#may 1983

84: The scientific-determinist aspect of Marx’s thought was precisely what made it vulnerable to “ideologization,” both during his own lifetime and even more so in the theoretical heritage he left to the workers movement. The advent of the historical subject continues to be postponed, and it is economics, the historical science par excellence, which is increasingly seen as guaranteeing the inevitability of its own future negation. In this way revolutionary practice, the only true agent of this negation, tends to be pushed out of theory’s field of vision. Instead, it is seen as essential to patiently study economic development, and to go back to accepting with a Hegelian tranquility the suffering which that development imposes. The result remains “a graveyard of good intentions.” The science of revolutions then concludes that consciousness always comes too soon, and has to be taught. “History has shown that we, and all who thought like us, were wrong,” Engels wrote in 1895. “It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was far from being ripe . . .” Throughout his life Marx had maintained a unitary point of view in his theory, but the exposition of his theory was carried out on the terrain of the dominant thought insofar as it took the form of critiques of particular disciplines, most notably the critique of that fundamental science of bourgeois society, political economy. It was in this mutilated form, which eventually came to be seen as definitive, that Marx’s theory was transformed into “Marxism.”