Dialectical Theory of Meaning, Mihailo Marković 1961

Part One (Extracts)

The Dialectical Method as Applied to the Problem of Meaning

The title of this work – The Dialectical Theory of Meaning – calls for still another
explanation – i.e. what in this context is meant by dialectics. It goes without saying
that there can be no question here of setting forth a ready-made theory of meaning
as part of a Marxist or any other dialectical philosophy, for the simple reason that
no such theory has been developed within Marxism. The question here is to
attempt to formulate systematically a theory of meaning from the standpoint of
Marxist humanistic dialectics.

What is often referred to by Marxist dialectics is a kind of ontology embodying the

most general laws of the movement of being (the unity of opposites, the
transformation of quantity into quality, the negation of negation). Furthermore
dialectics is often understood as a kind of logic applied to developmental processes,
exempt from the formal logical principles of noncontradiction and the exclusion of
the third. Of late, recognition has been given to an anthropological conception of
dialectics as a general theory of human practice.

All these varying interpretations of dialectics are possible in principle. However,

we shall not concern ourselves here with discussing these various possible
conceptions but rather with specifying the meaning in which the term “dialectics”
will be applied to the theory of meaning in this work.

We shall utilize “dialectics” to refer to a general philosophical method

characterized by a procedure of investigation that is maximally objective,
comprehensive, dynamic, and concrete, considering creative human practice to be
the key to theoretical objectivity.
1. The tendency toward objectivity is characteristic of many philosophical
doctrines, but the question is what “objectivity” refers to. A matter on which there
is agreement among philosophers of many schools is that the process of
investigation should lead to interpersonal knowledge about the objects and their
interrelationships such as they are in actual reality, regardless of the consciousness
of the individual subject. The demand for objectivity entails the elimination of all
extra-intellectual factors (desire, interest, feeling) in the process of investigation.
Of all our mental capacities we are left merely with observations aimed at
establishing individual facts and logical thinking aimed at drawing general
conclusions. There exists more or less full agreement – in theory at least, if not
always in practice – that in investigation one should not proceed on the basis of
ready-made schemata and uncritically accepted assumptions.

The distinguishing characteristic of the dialectical conception of objectivity is the

firm linking of theoretical investigation to practical activity. The object is not
understood as something merely given, external to man and completely
independent of him: human social practice is included in the definition of the
object. There are many objects that unquestionably exist in themselves, but we
know them only as they are for us, transformed by practice. Accordingly the
objectivity of the finding of an investigation is to be determined not solely in a
theoretical manner (by observation and thinking), but rather through purposeful
action and the alteration of the object.

What should be the consequences of the application of this principle in the theory
of meaning? In this field we are confronted with the following situation. A large
number of theories tend to reduce meaning to a subjective act or disposition or
concept, a set of observations or mental operations, a readiness for suitable
physical reaction, or – in the case of symbols from the field of art and morals – the
emotional state of appeal and approval, recommending and encouraging others to
change their attitude. On the other hand, we have theories that conceive the
meaning of a sign as the corresponding object in itself, or an ideal essence whose
existence is related neither to the mental life of man nor material reality, but
rather to a third, ideal sphere of validity.

The dialectical conception of meaning has to be placed in opposition to both groups

of theories mentioned. If a sign is actually used in social communication, so that by
means of it people can understand one another and coordinate their activity, it
certainly signifies something that is objectively given, independent of the
consciousness of any individual subject. But in distinction from the views of
various types of realists and vulgar materialists, “object” is to be conceived more
elastically. This is a very broad category which embodies both individual material
things, general properties and relations, social institutions, and even social ideas
and the general structures of collective mental processes – for these are all entities
that exist independently of the consciousness of any individual subject. These are
not absolute objects, postulated and given in themselves. A man can know only that
with which he has come into at least an intermediate practical relation, and which
he has practically modified. One can say something only about the humanized
world of objects. An object in itself is the most abstract of all abstractions.
This implies an essential criterion for decision whether a particular symbol
signifies a real object or there is no object of that type, so that at least in a cognitive
sense the symbol is meaningless (which does not involve that it could not refer to
an imaginary or ideal object and that it could not have some non-cognitive
meaning). This criterion is sharply distinguished from purely empiricist criteria
according to which one may meaningfully speak only about objects that can be
experienced by the senses. It also rejects the uncritical realism of those who
overload the sphere of being by postulating all possible types of objects, proceeding
upon the conviction that anything one speaks about must exist in some way or
another. The dialectical criterion involves practical operations that mediate
between theory and reality. When results of practical actions coincide with
predictions derived from a certain theory T, we have good reason to hold that a
symbol that is a constitutive element of the theory T truly refers to a real object.
This criterion is severe enough to exclude various imaginary, unreal objects, such
as Pegasus, phlogiston, the ether, etc., while remaining sufficiently elastic to
encompass objective correlates of the most abstract logical and mathematical
symbols that are often claimed to have no relation whatever to objective reality.

2. One of the characteristics of the historic process of human cognition is that,

consciously or not, we simplify objects in order to study their various aspects and
relations. At a later stage of inquiry we correct and enrich such oversimplified
images of objects. Eventually we tend to integrate the various partial aspects of
knowledge into a unified synthetic whole.

Every good scholar carries out such analytical simplifications in a conscious,

methodical manner, taking account of everything that has been excluded, with a
full measure of criticism of the natural, spontaneous tendency to hypostatize and
absolutize such one-sided, isolated abstract elements. Each time this analytic,
simplifying phase of investigation must be overcome with a fresh effort to
encompass synthetically and comprehensively the object of investigation in its
complexity.

None of the foregoing is unique to dialectics: many philosophers and

methodologists assume a critical stance toward one-sided approaches to objects
and advocate the mutual complementarity of analysis and synthesis. The
differentia specifica of the dialectical method is that in the analysis of the object of
study there is the tendency to discover opposing and even contradictory elements
and, conversely, in the processes of dialectical synthesis to establish genuine
continuity and the temporary unity of ostensibly irreconcilable oppositions.

This principle of investigation is based on the universally applicable empirical

premise that all objects have properties and dispositions that are mutually
exclusive and thus represent a source of the dynamic impulses that determine
movement and change.

In application to general theoretical problems, dialectics incorporates the demand

to encompass synthetically all the separate aspects, dimensions, and components
that have been obtained in analysis. Thus, by its very nature, this method
represents a criticism of all one-sided theories in which one element is unjustifiably
hypostatized at the expense of all others opposed to it. Thus for example many
theories in modern philosophy tend to explain meaning by reducing it to a single
relation (the relation of a sign to a designated object, to the concept which it
expresses, to other signs of the given linguistic system, or to the practical
operations associated with the given sign). Thus there arise ostensibly
irreconcilable oppositions between individual theories. The utilization of the
dialectical method ensures an openness to maximal complexity and elasticity in
approaching this problem. If two or more theories well supported by real facts
appear to exclude one another, the question arises as to whether they do not
express partial fragments of truth that should be encompassed by a broader and
more complex theory. Is not meaning a complex of relations (a structure)? Is not
the very concept of meaning relative to different systems of signs, to different types
of functions that a sign can perform in order to satisfy various types of human
needs? In this way one can establish a continuum of opposing, discrete elements.

This method might lead to eclecticism if carried out in a subjective, arbitrary

manner. But the unity of opposites must be objectively founded. This means that
one must proceed from genuine linguistic practice. Two opposing relations will be
interpreted as two dimensions of a higher unity – meaning, only insofar as the
concept of meaning is used in both ways, or in other words, if linguistic practice
cannot be explained in toto by reducing meaning to a single relation. But one may
be critical toward actual linguistic practice insofar as it leads to confusion or in
any sense seems unsuited to the attainment of important human purposes. In the
latter case one assumes a practical and creative stance toward one’s own linguistic
practice: we wish to change it. But it is of vital importance that this desire for
change be objectively founded: we must provide a reasoned, rational criticism of
existing linguistic practice, and we must cite the objective reasons that justify our
purpose and practical intervention. For example, in our synthesis of the concept of
meaning we shall try to encompass one of its neglected components in order to
eliminate confusion, ambiguity or incoherence.

Provided it is correctly theoretically reasoned and practically justified, this

dialectical unification of opposites, firstly, will not be arbitrary and eclectic and,
secondly, will in many cases lead to the relativization of opposites and the
elimination of their formal-logical incompatibility. The integration of opposing
factors assumes the determination of a context (coordinant system) in which each
of them applies. Inasmuch as these contexts (coordinant systems) differ from one
another, the result of this process will be the elimination of the apparent
irreconcilability of opposites.

3. One of the most essential characteristics of the dialectical method is that it treats
all objects as developmental processes. True, dialecticians are not the only ones
who study the genesis and dynamics of the object of investigation. Following the
triumph of Darwin’s theory evolutionism penetrated all fields of learning: today,
there are no serious scholars or philosophers still prepared to believe that objects
and forms are absolutely stationary, or who believe that the explanation of their
genesis and evolution is not an essential part of a rational explanation. But
nevertheless evolution may be conceived in a number of different ways. For
example Darwin and many evolutionists conceived of the evolution of living beings
as gradual change without discontinuity between old and new forms. Many
historians believed that in spite of all the variability of individual events they all
expressed certain unchanging, universal forms. The causes of development were
often sought in the action of certain external factors (God as the prime mover of
nature, the geographical environment and climate as the determinant of the
development of societies, etc.).

A distinctive feature of Marxist dialectics is to conceive of development as the

abolition of internal limitations and, accordingly, with respect to two successive
developmental forms, to note gradualness and continuity in some properties and
discontinuity and discreteness in others. This means that each successive higher
phase brings with it a new quality which cannot be reduced to the preceding one or
be explained as greater complexity or a greater quantity of the same. On the other
hand this new quality cannot be explained fully if it is not correlated with the
quality from which it emerged and some of whose essential elements it has retained
in a new form.

Moreover dialectics also directs toward investigation of the invariant structures in

variable phenomena and the discovery of laws, types, and cycles. There is no other
way of conceptualizing movement. Nevertheless for dialecticians there is nothing
absolutely stationary. All apparently permanent forms are conditional, changing
over time, disappearing, and being superseded by other forms. From a dialectical
standpoint, the only absolute is change and development.

The causes of development, for dialecticians, are principally internal. The

dynamics of an object are determined by opposition and the processes of mutual
exclusion of their properties, dispositions, and internal tendencies.

As applied to the question of meaning, the dialectical principle of development

implies the demand for the study of the origin and development of signs and
meaning. A separate chapter will be devoted to that problem, in which it will be
necessary to take into account, on the one hand, the history of human language
and symbolic activity generally, and on the other hand, the development of
language and thinking in the individual history of the child.

Finally the general character of the dialectical method, and particularly of the
principle of development, also determines to a great extent the method of criticism.
Criticism should be creative in the sense that it transcends both the viewpoint being
criticized and the critic’s own viewpoint. Ever since Hegel, to transcend has meant
to eliminate and to maintain. Unless one discovers and eliminates a limitation one
cannot give shape to a particular new quality. But conversely, unless one maintains
certain values, unless one establishes continuity and accepts the partial, if only
relative truth which the criticized viewpoint embodies, there can be no genuine
progress. Thus, in order to be dialectical, criticism should not be destructive – and
above all it should be self-critical; its own point of view evolves in the process of
criticism. In setting itself in opposition to the other viewpoint criticism sees its own
limitations and strives toward a new synthesis.

4. Dialectical concreteness is the tendency to link the universal with the particular
and individual. In the literature the meaning attached most often to “concrete” is
“that which is applied to an actual individual thing as opposed to an abstract
quality,” or “the specific as opposed to the general.” Dialectical concreteness is
taken to mean here a particular manner of interpreting the meaning of abstract
terms: meaning is not reduced solely to the common definition of a class of
individual cases or the bare generality taken in isolation, which can be expressed in
toto with a relatively brief definition. To comprehend concretely the meaning of an
abstraction is to encompass conceptually the distinctive features of the individual
objects to which the abstraction may be applied, the conditions under which this
application is possible in various contexts, and finally the practical consequences
relevant to its use. This mode of interpreting the meaning of abstract symbols may
be traced, in part, to Hegel’s idea of the “concrete universal.” The same notion is
to be found in Peirce’s principle of pragmatism and in Korzybski’s demand
(Universal Semantics) that the abstract always be exemplified and understood
“extentionally,” not just “intentionally,” and that we utilize only those symbols
that stand for genuine objects.

As applied to the problem of meaning, the dialectical principle of concreteness

implies principally the demand that one not be content solely with giving a general,
abstract definition of meaning, but instead show how meaning varies and specifies
itself in various types of languages, given the various functions that a symbol may
perform. Therefore although our prime interest is a specific type of meaning – the
cognitive meaning that the expressions of scholarly language can have – meaning
as a general category, and accordingly cognitive meaning will not be able to be
determined concretely if we do not take into account other specific types of
meaning, such as emotive and prescriptive meaning. Similarly, in discussing the
various dimensions of meaning, such as objective meaning for example, we shall
succeed in defining them concretely only if we specify them with reference to
various types of linguistic expressions – for example if we specify the objective
meanings of various categories of words, sentences, descriptions, logical
connectives, etc.

Moreover, the explication of the concept of meaning implies the use of a range of
general philosophical categories, such as object, experience, symbol, concept,
practice, and so on. The concept of meaning will be defined in a relatively concrete
manner only on the condition that these fundamental theoretical-cognitive
concepts are specified and made concrete. Thus the development of the dialectical
theory of meaning requires a separate section providing an explanation of the
basic categories necessary for the construction of the theory.

Finally maximal concreteness in treating the problem of meaning can be achieved

only if we identify the practical consequences of the proposed solution. In this case
practical consequences of the proposed theoretical explication of the concept of
meaning is the determination of the conditions under which meaning can be clear
and communicable to others and under which the interpretation of the meaning of
others may become maximally adequate. Thus the practical purpose of this entire
work is to define precisely the conditions of effective communication among
people.

The foregoing specification of the subject matter and method of this work
determines its structure. Part One will deal with the epistemological foundations of
the dialectical theory of meaning. Part Two will be devoted to an analysis of the
various dimensions of meaning and their interconnections. Part Three will trace
the genesis of signs and meaning and discuss the general conditions of effective
communication.

CRITICISM OF PRAGMATIC CRITERIA

Each of the three philosophers we have mentioned (and not those alone) seems to
agree that the existence of real objects can be neither directly known nor logically
proven. And in fact if direct knowledge is taken to mean only that knowledge
which is acquired by passive sensory experience, and if proof is taken to be strictly
exact proof in the sense of modern formal logic, these assumptions are correct.
Hume’s great contribution is that he resolved this question for modern philosophy,
if only by arriving at a negative result.

Since Russell, Quine, and Carnap are convinced that the use of symbols that
assume the existence of external objects cannot be avoided, they attempt to justify
it by means of such pragmatic arguments as effectiveness, fruitfulness, simplicity,
etc. In any case positivism and empiricism have had numerous points of contact
with pragmatism. (James characterized pragmatism as “radical empiricism,” and
the pragmatic criterion of convenience has always been acceptable to positivists.)
Of late there have been more elements of pragmatism in the doctrines of the
leading empiricists and positivists than ever, and nowhere is this as evident as in
the case of so-called ontological questions. Propositions that were once
unhesitatingly proclaimed nonsensical (for example, concerning the reality of the
material world) are now considered possible or even advisable alternatives, on
practical grounds.

The other important factor with both Quine and Carnap is an increased tolerance
for realism and materialism, coupled with the undertaking of a number of
necessary steps so that with the acknowledgement of the equal rights of the
language of material objects one does not smuggle in the old realistic metaphysics,
with its profusion of various objective entities. Hence the effort to restrict the
ontological assumptions of a theory to a minimum. This is the purpose of both
Russell’s theory of description and Quine’s method of eliminating names from a
language and Carnap’s refusal to acknowledge the theoretical significance of
“external questions.” But one must immediately observe that in this important
effort to eliminate metaphysics, today – as two and three decades ago – pragmatic
arguments go too far as regards material objects.

Thus, in his collection of articles entitled Mysticism and Logic, Russell speaks of
physical particles as logical constructs, and in Analysis of Mind he terms matter a
“logical fiction.” Elsewhere he has written: “Common sense believes that when one
looks at a blackboard one sees a blackboard. This is a serious mistake.” In spite of
all his tolerance and objectivity, Quine states that the phenomenalistic conceptual
system is epistemologically more fundamental, while asserting in a number of
instances that from the phenomenalistic point of view the conceptual scheme of
physical objects is merely a “convenient myth.” Carnap says the same thing in
different words when he categorically denies that in accepting the language of
things one simultaneously accepts a belief in the reality of the world of things. He
not only denies the justification of such a belief (which is a logical question), but
also the very existence of such a belief, which is an empirical, factual question.
In reality, virtually every normal human being “believes in the reality of the world
of things.” Hume’s problem did not arise because he failed to believe in the
existence of things and other people external to his consciousness, but rather
because he did not find sufficient reason for such a belief. But neither he nor any
other philosopher found sufficient reason against it. In such a situation the basic
question arises of the relationship of philosophy and science to common sense.
There are numerous fallacious or unsound common-sense assumptions and
interpretations. But in all such cases we know the reasons why we believe them and
can explain how we arrive at our misconceptions. We know the optical laws
because of which a stick stuck into water necessarily appears crooked. We know
the laws of celestial mechanics which explain why the Sun appears to rotate
around the Earth. We also knew about those forms of movement which are
unknown to common sense and on the basis of which we are aware of all the
naiveté of the common-sense point of view (embodied in Aristotelian physics),
according to which all bodies are at perfect rest until some external force moves
them. But if a straight stick were not really straight and a crooked were not
crooked, we would not only be unable to distinguish sensory illusions from
adequate perceptions, but also all knowledge would be impossible – for in the final
analysis truth and the most abstract scientific propositions depend upon the
adequacy of certain perceptions. Similarly, we do not normally err in assessing the
reciprocal relations of movement, and for many purposes, particularly
operative-practical ones, the assumption of static objects constitutes a useful
simplification.

In brief, common sense is far from being a label for the entirety of human illusions
and naive, unfounded beliefs. It is an indispensable basis for any genuine
knowledge. Science and philosophy do not proceed from assumptions differing
totally from common-sensical ones. In spite of the critical stance of science and
philosophy, their assumptions are revised when good reasons call for it; i.e. when it
may be shown that common-sensical notions are leading us to accept as true
certain propositions that are assuredly false, or to reject as false propositions that
have been established to be true.

