Axelos,Castoriadis,Papaioannou and Marx

Abstract

The intellectual ferment that emerged in postwar France was marked by the renaissance of Hegel’s thought and the focus on Marx's early writings. In a parallel way, the death of Stalin, the uprising of 1953 in East Germany and the revolts in Hungary and Poland in 1956 provoked a thorough critique against the theory and practice of orthodox Marxism. The relationship between Marx and Marxism or the issue about the philosophical foundations of Marx’s thinking became the subject of long-standing controversy and gave rise to several interpretations of Marx’s work. These debates were decisively fostered by the foreign intellectuals and refugees who arrived in France after the end of the Second World War; inter alia, a generation of young Greek intellectuals that included the prominent figures of Kostas Axelos, Cornelius Castoriadis and Kostas Papaioannou. This article focuses on Axelos’, Castoriadis’ and Papaioannou’s critique of Marx and provides an anti-critique of their intellectual endeavour. It outlines the common basis of their critical confrontation with the Marxian theorizing and argues that they interpreted Marx’s thought in a manner similar to orthodox Marxism. Despite the undoubted merits of their critique, they did not take it to all its theoretical and political conclusions. As a result, the horizons they opened lack radicalism and their dialogue with Marx was left open to being misunderstood.

Keywords

Kostas Axelos Cornelius Castoriadis Karl Marx Marxism Kostas Papaioannou technique

1 Introduction

In December 1945, approximately 220 young Greek intellectuals fled to France thanks to a scholarship provided to them by the French government. This exodus could be seen as the last episode of the intellectual migration that took place in Europe after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. Some of the future most significant Greek intellectuals left Greece for good; inter alia Kostas Axelos (1924–2010), Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–97) and Kostas Papaioannou (1925–81),¹ who did not only have biographical but also theoretical affinities. Living and writing in postwar France, the Greek scholars were deeply influenced by the intense intellectual ferment that was marked by the rediscovery of Hegel, the renewed interest in Marx, the focus on his early writings and the impact of German philosophy. Their intellectual effort was associated with some pioneer and radical journals in which they started publishing their theoretical elaborations, that is, Arguments (Axelos), Socialisme Ou Barbarie (Castoriadis) and Le Contrat Social (Papaioannou). Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou endeavoured a radical critique of Marxism and Marx during the Cold War anti-communist hysteria. Their undertaking started as an immanent critique of orthodox Marxism, which could be seen as their attempt at defending Marx from orthodoxy. At the same time, however, the Greek scholars went a step further. They considered the crisis of Marxism as a crisis of Marx’s original thought as well. They came to a position where they criticized Marx and sought the ambiguities of his thought which might have been responsible for the decline of the labour movement, the crisis of Marxism and the authoritarianism of the Soviet-type societies.² Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou probed Marx’s writings, in particular the early texts, with many penetrating questions in an attempt to explore the metaphysical presuppositions and positivistic elements of his thought. What was it in Marx’s thought that facilitated its orthodox Marxist interpretations? Why did Marx’s thought take the form of orthodox Marxism? Did his theory provide any basis for its later degeneration into an instrument of domination and suppression that served the ruling classes in the Soviet-type societies and smoothed the development of reformism and the fatalism of the Second International?

This article draws together the social and political thought of Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou – originally published in French and Greek – and examines for the first time their critique of Marx’s thought, a critique that preceded Poulantzas’ thought and has been for long ‘neglected’ by the Anglo-Saxon world. What is at stake here is the manner in which Axelos’, Castoriadis’ and Papaioannou’s critique of Marx has been received, read and used in recent theoretical debates. There has been an uncritical acceptance of this critique usually in the direction of indicating the rejection of Marx in favour of an abstract notion of democracy or in the direction of demonstrating the incompatibility of Marx’s critical theorizing and revolutionary theory. The growing academic and political interest in the thought of Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou, in most cases, is deprived of any radical and critical meaning, and this use of the Greek scholars entails significant political and theoretical implications. The article aims to outline the common basis of Axelos’, Castoriadis’ and Papaioannou’s critique of Marx, supply an anti-critique of their argumentation, shed light on their contradictions and question the purpose and the direction of their effort. The particular thematic concern is with the ways in which they interpreted Marx’s works and the conclusions they drew. The article argues that their analysis of Marx was rooted in the orthodox Marxist interpretations of his thought. In spite of their critique of traditional Marxism, they espouse the logic of that tradition in reading Marx through Marx’s base–superstructure metaphor from the ‘1859 Preface’. This dogmatic reading gave rise to serious theoretical inconsistencies in their treatment of Marx and determined the limits of their critique. The article juxtaposes their critical endeavour with other critical interpretations of Marx and sets out their critique in a broader critical and radical perspective. It concludes by exploring why their attitude towards Marx gave rise to misunderstandings and misappropriations.

2 Marx and the metaphysics of technique

During the 1950s and 1960s, Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou attempted to reopen a dialogue with the original thought of Marx, aiming to develop a direct critique of his theorizing. Seeking the philosophic core of Marx’s thought, they made an effort at the same time to grasp its origin, structure and development, with a view to finding the philosophical intuition, the thread, that penetrates the whole of Marx’s writings. It should be noted, however, that the critique of Marx provided by the three thinkers did not represent any ‘national’ or ‘Marxist’ school of thought. They neither formed a distinct group nor represented any kind of ‘Greek Marxism’. Unlike the ‘Frankfurt School’ or the ‘Budapest School’ or the ‘Praxis’ group in former Yugoslavia, Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou shared a common basis in their critique of Marx, but in no sense ever constituted a group or worked collectively. Each of them has his own theoretical objectives and his own political intentions. Needless to say, one can neither see the three approaches and contributions as identical nor overlook their disparities. And these differences do affect the content of their critique. What brings the three Greek scholars together and renders them comparable despite their political and theoretical differences is a common foundation in their critique of Marx emphasizing key concepts, which overlapped considerably. They all shared certain common assumptions and arrived, from different perspectives, at similar conclusions.

