time, history and revolution

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Dialectical Anthropology, I 1:1 (1986) 11-34 9 1986 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands 11 Essay TIME, HISTORY AND REVOLUTION Ulysses Santamaria* Translated by A.M. Bailey and J. Anglin To paraphrase the Ninth Thesis on Feuerbach, one could say that, as opposed to speculative materialism, dialectical materialism conceives the time of social development as a practical activity, and not as a factor that can be taken in isolation, a neutral parameter of development. Regis Debray [1] A speculative form of materialism as opposed to a dialectical way of thinking about time - it is within the taut space separating these two positions that I would like to develop my thesis. Though the thesis itself is quite simple, it nonetheless implies the existence of a broad underlying complexity where the destiny and meaning of the Marxist theory of history are at stake. By applying a certain turn of thought, Marx succeeded in undermining an entire metaphysics of time and history which can still be seen as a kind of watermark just beneath the surface of his work. Marxists, that is, post-Marx thinkers, have failed to accomplish this break with classical thought and have only managed to redeploy it right down to its most concrete effects, as can be witnessed by the practical evolution of its realization in history. I shall proceed on two levels. First, through a general analysis of what has become of Marx's theory as appropriated/expropriated by his "followers," I shall point out to what extent the Marxist tradition occupies a domain governed by metaphysics. Second, I will demonstrate how Marx's own thought, within the thematic lineage of historical reality, * Ulysses Santamaria is a Research Associate at Maison des Sciences de L'Homme constitues a break, through which the metaphysic has been dissolved. Further, I propose to elucidate how Marx's historical problematic suppresses metaphysics and encompasses a concept of time that escapes the systematic determinations which had, until Marx, comprised its definition. MARXIST TRADITION Even though the Marxist tradition does recognize Marx's theoretical originality, and though it may well affirm that Marx's thought is revolutionary, this double recognition assumes a form which nullifies itself. Marx's originality and the revolutionary nature of his thought are posited and thought of by tradition in terms of a continuity with past theoretical figures, and, as such, they become more than problematical. Marx's thought is thereby reduced to the status of a mere end- product of previous discourses and is seen only as a perfected form of their fulfillment. This is due to the post-Marxian general evolutionary framework which, as we shall see, is essentially based on a radically continuistic conception of social evolution. This is true despite claims and appeals which would have us believe that this continuity represents a sort of revolutionary watershed. I shall attempt to uncover the guiding principle of the continuistic conception of evolution as it is revealed in the abstract and metaphysical representation of time which serves to prop up its entire view of history. Marxist tradition has indeed propagated an image of Marx's work

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Page 1: Time, history and revolution

Dialectical Anthropology, I 1:1 (1986) 11-34 �9 1986 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands 11

Essay

TIME, HISTORY AND REVOLUTION

Ulysses Santamaria* Translated by A.M. Bailey and J. Anglin

To paraphrase the Ninth Thesis on Feuerbach, one could say that, as opposed to speculative materialism, dialectical materialism conceives the time of social development as a practical activity, and not as a factor that can be taken in isolation, a neutral parameter o f development. Regis Debray [1]

A speculative form of materialism as opposed to a dialectical way of thinking about time - it is within the taut space separating these two positions that I would like to develop my thesis. Though the thesis itself is quite simple, it nonetheless implies the existence of a broad underlying complexity where the destiny and meaning of the Marxist theory of history are at stake. By applying a certain turn of thought, Marx succeeded in undermining an entire metaphysics of time and history which can still be seen as a kind of watermark just beneath the surface of his work. Marxists, that is, post-Marx thinkers, have failed to accomplish this break with classical thought and have only managed to redeploy it right down to its most concrete effects, as can be witnessed by the practical evolution of its realization in history.

I shall proceed on two levels. First, through a general analysis of what has become of Marx's theory as appropriated/expropriated by his "followers," I shall point out to what extent the Marxist tradition occupies a domain governed by metaphysics. Second, I will demonstrate how Marx's own thought, within the thematic lineage of historical reality,

* Ulysses Santamaria is a Research Associate at Maison des Sciences de L 'Homme

constitues a break, through which the metaphysic has been dissolved. Further, I propose to elucidate how Marx's historical problematic suppresses metaphysics and encompasses a concept of time that escapes the systematic determinations which had, until Marx, comprised its definition.

MARXIST TRADITION

Even though the Marxist tradition does recognize Marx's theoretical originality, and though it may well affirm that Marx's thought is revolutionary, this double recognition assumes a form which nullifies itself. Marx's originality and the revolutionary nature of his thought are posited and thought of by tradition in terms of a continuity with past theoretical figures, and, as such, they become more than problematical. Marx's thought is thereby reduced to the status of a mere end- product of previous discourses and is seen only as a perfected form of their fulfillment. This is due to the post-Marxian general evolutionary framework which, as we shall see, is essentially based on a radically continuistic conception of social evolution. This is true despite claims and appeals which would have us believe that this continuity represents a sort of revolutionary watershed. I shall attempt to uncover the guiding principle of the continuistic conception of evolution as it is revealed in the abstract and metaphysical representation of time which serves to prop up its entire view of history. Marxist tradition has indeed propagated an image of Marx's work

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which makes of it a transformed version of what Hegel called absolute knowledge, i.e., a totalizing and synthetic knowledge which absorbs collected forms of partial and past knowledge and provides them with the unitary principle of their coherence and organic nature.

The interpretations which define the Marxist tradition always presented a retotalizing of knowledge of the past within the form of a contemplation of evolution. This is the case whether we are dealing with Engels, for whom Marxism represents the historic moment in which all the theoretical figures of the past are subsumed within the unity of a materialist synthesis (in "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy"); or with Plekhanov who portrays Marxism as the culmination of the best in theory, firmly adhering to a scientific synthesis. This is also the case with Kautsky, whose idea is taken up by Lenin for whom Marxism was the scientific synthesis of the three theoretical streams of thought defining modern times: English political economy, German philosophical idealism and French socialism.

In "The Three Sources of Marxism," Lenin wrote:

The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling "sectarianism" in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilization. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism. [2]

Marxism is seen as a theoretical principle from within this continuistic view of the history of thought, leading in a logical sequence from what had been thought before Marx to a higher stage in the spiritual evolution of humanity. This theoretical principle was to govern the Marxist tradition, especially what

it conceived to be the essence of Marx's thought, i.e., historical materialism, wherein Marx had presumably updated the objective laws of human evolution in the realm of history jus( as Darwin had done for the natural sciences. Far from having made a radical break in order to attain an effective way of conceptualizing revolution, Marx's role would thus be limited to having renewed classical historical thought. This was seen as a revolutionary revival; in one stroke Marx had ended the contradictions and errors of the past. We can find this image of a purifying Marxism in Plekhanov:

The materialist conception of history is the naturalproduct of a secular development of the conceptions of history. It encompasses all of them in so far as they have true value and confers on them far more solid foundations than those which they possessed in the era of their downfall. To use Hegel's already-cited expression, it is the most developed, the richest and the most concrete conception of history. [3]

For Plekhanov, cited here only as an example, things are simple.

The theoretical intervention of Marxism within the field of historical thought is defined by a natural transfer of historical thinking from ideology to science. The development of historical materialism is not a break, but the culmination of a long process of approach, moving toward historical reality - a mere transition of thought in its prescientific form to its completed form in science through continuous evolution; everything remains intact, however, in accordance with a mythical movement of A ufhebung, wherein suppression is but the passage of the same (thing) to a higher level. Marx's theoretical revolution is thus a mere transition from non- science to science. Through this now adequate knowledge of the real history arose the possibility of giving historical authenticity to the revolutionary project of transforming the world. Thus, according to Engels' formula, Marx shifts history to the realm of the positive sciences, tearing it away from philosophy, idealism and ideology.

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Plekhanov, following Engels, announces this expulsion of history, and thinking about history, from the domain of philosophy:

For the first time, dialectical materialism conferred on the science of society the rigour which it exercised in its sister, natural sciences. [4]

How? To understand this development more fully,

we must reconsider the notion that Marxism is the objective synthesis of all previous knowledge. In the words of Lenin:

It goes without saying that if this viewpoint is not taken, there would be no science of society, since the materialist conception of history is synonomous with the science of society. [51

Thus armed with the scientificity of materialism, the theory of history could come along and "tear the social sciences from the maze of their contradictions," as Plekhanov wrote, clearing the way for objective knowledge based on history. Materialism was thus becoming the governing power of all theory by blocking from the realm of history those paths leading nowhere, in which the previous discourse of history never ceased to lose itself.

