Alienation,reification and the antinomies of production

The Budapest School and the ‘renaissance of Marxism’

From the outset, Márkus’s philosophical activity has been characterised by a wealth of interests and intellectual orientations. While still at Lomonosov University in Moscow, Márkus had, during the 1950s, come into contact with the leaders of what has since come to be known as ‘creative Soviet Marxism’, a strand of scientifically, if not scientistically, grounded Marxism that combined a deep conceptual rigor with a profound grasp of the entire sweep of modern philosophy. However, as György Bence and Janos Kis, two former students and later close colleagues of Márkus, recall, it was not only his familiarity with the emerging trends of intellectually serious Soviet Marxism that made Márkus so significant a figure in the Hungarian philosophical scene of the 1960s, but also his intimate knowledge of the efforts being made within the philosophy of science and analytic philosophy more generally (Bence and Kis, 1980: 288). Yet despite this evident plurality of theoretical preoccupations, those closest to him have themselves stated that it came as little surprise that Márkus should have found himself, from the early 1960s on, coming increasingly within the orbit of Lukács and the evolving Budapest School. ‘The rapprochement’, write Bence and Kis, ‘seemed natural to us’ (Bence and Kis, 1980: 288).

For the next decade, Márkus, along with the other members of the Budapest School, was to be engaged in the Lukácsian idea of a ‘renaissance of Marxism’, his key contribution to which was Marxism and Anthropology, a wide-ranging and systematic reconstruction of the concept of ‘human-essence’ in Marx. During this time the ‘critical cultural practice’ of the early Budapest School was motivated by the conviction that the indurate doctrines and practices of official Marxist philosophy represented a fundamental distortion of Marx’s own ideas. Through their ideological and ‘administrative’ application, the philosophical premises of so-called ‘historical and dialectical materialism’ had, in addition, rendered the Marxist conceptual framework increasingly moribund, obscure and, in the end, meaningless. In light of these developments and convictions, the Budapest School sought to confront the scientistic pretensions of Soviet Marxism with a critical theory whose normative content had neither been derived from a hypostasised and ahistorical conception of human nature nor imported from the ethical postulates of universal reason, but rather from the very movement of history itself. It was Márkus who, in this regard, led the way with his masterful excavations of the philosophical-anthropological core of the materialist conception of history.

Freedom, universality and the critique of alienation

The argument presented in Marxism and Anthropology departs from a conception of work (die Arbeit) as the species-activity, the essential, life-constituting activity of human beings. Fundamental to this conception was the idea that social labour not only brings about a profound transformation in the environmental conditions in which human beings exist but also the expansion, multiplication and diversification of the human being’s capacities, skills, needs and abilities – the transformation, in short, of humanity itself (Márkus, 1966). Whilst this dual perspective – work as the unity of the production of useful objects and the production of needs, capabilities and aptitudes in the working subjects – was by no means foreign to the doctrines of Soviet Marxism, it is nevertheless evident that the anthropological dimension of the historicity of human society was to a large extent displaced by a preponderant emphasis upon the evolution of technique. Against this view, Márkus’s recovery, and insistence upon the primacy, of the intersubjective-constitutive significance of social production demanded that history be viewed not only as technological development but also as anthropological progress; that is, as the increasing universality and freedom of the human species (Márkus, 2014: 68). Further, it was, Márkus argued, in precisely these terms, and along these axes – which, taken together, constitute the anthropological wealth which he had taken as his fundamental value – that Marx had discerned in human history not simply a mechanical succession of otherwise contingent events, but a unified and developing process. It is by unpacking these two foundational concepts that we are able to fully appreciate the scope and intentions of Márkus’s early reading of Marx.

The category of universality is to a certain degree prefigured in the preceding discussions. Within the Marxian anthropology, the ‘universality of man’ signifies, and attaches a positive value to, the ever-widening productive relationship between human beings and the natural world. To the extent that work, in this broad, anthropological sense, can be said to both satisfy and, in equal measure, produce human needs, the range of natural objects that can be brought within the productive orbit of human beings is, in principle, limitless. So too, just as the development of human productivity is inextricably bound up with the increasingly extensive interchange between ‘man and world’, it is, according to Márkus, equally connected to the widening of interactions between human beings themselves (Márkus, 2014: 40). This means, simply stated, that with the ever-increasing refinement of technique and the subsequent extension of man’s productive reach to all aspects of the natural world, there arises a corresponding expansion of the sphere of actual human contacts and interactions. It is precisely at this point that the profound implication of the tendency towards the universalisation of humanity in the latter’s historically expanding freedom can be most readily perceived.

In terms of the universalisation of the human qua social being, the expanding material basis of human contacts means that, at least in principle, each individual social actor becomes exposed to and acquires the possibility of appropriating the values, experiences, ideas and capacities that have been historically accumulated, not only by his or her own particular community/social integration, but also by those that have been developed by all human communities (Márkus, 2014: 40). So understood, the universalisation of humanity becomes the necessary condition for the possibility of the individualisation of men and women. ‘Human beings’, writes Márkus, ‘become individuals in the real sense of the word only in a historical process that through the growth of social contacts – first of all through the advance of exchange – dissolves these communities which have functioned as the natural precondition of the life of individuals, that is, as something set and unchangeable’ (Márkus, 2014: 41). In sum, the exposure of human agents to the values and experiences of a broad spectrum of human cultures contains within it, in nuce, the prospect of the emergence of beings for whom it is possible to take a reflexive distance from the norms and values of their own milieu, thereby making the autonomous determination, the appropriation of self-chosen norms an equal, and equally abstract, possibility.

From the perspectives opened up by the critical employment of the concept of species-being, however, human freedom, Márkus argues, consisted not only in the reflexive appropriation of self-chosen values but also, and equally, in the ‘principle of negativity’; that is, as man’s species-essential, historically-attained capacity for continual self-transcendence: an unceasing release from the limitations on human life imposed by the natural world (Márkus, 2014: 86). Positively constructed, the species-essential freedom of human being signifies, according to Márkus, a ‘power which man procures for himself’. ‘It means’, he continues:

The development of man’s control and domination over the forces of nature, external nature as well as man’s own nature; it means the widening scope of human possibilities over which man can, individually or collectively, dispose; it is the formation and cultivation of human creativity, of the essential powers of man, beyond every fixed limitation, as an end in-itself. (Márkus, 2014: 86)

Certainly, the critical import of such statements in Budapest of the 1960s should not be underestimated. To cast the arena of history as the domain of the progressive, although hitherto alienated, universalisation and increasing freedom of the human species postulated a corresponding emancipation from the natural determinants of human existence, and with this a concomitant growth of the propensity of human beings to both collectively and individually determine the conditions of their lives. The socialist society envisioned by Marx involved, these writings suggested, less the development of a hyper-rationalistic industrial complex than an increased ability of the individual to appropriate the wealth of the species for him or herself. Socialism, meant, in other words, the consummation of the human potentials embedded within the historically realised stage of social production, a consummation made possible by the dissolution of those institutional conditions which, although once historically progressive, had since become barriers to the emergent universality and freedom – der wahre Reichtum – of individual human agents.

Marxism and Anthropology today

Despite being more or less widely recognised as both a pioneering work of philological exegesis and a leading authority on its subject matter, Marxism and Anthropology has, for its part, attracted significantly less critical debate than the contemporaneous works of Heller (see, for example, Lukács, 1971; Arato, 1974; Honneth and Joas, 1989). Nonetheless, a recent essay by Aaron Jaffe has argued for the timeliness of the re-publication of this work, given both current directions in critical theory and the particular importance of a number of substantive themes raised in the text. ‘Politically, economically, and philosophically, the time is indeed ripe for a serious re-investigation of Marxism’, Jaffe argues, ‘and Márkus’s account of Marx’s philosophical anthropology offers a sound and nuanced basis to support such further developments’ (Jaffe, 2015: 39). Of the various aspects of Marxism and Anthropology that Jaffe claims genuinely speak to the concerns and problems of the present, one in particular deserves specific attention. In a footnote to this admirable essay, Jaffe makes the following remark: ‘While not at the time of writing a distinct concern, it is worth noting here that Márkus’s interpretation of Marx’s anthropology provides fine resources to respond to worries that Marx is problematically “productivist”‘ (Jaffe, 2015: 49). To be sure, this is a claim that should be taken seriously. As Sarah Vitale has recently argued, the critique of Marx’s ‘productivism’ – along with, his economism, his purported subjectivism, and his ethnocentrism – ‘occupies a central position in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century receptions of Marx’ (Vitale, 2016: 130). Should a work, then, offer a compelling alternative to this currently rather ubiquitous understanding of the Marxian legacy, this would be not only of documentary but, moreover, contemporary relevance. How, then, and in what ways does Jaffe propose that Márkus offers this ‘fine’ corrective to the critique of Marx’s productivism?

Jaffe’s statement regarding the possible alternatives Márkus’s reading of Marx offers with regard to the problem of productivism comes in response to the following passage:

Since in the course of its historical development consciousness permits and directs wider relationships to nature, nature becomes increasingly intelligible not only as potential sources of need satisfaction but as specific objects appreciable for their unique and many-sided individuality. Márkus persuasively shows how this is the best way to read Marx’s somewhat opaque comments on the humanization of the senses. Humanization of nature is then read as epistemic access to the relationally-established rich self-sufficiency of nature and natural objects which are not then merely possible material for human use. (Jaffe, 2015: 41)

Prague ’68 and the search for a critical theory

It was not concerns relating to Marx’s productivism, his ethnocentrism, or his subjectivism, nor, for that matter, his economism (although these concerns would emerge in time), that had first led the members of the Budapest School, by the beginning of the 1970s, away from the project of the ‘humanisation of socialism’ and, with this, for the most part, away from the humanistic philosophy of praxis which had typified the works of the 1960s. It was, on the contrary, the invasion by Soviet troops, accompanied by detachments from the Romanian, Polish and Hungarian militaries, of Czechoslovakia on 20 August 1968. The years following the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which they jointly and publicly condemned, saw an intensification of the Budapest School’s critique of socialist reality. The merely ‘moralistic negation’ that was implicit in the hitherto preferred strategy of confronting the ideals professed by the apparatus with its de facto practice increasingly came to be recognised as serving an indirectly apologetic function. Needless to say, such clarity would only come with time – in the early 1970s the path was not so clear. What was needed was a more direct, more radical mode of social criticism, the search for which would, however, see the Budapest School as it had existed in the 1960s more or less dissolve within a few short years.

In contrast to Fehér and Heller, who responded to their new-found disillusionment with the realities of ‘actually existing socialism’ via the radicalisation of the philosophy of praxis in the form of a new theory of needs (Heller, 1976), Márkus, along with Bence and Kis, abandoned the philosophy of praxis and its accompanying project of a critical anthropology entirely. Central to this perspectival re-orientation was the desire to come to a more concrete and sociologically more specific understanding of the Soviet system. ¹ As Bence and Kis state:

[The] philosophy of praxis derived the concept of an ideal society from the general idea of a ‘human being.’ The resulting criteria of evaluation were just as applicable to all societies as to none. The illusion that these criteria were especially relevant to Eastern European societies was created by the tacit, and sometimes not so tacit, assumption that the historical mission of these societies, as socialist ones, is the realization of the ‘human being.’ The moment this metaphysical thread was broken, it becomes clear that the praxis philosophy has no special relevance to Eastern European societies. (Bence and Kis, 1980: 280)

Production, economy, and the problem of reification

In a series of essays originally written in the late 1970s and later published as part of the collection entitled Language and Production (1986), Márkus developed a provocative and highly original challenge to the then dominant Habermasian critique of the paradigm of production in Marx and, by extension, the legacy of Marx’s thought for the contemporary renewal of critical social theory (see, for example, Habermas, 1971, 1973; Wellmer, 1976). According to Habermas, the young Marx’s attempts to re-frame the conceptual movement of Hegel’s Phenomenology in terms of the historical self-constitution of the human species through labour had ended in a theoretically decisive impasse: notwithstanding his general, dialectical model of the interrelationship between the forces and relations of production – that is, labour and interaction – Marx had, Habermas insists, failed to properly establish the precise nature of the relationship between these mutually effective and co-constitutive aspects of social reproduction (Habermas, 1973: 168). As a result, Marx was led to reduce to one over-arching logic of historical emancipation what are, in fact, two interrelated but nevertheless distinct and autonomous spheres of action. By contrast, Márkus’s critique of the production paradigm not only raises a number of serious questions as to the extent to which Marx had, in fact, conflated labour and interaction, it also shows, in rather remarkable detail, the ways in which Marx had himself attempted to affect the very separation of the instrumental and the interactive, the technical and the social, upon which Habermas’s project for the renewal of critical theory was based.

In terms of its general orientation, the Marxian conception of production proposes, according to Márkus, to treat every historically emergent form or system of production as at once encompassing a specific, technologically mediated process of interchange between human beings and the natural world and the reproduction of a distinct and definite system of relations between human beings themselves (Márkus, 1986: 60). In more substantive terms, this binary understanding of society is worked out and developed via the implementation of the following analytic distinctions. Firstly, the paradigm of production involves the interpretation of social activities and their results as involving the objectivation and appropriation of human needs and abilities; secondly, the paradigm of production proposes to distinguish between, on the one hand, the ‘material content’ of these processes and their products and, on the other, their ‘social form’; and, finally, the paradigm of production posits any such act of production as a momentary point in an ongoing process of reproduction. Applied to the results of production, the notion of objectivation does not merely express the idea that human beings, in contrast to numerous other species, inhabit an artificially created and intentionally modified environment. Above all, the interpretation of the material results of social production as objectivations brings to the fore a fundamental difference that exists between natural and manmade objects vis-à-vis the practical subject-object relations in which these orders of objectivity stand to human beings. Of course, both naturally occurring and artificial objects possess a qualitatively diverse utility for human beings. However, in contrast to objects of nature, the results of production become use-values through their subsumption within a network of socially effective rules of use, a network which is often implicit, but nevertheless always circumscribes both the end and the manner of use to which these objects may or ought to be put (Márkus, 1986: 52). What this means is that as objectivations the material elements of the human environment evince what we might term a second order of normative pressure. As objectivations, as externally present and separate materialities, the results of social production not only embody, within their ‘physical frame’, a specific mode of use; they also, and this follows from the foregoing assertions, ‘physically represent and posit’ a historically and culturally specific constellation of socially recognised needs and abilities which, as such, may or ought to be developed, cultivated and appropriated by current and future generations of human beings (Márkus, 1986: 53). Through the dialectic of objectivation and appropriation, the concept of production, therefore, articulates a materially mediated model of practical intersubjectivity, within which processes of individual socialisation consist, for the most part, precisely in the appropriation of the myriad forms of social objectivity– and this includes the cultivation of skills and aptitudes requisite to these objects.

Yet, as fundamental as this process of objectivation and appropriation is in the self-constitution of human societies, in order for the dialectic of production to unfold, certain conditions must be met. Most significant in this regard is the notion that the material elements of the human environment can preserve their constituting and socialising function only on condition of the continuing presence of the material-practical – that is, productive – activities from which they arise. That production is always and equally reproduction is thus necessitated by the very materiality of the products of production themselves. Subsequently, the preservation of the common pool of social wealth – that is, the results of production and their corresponding subjective determinations – requires the incessant establishment and re-establishment of equilibrium between the various productive-practical activities through which it is constituted. Such equilibrium, however, is possible only on the basis of the establishment of relations of proportionality between the socially recognised and established system of needs, as refracted through the objects of production, and the specific activities of which these objects are the products. Simply stated, in order to reproduce the conditions of its life, each and every ‘social productive organism’ must distribute its historically accumulated factors of production in such a way as to maximally satiate the culturally specific system(s) of needs present at a given stage of historical development.

The institutional mechanisms through which these relations of proportionality between the various branches of the social division of labour are established vary across societies. However, ‘their very existence’, Márkus insists, ‘creates and presupposes in general another set of social rules related to products as objects of human use’ (Márkus, 1986: 55). In addition to the aforementioned socially recognised rules of use, Márkus maintains that the objects of social production be understood as simultaneously ‘bearers or materializations of definite social relations’ (Márkus, 1986: 55). Just as the material objects which go to make up the social world express, in objective form, rules of their appropriate use – that is, they possess a material content – they also, and to the same extent, embody social norms of employment – or, in Marx’s terminology, they assume a specific social form. In short, each humanly produced artefact has inscribed within it not only how it is to be used, but where, when and by whom. Thus, if it is rules of use which constitute human societies in their moment of universality or commonality, it is these norms of employment that signify the moment of difference within this greater whole. Indeed, it is, as Márkus states, the very function of these social norms of employment to establish and maintain a direct relationship between certain specific forms of productive labour – that is to say, specific strata of or subject positions within the social division of labour – and a traditionally fixed and corresponding system of material needs (Márkus, 1986: 56). Through the social norms of employment, societies not only map productive functions onto consumptive needs, thereby securing the aforementioned relations of productive proportionality, they also figure as one of the primary mechanisms through which human collectivities distribute the multiplicity of useful items between different social groups. In the process, the latter are themselves invested with qualitatively varied social characteristics, thereby being constituted as social agents of a specific and definite type.

In their unity, these conjectures fundamentally bring into question the extent to which the paradigm of production can be said to simply reduce the sociality of human society to the dynamics of instrumental action. In contradistinction to the views of Habermas and those who have taken up his reading, Márkus suggested not that Marx has conflated labour with interaction, but that he offers a widely different understanding of interaction itself. According to this view, it is not linguistic communication which presents to Marx the paradigmatic form of social interaction, but, as we have seen, the social division of labour in production. In a model which will provide the foundations and general orientation that will enable him to delineate the sui generis relations in and through which the autonomous spheres of high culture have been constituted in modernity, Márkus uncovers in Marx a form of social interaction based upon interrelated and complementary, institutionally articulated and differentiated activities that presuppose and posit not the shared competency that accompanies participation in a linguistic community but differing and often conflicting competencies and subject positions (Grumley, 1992). So understood, the paradigm of production brings these conceptual distinctions together in a way that organically links two paradigmatically modern determinations of the human condition – finitude and self-creation – whilst at the same time orientating critical social theory towards a radically historicist and radically immanent critique of the institutional norms which circumscribe, delimit, constrain, but also make possible, our ineliminable collective material interchange with nature.

In the writings currently under consideration, however, Márkus presents the production paradigm not only as both a powerful analytic tool and foundational heuristic in the radical, socialistic transformation of existing society. It was, he had also recognised from the outset, a deeply flawed conceptual model. The problem, Márkus contends, is that whatever analytic value these conceptual abstractions may, at one level, possess, in reality the categories of ‘material content’ and ‘social form’ do not appear as strict, separable, mutually opposed and exclusive. This is a point that can be demonstrated in both conceptual and historical terms. Limiting ourselves to the latter, it is immediately apparent that within pre-capitalistic forms of social organisation, the very instruments of labour themselves are embedded within complex webs of specifically sanctioned norms. Moreover, ‘In these societies’, writes Márkus, ‘the human abilities objectified in an instrument do not have the character of mere “skills,” to be applied for the procurement of some external goals, but are usually posited as social “duties,” the performance of which – in the concreteness of their technical details – is directly related to corresponding social motivations.’ Labour, he continues, ‘is performed not as an effective instrumental procedure upon nature to be judged exclusively in terms of success, it is conceived simultaneously as a form of moral (and religious) life’ (Márkus, 1986: 66). These means that within these societies what are, for Marx, sensu stricto technical operations are subsumed within the social – that is, they attest to nothing less (for present purposes) than the articulation of the processes of material reproduction in and through relations of dependence, kinship ties and political and religious bonds.

Of course, no one knew this better than Marx himself. It is only with the dis-embedding of the economy from the other spheres of social life that accompanies the rise of capitalism, and with it, the positing of the accumulation of wealth on an ever-increasing scale as its exclusive and overriding aim, that labour itself becomes a purely zweckrational activity, ‘liberated’, as it were, from its hitherto socially sanctioned and regulated character. On the basis of these quite rudimentary historical reflections, it seems as if it is only with the emergence of capitalist modernity that the conceptual distinctions around which the paradigm of production is based come to correspond to the actual conditions of the social life of human beings. However, Márkus, drawing on Marx’s own critique of capitalism, explains that this is not so. For, ‘the same capitalist development’, he writes, ‘simultaneously extends this principle of goal-rationality beyond the sphere of the merely technical, to that of social relations proper’ (Márkus, 1986: 67). Here we find one of the most complex, original, interesting, but also neglected ideas within Márkus’s body of Marx scholarship. It is also crucial to understanding his critique and eventual rejection of the materialist conception of history.

The key to understanding this historically apparent inseparability of the technical and the social lies in the problem of reproduction and, more specifically, in Marx’s conception of the functions of economies in general. To reiterate: the continuity of production requires, inter alia, the establishment and renewal of relations of proportionality between the various sectors thereof; that is to say, societies must in some way establish equilibrium between production and consumption, between the different branches of production, between useful resources and their being used up, etc. In all pre-modern social formations, this ‘technical’ task had been effected through social mechanisms: the relations of dependence, kinship ties, and political and religious bonds referred to above which organised and distributed individual persons as representatives of, or cyphers for, productive functions. In such contexts, reproduction entailed the inseparable reproduction of the material, or productive, what are for us ‘economic’, relations of proportionality and the traditionally fixed social relationships between individual men and women: here the two are one and the same; the former is realised through the latter. Indeed, it is precisely in the spontaneous reproduction of these social relations that the ‘goal of production’ – ‘the economic goal to be fulfilled within the limiting conditions imposed by the material-“technical” requirements of proportionality’ – is achieved (Márkus, 1982: 150; Habermas, 1970: 95). With the advent of capitalist modernity, this ‘goal of production’ is dissolved; production in its technological moment is freed from the restrictions imposed upon it by the need to preserve traditionally existing forms of interaction.

Concomitant to the emergence of a sui generis sphere of economic action a new ‘goal of production’ – the accumulation of wealth in the form of objectified social labour – also emerges. In the process, the technical and the social elements of the process of reproduction become again inseparably fused. This time, however, the social decisions concerning the aims and directions of production, which, in previous epochs, had been the unreflected and spontaneous preservation of existing traditions, is, as Márkus writes, subordinated ‘to the autonomously functioning mechanisms of realisation of value and surplus-value through the market’ (Márkus, 1982: 152). Finally, to the extent that these mechanisms act with an apparent logic of their own, compelling the denizens of modernity with the force of natural necessity, the social relations which they express themselves appear as natural-technical necessities of an emancipated and rationalised labour process, beyond the pale of contestation and critique, whilst, at the same time, the norms which pattern economic behaviour within capitalism assume also this naturalised, i.e. necessary and universal, form.

Here we arrive at an apparent deadlock. The paradigm of production is, so it would seem, essentially self-negating: at once orientating critical social theory towards a distinction that its own concrete analyses tend to repudiate. Indeed, this inseparability of the technical and the social, evidenced, as it is, in all hitherto existing forms of human society, came, according to Márkus, to be one of the overriding concerns of Marx’s late economic writings, including Capital, in which he refers to, and conceptualises, the phenomenon in question under the notion of reification (Marx, 1981: 969). Within the reified conditions of ‘pre-history’, the distribution and division of social labour, takes the form not of a technical task corresponding to the already articulated interests and needs of the members of society, but through social mechanisms, be they traditional forms of human contact or the interpersonal relations which underwrite the process of production within modernity, that subsume individuals under various productive functions, under ‘occupations’ or ‘vocations’ which themselves involve a fixed hierarchy of domination. In this light, the apparent deadlock, in fact, points towards the deeply practical nature of the concept of production in Marx. It points, that is, to the idea that the basic analytic distinctions, through which this paradigm is articulated, are themselves ‘posited not simply as descriptive categories, but as critical notions analysing the present and the past in terms of a difference that cannot be simply “discovered,” “found” in the material of history, but has to be made through the radical transformation of existing society’ (Márkus, 1986: 71). Otherwise stated, the paradigm of production, as the basic framework for both Marx’s theory of history and his critical theory of capitalist modernity, attains its practical truth only with dissolution of the reification (and alienation) that has typified the conditions of human ‘pre-history’, i.e. with the historical realisation of a socialist society, a society that is capable, in practice, of effecting the institutional separation of the ‘management of things and production processes’ from the ‘rule of men’. ²

With this, Márkus claims, the paradigm of production, and the interpretation of history to which it gives rise, subverts its own radically historicist premises and, in the end, devolves into a ‘covert’ but nevertheless unmistakably teleological view of history (Márkus, 1986: 72). Within this framework, the essential movement of history itself is understood, not, as Marx and Engels had argued in the works of the 1840s, as the open-ended and contingent outcome of the strivings of concrete social actors as they seek to satiate their needs within the parameters of their inherited social conditions, but, rather, as the progressive actualisation of those determinations that are implied by, or latent within, the paradigmatic, life-activity of these same social actors; that is, within the abstract notion of production as such. A process, which, although empirically verifiable, is nevertheless prefigured by its conceptual, ideational, content – a methodology rejected by the young Marx (1975: 332) as ‘uncritical positivism’ in his early critique of Hegel – and is therefore anything but open-ended and contingent. ³

Conclusion

In attempting to bring together these various threads into a coherent picture of Márkus’s break with the ‘neo-Marxism’ of the first decades of his intellectual activity, Marx’s final reversion to a Hegelian teleology of the concept is decisive. Evidently, this reversion signifies a deeply problematic return to the conception of a closed historical totality so evident in the Paris Manuscripts and, yet, so remorselessly criticised in such celebrated works as The German Ideology and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In addition, it also brings with it a number of significant concomitants with regard to Marx’s concrete analysis of specific social formations. From the perspective of the future trajectory of Márkus’s thinking, it is worth emphasising that to the extent that this historical finalism is employed both retrospectively and prospectively, not only does capitalism become the key to understanding all previous historical formations, but the former itself can be understood in its ‘essential’ structure if, and only if, it is always already posited as being necessarily transient to socialism. As a number of commentators have shown, the inability of Marxists to break free of the dichotomous conception of modernity as being faced with an epochal confrontation between either socialism or capitalism was to become a central motif both in the Budapest School’s final analysis and critique of Soviet-type societies as well as a focal point for discussing some of the felt inadequacies of even a ‘reconstructed’ Marxism in the changed conditions of the 20th century (Féher et al., 1983: 1–45). Taking a broader perspective, however, the ramifications and reverberations of Marx’s final return to Hegel are even more significant. ‘This finalism’, writes Márkus, ‘affects the entire “paradigm of production” in two interconnected ways: it leads towards the “naturalization” of material content and towards the “phenomenologization” of social form” (Márkus, 1986: 76). By the former, Márkus refers to the tendency prevalent within Marx’s later economic writings to depict ‘labour’ (die Arbeit) – the material content of the historical process – less as a process of metabolic interchange between human beings and the natural world than as an exclusively natural process; that is, as a wholly physical process of interaction between exclusively natural elements. This is a conception of labour which directly contradicts the tendency in Marx to theorise labour as objectivation and appropriation, constituted, as these terms imply, by social rules-and-norms. Not only this, the tendency towards an increasingly finalistic conception of history means that labour, so naturalised, becomes both repositioned as the propelling force of historical change whilst simultaneously also being divested of its critical potential. The purely ‘physiological’ interpretation of labour seems, that is, to be rather at odds with what Marx at other times posits as the dehumanising effects of the reduction of complex labour in the capitalist factory to a few bodily motions (see Honneth, 1982). In the process, and to the extent that the capitalist revolution succeeds in reducing labour to what it always was in its essence, the general direction of technological progress becomes, as Márkus writes, ‘anthropologically unchallengeable and…unchangeable’ (Márkus, 1986: 77). At the same time, this naturalisation of the material content of the historical process is met with what Márkus refers to as a ‘phenomenalisation’ of the social forms taken by this increasingly naturalised process. This means that the ‘operatively effective mechanisms and interconnections of the given mode of production’ are increasingly treated as more or less ‘surface phenomena’ in direct contradistinction to those ‘essential’ processes which, as disclosed by the scientific economy of the proletariat, point to the true nature and the real overcoming of the present time (Márkus, 1986: 78). Inter alia, this tendency towards the phenomenalisation of social form lends itself, Márkus claims, to the treatment of the actually existing life-conditions of the men and women who inhabit the present as being expressive of a necessarily false-consciousness, the falsity of which can be scientifically demonstrated by the theory itself (Márkus, 1986: 78).

That which immediately strikes the student of Márkus’s oeuvre is the changed stance that these criticisms imply vis-à-vis orthodox Soviet Marxism. In those representative works of the 1960s – most notably the essay on ‘Debates and Trends’ in contemporary Marxist scholarship – Márkus (1979) had been willing to dismiss ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’ as an outright distortion of genuinely Marxist thinking. In these more critical works of subsequent decades, however, we find that the theoretical cornerstone of the Budapest School’s early rejection of Soviet orthodoxy, that is, its ‘homogenisation’ of the natural and social worlds, is no longer perceived as an ideological distortion of Marx but is, rather, now seen as being directly anticipated in the works of the master. Taking this line of thought to its conclusion, Márkus’s identification of the dual tendencies outlined above and his situating of them as outcomes of Marx’s final appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic sheds, I submit, decisive light on that schism between ‘scientific’ and ‘critical’ Marxism that Alvin Gouldner made the subject of his widely read study of the early 1980s (see Gouldner, 1980). That is to say, Márkus offers the often neglected third – between Kautsky, Althusser and the positivist tradition of Marxism on the one hand, and Lukács, Marcuse, and the critical-theoretical tradition on the other – that illuminates the ideological one-sidedness of each of these influential and historically important interpretations of Marxism, while at the same time succeeding in locating each within the movements of Marx’s own theoretical system. Finally, Márkus’s critique of the paradigm of production offers an important corrective to the frequently encountered demonisation of Friedrich Engels, a man who has often been portrayed as the chief distorter of the Marxian doctrine. In contrast to even as fine a scholar as Tom Rockmore (2002: 18), who, in his recent assessment of Marx ‘after Marxism’ has argued that in order to recover Marx ‘we need to free him as much as possible from Marxism, hence from Engels, the first Marxist’, Márkus offers a sober, but by no means ‘value-free’, assessment of the inner tensions, contradictions and antinomies which Marx himself strove to overcome, often doing so only with great difficulty and just as often proffering solutions that raised just as many problems as they solved. In short, his reflections not only offer a decisive assessment of some of the most arcane and challenging aspects of the Marxian oeuvre, they also offer a microcosmic topography of some of the most important trends in Marxist philosophy during the 20th century.

How, then, given these developments and perspectives are we to understand Márkus’s turn, in the wake of these criticisms, to a post-Marxist philosophy of culture? ⁴ To my understanding, the temptation to draw a line of more or less continuous or organic development from the critique of production to the philosophy of culture ought to be avoided (cf. Pickle, 2015: 23). Nevertheless, the preceding reflections are, or may be, instructive. Critical theory, originating in Marx, has its genesis in the attempt to transcend, in the form a determinate negation, the philosophical tradition. In this, critical theory laid claim to totality: it sought to explain the entirety of humanity and our world in terms of our collective, social existence (Horkheimer and Marcuse, 1937: 631). Yet, from the outset, this totalising, explanatory moment had always existed alongside and as complement to the radical and revolutionary interpretation of the present. Critical theory is born of the identification within contemporary social forms themselves – and not in an ahistorical or transcendental system of norms and/or values – the foundations and principles of their own critique and possible transformation. The unity of these two moments, the explanatory and the interpretative, in turn implies a complete transformation in the very relationship in which theory stands to ‘social reality’. That is to say that theory no longer refers to the representation of facts to be analysed. On the contrary, it addresses itself to social agents as the expression of the active life-conditions in which they exist, through which these same agents come to an adequate ‘self-consciousness’. In the decades since its inception, however, Marxism, whatever else may be said of its failures and successes, proved unable to truly uphold its totalising claims to not only explain the conflicts, contradictions and crises which characterise modernity, but also to guide and orientate the purported radical subject(s) in the revolutionary transformation of existing society. This is, to be sure, a problem that is analytically distinct from the ‘integration’ of the proletariat within the modern order and the emergence of a plurality of ‘radical subjectivities’. It is a problem that, as the preceding discussions demonstrate, goes right to the heart of the antinomies that form the very basis of Marx’s project. Far from bringing it to an end, Marxism itself has been wholly implicated, Márkus concludes, in the perpetual contestation of ideologies that has accompanied and characterised modernity as such. ‘After Marxism’, contemporary critical theory opens onto modernity as the ground of a continual conflict of ‘self and world’ interpretations. Accordingly, culture, as the repository and formal determinant of these heterogeneous, frequently irreconcilable forms of consciousness, assumes a place of diagnostic primacy. In Márkus’s later works, the present, our modernity, no longer appears as the alienated, reified, apogee of the ‘inversion of the subject and object’ in history but, rather, as a form of life constituted in and through the agon of collective self-understanding – that is, as a ‘society of culture’.