The peculiarity of Axelos’, Castoriadis’ and Papaioannou’s reading of Marx’s early writings stands in direct contradiction with that of both orthodox Marxism and the approach of humanist Marxists. Whereas orthodox Marxism rejected the continuity between the young Marx and the mature Marx, and Marxist humanists pointed out the neglected humanist aspects in Marx’s works, Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou read Marx’s early writings as being imbued not only with radical and emancipatory elements but also with technicism. Though their critical approach came from different perspectives, they attacked Marx’s technicism considering it as responsible for the metaphysical, positivist and deterministic elements of his theory. The discussion of the concept of technique in Marx is a common thread running through the critique of Marx by the Greek scholars. Without making a distinction between the young and the old Marx, they argued that Marx was trapped in his conception of technique and imbued with the very categories and significations of western humanism and capitalist culture. Marx’s emphasis on the significance of technology determined his vision of history and his analysis of capitalism.

More specifically, for Axelos, the Hegelian influence penetrates through all levels of Marxian thinking. Nonetheless Axelos argued that ‘Marx knew Hegel and yet misunderstood the essential dimension of his thought. He recognized his greatness, and yet Hegel is a figure both present and absent in Marx’s work.’³ Marx’s thought was linked to Hegel’s theorizing and extended it dialectically. He developed and set in motion the power of negativity and the concept of alienation. Axelos asserted, however, that ‘the dialog, or duel, between Hegel and Marx is hardly conducted on the same level and on the same terrain; Marx makes a reply to Hegel using weapons that do not correspond to his thought’.⁴ Marx pushed one side of Hegel’s thought to its most radical and revolutionary consequences, but misconstrued other parts of the Hegelian positions. Marx attacked Hegel’s metaphysics by using metaphysical ideas. He made an effort to invert the Hegelian metaphysic in which history was seen as the place and time for absolute spirit to deploy itself, but Marx was led by the metaphysical concept to comprehend history as the history of the development of technique. According to Axelos:

… the Marxian vision is an advanced form of magnificent nihilism, a planetary nihilism, and yet, in consequence of this, it grasps planetary technique as the one lever that can put the world, this errant star, into motion, by abolishing the putrefied world and its ‘errance’.⁵

Axelos argues that the ‘capitalist technique is not only alienating, it is itself alienated’⁶ and asks: ‘Is not all making “alienating” and does it not remain so, especially when it takes the form of our enormous modern technical machinery?’⁷ According to Axelos, Marx attacked Hegel not in the name of philosophy or in the name of reason but ‘in the name of the will for the realization of Praxis, in the name of practice as a conquering force’.⁸ This will for power expressed through the conquering practice finds its ultimate embodiment in technique. Man is rendered capable of conquering the world by virtue of technique. The concept of technique unites Marx’s thought and constitutes the centre of the Marxian problematic. It is the philosophical core that was included in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and makes up the seed of Marx’s later theoretical elaborations. It is this central point ‘with its blazing ramifications that becomes thereafter consolidated doctrine’.⁹ In this respect, Marx made an effort to abolish metaphysics but all he managed to do was to ‘overturn traditional Western metaphysics’, to ‘reverse’ it. Consequently, he ‘fulfills modern metaphysics’ by giving a ‘position of privilege’ to the material world and technical activity. ¹⁰ Marx opposed any kind of dualism but his reduction of the world and world history to the development of technique reproduced dualism. In this, Marx simply continued the tradition of western thought as it had been constructed after the dawn of the pre-Socratic tradition.

Castoriadis also argued that Marx’s intellectual growth was marked by one central antinomy between two elements, that is, the revolutionary and the positivist elements. Marx’s idea of history includes two opposing theories of human emancipation: human emancipation through the development of productive forces and human emancipation through the class struggle. ¹¹ Initially, Castoriadis saw Marx’s early writings as indicative of the revolutionary inspirations of Marx’s youth. Later on, however, he claimed that the antinomy between revolutionary and positivist elements could be traced to Marx’s early works. ¹² According to Castoriadis, the positivist element of Marx’s works finally prevailed in the theory and practice of Marxism and the significance of class struggle was neglected. For Castoriadis, this prevailing positivism represents ‘the profoundly persistent hold of Marx’s contemporary capitalist world on his thought’. ¹³ Reinforcing this point, Castoriadis argued that Marx is ‘the founder of a great secular-“rationalist” religion’ in which ‘is incarnated the last great avatar of the West’s rationalist myth’. ¹⁴ Marx is deeply immersed in capitalist social imaginary significations. According to Castoriadis, the impact of this rationalist-capitalist universe upon Marx’s thinking had as a result the dominance in his writings of concepts like labour, productive forces and technique. Hence, it is no coincidence that Marx criticized neither capitalist rationality nor the form of the capitalist technique. Castoriadis maintained that while Marx fiercely criticized the inhuman conditions in capitalist factories, he did not condemn the organization of capitalist factories, the implied rationality and the form of technique. In other words, he took technique for granted, as something not likely to change. As Castoriadis remarked, however, ‘contemporary technique is well and truly capitalist; there is nothing neutral about it’.¹⁵ That is, ‘there is neither any autonomy of technique nor any immanent tendency of technique towards autonomous development’.¹⁶

