 1844 Marx speaks of the completely
new character of the man who no longer works in accordance
with the law of all species but works universally in accord¬
ance with the law of one species, the laws of beauty.
Art, the child of labour, is not necessarily something
separate from it, and still less something opposed to it. On
the contrary, it expresses the full significance of the object
produced by labour; it expresses what I may call the ‘double

reading’ of that meaning, since the object offers man a double
‘usefulness’ : its immediate, economic, usefulness in as much
as it is a product which is capable of satisfying a definite need,
and its more generally ‘human’ (I would almost say spiritual)

178
MARXISM AND ART
need, in as much as it is an object which reflects to man his

own image as creator, an objectiorising of man’s creative
power, which arouses in him a feeling of joy and pride but
at the same time, by constantly reminding him of this creative
power, a feeling of anguished doubt and responsibility.
When bronze-age man drew a criss-cross pattern on his
earthen drinking vessel, the decorative design acquired a cer¬
tain autonomy in relation to the strictly utilitarian function
of the object. Thereby man took delight in his own creative
act.
A new need, hitherto unknown in the natural kingdom,
had just been born; and, like all the other needs man has
created for himself and all the means he has invented to
satisfy them, it was to entail an enrichment and a profound
transformation of the subject himself: his very senses were to
develop and become more acute. The eye acquired the faculty
of not only recognising a sign indicating the presence of a
danger to be avoided or a quarry to be pursued, but of con¬
templating the object: of apprehending it, that is, not in
terms of the satisfaction of a biological need, unilaterally, but
of delighting in it in its totality, as an objectivising of man’s

subjectivity, of his fears and doubts, his hopes, and of his
dignity as creator. The eye, in fact, then became a human
eye. Similarly, when our ears distinguish the noise of a heli¬
copter’s engine from that of a jet, our sense of hearing has
already been impregnated by a whole culture; still more so
when, in a piece of orchestral music, it detects and is jarred
by a wrong note from one of the violins. Our senses, as Marx
put it, have become theoreticians: they sum up, in an ap¬
parently immediate reaction, the whole body of knowledge
and power acquired by mankind as a species in the course
of its history. Instead of the perpetuation of only the im¬
mediate and non-cumulative reactions of animal instinct, the
whole culture of a society lives and develops in our senses.
179 goes with a corresponding
This humanising of the senses
humanising of the object. Through their relationship with
this humanised nature, which is the work of human labour,

the senses become human senses.
The structure and functioning of the sense-organs have a

natural biological foundation, but they have become human
as a result of a long historical and social transformation of
mankind.
The development of the five senses, Marx writes, is the
work of the universal history of human societies.
The subject who is equipped with these senses is not an
isolated individual, but a social being who enters into a
complicated relationship with nature through society; and
this nature itself is a product of social labour.
*
Art, like labour, is an objectivising of man. Its products, like

the product of labour, are human ends that have been at¬
tained; they are projects that have been realised.
Between art and labour, therefore, there is not that irre¬
ducible opposition that would permanently make labour be
governed by vital needs that are necessarily servile, while
artistic creation would be pure freedom. Kant’s ‘final pur¬

pose itself without final end’, on which all idealist and formal
conceptions of beauty are based, impoverishes both the notion
of labour by reducing it to the realisation of strictly utilitarian
and immediate ends, and that of art, which becomes a gra¬
tuitous activity and a form of play.
In labour and art we have the two extreme limits of one
and the same creative activity which realises human ends
and satisfies human needs : sometimes they satisfy particular
needs, biological in origin but growing continually more
complex and more socialised; and finally, they satisfy the
need that is both the most general and the most deep-rooted
experienced by man, the need to realise his own humanity
through his creative act: the specifically human ‘spiritual’

need.
On the other hand, what is equally true is that in every
180
MARXISM AND ART
commodity society (which introduces alienation of labour

through the fetishism of commodities), and still more in every
society that is divided into antagonistic classes, in which re¬
lations of exploitation and domination aggravate and gener¬
alise alienation, a split or a cleavage is effected in the initially
single act of labour.
With the birth of private ownership of the means of pro¬
duction, man, that is the creator, the worker, becomes a
slave, a serf, or a proletarian, and no longer owns those
means of production. It is then that the organic link is broken
between the conscious end man assigns himself in his labour,
and the means he puts into operation to achieve it. Thus the
creator is cut off from the product of his labour, for it no
longer belongs to him but to the owner of the means of pro¬
duction, the slave-owner, the feudal lord or the capitalist
employer. His labour, therefore, is no longer the realisation
of his own ends and personal projects, but that of another
man’s. So, in his labour, man ceases to be a man, that is, the
person who decides the ends, and becomes a means; he is
simply one moment in the objective process of production,
a means of producing commodities and surplus value. Here
alienation is dispossession.
In every regime based on private ownership of the means
of production, the worker is cut off not only from the product
of his labour, but also from its very act.
The master imposes on him not only the ends of his labour,
but its means and methods. Physical movements and their
pace are governed from outside the worker by the place he
is assigned in the production line. They are designed in ad¬
vance, stereotyped, in a completely dehumanised form, and
at a rhythm that often becomes stupefying, by the tool or
machine, until, in Marx’s phrase, the worker is made into
‘a flesh and blood appendage in a machine of steel’. Here
alienation is depersonalisation.
The whole of the means of production existing at a given
period in history, and the whole of the scientific and technical
181
means of culture and power which they represent, are the

fruit of the labour and thought of all preceding generations.
When a man works, his activity embraces the whole of earlier
mankind; his labour is the expression of man’s ‘species-life’,

of all the creations accumulated by the human species. When
the means of production are in private ownership, all this
patrimony, which contains the creative work of the whole of
past mankind, of mankind as, in Marx’s phrase, ‘a species¬

being’, is in the hands of a number of individuals who have
at their disposal the inventions accumulated by thousands of
years of human labour and genius.
Thus private ownership is the supreme form of alienation.
‘Social power,’ Marx was to say in Capital, ‘has become pri¬
vate power in the hands of a few.’ Capital is the alienated
power of mankind getting itself up above men as a foreign
and inhuman power. Here alienation is dehumanisation.
This alienation of labour leads inevitably to the separation
in labour of what is a means for realising ends that the worker
has not determined, from what is creation, the determination
of ends; in every class society the latter is a class privilege.
This divorce between alienated labour and creative labour
is a source of mystification : alienated labour, which is in fact
an historical phenomenon, appears as the ‘natural’, and in

consequence the necessary and perennial form of labour, and
creative labour, which is the definition of art, will be cut off
from its earthly origins and appear as a gift from heaven,
transcending human needs.
We may, then, draw up the main lines of a Marxist critique
of Hegel’s aesthetics as follows.
i. Marx adopts Hegel’s key idea (borrowed, in fact, by
Hegel, from Fichte) that man is the continued creation of
man by man. However, unlike Fichte and Hegel, Marx does
not conceive this creative act in the abstract and alienated
form of spiritual creation, or the creation of concepts, or in
the individualistic and romantic form of arbitrary creation
in isolation.
182
MARXISM AND ART
From Marx’s materialist point of view, man’s creative act

is concrete labour; it is a moment of the reciprocal action of
nature and man, in which nature imposes his needs on man
and man emerges from this nature through the conscious
elaboration of his ends.
This concrete labour is at the same time social labour,
which constitutes its values in history, with their historical
continuity and their social objectivity.
Artistic creation is immanent in this labour ; it is its supreme
moment, in which new ends are discovered. It is not only a
production of mind but a realisation of the complete man.
2. Unlike Hegel, Marx distinguishes alienation from objec-
tivation. The latter is the act by which man, in producing an
object, realises his own ends, whereas the former is the form
assumed by objectivation in every economic and social for¬
mation in which the profit system prevails and, still more, in
every regime in which labour power becomes a commodity.
As Vasquez writes in his Las ideas esteticas de Marx, ‘objectiva¬

tion allowed man to rise from the natural to the human:
alienation reverses this movement.’ Such are the historical

conditions that entailed the separation between the concep¬
tion of the ends, which becomes the privilege of the ruling
classes, and their realisation; all those who do not own the
instruments of production become means for effecting the
latter. From this fundamental separation, which is a pro¬
duct of class divisions, all other forms of separation are gene¬
rated: of consciousness from manual operation, project from
execution, manual labour from intellectual, labour from art.
3. Unlike Hegel, Marx does not regard art solely as a form
of knowledge. For Hegel art (as, moreover, religion) is dis¬
tinguished from philosophy only by its form and language.
It expresses in images and symbols what philosophy expresses
more perfectly in concepts.
It is just because Marx conceives labour not solely in its
183
abstract form of producing concepts, but in its concrete form
of producing new means which give rise to new needs, that
he opens up for social man a boundless horizon of creation

and transformation. Man can discover what is specific to
art in its object, which is to satisfy not a particular need ex¬
perienced by man, but his specifically human need to ob¬
jectify himself as creator — in the precise sense in which Marx
was later to say in Capital that in communism the free develop¬
ment of man’s creative powers, released from physical needs,
will become an end in itself. He can make the same discovery
in the language of art, which is no longer the language of the
concept, which always expresses a reality, that is, an object
or a relationship which is already constituted, but that of
‘poetry’ (poiesis ), in the deepest sense of the word: the lan¬

guage of myth, which expresses not a ready-made reality but
one that is in process of being made, which is still incomplete,
and in which a still unforeseeable future is present in embryo.
*
Thus Marxist thought in aesthetics makes it possible to de¬

mystify and de-alienate from their romantic or mystical
variations, and so integrate, all that is most valuable in the
studies of aesthetics that have been made in the last hundred
and fifty years.
The modern concept of art was born of the affirmation of
man’s autonomy: art is not imitation but creation. A certain

romanticism introduced a deviation into this idea by obliter¬
ating the boundary between the self and the non-self, between
dream and reality; but that is only an aspect of romanticism.
To sum this up schematically we may say that the original
source of the two currents of romanticism is to be found in
Rousseau.
The first derives from the Reveries d’un promeneur solitaire-,

this was to develop in the direction of a ‘magical idealism’,
of which Novalis was the most typical representative, and its
life was nourished by the dream
184 of a mystical communion
with nature.
The second derives from the Social Contract, starting from
MARXISM AND ART
man’s act in constructing his culture and his ‘autonomy’, in

both the natural and the social world.
From this current comes our modern conception of art,
through Rousseau, the French Revolution, and the classical
German philosophy of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, of which
Marx could say that it was the ‘German theory of the French
Revolution’.
Here again the starting point is Fichte.
Writing about the French Revolution in 1793, at the height
of Robespierre’s ascendancy, Fichte applied the method and
the criteria of Kant’s philosophy to the justification of the
Revolution, as a vindication of the transition from theory to
practice. Fichte identifies Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ in

the theory of knowledge, which created a new universe of
truth from the free and autonomous act of thought, with the
revolution effected in France, which instituted a new right,
by which historical initiative was accorded to the citizen, and
the freedom to obey only those laws he has made for himself
or to which he has given his assent.
This identification, which is the basis of the primacy of
practice or action, was to become the soul of Fichte’s system.