Marx's theory of history was thus paradoxically defined, not as the result of a concrete analysis of historical reality, but as abstract knowledge produced by philosophical generalizations about the nature of being, quite apart from any reflection on the specificity of the historically real.

Thus, far from defining itself through an act of self-creation, historical, materialism finds its principle in a sphere of thought exterior to history; and rather than determining its own epistemological domain by taking charge and taking hold of what is concrete in history, it receives its principle from knowledge elaborated elsewhere, independently of all historical reflection, knowledge produced in an abstract discourse on the nature of being and objective truth.

In this transition from the revolutionary to

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the scientific, something is lost, namely, the basic critical aspect that Marx intended to maintain in his theoretical practice, an aspect which, above all, defines the actual behavior of revolutionary theory. In the scientific form of Marxism this aspect is dissolved and suppressed for the sake of the positivism of scientific knowledge.

The critical aim of theory is thus replaced by the positive aim of truth-in-itself as object, an aim which makes scientific knowledge its ultimate goal; which, in the realm of historical thought, corresponds to the establishment of the materialist viewpoint. History is thus the site of the conflict between materialism and idealism; historical materialism quite naturally intervenes against idealism to establish the rights of materialism.

In this way the theoretical tasks of historical materialism are shifted to a single objective by reason of its very definition: the application of dialectical materialism to the realm of history. Straight away historical materialism is locked in the old debate between materialism and idealism. Its entire theoretical effort and conceptual resources are dedicated to this sole objective which is the rationale of theory; here "rat ionale" is taken in two senses of the term: as the foundation of (i.e. that which upholds) historical materialism, as well as its rationality (i.e., that which gives it legitimacy).

In the eyes of the materialists, the errors of the past or the vagaries of historical tradition are but the result of a deficient perspective and the logical consequence of the erroneous nature of the pre-Marxist discourses' idealistic starting point which prevented them from finding answers to their questions. This is the case for the group of problems treated as well as for the nature of the solutions proposed and which are the effect of its deficient idealistic perspective. Thus, from their point of view, it would be sufficient to redevelop it on the basis of materialism, to overturn its perspective so that it might return to its natural roots in the positive terrain of science. By the same token, materialism finds here a

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form that is adequate to its rationality, one that constitutes the theory of history in its scientificity. Thus, through participation in the scientific regime of materialism, the discouse of history is raised to the level of science. This is the way Engels expressed it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

But now idealism was driven from its last refuge - the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded and a method of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being" instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing." [6]

Plekhanov explicitly affirms this continuity in his book The Development of the Materialist Conception of History, the work in which he proposes to reestablish Marx's doctrine in its scientific purity as against all theoretical revisions and ideological deformations of Marxist theory:

There is a kernel of truth in the idealist view of history, but not the entire truth. To understand the entire truth, we must continue research starting from where the idealist view of history left off. [7]

This is the same model that tradition situates within the treatment of the relations of Marx to classical political economy, a model thus described by Althusser:

It seems that, in essentials ... Marx was really no more than the heir of Classical Economics, and a decidedly well- endowed one, since he obtained from his forbears his key concepts (the content of his object) and the method of reduction, as well as the model of internal systematicity (the scientific form o'f his object). What then is peculiar to Marx, what is his historical merit? Simply the fact that he extended and completed an already almost complete work: he filled in the gaps, resolved the problems it had left open; in sum, he increased the patrimony of the classics, but on the basis of their principles, and therefore of their problematic, accepting not only their method and theory, but also together with the latter, the definition of their object itself: The answer to the question: what is Marx's object? What is the object of Capital?. is already inscribed, apart from a few nuances and discoveries, but in principle, in Smith and especially in Ricardo. The great theoretical web of Political Economy was already there waiting, a few threads away and a few holes certainly. Marx tightened the threads, straightened the weave and added a few stitches: in other words he finished the work making it perfect ... The history

of Political Economy from Ricardo to Marx thus becomes a beautiful unbroken continuity. [8]

This materialist reappropriation of an old set of problems concerning historical thought was meant to carry historical discourse from its scientific prehistory into its development as science. In fact, it succeeded only in creating a fictional science, a fiction which indeed disguised an essential incorporation into metaphysics, a fundamental and double-edged incorporation. For in fact, not only does Marxist historical thought adopt the former problems set in its metaphysics, but it also should be seen as the product of the application of that foremost philosophy, scientific materialism, a materialism which in itself is only a form of metaphysics. Thus, in this two-fold incorporation or in these two incorporations that reinforce one another, tradition places historical thought within the metaphysical arena.

On the basis of this interpretation, Marxism closes its eyes on its own identity. Taken in this self-definition, it identifies with what it is not, that is, with what it believes to be scientific theory; it thinks of itself as a science and is no more than a metaphysical philosophy on a par with the philosophies of history that it believed to have outgrown in its pseudo-transition to the positive terrain of science. Marxism's total illusion of itself as a theory, presenting itself as the radical critique of illusion with its scientificity assured is but a cover for a way of thinking that is entirely steeped in metaphysics. Marxism ends up becoming another of its forms by completing the discourse of metaphysics. We have already noted this incorporation in the divided structure of its theory and in the replication of this division within itself by its partitioning of metaphysics into two disciplines, general and particular. To bring to light this incorporation of Marxism within metaphysics in a concrete way, the effects of materialist philosophy governing historical thought need to be outlined.

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As we have said, tradition, by establishing Marxism in the division between dialectical materialism and historical materialism merely repeats the inaugural gesture that accompanies all metaphysics. It also reestablishes the hierarchy which holds that the being of the real can only be known by understanding the very being of reality or the reality of being in its very generality.

Only on this basis of a higher knowledge preliminary to the truth of being as being (in sum, its self-identity as being), can a discourse on the particular find its rationality. Historical materialism is therefore led back to a form of that discourse which specifies itself in a particular realm of being and for which dialectical materialist knowledge provides true understanding.

This knowledge or understanding is precisely that of a knowledge which is entirely of a metaphysical essence, a knowledge of being that is rooted in a metaphysical comprehension, i.e., one established and defined by metaphysics. The real, the being of the real, the truth of the being of the real is to be essentially the reality of matter. Materialism finds the definition of this matter in the meaning of being attached to all reality by metaphysics, in the meaning of being-in- itself, an in-itself which, here under the law of materialism, is put forward as a material "in- itself."

Stalin takes this view in Dialectical and Historical Materialism, a text which, far from schematizing, unveils rather the logical/ontological outline of the system of all traditional thought:

Contrary to idealism, which regards the world as the embodiment of an "absolute idea," a "universal spirit," "consciousness," Marx's philosophical materialism holds that the world is by its very nature material, that the multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter in motion, that interconnection and interdependence of phenomena, as established by the dialectical method, are a law of the development of moving matter, and that the world develops in accordance with the laws of movement of matter ... [9].

According to the logic of this development it is not only the central category of metaphysics which operates under the category of matter, but also the entire metaphysical logic and way of thought. Thus, Marxism revives all that Marx attempted to dissolve. In fact, this reassertion of the "in- itself" is not restricted to the mere reintroduction of a category, which, having been taken from the logic of another discourse, is then neutralized in its effects. With this reintroduction, not only does the category reemerge, but with it comes the logical system governing it and the universe of meaning it retains. The reinvestment in being- in-itself is the reinvestment in the entire former metaphysic. Through its strategic position within Marxist discourse, being-in- itself redeploys all its logico-ontological consequences that create the space of meaning in which being-in-itself comes to represent meaning itself. The position is strategic for it is at the starting point of any materialist problem set. Marxist philosophy and its entire theory begins its development on the basis of the reaffirmation of the materialist group of problems.

This starting point is itself reached through a division opposing idealism and materialism as two antagonistic figures in a conflict which ultimately makes itself the sole concern and the sole object of all theory. Theory exhausts itself in the struggle to such an extent that all that remains is the slender thread of an initial thesis, the single thesis of the metaphysical primacy of matter over spirit. The ultimate result of the conflict is the only result of all that was produced by its theoretical revolution. For history, a reduction of Marxist theory will ultimately result in depriving it of its object and make the Marxist theory of history an objectless theory, a discourse of limited stature since it will only speak to the historically real in terms of its dissolution. It is to become an abysmal theory without an object and maintain a discourse on something which every one of its affirmations

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continuously suppresses. The only form of progress of the theory is the absolute immobility of a notion indefinitely reiterated through a return to its point of departure, to its essential and unique thesis.