Castoriadis noted that the western and modern technique ‘is separated from creation’ and added that ‘it is separated, too, from questions about what is thus produced, and for what’.¹⁷ He connected the western, ‘vulgar’ notion of technique ‘as a neutral and ancillary instrument’ with Marx’s use of the concept of technique. ¹⁸ Like Papaioannou and Axelos, Castoriadis argued that having been under the influence of Hegel, Marx perceived the creation of ‘man’ as his self-engendering through labour and gradually he restricted this creation by identifying it with technical creation. Marx makes the same mistake as academic political economy did. He presupposed and posited technique as given and autonomous. For Marx, the fundamental issue was not ‘the state of technique, but its ceaseless development’.¹⁹ Castoriadis attempted to explicate why Marx did not provide a thorough critique of technique and focused his explanation on Marx’s idea of history. The influence of capitalist significations and the inversion of Hegelianism led Marx to write a philosophy of history in which technique, that is, the development of productive forces, makes history advance.²⁰ Marx was drawn to metaphysics of technique and to idealism since he regarded technical ideas as the decisive factor for historical development. ²¹

Papaioannou, on the other hand, challenged both orthodox and humanist Marxist readings of Marx’s early writings and called for a return to Marx in order to rethink Marxism as philosophy and reinvigorate the Marx–Hegel dialogue. In his attempt to understand Marx’s philosophical foundations, Papaioannou rejected the orthodox Marxist problematic regarding the ‘epistemological break’, the split between the young and mature Marx. At the same time, however, Papaioannou argued against humanist Marxist approaches to Marx’s early writings, seeing that they constructed a ‘new ideology’, a new ‘humanism’, that emanated from the discovery of the young Marx. ²² Following Papaioannou, in his early writings, Marx misconstrued the Hegelian metaphysics of labour and absolutized the concepts of labour and technique. Having been under the influence of Feuerbach, Marx was led to his early ‘naturalism–humanism’, which was nothing but a limited and contradictory synthesis of Feuerbachian naturalism and Hegelian historicism. In contrast to Hegel, for Marx it is not the state that can reconcile man with his world, but his productive labour. In this point, according to Papaioannou, lies Marx’s metaphysics of practice (praxis), as Marx has not specifically clarified the meaning of the term ‘practice’. As a consequence, Papaioannou criticized Marx for a conception of praxis that is not constituted in the real world.²³ It is concealed from the development of the productive forces, which become independent and determine historical evolution.

Marx reduced human praxis to labour activity and industrial practice. This perception of Marx’s concept of praxis served as a starting point for Papaioannou’s discussion of Marx’s theory. In Papaioannou’s view, the concept of ‘productive forces’ constituted the centre of Marx’s philosophical intuition. The premier dialectic of Marx is a pure metaphysics of technique formulated in his proposition:

If it is (industry) then conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man can also be understood.²⁴

Papaioannou stressed that in Marx’s analysis industry was reduced to a copula universi. Marx’s vision of a progressive unification of cosmos through the development of the productive forces takes the form of a veritable pantheism of industry. Only the industrial praxis is capable of abolishing the exteriority of nature in regard to man by achieving the ‘humanization of nature’ and the ‘naturalism of man’. In this way, Marx believed that the dualism between man and nature will be transcended. ²⁵ Based on this assumption, Papaioannou pointed out that Marx ended in a ‘monophysitic anthropology’ that deified labour, but only industrial labour since the peasantry, their productive activity and their affiliation with nature belong to the ‘idiocy of rural life’.²⁶ Papaioannou’s critique of Marx’s technicism concentrated nearly exclusively on Marx’s early writings. According to Papaioannou, after 1847, and basically with The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx gradually discarded the ‘metaphysical naivety of his youth’²⁷ and ‘blotted out from his memory this profoundly barbaric philosophy’.²⁸ Nonetheless, Papaioannou argued that the nihilism of the apocalypse of Marx’s early works did not stop having a subterranean influence on Marx’s disciples and connected this part of the young Marx with the ‘industrialism’ of orthodox Marxism. Orthodox Marxists utilized these technicist elements that could be traced in Marx’s thought and cancelled the more radical elements of Marx’s theorizing. In this point lies Papaioannou’s difference in relation to Axelos’ and Castoriadis’ approach to the concept of technique in Marx. For Axelos and Castoriadis, the concept of technique ran through all of Marx’s writings and marked his vision of man and history. According to them, Marx’s technicism and positivism penetrate his whole work and are not limited to his early writings.

