“Missing from Marx’s oeuvre is any concept of culture, of formation and re-formation (Bildung). There is no idea of a vocation which may be assimilated or re-formed by the determinations or law which it fails to acknowledge or the strength which it underestimates. Because Marx did not relate actuality to representation and subjectivity, his account of structural change in capitalism is abstractly related to possible change in consciousness. This resulted in gross oversimplification regarding the likelihood and the inhibition of change. This is not the argument that Marx’s predictions about the conditions of the formation of revolutionary consciousness were wrong. It is an argument to the effect that the very concept of consciousness and, a fortiori, of revolutionary consciousness, are insufficiently established in Marx.
This absence of any account of the formation of ‘natural consciousness’ or ‘subjective disposition’ in its modern, individualistic, moral, religious, aesthetic, political and philosophical misapprehensions has meant the Marxism is especially susceptible to re-formation. For revolutionary consciousness is subjective consciousness, just as natural consciousness is, that is, it is a determination or re-presentation of substance, ethical life, actuality, in the form of an abstract consciousness. An abstract consciousness is one which knows that it is not united with ethical life. It is determined by abstract law to know itself as formally free, identical and empty. It is only such an abstract consciousness which can be potentially revolutionary, which can conceive the ambition to acquire a universal content or determination which is not that of the bourgeois property law which bestowed universality and subjectivity on it in the first place.
The very notion of Marxism, that is that Marx’s ideas are not realized, implies that Marxism is a culture, the very thing of which it has no idea. Furthermore Marxism has been ‘applied’ or imposed as revolutionary theory both in societies with no formal, bourgeois law and in societies with formal bourgeois law. Marx’s use of ‘alienation’ as characteristic of capitalist society has obscured the force of Hegel’s historically specific use of alienation to present theantinomies of revolutionary intention if pre-bourgeois societies.
Strictly speaking, Hegel only analysed cultures in pre-bourgeois societies. In bourgeois, capitalist society the cultures of art and religion culminating in the French Revolution were over. Philosophy is attributed the vocation which other forms of re-presentation held previously, and, as we have seen, in places Hegel intimated that philosophy might be equally perverted, ‘awkward’ in its conduct’, and in others he seemed to be announcing its success.
Both Hegel’s and Marx’s discourse has been misread and has been either assimilated to the prevalent law or lawlessness or imposed on it. Hegel anticipated this, but Marx, who made the relation of theory and practice so central, misunderstood the relation between his discourse and the possibility of a transformed politics.
This is to point to a flaw not in Marx’s analysis of Capital, but in any presentation of that analysis as a comprehensive account of capitalism, and in any pre-judged, imposed ‘realization’ of that theory, any using it as a theory of Marxism. This is the utility which hegel analysed in the French Revolution: an instrumental use of a ‘materialist’ theory rests in fact on the idealist assumption that social reality is an object and that its definition depends on revolutionary consciousness. This is to fail to acknowledge that reality is ethical, and it is to risk creating a terror, or reinforcing lawlessness, or strengthening bourgeois law in its universality and arbitrariness.
This critique of Marxism itself yields the project of a critical Marxism.
The Hegelian exposition of a re-formation of a vocation in a society in which reflection dominates is an exposition of the perpetually renewed victory of forms of bourgeois cultural domination or hegemony. It provides the possibility of re-examining the changing relation between Marx’s presentation of the contradictions of Capital and a comprehensive exposition of capitalism * of capitalism itself as a culture in both its formative and destructive potencies.
To expound capitalism as a culture is thus not to abandon the classical Marxist interests in political economy and in revolutionary practice. On the contrary, a presentation of the contradictory relations between Capital and culture is the only way to link the analysis of the economy to comprehension of the conditions for revolutionary practice.” (Hegel contra Sociology, pp. 218-220).
Tahir: Those paragraphs, which end the book, I think should be read in the light of such other passages as the following:
"The System der Sittlichkeit is an attack on the primacy of the concept, and on the predominance of social relations to which such philosophical primacy corresponds. At the same time the exposition of absolute ethical life starts from these relations, lack of identity or difference, from their own (mis)understanding of themselves. The absolute identity cannot be starkly opposed to these relative identitites, for the absolute identity would then also be only negative and abstract, another imposed concept. Hence this different kind of identity must be evolved out of intuition, the nature which is subsumed. To put it in different terms, the idea of a just society where pure and empirical consciousness coincide cannot be merely legislated, for then it would be as unjust as the one imposed by the concept. The idea of a just society can only be achieved by a transformation not of the concept but of intuition (Anschauung).” (pp. 64-65)
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