The suppression of history serves as the inaugural act of this theory since in the action of its foundation the very basis of history is removed. This paradoxical situation marks what is perhaps the ultimate limit which all metaphysics comes up against when confronting history. It is a limit where metaphysics, in order to speak of history, can only do so by suppressing the latter as the sole condition of its own survival; as if history, were it to assume a role itself, would once and for all condemn metaphysics to the silence of that which can no longer be spoken. For what metaphysics presents as its discourse no longer allows it to be grasped within the system of its grammar and the rules of its lexicon.

This suppression of history is not evident at first blush. Rather, tradition craftily disguises it behind the positive statement that its discourse is on history and is historical discourse.

History thus profiled against the backdrop of a homogeneity with nature offers us nothing more than an abstract concept or the ghost of a concrete specificity that materialism never formulates, except through a process which denies it.

History, having been raised, supposedly promoted by tradition, to the ontological level of matter, can only disappear from the scene. This loss, however, is of little importance to the blinded materialists compared to the gains history makes by this identification with materialism, i.e. the gain of having restored its true foundations which had been confiscated by the idealists and which, in their discourse, had condemned it to being no more than mythical history. The loss of the concrete specificity of history can be neglected and its truth forgotten in what materialism believes it has given to history in return, an act that is constantly maintained through a process of

denial. In fact it is through this constant process of denial that materialism becomes, in practice, the negation/suppression of history.

Furthermore, if the difference between the natural and social sciences is to remain well established, this differentiation will be confined within a framework of an undifferentiated monism of matter which automatically cancels it. This annulment is carried out by affirming the oneness of matter. The oneness itself comes to be the fundamental oneness of forms of knowledge acquired on the basis of this materiality.

According to tradition, the natural sciences and historical knowledge, far from defining distinct epistemological fields or distinguishable areas for reflection, constitute the same instance of intelligibility and lead to a single form of reasoning. Scientific understanding and historical reason are thus undifferentiated within the oneness of the same rationality. This singular rationality at last enables the realization of one of the goals of Marxist historical thought: communication between naturalist and historical discourses. In this newly established dialogue, communication is created through the epistemological model of the natural sciences and the rigour and objectivity of scientific knowledge, this scientific rigour having been lacking in historical thought until now.

What is at work beneath this identification of methods, of means to knowledge and of practical theories is the essential identification of historical reality with natural reality. One can follow this reduction of the historical to the natural in Engels' treatment of the pseudo- difference between the history of nature and human history. Feuerbach is quite correct in asserting that exclusively natural-scientific materialism is indeed "the foundation of the edifice of human knowledge, "but not the edifice itself." For we live not only in nature but also in human society, and this also no less than nature has its history of development and its science. It was therefore a question of bringing the science of society, that is, the sum

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total of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialist foundation, and of reconstructing it thereupon. [10]

One aspect in the battle against idealism concerns the differentiations through which idealism in history attempts to situate the specificity of the historical field in relation to the realms of natural phenomena. Idealism tries to guide these differentiations back to their organic principle that is the basis of the material and materialist identity of those areas of being that idealism had wanted to maintain as separate.

Thus in "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy," Engels goes out of his way to demonstrate the essentially identical nature of real movements as opposed to the differences displayed by movements that are only apparent. The text is exemplary, for the process of denial noted above within the dissimulation/non-dissimulation of these procedures is here quite conspicuous.

After having recalled the task of the science of history - the elimination of artificial links as distinguishable from real links, i.e., " the discovery of the general laws of motion which in the history of human society make themselves felt as dominant laws" - Engels arrives at the difference between the history of the development of nature and that of society.

In one point, however, the history of the development of

society proves to be essentially different f rom that of

nature. In nature - in so far as we ignore m a n ' s reaction

upon nature - there are only blind, unconscious agencies

acting upon one another , out of whose interplay the general

law comes into operation. Nothing o f all that happens -

whether in the innumerable apparent accidents observable

upon the surface, or in the ult imate results which confirm

the regularity inherent in these accidents - happens as a

consciously desired aim. In the history of society, on the

contrary, the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards

definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim. But this distinction,

important as it is for historical investigation, particularly of

single epochs and events, cannot alter the fact that the course of history is governed by inner general laws. [11]

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According to Engels, the difference between nature and society, or between natural and social development is the distinction between a world where consciousness is absent and a world where consciousness must be integrated as an element in the process of its development. Nature and history are distinguished by the presence in one of what is absent in the other: the phenomenon of consciousness. Engels restricts himself to indicate that "the history of the development of society reveals one essentially different aspect from that of nature" which is not the subject of further reflection. The real basis does not lie here for Engels. In fact, what is clear from the text is, on the contrary, the confirmation of the basic identical nature of natural and human history (an identification through which human history ends up becoming merely natural history) and the complete ontological correspondence between these two histories.

Therefore what interests Engels is not to point out the difference so as to make it an object of reflection, but to note it only so that he can then ignore it, sheltered from any charge of misidentification:

Regardless of its significance for historical investigations,

this distinction can change nothing given that ... [12].

He continues elsewhere to relativize this distinction, turning it into one which essentially makes sense at the methodological level. Engels adds that it is above all from the methodological perspective " for historical research into isolated eras and events" that this distinction is worth noting, but certainly not from the "ontological" perspective where it can change nothing of its identity which is ultimately all that matters. This initial relativization is strengthened by the very terms which came to thematize it. It is forced back upon consciousness which, for materialism, can only be secondary. On the first count, this is due to the fact that it is the phenomenon of existence, within the history of consciousness, that enables us to make the distinction

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between nature and history. The derivative nature of this phenomenon of existence within the history of consciousness can only be of secondary importance and secondly, it is due to limiting the significance of this recognition to the level of methodology alone, to the research method and not to the meaning recognized in the nature of the subject matter.

What is significant here is the way in which materialism manipulates denial to try to conceal its dogmatism. This concealment results in the fact that the distinction may, beyond its affirmation, be relativized radically to the very point of being dissolved. Such a dissolution does not enable one to either question the distinction or to place the totality of its system of interpretation in doubt. To do so, Engels plunges into an entire dialectic of ends and results which helps him to avoid the real problem. Thus he is able to state further on in the same text that it is men who make their history while simultaneously he reduces history to a process of natural history, a contradiction of Marxism often remarked upon, but which has never shaken any of its dogmatic tenets. By placing the problem in the web of causality and the differential nature of causality, with blind and unconscious factors, on one side, goals and willpower on the other, Engels avoid contemplating the difference in the nature of the products and can thus find unity and identity, secretly his sole motive, against a prepared backdrop of difference. The unity and identity of nature and history are seen as phenomena resulting from one and the same movement of matter.

Natural history and social history are two forms of evolution which result in a definition of history itself, history in its concrete reality. Thus when Engels recognizes Hegel as the individual who finally developed a historical mode of thinking, he conceives of this step in terms of a purely and simply identifiable dialectic reduced to a doctrine of evolution. Thus, in "Feuerbach" he writes:

great merit - the entire world of nature, o f history, o f spirit was presented as a process, i.e., as undergoing constant movement, change, transformation and evolution. [13]

Similarly, following Engels, Plekhanov situates the entire revolutionary nature of Hegelian philosophy in his thought on the undefined development of all things.

Hegel's importance for social science is above all that he considers every social phenomenon in its formation and development. [14]

For Engels, Plekhanov and along with them an entire tradition, history, evolution and development are almost synonomous. Behind these terms there is always the same, singular reality of matter in motion, in the motion of evolution or historical becoming.