What Fichte calls the ‘pure ego’ is what, in me, speaks and
acts in the name of the whole of mankind. The creative act
of the artist provides the model of this. ‘The arts,’ he says in

his Science of Ethics, ‘convert the transcendent point of view
into the common point of view.’
Goethe develops this conception of art-creation in his ‘Cri¬
tique of Diderot’s essays on painting’ : he writes, ‘The con¬
fusion of nature and art is the malady of our age . . . The
artist must establish his own kingdom in nature . . . and
create from it a second nature.’
This conception of art, which lies at the origin of all
modern aesthetics, spread to France at the beginning of the
nineteenth century.
The transition, as Etienne 18Gilson
5 has emphasised, was
effected with Madame de Stael. She brought out, in the
first place, the fundamental orientation of German idealism.
‘No philosopher before Fichte,’ she writes, ‘had carried the

system of idealism to such a degree of scientific rigour: Fichte
makes the activity of the soul the whole universe ... It was in
virtue of this system that he was suspected of scepticism. He
was heard to say that in his next lecture he was going to
create God . . . the truth is that he was going to show how
the idea of divinity was born and developed in the soul of
man’ {De V Allemagne, part 3, ch. 7).
She then deduced the aesthetic consequences of this con¬
ception : ‘The Germans do not, as is ordinarily done, regard
the imitation of nature as the principal object of art ... In
this respect, their poetic theory is in complete agreement
with their philosophy’ {Ibid).

Thus was born the conception of art-creation. Borrowing it
explicitly from Madame de Stael, Delacroix was to express
it again more forcibly: ‘In Madame de Stael I meet again

what is precisely the development of my own idea of paint¬
ing,’ he writes in his Journal (26 January 1824). When he
systematically developed his thought in his fundamental
article on ‘Realism and Idealism’, he lifted from Madame
de Stael, without even enclosing them in quotation marks,
her key propositions on German philosophy and aesthetics,
on realism and the moral role of art:
‘Art is not imitation but creation.’

‘Art should elevate, but not indoctrinate the soul.’
Later, Baudelaire, starting from Delacroix’s work and his
conversations with him, laid the foundations of all modern
aesthetics, at the same time re-adopting Goethe’s central pro¬

position, the artist’s creation of a ‘second nature’.
It is commonplace in contemporary art-history to note the
widening, in time and space, of the artistic horizon during
the last hundred years, and the growing attention paid by
artists, those who practise the plastic arts in particular, to
non-western arts. This is true of the impressionists’, particu¬

larly V an Gogh’s, study of Japanese prints, of Gauguin’s in-
186
MARXISM AND ART
terest in the arts of Indonesia and the Pacific, Matisse’s or

Paul Klee’s in Islamic and Persian art, and that of the sur¬
realists, the Cubists, Leger and, most of all, Picasso, in the
arts of pre-Columbian America, black Africa, Asia and
Oceania.
The interpretations, however, of this undeniable fact do
not seem as yet to have brought out its underlying signifi¬
cance.
It is often explained simply as a need to escape or revolt,
that is, as a merely negative reaction: the wish to shake off a
tradition.
Sometimes it is added that when they reject the idea that
only the art of classical Greece and the Renaissance can
provide a criterion of beauty, artists who are exploring new
roads are looking for a sanction or a confirmation for their
new departure in other traditions; and these may be found
either in time, by going back to romanesque or Byzantine or
Sumerian art, or in space, by contact with non-western arts.
It is true enough that such considerations affect the in¬
vestigations of contemporary painters, but they are never¬
theless only a secondary aspect.
*
When the criterion of beauty no longer calls for reference to

a reality external to the work, one that is defined once and
for all and in accordance with the norms of Greek rationalism
or the technical spirit of the Renaissance, it is the very notion
of the real that is challenged. Its definition is seen more and
more as a function of the historical development of man, of
science, of technology, and of social relations : in short, as a
function of man’s activity.
Conversely, when once that has been accepted, the picture
can no longer be regarded either as a mirror in which an
immutable external world is reflected, or as a screen on
18
which an eternal interior world 7is projected. It must be seen
as a ‘model’ (in the sense the word bears in cybernetics).

It is a plastic ‘model’ of the relations between these two

worlds, that is, between man and the world: a ‘model’ which
varies at every period of history according to the powers won
by man over nature, over society and over himself.
It is from this way of looking at the arts that the whole
idiom of modern painting derives.
Drawing is less and less the outline of an image or the
abstract sign of a feeling, and more and more the recorded
track — the wake, you might say — of a movement or an act.
Colour is no longer necessarily the local tone of things, nor
the impressionist play of sunlight and life, nor a symbol of
purely emotional value : it takes on a constructive value, and
creates a space that is no longer given but made.
Composition is no longer necessarily a variation of the scenic
content, obeying the physical and geometric laws of things,
nor a mere decorative or musical arrangement: it is the con¬
struction of a ‘model’ which expresses the structure of an
act. It is no longer subordinated to external things or only
to creative participation in the development of the world.
Thus the picture is an object whose value cannot be
measured in relation to a world which it is taken to repre¬
sent. It has value in itself, as a technical object has, but with
this difference that its purpose is not to assist a particular
action but, at every period, to provide a ‘model’ which ex¬

presses our power of creating or transforming the world, and
our confidence in that power.
From that starting point there develops what one might
call the working out of the ‘plastic model’ of universal
humanism proper to our own time. The relations between
man and the world, between nature and culture, are from
now on no longer expressed by painters according to the
exclusively rationalist and technical ‘model’ worked out in
essentials at the Renaissance; they take their inspiration
from relations conceived and expressed in another language
by non-western artists. For all the diversity of their investiga¬
tions during the last hundred years, what is common to them
1 88
MARXISM AND ART
all and fundamental's the challenge to the essential postulates

of the western conception of the world since the Renaiss¬
ance.
The aesthetics that came to be accepted as traditional since
that time was based on a conception of the world and of man,
according to which man, as an individual, was the centre and
measure of all things ; he inhabited a world whose space had
been defined once and for all by the geometry of Euclid and
the physics of Newton. The laws of perspective, codified at
the Renaissance, expressed this conception of the world and
of man. Within this immutable framework the painter re¬
constructed sensible appearances and ordered them in accor¬
dance with laws which were regarded as both laws of nature
and laws of reason.
Such was at least the theory; for the artists who in the last
four centuries created the masterpieces of classical painting
were great precisely by virtue of that element in their paint¬
ing which escaped their principles. To take but one example,
we have only to think of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della
Pittura, which is an admirable witness to sixteenth-century
humanism, but deals with the author’s technique and not his
art.
At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth, painters rediscovered in non-western arts and
by going back beyond the Renaissance, what had been lost
for four centuries in western art. Instead of starting from
sensible appearances and imposing order on them, they are
fascinated by the opposite procedure, so common among
artists of other civilisations, of starting from the lived ex¬
perience of invisible forces and then creating plastic equiva¬
lents which can express them.
‘To make visible the invisible,’ as Paul Klee said, was to
link up with the spirit of Byzantine and romanesque art,
whose tradition had been, if not interrupted, at least obscured
since the Renaissance. 189
Such a point of view brings out clearly the source of the

mistakes that are made whenever there has been an attempt

to define realism, in a socialist regime for example, with
nothing behind one but the criteria of realism that were pro¬
duced by the Renaissance; an attempt at definition which
at the end of the nineteenth century was already causing the
most conservative bourgeois critics to see in what went before
the Renaissance, with its conception of space, colour, and
composition, nothing but the fumblings of primitives, and in
what, after the Renaissance, challenged its postulates, nothing
but the impotence and perversity of degenerates.
Our Marxist conception of realism must not follow the
lead of what was most conservative and limited in bourgeois
criticism, but embrace the heritage of all the great creative
periods of mankind and carry them further boldly and
creatively.
This is all the more important in that a dogmatic con¬
ception of historical and dialectical materialism, has still
further aggravated the consequences of the metaphysical
conception of the worst bourgeois criticism: that which
accepted as perennial and immutable the aesthetic postulates
of the Renaissance.
To take simply three examples of mistakes in aesthetics
which derive from a mechanistic distortion of historical
materialism :
i. The application of the global concept of decadence in
Marxist criticism. Marx himself scoffed at this ‘pretentious
folly’ of the eighteenth-century French materialists, who on
the strength of their mechanistic materialism argued as fol¬
lows : we are superior to the ancient Greeks in our technology
and economy, therefore our art is superior to theirs. Vol¬
taire’s Henriade is better than Homer’s Iliad.
This argument sadly underestimates the relative autonomy
of superstructures, and leads to the belief that a decadent
social and economic regime can produce only decadent
works.
This is not true even in philosophy: even the period that
MARXISM AND ART
has brought the collapse of imperialism has witnessed the

birth of important works, from which we have much to learn:
our Marxism itself would be the poorer if we still thought,
for example, as though Husserl and Heidegger, Freud, Bache-
lard or Levi-Strauss, had never existed.
Even more does this hold good in art: the period that
brought the decadence of capitalism and the collapse of im¬
perialism witnessed the flowering of impressionism, Cezanne
and Van Gogh, the Cubists, the Fauves, and in literature a
whole body of immensely valuable writing, from Kafka to
Claudel.
2. This application of the concept of decadence is only
one particular instance of a more general mistake : this con¬
sists in seeing in art no more than an ideological super¬
structure, and a mere reflection of an already constituted
reality which is external to it. The mechanistic conception
of reflection is as fatal for the arts as it is for the sciences.
No Marxist would have any doubt but that art is part of
the superstructures and, as such, is tied up with class in¬
terests; but to reduce the work of art to its ideological ‘in¬
gredients’ is not only to lose sight of its specific character, but
also to disregard its relative autonomy, and to forget that
the development of art does not keep in step with that of
society.
Marx emphasised that there is no difficulty in explaining
the historic links between the tragedies of Sophocles and the
social regime in which they were produced; but we still need
an explanation of how it is that even today, in a completely
different regime, they can still give us aesthetic pleasure and
are still recognised as models that cannot be surpassed.
3. A third mistake consists in explaining the enduring
value of a work of art, irrespective of class regimes, simply by
the fact that art is a form of knowledge. No doubt, as Marx
showed, for example, in the case of Balzac, or Lenin in that
of Tolstoy, great works have value as knowledge; but to reduce
art to this aspect is once again to fail to recognise its specific
character. It is not enough to follow Hegel and repeat that

art is a specific form of knowledge, for it is not true that art
teaches us through image what philosophy and history teach
us through concepts. I cannot ‘translate’ Don Quixote or