3 The limits of Axelos’, Castoriadis’ and Papaioannou’s critique

Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou not only were based upon common central issues in terms of developing their critique on Marx but they also shared similarities in the limitations of their approaches. The Greek scholars’ reading of Marx was inextricably tied up with and rooted in their experience of traditional Marxism both in Greece and France. Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou got a very strong flavour of the orthodox, dogmatic and mechanistic Marxism of the Greek communist movement. Especially for Castoriadis, who as a Trotskyist ran the risk of being arrested and murdered by the Greek Stalinists, this experience caused obsessions or traumas, which proved to be crucial in forming the ground of his critique of Marx. Arriving in France, they had to deal with the dominance of the Stalinist intellectuals and the influence of the French Communist Party. Castoriadis also faced the theoretical and political inadequacy of French Trotskyism. This part of the French intellectual and political setting was in some ways a continuation of the experience of orthodox Marxism they had in Greece. For all their differences, one key limitation which the Greek scholars have in common is that they did not manage to get away from the experience of orthodox Marxism, to liberate themselves from the shadow of traditional Marxism. In many cases, their reading of Marx was overshadowed by it. They read Marx without drawing a distinction between Marx and orthodox Marxism. Hence, they identified Marx with traditional Marxist interpretations and came to the point of reading Marx through the prism of orthodox Marxism. As a consequence, their interpretation of Marx was made through the classical formulation used by traditional Marxism to interpret Marx, that is, through the base–superstructure scheme. All of them read Marx through the ‘famous’ passage from Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, according to which the economic structure of society determines the political superstructure. Marx’s thought was seen as reinforcing a split between the subject and object, between struggle and the objective laws of the development of society, between subjectivity and structure, between economics and politics. This traditional analysis of Marx determined the questions they asked and led to significant consequences as regards their evaluation of Marx’s antinomies and limitations.

For Axelos, ‘there is a dogmatic element in Marx’s thought itself, the closure of many questions’.²⁹ But how successfully can someone uncover Marx’s dogmatism by using a ‘dogmatic reading’ of Marx? How could one criticize Marx’s presuppositions by presupposing and espousing an ‘orthodox reading’ of Marx? Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou failed or refused to recognize that the base–superstructure model is just a ‘simple popularization’, a ‘popularistic simplification’³⁰ of Marx’s theorizing, overemphasized and misused by the traditional Marxist currents over the last century. Even when Axelos uses the concept of alienation to study and reflect upon Marx’s thought he does so through the base–superstructure image. For this reason, in his analysis of the concept of alienation in Marx he divides the concept into its economic, social, political and ideological dimensions and considers that according to Marx economic alienation (the base) determines the other aspects of alienation.³¹ Yet, Axelos himself does not make explicit what this separation of alienation means and how many alienations exist. The problem with Marx, according to Axelos, is that he did not want to recognize that thought will never be identified with practice, since ‘theory and spiritual manifestations, thought, consciousness, and knowledge will always soar over the reality of practice’.³² But if this is the case, why should we identify Marx’s thought with the practice of Marxism? For Axelos, in Marx’s thought the material-practical world remains the dominant one. It determines all other aspects of human life. As a result, Marx’s theorizing remains metaphysical and dual. It fails in uniting theory and practice, the material and the spiritual world. Axelos’ reading of Marx posits an external relationship between theory and practice and in his analysis ideas appear as not being practice-related and theory exists as practice-independent. Axelos did not manage to conceive of Marx’s insight of ‘practical-critical’ activity, that is, to grasp Marx’s dialectical, internal and reciprocal relationship between theory and practice. Yet, as Gunn has argued:

The best way to characterize Marx’s view of the distinction between, and the unity of, theory and practice is to say that, for him, theory is a real and necessary moment or aspect of practice as a totality or whole. Thus practice is theory-inclusive just as theory, for its part, is practice-related.³³

Similarly, Papaioannou argued that Marx paid little attention to the fact that there has been a ‘spiritual unity’ of humanity, which ‘preserves certain common elements and subjects in and beyond the movement of becoming’.³⁴ For the Greek scholars, the break with Marx’s dualism and economic determinism involved a strong emphasis put on Marx’s failure to grasp the essence of art and philosophy, or to admit an autonomy of thought and the spiritual sphere. By doing so, however, they made a mistake similar to structural Marxism. That is to say, they reproduced in their argument the same logic of the base–superstructure scheme, by continuing to analyse society in terms of economic, political and ideological structures, this time assigning much more importance to the autonomy of the spiritual and ideological.

Castoriadis also developed his critique of Marx and dealt with the question of technique through the base–superstructure metaphor. He struggled against orthodox Marxism, but he espoused its analytical framework and perspective when he developed his critique of Marx. In this respect, Monica Reinfelder has rightly pointed out that:

While Castoriadis thus repudiates what the technicists uphold, he nonetheless stands on common ground with them as regards the content and location of Marx’s ‘message’. While mocking the vulgarizers for ignoring the corner-stone of Marx’s theory, namely, Capital, Castoriadis himself shows a marked tendency to rely on the ‘1859 Preface’ so popular with them. When he does turn to Capital, it is to copy out passages reaffirming the ‘dialectic of history’ rather than to study Marx’s analysis of ‘Machinery and Large-Scale Industry’; this failure too Castoriadis shares with the ‘orthodoxy’ he so despises.³⁵

Indeed, what Castoriadis appears to be arguing is that Marx never questioned the pseudo-rationality of the capitalist technique. He did not realize that there is no autonomy, no neutrality of the capitalist technique. As a result, he presupposed the state of technique and its perpetual development. However, Marx very emphatically argued in Capital, just to give an example, that the ‘automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the worker during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labour-power’.³⁶ Marx made clear that ‘the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, coordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force’.³⁷ But Castoriadis, as Raniero Panzieri has argued, is more interested in expressing ‘his polemical opposition to Marxism’³⁸ and does not want just to liberate Marx from the economistic or technicist interpretations of orthodox Marxism.

In a manner similar to Castoriadis and under the influence of Heidegger’s insights, the issue of technique occupied a prominent place in Axelos’ critique of Marx. For Axelos, Marx drew a parallel and associated the ‘history of industry’ with the ‘history of humanity’. He paid special attention to the development of industry and claimed that the historical modes of production are determined by the development of the productive forces. Technical changes not only cause social changes but also lead to a technological interpretation of the whole of human history. Axelos argued that the concept of technique unites Marx’s theorizing and constitutes the thread that runs through the whole of Marx’s work. Axelos rests his critique of Marx and his central argument on a ‘presupposition’, an a priori claim: Marx belongs to the history of western metaphysics and his theorizing is penetrated with the concept of technique, which was seen as a ‘driving force’ in his analyses of capitalism and world history. As Heidegger maintained – and Axelos espoused it – the essence of Marx’s materialism ‘is concealed in the essence of technology’.³⁹ For Heidegger, both Hegel’s and Marx’s thinking ‘had to move in the shadow of the essential nature of technology; and so they never achieved the freedom to grasp and adequately think about this nature’.⁴⁰ Axelos’ attempt to read Marx along with Heidegger goes hand in hand with his traditional approach of Marx through the base–superstructure model. Marx was seen to have espoused a one-dimensional and partial perspective:

Marx reduced open and multidimensional world both to a material world as a product of material labour and to ideological superstructure. As a result, the liberation he was aiming at was and remained partial … Marx considered technique as a driving force; however, he failed in conceiving its remote origin and its dominance on his own thought and action as well.⁴¹

Axelos’ critique of Marx’s technicism could promote the discussion regarding the ‘roots of Marxism’s posivitism in Marx himself’.⁴² Yet, as Sidney Hook aptly commented on Axelos’ positions, ‘it is sheer intellectual violence to the letter and spirit of Marx’s work to present his vision of man and history as the full flowering of technology’.⁴³

Seen through the prism of orthodox approaches, Marx was found to have neglected class struggle and his writings were seen as promoting ‘scientific’ analysis and prioritizing objective historic necessity. According to Castoriadis, Marx failed to recognize that the class struggle determines the development of technique. For Castoriadis, Marx maintained that ‘capitalism evolves solely in terms of the effects of the economic laws it contains’ and consequently ‘class struggle nowhere comes into it’.⁴⁴ In an attempt to reinforce his point, Castoriadis maintained that there is ‘a more nuanced and more subtle Marxism’ that ‘affirms that the class struggle plays an important role’, in opposition to Marx, who remained obsessed with the study of the economic laws of capitalism and abandoned class struggle. Assuming this to be the case, Castoriadis criticized this kind of Marxism for situating class struggle ‘within a given framework which marks out its limits and defines its meaning’.⁴⁵ Castoriadis’ passion to prove Marx’s positivism reached to the point of arguing that compared with the ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ approach taken by Marx, structuralist Marxism called attention to the importance of the class struggle, though within a structurally determined framework of capitalist development. While Castoriadis rightly pointed out the limited and confined role that the class struggle played in Althusser’s and Poulantzas’ thought, his approach to Marx’s conception of class struggle was based on a misunderstanding and led him to misinterpretations that had great theoretical and political implications. Marx is understood as a ‘scientist’ whose main purpose was to study the objective trends of capitalist development and discover the objective laws of motion of history. Without drawing a clear distinction between Marx and traditional Marxism, Castoriadis noted that within Marxism class struggle always remained of secondary importance. It is not clearly separated from economic determinism. Hence Castoriadis came to conclude that ‘Marx, who discovered class struggle, wrote a monumental work analyzing the development of capitalism from which the class struggle is totally absent’.⁴⁶ In opposition to Castoriadis’ claim, however, Marx emphatically wrote in his letter to Joseph Weydemeyer: ‘I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them.’⁴⁷ For Castoriadis, Marx simply believed that economic laws govern capitalism and he did nothing but formulate these laws. Class struggle affects the historical evolution unconsciously and it is limited by the ‘state of the technical-economic infrastructure’.⁴⁸ For Marxism, classes have no conscious and separate role and they are ‘simply the instrument in which the action of the productive forces is embodied’.⁴⁹ Thus, Castoriadis concluded that in Marxism there is ‘a triumph of determinism over class struggle’.⁵⁰

Castoriadis proceeded to evaluate Marx’s thought not on the basis of its total content. And this is the case for Axelos and Papaioannou too, who, to a large extent, tended to focus their attention on Marx’s Early Writings and even then they did it very selectively. The Greek scholars’ critique emphasizes some parts and fails to examine Marx’s work as a whole. The assessment of Marx’s concepts is not understood and located within the whole of his writings. Castoriadis intentionally overlooks the primacy that Marx attributed to class struggle in his earlier works and fails to see that in Capital there is ‘a shift of attention from class struggle in general to the specific form taken by class struggle in capitalist society’.⁵¹ Castoriadis focused more on the economic interpretation of Marx’s critique of economic categories. His treatment of Capital seems lacking in depth given that he reads it as an economic text that seeks to investigate the objective laws of capitalist society. Castoriadis accepts the economic categories in Capital uncritically; that is to say, he does not see commodity, value, money, capital, wage, etc., as forms that are socially constituted, deriving from antagonistic human social relations. These categories are categories of social conflict, of struggle, even when Marx himself failed or omitted to emphasize the working-class struggles. As Holloway put it, ‘working-class struggle is not the explicit object of the analysis in Capital, but it is implicit in every category’.⁵² As a result, Castoriadis fails to perceive that ‘Capital is a formal analysis of struggle in capitalist society, an analysis of the forms taken by the antagonistic social relations’.⁵³ Castoriadis grasped these categories as being deprived of the class antagonism and not related to the class struggle, reproducing in this manner the traditional Marxist interpretations that he was forcefully opposed to.