Engels thematically exposes the distinction between metaphysics and dialectics, the guiding opposition governing Hegelian philosophy within the framework of this simple opposition between motion and non- motion. Thus in Anti-Duhring, in his treatment of metaphysical and dialectical thought through their relation of opposition, Engels writes:

Metaphysics considers things and their mental images, ideas, in isolation, one after the other. They are considered to be rigid, fixed objects given once for all. Either a thing exists or it does not; a thing cannot be itself and something else at the same time. At first sight this mode of thought appears plausible, it is however metaphysical. Dialectics, on the other hand, goes beyond this: it considers things and concepts in terms of their sequence, their interrelation, their interaction and the results which ensue, their birth, development and decline. Since things do not exist singly for themselves in the world, but affect and act upon one another, are born and pass away, the metaphysical mode of thought may be understood easily - even justified in some areas, extensive, however limited, areas the extension of which is determined by the nature of the object under consideration. However, metaphysics, sooner or later, in every area comes up against a barrier where it becomes narrow-minded and abstract and ends in irresolvable contradictions from which only the dialectic allows a way out. [15]

In the Hegelian system, for the first time, and this was its This reappropriation of Hegelian

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philosophy in terms of a simple philosophy of becoming does not occur haphazardly, it serves a twofold goal. First of all, the goal is intra-theoretical: Hegel thus interpreted confirms Engels' image of the world, one which permits him to conceal the simplicity of his realism behind the screen of a rich and complex way of thought. Furthermore, on the ideological and political level, it enables him to state, against all bourgeois ideologues, that the supposedly "natura l" capitalist system (i.e., in Engels' sense, eternal) is itself caught up in the movement of all things or in the necessary law that things perish and disappear. In short, Engels can state that revolution is destiny, the historical destiny of the capitalist future, thus an objective fact inscribed within the very heart of a given reality. Revolution can take its place beside legality and be stated as a necessary law upholding the future of the totality of the system.

The advance marked by this interpretation of Hegel is striking and one might say immeasurable for tradition. Revolution finally escapes what the advent of the science of history had viewed as a nullifying weakness, i.e., utopia, and is presented as an actual element within the evolutionary process of history. Historical destiny must become the destiny of human beings and it must be done and will be done of necessity by virtue of its objective nature and of its inscription within the causal legality of the law of the future itself.

But if the bases and raison d'&re of revolution have been found, on the theoretical side of things, everything is equalized, levelled out and impoverished despite the fact that theory is not indifferent to revolution. In this frame of thought, revolution is shifted to utopia, as if by some ruse of reason, but this time it is a bad utopia built upon illusion and mystification. For theory, the dialectic is no longer that revolutionary way of thinking that enters the order of theory and, beyond that, the pre-eminently practical order of

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representation, to produce a radical revolution, a revolution in the way of thinking (particularly the way of thinking about revolution itself) and a decisive transformation of the system of meaning and value which heretofore imposed its metaphysical regime upon discourse and with it on practice itself. The thought and practice of the dialectic are no longer anything more than the general theory of the reality of being which recognizes in being its mere essence of becoming, the law of its being as future or an abstract thought applied to movement which is itself abstract. This future, at the junction of materialism and the dialectic, provides the basis of an ontology according to which history and nature can align and bury their differences.

The reduction of the meaning and theoretical as well as practical value of Hegelian dialectical thought to the image of an abstract thought about the future is an operation which cancels out that which the Hegelian dialectic had attempted to think. It cancels out what Marx intended to reappropriate from Hegelian philosophy as the basis of his own thought, the idea of subjective activity, the productive power of the active subject. This was the idea that Marx translated into his revolutionary thought on praxis. Alfred Schmidt noted this way of thinking about praxis as precisely one of the most important thoughts of Marx and it alone enabled us to understand the specificity of Marx's thought.

The concept of praxis as it is set out in the theses on

Feuerbach is decidedly the most important o f Marx ' s

concepts. This concept mus t always be referred back to in order to understand what Marx means by materialism and

on what basis his materialism is dialectical. [16]

With Engels, the dialectic, far from leading us back to thinking of subjectivity and activity, encloses us within a circle of objectivity. This is the objectivity of the "in-itself" where the sole form of activity can never be anything other than that of movement, of the objective

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movement of matter be it that of history or that of nature. Engels' dialectic is only to be the camouflaged form of a metaphysics of motion which merely makes movement the absolute of all being, an absolute which is not distinguishable from that which enables him to affix the real to the immobility of eternal stasis.

With Engels, the transfer from metaphysics to dialectics changes nothing, the real remains what it is and what it was with the simple difference that its definition has received a novel attribute of motion. Being is not transformed but merely enriched by a positive determination: motion. This enrichment is relative since it is no more than the substitution of a positive determination for a negative determination. In this transition from negative to positive, the dialectic has gained nothing if not its own dissolution. The dialectic loses out to metaphysics which returns in force, enriched by that which seemed to escape it. It seemed to do so, for in reality, it was never anything but an internal choice between movement and non-movement for relativity. This is a choice which, regardless of the position taken, holds metaphysics in its grip.

The illusion that metaphysics is defined by its essential incapacity to take hold of movement is the result of forgetting that the core of metaphysical thought does not lie in this problem, and that dynamic metaphysics do exist. In short, motion is not a thought which is resistant to any reinstatement of metaphysics, but may very well constitute a determinant and even a major determinant of it.

Engels had to transform Hegel to be able to recognize his own thought in him. Engels constructs an inverted Hegel in his mythic battle against metaphysics. Here is an image of Hegel which screens out the meaning of all that the Hegelian critique produces in the way of concrete effects. What Engels recognizes in Hegel is his own thought projected onto Hegel, a form of thinking which he believes

will come to be opposed to metaphysics, but which in fact he only opposes to a metaphysics reduced to one of its manifestations and which, by identifying it with its totality, no longer has real consciousness. Engels' relationship to Hegel and metaphysics is very shaky indeed, based as it is on the massive misinterpretation through which Engels presents himself as the representative of exactly that which prevents the very exercise of his thought. What is proscribed in Engels is what Hegel posed as the very condition of his dialectical thought.

Engels is absolutely blind to the actual identity of his own thought which was, however, to become the central source of interpretation for the entire tradition.

In this total misinterpretation of the meaning of the Hegelian dialectic, a misinterpretation through which no less than the nodal concept of all Marxist theory is lost, the dissolution of the concrete reality of history is imposed. The concrete dimension of the reality of historical objectivity is suppressed to the benefit of the abstraction of the materiality in-itself of matter in movement, of a substance in evolution.

History, historicity or the historicity of history is thus no more than this essential quality of the being of being as a moving reality, a becoming reality in the process of transformation on the evolutionary path. It is a reality basically defined by that which opposes it: non-movement, non-evolution, fixedness, rest, immobility. The historicity of history is affirmed, but within the framework of a way of thinking which only allows it space on condition of reducing it, ultimately ending with historical thought as thought of the future, the movement of the future where, under the identification between history and evolution, a presupposed identity between time and history operates silently. In this identity, time and history are equalized in a system of ontological equivalence where it becomes possible to pose the equation:

History is all that is observed in time, all

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that belongs to the temporal becoming, an equation where historical being is no more than being grasped within the flux of time. Here is a procedure identifying time with history and history with becoming which is carried along by an entire metaphysics of time, a metaphysics which is the organic principle of an entire metaphysical historical way of thought and one which is the silent presupposition of all historical metaphysics.

History is thus spread along the timeline and governed by a chrono-logic, whose logic is the law of necessary causality of its ends whereby it must locate its different determinations along the timeline.

MARX

The theory of Marx is completely contrary to this way of thinking, being basically defined by Marx's break with metaphysics and its universe of meaning. This break could not be understood, except by annulling it, according to the logic used by Engels to oppose metaphysics and dialectics. Rather, it invalidates this opposition by uncovering its illusory nature, which masks the profound solidarity and identity of ideas and screens them off behind the apparent contradiction in the definitions of the metaphysical and the dialectical.

The theoretical specificity of Marx may only be defined in the takeover of this theoretical revolution by virtue of which the break occurs. The theses on Feuerbach represent a key moment in this theoretical revolution in that they are the only place where Marx condenses the essential results of his entire critique of philosophy to a few pages and, through these, the theoretical and epistemological meaning of his own thought emerges.

In these theses, Marx relinquishes the terrain of metaphysical reflection. This abandonment only becomes readable through

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an effort aimed at grasping what is attempted to be thought in these thoughts, the immediate presentation of which does not simply render the specific and concrete meaning.

Thus the first thesis on Feuerbach claims:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. [17]

The thesis indicates a radical break which transfers us from one universe of meaning, that of metaphysics, to another, that which will take up the authentically critical thought of Marx.

On this rejection of the object of intuition, M. Henry writes:

Here Western philosophy is overturned in what it held to be most constant and apparent. For such is the impact of the reversal carried out by Marx in the theses on Feuerbach: the overturning of Western philosophy itself. Furthermore, going far beyond Feuerbach, the horizon from which philosophy had always posited and solved its problems is surpassed; the very concept of being is questioned. [18]

In its essential meaning, the First Thesis on Feuerbach sets out the abandonment signalled by the rejection of the object of intuition and of the representative determination of the meaning of being or its position "in-itself." From then on, this position is governed by metaphysics, it is to be seen as the THEORIA which sets out the laws. The theses on Feuerbach ultimately focus on the structure of being. Here we find one of the basic meanings of Marx's outline reversing the primacy of theory over practice.

For Marx (and there is included in this new definition of reality's being, all the work carried out by Hegel in his contribution to metaphysics) the real is practice, the meaning of reality's being is the meaning of a practical objectivity. It is a reality defined basically by its concrete determination of the reality produced. Its general peculiarity of being is always the result and effect of a practice, a practice that Marx always specifies as social

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and historical practice, socio-historical practice. The radical break is with all metaphysics of the "in-itself" since regardless of a critical, practical materialism there could no longer be any pretenses as to objective existence outside and independent of the practical process by which it had been produced, posited or constituted.

Thus, here is a break in which the revolutionary meaning of Hegelian philosophy can no longer be related to this doctrine of evolution which tradition believed could be read into it. This break gives the Hegelian dialectic its true feature of a revolutionary thinking of the dialectical process of reality in a meaning of the dialectic where the process is no longer that of a simple movement or development, but a mediation. This mediation gives all reality the appearance of a product, a postulate, a result or effect of a process of mediation taken in its basic dimension of the practical process. (This dimension comes to represent the nodal concept of all Hegelian logic, the concept of Wirklichkeit). Thus the break brings out the opposition between metaphysics and dialectics according to its essentially practical import, as opposed to any falsifications of its meaning. Hence what is opposed is no longer two more or less complementary methods or two ideas following a simple opposition between movement and non-movement, but two ways of grasping what is real: in its meaning of being as "in-itself" or as practice. The opposition between the "in-itself" and practice allows us to give meaning to Marx's theoretical revolution, a meaning wherein only recognition permits an understanding of the originality of his thought and its actual distinctiveness from all tradition, locating its nucleus in his thinking on history, a form of thinking aimed at revolutionizing revolutionary thought.

Gramsci clearly made this recognition. Gramsci, throughout his deepening theoretical research was constantly opposed to tradition, denounced theoretical regressions,

falsifications, and any incorporation within the sphere of metaphysical legislation. Gramsci, who refused the terminology imposed by the traditional interpretation, recognized Marx's theory as a form of absolute historicism and set Marx off from previous metaphysics, emphasizing the specific theoretical orginality of his thinking. With the concept of absolute historicism, he came to disqualify the central fundamental category of traditional materialism: matter, the "in-itself" of the materiality of matter which he likened to forms of theology.

For Gramsci, Marx, far from being identified with the ancient figures in theory, had produced a totally original form of thought, a philosophy of praxis, a novel form of philosophy. This original form of philosophy was one where the real is no longer thought of outside its historical and social roots, but in the basic correlation linking human activity to the practical reality of the socio-historical activity that defines it.

In the philosophy of praxis or absolute historicism, nature is at the point of convergence of a subjective conceptualization of reality and thinking on absolute immanence. The point of convergence itself defines a set of problems where the only acceptable "goal" is a humanly historical objective, one radically distinct from the recognized meaning of matter. Gramsci makes the following comment on matter:

It must not be understood in either the meaning acquired by the natural sciences or in the meaning that stems from various materialist metaphysics. [19]

(The identification of these two meanings defined the entire materialist practice of tradition).

Absolute historicism is thus where the new meaning of reality's essence enables us to move away from the traditional equation: Matter = Reality = In-itself, toward a new equation: Reality = Objectivity = Practice.

The new meaning assigned to what is real opens the door to a recognition of the concrete

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reality of history; a door that tradition had closed, imprisoned as it was within its metaphysical system of representation of the real. This system prevented tradition from rejecting the pseudo-evidence of the concept of history which served as the framework of the whole of classical thought.

Marx, bearer of a critical problem set, does not allow himself to be caught up in the system of presuppositions of the classical representations of history. Breaking with metaphysics, he no longer gives himself only to the simple empiricist identification of history as was common practice in historical thought.

Countering the gross empiricist determination of the nature of the historicity of history, he produces the concept of his object. He no longer proceeds by mere designation as tradition would nevertheless continue to do after him. This kind of designation simply came along to mark out, to circumscribe what in empirical reality may be subsumed under the category of history and falls into a historical category of thinking.

In contrast to previous philosophies of history, Marx refuses to accept his object as given, one which it would suffice to recognize within the diversity of empirical reality. He denies this empirical nature imposed by all tradition (imposed by imposing its law) and constructs the concept of its object in a precise definition of historical matter, matter which thus escapes the indeterminacy which previously qualified it, constantly returning it to the logical circularity of the following tautology, thereby fixing its meaning: History is the reality which is the subject matter of history; the theory of history is the theory of this reality that is history.

This change in attitude with regard to the problem of history is decisive. Through it Marx succeeds in escaping the law of empirical determination of the historically real, an escape which then opens up the possibility of an effective reappropriation of the concrete reality of the historicity of the historically

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real. Here is the possibility of an effective way of thinking about history which heretofore had been blocked by the system of empirical presuppositions of all historical discourse. By taking on the critical problem of the reality of his subject matter, Marx suppresses the merely referential status of the historical object which had until then defined the historically real. (History had never been more than the referential object of a discourse calling itself historical discourse, without the concrete nature of its object ever truly being thought through). Marx broke with the system and the traditional theoretical field of historical reflection and put an end to historical practices dominant until then.

For Marx, the concrete being of historical reality is not the fact of its immersion within the flux of time or the effect of its being as being in time. What makes an object real, an historical reality, is no longer the fact of being a future, but something else, something that this metaphysical tradition of history, while recognizing it, essentially misrecognizes. It misrecognizes the basic fact proclaimed in its nature of having become, of having produced reality, the reality of a product, reality produced in and through socio-historical practice. This determination breaks up the hierarchy that had dominated all historical thinking, a hierarchy which required the thinking of the phenomenon of historicity within the thought horizon of time, of a time itself requiring no city from their subordination to the image of change and becoming, and in undoing the subjection of historical thinking to implicit thinking on time, Marx proposes a new equation. It is an equation where history is no longer time's double, but confirms the reality of practice, the practical reality of a production that is itself historical, i.e., practice; the equation does not seem to take us beyond the tautological forms of definition that were decried above, but where the apparent tautology of its result sets out a basic idea with which Marx was to begin in his revolutionary theory.

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The equation, taking its model from a famous phrase of Hegel, enables one to affirm: All that is historical is practical; all that is practical is historical. This new equation reduplicates that represented by the theses on Feuerbach stating: All that is real is practical, all that is practical is real.

The basis of the historicity of history is no longer understood in terms of temporality, but instead is seen as the space of practice, thus a paradoxical way of thinking of history. This is only a paradox, however, relative to the current representation of history as spontaneously made. Its object is no longer thought within the space of time, but within a geometrically logical space of practices. This is less the space of a development, than one of deployment, a deployment not so much of forces as of forms. It is the logical space revealed to Capitalism as that of the logic of a form, the logic of capital. Thus the very essence of the historicity of history changes its meaning. Historicity is no longer defined by a becoming, but by a form of matter, the materiality of which is always basically practical, produced reality, the result of a practical process forever specified as social and historical. The basis of the historicity of historical matter is its practicality (but this basis or foundation no longer emerges from the ancient metaphysics of Grund that Hegel had destroyed in the Science of Logic). This practicality makes Marx's theory less a materialist theory of history than a historical theory of matter, a theory of the practical historicity of matter that Gramsci emphasized by dubbing Marxism absolute historicism, leading him to remark that:

In the expression historical materialism, it was forgotten that the stress should have been placed on the first term "historical" rather than on the second, which is o f metaphysical origin. [20]

The emphasis is on "historical," but within the essential recognition of the new set of problems which guides Marx's entire thought. These critical problems redefine the historical

on the basis of a materialism of practice, a materialism for which all reality, all materiality always takes one back to the practical process of its production and can never be fixed in its appearance "in-itself," its appearance of an objective exterior reality independent of all subjectivity.

It becomes altogether evident in the light of the materialism of practice to what extent the classical model for interpreting used by tradition is unacceptable, since history is no longer responsible for dividing the world into regions (of which history constitutes one ontological region, but it does so in its concrete dimension as the very center of the world, a world which only makes sense within the bounds of history, of the practical reality of its foundation: socio-historical practice).

Here is a materialism of practice which can legitimately invoke the title of historical materialism since history is no longer reduced to its empirical phenomenon, but is defined by its materiality which Lukacs emphasized when he remarked that history is essentially defined by Praxis:

On the one hand, history is the product of the activity of human beings, on the other hand it is the succession of processes in which the forms of this activity ... are transformed. [21]

How then is the structure of the concepts of history and historical reality organized within this new theoretical articulation of questions on the historically real? In refusing the automatic identity between the temporal and the historical, Marx finds the source of historicity in another principle which gives the temporal character of historical reality a secondary, derived determination, one that is no longer principal or original, but simply phenomenal. This is a statutory transformation of what, until then, had served to define the essence of the historically real, where the simple phenomenal nature of temporality is to be understood as temporality which is no more than the phenomenon of that which constitutes the effective structure

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of historicity recognized by Marx in the concept of practice. The concept of practice is the concept of a set of problems located within the circle of this basic way of thinking on the entire theory of history: the historical is both of and in practice, and only as such can it be historical. This circle is neither vicious nor vitiated, rather it constitutes the non-circular and non-tautological site where old antinomies of historical thinking can find their solution and dissolution. It is therefore a circle where practical reflection should be deployed, i.e., reflection that is no longer limited by a simple reflexive discourse on positivism as absolute, in other words an empirical positivism that is trapped by an empirical understanding of its object and incapable of producing a true critique of it. In this regard, what Marx said of classical political economy in 1844 could be said of the Marxist tradition, i.e., it is part of history, but it does not explain history to us, it expresses the material process that makes up reality, it formulates general and abstract laws, but does not understand these laws.

This new way of thinking of history is a critical one, demystifying a way of thought such that Marx was then able to think in terms of revolution. Through the transformation and radicalization of questions dealing with the historical field, we can indeed consider Marx to be the theoretician of an effective way of thinking of revolution; a revolution that would no longer be reduced to the status of a form leading us back to something which was already there, a merely repetitious exercise. This kind of repetition, Marx reminds us, always takes the form of a tragic farce, a farce that the historical evolution of tradition has concretely embodied, a tragedy the gravity of which has been demonstrated by the fate of the Russian Revolution.

History, by becoming the site of practice, or the space filled by the totality of historical and social practices, nevertheless appears, not as the field of the deployment or development of its object, but as the field of all subject/object

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dialectics, where the effective relations between subject and object intertwine, the field of a concrete dialectic, the dialectic of the practical process of social practice, enabling Lukacs to write of the dialectic:

In Marx it becomes the essence of the historical process. [22]

The dialectic thus makes history the place of the practical reality of subject-object relations, a continuously evolving reality and one in perpetual practical (re)production of itself. The dialectic is always open, re-opened in/to each of the moments of the practice which constitute it. (The general order of this practice is the double movement of internalizing the exterior and exteriorizing the interior that Sartre describes in the Critique of Dialectical Reason).

The dialectic makes history the practical process of the totality of dialectics, the organization of which makes up the social totality, a social totality which no longer returns history to the sole form of a becoming or abstract form of a future that is itself abstract. It returns it to a concrete evolution, a practical evolution of practice. This new definition of historicity enables us to get around the finalist act that nearly always governs classical thought on history. To define history as materiality, the materiality of practice, and not as temporality, permits one to avoid the major pitfalls of former historical thought, i.e. the immersion of being in the flux of historical time. It permits one to reset historical reality on the timeline or path that historical reality must follow in order to fulfill the laws of its evolution.

In defining history as the reality produced by social practice, one is forbidden to establish such an evolutionary line a priori. History no longer appears under the idea of perfect and regular continuity, an idea always upheld by the adjunct notion of progress, but under that of radical discontinuity, of a series of successive conjunctures making up the fabric of the practical becoming of history for which at every moment only practice

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determines the end result. Instead of being defined as a law of

evolution carried out by an objective legality, history is presented as the site of contradictions where only practical resolution allows them to be overcome. Far from being presented as the movement of content in time, history is therefore a discontinuous chain of moments with the reproduction of the historically real at stake. This is an undefined process indefinitely reproducing the reproduction of itself according, however, to a mode of reproduction which always contains the present and actual possibility of revolution. History is no more than this chain of concrete histories in which the law of necessity is always the law of practice, the necessary law of a necessity itself always produced, reproduced within the contradictory play of practices. Here is a revolutionary view of history where the time of socialism becomes a time which is to be produced, rather than being given as that future already decided which awaits the quasi- natural ripening of things. This is a time of socialism which is indeed a practical project to be carried out, but only in relative terms, not with a view to some future time, but in terms of a present that is to be transformed.

History thus presents itself as the dialectical process of a practice, a concrete process of historical social practice, one which, far from finding one of its presuppositions in time, quite to the contrary, constitutes the temporality of social structure. The historicization of time breaks down the classical determination of the traditional concept of historical time and represents a radical subversion of the natural determination of the time of tradition, a time that is forever reduced to the status of naturalness which improves itself upon social structure from without. It is a subversion that reduces this determination to the form of mere appearance and substitutes for it its concrete definition of practical reality, of posited objectivity constituted in and by social practice itself.

Marx is the consistent theoretician of historicity and of the radical nature of historical efficacy. This radical nature is at the basis of everything, it is the concrete essence of reality. Time itself no longer escapes the rule of the historicity of all reality. It must give up its classically determined status of an apriori or pre-given reality of the presupposed framework of all historical construction. Time abandons its former determinacy of the natural "in-itself," the a priori and transcendent condition of the possibility of historicity and of historical evolution without ever being itself affected. If changes, if historical facts were produced in time, it was always in the same way that movement is produced in space, surrounded by the same indifference that space has with regard to the position of the things that occupy it. Time thus remains foreign to the events at play within it, the metaphysics of time making historical time purely passive, an inert milieu for any and all dynamic forces. Here, time itself escapes temporality and evolution; it is an abstract time extracted from concrete history and presenting itself as a transcendental phenomenon or a milieu that is thinner than being, a milieu always posited and thought of as a separate state leading to the paradigmatic form of the "in-itself," a singular "in-itself."

The "in-itself," reality in-itself, are to be recognized according to their truth as results of the thought that thanks them, the representative thought, a thought arriving here in the reality of time to impose its categories, its fixations and its abstractions. This representative thought is that which Hegel showed to be incapable of thinking its objects other than under the guise of exteriority and transcendence; thought always thinking in the milieu of exteriority which always acts as the basic determination of all reality for it, as the very guarantee of its substantiveness. The "in-itself" of time is thus no more than the result of the dominant system of the representation which here

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functions within historical thought by establishing the objectivity of historical time in the absoluteness of its separate status in accordance with the specific mode of operation of its theoretical domain.

It should be understood that the "in-itself" of time is but the expression of a thought always defining time on the basis of an exclusive reference to a reduced subject, a subject always understood and defined as a subject of representation, a conscious, representative and individual subject. Now, this restrictive determinacy of the subject is overturned by Marx with his new theory of practice, a theory where the subject is no longer caught in its singular recognition of a thinking subject, but where the practical dimension of all subjectivity is affirmed according to a concept of practical and intersubjective subject, a subject of a practical intersubjectivity that Marx designates as historical social practice.

The practical subject comes to subvert the domination of the only theoretical definition of subjectivity, making the representation of time imposed by metaphysics appear as a mere projection of the system of representation, the effect of the "represented being" of time projected on reality. We are dealing with a time that is simply represented, one that screens out the concrete reality of a time whose simple representation reduces it to a simple image. This image of time corresponds to the empirical view of it; it is an image of flow and flux corresponding to the traditional imagery of time, where time is never anything more than moments in flux, the succession of day and night, the swinging of the pendulum, the ticking of clocks. This fluvial conception makes time "a fluvial reality whose current runs across the continental reality of the world" [23]. It is a given in-itself in which the real comes to be represented simply and which itself corresponds to a true ontology of time, to a metaphysics where time is always referent to the site of its perception.

In opposition to this time of metaphysics,

which always refers to consciousness, or is reduced to a representative conscious phenomenon, Marx posits a sociological time, the time of social and historical thought. It is thought on the social and historical which, as such, no longer appears in the guise of an "in- itself," but as a produced reality, a concrete reality of time which returns the in-itself of time to the theoretical configuration of the abstract time of sense perception, of empirical representation and to the time of representative metaphysics.

With this new organization of categorical relationships, the formerly established basic relationships are overturned. The dogmatic position of an abstract and transcendent time no longer defines the field of history and its temporality, but, on the contrary, time is no longer defined other than as a function of historical reality itself, a reality which time no longer defines, which instead defines time as one of its concrete effects. Time is no longer aligned on an image of physical time, it is always historically and practically specified.

Hence, the basis upon which all historical determinations came to find their definition, the temporality of time, is itself viewed as being held in a determinate movement. It loses its former status as an absolute since it is no longer anything but mediated reality, the reality posited by social mediation or practice. Its reality, its objectivity, moves from the status of a simple, natural/physical reality to that of historical reality or produced objectivity, hence a reality that loses its characteristic and privileged originality and exteriority with respect to historico-social reality and becomes one of the determinations in the process of historical social practice.

In opposition to this new definition of time, Regis Debray sets off the abstract nature of its conception and denounces it from the traditional point of view of Marxist history. His critique, cited here, is pursued in Time and Politics:

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To paraphrase the Ninth Thesis on Feuerbach, one could say that, as opposed to speculative materialism, dialectical materialism conceives the time of social development as a practical activity, and not a factor that can be taken in isolation, a natural parameter of development. [24]

Indeed, time within Marx's problem set is no longer this empty framework. It is the practical result of practical activity, interiorized within the subject/object dialectic that structures the historical field.

Sartre's analysis in the Critique of Dialectical Reason bears upon the concept of practice. Practice is a structure presenting the same contradictions in-itself and for-itself through which Sartre defines the structure of action as a structure which enables one to say that social historical time, which is the time of social practice, is a practical result of social practice with temporal dimensions.

The concept of temporalization is essential here as it permits a radical break with the view of time as pre-given or deployed without affecting practice, a break with the abstract and metaphysical view of time "in-itself," prior to practice and external to its process.

The concept of temporalization allows the suppression of this radical externalness of time, a property which traditionally resulted in its entire (metaphysical) definition.

Practice is the place of origin for the emergence of time according to the particular property of its existence. Practice is not pure and simple objectivity, but surpasses the position of object and is posited as a dialectical reality which takes the constituent form of the project. Process, project and totalization are the specifying properties of practice, determinants that make up the structure of the differential being of practice within reality, of practice within the world of this particular existence endowed with temporality, temporality such that, as Sartre writes:

... temporality can only indicate the mode of being of a being which is itself outside itself ... temporality only exists as the intra-structure of a being which has to be its own being. [25]

Practice is basically the subject of temporalization and relates to time according to this basic structure of the project. This determining relationship is no more than one of the guises taken by practice as its own relationship to itself. Time is defined in the domain of this concept of temporality that Sartre always presented as follows in Being and Nothingness:

Temporality is not a universal time containing all beings and in particular human realities. Neither is it a law of development which is imposed from without. Nor is it being. But it is the intra-structure of the being which is its own nihilation - that is, the mode of being peculiar to being for itself. The For-itself is the being which has to be its being in the diasporatic form of Temporality. [26]

It is thus a time where practice, in the process of its own deployment, deploys the dimension of time and makes time real, social historical time, the product of a practice of social temporality, the result of the practice of temporality constituted by social practice which is temporalized.

Likewise, the social totality which is totalizing itself is temporalized. It is not, simply speaking, in time; it exists no more in time than in space. Rather, it constitutes a site where time and space are produced. It is real time itself, an essentially qualitative time irreducible to its purely physical quality, to the time of mathematics; irreducible to its physical quality that metaphysics uses as its concept of time. Sartre opposed this reduction:

Failing to develop by real investigations, Marxism makes use of an arrested dialectic. Indeed it achieves the totalization of human activities within a homogenous and infinitely divisible continuum which is nothing other than the " t ime" of Cartesian rationalism. This temporal environment is not unduly confining when the problem is to examine the process of Capitalism, because it is exactly that temporality which Capitalist economy produces as the signification of production, of monetary circulation, of the redistribution of property, o f credit, of "compound interest ." Thus, it can be considered as a product of the system. But the description of this universal container as a phase of social development is one thing and the dialectical

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determination of real temporality (that is, of the true

relation of men to their past and their future) is another.

Dialectics as a movement of reality collapses if t ime is not

dialectic; that is, if we refuse to recognise a certain action of the future as such ... One must unders tand that neither

men nor their activites are in time, but that time, as a

concrete quality of history, is made by men on the basis o f

their original temporalisation. [27]

Against the Cartesian metaphysics of physical, mathematical time, dialectical thought must validate a practical mode of temporality, a practicalmode that makes time a product of activity and not its universal content. The temporality of this time is social temporality itself, submitted to a practical process of structuration giving it its own rhythm. The modality of this practice defines social historical time.

Social temporality is thus an instituted temporality governed by the mechanism of the social machine. It is a temporality that is immanent to the modalities of practice, a temporality structured by the set of practices which, like the Cartesian God, create the world each moment without the movement of its evolution ever being relatable to the movement of a content that preserves itself in the flux of time.

Indeed, social totality as a process of evolution in temporalized social practice is always a continuously self-producing reality. It is a reality fashioned by the contradiction of its reproduction and its suppression, and by the contradiction of its totalization, a totalization where, at every moment, society in its concrete existence is recalled into play, confronted with the possibility of its destruction, its annihilation and dispersal. Social life is no more than this interplay between being and nothingness, this dialectic where its own life and survival is at stake. The being of the social is an existence ever open to the chasm of its explosion, always threatened with being reduced to nothingness, an interplay where the totalizing synthesis is, in the last instance, always governed by practice or the form taken by practice in the process of reproduction.

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No social reproduction is purely automatic. Reproduction is never the simple result of a purely objective mechanism. Such a representation is only the result of the appearance through which the world presents itself, purely as a world of things, and of its evolution toward being the law that governs the relationships between these things. Reproduction always presupposes the movement of a practice which serves as its executant. This presupposition precludes understanding the movement of social reality as the movement of a context preserving itself in its permanence throughout its development. (This representation causes us to regress to an ontology of the continuous).

The process of the real is the product of a dialectic between a constitutive practice and an objective world of things that Sartre calls the practico-inert and a constituting practice. Social reality is always posited in a practice which retains in it the twofold form of constituted practice and constituting practice, this twofold form being the required structure of all practice. Indeed all practice is always presented according to these two aspects. Within practice the articulation of these two aspects defines the form of the efficacy of practice itself. The form of efficacy may either be that of a constituted practice, and in such a case, the constituted aspect dominates, subjugating the constituting aspect, or that of a constituting practice where conversely in the constituted/constituting practice relation of all practice, the constituting aspect dominates. Here is the dual determination of the actual structure of all practice, where the form it takes is always the result of the relationship between these two aspects. It is the result of the movement determining their reciprocal hierarchical organization and of the structure of the balance of power which arises between the constituted and constituting aspects of practice. The dual aspect was not recognized by the materialism of tradition, blinded as it was by the ontological viewpoint of content. Metaphysical materialism sees movement of

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the social order only as the automatic result of a structural system without ever taking the constituting aspect of social practice into account. In this view, constituted practice, the practico-inert, reproduces itself without the practical intervention of historical subjects, it is the idea of the identical reproduction of society as the imprisoned result of social structure, as the mechanical effect of a system of legality wholly external and independent of all practice; the idea of reproduction is here seen to be inscribed within the order of things and thus obscures the intervention of historical subjects through practical activity, an intervention that is always included in and required by the process of reproduction. This mistaken idea overlooks the fact that the social reproduction of society only occurs through some form of practical activity in and through the global practice of social subjects and that in all reproduction there is an essential moment of production.