Hamlet, or any poem or picture, or musical composition,
into concepts : and this because the specific property of the
work of art is precisely its being inexhaustible both in its
object and in its language.
In its object , because it is man as an active being, as creator.
When, as we said before, a still-life by Cezanne gives us the
feeling of an equilibrium that is on the point of collapsing,
and this world, reduced to a table, a plate and three apples,
seems to be held on the verge of catastrophe only by man’s

major act — artistic composition — we have there the plastic
expression of the truth that the real is not only a given situa¬
tion, but a task to be accomplished. The work is an awaken¬
ing to responsibility, a reminder of what man is : a creator, a
responsible being. This is as true of the Antigone as it is of
Faust.
The language of art is closely linked to its object. Like the
latter, it is necessarily inexhaustible. It is creative of myths,
that is to say of ‘models’ of man as he transcends himself,

and, going beyond the concept, which expresses what is
already made, it is poetry or symbol; in other words it is
the unexpected encounter of terms which does not give us an
already made reality, but points out to us, and offers us as
a ‘target' , a reality that is being made.
Thus art is knowledge, but knowledge specifically qualified
by its object and its language. It is man’s knowledge of his

creative power expressed in the inexhaustible language of
myth.
This concept of reality at which the work of art aims
implies a realism that can undergo endless developments and
renewals, just as can that of reality itself: a realism which is
not simply a reflection of the reality but a participation in
the creation of a new reality.
192
MARXISM AND ART
For a Marxist, the history of art is not consciousness of self,

as Hegel thought, but the history of the creation of self.
If we recognise this specific character of artistic creation
we shall reach conclusions similar to those we formulated for
the sciences.
If reality has been defined dogmatically and definitively,
we shall exclude from realism everything that is a new reality,
and what we will have done will be to claim to have defined,
or determined, criteria of reality or morality which are given
validity once and for all.
On the other hand, the recognition of the creative role of
art will mean that we not only accept but look for, in art as
in the sciences, a fruitful pluralism of styles and schools.
It is from this great aesthetic movement that it becomes
possible to begin the working out of a Marxist aesthetics:
not in order to demand from the artist the illustration of
short-term slogans, but to call on him to share in the building
up of the future of man — and this he can do by starting from
a clear consciousness of the laws of historical development in
our own period, and from an acute awareness of his personal
responsibility towards that development, together with a
similar consciousness of what socialism is fundamentally. Go¬
ing beyond the negative phase of the class war, in which
socialism is defined by contrast with the past, it is the regime
that can make every man a man, that is a creator, at every
level: the economic, the political, and the cultural. To give
the artist this consciousness is to help him to play his part in
awakening men to consciousness of their human, and there¬
fore creative, quality.
*
Although we have here an exaltation of the role of subjec¬

tivity, it by no means follows that we are abandoning the
positions held by historical materialism. What we are doing
1
93 claim, the dogmatic claim
is to denounce a pseudo-scientific
to entrench oneself in historical development, to possess facts
which are conceived as incompatible and immutable blocks

of matter, and to be also the architect who knows in advance
the overall plan, like God the Father and his Providence in
Bossuet’s Discours sur Vhistoire universelle, and finally to possess
a legal code for the management of these materials.
This critique of history does not lead us into a wilderness
of ruins : it does not mean abandoning the hope of a scientific
history, but simply points out that history which claims to be
scientific is not always so. Scientific history is not apologetics
nor hagiography; nor is it a ‘philosophy of history’ still
haunted by the ghost of Hegel’s ‘absolute spirit’ under a new
name. It is in the first place a human history.
It is a reflection of man and time. It does not start from a
sceptical doubt, which is merely destructive and leads to
despair, but by a methodical doubt, which as the etymology
of ‘method’ indicates, leads somewhere : and what it leads
to is a certainty more sure than that of credulity.
With man, time takes on a new rhythm and a new mean¬
ing. While nature’s time is measured by the movement or
transformations of matter, man’s time (in as much as he is
no longer only, like the other animal species, a being that
adapts itself to nature, but a being that transforms it, and
in so doing transforms himself) — man’s time is measured by
his decisions and creations.
These decisions and creations are not arbitrary; they are
conditioned by his earlier decisions and creations. Man,
however, is not simply a link necessary and in itself without
value, between the past and the future. The present is the
time of decision; it is the moment when man assumes his
responsibility towards the outcome, with the consciousness
that, while his act results from a past of which he is the in¬
evitable fruit, at the same time he inaugurates a new begin¬
ning; that he creates new possibilities and new chances, and
there is no web of causality so19strong
4 but that it is possible
for him first to fray it and then to tear it apart. True scientific
history is the history which takes into account the specific
MARXISM AND ART
character of its object, which does not claim identity with the
history of physics, of biology or astronomy, and which is a
history of men as beings responsible for the future. A man’s
life is really ‘historical’ (and not biological) when it is made
up of free decisions.
This conception of history is also a conception of life.
Marxism, by inaugurating, in alliance with historical ma¬
terialism, a new age of history, has provided man with new
means for building his own future. Because its materialist
conception of man and the world is based on man’s creative
practice, it is a methodology of historical initiative. At the
same time, this conception of the world is a moment in the
liberation of man.
When, under the claim of being scientific history, it be¬
comes fixed in dogmatism — in a scheme of development
divided into five stages, universal in value and immutable
— not only is there a reversion to a ‘philosophy of history’,
whose uselessness was demonstrated by Marx, but a new fate,
and a new inevitability are given currency, with all the
fanaticism in behaviour which is produced by dogmatism in
thought.
The time of history is not this empty framework into which
events and men must at all costs be thrust. If many of our
actions are not our own or are no longer our own, as a result
of a dialectic of ‘alienation’ and of the ‘fetishism’ the key to
which was given to us by Marx, and the analysis of which
we are still a long way from completing, then how can a
personal existence have any real meaning? Is man simply a
function of structure and conjectures?
This is a problem which the novelist has to face, since, as
Elsa Triolet writes in Le grand jamais, he is ‘his heroes’ pre¬
destined fate’. To what extent can one predict a man’s future
as one predicts that of the hero of a novel?
Is not the novelist’s time, 1made
95 up of man’s initiatives
more than of what he has to accept, closer to human, historical,
truth than the clock-time and calendar-time in which we
try to enclose ‘facts’, forgetting just the essential point — that

they are historic, and therefore human ‘facts’? That they
are ‘facts’ in the sense of things made or created, and not
inert data.
The problem of man and time brings us back to that of
art and realism.
Is the novel history, or is history a novel?
The answer is not a matter of personal caprice : a distinct
choice has to be made in relation to time.
The novel is not a link in the chain of time. Like the myth,
it is in advance of time, and, for the Marxist, that defines it as
creation: specifically human labour is labour which is pre¬
ceded by the consciousness of its end; it is preceded by the
project, which becomes its law. The work of art is this global
image of the world and of himself which man cannot achieve
until he takes a decision and affirms himself as creator. A
myth is a model of action which corresponds to a global
vision of the world and its meaning.
Science reduces what is purely arbitrary in that construc¬
tion; it can never destroy its roots, since the roots are man
himself as creator: creator of projects, of decisions and acts,
of myths, of his own history, creator of his art and of his
future. This is the very definition of man; it is what dis¬
tinguishes him from other animals and other things, of which
he is a part.
The specifically human reality is this projection or project;
it is what a theologian would call this transcendence. Through
its forward-looking character, art expresses the essence of
humanity. The work of art is human reality being made.
Any form of realism, then, is insufficient if it recognises as
real only what the senses can perceive and reason can already
explain. The true realism is not that which affirms man’s
destiny but that which concentrates more on his choices : for the
strictly human reality is in addition all that we have not yet
become; it is all that we project ourselves as being, through
myth, choice, hope, decision and battle.
196
MARXISM AND ART
There is a time proper to things, which is measured

spatially and includes man as one of its elements; and there
is a time proper to man, the time proper to the invention
of self, which is measured by responsible decisions. Thus the
fabric of our life is woven from this double time ; its drama
and its beauty lie in this, that what is at stake is the victory
of man’s time.
197
Postscript
by way of introduction to a discussion of this essay, with a plea

for indulgence towards its shortcomings
Seven years ago, in Perspectives de I’homme, a far-reaching

survey of the great currents of contemporary thought, I
introduced the debate into the book itself by asking the
authors whose views were disputed, or their supporters, to
reply to the interpretation given of their work. This pro¬
cedure made possible an initial approach, and the steps
taken in the same spirit by the French Centre of Marxist
Studies and Research to inaugurate public discussions, to¬
gether with its study- weeks (the Semaines de la Pensee Marxiste ),
were the starting point for a large-scale dialogue between
living thinkers.1
This dialogue was initiated by French Marxists and, as a
result of the particular conditions prevailing in France, it
was above all in Catholic quarters that it developed. There
was a sudden expansion when the encyclical Pacem in terris
and later the Vatican Council showed the willingness of the
most vital elements in the Church to enter into ‘dialogue’
with the world.
Carrying this into practice enabled the various participants
to realise the profound meaning of this dialogue : it is neither
1Cf. Marxisme et Existentialisme (Paris, Plon, 1962), which reproduces the

discussions at the first Semaine de la Pensee Marxiste; Morale chretienne et
morale Marxiste (Paris, La Palatine), which contains the shorthand record
of the first important dialogue between Christians and Marxists at the
Palais de la Mutualite in i960; L’homme chretien et t'homme marxiste (Paris,
La Palatine, 1964), which sums up the main discussions that followed in
Paris and Lyons.
POSTSCRIPT
a skilful, and at the same time polite, form of polemic en¬

gaged in by dogmatic systems, all of which are equally con¬
vinced that they alone possess the whole truth and whose
only tactical aim is to make the other party accept it; nor
is it an attempt to replace inevitable conflicts — in particular
the class war — by purely verbal confrontations, which are
regarded as an end in themselves; nor, again, the eclectic
and agnostic approach, which puts all the proposed theses
on the same footing, and holds that each of them contains
an equal portion of the truth. On the contrary, it is a method
of inquiry which allows our teaching to incorporate not only
every fragment of truth that may have emerged from different
theoretical positions, but also, and above all, to ensure the
living development of its own truth by taking into account
what, at every moment, is being born in its new presentation.
Thus dialogue between men aims, beyond itself, at dialogue
between men and the world they are building.
If Perspectives de Vhomme constitutes a starting point, this
essay on twentieth-century Marxism makes no claim to be
a terminal point or conclusion. All it hopes to do is to draw
up a first provisional estimate of what Marxism can gain for
its own creative development from this dialogue. And this
will be in the first place the incorporation of the extremely
valuable heritage of researches and discoveries that, even
from a mystified or alienated position, other currents of
thought have been able to make — whether they be philo¬
sophical or religious doctrines, scientific theories or methods
of research, Christian thinking or reflection upon life, psycho¬
analysis or structuralism. In addition, Marxism will have the
further gain of becoming fully alive to the transformations of
knowledge, of the world, and of history which are develop¬
ing in the twentieth century with unprecedented rapidity.
The very principle of this book is such that it cannot end
with a conclusion, since its aim is to understand the move¬
ment of thought and action and 199 not to enclose them in a
concept or a complete system. Having reached, therefore,
the point where I should ‘conclude’ it, I realise how easy it