More to the point, Castoriadis repeatedly refers to Marx’s naturalization of history and his emphasis on the economic laws of capitalism at the expense of class struggle. Castoriadis over and over again quotes Marx’s words in the preface to the first edition of Capital (1867). Marx argued there that ‘it is the ultimate aim of this work to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society’ and that ‘the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history’.⁵⁴ Castoriadis pointed out that Marx’s economic determinism was developed ‘in the form of a system’. Marx saw history as a ‘rational system ruled by given laws’.⁵⁵ In this line of thought the development of the productive forces is seen as ‘progress’ that ‘commands the rest in social life’.⁵⁶ Indeed, the Second and Third International naturalized the capitalist economic categories and deified an objective developmental logic. Once again, Castoriadis pushed some of Marx’s unfortunate and problematic formulations to the extreme. He not only neglected the critical Marxist accounts on this issue but also failed to interpret the ‘laws’ (as Marx called them) of capitalist society as a product of class struggle between capital and labour, as forms through and in which class conflict subsists. Marx’s analysis of the imposition of the commodity form and the creation of a normal working day constitutes a very clear manifestation of what Marx meant when he talked about those ‘laws’ of capitalism. Marx comprehends the laws that legalize and exercise control over the length and structure of the working day as the outcome of fierce struggle between labour and capital:

… these [legal] minutiae … were not at all the products of Parliamentary fancy. They developed gradually out of circumstances as natural laws of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, official recognition, and proclamation by the State, were the result of a long struggle of classes.⁵⁷

The consequence of viewing ‘the economic laws of motion of modern society’ in this way contradicts the naturalization of both history and capitalist economic categories. It regards history as the making of people’s will and not as the result of objective social and historical laws. As Cleaver aptly argued, these ‘natural laws’ are

… hardly the metaphysical, unexplained regularities usually evoked by traditional Marxists. The ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist society are the direct product of the class struggle and denote only what capital has had the strength to impose, given the rising power of the working class. They occur ‘behind the backs’ of the actor only in the way they are the unforeseeable outcome of the confrontation of the two classes’ ‘power’.⁵⁸

‘Laws’ do not exist separately from the class confrontation nor do they act independently from human actions, from the antagonism of class struggle. Nor does this class struggle derive from presupposed structural mechanisms; it does not take place within a given framework of enduring structures and laws. The laws of social reproduction express the social and historical specificity of the movement of class struggle in capitalism. They are neither objective nor transhistorical regularities, but rather transient categories that are always in motion. On this issue and in contradistinction to Castoriadis, Papaioannou argued that Marx reproached bourgeois political economy for ‘fetishism’, that is to say, for considering ‘things’ as creations external to human activity, while in fact they are the products of human practice.⁵⁹ One could criticize Marx’s thought for its own insufficiencies, but it is impossible to claim that ‘production relations’ or ‘economic laws’ in the thought of Karl Marx constituted an objectivity external to human activity. For Papaioannou, Marx’s phrases in the preface of Capital as well as in some isolated passages of his writings regarding the ‘economic laws’ and the naturalization of history do not represent Marx’s thinking, but rather betray his sociological thought.⁶⁰

It is this latter point made by Papaioannou regarding the sociological thought of Marx that constituted another common limitation that the three Greek scholars shared in reference to their reading of Marx. Indeed, what they all had in common is that Marx’s work was seen as divided into its economic, philosophical, political and sociological parts. Such an approach to his work seen in this light led them, despite claims to the opposite, to endorse in their analysis of Marx the distinction made by the established Marxist tradition between Marxist economics, Marxist philosophy, Marxist sociology and Marxist political science. Papaioannou’s and Axelos’ re-examination of the relation between Marx and philosophy and the return to Hegel’s philosophy could be seen as an attempt at an anti-dogmatic reading of Marx. Yet, the emphasis put by Papaioannou and Axelos on the philosophical origin of Marx failed to grasp Marx’s thought as a theory of struggle against capitalism and this implied a misunderstanding and disregard of Marx’s work as a critique of economic categories. Axelos’ critique of Marx’s early writings remained restricted in so far as it did not take into account Marx’s criticism of fetishism and misconstrued the total content and aim of Marx’s critique of political economy. It also took the form of a philosophical critique; that is to say, Axelos treated the concepts of alienation and technique in Marx’s thought abstractly and ahistorically. He leaves out of the account the socio-historical content of these abstractions and hence his approach to Marx remains abstract. For Papaioannou, Marx’s works contain some considerable sociological insights that should be acknowledged for their analytical and interpretative force. Papaioannou laid particular stress on Marx’s thought as ‘a theory of society’ and not as a ‘theory against society’, against capitalist society.⁶¹ As Holloway has put it:

Once it is understood as a theory of society, Marxism can be ranged alongside other theories of society, compared with other theoretical approaches which seek to understand society. Through this comparison, emphasis falls on the continuity rather than the discontinuity between Marxism and the mainstream theories of social science. Thus, Marx the economist is seen as a critical disciple of Ricardo, Marx the philosopher as a critical disciple of Hegel and Feuerbach; in Marxist sociology, there has been discussion of enriching Marxism with the insights of Weber; in Marxist political science, especially in the writings of many who claim to derive their inspiration from Gramsci, it is assumed that the purpose of a theory of the state is to understand the reproduction of capitalist society.⁶²

In a parallel way to Axelos and Papaioannou, Castoriadis argued that having been under the influence of capitalist ideology, Marx developed in Capital an ‘economic system’ which ‘does not account for the functioning and evolution of capitalism’.⁶³ In his view, the development of Marx’s thought could be seen as ‘an evolutionary movement that estranged him from the revolutionary inspirations of his youth so as to make him into a “systematic” theoretician’.⁶⁴ From this perspective, he made the claim that we have to reconsider ‘Marx’s economic theory’ and argued that this economic theory ‘is tenable neither in its premises, nor in its method, nor in its structure’.⁶⁵ Hence he took great pains to demonstrate the failure of ‘Marx’s economic theory’ and Capital was read as a text on economics. Once again, what is missing at crucial points in Castoriadis’ critique of Marx is a clear distinction between Marx’s ‘dialectic method of exposition’⁶⁶ and the orthodox Marxist views regarding the existence of a Marxist economic theory or Marxist political economy with its structure and its economic premises. As Simon Clarke has pointed out, the term ‘Marxist political economy’ is ‘a contradiction in terms, since Marx always referred to his work as a “critique of political economy”’.⁶⁷ Hans-Georg Backhaus adds that Marx developed a critique, ‘a critical explication of economic categories’ and a ‘critique of economics’, in order to destroy ‘the categorical basis of academic economics’.⁶⁸ Marcuse expressed the same idea when he pointed out that ‘Marxian theory rejects such a science of economics and sets in its place the interpretation that economic relations are existential relations between men’.⁶⁹ By seeking ‘the actual content of the economy itself’ and making an analysis of the origins of capitalist production, one can ascertain that this mode of production is not a ‘natural’ one but ‘a specific historical form of existence that man has given himself’. As a result, ‘once this content comes to the fore, economic theory would turn into a critical theory’.⁷⁰ Castoriadis appraised Marx as a political economist and saw in Capital, as the established Marxist tradition did, an alternative economic theory. In this respect, he appears not to be able to get hold of Marx’s critical theory and his subsequent critique of economics.

4 Freeing or freezing Marx?

Papaioannou evoked Marx’s positions against orthodoxy and ideological monolithism and made an effort to ‘rescue from oblivion’ the ‘sum total of Marx’s message that has been forgotten and misted over by the clouds of incense that burn before his effigy’.⁷¹ In the same vein, Axelos acknowledges that Marxism was ‘castrated in the impetus’ of its project ‘by the removal of the revolutionary element’.⁷² According to Axelos, ‘the freeing of the truth in Marx … and in Marxism … would mean bringing’ Marx and Marxism ‘back to a much more basic wandering, a movement, which is based on nothing, but which assimilates and gives rise to substructures and meanings’.⁷³ Did Papaioannou and Axelos, however, attempt the ‘freeing of the truth in Marx’ or try to liberate the revolutionary elements of Marx’s theorizing? Axelos’ reading of Marx and his emphasis on the concept of technique resonated with Heidegger’s analytic categories and approach of Marx. Axelos accused Marx of metaphysics and of a lack of radicalism. But, following Heidegger’s thought, has Axelos managed to radicalize Marx’s thought, to keep Marx’s questions open and at the same time to render them more problematic? Papaioannou himself oscillated between social-democratic and libertarian positions and came to the point of marching together with Raymond Aron on 30 May 1968 in support of the right-wing government and against the May 1968 events.⁷⁴ This lack of radicalism was also evident in Papaioannou’s later theoretical development. It is thus no coincidence that the last period of his life till his early death in 1981 was marked by his return to an analysis of Lenin and Leninism. Papaioannou never worked on the conclusions of his critique of Marx, and never developed the most radical aspects of Marx’s thought.

On this issue, Castoriadis’ attitude towards Marx seems to be completely contradictory. On the one hand, he asserted that Marx is a great author,⁷⁵ a ‘great mind who wrote a great work, the Capital’.⁷⁶ For Castoriadis, the work of Marx ‘embodies one of the most radical, even if failed, attempts toward a critique of the existing social order’.⁷⁷ This approach led Castoriadis to argue that ‘it is clear that by analysing the historical destiny of Marxism, I am not, in any ethical sense, “imputing” the responsibility to Marx’.⁷⁸ According to Castoriadis, even after the demise of the Soviet-type regimes, ‘to draw from this collapse the conclusion that it nullifies Marx’s work would be tantamount to accepting the Hegelian principle of Weltgeschichte ist Welt-gericht – world history is the Last Judgment – that is, paradoxically, to remain a Marxist’.⁷⁹ On the other hand, he opined that ‘apart from a few abstract ideas, nothing that is essential in Capital is to be found in the reality of today’⁸⁰ and he regarded as ‘laughable’ ‘the “faithfulness to Marx” that brackets the historical fate of Marxism’.⁸¹ Castoriadis made clear that ‘there can be no “restoration” of Marxism in its original purity, nor a return to its “better half”’.⁸² He was opposed to a ‘particular reading of a few passages of Marx’ and ‘the omission of an infinitely greater number of texts’.⁸³ His emphasis was on the actual history of Marxism, ‘of what Marxism has actually become, of how it worked and still works in real history’,⁸⁴ and arrived at the conclusion that Marxism is what it became in reality. Hence ‘the return to Marx is impossible’ since the ‘full sense of the theory is, according to the theory itself, that which appears in the practice that it inspires’.⁸⁵

Following this line of thought, Castoriadis took the argument a step further. Not only is the return to Marx impossible, but also Marxism has been ruined and has come to an end. It ‘no longer exists historically as a living theory’⁸⁶ and according to Castoriadis ‘we have to choose between remaining Marxist and remaining revolutionaries’.⁸⁷ Castoriadis oscillates between his two extreme and bombastic assertions. From the claim made in 1949 that ‘we know ourselves to be the only ones who are responding in a systematic way to the fundamental problems of the contemporary revolutionary movement: we think we are the only ones who are resuming and continuing the Marxist analysis of the modern economy’⁸⁸ to the announcement about the end of Marxism in 1964. Castoriadis seems to get confused by his effort to reconcile his intellectual origins or the revolutionary elements which he knows exist in Marx’s thought and his ambitions not only simply to renew the revolutionary movement but to move beyond Marx. It was Castoriadis who returned to Marx to defend him against orthodox Marxism and he was the ‘only one’ who in 1949 represented the ‘living continuity of Marxism within society’.⁸⁹ And it was Castoriadis who 15 years later was entitled to announce the ruin, the end, of Marxism (in fact at this time Castoriadis was not the ‘only one’, and was not a pioneer in announcing the end of Marxism). Castoriadis tended to forget that ‘a philosophical doctrine has many sides, and each side may have the most diverse historical effects’⁹⁰ and most importantly that ‘the end is where we start from’.⁹¹ As Axelos reminded us, ‘one cannot propose a one-dimensional approach and reading of Marx. If someone did so, she would be dogmatic.’⁹² Castoriadis made the same mistake which he attributed to critical Marxism. Despite his claims to the contrary, he neglected the other sides or the other readings of Marx. Marx’s theorizing was understood as a closed system, as a finished and definitely completed project, and not as having an ‘open-ended character’ and constituting a moment of beginning for ‘practical-critical’ activity. Similarly, Capital was grasped by Castoriadis as a ‘closed book’, which aimed to provide us with absolute knowledge. It was not read as an ‘open book’ and, consequently, it was not perceived and construed as an ‘open-ended project’.⁹³

According to Axelos, ‘no one ever sufficiently puts into action the thought of the person he is discoursing with. There always remain important hidden elements which do not come to light.’⁹⁴ Given this, Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou did not attempt to put Marx’s thought into action. They did not go beyond their negation to free Marx, but the choice they made was to flee from Marx. The Marxian theory was seen by the Greek scholars, and despite their claims to the contrary,⁹⁵ as a theoretical system that should have lacked any contradictions and inconsistencies. Yet, needless to say, Marxian thinking is not a pure and harmonious set of doctrines that could explain everything and provide us with the ultimate and correct solutions to our problems. The key issue for critical and radical theory, then, is identifying the direction in which any critique of Marx’s contradictions should be orientated. Axelos, Papaioannou and Castoriadis neither disclosed the radical elements of Marx’s thinking nor did they attempt to liberate his theorizing from positivist and dogmatic elements, to reveal a critical and radical Marx by criticizing his ‘orthodoxy’, his orthodox aspects. We could assess Axelos’, Castoriadis’ and Papaioannou’s critique of Marx by applying Ernst Bloch’s questions to them: ‘What goal and what purpose? What do we really want?’⁹⁶ Or in other words, what did they really want when they developed their critique of Marx and Marxism? Why were they dealing with Marx? What were they aiming at? In most cases, the Greek scholars’ assessment of Marx was compatible with the postmodernist critiques of Marx, whose common thread is the ‘refusal’ to see Marx’s critical theory ‘as an open-ended project and the resulting attempt to “freeze” that project at the level of its “paradigm” and thereby to reduce it to an “historical-philosophic theory of history” – exactly that which Marx expressly denied’.⁹⁷

What is missing in the development of the Greek scholars’ critical theory is taking their critique of Marx through to its radical theoretical and political implications. It seems that their critique of Marx was operating in a theoretical and political framework which was already pre-constituted in the direction of not building on Marx’s revolutionary elements. One of the reasons for this failure lies in their decision – mainly after the 1960s – to go beyond Marx and any Marxist perspective. The complete refutation of Marx or any Marxist critical contribution, however, could have negative implications for the function of radical and critical thought. Luxemburg made a very apt remark on this:

The scrupulous endeavor to keep ‘within the bounds of Marxism’ may at times have been just as disastrous to the integrity of the thought process as has been the other extreme – the complete repudiation of the Marxist outlook, and the determination to manifest ‘independence of thought’ at all hazards.⁹⁸

The endeavour made by Axelos, Castoriadis and Papaioannou to demonstrate their ‘independence of thought at all hazards’ and to draw a marked distinction between their work and orthodox Marxism led them to an ambivalent attitude towards Marx and critical Marxism. Yet, as Horkheimer has pointed out, ‘investigation of facts is strenuous … but one at least knows what to go by’.⁹⁹ Did the Greek scholars know what to go by? Similarly, a radical critique of Marx must presuppose anti-capitalism, otherwise there will be a gulf between the critique of Marx on the one hand and the social reality and ideas which this critique serves and reproduces on the other. The Greek scholars failed to bridge this gap and opened themselves to misappropriation. As a consequence, today their ideas are mostly praised and utilized having been deprived of any critical and radical meaning. Yet, one could reply to Axelos’, Castoriadis’ and Papaioannou’s most recent celebration of their ideas with Cavafy’s verses from his poem ‘Theodotos’: ‘If you are one of the truly elect, be careful how you attain your eminence’. ¹⁰⁰