All reproduction is simultaneously production. All reproduction is production which only takes the form of production on the basis of the relations between the constituting and constituted aspects within practice. Hence reproduction far from being equivalent to a completely external objective material necessity is but the result of the activity of subjects. This activity takes and receives a given form that is required by reproduction, the form wherein practice is constituted in a relation of the total subordination of constituting practice to constituted practice, where the constituting practice is submitted to the imperatives of the reproduction of the practico-inert and internalizes them as its law.

The law of social reproduction is a long way from being a purely objective law and is itself submitted to the law of the relations between constituted practice and constituting practice, in other words, to the law of practice.

The social totality can be reproduced and can find its effective possibility of reproduction only in and through the set of

practices within the totality. If there is structural causality, it should be seen that it only has efficacy if historical subjects make themselves its agents in their practice. The structural thus cannot become hypostasis (which Althusserian analyses tend toward) in reducing historical subjects to the status of mere supports of structure. The relationship of subjects to historical reality and to their conditions of existence is always a complex and contradictory one. It is a relationship in which the subjects always have a dual function, as supports and producers simultaneously, as acting and enacting agents, but agents nonetheless, through their position as subjects acted upon without one ever being able to reduce them to the status of a mere structural support.

Now, this practical aspect of reproduction escapes materialism which, far from seeing the totalizing process of social practice in the social totality, a reality which is essentially at stake, and in the unending agitation of its being, only sees the movement of a content having in itself the very law of its reproduction. Here is a metaphysical reduction of the complexity of the socio- historical reality of the social totality which no longer appears in its basic dimension of order continuously exposed to disorder, a process of structuration that always brings with it the possibility of its destructuration. This is its dimension of self-totalizing activity, of the practical process of its own totalization and which, as such, is always a provisional totality threatened by its possible collapse or dissolution. Materialism ignores all this, substituting for it a notion of objective content in time that maintains itself in the flowing temporal flux.

The active, processive form of the dialectical totality, one ever to be retotalized, always having its dispersal as its possible and present future, here becomes hypostasis in the given of a content. Here then, the coherence of the social whole is no longer the object of a conflict or a battle at the end of which an

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order of domination and determination is established in the balance of power between the constituting and constituted aspect. This order, on the contrary, is established as an automatic effect of the substantial content of social being. If reproduction is carried out, the activity of historical subjects is of a determined form of practice, that of a constituting practice, but where the constituted aspect dominates. The moment of objective conditions, the moment of the "in- itself" with the structure "for-itself" of practice dictates and forms the practice. The form is here submitted to the system of the legality of the practico-inert where the causality of the reified world of past practices come to define the movement of present practice. Thus reproduction can no longer be understood as the movement of content or conceived of as a process without a subject. If there is a process without a subject in reproduction, it is in so far as this process without a subject is the process of a subject denied, the process of a subject subjected to the practico-inert, a subject denied its autonomy, a subject that has internalized the counter-finality of the practico-inert as the law of its movement, a subject of a regulated constituting practice bowed before the multiple existence and necessity of reproduction. Thus there is no autonomous (sufficient) reason for reproduction at the level of the causal and material series of the world of things. The efficient cause is to be found elsewhere, in this instance it is at the very site where any principle of autonomy is located: social practice in its constituting aspect, the reason of the immanent material pseudo-reason toward things, the cause of historical causality, the institutive reality of this object causality that limits the idea of hypostatic structural causality to being a fiction.

Hence, if it is true that all time is the effect of the temporalization of a practice, the dual possibilil~y of effecting practice enables us to differentiate two modalities of its model

building within historical temporality. Of these two possible forms of its modality, a constituted and a constituting temporality, the former may be said to be the practical result of practice in its constituted form, one that has been given the dimension of temporality; the latter is produced in the flow of the temporalization of the instituting practice.

This dual temporality of historical time always makes socially concrete time the product of a specific practice of social temporality which is itself always the effect produced by the temporalization of practice. These two modes of temporality correspond to two modes that practice itself may take and they demonstrate that the nature of historical time is a lways decided in the relationship between social practice and its own temporality, in the practical relationship that social practice maintains with its own temporality. It is a temporality that ever produces/reproduces in the continually repeated movement of its temporalization. Temporality is thus not "in-itself." It is only continuously constituted in the process of practice, in a process of mediation where practice never ceases to reinternalize its own temporality in order to redeploy it yet again.

Thus, if one may speak of a practice of time within the process of social practice, it is a practice of time that defines a social temporality, but one where this practice is only practice (a practice of social temporality). There is no time, save within the space of a constituted temporality, and no practice of time ever has to produce anything other than an already constituted temporality, a social historical temporality. Thus, the concrete reality of time is only defined in the process of a practice the object of which never appears in the abstract guise of time, but always within the concrete reality of a determinate social temporality. Thus, it can be said that historical time is never anything but the effect produced by an already existing concrete practice of temporality, already determined in its structure by past practices.

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Historical time under the capitalist system always plays against a mechanical and dialectical temporality. It is mechanical since the form taken by the temporality of practice within the capitalist system is a time structured according to the natural divisions of time as measurement: hours, days, months, purely quantitative time which makes up the basic time of capitalist accountability. In its phenomenal form it is presented as quasi- physical time, a time corresponding to the physical time of Cartesian mechanics. It is dialectical since the form of time no longer corresponds to the passive practice of temporality, but to the productive/creative movement of practice. This dialectical temporality appears at those exceptional moments in the series of circumstances that make up the real fabric of the history of revolutionary crises, at these breaks where the initial mechanical temporality is defeated and replaced by a dialectic of time which is unique for each moment.

Part of this dual temporality stems from the mechanical time of reproduction, the other part from the dialectical time of revolution where the temporality at work is always real temporality in both its mechanical and dialectical aspects, resulting in the fact that

real time and concrete temporality are no longer reducible to the classic view of continuous, linear and homogenous time since, nevertheless, historical time, as the practical effect of the temporalization of social practice is marked by radical discontinuity. It is a discontinuity that prevents the construction of a definite time of evolution. The only impinging necessity is that of contingency in a dialectic of historical practical evolution in which only praxis in its concrete execution can eventually determine meaning.

This view of history necessitates a break with evolutionism and finalism in order to return to a practical way of thinking about history. As Marx put it,

History does not contain enormous wealth, it is not free from strife. Rather it is man, real and living man who makes and contains all that and who is engaged in struggle. Rest assured, history does not use man as a means of realizing its own ends - as if it were an actor playing a role - it is no more than the action of man pursuing his goals. [28]

Marx's statement is no longer a phrase with neither subject nor object as it was with tradition. It opens up thinking onto a renewed historical practice, a practice which could be that of a truly revolutionary project.

NOTES

1. R. Debray, Prison Writings (London: Pelican, 1975), p. 92.

2. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 23.

3. G. Plekhanov, Oeuvres choisies (Moscow, 1959-1972) Vol. I., pp. 53-54.

4. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 240. 5. V . I . Lenin, Complete Works (Moscow, 1959-1972), Vol.

I, pp. 53-54. 6. F. Engels, op. cit., 1970; p. 415. 7. G. Plekhanov, op. cit., Vol. II, po. 698. 8. L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London:

New Left Books, 1972), p. 85. 9. J. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Little

Stalin Library No. 4 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1941), p. 11.

10. F. Engels, L. Feuerbach et la f in de la philosophic classique allemande (Paris: Editions Sociale, 1960), p. 130.

11. Ibid., pp. 66-67 12. Ibid., pp. 622-623. 13. Ibid., p. 623. 14. G. Plekhanov, Questions Fondamntales (Paris: Editions

Sociales, 1948), p. 108. 15. F. Engels, Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science

(Anti-Duhring) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1935), pp. 28-29.

16. A. Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 193

17. K. Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 421. 18. M. Henry, Marx, une philosophic de la realite (Paris:

Gallimard, 1976), Vol. I, p. 165. 19. A. Gramsci, Gramsci clans le texte (Paris: Editions

Sociales, 1975), p. 197. 20. Ibid., p. 175.

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21. G. Lukacs, Histoire et conscience de classe (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1960), p. 230.

22. Ibid., p. 233. 23. Grimaldi, Ontologie du Temps. 24. R. Debray, op. cit., 1975; p. 92. 25. J . P . Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen,

1943), p. 136.

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26. Ibid., p. 142. 27. J .P . Sartre, TheProblem of Method(London: Methuen,

1963), pp. 91-92. 28. K. Marx, La Sainte Famille (Paris: Editions Sociales,

1969), p. 119.