will be to misunderstand it.
To reflect on what twentieth-century Marxism can be, is
not to propose any ‘revision’ or ‘supersession’ of Marxism.
Rather is it to recall, as against any attempt at revising or
dogmatising Marxism, what was Marx’s essential discovery
a hundred years ago, and the part played today by that
cardinal discovery in raising thought and action to the level
of the new conditions in which they are exercised. It is to
recall the requirements, as simple as they are essential, of
living Marxism: in the first place, that Marxist materialism
is dialectical, and secondly that scientific socialism is not a
‘scientist’ Utopia, but militant thinking and a guide for
action.
To say that Marxist materialism is dialectical is to em¬
phasise that, unlike all earlier forms of materialism, every
man is other than and more than the resultant of the condi¬
tions which produced him. It was only thus that Marx was
able to base a methodology of historical initiative on a ma¬
terialist conception of the world. If the future were no more
than the extrapolation of the past (even one conceived
through a mechanistic conception of dialectical reversals and
supersessions), if conceptual knowledge of existing being al¬
lowed an exhaustive deduction of the act to be performed in
order to fulfil future history, then there would be no more
history; there would only be a philosophy or even a theology
of history, and all it would do would be to replace the divine
Providence of Bossuet’s Discours sur Vhistoire universelle by the
concept of a speculative dialectic of production relations.
Marx’s signal virtue is precisely that he pin-pointed the
coupling of historical science and historical initiative, with¬
out sacrificing either the rational to an abstract ‘freedom’, or
human choice to the concept in which what already exists
and what has already been accomplished are summed up and
illuminated.
When Marx says that men make their own history, but
200
POSTSCRIPT
that they do so in determined conditions handed down by the

past, which they have not created in their entirety, he is
expressing the principle of a method which links dialectically
the two poles of historical development. In this, he is not
claiming to give us a definitive conclusion, a universal key
which will unlock the secret of the past and infallibly open
the gates of the future. It marks the starting point of an
inquiry into the meaning, inexhaustible in both directions,
of history. In the first place this extends into the conceptual
analysis of objective conditions: for history is not only made
by men, but written by them. Analytical exploration of the
past and its synthetic reconstruction — if this history is scienti¬
fic and not scientist and dogmatic — are like every scientific
theory; they can be challenged, they can be overhauled in
their entirety in the light of and as expressions of new dis¬
coveries. By this I do not mean simply the digging up of new
sources of information and documents about the past, but
also the opening up of new roads into history as it is being
made (and not merely written) which shed new light on
the ways in which transition is effected from one structure
to another. For example, the national liberation of peoples
who have for a long time been colonialised, the renascence
of their own history (denied to them or made meaningless
by colonialism), the unprecedented forms assumed among
them by the transition to socialism, have made it possible
to express with a new clarity the wider problem of the
diversity and complexity of the forces of transition from one
structure to another : what Marx has so admirably visualised
under the name of ‘the Asiatic mode of production’, and
Stalinist scientism had buried in its dogmatising on the ‘five-
stage’ formula.
The recognition of this authentically dialectical and
creative character in the progress of knowledge (including
historical knowledge) through overall reorganisations, in¬
volves no questioning, in historical science any more than
in any other science, of what has been definitively gained;
201
all such gains are preserved within new syntheses when the
preceding thesis is dialectically superseded. On the other
hand, it does rule out the aberrations of an over-simplified
scientism, which claims to be entrenched in a system of com¬
pleted concepts, and from them to deduce the whole of
earlier and later history: just as before our time a mechanistic
conception of determinism had led Laplace to maintain that
he could deduce in physics all the earlier and all the later
states of the world system.
In the field of action and men’s historical initiative, of
their practice in the strongest sense of the word, the abandon¬
ment of one of the terms indissolubly linked together by Marx
in his materialist and dialectical conception of history would
have consequences as disastrous as on the plane of theory.
Action is not the conclusion of a syllogism or of a demonstra¬
tion in elementary mathematics : when conceptual, scientific,
analysis of objective conditions has been carried as far as
possible, then responsible decision comes in. This is not an
arbitrary choice: it is, on the contrary, based on scientific
study, but it is not derived from it in the same way as
technical application results, with nothing to carry forward
beyond itself, from knowledge of existing laws.
To recall this is not to provide a solution to the problem;
but it does express the problem and show that there will
never be a complete and definitive answer.
We can never repeat too often that we must emphasise the
necessity of keeping hold of both ends of the chain, of main¬
taining, that is, the dialectical character of Marxism.
All Marxism’s vicissitudes, during these last twenty years,
have been caused by abandoning one or other of the aspects
of historical dialectics.
To confine ourselves to France, there were, immediately
after the Liberation, the numerous variations of a so-called
‘humanist socialism’ developed over fifteen years, from Leon
Blum to Pere Bigo, and from Maximilien Rubel to Pere
Galvez. Marxism was thus reduced to one of the forms of
202
POSTSCRIPT
pre-Marxist socialism, utopian and moralistic. Henri Lefebvre

proposed a new ‘reading’ of Marx, based on a ‘return to
Hegel’, and making Marxism a renascence of the ‘Hegelian
left’ and its philosophical ‘communism’.
Against these various idealist retrograde movements we
have opposed, in philosophy, the bulwark of a sketchy ma¬
terialism, which often was no more than a barely modernised
restatement of eighteenth-century French materialism or of
Jules Guesde’s and Paul Lafargue’s polemical simplifications
— when it was not positivism or scientism. In this respect,
the most characteristic works were the successive re-issues,
in the form of a ‘Manual’, of notes taken before the war
during Georges Politzer’s lectures, whose writings, some years
earlier, had been the most forcible expression of Marxist
thought. Another book which is characteristic of this ap¬
proach, published in 1953 at the other end of those two
decades, is my own Theorie materialiste de la connaissance. As
early as 1956 I forbade its re-issue. There is in it, as there is
in the ‘Manual’, some useful material, but its general orienta¬
tion is nevertheless pre-Hegelian and even pre-critical, and
this, like all the writings of that period, brings us back to a
pre-Marxist form of materialism.
The latest in date of the distortions of Marxism, illustrate,
by their very symmetry, the consequences of abandoning
one or other of the two aspects of Marx’s conception : Sartre
neglecting the essential element in scientific socialism by over¬
emphasising subjectivity, and Althusser, on the contrary,
eliminating subjectivity and retaining only the conceptual
aspect.
I shall not deal again here with Sartre’s attempt, the
significance of which I tried to bring out in my chapter on
ethics, and shall confine myself simply to recalling that it
cannot be regarded as an attempt to ‘complete Marxism on
the subjective side’. There is no ‘Sartrian variant of Marxism’,
as has often, with too little justification,
203 been asserted. It can¬
not be denied that in our time Sartre’s philosophy has forcibly
raised the problem of subjectivity, and I have shown the

necessity, for Marxism, of not underestimating its importance.
But the answers Sartre gives cannot be included in the Marxist
point of view; they are, in fact, its negation.
From Being and Nothingness to the Critique de la Raison
dialectique, Sartre has, indeed, been trying to express the
philosophical conclusions to be drawn from historical ex¬
perience of the part played by the working class and its
renewed assertion that Marxism is the unsurpassable truth
of our time; but in spite of this his conception of freedom is
still metaphysical ; it is still transcendent in relation to history,
and fundamentally individualist. Since he thus defines free¬
dom not as an increasing power gradually won by history,
but as the abstract privilege of saying ‘No’ and inaugurating
absolute beginnings, the boundary line, in Sartre, is still im¬
precise between the necessary recognition that the meaning
of history is still open and the illusion that at any moment
there is no saying what it may not become. This fundamental
irrationalism in philosophy takes the form, in political prac¬
tice, of an inability to distinguish at every moment between
the real forces from which a human future can be secured,
and speculations which are the fruit of impatience and im¬
pulse. In spite of Sartre’s verbal recognition of the determin¬
ing role of the working class and its party, and his desire to
assist the forces of progress in the Resistance, and in the
struggle against colonialism and personal power, his initial
error takes the form, in his political activity, of some disastrous
confusions: the fundamental confusion in 1956, for example,
between a revolution and a counter-revolution, or the attempt
to set up under the name of ‘Democratic Alliance’ (Rassemble -
ment democratique) a ‘third force’ whose uselessness he later
realised, although he continually repeated the mistake of
believing that he could effect progress by collaborating not
with the working class and its2party
04
but with its opponents.
The source of these mistakes and the impotence which de¬
rives from them is the same in each case: individual sub-
POSTSCRIPT
jectivities do not provide a starting point from which one

can distinguish real, objective, historical forces operating in
the confrontations of classes and nations.
Althusser’s ‘theoretical anti-humanism’, the exactly corres¬

ponding converse of Sartre’s subjectivism, rests on the illusion
of being able to entrench oneself in the concept and so treat
structures and social relationships without reference to human
options. This eliminates the ‘active element’ of knowledge so
forcibly emphasised by Marx as being the ‘subjective’ (but
in no way individualist) element of historical initiative — the
active element of consciousness which is inherent in the very
principle of a revolutionary party. Althusser’s point of view
loses what is fundamental in Marxism : the deep-rooted unity
of theory and practice, in the Marxist sense of the latter term.
Where it is not reduced either to the ‘theoretical practice’ of
linking together concepts in sequence, nor to the purely
‘technical’ practice of unfolding the consequences of a system
of already formed concepts in order, for example, to construct
a machine.
‘Practice’, as the word is used by Marx and Lenin, implies

both the element of conceptual analysis of the objective con¬
ditions of action, and the specifically human element (no
longer merely technical, but ‘moral’) of the dialectical super-
session and the break which calls for anticipation of the ends
— with all that anticipation contains of risk, of responsible
choice, and real historical initiative.
For Marxism, neither the concept nor freedom is consti¬
tuted and defined, once and for all, outside history: that is
outside men’s works, outside man considered in the develop¬
ment of his history.
The ‘theoretical anti-humanism’ of Althusser’s school is the
specifically French variant of neo-dogmatism:1 specifically
1 Dogmatism, in the philosophical 2meaning
°5 of the word (as defined in
Chapter 2) and not in cultural and political meaning. The latter is denial
of freedom of research and creation, and rejection of a plurality of hypo-
French, because it claims to reject all that Marx inherited

from Hegel, Fichte and Kant, and to rest upon a Cartesian
conception of the concept with a new infusion of struc¬
turalism.
This French variant of neo-dogmatism carries the dogma¬
tising of Marxism to very great lengths. For the Marxist
dialectic it substitutes a Cartesian or Spinozist theory of the
concept (whose hopelessly outworn character, when looked
at in the light of contemporary scientific development, was
emphasised over twenty years ago by Bachelard in his studies
on a ‘non-Cartesian epistemology’). This return to Descartes
or Spinoza obliges the neo-dogmatists to remove from Marx
the whole legacy of classical German philosophy which Marx
and Lenin regarded as their prime source.
In this retreat from a materialist and dialectical philosophy
towards a dogmatic rationalism in which the subject of his¬
tory is no longer man but the concept, history is made with¬
out men (who are reduced to being no more than the medium
which carries production relations) ; and ethics and, more
generally, practice, cease to have any meaning and are ex¬
pelled into the outer darkness of ideology.
The element of the concept, that is, of science already
constituted, is a cardinal element in historical dialectic; but
if this element alone is stressed at the expense of all the others,
if the ‘active element’ of knowledge (of which Marx writes
in the Theses on Feuerbach) is thus left out of account, the
element of conscious anticipation of the ends in labour (of
which, again, he writes in Capital) ; in other words, if the
element of project and historical initiative is eliminated from
human practice, then the neo-dogmatism of this ‘theoretical
anti-humanism’ thereby eliminates dialectic, history and
practice; it gets rid of all that is fundamental in Marxism.
theses at any given moment. The two aspects are often allied, but this does
not mean that dogmatists may not be ardent supporters of conditions that
allow free investigation.
206
POSTSCRIPT
Cartesianism and Spinozism, eighteenth-century French

materialism, and classical German philosophy have all had
their own greatness, and they are still inexhaustible sources
of reflection and indispensable models of method for contem¬
porary thought; but Marxism, which has to incorporate this
wonderful heritage, cannot go back either to Descartes or
Spinoza, to d’Holbach or Fichte, to Hegel or Feuerbach.
What constitutes the revolution in philosophy inaugurated
by Marx is precisely this: that for the first time he forged an
unbreakable link between theory and practice, philosophic
thought and militant action, for the transformation of the
world : that he thus made theory an element in history being
made.
Althusser’s concepts of ‘metonymic causality’ and ‘struc¬

tural determinism’ destroy historical dialectic at two levels :
the emphasis laid on structure leads to a neglect of
creativity
(a) at the powers of production level

(b) at superstructure level
Action (political action, for example) is conceived with the
application of science as the model.
Most fortunately, although this neo-dogmatism has strongly
coloured various intellectual reviews, it has as yet caused no
deviation in the policy of the French Communist Party.
In this essay, I have done my best to relate every thought
and every action to its starting point, and to comprehend
them in their operation, while they are in process of forma¬
tion. It is a very difficult matter to direct one’s thoughts
upon what, by its very principle, cannot be reduced to the
concept: the concept in its nascent state, while it is still
hypothesis, still a movement of the mind, an aim that is
still fumbling; and the same applies to historical initiative of
action while it is still project and provisional anticipation.
At this level there is a very 2serious
07 danger of confusion. It
will be easy to accuse of irrationalism, pragmatism and
‘humanist’ ideology, of abandoning Marxism, an attempt to

reflect upon the concept and action when they are still being
born in the melting-pot.
The concept is the sum total of verified and systematised
knowledge at a given moment in the development of the
sciences. It makes possible an objective synthesis of the
known. Engels, for example, unfolded its magnificent pano¬
rama in his Dialectics of Nature. The error, for which neither
Marx nor Engels is to blame, but which was introduced by
some of their dogmatic and naive followers, lies in confusing
this provisional balance-sheet of science at one moment of
its development with a definitive metaphysical extrapolation
which would make it possible to unfold a philosophy of
nature and a philosophy of history whose inflexible path is
already drawn once and for all, and in which men, their
creative act and their historical initiative, have no part to
play.
For a Marxist, the meaning of life and of history is not
the creation of the individual man, as existentialism suggests.
This meaning is not laid down at once and for all and without
us in a history which unfolds in accordance with the im¬
mutable laws of a Providence or the no less immutable (and
no less theological) laws of a ‘Progress’ which is conceived
in the manner of a metaphysical materialism (very close,
moreover, to a metaphysical idealism, of which it is simply
the inverted form) . Certain scientist interpretations of Engels’
Dialectics of Nature or of Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of
Man lead to forms of dogmatism that are very close to one
another. The meaning of history is man’s work, or rather the
work of men in the totality of their history.
We can say, contradicting all ‘existentialisms’, that this
meaning already exists, before us and without us, because
the historical initiatives of early generations are crystallised
today into products and institutions which create rigid his¬
torical conditions for the operation of our present initiatives,
and radically exclude a large number of historical ‘possibles’.
208
POSTSCRIPT
Nevertheless this meaning is still an open question, for the

future still has to be created even though its creation must
start from conditions inherited from the past. It is not already
written down, and if we do not fulfil our task as men, that is,
as creators, the possibility of the dialectical transcendence
not being effected is by no means ruled out; there may well
be, simply through the force of inertia of the past, a corrup¬
tion of history; the contradictions that are undermining the
world of capital, instead of finding their historical solution,
may lead to disruptions which, at the present stage of the
development of the techniques and the powers of destruction
that man has conquered, could end in the collapse of evolu¬
tion and the abolition of life. The game is not over; no move
can be made without us.
Our conceptual analysis of the conditions in which our
historical initiative and our decision have to intervene can
be exhaustive; but that does not exempt us from making a
choice and taking a risk. It is in this sense that there is
‘transcendence’, which simply means that there is a dis¬
continuity between the human creative act and the being al¬
ready realised, together with the concept which expresses
the latter. This ‘transcendence’— which is simply this dis¬
continuity between creative human act and being, is not the
attribute of a God, but the specifically human dimension of
action. If ‘transcendence’ in the alienated and religious sense
may be taken as equivalent to ‘supernatural’, then the
authentic, no more than human, experience which covers
the word is the experience of dialectical supersession of the
continued creation of man by man which involves the relative
discontinuity referred to: that discontinuity being the im¬
possibility of reducing act, decision, and choice, to the con¬
ditions which produced them and the analytical concepts of
those conditions.
In short, neither meaning nor value nor responsible de¬
209
cision can be interpreted at simply the level of the concept.
To understand what a Christian’s faith can be, one has
to adopt the position in which to think that the world has

a meaning and to hold oneself responsible for its significance
are indistinguishable. This commitment of our whole being,
both in theory and practice, is what is traditionally known as
faith. The word can lead to many ambiguities, precisely
because this faith is essentially dialectical: it is at once
knowledge and action, being and act; it is both assurance
and uncertainty, commitment and awareness of risk, de¬
pendence on the past and a breakaway which creates the
future; and it is under the constant threat of alienation.
We have only for a moment to leave the ridge on which
affirmation and challenge, belief and doubt, come together
in unstable equilibrium, to slide down one or other of the
two slopes. And then we see only the aspect of rupture, of
transcendence, and are lost in fideism, in credulous accept¬
ance of the supernatural and irrational; or, on the other
hand, we see only the aspect of affirmation, of immanence,
and entrench ourselves in the fatal inertia of an absolute
knowledge, either in its theological or its scientist form —
both variants of one and the same dogmatism.
The first road, to take an example, leads to Catholic
integrism, whose essential characteristic is the confusion of
what is fundamental in the Christian message with the cul¬
tural and institutional forms in which it has been expressed
at a particular moment of its historical development: in
other words, it is the confusion of faith with religion, it is
to entrench oneself in what one believes to be an immutable
truth which becomes in reality a mythology so soon as it
ceases to be the living source of man’s endless renewal, so
soon as it is no longer a perennial summons to transcend a
form that has been acquired, and inaugurate a future that
is always open. We then have all the varying forms of a
Christianity which is seen through Plato and Aristotle and,
paradoxically, identifies their conception of the world and
knowledge with what Bultmann calls the Christian Kerygma ,
that is, the Christian message and its preaching. This hel-
210
POSTSCRIPT
lenising and theocratic Christianity is not only, from the

theoretical point of view, completely out of step with the
theory of knowledge suggested to us by the whole of the
modern development of technology, science and the arts;
but, in addition, it serves, in practice, as an opiate. It hampers
human progress by contrasting this world and the other
world, combat and love, and so providing an excuse for all
the forms of conservatism to which it gives its blessing and
the ‘fragrance of spirituality’ (cf. Marx, Early Writings, pp.
43'4) •
The second road, to take another example, leads to a
pseudo-Marxist dogmatism, whose essential characteristic is
the confusion of what is fundamental in Marxism with the
cultural or institutional form in which it has been expressed
or realised at this or that moment of historical development,
in this or that country or in this or that condition. It is the
confusion of science with scientism, in other words the reduc¬
tion of science to science as already constituted, and the en¬
trenching of oneself in a system of complete concepts. There
we have the essence of all dogmatic perversion.
The central aim of this essay on twentieth-century Marxism
is to fight this perversion by showing that Marxism contains
within itself, in its very principle, infinite possibilities of de¬
velopment and renewal ; and that at every moment in history
these make it possible to be fully conscious of new conditions
of thought and action.
In order to achieve this aim it was essential forcibly to
stress — too forcibly, maybe, since it necessitated breaking
with an ingrained habitual procedure — the aspect of dia¬
lectical transcendence, with all the break and discontinuity
in relation to the past that it implies. This experience of break
and discontinuity, which is one of the specific dimensions of
the human act, has been lived by Christianity in the alienated
form of transcendence and faith. The alienated form it has
assumed in history cannot prevent a Marxist from trying to
disclose the authentically human reality and the real content
2 1 1
it conceals and which Marxism has to incorporate. That is

why we insist so forcibly on analysis of the religious phenome¬
non. To fail to understand its essence or to simplify its nature,
would make Marxism itself unintelligible to us.
That explains the emphasis on the problems of aesthetics.
Consideration of the nature and characteristics of creation
in the arts is an indispensable element in Marxist research
and in the development of a living Marxism, for it enables
us, by starting from a specially favoured experience, to
appreciate the conditions of the creative act in general, and
to distinguish ‘levels’ of knowledge; it prevents us, too, from
entrenching ourselves dogmatically in being and the concept
which expresses it, and enables us to understand that act is
not the mere extension of being.
At this point the dogmatist will complain that this means
the abandonment of reason and rationalism; in fact it is
simply a question of not confining oneself to reason as already
constituted : what we have to do is to take up our position
at the level of a rationalism that is constantly being created ;
we have to be at hand wherever something new is being
born, which has not yet been crystallised in the form of
concept.
There is a Buddhist proverb which answers this dogmatic
temptation: ‘Point at the moon and the fool looks at your
finger.’
212
Acknowledgements
The editions of major works referred to in this volume are listed

below. The translator and publishers would like to acknowledge
their indebtedness for permission to use quotations from them:
The Peasant War in Germany by Friedrich Engels, International

Publishers, New York, and Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1957;
The Phenomenology of Mind by Friedrich Hegel, translated by Sir
James Baillie, Allen & Unwin, London, 1966; Capital by Karl
Marx, edited by Friedrich Engels, in 3 volumes, Lawrence &
Wishart, London, 1 954-9 ; Early Writings of Karl Marx, translated
by T. B. Bottomore, C. A. Watts, London, 1963; The German
Ideology by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, International Pub¬
lishers, New York, and Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1968; The
Holy Family by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, translated by
R. Dixon, International Publishers, New York, and Lawrence &
Wishart, London, 1957; Selected Works of Karl Marx and Fried¬
rich Engels, International Publishers, New York, and Lawrence
& Wishart, London, 1968; Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul
Sartre, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Methuen, London, 1966;
Existentialism and Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by
Philip Mairet, Methuen, London, 1968.
213
Index
act; man’s creative, 173-4, 1 76, 178, modern conception, 63-4, 184, 185-
1 80, 1 8 1 , 1 83, 208 ; philosophy of, 66, 6; non-Westem, 186-7, >88, 189;
84, 130; and project, 98 romanesque, 189; and satisfaction
aesthetics, 42, 71, 176, 212; form in, of human needs, 178-9, 180, 184;
69; Marxist, 174-6, 193, 212; beauty
sociology of, 72-3. See aesthetics,
Marxist critique of Hegel’s, 182-4;
non-Aristotelian, 77, 159; and Asia, 21, 35, 36, 46-7
realism, 34, 190; in the Soviet atheism, 106-8, 141-3, 160-61, 162
Union, 28, 29; traditional, 189. atomic bomb, 22
See art, beauty atoms, 45, 48, 67-8
Africa, 21, 35, 36, 46 Augustine, St, 108-9, II2> '30, 134
‘agape’, 137 autonomy, concept of, 132
agnosticism, 58, 59, 127 ‘auto-regulation’, 63, 70
Averroes, 36
alienation, 31, 34, 88, 99-100, 139, aviation, 24
154, 181-2, 195; and Christian love,
134-5; distinction from objectiva-
Bachelard, Gaston, 37, 42, 64, 77, 95,
tion, 148, 183; and faith, 210;
Marx’s concept, 77, 122-3; and 191, 206
moral systems, 101 ; private owner¬ Balzac, H. de, 191
ship supreme form, 182; religious, Bannour, Wanda, 87-8
Barth, Karl, 159, 173
1 16-18, 120; and social stereotype,
165; and transcendence, 134 Batista, Fulgencio, 16
Althusser, L., 203, 205, 207. See anti¬ Baudelaire, Charles, 168, 186
humanism Bauer, Bruno, ti6, 118
analogy, reasoning by, 71 beauty, 62, 176, 178, 180, 187. See
aesthetics, art
anti-communism, 16-17, 152
Antigone, 81, 166, 167, 173, 174 Beauvoir, Simone de, 88, 90-1, 92, 93
anti-humanism, 205-7 Becquerel, Henri, 40
Apelles, 63 being; and act, 173, 208; Greek con¬
Apostel, L., 70 cept, 159; philosophy of, 66, 84, 130
Aragon, Louis, 64, 104, 12 1-2, 136, Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert, 138
Berkeley, George, 164
141-2
Bernard, Claude, 24
Aristotle, 57, 59, 60, 64, 66, 158, 159,
210 Bigo, Pere, 202
Armenia, 32 biology, 24-5, 39, 46, 48, 60, 71
Blanquists, 1 1
art, 56, 95-6, 125; Byzantine, 187,
189; and concept of decadence, Bloch, Joseph, 52
19 1 -2; and creation, 164, 174, 175, Blok, Alexander, 1 2

Blondel, Maurice, 159
177, 178, 184, 185-6, 193; in¬ 215
exhaustibility, 192; and knowledge, Blum, L^on, 202
1 91 -2; language of, 184, 192; Boehme, Jakob, 61
INDEX
Bolsheviks, 12 Christians; and building of socialism,

Boltzmann, Ludwig, 39 155-6; and Communists, 17, 121,
Bonard, Andre, 1 70 152; dialogue with Marxists, 15,
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 9, 157, 161 1 14-15, 152, 155, 198-9; dissocia¬
Bossuet, J.-B., 194, 200 tion from obsolete conceptions,
Brecht, Bertold, 77, 171 157; faith of, 209
Brillouin, L., 72
Church, 106, 159; and class domina¬
Bruno, Giordano, 38 tion, 109, 156, 162, 163; and
Bultmann, Rudolf, 157, 159, 167, 173,
210 communism, 152, 162; ‘missionary’
function,
class 156; ‘of
antagonism, 49, silence’,
51 17, 162
bureaucracy, 123
class regimes, 154, 182, 183
class war, 10, 14, 15
Caesar, Julius, 24
Calvez, Pere, 203 Claudel, Paul, 134, 136, 139-41, 191
coal, 22
Calvin, John, 13 1
capital, 135, 182, 209 cogito,
Cohen, 82, 91, 94, 96, 105
H., 39
capitalism, 15, 16, 27, 50, 100
collective farms, 32
capitalist regime, 13-14, 29, 81-2, 122, colonialism, 13, 35
123; Church and, 162
capitalist world, 10, 28 colour, 188
Carmathian movement, 36 commodities, fetishism of, 56, 122,
64 123, 181, 195
Cartesianism, 43, 147, 206, 207; and
modern theory of knowledge, 37, commodity relationships, 29-31, 32,
Cassirer, Ernst, 164 Commune,

33. !23 Paris, 11,12
Castro, Fidel, 17 communication, development of, 24
Cathars, 137 communism, 52, 101, 105, 123; and
Catholics, 21. See Christians the Church, 152, 162-3; and the
Cervantes, Miguel de, 1 7 1 human person, 27, 145
Cezanne, Paul, 64, 95, 171-2, 191, Communist party, 13; French, 15,
192
18-19, 1 14-15, 207; twentieth con¬
child, thought and reflection in, 127 gress of U.S.S.R., 17, 18, 29
choice, 98, 99 communists ; Christian, 1 1 1 ; and
Christ, in, 1 12, 1 18, 159, 167; Christians, 17, 12 1, 152
Resurrection, 173 composition in modern art, 188
Christianity; adapted to commercial computers, 23-4
society, 117-18, n8n, 119; contri¬ Comte, Auguste, 58, 65, 107
bution to concept of man, 129, 130- concept, 43, 44, 76, 207-8, 209; Carte¬
1, 144; Hellenisation, 155, 158; sian and Spinozist theory, 206, 207
consciousness, 84, 85, 98
Helleno- Christian current, in,
conservatism, 211
1 12-13; heritage of, 162-3; Judaeo-
Christian current, in, 112, 130, Constantine, 109, no, 152, 162
131, 134, 158; and liberation of contradiction, 56, 70, 81-2
man, 163; primitive, 109-10, 113, Copernicus, 172
creation; attribute of man, 134;
1 14, 120, 130; ‘progressive role’,
labour and, 169; of man by man,
1 14; ‘religion of the absolute
future’, 167; religionless, 161 ; and 77. 79. '05, 1 19. !24. 1 37. M5> 164,
the world, 160 171, 176, 182, 209
2l6
INDEX
Crick, F. H. C., 25 economism, 10, 11, 15

economy, 56
criticism, 17, 36, 40, 48, 52
education, 26, 29
Cuba, 13, 91
cubism, 64, 187, 191
ego, 83, 86-7. See I
culture, 21, 134, 165, 177; Marxism Einstein, Albert, 54, 1 28, 1 72
electronics, 23-4
and, 9, 26-7, 28, 35-6, 39; and
subjectivity, 95-6 Eliade, Mircea, 166-7
Eluard, Paul, 136, 154
cybernetics, 14, 22, 34, 39, 61, 66,
empiricism, 68
69-7°> 7i. 73-5
encyclical; Divini Redemptoris, 162;
Dante Alighieri, 96 Pacem in terris, 198; Quadragesima
Dead Sea Scrolls, 1 10 anno, 162
death, 18, 105 Encyclopaedists, 38, 106
de-centration, 172 Engels, Friedrich, 9-10, 27, 41, 47,
decolonisation, 21, 35, 36-7, 156, 201 71, 125; and aesthetics, 174; on
Delacroix, Eugene, 168, 186 Christianity, 109-10, 113, 114, 120,
democracy, 16, 17, 27 1 2 1 ; on history, 52-3 ; on material¬
Democritus, 64, 129 ism and scientific discovery, 26,
demythologisation, 157 39, 155; on science and nature, 54,
Desbordes-Vaimore, Marceline, 136 208; on socialism, 41, 48-51, 135,
Descartes, Ren6, 38, 41, 48, 57, 60, 136
64, 66, 81, 96, 128, 132 entropy, structural negative, 72
Epicurus, 84
determinism, 46, 202 ‘eros’, 137-8
Dewart, Leslie, 158
dialectic, 37, 53, 55, 61, 62, 206; laws Essenes, 1 1 1 , 1 1 2
of, 46, 59; and truth, 46, 48 ethics, 64, 65, 206; of the future, 105;
dialectical machine, 70, 77 non-Platonic, 77, 158; and politics,
ality
dialectical reason, 55-9, 61, 63, 65 90-1, 94-5; and society, 80, 81-3;
dialectical transition, 79, 80 in Soviet Union, 28-9. See mor¬
dialogue, 66, 87; between Christians ethnology, 74, 75
and Marxists, 15, 114, 152, 155,
198-9; necessity for Marxism, 36, Euclid, 54, 60, 63, 189
199 Europe, 13, 15
Diderot, Denis, 41, 57, 176, 185

25. 27
evolution, 75, 133; man’s control of,
disalienation, 98, 102, 184
discovery, application of, 25-6 existentialism, 79, 83-7, 208
Docetism, 137, 159 experience, 84
dogmatism, 10, 14, 15, 19, 31, 37,
facticity, 87, 87n, 88
40-2, 44, 46-7, 62-3, 68, 76, 83, 195,
210 et passim Fadeiev, Alexander, 29
drawing, 188 science,
faith, 109-10,
157 155, 160, 209-10; and
dream; and creation, 169; -symbol Faust, 174
and myth-symbol, 165
Fauves, 191
Duhem, Pierre, 40
Dumery, C. J., 164 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 77, 79, 122;
Durkheim, Emile, 58, 65 Engels on, 39, 41; humanism, 108;
inversion of Christian love, 141-2;
217
econometrics, 34 Marx on, 41, 42, 68, 116, 206
INDEX
Fichte, J. G., 41, 66, 79, 83, 85, 97, Guesde, Jules, 203
Guillaumaud, 70
128, 182, 206; and art, 185; ethics, Gurvitch, G. D., 94
83, 94-5; idealism, 176, 186; source
Gusdorf, Georges, 164
of existentialism, 86-7; and syn¬
thesis of humanism, 108, 132-3
Hamlet, 174, 192
five-year plans, 12, 29, 33
Focillon, H., 72 Hammurabi, 80
formalism, moral, 89, 90 Hartmann, E. von, 39-40
Fourier, Charles, 41 Hegel, Friedrich, 36, 41, 59, 76, 77,
Francastel, Pierre, 72-3, 74 79. Si, 83, 122, 128, 147, 169, 176,
Franco, General Francisco, 17 185, 206, 207; and absolute
freedom, 36, 86, 96, 98, 99, 147, 150, knowledge, 49; absolute spirit of,
176; existentialist concept, 88-9, 144, 145, 150, 194; conception of
91, 92"3> 94. 204; and facticity, 87, history, 168; and conception of
87n, 88 myth, 170; dogmatism in ethics,
Freud, Sigmund, 165, 168-9, I7°. I9I 83; on fear of death, 18; ‘Hegelian
Freudism, 149
left’, 203; humanism, 108, 133;
future, 10, 12, 18, 98, 151, 155; idealist illusion, 42, 45; Marxist
building up of, 163, 166, 193, critique of aesthetics, 175, 182-4,
195, 208-g; man and, 160, 165, 166 192, 193; on religion, 116, 118;
‘reversal’ by Marx, 141, 142, 145
Garaudy, Roger; Perspectives de Heidegger, Martin, 159, 191
Vhomme, 198-9; Thiorie matirialisle Hellenism, 77, 130, 137, 138, 159
Helvetius, 90
de la connaissance, 19, 203
Heraclitus, 61
Gauguin, Paul, 186
geometry, Euclidian, 60 hero, mythical, 168, 170, 174
Georgia, 32 Hertz, Heinrich, 39
Gide, Andrd, 64 Hippocrates, 24
Hiroshima, 13, 22
Gilson, Etienne, 185
Giotto, 96 history, 10, 21, 46, 51; creation by
Girardi, Father, 144-5 man, 52-3, 77-8, 124, 149-50, 176,
Gladkov, F. V., 29 201; and dialectical reason, 56;
gnosticism, 137, 138 initiative in, 10, 195, 200-1, 202,
God, 95, 104, 107, 128, 130, 132, 140, 208; Marxist conception of mean¬
141, 143, 160, 161, 194; Christian ing, 102, 208; meaning, 167-8, 174,
concept, 158, 159; love of, 137, 138, 201; scientific, 194-5; and struc¬
142, 160; and transcendence, 63, turalism, 74-5 ; subjective factor, 95
133 Hitler, Adolf, 165
79. 83, 167; will of, 108, 109, 130, Hitlerism, 13, 29
Goethe, Wolfgang, 133, 185, 186 Holbach, P.-H. D. d’, 76, 85, 106,
Gollwitzer, Pastor, 144, 147, 153, 154 177, 207
Homer, 190
Gorki, Maxim, 12, 105 ‘horizon’, 63, 157
Graeco-Roman thought, 129-30, 131
Greece, 112-13 human relationships, 27-30
Greek gods, 112, 170 humanism, 34; Marxist, 75, 107-8,
Guatemala, 14
150, 151, 154; modern, 64-6; new,
Guernica, 13
75; two currents, 13 1-3, 134;
Gueroult, M., 86 universal, 36, 37, 188
2l8
INDEX
t59
Husserl, Edmund, 191 Kautsky, Karl, 1 1
hypotheses, 53, 65; necessity for kerygma, 167, 210
Kierkegaard, S., 83, 85, 87, 133, 134,
plurality of scientific, 47-8; and
power over nature, 59-60; of
structure, 72 Klee, Paul, 171-2, 187, 189
knowledge;
84 ‘absolute’, 49, 63; active
I; and consciousness of self, 96-7; and character, 41, 53, 99, 125, 176, 205,
206; dialectical character, 37, 55,
the other, 93-4, 103-4; the pure and
the empirical, 94. See Ego 127, 20X-2 ; doubling of human, 25,
I bn Arabi, 141 26; Marxist theory, 42-3, 45, 125;
Ibn Khaldun, 36 non-Cartesian, 37, 158; pre-Marx¬
idealism, 62, 127, 177; German, 41, ist theory, 53-4; relative character,
45. t76; illusions, 42, 45, 79
Koestler, Arthur, 153
ideology, 49-51, no
impressionism, 191 Kornberg, Arthur, 25
Incarnation, 159 Kruschev, Nikita, 17
incentive, 30-1, 33 Kugelmann, L., 11-12
individual and social relations, 91-2,
148-9, 150
Laberthonniere, Lucien, 158, 173
individualism, Sartrian, go, 204 labour; and alienation, 181-2; and
information, theory of, 71-2 creative act, 183; dependence on
infrastructures, 33 nature, 124; and ethics, 105;
initiative, historical, 10, 195, 200-1, human, 167, 169, 176; and human
202, 208 needs, 180, 183-4; and myth, 165,
‘in-self’, 59, 60 167 ; at origin of all human activity,
integrism, 173, 210 125; social, 27; and transcendence,
intuition, 37
133-4. $ee work
labour-power, 32
Lacazette, 153
Jaspers, Karl, 159
Lactantius, 130
Jaur£s, Jean, 163
Jews, 1 16 Lafargue, Paul, 202
Langevin, Paul, 40
John of the Cross, St, 104, 12 1-2, 142,
160 language, 96, 97
Jung, C. G., 164 Laplace, P.-S. de, 60, 65, 202

Latin America, 14
‘just man’, theme of role, 1 1 2
law of value, 29-30, 32, 33
justification, ideology of, 80-1, 82
Justin, St, 161 Lefebvre, Henri, 203
Leger, Fernand, 187
Kafka, Franz, 191 Leibniz, G. W., 42, 57, 128, 132
Kandinsky, Vasili, 12 Lenin, 33, 38, 49, 61, 84, 125, 191,
Kant, Immanuel, 40, 60, 66, 74, 75, 206; on Christianity, no, 163; and
81, 82, 85, 128, 176, 185; abstrac¬ fundamental inspiration of Marx¬
tion of ‘citizen’, 1 1 9 ; categories, ism, 10-12, 15; on inexhaustibility
of matter, 150; and knowledge, 41,
59, 84; on dialectic, 55; and ‘duty
to be’, 97; and freedom of the 42, 148; on myth, 164; and practice,
other, 92-3; legacy of, 41, 79, 83, 205; on religion, 125, 128; and
206; and synthesis of humanism, 219 subjectivity,
science, 26, 39-40, 43, 46, 155; on
95
132
INDEX
Le Roy, Edouard, 40 191 ; on atheism, 107-8; Capital, 56,

Levellers, 50 100; contribution to moral science,
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 71, 73-5, 100; 77-8; and ethics, 77-8, 101; and
on myth, 169-70, 1 9 1 fundamental inspiration of Marx¬
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 58 ism, 76; individual sum of social
life; destruction of, 22; Marxist con¬ relations, 68, 97, 142, 148, 149-50;
ception of, 195, 208-9; myth and on knowledge, 41, 42-3, 179, 206;
meaning of, 174; synthesis of, 25 on labour, 98, 124, 177-8; on love,
linguistics, structural, 67, 149 134; on making of history by man,
Loeb, Jacques, 25
logic, 57, 59 49-50, 52> 124; man as species¬
being, 154; methodology of his¬
Lombardo-Radice, L., 162 torical initiative, 195, 200-1, 202;
Los Angeles, 14 on myth, 165, 166; on nature, 177;
love; in Aragon’s works, 1 41 -3 ; and religion, 108-9, II0> 1 !4> 115-

Christian conception and contribu¬ 18, 1 19-21, 163, 21 1 ; reversal of
tion, 130, 131, 134-9, >42; in Hegel, 141, 142; revolution in phil¬
Claudel’s works, 139-41; force, osophy, 206-7; and value of human
person, 147
144; Marxist concept, 139, 140;
and transcendence, 104, 105 Marxism, 9, 38-42,46, 51, 59, 76-7,
Lucretius, 45, 48, 66
84, 164-5, 211 et passim-, and con¬
Ludendorff, E. von, 13 cept of decadence, 190-1; and cy¬
Luther, Martin, 131 bernetics, 73 ; dialectical character,
202; distortions of, 202-7; and
MacCarthyism, 14
existentialism, 85-6, 95 ; Lenin’s role,
Mach, Ernst, 39 8-12; and moral behaviour and
Madaule, Jacques, 139 society, 79-80; and the novel, 196;
Maiakovski, Vladimir, 12 refashioning of, 21, 26, 155;
scientific character, 15, 41, 42, 44,
Makarenko, A. S., 29
Malevitch, K. S., 12 47; and structuralism, 73; twen¬
man; and control of evolution, 25; tieth century, 199-200, 21 1-12; ulti¬
creation of man by man, 77, 79, mate end of, 146-7; universality,
105, 1 19, 124, 137, 145, 164, 1 71, masses, 11, 26, 33, 34
176, 182, 209; creative activity,
176, 180, 18 1, 196; creative power, materialism; and absolute and rela¬
107, 134, 146; emancipation, 118- tive truth, 46-7 ; dialectical Marxist,
19; makes himself, 86; makes own
41, 42, 43, 45, 62, 200; distortion of
history, 52-3, 77-8, 124, 149-50, 35-6
historical, 190-2; dogmatic, 41, 53-
176, 201; potentialities, 9, 22, 25;
4) 1 77> 193-4; eighteenth-century
primitive, 54, 126; project of total, French, 40-41, 90, 176, 203, 206;
102, 103; and religion, 108-9; split historical, 51, 190; and ‘inevitable
life, 1 1 7, 1 1 8 ; thought dialectical,
progress’, 77; Marx’s, 56-7, 200;
59; transformer of nature, 177 mechanistic, 76, 84, 176; new form
martyrs, communist, 153 and scientific discovery, 26, 39,
Marx, Karl, 9-12, 27, 38, 42, 49, 51, 155; speculative, 48; and theory
52, 56, 61, 62, 84, 124, 128, 136, of reflection in knowledge, 44-5,
155, 160, 180, 185 et passim\ aesthe¬
‘sets’125
53. , 69, 71 42,
mathematics, 124; theory of
tics, 1 74-5 ; on alienation, 77, 122-3,
135, 181, 182; on art, 182-4, 1 90,
220
INDEX
Matisse, Henri, 187 needs; creation by man, 98, 99, 177-

matter; disintegration of, 22; in¬ 8; satisfaction of, 177-8, 180
exhaustibility, 40, 150; mechan¬ neo-dogmatism, 205-7
istic concept, 41, 46, 76; and Newton, Sir Isaac, 54, 60, 63, 65, 189
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 64, 137
‘transcendence from below’, 63; Novalis, 176, 184
twentieth-century concept, 67-8
Maxwell, J. C., 39 nucleotids,
novel, 196; 25,
‘new’,
39 64, 168
means of production, 27, 28, 31, 122,
155, 181-2, 183
Menenius Agrippa, 81 objectivation, 148, 183
Meslier, J., 106 obligation, 81
metaphysics, 44, 48, 76 occult, 126-7
models; and art, 188; construction Ochoa, Severo, 25
oil, 22
by thought, 54, 55; cybernetic, 69-
70, 71, 100; idealist concept, 42; other, the, 93-4, 97, 103-4
Owen, Robert, 41
and knowledge, 41, 44, 45; la¬
bour and creation of, 169; and ownership of means of production;
myth, 169-70; plurality of, 31, 37, private, 27, 31, too, 155, 181-2,
65, 66. 183; collective, 122
morality; ‘of ambiguity’, 88, 90-1,
Parmenides, 66, 158
92, 93; ‘constituted’ and ‘con¬ Pascal, Blaise, 104, 134
stituent’, 80, 82, 88, 91, 95; demys¬
tification, 87-8; and dogmatism Paul, St, 1 12
Pavlov, Ivan, 171
and formalism, 82, 83; and Marx¬ Pearson, K., 39
ism, 34, 62, 79; socialist, 28-9, 31.
See ethics Peasants’ war, 50
Mosaic Decalogue, 80 Pelagius, 1 1 2
Mtinzer, Thomas, 50, 112, 113 Peri, Gabriel, 16, 153
mysticism, 141 person; classic theory, 132; and the
mystification, 79, 121, 124, 126, 129, community, 154; Marxism and
133. I39» HO, 146, 182 absolute value of human, 144-7,
myth, 96, 165; and creation, 164, 165, 1 5 1 ; and private property, 1 56
172, 173-4; element in thought, 54; philosophy, 49, 56; classical German,
and labour, 165, 169; language of, 35> 79> i85> 206; critical, 76;
1 71-2, 173, 184, 192; Marxist con¬ present confusion, 38; Stalinist,
ception, 1 7 1 ; and morality, 80 ; 14, 19; superiority of Marxist, 38-9
mythology corruption of, 173; physics, 14, 25, 39, 60, 67-8, 71, 202;
and subjective factor, g5
starting
127 point of science, 54-5, 1 26,
Picasso, Pablo, 187
mythology, 173, 210 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni,
Napoleon, 24 picture,
131-2 187-8
nature, 27, 54; contemporary arts planning, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32-3
and, 63-4; dialectic of, 53, 59, 60- Plato, 76, 84, 85, 129, 158, 160, 210;
1, 69, 71; man and, 22-5, 55, and beauty, 176; ‘eros’, 137-8;
62
124; ‘second’, 124, 171, 177, 185, ‘Laws’, 81, 130; theory of ideas, 51,
186
Nazism, 12, 13, 121 Plekhanov, G. V., 1 1 , 12
221
INDEX
Plotinus, 158 realism, 12, 34, 190, 192, 196

pluralism, 47-8, 64, 65, 193 reality,
60, 6342, 58, 61
poetry, 141, 143, 170, 184 reason, 50, 51-2, 67; dialectical, 55-9,
Poincare, Henri, 40, 99
political economy, 34, 35 reflection, 96-7; and knowledge, 45,
Politzer, Georges, 203
53-4,
ception,62,1 91125; mechanistic con¬
positivism, 10, 34, 58, 68, 107, 203;
Reformation, 50, 131
structuralism antidote, 68-9 reification, 63, 157
possible, 96, 97, 99, 100
relativity, 64, 65
Poussin, Nicolas, 96
practice, 52, 53, 62, 79, 101, 105, 206; religion, 56, 125, 126, 128, 156;
criterion of, 55, 59, 84, 145-6; atheism and, 106-8; distinction
human, 84, 202
from faith, 63, 157, 158; ‘human
pragmatism, 59, 145, 146 core’ in, 1 1 7, 1 20, 1 2 1 ; Marxism
prices, 32
and, 1 13-15; ‘opium of the people’,
prime elements, 37, 64, 67 109, no, 163; persistence in
production; capitalist, 51, 52; means socialist state, 123-4; reflection of
of, 27, 28, 31, 100, 122, 155, 181-2, distress and protest against it, 108-
183; relationships, 27, 100, 125 9, no, 120, 125; roots of, 124, 125,
profitability, 33 128. See Christianity
progress, 77, 208 Renaissance, 35, 38, 39, 131, 187,
188, 189, 190
project, 53, 96, 97, 99, 100, 1 51, 178,
206; characteristic of man, 125-6, responsibility, 78, 81, 86, 91, 95, 119,
169; fundamental human, 146; 197; for the future, 194, 195
realisation in art, 180, 196 revisionists, Russian, 40
proletariat, 10, 15, 26 revolution, 39, 100; Chinese, 13;
Prometheus, 166, 167 counter-, 152; 1848, n, 101;
Protagoras, 129 French, 50, 86, 116-17, 185;
Proudhonians, 1 1 October, 12, 16; Russian, Dec.
Providence, 194, 200, 208 1905, 11 ; social, 146-7
psychoanalysis, 170, 199 Ricardo, David, 36, 100
psychology of form, 69 Ricoeur, Paul, 63, 157, 167, 168-9
ritual, 126, 127
Ptolemy, 54, 172
Pushkin, Alexander, 18 Roman empire, in, 113
romanticism, n, 12, 176, 184
quanta, 64 Rousseau, J.-J., 184-5
Rubel, Maximilien, 202
Rucker, A. W., 39
Racine, Jean, 134, 136
radio, 24
Rahner, Karl, 159, 167 Saint-Exupdry, A. de, 97

Raphael, 63 Saint-Simon, C. H. de, 36, 41
rationalism; classical and lesser, 57-8, Salazar, Dr. A. de O., 17
128; dialectical reason distinct Sartre, J.-P., 86, 88-9, 91-2, 93, 96;
from, 57-8; dogmatic, 43, 85, 206- distortion of Marxism, 203-5
satellite, 23, 24
7; Greek, 35, 187; and Marxism,
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 67
scepticism, 82
real, 57, 61, 62, 171, 172; new con¬
cept36of, 65 Schmidt, Conrad, 125
222
INDEX
Scholastics, 66, 84, 158 Stirner,

205 M., 83, 87, 95, 147, 148,
150
science, 17, 35, 56; and absolute
Stoics, 129, 130
truth, 43-4, 46; and concept, 208;
development, 21, 22-6, 37, 65, 66, structuralism, 66-9, 71-5, 100, 199,
67-8, 157, 21 1 ; discoveries, 26, 39,
155; and faith, 157; laws, 62; subjectivity, 83, 84, 87, 95, 150, 193,
and myth, 54-5, 126, 127; and 203; and Christianity, 133, 134;
scientism, 63, 21 1; and Stalinism, Marxist concept, 79, 80, 85, 87,
14, 19 95-6, 149
scientism, 10, 34, 63, 68, 201, 202, Sue, Eugene, i35n
supernatural, 7g
203, 21 1
self; consciousness of, 96-7; gift of, superstructures, 33, 34-5, 56-7, 72-3,
153; in-self and for-self, 87, 91;
transition to others, 93-4. See ego, I 136, 190-1
surplus- value, 33, 51, 82
surrealism, 142
senses, humanising of, 179-80
seriousness, spirit of, 88, 88n symbol, 171, 172, 173
synthesis, 47
servo-mechanism, 70
Sholokov, Mikhail, 29, 36 Taine, H., 65, 75
Siberia, 32
Sik, Professor, 30 technocratic cleavage, 26
Smith, Adam, 65, 100 technology, 35, 56, 77, 125, 177;
social labour, 27 development, 21, 22-4, 53, 157,
social relations, 30, 91-2, 124, 135-6, 21 1
148-9, 150, 156 Teilhard de Chardin, P., 138, 144,
socialism, 17, 26-30, 34-5, 37, 52, 100, 159-60, 16 1, 208
135. 193; building of, 15, 21, 28, telecommunications, 24
television, 24
29, 36, 122, 123, 155-6; humanist,
Teresa of Avila, St, 136, 137
202-3; Islamic, 36; scientific, 36,
Thales, 66, 129
41. 43. 44. 48-50. 51. 100, 164, 200,
203; and social relations, 135-6 theology, 44, 63, 155, 159
thermonuclear bomb, 22
society, 10, 46-7, 75, 91-2, too
sociology, 34, 71, 72 ‘thing in itself’, 62, 63
‘this-sidedness’, 43
Socrates, 81, 129, 130
sophistics, 48 Thomas Aquinas, St, 84
Sophocles, 1 91 Thorez, Maurice, 15, 1 13-14, 120
Soviet Union, 16, 28, 29, 34 thought, 54. See concept, knowledge
space rocket, 24
time; man’s, 194-5, 1 97 5 nature’s,
species-being and species-life, 117-18, 194; novelist’s, 64, 195
1 19, 154, 182 tolerance, 65-6
Spencer, Herbert, 81 Tolstoi, Alexis, 12, 29
Spinoza, Baruch, 41, 51, 57, 76, 85, Tolstoy, Leo, 191
104, 128, 206, 207 transcendence, 63, 79, J02, 209, 21 1;
spontaneity, 10, 15, 31 from above and from below, 63, 83 ;
Stael, Madame de, 185-6 man’s, 97-8, 133-4, 166, 167
Triolet, Elsa, 195
Stalin, Joseph, 29, 33, 48, 54
Stalinism, 14-15, 19, 76, 201 truth, 48, 62, 78, 155; absolute and
Starkenburg, Heinz, 52 223 relative, 16, 42-6, 49
Stendhal, 172 Tsitsilonis, Yannis, 153-4
INDEX
Ward, 39
United States, 13, 23 war, 13, 15, 16
utopianism, 48, 49-50, 101 ‘we’, 96,
Watson, J.99 D., 25
values, 98, 100
Van Gogh, Vincent, 186, 191 Weber, Max, 82
Van der Leeuw, G., 166 Weitling, W., 101
West, the, 35, 37
Van Lier, 63
Vasquez, 183 Wiener, Norbert, 22, 73
Wolfflin, H., 72
Vatican Council II, 156, 198
Versailles treaties, 13 work, 27, 29, 30, 56, 96, 97-8, 99, 100,
Vietnam, 14
1 50- 1. See labour
Vinci, Leonardo da, 38, 189 working class, 10, 11, 26, 101. See
violence, 17, 151-2
proletariat
Voltaire, 190 world; and contemporary art, 63-4;
and ‘model’, 42 ; twentieth-century
concept, 66
Waldeck-Rochet, P., 114-15
Wallon, Henri, 54, 55, 126-8, 166
Walter, W. Grey, 70 Zealots, 1 1 1
224
HARYGROUE COLLEGE LIBRARY
Marxism in the twentieth centu
335.4 GIGm tHl
3 na? □□□oa?Eci i
DATE DUE
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335.4
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t5G3 ^1S'h.

Translated by Rend Hague

Charles scribner’s sons

French language edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book

Printed in the United States of America

Pablo Neruda. ‘ Sonata Critica’,

1 The Terms of the Problems in this Last Third

2 From Dogmatism to Twentieth-Century Thought 38

3 Marxism and Ethics 76

4 Marxism and Religion 106

5 Marxism and Art 1 64

It is sometimes much more difficult to state a problem cor¬

sharply aware of his creative potentialities and gave the

In a preface written in February 1907 for the Russian

struggle against utopia, they would ridicule the man who so

This total crisis was ultimately overcome only by a ‘total

whole continents such as that of Latin America. It failed to

Nevertheless, the building up of socialism was carried on

As soon as one abandons the indivisibly scientific and

under Fidel Castro, which tries to rouse the passions of

Confronted by these revelations, and not for a moment

own individual name : it is only my own self that I am com¬

The Terms of the Problems in this Last Third

Cultural problems present themselves today in new historical

Starting from the three great facts enumerated above, how

Man’s power over nature has increased more in twenty

What we have witnessed is not a mere quantitative change,

would automatically lead ships to the fishing grounds and

At the beginning of this century Loeb thought that science’s

application is being fantastically cut down: in the case of

The establishment of socialism created the conditions for

to a regime which turns cultural values into commodity

will form a ‘totality’.

The real historical development of the Soviet Union and

construction yards of the five-year plans, and then again in

Chapaiev to Gladkov’s Cement, from Alexis Tolstoi’s Road to

men have disappeared, and the law of value is no more than

them in opposition to one another: it is only by constantly

in itself sufficient to do away with every form of man’s aliena¬

The private interests of groups of producers cannot be

Labour, or rather labour-power, has ceased to be a com¬

has made it possible to provide for the immediate needs of the

masses, effectively expressed in their lives, and for the econ¬

Economic problems, then, and planning problems in par¬

necessity of making allowance for commodity relationships

treated as ‘bourgeois’, such as econometrics and cybernetics.

structures necessarily derive from them, and that man is

The third great historic fact which profoundly transforms

the culture of every people. An Algerian, Islamic in culture,

discovery of the living spirit of Marxism, beyond the

Reflection on each of the three great facts of our century

imposes correspondingly the notion of a plurality of ‘models’,

From, Dogmatism to Twentieth-Century Thought

The fantastic transformation of the world and the three

great facts that characterise it have produced great con¬

and with man’s action which transforms them, it is materialist

Can we say that Marxists have carried out Engels’ pro¬

way, with Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Lenin