‘It is a matter of a confession, and nothing more’.
Marx1
In the midst of an intimate conversation at a time when this project was just a hazy idea of an amorphous plan for critical engagement with Marx’s philosophy, I found myself in the odd position of identifying as a Marxist, supporting the central philosophical and political tenets of Marx’s social theory, but simultaneously maintaining that his theory of revolutionary subjectivity – which, in my view, is a central component of his revolutionary theory – is inconsistent and full of gaps. In a way, this work has inadvertently become a recounting of the shedding of my theoretical skin – a kind of anámnēsis. It is not just an interpretation of Marx’s writings; it is intended to be a critical engagement with his thinking. The point of interpretive work is to raise the truth of Marx’s thought higher and to reanimate it for our current historical moment.
I do not attempt to solve the problem of revolutionary subjectivity as it exists in his work. A ‘scientific’ theory of the development of revolutionary subjectivity can only be demonstrated through self-evidence which is both ‘theoretical and practical’, at which point the apparent opposition between theory and practice is sublated. In other words, the ‘soul’ of the revolutionary subject cannot be known merely as an object in the world but fundamentally as the activity of a subject through our own collective participation in ‘revolutionary practice’.
Admittedly, attempting to solve the problem was part of my initial aim as a Marxist until I went deeper into Marx’s thought. Engaging with the question of revolutionary subjectivity compelled me to move beyond my Marxism and alter my theoretical orientation. I had to sublate Marx’s thought and was not able to do it as a Marxist because it took me down paths that were untrodden and obstructed by Marxist interpretations of his thinking. This intellectual journey is elaborated throughout the present work.
At a Historical Materialism conference in Toronto in May 2016 I was asked why I bothered to investigate Marx’s idea of revolutionary subjectivity ‘theoretically’. This question had never crossed my mind in any significant way until that moment. My interlocutor argued that the revolutionary subjects are created by ‘history’ and that we do not need a theory because we/they just need to become revolutionary. Essentially, the question boiled down to why I even bothered to make it a philosophical problem if Marx’s revolutionary social theory is ultimately about ‘changing the world’. I cannot recall how I responded but I remember wanting to say that we are driven to comprehend this philosophically because of our ‘material and spiritual’ struggles, as Marx put it. The lives of working people are becoming more difficult and our suffering is increasing. The worker’s movement around the globe is stagnating and extreme right-wing reaction is on the rise worldwide – and as the average temperature of the Earth rises at an intensified rate, it appears that the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’ is only getting colder.2 Widespread economic precarity since the Great Recession of 2008 has led to an ever deepening global political crisis after banks and corporations were bailed out and the masses of working people were met with punitive and devastating austerity. The legitimacy of the neoliberal politics of so-called centrists has collapsed. Political attitudes are rapidly polarising in this environment and the ideological conflict is becoming sharper. It is particularly troubling that the rise of extreme right-wing politics around the globe is eclipsing the organisational efforts of the disarrayed left. Indeed, nationalist, racist, xenophobic, and authoritarian trends are ascendant features in political life. As a plethora of far-right tendencies are on the rise globally among societies under immense stress from socioeconomic crises and profound inequality, the world approaches a political precipice. With the percolating instability of the global economy and anticipated destabilising effects of climate change looming on the horizon, a perfect storm for intense social conflict within nations and between nations is brewing.
It is in this time of crisis and increasing sociopolitical polarisation, in which a decidedly reactionary right is ascendant in many parts of the globe, that we find ourselves in the midst of a Marx revival. At the same time, the growing support for increasingly far-right politics among significant sections of the working class poses significant challenges to his theory about the ascendancy of the revolutionary proletariat and the movement for ‘human emancipation in general’.3 And yet Marx’s work also contains the vision of counter-revolutionary tendencies which mirror the contemporary working-class susceptibility to far-right politics. This situation evinces the need for a systematic re-examination of Marx’s thought about revolutionary subjectivity in a way that goes further than existing literature and into the depths of his philosophy – and beyond it.
Marx claimed that humanity ‘inevitably sets itself on such tasks as it is able to solve’.4 Whether or not this is determined to be true, we cannot comprehend the solutions to the social problems and political conflicts that we face without comprehending ourselves, and if we seriously intend to achieve these aims, we cannot avoid becoming involved in philosophy. As Alfred North Whitehead claimed,
Every epoch has its character determined by the way its populations re-act to the material events which they encounter. This reaction is determined by their basic beliefs – by their hopes, their fears, their judgments of what is worthwhile. They may rise to the greatness of an opportunity … On the other hand, they may collapse before the perplexities confronting them. How they act depends partly on their courage, partly on their intellectual grasp. Philosophy is an attempt to clarify those fundamental beliefs which finally determine the emphasis of attention that lies at the base of character.5
This kind of philosophical approach shares a similar spirit with what Marx called the ‘self-clarification’ – or ‘confession’ – of ‘the present time of its struggles and desires’.6 In his opinion it is a ‘task of history’ to ‘establish the truth of this world’, and the immediate task of ‘philosophy’ insofar as it ‘is in the service of history’ is ‘to unmask human self-estrangement’.7 However, this book demonstrates that Marx’s philosophical approach is not – and indeed cannot be – oriented toward discovering the truth for others to merely ‘accept, preach and put into practice’.8 Instead, its ethos is akin to the sentiment expressed in what Socrates said, while he stood on the threshold of the Cave, about those who are not aware of their chains: ‘They’re like us’.