There is no common-sensical axiom that is so firmly and generally accepted as the

belief in the existence of an objective world external to our consciousness.
Empiricists claim this belief to be “naively realistic,” and have their reasons for
their criticism: they have drawn attention to instances of various illusions and
hallucinations where there are no genuine objects corresponding to our
experiences, or at least identical to them. But if one may distinguish illusions and
hallucinations from other perceptions and assign them to a separate class, this
argument merely leads to the conclusion that “naive realism” should be replaced
with “critical realism,” i.e. observations are not substantively identical to observed
objects, and sometimes such objects do not even exist. What additional reasons
exist to call material objects “mythical,” “convenient formulas,” “logical
constructions,” “fictions,” etc.?

There are no such reasons. While science critically transcends common sense,
pointing out both its errors and its psychological inevitability, positivism – which
considers itself to be a scientific philosophy, utilizes a different method: it rejects
before it has found arguments, it ascribes to itself the qualities of science in
contrast to common-sensical naiveté before it has demonstrated its superiority
with respect to other alternatives.

True, one may challenge the view that philosophy should take common sense as its
departure point and deviate from it only when sufficient reason exists to do so, One
might say that the task of philosophy should not be understood so positively and
optimistically, but more negatively and skeptically: one might proceed from
universal doubt rather than from the conception that we already know a good deal
on the basis of common sense. In the latter case the question would not arise as to
whether we have sufficient reason to abandon a common-sensical belief; the issue
would be rather whether we have sufficient reason to accept it. But in this instance
skepticism is transformed into a kind of dogmatism, for it generalises and gives
absolute validity to conclusions from a very limited field of investigation. Modem
skepticism – and its founder, Hume – takes into account only two possible sources
of cognition of objective reality: sensory observation (conceived as passive
contemplation, rather than as an integral element of material practice), and logical
reasoning (conceived as the exact, formal derivation of one set of propositions from
others in accordance to explicitly formulated rules). One would be justified in
saying only that neither of the two forms (without claiming to be the sole ones)
provides good reasons to assert anything about existence external to our
consciousness. Any other conclusion would be a non sequitur.

Accordingly the first objection to the viewpoint taken by Russell, Carnap, Quine,
and many of their followers is that their moderate skepticism (as opposed to the
radical skepticism that leads to solipsism) diverges from a widespread and
deep-rooted viewpoint, while lacking sufficient arguments to do so. To that extent,
their own viewpoint is arbitrary and unfounded. It becomes fallacious to the extent
that it may be shown that in addition to the two forms of cognition that empiricists
rely upon solely there also exist others, or if it is shown that these two forms are
much more complex than empiricists treat them, consequently that, when sources
of knowledge are taken in its totality and in all its complexity, sufficient reasons
may be found for belief in the existence of material objects.

Secondly, we have seen that empiricists have converted the ontological question
about existence external to consciousness and language into a linguistic question
concerning the suitability of the use of terms and forms of language referring to
material objects. They permit a choice of various forms of language and
conceptual systems, and deny that the decision is cognitive in character. Thus the
question of the criterion of choice appears to be not theoretical, but rather a purely
practical one.

One can raise against this viewpoint all the well-known objections that have made
pragmatism untenable as a complete philosophical doctrine. First and foremost,
without certain theoretical considerations one can never know whether a
conceptual system is truly effective and fruitful or merely appears so temporarily.
Moreover the very concepts “effectiveness” and “fruitfulness” are relative and
depend upon the given purpose. Since the purpose for which a given language is
used may be cognitive, the criterion of choice between various forms of language
must be a cognitive question of the first order. Carnap, speaking about the
purposes for which a language may be used, cites only an example that makes his
viewpoint plausible. He says: “The purposes for which a language is to be used –
for example the purpose of transmitting factual knowledge – will determine the
factors relevant to a decision. Effectiveness, fruitfulness, and simplicity of the use
of a language of things may be among the decisive factors.”

But obviously the purpose does not need to be objective or social in character –
such as the purpose of transmitting factual knowledge. Other purposes may be to
advertise the products of a company, propagandize for a church, sect, state or
political party. In that instance one may deem as “effective” and “fruitful” – with
respect to the purpose of a given subject or social group – a conceptual system
which is cognitively worthless, i.e. in which scientifically false propositions have the
status of true ones, and vice verse.

Thus either the selection of a particular conceptual scheme is in fact a purely

practical question, which leads to relativism and subjectivism, or practical criteria
must be supplemented with theoretical ones. If one restricts the purposes for which
a language may be utilized and if one wishes to provide an objective scientific
interpretation by means of the concepts of effectiveness and fruitfulness, this may
be achieved, in the final analysis, solely by relating it functionally to the ultimate
goal of knowing the objective truth. In that case the question of the selection of the
form of a language becomes a significant cognitive question. In addition to the
effectiveness and fruitfulness of a set of concepts, the question also arises of their
compatibility with all the relevant existing knowledge and their compatibility with
one another. This means, first, that a conceptual system must have an empirical
justification regardless of its effectiveness and fruitfulness in various instances of
practical application and, secondly, that the theoretical investigation of a given
system in the framework of a metasystem must demonstrate whether its categories
are justified and necessary, whether they may be derived from other categories or,
conversely, whether the latter require the former to be defined precisely.

The necessity for such a theoretical analysis of categories may not be denied by
appealing to an increasing utilization of the postulation method in modern exact
sciences. The postulating of certain concepts is better perhaps than bad
explanation, and the postulation method in general deserves respect to the extent
that in every theory certain concepts go undefined. But sometimes it is a symptom
of lazy thought or the impotence of a theory that it avoids rather than confronts
problems. In other words, there should be as few postulated concepts as possible:
wherever possible the meaning of terms should be discussed and defined explicitly.

DO PURELY EXPRESSIVE SYMBOLS EXIST?

A very common misconception among philosophers and logicians is that every

thought is discursive and that the symbols of thought are either discursive or
meaningless. One after another modern empiricists and logical positivists have
advanced the view that the symbols of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and
literature do not signify anything, but have only an expressive function. This is the
natural consequence of narrowing the ontological basis of their philosophy. If the
sole objects are individual things or events, then the sole symbols that “signify”
something and have an extralinguistic meaning are the words and propositions of
empirical science, and perhaps also verifiable, true propositions of ordinary
speech.

Logical symbols are, then, symbols referring to language, whereas an other

symbols would merely express feelings. Carnap said, “The purpose of a lyrical
poem which repeats the words “sunshine” and “clouds” is not to inform us of
certain meteorological facts, but to express the feelings of the poet and to arouse
similar feelings in us ... Metaphysical propositions – like lyrical poems – have only
an expressive function, but not a representational one. Metaphysical propositions
are neither true nor false, for they state nothing... Like laughing, poetry, and music
they are expressive. They express not temporary feelings but rather permanent
emotional and volitional dispositions.”

The concluding Carnap sentence is correct, but it requires two addenda. First,
nondiscursive, artistic and other nonscientific symbols express not just permanent
emotional and volitional dispositions, but also reflective ones as well. Secondly, if
we are confronted by social symbols and not just those meaningful to a single
individual, these dispositions are intersubjective and common to all the members
of a social community.

What then is the fundamental distinction between scientific and literary symbols?

In both cases the symbols are related to certain intersubjective permanent

dispositions to observe, imagine, conceive or feel something. Why does Carnap,
like many before him (including Ogden, Richards, and Korzybski) believe that in
the former case there is an object that is signified by a symbol, while in the second
case there is no such object? Because verification by sensory experience is taken as
the sole criterion for the existence of an object. Thus the word “cloud” in scientific
language signifies an object because a cloud may be seen. When the word “cloud”
is utilized in literary language as a symbol that signifies misfortune, “misfortune”
is not an object because it can be neither seen nor touched.

The difficulty with this empiricist reasoning is that mere verification is an

insufficient criterion to ascertain the existence of anything. This was seen even by
those empiricists who were sufficiently consistent to derive the solipsistic or
moderately skeptical consequences from the acceptance of such a criterion of
existence. In this manner Hume came to the conviction that we believe in the
existence of material objects, other people, and our own bodies on the basis of
instinct and other irrational factors. Accordingly we are unable to know solely on
the basis of sensory experience that the word “cloud” in meteorological language
represents the real object – cloud.

But if we include all of practical experience in the criterion of objectivity then the
field of objects becomes far broader than the sum of experienced material things.
In that case the word “cloud,” utilized as a metaphor in a lyric poem, does not only
serve to express the subjective feelings of the poet and to stimulate similar
sentiments on the part of all who become acquainted with the poem, but rather
signifies the general form of all such possible sentiments. The association of the
word with this form turns the word “cloud” into a symbol. Accordingly the form
per se, is something objective, something that exists relatively independently of the
subjective experience of any isolated individual. Each form of feeling, like the form
of observation, is a thought, although not a discursive thought or concept. Each
form is something general (in the individual), something abstract (in the concrete),
and something constant (in the variable). Thus form may be experienced in feeling,
in the sensory image, but may be understood only in thought. The interpretation of
each symbol involves these two elements: first it expresses a form, something
objective, second, this form is conceivable only in thought.

In the case of the interpretation of scientific, discursive symbols, immediate

sensory-emotive experiences may be omitted. While I read the formula a2 - b2 = (a
+ b) × (a - b), I experience a sensory perception, but this is not the interpretation of
the symbol, but only the perception of the symbol as a material object.
Interpretation consists exclusively in understanding a general relation among
concepts (the difference between the squares of any two numbers is equal to the
product of their sum and their difference). In some cases of scientific symbols the
very interpretation may include also sensory and emotional elements. For example
the interpretation of the formula a2 + b2 = c2 consists not only in the understanding
of a general relation among concepts, but may also include a sensory image – that
of a right-angle triangle above each of whose sides a square has been constructed.
The interpretation of the symbol “atom” also may include both elements – the
conceptualization of the essential characteristics of a type of material particle and
the experience of the sensory image (model) which represents pictorially the
structure of this type of particle. One might say that the ideal of scientific
knowledge is associating the general with the specific, and the understanding of the
general as the concrete, which calls for the association of concepts with images
incorporating the greatest abundance of details. Furthermore there can be no
question that the interpretation of scientific symbols, and particularly of complex
symbols – sentences and sets of sentences constituting a theory – can be
accompanied by intense emotional reactions. The theories of Copernicus and
Galileo in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and those of Darwin
and Marx in the nineteenth aroused such a storm of sentiment and such vehement
reactions that one can hardly think of any work of art to compare with them.

On the other hand a work of art always has an expressive character. By observing
or listening to it we have, above all, a visual or acoustic experience of the symbols
themselves – letters, tones, movements, shapes, or colors. This is still not
interpretation since when a person goes no further than passively perceiving the
symbols without troubling himself with their meaning, we say that he has failed to
understand the work. Interpretation begins only with a visual or acoustical image
of what the symbol means, i.e. with experiencing a more or less powerful emotion
which the symbol expresses. But even so we have not yet arrived at what is deepest
and most essential in the meaning of the symbol – the object which is designated.
As we have seen, the object referred to by the symbol is usually the concept of
something general (essential or typical). This is often called an “idea,” which is, to
be precise, always a constant structure of human reflective and affective life. This
structure, designated by a symbol, can only be understood in intellectual terms –
although at issue here is so-called nondiscursive thinking, a direct, nonconceptual,
simultaneous understanding of the whole. Thus, Urban cites the example of one of
Ibsen’s symbols in Peer Gynt in order to demonstrate the great cognitive value this
nondiscursive understanding may have. When Peer peels the onion to reveal the
hidden, inner essence, but winds up with nothing after removing all the layers,
there arises in him the painful knowledge that he, Peer, is like that, and this
symbol (according to Urban better than any intellectual exposition) points to the
social nature of our ego. After we remove all the layers of social ties and relations
with other people, nothing remains except emptiness. People who are incapable of
forming a firm social bond become as empty as Peer Gynt. One may interpret in
this way Engels’ famous statement that one may learn more from Balzac’s novels
about social conditions in France in the early nineteenth century than from all the
tomes of the historians, statisticians, and economists of the time.

Thus nondiscursive symbols do much more than merely express and evoke
feelings: they also have a cognitive meaning, designating objects which we
comprehend by means of nondiscursive thinking.

Accordingly it is in the nature of all symbols – and not just those encountered in
science and philosophy – to have a dual relation: toward the objects which they
designate and toward the forms of mental life which they express.

Urban termed this dual relation “bi-representation,” which is not the most
felicitous term, for different relations are here at issue. The relation of the word
“Mars” to the concept of Mars differs significantly from the relation of that word
to the fourth planet with respect to distance from the Sun. Accordingly it is
inappropriate to utilize the same word – “representation.” In fact the term is not
appropriate to refer to either of the two relations. Even with a symbol such as a
landscape, still life, or portrait we could speak of representation only if we took an
individual natural scene, a particular person, or group of apples, carrots, or fish
literally as the object designated by the symbol. In fact the object of a symbol is
always something general and constant, a form, which is not represented pictorially
but referred to or designated. It is even less suitable to say that a symbol
“represents” the corresponding form of mental life. It is not clear how the word
“father,” “pere,” “Vater,” “padre,” and “otac” all represent the same concept.
Thus it is much more correct to say that they all express that concept.

HYPOTHETICAL ELEMENTS IN THE CONTENT OF CONCEPTS

Here we arrive at a point where we must provide further explanation of concepts

as forms of thought. The best means to do so is by answering the following
questions: If the meaning of concepts is comprised of elements of experience
(which are social in character, invariant under various conditions) how is it that in
time we reject certain concepts even though nothing has changed in the experience
upon which the concepts were built? What is rejected in a concept if the experience
upon which it is based remains unaltered?

The fact of the matter is that concepts transcend all experience. Human
consciousness takes the elements of experience and creates an imaginative whole.
In addition to given elements, a concept always contains hypothetical, presumed
elements. This idea was implied in the above-mentioned thesis that the content of a
concept is constituted by objective experience that is invariant in the course of the
transformation of the given conditions, and that concepts permit us to orient
ourselves in new situations. The hypothetical element in a concept is the
assumption that in a particular alteration of conditions we will undergo the same
or some specific altered experience, with the indirect conclusion that certain
experiences are excluded as incompatible with our assumption. For example, our
concept of the Moon implies the hypotheses that on one of its hemispheres we
would experience terrible heat and on the other terrible cold; that we would
suffocate there without oxygen, that all objects – and our own bodies – would be
fifty times lighter, that we would find ourselves there beside a sea of stone, without
water, and without the slightest sign of life. On the other hand this concept rules
out the possibility of the moon appearing like a round coin viewed from the side;
the possibility of living beings on its surface, etc. It thus happens that we believe we
know things that no one ever experienced, but nevertheless later experience
confirms most such beliefs.

Empiricism is incapable of explaining the creativity of human thought. The

formation of concepts of a higher order remains a secret if we try to explain the
process solely by means of experience. Only the most elementary concepts – pen,
house, wall, chair – contain experiential elements and nothing else. Nevertheless,
even these involve the assumption that there is a permanent relation between
perceptions, that there are real objects to which the structures of perceptions
correspond. As far as concepts of a higher order are concerned, such as the
categories of the various sciences, there is nearly as great a difference between
them and elementary concepts as there is between them and the representations of
experience from which they arose.

In the very best of cases empiricists distinguish – in addition to sense-data –

dispositions toward a particular behavior, chiefly toward the utilization of symbols
in a particular manner. But we have already seen that these dispositions differ
fundamentally from conditioned and unconditioned reflexes, since these are
conscious and represent a mechanism for reacting to conditions that we have never
actually experienced before. Dispositions to overt behavior are merely the external
mechanism of an internal, conscious process. As regards consciousness and its
relationship toward behavior, empiricists make an unjustified distinction. With
respect to sensory experience, there are genuine differences between external
reactions, physiological and other material processes, on the one hand, and
internal, conscious experiences – sensations and perceptions, on the other. They
acknowledge something that could be called the power of perception, i.e. the power
to associate various sensations in an integral sensory experience.

But when it comes to thought, empiricists manifest an extraordinary critical

stance, without sufficient justification. They reject not only Descartes’ assumption
of the “spirit in the machine” but also the very existence of thought as an essential
quality of consciousness. Accordingly they do not acknowledge what is analogous
to perceptions and sensations – concepts, or something analogous to association –
conceptual power and conceptual activity. However, the generality of concepts,
and the fact that they imply experience which was never actually lived cannot be
explained in any other way but by assuming that at a certain high level of its
development consciousness begins to proceed according to its own laws, relatively
independently of the laws that prevail in the material world. Its activity consists in
the execution of certain operations with experiential contents whose result are
certain thoughts which contain not just given elements but hypothetical ones as
well.

The assumption of certain mental capacities (conceptual powers) that are manifest
in the performance of certain intellectual actions (abstraction, generalization,
analysis, synthesis, etc.) is by no means a speculative assumption, as the empiricists
assert. As a matter of fact this alone is capable of explaining those forms of
successful communication and cooperation among people which cannot be
explained by the thesis of the structural similarity of their experience.

For example general agreement reigns in psychiatry today as to the psychoanalytic

explanation of the cause of hysteria: virtually all professionals in the field agree
that hysteria is caused by the suppression of an unconscious desire, usually sexual
in character, which is regarded as immoral or unnatural. Guided by this
explanation psychoanalysts utilize the therapy of free association in order to help
the patient uncover unconscious feelings and work them through, usually with
good results. But what is the experiential basis upon which this theory is based? All
that can be observed are certain symptoms of illness and certain facts to be seen in
the treatment of the patient – manifestations of a powerful emotional attachment
to the therapist (“transfer”), a tendency toward resistance during discussion of
events in the patient’s past, and cessation of the symptoms after the therapist helps
the patient to come up with certain explanations. In themselves these experiential
facts explain little as to why psychologists and psychiatrists agree on the existence
of unconscious desires, censure of consciousness, repression, etc., and how they
understand one another when they utilize the appropriate terms. Similarly
experience is quite insufficient to justify their agreement in therapeutic practice.
Accordingly we have two orders of facts: (1) the direct experience of individual
scientists and (2) mutual understanding and successful cooperation. This
agreement of behavior cannot be explained merely by constant elements in
experience. Certain other factors of conscious life must be assumed. These are our
capacities to derive certain mental actions with constant elements in our
experience.

We compare, identify, distinguish, break down, isolate elements given in

experience, generalize them (i.e. we expect them even when we notice changes in
the external environment), build up new wholes. These actions are not arbitrary –
at least insofar as our object is to increase our knowledge and not to fool around.
Certain practical goals give us an additional sense of orientation. Among many
possible mental creations only those attain and retain the status of concepts that
can serve as a means to attain these goals.

The first, rudimentary concepts arise primarily through identifying the invariant
elements in our experience and assuming that they will remain invariant even
during the transformation of external conditions. Here we still have not removed
ourselves too far from experience. The only new factor is the separation of certain
experiential elements from their context and the assumption that we will re-
experience them on certain occasions. Once we develop a certain basic stock of
concepts, we are able to increasingly manifest our freedom and creativity. By
means of synthesis we build sets of experiential elements that we never actually
experienced. Then we introduce distinctions, and, divide them into subsets, which
in turn manifest themselves either as new wholes or as components to integrate
into new wholes. In this manner, the more we move away from the concepts
encountered in everyday life toward concepts utilized by specialized experts, the
less point there is in referring to the content of concepts as a mere reflection. If
even the most elementary. given in experience is the result of the action not just of
external stimuli but also of our activity by which the quality of the observed object
is partially modified, then for higher concepts one may justifiably say that they are
in the first place instruments of cognition and of the attainment of certain practical
goals and that only a posteriori – after their utilization – one knows whether and to
what extent there are elements or reflection in their content.

It is only on the basis of such understanding of concepts that one may explain how
a concept may be rejected and what it is in it that is rejected (if not direct
experience). What is rejected are the hypothetical elements introduced by our
mental action.

If a sociologist suggests that white-collar employees be considered a special social

class, he does so after having identified certain members of society with respect to
their capacity as intellectual workers who follow the orders of those who pay them.
All the facts of experience he has taken into account are certainly correct, but one
may argue whether it is worthwhile to construct the concepts of classes on the basis
of the characteristics he has used (instead of others such as: share in the
distribution of society’s surplus product, property rights with respect to means of
production, decision-making power, the degree of alienation of labor, etc.). One
justifies a specific class identification by applying the resulting concept in order to
classify social strata in various societies. We may notice that the empirical facts
(about people’s behavior, joint activities, contact, marriage, mutual conflicts) point
to a classification of people different from the classification resulting from the
concepts we are utilizing in the given case. This would mean that in concentrating
upon one characteristic we have lost sight of essential differences with respect to
other characteristics as if we were to classify fish and whales in the same group
because they both swim, birds and bats together because they both fly, and men
and gorillas in the same category because they walk upright. There are greater
differences and contrasts in the various forms of behavior between the lower
orders of white-collar employees (administrative workers, teachers) and the big
technical bureaucracy or the heights of the state apparatus, then there are between
the former and workers and the latter and capitalists. The hypothetical element in
the concept “white collar employees’ is the assumption that the people referred to
by the term form a homogenous social grouping (class) because they possess
certain identical properties. A revision of the concept does not challenge the
empirical facts, but eliminates the adopted criterion of classification.

There are even more hypothetical elements in our synthetic concepts such as the
various physical models that serve to illustrate the results of abstract,
mathematical thinking. When Rutherford and Bohr derived the first models of the
atom, they were unable to explain certain experiential data obtained by spectral
analysis of the radiation of certain chemical elements except by analogy with the
structure of the solar system. Their models were the result of synthesis, and the
hypothetical factor in them – the flight of thought into the unknown in order to
explain a known given of experience – was the conception of electrons as a sort of
tiny balls revolving around nuclei in orbits, comparable to those of the planets.

The conceptual constancy under various specific conditions is attained by a kind of

extrapolation of regularities observed in a series of successive states. When we
consider the identical items we have abstracted from previous experiences we
assume that they will continue to repeat in the future, without regard to
transformations of medium and given conditions. Thus, for example, the history of
capitalism from the July Revolution of 1848 to World War II shows that in most
societies workers have had to resort to force in order to free themselves from
exploitation and implement a classless society. Furthermore, the entire history of
class society has shown that never in history have the exploiters voluntarily
renounced their privileges. Proceeding from that experience the mind naturally
engages in extrapolation. The concept of socialist revolution as exclusively violent
and armed is formulated. It is assumed that even under changed conditions in
capitalism it would not be realistic to expect capitalists ever to voluntarily
renounce their power and profits. This hypothesis was justified with respect to
available evidence at the time when it was formulated. But new developments
bring about experiences which indicate the lack of the absolute validity of previous
extrapolations. Technological development and various economic and political
difficulties (depressions and wars) lead to an increasing concentration of power in
the hands of a new social stratum – the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy manifests
itself as a partial regulator of the conflicts that previously could be resolved only
by resort to force. Under the pressure of the working class it makes economic and
political concessions that capitalists themselves probably would never have made.
A significant portion of the surplus profit that in previous conditions would
probably have gone to the bourgeoisie now passes (in the form of increased wages,
social insurance, reduced unemployment, etc.) into the hands of the class that
created it. The working class also obtains greater political rights, so that in some
advanced countries there is the prospect of an evolutionary transformation of
capitalist society.

New experience calls for the revision of the hypothetical elements in the previous
concept of socialist revolution. What remains essential in it is the qualitative
transformation of capitalism toward the construction of classless society.

Such modifications and revisions of the content of concepts are unexplainable if a

concept is empirically reduced to mere experience (for new experience did not
deny old experience). This is similarly the case if a concept is understood as a mere
reflection, for again the negation of a concept does not mean the negation of those
elements of it that were truly a reflection of reality.

***

One may conclude the following on the basis of the foregoing discussion of
concepts:

1. Every concept contains certain constant elements of objective, social experience.

2. On the ground of such given elements, which we have abstracted from their
immediate experiential context, one builds concepts as more or less permanent
forms of consciousness by means of the mental operations of comparison,
identification and differentiation, analysis and synthesis, and abstraction and
generalization.

3. With such operations we supplement the given empirical elements in concepts

with hypothetical elements, by means of which we postulate the constancy of
experience in the context of a changing external environment as well as orderly
alteration of experience under altered conditions.

4. Accordingly, every concept serves as an instrument to predict experience in the

future and to select and classify that experience.

5. In this way all concepts in at least an indirect way, are a means to achieve
certain practical goals.

Mihailo Marković 1968

Marx and Critical Scientific Thought

Written: 1968;
Source: The Autodidact Project;
First Published: Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought. Marx et la Pensée
Scientifique Contemporaine (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), pp. 155-67. Papers from
the Symposium on the Role of Karl Marx in the Development of Contemporary
Scientific Thought, 1968, in Paris;
Transcribed: Ralph Dumain.

Marx developed a theory which is both scientific and critical. However, in most
interpretations and further developments of his thought either one or the other of
these two essential characteristics has invariably been overlooked. Among those
who speak in the name of Marx or consider themselves his intellectual followers
some accept only his radical criticism of the society of his time, some lay emphasis
only on his contribution to positive scientific knowledge about contemporary social
structures and processes.

To the former group belong, on the one hand, various apologists of post-capitalist
society who develop Marxism as an ideology, and, on the other hand, those
romantic humanists who consider positive knowledge a form of intellectual
subordination to the given social framework, and who are ready to accept only the
anthropological ideas of the young Marx.

To the latter group belong all those scientists who appreciate Marx’s enormous
contribution to modern social science, but who fail to realize that what
fundamentally distinguishes Marx’s views from those of Comte, Mill, Ricardo and
other classical social scientists, as well as from those of modern positivists, is his
constant radical criticism of both existing theory and existing forms of social
reality.

The failure of most contemporary interpreters of Marx to grasp one of the basic
novelties of his doctrine has very deep roots in the intellectual climate of our time
and can be explained only by taking into account some of the fundamental
divisions and polarizations in contemporary theoretical thinking.

I. – The development of science and philosophy in the twentieth century has been
decisively influenced by the following three factors: (1) the accelerated growth of
scientific knowledge, which gave rise to a new technological revolution
characterized by automation, use of huge new sources of energy and new exact
methods of management; (2) the discovery of the dark irrational side of human
nature through psychoanalysis, anthropological investigations of primitive
cultures, surrealism and other trends of modern arts, and, above all, through
unheard of mass eruptions of brutality from the beginning of World War I up to
the present day; (3) the beginning of a process whereby existing forms of class
society are destructuralized, and the rapidly increasing role of ideology and
politics.

(1) As the result of a rapid technological development and of an increasing division

of work in modern industrial society, the rationality of science has gradually been
reduced to the narrow technological rationality of experts, interested only in
promoting and conveying highly specialized positive knowledge. In an effort to free
itself from the domination of theology and mythology, modern science has always
tended to dismiss unverifiable theoretical generalizations and value-judgments. As
a consequence, a spiritual vacuum was created, which, under the given historical
conditions, could be filled only by faith in power, faith in success of all kinds. This
philosophy of success, this obsession with the efficiency of means, followed by an
almost total lack of interest in the problem of rationality and humanity of goals,
are the essential characteristics of the spiritual climate of contemporary industrial
society.

By now it has become quite clear that, while increasing power over nature,
material wealth, and control over some blind forces of history, while creating new
historical opportunities for human emancipation, the material form of positive
science, industry has neglected many essential human needs, and has multiplied
the possibilities of human manipulation. The universal penetration of technology
into all forms of social life has been followed by the penetration of a routine and
uniform life-style. Growth of material wealth did not make men happier; data on
suicide, alcoholism, mental illness, juvenile delinquency, etc., even indicate a
positive correlation between the degree of technological development and social
pathological phenomena.

Obviously, positive science and technology set off unpredicted and uncontrollable
social processes. The scientist who does not care about the broader social context
of his inquiry loses all control over the product of his work. The history of the
creation and use of nuclear weapons is a drastic example. Another one is the abuse
of science for ideological purposes. The most effective and, therefore, most
dangerous propaganda is not that which is based on obvious untruths, but that
which, in order to rationalize the interests of privileged social groups, uses partial
truths established by science.

Science would be helpless against such abuses if it were atomized, unintegrated,

uninterested in the problems of wholes, and neutral with regard to such general
human values as emancipation, solidarity, development, production according to
the “laws of beauty,” disalienation, etc.

However, the most influential philosophy in contemporary science is positivism,

according to which the sole function of science is to describe and explain what
there is and, if at least some laws are known, to extrapolate what there will
probably be. All evaluation in terms of needs, feelings, ideals, in terms of ethical,
aesthetic and other standards, are considered basically irrational and, from the
scientific point of view, pointless. The only function of science, then, is to
investigate the most adequate means for the ends which have been determined by
others. In this way, science loses its power to supersede the existing forms of
historical reality and to project new, essentially different and more humane
historical possibilities. By its indifference towards goals it only leads to an abstract
growth of power, and to a better adjustment within a given framework of social
life. The framework itself remains unchallenged. Thus, behind this apparent
neutrality and absence of any value orientation one discovers an implicit
conservative orientation. Even a passive resistance to the reduction of science to a
mere servant of ideology and politics is acceptable to the ruling elite, because pure,
positive, unintegrated knowledge can always be interpreted and used in some
profitable way: ultimately society would become devoid of its critical
self-consciousness.

(2) Nowadays, positivism and other variants of philosophical intellectualism,

conformism and utilitarianism are facing strong opposition from all those
philosophers, writers and artists who prefer “the logic of heart” to “the logic of
reason,” and who rebel against the prospect of an impersonal inauthentic life in an
affluent mass society of the future. They see that power and material wealth in
themselves do not help man to overcome his anxiety, his loneliness, his perplexity,
boredom, uprootedness, his spiritual and emotional poverty. They see that new
experiences in political life, modern art, and science are signs of a general lack of
order and stability in the world, and of a basic human irrationality. Thus they
reinforce the feeling that from all the successes of positive sciences and technology
has emerged a fragile, unreasonable and suicidal society.

As a reaction against the spirit of the Enlightenment (which has to some extent
survived in the form of positivism), a powerful anti-Enlightenment attitude is
gaining ground among intellectuals. The world does not make sense, there is no
rational pattern by which the individual can hope to master it, no causal
explanation which would allow him to predict the future. There is no
determination and progress in history; the history of civilization is only the history
of growing human estrangement and self-deception. Human existence is absurd.
Man, who is confronted with a universe in which there is pure contingency, and
who lacks any stable internal structure, lives a meaningless life filled with dread,
guilt, and despair. There are no reasons to believe that man is basically good; evil
is a permanent possibility in his existence.

Such an anti-positivist and anti-Enlightenment philosophy (which has been most

consistently expressed in Lebensphilosophie and various forms of existentialism) is
clearly critical, and concerned with the problems of individual existence. However,
this kind of rebellion against “given” and “existing” tends to be as immediate as
possible and to avoid any mediation by positive knowledge and logic. The basic
idea of this obviously anti-rationalist form of criticism is the following: to rely on
empirical science already means to be caught up within the framework of the given
present reality. On the other hand, as neither the historical process nor the human
being has any definite structure preceding existence, all general knowledge is
pointless. Nothing about the present can be inferred from the past, nor can the
future be determined on the basis of knowledge of the present. All possibilities are
open. Freedom of projection is unlimited.

This kind of romantic rebellious criticism is entirely powerless. Postulated absolute

freedom is only freedom of thought; as Hegel already showed in Phenomenologie
des Geistes, it is the imagined freedom of a slave. Real criticism must start with the
discovery of concrete practical forms of slavery, with the examination of human
bonds and real, practical possibilities of liberation. Without such concrete and
practical examination (which requires the use of all relevant social knowledge and
the application of scientific methods), criticism is only an alienated form of
disalienation.

(3) In an historical epoch of fundamental social transformation a theory which

expresses the needs and acceptable programs of action of powerful social forces
becomes a decisive historical determinant.

The theory of Marx has been playing such a revolutionary role throughout the
historical epoch of human emancipation from alienated labor. It has been and still
is the theoretical basis for every contemporary form of active and militant
humanism.

The critical thought of Marx is the fullest and, historically, the most developed
expression of human rationality. It contains, in a dialectically superseded form, the
essence of ancient Greek theoria: a rational knowledge of the world’s structure,
with which man can change the world and determine his own life. Hegel’s
dialectical reasoning is already a creative negation of the Greek notion of ratio and
theory, in which the contradictions between static, rational thinking and irrational
dynamics, between positive assertion and abstract negation are superseded
(aufgehoben). The theory and method of Marx is a decisive step further in the
process of totalization and concretization of dialectical reasoning: it embraces not
only change in general but also, in particular, the human, historical form of
change: praxis. The dialectic of Marx raises the question of rationality, and not
only the rationality of the individual, but also that of society as a whole, not only
rationality within a given closed system, but also that of the system’s very limits,
not only rationality of praxis as thinking but also of praxis as material activity, as a
mode of real life, in space and time. There is dialectical reasoning in history only in
the extent to which it creates a reasonable reality.
This theoretico-practical conception of man and human history has not been
further developed by Marx’s followers in its totality; rather it has been divided up
into its component parts: various branches of social science, philosophical
anthropology, dialectics, philosophy of history, conception of proletarian
revolution and socialism as a concrete program of practical action, etc.

In socialist society, as in capitalist society, science that had no dialectic and

humanist philosophy incorporated in its telos, in all its assumptions, criteria and
methods of inquiry, developed as partial, positive, expert knowledge, which
informs about the given but does not seek to discover its essential inner limitations
and overcome them. The connection with philosophy remained doubly external:
first, because this science assimilated the principles of Marxism in a fixed,
completed form as something given, obligatory, imposed by authority, abstract,
torn out of context, simplified, vulgarized; second, because these principles
externally applied do not live the life of science, are not subject to the process of
normal critical testing, reexamining, revising, but become dogmas of a fixed
doctrine.

That is why Marxist philosophy became increasingly abstract, powerless,

conservative. That part of it which pretended to be a Weltanschauung looked more
and more like a boring, old-fashioned, primitive Naturphilosophie, and the other
part, which was supposed to state the general principles for interpreting social
phenomena and revolutionary action, assumed increasingly the character of
pragmatic apologetics, expected to serve as a foundation for ideology, and for the
justification of past and present policies.

This temporary degeneration was the consequence of several important

circumstances:

– Marxist theory became the official ideological doctrine of victorious labor

movements;

– revolutions had unexpected success just in those underdeveloped countries of

East Europe and Asia where, in addition to socialist objectives, the tasks of a
previous primitive accumulation, industrialization, and urbanization had to be
accomplished;

– it was necessary, under such conditions, to give priority to accelerated

technological development, to establish a centralized system and to impose an
authoritarian structure on all thinking and social behavior.

Thus a return to and reinterpretation of Marx’s thought is needed, in order to

restore and to further develop his critical method.

II. – The essential theoretical and methodological novelty of Marx’s conception of

science is constituted by the following features:

1) By moving in the research process from unanalyzed concrete phenomena

(population, wealth, etc.) to abstract universals (commodity, labor, money, capital,
surplus-value, etc.) and from these back to analyzed empirico-theoretical concrete
phenomena, Marx succeeds in overcoming the traditional dualism between the
empirical and the rational (speculative) approach. There is no doubt that he tries
to support each of his contentions by as ample evidence as possible; all his major
works have been preceded by years of studying data and establishing facts. But, in
sharp contrast to empiricism, Marx’s science neither begins with brute facts nor
remains satisfied with simple inductive generalizations from them. His real
starting position is a philosophical vision and a thorough critical study of all
preceding relevant knowledge. Initial evidence is only a necessary part of the
background against which he builds up a whole network of abstract scientific
concepts, endowed with an impressive explanatory power. This elaboration of a
new conceptual apparatus (new not so much in the sense of introducing new
terminology as in the sense of giving new meanings to already existing terms) is the
most important and most creative part of Marx’s scientific work.

(2) According to Marx, science should be primarily concerned not with the
description of details and explanation of isolated phenomena, but with the study of
whole structures, of social situations taken in their totality. That is why Marx’s
new science does not know any sharp division into branches and disciplines. Das
Kapital belongs not only to economics but also to sociology, law, political science,
history, and philosophy. However, although the notion of totality plays an
overwhelming role in the methodology of Marx, his approach is not purely
synthetical. Marx knew that any attempt to grasp totalities directly, without
analytical mediation, leads to myth and ideology. Therefore, a necessary phase of
his method is the analytic breakdown of initial, directly grasped wholes into their
components, which in the final stages of inquiry have to be brought back into
various relations with other components, and conceived only as moments within a
complex structure.

(3) Those variants of contemporary Marxist humanism which are mainly

interested in the diachronic aspects of social formations, and structuralism, which
pays attention only to their synchronic aspects, are degenerated and one-sided
developments of certain essential moments of Marx’s method. In Marx’s new
science these moments are inseparable. A totality cannot be fully understood
without taking into account the place it occupies in history. A system is meaningful
only as a crystallization of the past forms of human practice and with respect to
historically possible futures. On the other hand, what is historically possible cannot
be grasped without taking into account determining structural characteristics of
the whole given situation. Marx discovered self-destructive forces within the very
structure of the capitalist system; without establishing the law of decreasing
average rate of profit and other laws of capitalist economy, he would not have been
able to point out the historical possibility that capitalist society will disappear. But
on the other hand, had he not had a profound sense of history, had he approached
capitalist society in the same ahistorical way as Smith, Ricardo and other
bourgeois economists – as the permanent, natural structure of human society, he
would hardly have been able to look for and find all those structural features
which determine both the relative stability and ultimate transformation of the
whole system.

(4) A true sense of history implies a critical attitude, not only towards all rival
theories but also towards the examined society. Marx’s dialectics is essentially a
method of critique and of revolutionary practice. He himself had expressed this
fundamental characteristic of his method by saying that dialectics arouses the
anger and horror of the bourgeoisie, because it introduces into a positive
understanding of existing states, the understanding of the negation of the
bourgeoisie, of its necessary destruction; because it conceives every existing form in
its change, therefore as something in transition; because it does not let anything be
imposed upon it, and because it is fundamentally critical and revolutionary. [1] This
thought was expressed much earlier in Theses on Feuerbach: the basic weakness of
traditional materialism was to construe reality only as object, not as praxis. This
praxis is critical and revolutionary; man is not just the product of social
conditions, but the being who can change these conditions. He lives in a world full
of contradictions, but he can resolve and practically remove them. The main
objective of philosophical criticism should be the “real essence” of man; however,
this essence is not something ahistorical and unchangeable, but the totality of social
relationships. In short, what really matters is not just the explanation of, but also
the change of the world.

What must follow from such activistic assumptions is a new conception of the
function of science. According to this conception, science does not only provide
positive knowledge but also develops critical self-consciousness. It does not only
describe and explain the historical situation but also evaluates it and shows the
way out. It does not only discover laws and establish what are the possibilities and
probabilities of the future, it also indicates which possibilities best correspond to
certain basic human needs. Thus critical scientific thought is not satisfied by
showing how man can best adjust to the prevailing trends of a situation and to the
whole social framework; it expresses a higher level idea of rationality by showing
how man can change the whole framework and adapt it to himself.

Two examples would suffice to illustrate this conception of critical science.

In his economic writings Marx thoroughly examines structural and functional

characteristics of capitalistic society. He does that in an objective way, in
accordance with all requirements of the scientific method of his time. But a critical
anthropological standpoint is always present: man is a “generic being,” a
potentially free, creative, rational, social being. In relation to what man could
already be, how he could already live in a highly productive and integrated
industrialized society, Marx shows how utterly limited and crippled man in fact is
in a system in which he is reduced to his working power, in which his working
power is being bought as a thing, and regarded not as creative power, but as a
mere quantity of energy which can be efficiently objectified and marketed with a
good profit. The message of Marx’s theory is not that the worker could better
adjust to the situation by demanding a higher price for his labor power – insofar as
his labor power is a mere commodity, he already receives the equivalent for it. The
implication of Marx’s theory is that the worker should reject the status of a thing,
of a commodity, and change the whole social framework in which his labor is so
alienated.

Another example. In his criticism of Hegelian philosophy of law, Marx points out
that the general interest of a human community could not be constituted by the
abstract concept of an ideal, rational state. Insofar as in “civil society” there is
bellum omnium contra omnes and each individual and social group pursues only
one or another particular interest, the general interest of a truly human
community has not yet been awakened. The Hegelian state, construed as a moment
of objective spirit, exists only in abstract thought. What exists in reality is alienated
political power beside and above all individual and particular interests. The form
of this alienated political power, which treats society as the simple object of its
activity, is the state and its bureaucracy. Now, Marx’s explanation of the nature of
professional politics, the state and bureaucracy does not lead to the conclusion that
man could be freer if he would simply make the state more democratic or increase
control over bureaucracy. Without disregarding the temporary importance of such
modifications, Marx opens up the prospects of a radical human emancipation by
altogether abolishing the state and political bureaucracy as forms of social
organization. This, according to Marx, is possible if organized labor, the only class
whose ultimate interests coincide with those of mankind as a whole, practically
removes the economic and political monopoly of any particular social group. The
atomized, disintegrated world of the owners of commodities would, in such a way,
be superseded by an integrated community of producers. The state would be
replaced by organs of self-management, i.e. by institutions composed of the true
representatives of the people, who have been elected by a general free vote, who
are immediately responsible to and replaceable by their voters, and who do not
enjoy any privileges for the duties they perform.

III. – The nature of the key concepts in Marx’s anthropology and philosophy of
history best shows the character of his theoretical thought. These concepts are not
only descriptive and explanatory but also value-laden and critical.

Thus Marx’s criticism of the fetishism of commodities in Capital can be understood

only if we bear in mind his assumption of a truly human production, in which man
affirms both himself and the other:

1) by objectifying his individuality and by experiencing his personality as an

objective, sensate power by an immediate awareness that through his activity and
through the use of his product, the needs of all other human being can be satisfied;

2) by mediating between the other and generic human being (his activity become
part of the other’s, whom it has enriched and complemented) so as to allow man to
immediately affirm and fulfill his own generic being.[2]

Alienated labor is labor which lacks these qualities.

In a similar way the concepts of social man, human needs, history, freedom, the
state, capital, communism, etc. always imply a distinction between actual and
possible, between factual and ideal.

Social man is not just the individual who lives together with other individuals, or
who conforms to the given norms of a society. Such a person can be very far from
reaching the level of a social being. On the other hand, a person may be compelled
to live in isolation and still profoundly need others, and carry in his language,
thinking, and feeling all the essential characteristics of generic human being.
In this sense, Marx distinguishes, for example, between mail who regards woman
as “prey and the handmaid of communal lust,” “who is infinitely degraded in such
an existence for himself,” and man whose “natural behavior towards woman has
become human” and “whose needs have become human needs.” This “most
natural, immediate and necessary relationship” shows to what extent man “is, in
his individual existence, at the same time a social being."[3]

Furthermore, history is not just a series of events in time – it presupposes

supersession of “the realm of necessity” and full emancipation of man. That is why
Marx sometimes labelled history of our time as “prehistory."

Freedom never meant for Marx only choice among several possibilities or “the
right to do and perform anything that does not harm others.” Freedom in Marx’s
sense is the ability to self-determine and to rationally control the blind forces of
nature and history. “All emancipation is restoration of the human world and the
relationships among men themselves.” [4]

The state is not just any social organization which directs social processes and takes
care of the order and stability of the society. The typical feature of the state,
according to Marx, is its coercive character as an instrument of the ruling class.
The state is institutionalized alienated power. Thus Marx very definitely
maintained that the labor movement must abolish the state very soon after
successful revolution, and replace it by the associations of workers.

Capital is not only objectified labor, stored up in the form of money or any
particular commodity. It is the objectified labor which at a given level of material
production appropriates surplus value. The objective form of capital conceals and
mystifies a social relationship beyond it; the object mediates between those who
produce and those who rule.

There is no doubt that in both the early and the mature writings the concept of
communism does not only express a possible future social state, but also contains
an evaluation of that state. In Economic and philosophical manuscripts there are
even three different descriptions and evaluations: 1: “crude communism” in which
“the domination of material property looms so large that it aims to destroy
everything that is incapable of being possessed by everyone as private property";
2: communism “(a) still political in nature, (b) with the abolition of the state, yet
still incomplete and influenced by private property, that is, by the alienation of
man"; 3: communism “as the positive abolition of private property, and of human
self-alienation.” [5] But even when, in The German ideology, Marx denies that
communism is “an ideal to which reality will have to adjust, he says, we call
communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs.” [6]
Here the adjective “real” clearly is a value term.

Therefore any attempt to determine the nature of Marx’s scientific thought should
lead to the conclusion that it is both knowledge and a vision of the future. As
knowledge it is vastly different from the idea of knowledge propounded in any
variant of empiricist philosophy, because for Marx, our future project determines
the sense of everything in the present and the past, and this preliminary vision of
the future is more an expression of revolt than it is a simple extrapolation of the
present trends determined in an empirical way. And still, no matter how bold and
pervaded by passion is this vision of the future, it is not merely an arbitrary dream
or a utopian hope. The future is not a logical inference from the present, it is not
the result of a prediction made according to the methodological standards of
empirical science, nor is it divorced from the present and the past. At the
beginning of inquiry, it is a relatively a priori projection (based more on preceding
theory than on empirical data). But when, at the end of inquiry, it has been shown
that the preliminary vision has been confirmed by all available evidence about
actual trends in the present reality, then a posteriori, this vision of the future
becomes meaningful knowledge.

This dialectic between the future and the present, the possible and the actual,
philosophy and science, value and fact, a priori and a posteriori, criticism and
description, is perhaps the essential methodological contribution of Marx to
contemporary science – one which so far has not been sufficiently taken into
account, even by the followers of Marx themselves.

IV. – In order to clarify and further elaborate our contention about the critical
character of Marx’s scientific thought, we should add the following qualifications:

1. Criticism is present in all Marx’s works and at all stages of his intellectual
development, To make a sharp distinction between the value-laden humanist
utopia of the young Marx and the value-free scientific structuralism of the mature
Marx would be a grave error, indicating a superficial study of his work. To be
sure, there are some important differences in methodology, in richness, and
concreteness of the conceptual apparatus used, in the extent to which theory is
supported by empirical evidence. However, the fundamental critical position
remains the same. There is often only a change of vocabulary, or a substitution of
specific terms applicable to capitalistic society for general terms applicable to
society in general. For example, what Marx calls “alienated labor” in his early
writings (e.g. in Economic and philosophical manuscripts) will, in Capital, be called
“the world of commodities.” Or, in his criticism of Hegel’s philosophy of the state
Marx says that “the abolition of bureaucracy will be possible when general interest
becomes a reality” and “particular interest really becomes general interest"; in
Capital and in his analysis of the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx is much
more concrete and explicit: associated producers will do away with the state and
take the control over exchange with nature into their own hands.

2. Marxist criticism is radical although not destructive in a nihilistic sense.

Without understanding the Hegelian concept of aufheben, the nature of this
criticism can hardly be grasped.

In spite of the differences between Hegel’s and Marx’s methods, they both
maintain that the idea of dialectical negation contains both a moment of
discontinuity and a moment of continuity: a moment of discontinuity insofar as the
given cannot be accepted as it is (as truth in Hegel’s logic, as satisfactory human
reality in Marx’s interpretation of history), a moment of continuity insofar as a
component of the given must be conserved as the basis for further development – it
is only the inner limitation which must be overcome.
Most Marxists are not quite clear about the nature of Marxist criticism, but this is
not surprising, considering how few have tried to interpret him in the context of
the whole intellectual tradition to which he belongs. However, a good deal of
misunderstanding is of an ideological character. Thus, in order to develop a
militant optimism or to express a natural revolt against market economy
tendencies in underdeveloped socialist countries, some Marxists tend to
underestimate the importance of those forms of civilization, of political democracy,
of educational and welfare institutions which have been developed in Western
industrial society. Marx took into account the possibility of such a primitive
negation of private property and called it “crude” and “unreflective” communism,
which “negates the personality of man in every sphere,” “sets up universal envy
and levelling down,” “negates in an abstract way the whole world of culture and
civilization,” and constitutes a regression to the “unnatural simplicity of the poor
wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not
yet even attained it.” [7] Thus, there can hardly be any doubt that, for Marx, a true
negation of class society and alienated labor is possible only at a high level of
historical development.

Such a negation presupposes an abundance of material goods, various civilized

patterns of human behavior (which arise as scarcity is overcome), and, most
important of all, an individual who, among other things, has overcome at least the
elementary, rudest forms of greed for material objects.

In this respect, some Marxists are overly-radical critics, who fail to realize that
certain features of advanced capitalism are necessary conditions for any higher
forms of society. But these same Marxists, in some other essential respects, give the
impression of being reformers; they remain quite satisfied with certain initial
changes, and all too soon become interested in preserving the status quo, rather
than in persisting in their revolutionary role, and striving for further and deeper
structural changes.

What present day socialism offers as a practical solution to the fundamental

problems of alienated labor and political alienation is far from constituting truly
radical criticism, or from really superseding the alienation of capitalist society.

As we have said, the main source of exploitation and of all other aspects of
economic alienation lies in the rule of objectified, stored-up labor over living
labor.[8] The social group disposing of stored-up labor is able to appropriate
surplus value. The specific historical form of this structure in Marx’s time was the
disposal of capital on the grounds of private ownership of the means of production:
however, private property is not the cause but the effect of alienated labor.
Abolition of the private ownership of the means of production is only abolition of
one possible specific form of the rule of dead labor over living labor. The general
structure remains if there is any other social group such as, for example,
bureaucracy, which retains monopoly on decision making concerning the disposal
of accumulated and objectified labor. Therefore, only such criticism might be
considered radical and truly revolutionary which puts a definitive end to
exploitation and which aims at creating conditions in which associate producers
themselves will dispose of the products of their labor.
Another example. If the state, as such, is historically a form of alienated political
power, the abolition of the bourgeois state is only an important step in the process
of disalienation of politics. This step, according to Marx, (and Lenin in State and
revolution) must be followed by a transition period of gradually withering away of
any coercive state apparatus. Unless such an apparatus is replaced by an entirely
different social organization, all the symptoms of political alienation, such as
apathy, distrust, lust for power, need for charismatic leadership and for ideological
rationalization, use of all available techniques for manipulating masses, etc. will be
reproduced.

Insofar as in man there is a profound Faustian need to rebel against any

permanent, historically-determined limitations in nature, in society and in himself,
he will strive to supersede such limitations, to develop further his human world
and his own nature. Such an activistic attitude towards the world will always need
a philosophical and scientific thought which would constitute a bold radical
criticism of existing reality.

Notes

1. K. Marx, Capital, Afterword to the second German edition.

2. K. Marx and F. Engels, Gesamtausgabe, I, vol. 3, Berlin, Marx-Engels Verlag,

1929-1932, p. 546.

3. E. Fromm, Marx’s concept of man, with a translation from Marx’s economic and
philosophical manuscripts, New York, Ungar, 1961, pp. 126-127.

4. K. Marx, “On the Jewish question,” in: L. Easton (ed.), Writings of the young
Marx on philosophy and society, New York, Doubleday, 1967.

5. Marx, Economic and philosophical manuscripts, op. cit., p. 127.

6. Marx, “German ideology,” in. Easton (ed.), op. cit., p. 426.

7. Marx, Economic and philosophical manuscripts, op. cit., p. 125.

8. K. Marx and F. Engels, Archiv, Moscow, Marx-Engels Institute, 1933, p. 68.

Mihailo Markovic 1981

New Forms of Democracy in Socialism

Source: Praxis International, April 1981.

An essential part of the right-wing ideological counteroffensive in the 1970’s has

been an attempt to prove that socialism is incompatible with democracy, that
socialism cannot be but authoritarian, and that democracy cannot but have
traditional parliamentary form.

Views of this kind cannot be proven – as anyone knows who understands the
methodology of social sciences. But they have, unfortunately, been well supported
by evidence about post-revolutionary developments in many countries. They have
impressed all those intellectuals who always prefer to swim with the mainstream.
There is a definite “sliding toward the right,” and a flood of texts have appeared
repeating that “socialism has lost any historical significance,” and that, after all,
“socialism is Gulag.”

The fact is that revolutions claiming to be socialist have so far either produced
gulags, or have lost momentum halfway toward new democratic forms. That
suffices to necessitate undertaking a critical re-examination of the theory of
socialist revolution and a re-appraisal of the status of societies claiming to be
socialist. But it does not suffice to make generalizations of universal and epochal
significance. On the basis of experiences with some rural, patriarchal societies –
despotically governed over centuries – nothing can be concluded about the whole
world and especially about future possibilities of the most developed countries.

A comparable carelessness of thought characterizes much of the contemporary

debate about Marx’s concept of a “transition period.” On the one hand, apologists
of bureaucratic tyranny use some ambiguous statements of Marx in order to make
that tyranny pass for the historically highest, most developed form of democracy.[1]
Every hitherto existing form of democracy was in fact a dictatorship of the
minority, whereas the new “proletarian” state is, allegedly, a dictatorship of the
majority – which can be demonstrated by the empirical fact that members of the
Soviets have invariably been elected by the 99.99% majority! This way of
reasoning has now become ridiculous everywhere. But an apparently totally
opposite approach deserves the same destiny. When French “new” philosophers,
among others, identify Marxism with Gulag, they seem to believe that there is only
one possible interpretation of a theory which then alone has the power to produce
a social reality. It is beyond the dignity of intellectual work to have to teach them
that a social phenomenon has many causes and that an abstract theory allows
many interpretations.

As a matter of fact, it can be shown that Marx’s basic philosophical ideas on

human emancipation and praxis are incompatible with any state monopoly and
party rule, and that a true socialization of the means of production requires a true
participation of all citizens in social decision-making. Our next problem is under
what historical conditions is this possible. The basic purpose of this paper is,
however, to explore more in detail the new democratic forms that can be projected
on the basis of contemporary socialist experiences.

1. The theoretical basis of the idea of democratic socialism

Existing forms of bourgeois democracy allow for egoistic man who aspires toward
more wealthy personal success and power, and who is free to the extent that no
social forces block the realization of those private aims. This form of democracy is
reduced to the political sphere of society; in the civil sphere (of economy, culture
and everyday life) the “negative” freedom of possessive individualism goes
together with domination and glaring social inequalities. But even in political
society this form of democracy is rather limited. It is certainly the necessary
ground on which any further emancipation can take place, and one cannot
sufficiently emphasize its importance in a world still largely controlled by
totalitarian forces. However, parliamentary democracy is far from being the
optimal historically possible form of the political organization of an advanced
society. It still allows and makes legitimate a tremendous amount of domination
and heteronomy. This is partly the consequence of the enormous strength of extra-
political powers (direct influence of corporate capital on the government and on
party bosses; lobbying; pressure through large-scale mass-media). It is also the
consequence of its own inner structure. Parliamentary democracy is a permanent
form of the state, the primary function of which is to preserve existing social order.
Whatever inequalities and injustices there are in the civil sphere, the state may
“legitimately” use violence to conserve and perpetuate them; this legitimacy is
ultimately derived from the decisions of the parliament. Parliament as an
institution rests on the principle of party rule. Parties appear as the mediators
between the people and the government. But parties are hierarchical,
authoritarian organizations which inevitably develop ruling oligarchies and which,
in the scramble for power, increasingly try to ideologically manipulate potential
voters. Under such circumstances even the most important and most worthy
democratic forms (free elections and limitation of the mandate, separation of
powers) lose much of their substance.

However, existing forms of “real socialism” destroy civil society altogether instead
of radically democratizing it. Everything that is social has been brought under the
control of the state. Instead of “withering away,” the state has become an all-
embracing, omnipotent force. In such a way, possessive individualism has not been
transcended by a unity of the personal and the communal, but has turned into an
extreme opposite – a false collectivism that, behind the façade of a general social
interest, perpetuates a selfish particular interest of the ruling bureaucracy. The
form of the party has been preserved as the only permissible form of political
organization, with the only historical “advantage” being that a plurality of parties
(which at least offers the opportunity to choose the least evil) is now replaced by
one ruling party which has brought hierarchy, authoritarianism and ideological
manipulation to extreme and absurd forms.

No matter how much possessive individualism and totalitarianism differ, they

share a sceptical view about human potential and especially about a capacity of
ordinary human beings to understand the nature of social needs and the rational
ways to meet them. That is why they both reject the right of the decision-making
power by all citizens, in all aspects of public life; that is why they both need
parties, professional politics and state bureaucracy.

A truly emancipatory philosophy starts from the assumption that each individual,
with all his or her distinctive abilities and needs, is at the same time a social being.
One becomes human only in society; by learning a language, rules of conceptual
thinking and moral norms; by acquiring the cultural heritage of a former
generation. Need for personal freedom goes together with the need to be
recognized and esteemed in the community to which one belongs. Self-realization
has an inner limit in a concern about the well-being of others: in that sense human
freedom is responsible. Far from being a natural condition, egoistic, irresponsible
behaviour may invariably be explained as the consequence of negligent, abusive
treatment in early stages of one’s growth. But if egoism, acquisitiveness and
aggressiveness are not inevitable, genetically determined traits of human nature
but patterns produced by education, then any political philosophy based on the
assumption of egoistic human nature no longer holds ground.

The possibility of new forms of democracy in socialism presupposes a philosophical

conception of man as a being of praxis, i.e., a being capable of free creative activity,
who brings to life the individual’s potential and at the same time satisfies the needs
of others. Under unfavourable historical conditions this potential for praxis is
wasted; this is the general meaning of the various dimensions of alienation. The
whole purpose of the struggle for universal human emancipation is to create
different conditions, different social structures, under which this potential can be
increasingly brought to life.

From the general philosophical assumption of man as a being of praxis, a more

specific principle, relevant for the whole sphere of social decision-making, can be
derived. That is the principle of equal self-determination, which asserts that all
human individuals have a capacity for self-determination and, therefore, should be
equally treated as self-determining beings (who have the capacity to choose
autonomously and rationally among alternative possibilities, to act accordingly,
and to contribute by their action to the determination of the course of historical
events).

The conception of society based on the principle of equal self-determination differs

essentially from either traditional liberalism or bureaucratic collectivism. If each
individual is essentially a social being and has a potential for self- determination,
then any division of human beings into dominating ruling subjects and dominated
ruled objects is untenable, whether in politics or in economy and culture. This
entails three conclusions relevant for our discussion:

First, the means of production and means of other socially necessary activities
must not remain the monopoly of any particular social group (bourgeoisie,
bureaucracy, technocracy); they ought to be socialized (not turned into the
property of the state).

Second, the realm of democracy is not only the political sphere but the whole
sphere of public life – production, education, scientific research, cultural activities,
health service, etc. This is possible under the conditions of a thorough
decentralization. The need to coordinate some social activities does not restore
centralism but leads to federalism.

Third, since political (in contrast to technical) dimensions of social decision-

making do not require specialized skills but, rather, reason, responsibility,
personal integrity, wisdom and understanding of social needs – and these are
general capacities of human individuals independent of their profession – there is
no need for any concentration of power in the hands of professional politicians. A
form of democracy without professional politics is councils-democracy or self-
government.

2. Conditions of the historical possibility of democratic socialism.

In all socialist revolutions thus far – in the Paris Commune, in the 1905 and 1917
Russian Revolutions, in Yugoslavia and China and elsewhere – there was a
spontaneous tendency to create new forms of democracy, e.g., councils, Soviets,
people’s committees. Invariably those new self-governing organs lost their power
and at best remained a facade useful for ideological purposes. In one case,
Yugoslavia, they were brought back to life after the conflict with Stalinist statism,
and they continued to develop by assuming former roles of the state in all spheres
of social life during the subsequent fifteen years. Their further development was
blocked in 1965 when the point was reached where the very central organs of the
state in the federation and federal republics should have been replaced by the self-
governing assemblies.

A causal analysis of this type of failure leads to the following conclusions.

First, spontaneous democratic tendencies in all those countries where socialist

revolutions were attempted for the first time in history met insurmountable
cultural and psychological barriers: in the preceding authoritarian political
tradition; in the possessive individualism of an insecure petty bourgeoisie and
uprooted, urbanized peasants; in the patriarchal family reproducing master-slave
relations among sexes and generations; finally, in the nationalistic divisiveness
flaring up in ever new frictions and clashes among socialist forces themselves.

Second, these cultural and psychological constraints are the historical product of
retarded and abortive bourgeois development. General social backwardness
constrains socialist development not only in the sense that all of the best human
resources have to be engaged in the typical tasks of the bourgeois revolution (such
as industrialization and urbanization), but also in the sense that those human
resources are extremely limited, not easily reproducible and are likely to be
deformed after a prolonged period of staying in power.

Third, this likelihood of deformation was greatly increased owing to the fact that
the most conscious socialist forces were organized in an essentially feudal,
hierarchical and elitist way. They hardly ever set an example of a self-
determining, egalitarian community and remained obsessed with the preservation
of power. Instead of coping successfully with all those overwhelming impediments,
they themselves began to reproduce them: seeing a possible ally in a rising new
middle class; cultivating patriarchal loyalty rather than socialist solidarity; using
nationalist resentments and frictions in order to prevent internal dissent and to
consolidate their authority. All of this is a formidable lesson.

We now know that authoritarian political organizations cannot produce

democratic socialism, even when they consciously aspire to it, and even when they
are imbued with true revolutionary zeal. Democratic socialism can be brought to
life only by broad, pluralistic, democratic movements. Marx stated that explicitly
as early as 1847:
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class
parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as
a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to
shape and mould the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this
only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries,
they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat,
independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the
struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they
always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.[2]

The very possibility of such a movement presupposes the existence of a fairly

democratic order in which civil liberties, no matter how formal, are truly
respected. This in its turn presupposes a rather high level of general material and
cultural development. Only on the ground of an already achieved bourgeois
democratic revolution, of an already industrialized and urbanized civil society, is it
really possible both to socialize the means of production and to turn government
into self-government. Productivity of work must reach a point where it would be
possible both to satisfy the elementary needs of all individuals and to reduce
socially obligatory working hours to a level which will allow everybody truly to
participate in communal activities and decision-making processes. These
conditions exist today in all highly developed industrial countries.

It does not follow that the rest of the world has to wait in order to pass through all
those stages of capitalist development which took place in Western Europe and the
United States. The days of bourgeois revolutionary liberalism and of
entrepreneurial capitalism are over. What rules now in many countries of the
Third World is a blend of parasitic bourgeoisie and feudal aristocracy which needs
the most brutal repressive force and the support of at least one superpower in
order to survive. Organizations and revolutions of the Leninist type may be one of
the ways to reduce the suffering of the masses of the population and to open the
road of an accelerated development. All kinds of mixed societies will emerge on
that road. Some of them will end up in bureaucratic collectivism; some of them
might eventually generate conditions which are necessary for a transition towards
democratic socialism.

Conceptual clarity about what democratic socialism really is helps to provide a

long range sense of direction. We can no longer afford to believe that there is an
inevitable progress and that socialism is the necessary consequence of the dialectic
of history. We know now that nothing is guaranteed, that the strongest human
commitment to one among the alternatives of a given framework decides the
course of history, and that we can not hope to make proper choices without such a
long-range project. However, clarity about the nature of that project helps to
demystify ideological claims intended to legitimate bureaucratic authority in
various abortive or incomplete revolutions.

Three crucial issues need to be clarified:

(1) How is it possible to socialize the means of work without creating new organs of
alienated power?

(2) How is it possible to preserve a necessary level of coordination and conscious

direction in a decentralized society?

(3) How is it possible to turn government into self-government?

3. Democratic socialization of the means of work.

There is an enormous confusion in the use of the term “socialism.” In the USA it is
highly suspect; however, in Western Europe it is so respectable that even those
ruling parties claim to be “socialist” which do not ever intend to transform
corporate property. Yet the entire Eastern European camp labels itself “real
existing socialism” although the means of production are there nationalized and
turned into state property rather than really socialized.

In both cases workers remain wage-laborers. In one case they may have more civil
rights – to express themselves freely, to organize, demonstrate, strike, struggle for
the improvement of wages and labor conditions. In the other case they may have
more social rights – to employment, health service, retirement. But their social
position is the same. They are engaged in a purely instrumental, mechanical work;
have no say about the organization and planning; they do not decide about the
distribution of the results of their work. Their social emancipation requires,
therefore, the abolition of both private and state ownership of the means of work;
these must be socialized.

There are two meanings to the concept of socialization in this context. In the first
sense, socialization of the means of production is the transformation of private
property into common social property. To be common social property means: (a)
to belong to the society as a whole without anybody’s right to sell it or to bequeath
it; (b) to be put at the disposal of a working community which could then share the
income from the results of work with the rest of society in order to cover both
individual and collective social needs. Socialization in this strong sense is relevant
to all those larger enterprises where the process of production has already been
social but where the appropriation of the product has been private. The
justification for the socialization of the means of production is that those means
were actually produced by social work, by the accumulated, unpaid surplus work
of hired producers over a long period of time.

There is another, weaker sense of socialization applicable in those cases where an

individual has acquired some property by saving from his or her own past work,
without any exploitation of other workers. An individual is free to enter into
associations with other producers (cooperatives, collectively owned and managed
small firms). Such associations distribute their income (after they pay their share
for the satisfaction of general social needs) according to the rules they have laid
down.

In both cases what makes socialization a truly democratic act is the effective
introduction of worker’s self-management. The collective of all workers (in small
working communities), or the council composed of worker’s delegates (in large
ones) becomes the highest authority in the enterprise, responsible for the basic
making of decisions regarding all issues of production, distribution and communal
life. It has the right of full control, involving the rights of firing, election and re-
election of the operative management that is responsible for technical decision-
making. The advantage of the management seems to be its skills, access to all
information and leisure necessary for the preparation of decisions.

There is always the danger that the technical management can gain control and
reduce the self-governing council to an easily manipulated approval body. But the
council must have the power to create information services and critical study
groups independently and outside of the administration in order to check the data
provided by it. The council must also have the power to request the management to
offer alternative proposals analyzed in terms of their advantages and limitations.
The more workers improve their education, develop a genuine interest in long-
range goals of development, overcome group egoism, and preserve full democratic
control over their own delegates in the worker’s council, the better their chances to
efficiently counteract this technocratic danger.

4. Centralism or Decentralization.

An even more serious problem than technocracy within the socialized working
organization is that of coordination within a large, modern society. Extreme
decentralism, advocated by some classical libertarian thinkers (Godwin, Hodgskin,
Warren, Tucker) and some contemporary ecologists, holds that all big systems are
intrinsically bad and that all those activities that require them (for example, the
production of nuclear power, jet transportation, big cities) ought to be abandoned.
Giving up a part of power over nature would allegedly be a reasonable price to pay
for a reduction of authoritarian social order.

On the one hand, excessive decentralization has a number of shortcomings, such

as:

(1) The absence of necessary coordination leads to disorder, waste of natural

resources, inefficiency. Some important social activities require common natural
and human resources, division of roles and unique direction. These include energy
production, public transportation, large-scale exchange of goods, protection of the
natural environment, production of indispensable raw materials, defense.

(2) A low level of productivity based on small scale technology requires more labor
and yet produces more poverty. Many important human needs can not be met with
small scale technology.

(3) Small scale social organization and reduction of needs makes many rare,
specific human skills redundant. Specialized scientific research, fine arts, high
achievements in athletic skills cannot be supported by small, self-reliant
communities. Hardly any goal can justify a reduction of an already achieved high
level of human creativity.
(4) The inevitable social-psychological consequence of a narrow, provincial
mentality. After bourgeois civilization, with its revolutionary tendency of growing
cosmopolitanism and life enrichment, any return to parochial forms of life and
thought would constitute a major retrogression.

(5) Decentralization does not ipso facto eliminate domination and oppression. One
huge, impersonal “leviathan” may be merely replaced by a number of small,
personal, local masters. Far from being more beautiful, the small master may be
more inconsiderate, arbitrary, frustrated and sadistic.

On the other hand, centralism also has serious shortcomings:

(1) Each centralistic system has a hierarchical structure which involves a

tremendous amount of domination. A well known way to legitimate central
authority is to ascribe to its bearer the status of a revolutionary, history-making
vanguard of the vast majority of the population. But unless the vanguard gets
really autonomous consent from that population, which presupposes nothing less
than full respect of civil liberties, it is hardly anything but a self-appointed master.
The so-called “democratic centralism” has nothing democratic in it: a well
organized threatening elite, holding firmly all levers of power, will never fail to
secure a majority. In some other systems minorities have the right to continue to
defend their dissenting view; here they are fully compelled to conform.

(2) An element of heteronomy which is inevitable in every large society (in which
the very survival depends on many compromises) increases enormously in a
centralistic system. Too many issues that can be regulated by local or regional
communities themselves are now decided upon at the level of global society. Also,
as Rousseau observed, in large scale societies representatives are more likely to
alienate themselves from the people.

(3) The more centralistic a system, the more mediation is needed between the
center of power and the people. Bureaucracy must be generated to fill this need.
Since its sacred principle is order it will kill all initiative and spontaneity except
that which comes from the center. Bureaucracy creates and carefully maintains
the image of itself as a precious social force without which the society would fall
apart, and which, consequently, deserves excessive privileges for its services. The
truth is, of course, that the more expansive it grows, the more useless and
paralyzing it becomes.

(4) While claiming rationality and efficiency, all centralistic systems suffer from a
specific form of inefficiency and waste. Decisions are taken at a considerable
distance from the place where they are needed, and they often come with a
damageable delay. The center has the advantage of seeing the whole context, but it
has to operate on the basis of abstract, reifying information, missing too many
psychological factors, and lacking real understanding of the specific situation. The
center, therefore, tends to impose simple, uniform, elegant-looking solutions for
the whole system. But complex, irregular-looking solutions may do much better
justice to the diversity of various parts within the system. Human beings feel
responsibility in proportion to the freedom they have to contribute, by their own
autonomous action, to a given course of events. The more often they have to wait
for the orders from the center, the less responsible they feel, the more apathetic,
alienated, they become. Then things begin to drag on in a routine way with far too
little initiative to introduce the necessary innovations. In that sense all centralistic
systems become barriers to qualitative development, no matter how much they
may foster quantitative growth. A real alternative to both centralism and
decentralization is federalism.

5. Federalism – the optimal form of organization of communities into a global

society.

The term “federalism” is used here in the most general sense of a union of
communities (national states, provinces, cultural or political organizations) which
collaborate as equal partners while preserving a high degree of their autonomy. A
federation of this kind is possible when all component communities have an
objective interest in cooperation, in sharing certain natural or cultural resources,
in exchanging goods and experiences, in joining efforts against natural forces or
some other common threat. Thus the basic assumption of the federation is that it is
a free creation of the parts rather than a primary whole that determines the
conditions of its parts. No matter how high a degree of coordination in a union of
this type, it does not have any dominating center because none of its component
units aspires to domination, and/or because all of them strongly resist any such
tendency. The stability of such a federation depends on a balance of two opposing
forces. One works irreversibly toward greater identity and uniformity; the other
maintains diversity and preserves specific communal traditions and cultural
values. In the same way in which an individual experiences a community as an
indispensable social environment when he freely acts and develops in it, a
community willingly accepts a larger society as its natural environment when it
can freely develop within it, autonomously decide on its specific problems, equally
participate in the solution of issues common for the whole society, and when it can
collaborate with other parts without being abused or exploited by any of them. In
fact the level of coordination among parts can be higher in a federation then in a
centralist system. What makes it a federation is equal distribution of power
regardless of the size, and full political, economical and cultural self-
determination.

While conceptual clarity is essential for building clear, transparent relations within
any large association, experience with existing federations indicates all kinds of
difficulties requiring sometimes rather ingenious solutions. One such difficulty is
difference in size and population. If ordinary democratic rules would be applied, a
bigger and more populous federal unit would have a larger electorate, a larger
number of representatives in the federal self-governing body (federal assembly)
and, consequently, more power. Purely quantitative and representative democracy
must be corrected in order to diminish the importance of numbers and to protect
the interests of the minorities. But if this is being done, following John Stuart Mill,
by giving more weight to some votes than others, this destroys the equality of
individual citizens and may damage the bigger units. Such a difficult problem can
only partly be solved by building a more sophisticated institutional arrangement.
For example:
(1) A federal assembly would consist of several chambers. In one of them all
federal units would be represented by an equal number of representatives
regardless of the size and population. Such a chamber would separately discuss
and vote, with a right of veto, on all those issues that are vital to the interests of
any particular federal unit. However, another chamber would be composed of the
representatives of all individual citizens – since a federation is ultimately an
association of people, not of abstract entities, and many issues will be common or
cut across other than particular federal units’ interests.

(2) Conflicts of interest among two groups of federal units or between one and the
rest of the federation cannot be resolved by a simple vote. The only appropriate
method available is dialogue, negotiation and, eventually, the reaching of a
consensus. All kinds of objections are possible here. The method may be too slow
in a situation that requires quick solutions. The compromise solution, reached
after all parties make concessions, need not be the most rational one. Negotiations
do not take place under the public eye and individuals who take part in them seem
to acquire some special powers – thus this procedure does not seem to be
democratic. There is also a problem about efficiency: there is no guarantee that
such agreements will really be implemented.

Surely this, in the short run, need not be the most efficient or instrumentally
rational way of conflict resolution. Those for whom efficiency and instrumental
rationality are supreme values may opt for centralism. This method is optimal for
those who commit themselves to autonomy and equal distribution of power. A
price has to be paid for each choice. A federal society may deliberately decide to
invest in the development of full self-determination of all its constitutive
communities. In the long run it is more rational and may be even more efficient.
An impatient and careless handling of initial tensions might later result in
explosive and irreparable cleavages.

However the survival of a stable, harmonious federation can not be secured simply
by more complex institutional arrangements and more democratic methods of
conflict resolution. There must be a political culture that combines autonomy with
solidarity, genuine pluralism with a universal, emancipatory rationality. Pluralism
is indispensable in order to understand and respect different needs of others. Yet
whoever requests understanding for his particular needs clashing with the needs of
others must be able to justify them rationally. An association would fall apart if its
constituent communities would pursue only their selfish, particular interests; fight
all the time; and squeeze out half- satisfactory compromise solutions. The purpose
of a common political culture, a part of which must be explicitly expressed in the
constitution, would be to provide a consensus in basic premises for any conflict
resolution. Such basic premises are, first, agreement about ultimate preferences,
other conditions being equal; second, agreement about which ultimate preferences
have priority when other conditions are not equal, and when they happen to be
mutually incompatible. When a federal unit, for selfish reasons, raises a particular
issue, it will be invited to justify it with reference to generally accepted principles.
Dialogues cannot be won with short-sighted, self-centered policies. It is true that
these policies can be stubbornly defended once one escapes the field of rational and
moral discourse and turns to formalistic legal rationalization. After all, it is
conceivable that, using its veto power, a part may blackmail the rest of the society.
But in such a case either the particular discordant leadership would lose the
support of its own constituency and would be recalled, or the federation’s social
fabric would collapse, and it would practically fall apart.

Another essential difficulty of federalism is the gap in the level of economic and
cultural development of the various parts. It is hardly possible to achieve full
autonomy and equal distribution of power when some parts are much less
developed than the others. It is conceivable that, while commodity production still
exists, a loose federal structure may even allow an increase of this gap. Centralism
may be more efficient in closing it but at the expense of strengthening a lasting,
alienated authoritarian power. Since federalism by its very nature excludes the use
of authoritarian central force, it may resort only to those means which are
compatible with the autonomy and self-determination of each unit. Such is
solidarity. One of the basic purposes of living in any community is mutual aid,
support of the whole for any of its parts when coping with a problem that exceeds
its own powers. It is important to note here that while “aid” appears to be a one-
way operation, a humanitarian act, it is, in fact, an expression of mutuality and
justice; indeed it is a return to the less developed of what was taken from them,
e.g., cheap food, raw materials and less expensive labor. However, aid to overcome
backwardness need not be justified only on moral grounds. Not only is it a moral
obligation, but under deeper scrutiny, it also turns out to be a rational thing to do,
a matter of mutual interest. Growing social inequalities among the parts intensify
conflicts and make the federation increasingly vulnerable and unstable.
Investment in self-development is a much more reasonable and less costly policy
than a myriad of mere welfare programs with all its waste, bureaucracy and
condemnation to passivity. Parts that overcome material misery and begin to
approach affluence become much better partners in exchange of goods and
services. Certain issues can be resolved only in a global way; for example, efforts of
more developed federal units to improve the quality of the natural environment do
not make much sense if the backward ones cannot afford to join them. In a world
of growing interdependence, federalism appears to be the optimal way of
transcending backwardness.

6. Transformation of government into self-government.

The most striking novelty of socialist democracy is self-government. It has become

customary for social scholars and politicians to interpret the concept of self-
government as a form of direct democracy in working organizations and local
communities. In such a way its range of application has been reduced to social
micro-structure leaving macro-structure, the institutions of the global society,
essentially unchanged.

After more than half a century of various attempts to bring to life self-
government, in that restricted sense, one must conclude that either self-
government will become the principle of a new organization of all social life, at all
levels, or, if limited to enterprises and local communities within an authoritarian
society, it stagnates and fails to meet reasonable initial expectations.

Those initial forms of self-government may temporarily coexist with an

incompatible mode of production, with a bureaucratic state and ruling political
parties. They are, for a while, islands of an emerging new society; they are an
indispensable phase in the process of radical social change. If this process grinds to
a halt those embryonic self-governing forms will decay or will be co-opted and
used to give legitimacy to policies adopted in centers of alienated power.

While the political organization of the global society still has the form of a state,
the room for autonomous functioning of self-governing bodies will be greatly
restricted. When the state determines both the legal framework and the social
conditions under which those organs may operate, this constant interference
decreases the sense of responsibility, initiative, dignity, and creative imagination of
workers, and dangerously shifts their interest from the issues of production toward
issues of distribution. If the function of overall coordination remains in the hands
of the state, workers’ collectives and their councils remain poorly linked and
disintegrated. Under political pressure to be as efficient as possible they compete
on the markets clash with each other and fail to develop an indispensable new
socialist political culture.

The most difficult problem of a socialist revolution is, in fact, bringing to life self-
government as the new form of democracy, as the basic structure of social
organization at all levels. In other words, that is the problem of the transcendence
of the state (“withering away of the state” in the more popular language used by
Engels and Lenin).

The fact is there is not much discussion about "withering away” of the state in
recent Marxist literature. Lenin had neither the time nor the will to put his ideas
from State and Revolution (1918) into practice. The last Soviet legal philosopher to
defend the theory of the “withering away” of both the state and the law,
Pashukanis, disappeared in 1937.

In Yugoslavia a critique of Stalinism, of professional politics and of bureaucratism

had quite a prominent place in the 1959 Program of the League of Communists of
Yugoslavia. There it was stated quite clearly that the organs of the state would have
to be transformed into organs of self-government. This process was blocked in
1965 and was reversed in 1972. Some of the federal state power was transferred to
republican state organs, but the level of state intervention and coercion is higher
now than two decades ago.

Eurocommunist parties made a promising move when they dropped the phrase of
the “dictatorship of the proletariat” which was already misleading at the moment
when it was coined by Marx. But they are still reluctant to accept the idea of self-
government: they discretely study the possibilities and ways of the democratization
of the state.

However the only long range revolutionary solution is the structural

transformation of the state (saddled with its professional bureaucracy and coercive
machinery) into a multi-level network of self-governing councils and assemblies.
Other alternatives are either liberal or Stalinist.

The former was expressed by Kautsky when he opposed a “democratic state” to

self-government and said: “It is not quite suitable to speak about state democracy
as self-government of the state by the people. People as a whole cannot govern
themselves. They need appropriate organs to run things in their organizations.
They need especially the most powerful among their organizations – the state."[3]

The Stalinist alternative was inaugurated by Stalin himself at the 18th Congress of
the Bolshevik Party: “The Soviet state is an entirely new state never seen in
history. While capitalism still exists in the rest of the world the state has to stay
and increase its power even in communism."[4] Nothing reveals better the
bureaucratic nature of an opportunistic party or of a stagnating postrevolutionary
establishment than such apologies of the institution of the state.

Because a mode of dualistic thinking is deeply rooted in Western Culture, most

people continue to think in dichotomies: either the state or the regression to the
private; either competent bureaucrats or incompetent laymen in charge of
important social affairs. But there is a third self-governing solution. The real
dilemma is not competent professionals or incompetent laymen. Professionals
invariably have a limited kind of skill which is limited to one special field. They are
poorly prepared for the determination of basic policies. This kind of task requires
a different sort of competence to be found in persons of wisdom and integrity
across the lines of the professional division of labor. The real alternative is,
therefore, whether professional experts will be employed for precisely those roles
for which they are truly competent, with full responsibility to the elected
representatives of the people, or whether the strings of power politics will be pulled
behind the ideological screen of “expertize” by unknown grey eminences. The
practical meaning of the transformation of government into self- government may
be spelled out in the following way:

(a) The members of a self-governing body, at any level of social organization, are
directly elected by the people or delegated by a lower-level organ of self-
government. The procedure of election is fully democratic: no candidate can have
any privileges because of his professional role, past merits, or backing by existing
political organizations.

(b) The members of a self-governing body are elected for limited intervals of time;
the principle of rotation must be strictly observed and it excludes perpetuation of
the power of professional politicians.

(c) The members of self-government are directly responsible to their electorate

(and not to any political organization). They are obliged to regularly give account
to the community which they represent and are subject to recall. Such dependence
on the will of the community does not preclude their leadership role. They lead by
articulating and stating explicitly vaguely felt needs of the community, but also by
finding ways to reconcile particular interests of the community with interests of
other communities and the society as a whole. The institution of self-government
excludes authoritarian leadership. The will of the people must count all the time,
and the use of force is out of the question. But it does not follow that the roles are
simply reversed and that elected representatives have no other alternative but to
follow blindly every twist and turn of the mass current. In case of conflict they will
make an effort to prevail due to the strength of their arguments – or else they will
resign. The road to becoming a career politician is closed. And the community is
strongly motivated to have an able representative.

(d) Representatives must not enjoy any material privileges. They may be
compensated for their work as in the case of any other creative public activity.
Anything beyond that level constitutes a concealed form of exploitation, produces
undesirable social differences, lowers the motivation of the representatives as well
as the morale of the community, and eventually leads to the creation of a new
alienated social elite.

(e) An organ of self-government constitutes the supreme authority at the given

communal level. That is where it differs from analogous organs of participation,
co-management, or workers-control which have only advisory, consultative, or
controlling functions and, at best, only share authority with the political
bureaucracy, capitalists, or the techno-structure. “Self-governing” institutions
presuppose the elimination of all ruling classes and elites; professional-technical
management must be subordinated to them. They create basic policy, formulate
long range goals, establish the rules, decide about cadre issues, and control the
implementation of accepted policies.

(f ) While there might be a plurality of organizations that mediate between people

and self-governing institutions, none of them must be allowed to dominate the
institutions of self-government. They can play useful and, indeed, necessary social
roles: to express specific group interests, to politically educate people, to mobilize
them for alternative programs of development, to contribute to the creation of a
powerful public opinion. But none of them – the forms of political party, or trade
union, or church, or any other pressure group – must have control over the
institutions of self-government. Whatever the personal affiliations of individual
elected representatives, their loyalty must go directly and fully to the people whom
they represent, and not to any mediating organization.

(g) All power of self-governing bodies is delegated to them by the people from the
given field and is not allocated from the center. When social power is alienated, all
decision-making goes from the top to the basis of the social pyramid. When it is
not, it is always the lower level of social organization, closer to the base, which
decides how much regulation, coordination and control is needed at the next
higher level. According to such a decision, a certain amount of power is, then,
delegated. In such a way the authority of a central federal assembly rests on that of
national or regional assemblies, and all of them are eventually authorized to decide
on certain issues by the councils of basic working organizations and local
communities. Learning from experience in a quickly changing world will give rise
to changes of the whole structure. On the one hand, with a growing sense of ethical
identity, mass culture will be increasingly decentralized; on the other hand, the
scarcity of energy requires joint efforts of the whole society and a considerably
higher level of coordination and overall control.

Clearly, the problem is not central decision-making but the source of authority for
it. In a bureaucratic, repressive state, classical liberal doctrines of “social
contract,” sovereignty of the people and “majority rule” serve to legitimate a
situation in which all power stems from a relatively small central oligarchy even
when it is considerably diffused and decentralized. In self-government, all power
really originates with the councils in the independent social communities, even
when a considerable amount of it has been delegated to central self-governing
institutions.

7. The structure of self-government.

If self-government is to replace the state in all its socially necessary functions, it

has to embrace a network of councils and assemblies constituted at several levels of
social reality and on both territorial and productive principles. One would have to
distinguish clearly among at least four levels:

(1) Basic organs of self-government in most elementary working and living

communities;

(2) Organs of self-government in larger associations – enterprises, communes;

(3) Organs of self-government for whole regions and branches of social activity;

(4) Central institutions of self-government for the global society.

1. The basic level of self-government is characterized by direct democracy. Each

individual has the right (although not the duty) to directly participate in decision-
making in most elementary units of social life. Thus the individual has a chance to
express and affirm oneself not only as a citizen, but also as a producer and a
consumer (the last in a most general sense, with respect not only to material goods
but also culture, natural environment and communal activities).

2. The next level is constituted by councils of larger working associations and the
assemblies of larger local communities (communes). Here referendums and
assemblies of all workers or residents remain the only feasible form of direct
democracy. Councils composed of the elected representatives practically become
the highest authority in the area or enterprise. But they are strictly responsible to
the given community. However, they are limited in their decision-making by the
existing legislation and accepted policies of the higher-level organ of self-
government. In a true system of self-government the laws are not merely imposed
from the center. The center has been delegated power to pass them, therefore they
can be revoked once they stop serving any useful social purpose.

3. Another intermediary level is constituted, on the one hand, by the coordinating

self-governing boards for whole branches of activity (metal industry, energy,
agriculture, transportation, etc.); on the other hand, by regional organs of self-
government coordinating the development of all communes from a definite area.
Once a bourgeoisie and bureaucracy have gone from the historical stage, the
purpose of better organization, coordination and direction is no longer to increase
efficiency in the struggle against another nation or region, not to control the
market. The main purposes of coordination are now the elimination of waste,
reduction of friction, joining forces for the solution of ecological problems, mutual
aid and solidarity, aid for accelerated growth of the weak and underdeveloped.
4. Self-government at the level of global society does not yet exist in any country in
its systematic integral form, although some of its elements have been existing in all
relatively democratic political systems. Already in classical liberalism the principle
was stated that political power must rest on people’s voluntary surrender of a part
of their natural liberty in order to gain security within a political commonwealth.

The central organ of self-government – a federal assembly or congress of people’s

delegates – must integrate both networks, one covering various types of activity,
the other various territorial communities. There are a variety of forms possible for
their inner organization, but all of them have to take into account the following
three necessities:

The first is to reconcile the particular interests of various types of activity with the
particular interests of various regions.

The second is to reconcile particular interests of both professional and regional

groups with the common interest of the whole society.

The third is to preserve the unity of authority in order to secure efficiency and
reduce wasteful inner conflicts, but at the same time to separate powers – in order
to prevent dangerous concentration of powers in the hands of an oligarchy or a
single dictator.

One possible solution is to have three different chambers: one composed of the
delegates of all workers; another constituted by the delegates of all communes; a
third composed of the directly elected representatives of all citizens. The former
two would approach issues from the point of view of particular professional or
regional interests. The third would mediate between them from the point of view of
general interests of the whole society.

One of the most difficult problems of any democracy is how to preserve unity of
purpose and protect the general interest without making it overwhelmingly strong.
The classical liberal solution has been to separate legislative, executive and
judiciary power – this is an achievement of lasting value. However at a much
higher level of social organization public institutions assume some new powers,
e.g., regulation and planning of work, overall control of the implementation of
adopted programs, cadres policy. All these powers should be separated. This can
be done, for example, by creating a council composed of elected members of the
Assembly for each of these powers. Each member of the Assembly would thus
participate in protecting a certain interest in one of the chambers, and would also
participate in the execution of one specific power in one of the Assembly’s councils.

All improvements in the structure of self-government do not make much difference

if the whole political process is fully controlled by one or more political parties.
The party in the proper sense is a political organization that struggles to win
power. It is hierarchical and authoritarian, manipulative and ideological. Both the
state and the party are incompatible with real self- government. The party will be
transcended by a political organization that aspires to educate and not to rule, to
prepare rational solutions rather than to decide about them, to build up criteria of
evaluation rather than to evaluate itself, to engage in dialogues in order to clear up
issues rather than to settle them. Under such conditions, the pluralism of political
life will no longer be a pluralism of entrenched class interests struggling for
domination but a pluralism of visions, of options, of imaginative approaches in a
really free society.

Notes

1. In 1936 Stalin asserted that Soviet socialism was the most developed existing
form of a democratic society and that the new Constitution of USSR was “the only
thoroughly democratic constitution in the world.” Stalin, “On the Draft
Constitution of the USSR,” in Problems of Leninism (Moscow, 1945), pp. 550, 557.

2. Marx, Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, II.

3. Karl Kautsky, Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (Berlin, 1927), Bd. II, s.

461.

4. Stalin, “Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU(b)” in Problems of

Leninism (Moscow, 1945), pp. 632-638.

Mihailo Markovic 1981

Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights

Source: Praxis International, 1981, No. 4.

Section 1 of this essay was prepared by Prof. Ljubomir Tadic and myself as a part
of the collective statement of the Belgrade Praxis group “The Meaning of the
Present-day Struggle for Human Rights.” – Note by the author.

Basic civil rights and liberties are great achievements of the past democratic
revolutions. They are necessary – although not sufficient – conditions of free
human life in any society. A critique of these rights which rejects or disparages
them as merely “formal,” “abstract,” or “bourgeois” is devoid of historical sense
and expresses an aggressive obscurantism, particularly when it comes from
societies which not only have not overcome this “bourgeois” level, but have not yet
even approached it.
These rights are surely limited, and in conditions of a very unequal distribution of
wealth and of material and spiritual misery in which great parts of the population
are still condemned to live, these rights indeed partly express only abstract
possibilities which, for economic reasons, cannot be brought to life. But it is
equally true that changes in economic systems without an essential political
democratization do not lead to really new and more just forms of society. They
tend to keep alive authoritarian institutions analogous to those in feudal society, in
the same way as one-sided political democratization, without economic
democratization, made the survival of slavery possible in the U.S. during a whole
century from Washington to Lincoln. Socialist revolutions in our century rejected
imperial and royal autocracies because they were imperial and royal, and not
because any autocracy is incompatible with the principle of the sovereignty of the
people. Power remained completely concentrated: it was possible to command
from one single center not only executives, but also legislators and judges. The
individual was called “citizen” and “comrade,” but the level of civil rights and of
civil consciousness which had already been reached in the eighteenth century
remained a distant, almost unattainable goal of political development. Instead of
being a civil servant responsible to citizens, the state functionary keeps demanding
proofs of political loyalty from them. The power fully controls people instead of
being controlled by them. Instead of reaching the maximum of personal security
when they behave in accordance with the constitution of their country, citizens end
up in jail when they interpret literally those articles of the constitution which
guarantee to them freedom of speech, freedom of public manifestation and
demonstration, freedom of political organization.

It is true that bourgeois representative democracy can no longer be considered the

optimal form for the political organization of society. It is, however, the necessary
initial level of a democratic society. The presupposition of democracy is the
recognition that demos (the people), is mature, able to make basic decisions, able,
among other things, to elect its representatives. With nineteenth century political
parties, powerful mediators between citizens and their representatives appeared
on the historical stage. As a consequence of this mediation, the influence of the
voters over elected representatives was diminished, the power of political parties
and their factions in parliament was increased and alienated. This alienation
reaches its maximum when a single, monolithic, authoritarian party monopolizes
all political power. Under such conditions, elections no longer express the people’s
will but its loyalty; they are no longer a right but an obligation. The purpose of the
principle of limitation of re-election was to prevent a permanent alienation of the
elected representatives from the electorate, and in some bourgeois societies it has
been strictly respected for the last two centuries. By contrast, the institution of
ruling cadres who can be removed only by the action of biological laws or as a
consequence of disloyalty to the sovereign leader is much closer to a feudal than to
a new socialist society.

1. European history of human rights

The issue of human rights emerges in history in its practical political form at the
moment of open conflict between a revolutionary bourgeoisie and state absolutism.
Only then does the contradiction between law and state become manifest: law
emerges as a guarantee of human freedom against the arbitrariness of state power,
as an expression of the citizen’s resistance to oppression. Thus in the 1793 French
Constitution, it was stated explicitly that the need to proclaim rights of free
expression of thought and of free gathering and religious festivities involves “a
presence of a memory of autocracy.” According to the constitution, “the law must
protect public personal freedom against oppression by the rulers.” Freedom was
recognized as a “natural, in-alienable right.” Laws ceased being mere instruments
for subordinating people, ceased being tools of usurpation and tyranny. They now
became the means of protecting the citizen from the abuses of the rulers. Political
emancipation means that the state as a public power may not be used for the
private goals of its functionaries.

Since 1789 the concepts of “constitutionality,” of “legal rule,” and “legal state”
grant legitimacy only to that state which can be controlled by its citizens, only to
that power which excludes autocracy and absolutism. In accordance with the
concept of constitutional and legal guarantees of freedom, criminal law no longer
protects “the interests of the state,” nor the imperative of “state reason,” but the
interests, liberties, and rights of its citizens. A necessary condition of their
protection is a judiciary independent of executive power. Laws and state acts
which violate these principles of justice can no longer be considered legitimate.
This affirmation of justice over the state and positive law was stated explicitly for
the first time in the American Declaration of Independence and the French
Declaration of The Rights of Man. It completes the great revolutionary democratic
process which started with the Enlightenment and the idea of rational natural law.
The focus of legality had now been shifted from force and sanction to civil
freedom.

It is hardly controversial, since Marx, that the whole idea of civil liberty, of
political emancipation, has its class limitations. The human individual is split, in
that idea, into an immoral, economic egoist and an abstract citizen who is supposed
to be a moral person. What is controversial, and what makes the debate about
human rights so important today, is the stubborn rejection of political
emancipation in toto by official Marxism in socialist countries. Clearly what tries
to remain hidden behind dogmatic theory about the incompatibility of bourgeois
and socialist democracy is a long praxis of drastic suppression of human rights and
the revival of state absolutism. It is true that bourgeois law presupposes the
enslavement of humans to things; that private property is an obstacle to, rather
than a guarantee of, freedom; that bourgeois democracy gives a very limited
amount of political power to its citizens. But how can an absolutist state, even
when it calls itself socialist, be considered a better, historically superior form than
a liberal, representative democracy? What follows from Marx’s dialectical critique
of bourgeois law is that political emancipation is a great progressive achievement.
Even though it is not “the ultimate form of human emancipation,” it is the highest
form of human emancipation “within the existing world order.” But if political
emancipation is a phase of universal human emancipation, socialism cannot ignore
or reject it without jeopardizing the very reason for its existence and the legitimacy
of its ultimate goals. The great emancipatory tradition is one of the grounds of
socialist revolution. Of course it went beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois law
and carried in itself the goals of universal human liberation. However, political
emancipation can be transcended but not repudiated.
The Constitution of the Russian Federal Socialist Republic of 1918 in its
Declaration of Rights of Exploited Working People laid down as its basic task the
abolition of the exploitation of one person by another and stated as its general
principles: “true freedom of conscience,” “true freedom of thought,” “true
freedom of choice,” “true freedom of association,” and “true freedom of
education” for working people. There was an obvious intention in this first Soviet
constitution to remove the contradiction between the form and the content of
democracy. On the other hand, by proclaiming “the dictatorship of urban and
rural proletariat and poorest peasants,” the first Soviet constitution deprived
earlier ruling classes of many rights. The Soviet legal theory of that time defined
the dictatorship of the proletariat as a power “which exercises coercion over the
bourgeoisie and in doing so is not constrained by any law.” Such a view was
interpreted at that time as a legal revolution. Soviet legal theory justified the
complete subordination of law to politics in the transition period by “revolutionary
expediency.” The danger of bureaucratization was completely overlooked:
according to the official Soviet ideology it was a “ridiculous and absurd nonsense”
to oppose the dictatorship of masses to the dictatorship of leaders; it was “an
elementary truth” that the relationship between the leaders, the party, and the
class was “ordinary, normal, and simple.” As a matter of fact, however, and in a
rather simple way, the dictatorship of the class was indeed reduced to that of the
party which, in turn, degenerated into the dictatorship of a single party leader.

After the critical year of 1921, in the Bolshevik party leadership the view prevailed
that the party mechanism in the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat could
secure its leading position only under the condition of monolithic unity. That
meant the complete elimination not only of other, even socialistic, parties, but also
of any organized groups and factions within the Bolshevik party itself. The
dictatorship of the proletariat turned out to be incompatible with political
democracy. The bourgeois fetish of law was replaced by a bureaucratic fetish of
politics. The vague idea of “revolutionary expediency” was later transformed into
the cynicism of the “reason of state.”

In the new system there was no place for the associations of citizens and producers
that Marx spoke about. There was indeed no place for any organization that rested
on the self-determination and self-initiative of liberated individuals. Duties
prevailed over rights, prohibitions and sanctions over liberties – the ideal of any
authoritarian power. The legitimacy of an utterly voluntaristic state praxis was
based on an assumption of reified, suprahistorical, suprahuman “objective laws”
of socialism which acted independently of the consciousness of actual living people.
“Masses” were construed as purely mechanical, passive material modelled
according to the twists and turns of this non-human necessity. What started as a
Marxist critique of bourgeois law ended up as a conservative justification of
political Caesarism.

What remained of proclaimed real liberties of conscience, thought, education, and

organization were caricatured forms only. A citizen was free to think but was
suspect until he or she proved that their thinking was “constructive.” One was free
to elect as one’s own representatives only those who were previously chosen by the
Party. One was also free to join all those organizations and societies which
underwent strict and permanent Party control. “Real” education has been
subordinated to the pragmatism of daily politics and the imperatives of a
thoroughgoing pseudo-revolutionary indoctrination. The citizens were not even
aware of their right to know what the state did in their name and how it spent the
surplus product of their labors.

Even the most naive citizens hardly believe today that all those articles of the
Constitution which guarantee freedom of conscience, thought, speech, publication,
and organization are really written for them. They know they could be held
responsible for a crime “against the people and the state” or end up in a mental
hospital if they take the Constitution of their country seriously and behave
according to it. One of the most oppressed strata of this pseudo-socialist society is
precisely its “ruling class”: the workers do not even have the traditional rights
which they exercised in capitalist society before they were “liberated,” namely, the
right to organize into trade unions and the right to strike. A really new, free, and
just society presupposes both political and economic emancipation. What lies
beyond both an authoritarian, coercive state and a reified market regulation of
production is a democratic socialism in which all public power that is necessary for
the regulation of socially necessary processes remains in the hands of self-
governing councils and associations of citizens and producers themselves.

2. Four humanist alternative grounds of human rights

How can we justify human rights and, indeed, any given or conceivable legal
order? If we reject the idea of their divine origin, we seem to have essentially the
following four alternatives:

(1) A static, ahistorical relativism exemplified in any empiricist, pragmatist, or

structuralist approach. From this point of view each particular society, each
civilization, has a set of rules which regulate human relationships and maintain a
necessary level of social cohesion. These sets are different and incommensurable
paradigms – like Bachelard’s different types of rationalism, or Kuhn’s scientific
paradigms, or Levi Strauss’s “codes” for the expression of specific social
structures. This type of approach allows an objective study of each particular
paradigm but rules out the possibility of speaking of a universal human justice.
Moral and legal systems cannot be compared: all concepts of “good,” “right,”
“ought,” or “just” become relative to a specified system, and it does not make
sense to evaluate one morality as “better” than the other.

(2) If this relativism does not satisfy us, because it tends to strip the general ideas
of “human being” and “history” of any meaning, we may turn to an absolutism of a
Kantian or phenomenological kind. There is a transcendental concept of the
human person and of practical reason; an ahistorical, autonomous good will, a
universal moral law (the “categorical imperative”), provide the basis of all
morality and justice. Those who, like Scheler, reject the identification of the apriori
with the formal and of the aposteriori with the substantial, may project moral
values into a particular realm of validity (Geltung) outside of both spheres of the
material world and human consciousness.

(3) Those who, in an age of rapid historical progress, do not see much merit in such
a static conception of both a formal ethics of duty and of an axiology of values “in
themselves,” may prefer the historical absolutism of Hegel. Any particular moral
order within a family, a nation, or a civilization, and morality in itself as a form of
consciousness, are only objective stages in the development of an absolute Spirit.
This approach opens the possibility of comparison and critique of various moral
and legal systems, of seeing their inner limitations, of evaluating one as merely a
particular moment of the other. However, the basic assumption of an absolute
mind implies the absence of history, of the possible creation of new forms of
morality and law in the future. The system had to be closed if it claimed absolute
truth: all real development took place in the past.

(4) The legitimate heir of Hegel’s thought, Marx left behind an ambiguous body of
ideas. Those which nowadays constitute the foundation of official Marxist
ideologies offer a historical but relativist conception of morality and law. According
to it there is a true development of morality in history. History – and not only the
past but also the future – may be seen objectively as a process of growth of social
productive forces and a succession of increasingly rich and free socio-economic
formations. But history may also be seen subjectively as a history of class struggles.
Each class has its own morality rooted in the objective material life conditions of
that class. An overemphasis on the class character of humans and a reluctance to
see elements of universal humanity in each individual and class lead back to
relativism. This is obvious in the Marxist orthodoxy of both the Second and Third
Communist International and also in the Marxist structuralism of an Althusser.
Rather than seeing in the future what Hegel established in the past (namely, a
process of totalization of humans in general, our progressive enrichment and
emancipation), both orthodox and structuralist Marxists construe history as a
series of modes of production which are separated by social ruptures – revolutions
and cultural (“epistemological”) gaps.

While it could be argued that Marx himself is very much responsible for this
relativist interpretation (consider Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach: “Man is an
ensemble of social relations”), he also made essential contributions to a humanist,
truly historical conception of morality that goes beyond the dilemma of absolutism
versus relativism. The view of the human being as a universal self- consciousness,
developed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, was transcended by a conception of
the human as a practical being who creates its history, its material life conditions,
social forms, morality, and law beyond any preconceived limit.

3. The conception of humans as beings of praxis – a philosophical basis for human

rights

The ultimate foundation of human rights is constituted by those essential needs of

each individual the fulfillment of which is, under given historical conditions, a
necessary condition of social survival and development. Law is just, humane, and
universally valid only if particular statutes and legal acts express such universal
needs; if they do not, then law is only the expression of naked force. If law is
reduced to positive law, to what is written in the laws of a state, it is nothing but a
justification of particular interests of the ruling elite. In such a case law would be,
as Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic put it, “what benefits the most powerful.”
Obviously, then, laws can be profoundly unjust. Just law cannot be based on the
authority of the state, but on a superior principle which makes the state itself
possible and meaningful. That higher principle was interpreted in various ways in
the philosophical critique of positive law: “natural law,” “rational law,” “reason,”
“freedom,” “external, unchangeable justice,” “absolute moral values,” “logos of
history.” Such interpretations make sense as a challenge to legal positivism and as
the expression of critical thought which cannot reconcile itself with a legal apology
for an existing tyrannical and inhuman order. However, the essential limitation of
such interpretations is the fact that they are unhistorical or even antihistorical.
The principle on which all law rests must allegedly hold in a transcendental way,
for every conceivable society, sub specie aeternitatis. What follows, then, is that
human rights are determined by the very fact that an individual belongs to the
human species, that those rights have already their ultimate formulation in
eighteenth century bourgeois revolutions, and that the whole historical process
after that should only render economic and political conditions for their
implementation.

The static, ahistorical nature of this approach makes it acceptable to the

conservative forces of bourgeois society. However, the fact is the human species is
not merely given – it undergoes a process of permanent self-determination and
self-development. Actually existing human rights and liberties constitute only a
phase in this historical process of increasing emancipation.

How can one criticize positive law and yet avoid idealistic transcendentalism? How
is it possible to hold that law is historically conditioned and open to development,
and yet avoid an eclectic relativism?

In order to build a point of view which is historical but not relativistic, critical but
not sceptical, objective but not transcendental, we must ascertain those specific
features of human activity which make the difference between the simple flow of
time and human history. Then we must ask which are the specifically human needs
that make this activity possible and which permanently evolve in the course of
human history. Do not these constitute the very basic source of human rights?

One has to ask if human history as a whole is a meaningful process or not. Before
answering such a difficult and complex question, one could ask a simpler, more
general one: What constitutes the meaning of any life process? Jacques Monod’s
answer was teleonomy: a unique, primary project of preservation and
multiplication of the species. One could ask here: what makes this basic project
“valuable?” Why is preservation of species better than disappearance? Why is it
better to multiply than to simply restore the already achieved quantitative level?

The only answer to such a question is the following: What is here described as
“better” or “worse” is not merely a matter of subjective preference, it refers to a
tendency which is a necessary part of the very definition of life. Surely not all
individuals and species survive and multiply. But while they do, they are alive. In a
similar way one should add that life involves a tendency to maintain and increase
order and structural complexity; a process of change in the opposite direction
toward lesser order and complexity is “bad” for a living organism since it leads to
the destruction of life. It is therefore being described in negative terms: as a
process of degradation.

The comparable question with respect to human history asks: What is the primary
project of historical development? Which are the objective conditions necessary
for human survival and development, not as a mere living organism but as a
distinctly human being? Many things which actually occurred in the course of
history do not belong to such conditions: famines, floods, earthquakes, massacres,
destruction. What made human history possible and indeed unique – in view of the
explosive development of the last few thousand years – was a specifically human
activity: praxis. Praxis is purposeful (preceded by a conscious objective), self-
determining (choosing autonomously among alternative possibilities), rational
(consistently following certain general principles), creative (transcending given
forms and introducing novelties into established patterns of behavior), cumulative
(storing in symbolic forms ever greater amounts of information and conveying it to
coming generations so that they can continue to build on the ground already
conquered), self-creative (in the sense that young human individuals, after being
exposed to an increasing wealth of information and new environmental challenges,
develop new faculties and new needs). Praxis is a new, higher-level form of the
human species. It retains genetic invariance, self-regulation, teleonomy. But it goes
far beyond them. The plastic genetic material will be shaped in countless different
ways by social conditioning; self- regulation will become more and more conscious
and autonomous; and the conservative telos of the species – preservation and
multiplication – will be replaced by an entirely new basic project: the creation of a
rich manifold, increasingly complex, and beautiful environment, self-creation of
persons with an increasing wealth of needs. Many human activities are clearly not
instances of praxis, nor are they characteristic of human history. The repetitive
work of a slave, serf, or modern worker resembles more a beaver’s dam building
than creative work.

As in the discussion about the basic, inherent teleonomy of life, it is possible to ask
the question: What is the good of all this creation and self-creation? Is it not better
to go back to simple organic life in as natural an environment as possible, with a
minimum of needs? And, as in the earlier case, the answer is that a different telos
is possible, but it would not be the telos of human history. The emergence of
human life is this gigantic step from the simple, organic, repetitive, narrow natural
world to the complex, civilized, continuously developing, vastly expanded historical
world, from a poverty of needs and abilities to an increasing wealth of goals and
life-manifestations.

A judgment of this kind is still factual. What has been argued so far is that, as a
matter of fact, the specific characteristic of humans and human history is praxis. A
basic normative standpoint is taken when one commits oneself to supporting,
stopping, or reversing that trend of growing creativity in history. This is the point
of a crucial bifurcation in ethics.

To commit oneself to increasing creativity in history, to praxis as the basic

axiological principle, means to assert that it ought to be universally accessible, that
it ought to become a norm of everybody’s life. This again means to encourage
discovery of the essential limitation of given social forms, institutions, and patterns
of action; it means to try and explore new, hidden possibilities of a different,
richer, more complex, self-fulfilling life; to express them in the form of ideals; to
examine strategies of bringing them about. This type of ethical orientation is
clearly critical and emancipatory.

A conformist, status-quo preserving approach involves a tendency to reserve praxis

for the elite and to condemn the vast majority of human beings to inferior, not
characteristically human, forms of activity; involves offering receptivity as a
surrogate for creativity and condemning emancipatory ideals as utopian. It resists
further liberation processes, but at least it tends to retain the level of freedom
already achieved.

A retrogressive normative attitude to history involves a commitment to the reversal

of the historical trend, to the restoration of already dismantled master- slave social
relations. Servility is offered as a substitute for creativity: the glory of conquest and
domination, on the one hand; the honor of serving and patiently, loyally enduring,
on the other.

These three basic attitudes to history are mutually incompatible. The dialogue
between those who advocate them makes sense only in order to establish whether
they have been taken consistently and whether they can be lived in practical life. If
this is the case, discrepancy in value judgments cannot be overcome.

Assuming that we accept the universalization and continuation of praxis in history

as our fundamental normative standpoint, the question is what else does it involve,
and how could it be further analyzed? What is meant by saying that humans are
and ought to be beings of praxis?

(1) In contrast to traditional materialism and empiricism, the human person is not
merely a reflection of external natural and social forces or a product of education;
he or she is not only a superstructure of a given economic structure but also a
subject who, within the constraints of a given situation, create themselves and
reshape their environment, change the conditions under which certain laws hold,
and educate the educators. On the other hand, in contrast to Hegel, a human is not
conceived as a self-consciousness only, but as a subject- object who is constrained
not only by the quality of existing spiritual culture but also by the level of material
production and the nature of social institutions. However, precisely because we
have both subjective and objective dimensions, both spiritual and material power,
we are able to understand our limitations and, also, to overcome them practically.

(2) Humans are certainly actual, empirical beings. An ethical theory becomes
irrelevant when it merely imposes on us norms which are completely divorced
from that empirical reality and have no ground in it. Certainly, using sophisticated
means of manipulation and brute force, certain obligations and duties can be
forced upon a community, but a true morality cannot be produced in such a way.
It has to be autonomous, and only an actual (individual or collective) subject can
lay down its own moral laws. On the other hand, moral norms, by the very nature
of being norms, are never a mere reflection of actual existence. Morality, like every
act of praxis, begins with an awareness of a limitation in actual empirical existence,
in the way we habitually, routinely act. Norms may be already present in our
customary behavior, but these are either legal norms imposed by force, by the
threat of social, overt coercion, or customs unconsciously accepted in the process of
socialization and blindly, instinctively followed like any unconditioned reflex.
Morality involves a conscious, free choice among alternatives, and that choice
transcends the immediate, selfish needs of our actual existence – it expresses long-
range needs and dispositions of our potential being.

Human potential is not a part of directly observed empirical existence, but it

belongs to the reality of a person or community and is empirically testable. Far
from being a vague metaphysical concept, the notion of a potential capacity or of a
disposition can be operationalized by stating explicitly the conditions under which
it would be manifested (provided that those conditions can be produced in
specified ways and the reality of dispositions tested).

(3) Both in actuality and potentiality a human being is, in the first place, a unique
person with quite specific capacities, powers, and gifts. A person is also a
particular, communal being: only in a community does one become a human, bring
to life one’s abilities, appropriate accumulated knowledge skills and culture
created by many preceding generations, develop a number of social needs: to
belong, to share, to be recognized and esteemed. The levels of particularity are
many: an individual belongs to a family, to a professional group, class, nation,
race, generation, sex, civilization.

That is where all relativists stop: a particular being invariably has a particular
morality; there can be no universal standard of evaluation. Philosophers who
develop such universal criteria had either to eliminate history like Kant in his
transcendental ethics, or, like Hegel, to construe history as the process of
actualization of a potential universal spirit. Both lead to absolutism. The problem
becomes solvable only when the absolute spirit is replaced by the idea of a
universal human species-being. As we saw, that universal is not only spiritual but
also practical; it does not exist in abstracto but as the basic potential of concrete
living individuals. The descriptive concept of this universal human nature is
constituted by a set of conflicting general dispositions; some supporting
development, creation, and social harmony; some causing conflicts and
destruction. From the standpoint of historical praxis, the former are evaluated as
“good” and enter into a normative concept of human nature. This concept is not
fixed since history is, in contrast to Hegel, an open-ended process. This point of
view is not absolutist as was Hegel’s: humans continue to develop, and in the
future ever new forms of morality may be expected to evolve. And yet one need not
relapse into relativism. Development in history is continuous: a translation and
incorporation of the practical products and experiences of an earlier period into a
later one remains possible, and there are trans-epochal invariants. Therefore there
are good reasons to argue that, in spite of all discontinuities between particular
epochs and civilizations, there is one universal human knowledge, there is one
material and spiritual culture that grows, one human species-being that evolves
through the life of all various individuals and particular communal beings. At a
given moment of history there may be one theory that expresses their accumulated
knowledge (that already achieved wealth of human beings) better than other
preceding or coexisting theories. In the future this theory will also need revision,
but at the present its author could have sufficiently good reasons to hold that his or
her views are truer than those of his or her opponents. He or she may be wrong,
but that must be shown by superior arguments.

4. Rational Resolution of conflicts concerning human rights

A conflict concerning human rights is a special case of a conflict in value

judgments. Its resolution would be rational under the following conditions:

(a) The proponents of conflicting value standpoints enter a dialogue (i.e. a

discourse in which they are equal parties) in which they try to prevail by the force
of arguments but allow from the beginning the possibility of a limitation in their
own position which they are ready to overcome.

(b) The dialogue as a whole must be consistent: all contradictions that emerge must
be resolved.

(c) The reasoning of both participants in the dialogue is regulated by rules

(implicitly or explicitly accepted by both of them).

(d) A rational consensus will be reached if the opponents share the same ultimate
principles.

Obviously it is very difficult to meet all those requirements. Partners in a

communication on human rights are not always equal and are not always ready to
give up any other force except the force of arguments. Also they are usually not
ready to take a critical view of their own position and to allow for the possibility of
its revision. Most people prefer to live with contradictions rather than to resolve
them, and the rules which they follow are not always logical rules common to both
opponents.

Especially difficult seems to be the requirement of shared basic principles. And yet
it can be met. There are enormous differences in value judgments made in
different situations. But if differences were put into brackets, agreements on basic
preferences would be discovered surprisingly often.

A vast majority of people would agree that – other conditions being equal – life is
preferable to death, creativity to destruction, freedom to slavery, communal
solidarity to brute egoism, material well-being to poverty, development to
stagnation, independence to being dominated, dignity to humiliation, autonomy to
heteronomy, justice to abuse, peace to war. Disagreements arise about the
hierarchy of such universal values and, especially, because other conditions are
really not equal. Life need not be preferable to death when the price for it is loss of
dignity; peace need not be preferable to war when it leads to less of freedom.
Consequently, the greatest problem for the rational resolution of value conflicts is
not the absence of any common axiological principles, but the conflicts among
those very principles under various specific conditions and the fact that different
communities, living under different historical conditions, assign those principles
different weights and hold them in different hierarchical orders.
Those who deny the very possibility of agreement on certain basic values among
people who belong to different cultures and different social systems should try to
account for the fact that on December 10, 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights was accepted by American, Soviet, and other leading politicians of the
world. How was it possible for ideologues of conflicting political and social systems
to reach consensus on a number of fundamental values? How was it possible to
reaffirm, in Article 1, the principles of equality, freedom, and brotherhood? How
was it possible to agree, in Article 2, on the principle of non-discrimination
concerning race, color, sex, language, religion, political beliefs, and national and
social origin? How was it possible to agree in articles 18-24 on the rights of free
thought, conscience, information, organization; on the right of each person to
participate in governing their country; the right to social security; the right to
work and to have equal pay for equal work?

All this was possible because, in the first place, in present-day society certain basic
things are no longer controversial. It is one thing to play a bizarre language game
in a class room or in an academic journal, it is another thing to challenge seriously
and publicly certain values on which the whole present civilization rests. American
and Russian ideologues will easily endorse together that “No one must be kept as a
slave or a serf; slavery or slave trade are forbidden in all forms” (Article 4). And
why? Because their present-day social systems have come into being precisely as
the consequence of the abolition of slavery, in one case, of serfdom in the other.

Politicians tend to agree (or at least to verbally make an appearance of agreement

even when they know that the conflict of interests has not really been removed)
because they are dealing with issues of direct, general concern, often with
dangerous and disastrous practical implications; because they are doing it under
the public eye, sometimes under great psychological pressure to come to terms
with the opponent; and because they are very well aware of the possibility of
construing agreement as a great personal success. They cannot afford to play with
logical possibilities and allow themselves to be pushed into a defense of crazy
theories – that could finish them as politicians. They act under much greater real
constraints than the intellectuals, and in order to escape them they use ideology.
What looks as a rational resolution of conflicts will often be a case of ideological
resolution: missing consistency, distorting the customary meanings of words, and
construing the own particular interest as the universal, therefore ethical, one.

For the time being such agreements are of limited, but by no means negligible,
importance. They tend to erode rigid positions, to expand the spiritual horizons of
the opponents, and to make them understand better alternative points of view.
And even when the terms of a conflict solution are not taken seriously by those
who produced it, they can be interpreted literally and used in surprising ways by
large audiences everywhere. A good example is the 1975 Helsinki agreement on
human rights which was reached easily by a number of governments because it
was considered a harmless and non-binding document. It became important when
it raised the hopes of millions of people and helped to articulate their demands for
more freedom and justice.

Dialogues on human rights help us to see better where the real difficulties are on
the road of rational resolution of value conflicts. In contrast to what many
philosophers imagine, the greatest difficulties are not the absence of any general
value principles from which particular value judgments can be derived, nor the
incommensurability of the values of different social groups and cultures.

In the United Nations Charter, for example, American liberals and Soviet Marxists
found ways to agree on whether private property is a human right or constitutes a
violation of worker’s human rights. Article 17 says: “(1) Each has the right to own
property alone or in community with others. (2) No one may be arbitrarily
deprived of his property.” This is an example of a general rule that expresses what
is common in the particular norms of Liberal and Marxist systems of values.

The Marxist does not deny that what he calls “personal property” in contrast to
“private property” is a human right. Marx and Engels stated that capitalism
abolished the personal property of artisans and farmers and concentrated
property in the hands of a few individuals, whereas communism restores personal
property on new ground. The Liberal, on the other hand, does not bother about
the distinction between “private” and “personal” property and, rather satisfied
that the formula about “the right to own property alone” is acceptable to the
Marxist, has no reason to oppose the idea of communal property. After all, what is
a corporation if not a peculiar form of communal ownership?

Again, to the Marxist it is of essential importance that the new revolutionary state
may expropriate private property. This is unacceptable to the Liberal. But the
latter can have no arguments against the formulation “no one may be arbitrarily
deprived of his property.” He also believes in the State and the law, and he knows
very well that modern factories, city quarters, railways, and airports would not
have been possible without compulsory purchases of hundreds of thousands of
private farms and houses. So he must reduce his defense of capitalism to the denial
of “arbitrary” revolutionary expropriation. Once there is a new state and a new
law, their acts cannot easily be criticized from the standpoint and to the advantage
of a Liberal. An eighteenth century revolutionary democrat could challenge
positive law from the standpoint of natural law, and he could condemn various
coercive acts of any state from the point of view of the sovereignty of the people.
For both a Soviet bureaucrat and an American quasi-liberal this is a dangerous
approach. Sovereign people would hardly tolerate enormous concentration of
either economic or political power in the hands of a few; they prefer to reduce
sovereignty of the people to sovereignty of the state, thus to gloss over the right of
people to challenge positive law, to recall its so-called representatives, and to
overthrow the government which betrays public interests.

Thus we see that even antagonistically opposed participants in a dialogue may

resolve their value conflicts because they share important interests against third
parties (people, in our example, or small countries, or the Third world), and they
invariably share some general interests of the whole epoch, of the type of
civilization to which both belong, of humankind as a whole. No matter how
ideologically divided, Eastern and Western Europe share not only institutions of
the state, of law, and of personal property, but also of some kind of market, of
marriage, of free elementary education, of a minimum of social security and
welfare. Most of these could be reasonably challenged from a different
civilizational standpoint. On the other hand, some interests are truly universal: for
example, to support life on Earth, to preserve nature from irreversible pollution, to
save non-renewable natural resources for future generations, to produce enough
food and energy for all countries, to control and reduce demographical growth, to
conquer epidemical diseases and natural catastrophies, to prevent a nuclear
holocaust.

All these different kinds of common interests constitute a basis on which some
value conflicts can, and sometimes must, be rationally resolved. Our example
suggests that both parties in the dialogue are able to reach consensus when: (1)
they stop simply attacking the values of the opponent in the specific forms in which
they were expressed initially; (2) they stop making propaganda for their own
values in the specific form in which this is usually done; (3) they search for a more
general formulation of their own values; (4) they make concrete suggestions as to
how to generalize value judgments of the opponent; finally, (5) they look for a
general rule which expresses the indispensable minimum content of both opposed
value judgments.

The greatest difficulties arise in the application and the control of implementation
of a solution of this kind. First, the parties in the dialogue (for humanitarian or
propagandistic reasons) subscribe to the values which are incompatible with social
make-up in their countries. Thus the Soviet representatives agreed to the right of
each individual to move freely: to leave any country for good; to think and express
their thoughts freely, without harassment; to exchange information and ideas
across national borders; to have equal access to any public service in one’s
country; to freely choose one’s profession; to organize trade unions for the
protection of one’s interests, and so on. These rights could be practically
implemented only if the whole Soviet system were radically changed. On the other
hand, American and West European representatives have agreed to the abolition
of any discrimination concerning race, color, sex, language, political affiliation,
and social origin. Yet all these forms of discrimination exist, and will continue to
exist for a long time. Furthermore, there are a number of specified rights which
are hardly compatible with the capitalist system, such as: the right to work, to just
conditions of work, to equal pay for equal work, to equal access to schools, and to
an education oriented toward full development of one’s personality.

Second, because it is necessary to seek consensus at a sufficient level of generality,

the problem of classification inevitably arises. It will often be unclear whether an
individual case can be subsumed under a general norm, and, since various
governments keep violating the norms, they deliberately obscure the issues by
misclassifying the cases. When East European dissidents are fired from their jobs
and locked up in prisons or mental asylums, these are not presented as cases of the
violation of human rights but as justified defense of society from criminals and
psychopaths. When Western radicals become victims of the Berufsverbot, or are
urged to register as the agents of a foreign country, or are framed and jailed –
these are also “legitimate acts against enemies of the democratic order.” Consensus
on values had to be so abstract that all those repressive acts would not jeopardize
it. Thus appearances of full respect for human rights can be kept.

Third, there is a tendency to make allowances for the exceptions from the agreed
general norms. In politics such attitudes may pass as examples of realism, wisdom,
and statesmanhood. From the philosophical standpoint these are cases of
irrationality. Ethical principles either involve a claim to universal validity – then
their practical application can be challenged only from the standpoint of a
principle which ranks higher in the scale of values – or, if they can be disregarded
because of a particular need, such as the strategic interest of one state, they are
deprived of any validity. A universal declaration of human rights which should be
obligatory for hostile countries but not for allies would hardly be worth more than
the paper on which it has been written.

Fourth, to the extent that a consensus is rational, it implies an openness for critical
examination of its practical import. However, East European governments reject
the universal right of such a critique in the name of state sovereignty and non-
interference in the internal affairs of other countries. This is clearly inconsistent
with their ideological claim to be the heirs of ancient Greek democracy, the
Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. One of the basic assumptions of this great
tradition is that state power derives from the will of the people, and that human
rights are prior to state rights.

From this analysis of existing dialogues of human rights it seems to follow that
many conflicts in the future could be resolved if:

(1) the idea of human rights were generalized, including not only political but also
economic and cultural rights;
(2) critiques of violations of human rights were more consistent and impartial,
directed at allies as well as enemies;
(3) sovereignty of the state were subordinated to sovereignty of the people.

Conclusion

The present struggle for the practical realization of civil and human rights is a new
dimension of contemporary emancipatory aspirations. To the extent that it stops
being a mere phase of confrontation between governments and ideological camps,
and achieves the character of a mass movement, it will contribute essentially to the
abolition of present-day barriers to human freedom and social justice.

To be sure, in different societies it will assume different forms and priorities. In the
countries of developed capitalism it is possible to use the level of political liberties
already achieved in order to abolish present-day forms of economic exploitation
and social oppression. In the countries of state socialism, an obvious prior need is
the overcoming of state absolutism and a thoroughgoing political democratization.
In the countries of the Third World it is essential that the basic material and
cultural preconditions for the implementation of human rights be created, the
growth of oppressive institutions and mechanisms adopted from modern industrial
society be avoided, and the attempt be made to preserve still existing pre-industrial
forms of human solidarity and autonomy. In none of these different situations will
a higher level of human rights and liberties emerge spontaneously, nor will it be
granted to a society by its government: it will be achieved only by the resolute
struggle of various emancipatory movements. Even in the most difficult conditions,
even without any political organization, strong, fearless individuals and groups
may keep alive great emancipatory ideas of the past, and by their own example
may contribute to the awakening of an elementary civil conscience.

Mihailo Marković 1983

The Idea of Critique in Social Theory

Written: 1983;
Source: The Praxis International Archive;
Transcribed: Zdravko Saveski.

There are two basic issues among those scholars who consider themselves critical
theorists:

(1) How to conceive the notion of critique and its relation to explanation (Erklären)
and understanding (Verstehen)?

(2) Which spheres of social life should be the primary targets of critique?

If one reduces Critical social theory to the work of the Frankfurt Institute for
Social Research and its followers, then critique is an alternative to explanation and
understanding. Critical social theory would be one of the three major
philosophical orientations in contemporary social science, the other two being
analytical-empirical and interpretative (phenomenological-hermeneutical)
approach.[1] The attitude of the older generation of critical theorists toward
methodologies of Erklären and Verstehen was one of separation and even rejection
rather than Hegelian transcendence (Aufhebung). Habermas provided systematic
theoretical ground for this separation when he distinguished three basic
knowledge-constitutive interests which are incorporated in the approaches of the
three types of sciences. “The approach of the empirical-analytic sciences
incorporates a technical cognitive interest; that of the historical-hermeneutic
sciences incorporates a practical one, and the approach of critically oriented
sciences incorporates the emancipatory cognitive interest.” [2] This kind of typology
is much closer to the positivistic than to Hegelian tradition. There is no link
between them, no transition, and the last in the triad merely differs from the other
two and does not contain them as both abolished and preserved (aufgehoben)
moments. Their mutual isolation is further strengthened by the fact that each of
those interests is rooted in one dimension of social life: work, interaction and
power. Thus power (Herrschaft) gives rise to emancipatory interest which guides
critical social science. The concept of critique that derives from such a scheme is a
very narrow concept. It is narrow in two senses.

First, it is not clear how critique in this sense can incorporate “positive“ knowledge
about social structures, patterns of behavior, actual forces that shape history.
Without such knowledge it is impossible to project alternative real possibilities of
social change among which one could choose, enlightened by the “emancipatory”
interest. Emancipatory projects would be no more than pre-Marxian utopian
visions. The fact is that the critical method of Marx includes very careful factual
description, structural analysis, establishment of laws – all those things that
analytical-empirical approach emphasizes so much and which some critical
theorists dismiss as mere “positivism.”

A second sense in which the Habermasian concept of critique is narrow is a very

limited conception of the object of criticism. The scheme even fails as self-
understanding of what Habermas and other Frankfurt School scholars were doing.
They did more than criticize Herrschaft – authoritarian family, the state, Nazi
politics. In their interpretation of psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School theorists saw
the critical role of the analyst in his analysis of the distorted self-formative
processes of the patient. Inner resistances, which cause his/her pathological state
and which the analyst helps to combat by setting off a process of depth self-
reflection in the patient, is obviously a considerably different kind of target of
critique than external authority (although it could be mediated by the internalized
form of this authority, the Super-ego). Another example is Habermas’ theory of
communicative competence. Here emancipatory interest is grounded on both
interaction and power and the critique reveals how closely linked these two are.
The negative features of discourse (that would be removed in an “ideal speech”
situation) are: lack of autonomy and responsibility, asymmetry among the
participants, constraints other than those of argumentation itself. The aim of
critique is to initiate self-reflection by which we can be liberated not only from
direct domination but also from its more hidden, indirect forms that are implicit in
speech, culture, tradition, customary ways of life. Power cannot be regarded as a
separate dimension of life isolated from interaction; neither can it be isolated from
work. The latter is a dimension of social life which falls almost entirely outside the
scope of interest of the Frankfurt Critical social theory. The Institute for Social
Research shifted its primary concern from the critique of socio-economic structure
of bourgeois society to the critique of its cultural superstructure.[3] In Habermas’
classification of cognitive interests only a technical interest is grounded on the
sphere of work. An ideal community is an ideal speech community, not a
community of praxis, that transcends alienated labor and alienated politics, and
that includes “free, symmetrical, responsible, unconstrained discourse” as one of
its dimensions. The question arises, of course, how a social critique can be
thoroughgoing and radical enough if it does not see the roots of distorted speech in
those political and economic structures that support social relations of domination
and exploitation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a more general and concrete idea of
critique. I shall argue that a social inquiry that lacks critique of its object is not
complete and that critique in its various dimensions plays a central role in all
phases of research. Therefore one should not isolate critique from explanation and
understanding, and treat critical social science as a mere alternative to the
analytical-empirical and the interpretative one. