I think your questions, reproduced below, are important questions. But to be honest, my first impulse was not to answer them. I believe that a proper, comprehensive answer in this case requires a bit of explanation and supporting evidence. I have found that when you do that on listservs, there is a tendency for others to pull out one sentence here or there, and ignore the general argument which was made. But I guess that I am a bit of a sucker for this stuff, so here I go.
There is a near universal scholarly consensus, I believe, that Hegel's philosophy of history, with its conception of history as the gradual unfolding of Geist [commonly translated as Spirit, although sometimes rendered as Mind], clearly relies upon a teleological notion of history. For Hegel, there is immanent, transcendent logic to all of human history, the logic of the dialectical development of Geist. This conception is perhaps most clearly expressed in the Hegel's Introduction [Reason in History] to his _Lectures on the Philosophy of HIstory_, which has a good translation by Nisbet. There is also a near universal scholarly consensus, I believe, that Marx's early intellectual development took place in a milieu of German young Hegelians, and that a primary focus of it was the clarification of his intellectual relationship to Hegel and young Hegelians such as Feuerbach.
The writings of Marx which most directly address questions of his philosophy of history are his early writings in which he was working out his relationship to the 'German Ideology' of Hegel and the young Hegelians. Here, we can find a number of rather unambiguous statements of a philosophy of history which is teleological and which relies upon a notion of an immanent logic in history. Perhaps the best expression of it is the following passage from the _Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts_, in which communism is described as the telos of history: (c)ommunism is the positive supercession of private property as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man as a social, i.e., human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.
What this points to, in my view, is that Marx understood his relationship to Hegel as one of inversion. This is captured, of course, in the famous line in _Capital_ where Marx talks of Hegel as standing on his head [a trope for his idealism], and Marx putting him on his feet, but it is clearly also present in the early works. This is certainly the case in his _Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State_, where he takes the Feuerbachian position that Hegelian philosophy inverts the relationship between subject and predicate (object), making the Idea as logos into the subject and the real subject -- the material (empirical, sensible) world of man -- into a result of the Idea. As Marx becomes more of a socialist, he comes to define the material world in terms of production.
The problem is that a simple inversion of Hegel -- the Hegelian dialectic, Hegelian politics and Hegel's philosophy of history -- retains the fundamental structure of Hegelian thought, while simply shifting the terms of valorization. We still have a teleological philosophy of history, in which history is directed by an immanent logic, but now it is the material world of production which supplies that logic. That is why when one puts Hegel's stages of human history next to Marx's modes of production, one finds a one to one correspondence.
The closer one adheres to this inverted eschatological Hegelianism, the more difficult it is to do good politics or good historical analysis. Within the Marxist tradition, there have been two methods for trying to escape its grasp. The first method was best represented by Althusser and his school. They went straight to the philosophical core of the problem, and attempted -- via the notion of an epistemological rupture in Marx -- to separate the youthful, humanist [Hegelian] Marx from the mature, scientific [implicitly anti-Hegelian] Marx. At first, Althusser claimed that works such as _Capital_ were mature, post-rupture works, but this was a more and more difficult position to sustain, as sections of _Capital_ such as the analysis of fetishism of commodities clearly have a heavy Hegelian cast to them. Eventually, by the last time he addressed the question, Althusser was at the position of implausibly claiming that only an unpublished writing of Marx immediately before his death [Notes on Wagner] represented the mature Marx. And the science of Marxism that Althusser and his followers produced, with its structuralist bent, was problematic in its own right in many ways.
The more common position was simply to ignore the Hegelian influence on Marx. Given that the early writings were only published scores of years after Marx's death, this was not so hard to do until after WWII. Although the Hegelian influences in Marx are present in works such as _Capital_, they are not as explicit as they are in the earlier works. Those who had a more Hegelian interpretation of Marx, such as Lukacs and Korsch, constructed largely in ignorance of the earlier works. But when you look at the most impressive Marxist historians who have produced works from which we can still learn a great deal, the E. P. Thompsons and Eugene Genoveses, the Christopher Hills and Eric Hobsbawms, they did so by ignoring the philosophy of history of Marx, while taking insights from the concrete analyses of _Capital_ and the historical writings such as the Eighteenth Brumaire.
So although there is much to be learned from the Marxist tradition, it is in spite of, rather than because of, Marx's philosophy of history.
Todd wrote: <<Where do you find Marx being teleological? I've been reading him for the past few weeks, and nowhere I've read does he state that the immanent end of history (in Fukuyama-esque terms) is communism. He does point out that the internal motions of capitalism will bring it to crises no matter how hard the capitalists try to reform the system piecemeal, and that these crises won't, of themselves, usher in socialism. They merely provide the environment/grist for the attempt at revolutionary transfer of (hegemonic) power from capitalism to socialism by way of human revolutionary activity. He does say that, under fully developed communism, the contradictions experienced under capitalism will be resolved (presumably they will be in the process of being rationally "worked through" under socialism); I assume here that he means the production contradictions only which perturb society at large. This is nowhere near Hegel's conception of Universal Mind.
Again, please point out to me where Marx mentions anything transcendental pre-existing human history. To my reading, at least, class-struggle is a back-drop, a "meta-struggle" to the various other struggles which have gone on in history, and this meta-struggle between the producers and those who live off the producers has come to a visible head under capitalism. Historical record mentions episodes which, perhaps inaccurately, point this up (e.g. the land reforms of the Gracchi brothers, the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages, and the pre-Marxist "socialist" struggles of e.g. Chartism). Of course this does depend on how one defines human beings as apart from other animals: we do produce our own "subsistence" instead of taking it "raw" from nature (at least, once we figured out how to do it), we use our unique (among terrestrial species at least) human intelligence to create what we need. Marx points out that a class of people came about who, inadvertently (initially?) or not, expropriated what the class of producers created; this has been going on for all of recorded history. I haven't read Laclau and Mouffe for some time now, but I do remember thinking that, while generally agreeing with their observations, they seemed to concentrate too heavily for my liking on too many particularities of society and to forget the larger meta-struggle going on. I'll have to read them again (if only to argue some more with you, Leo).
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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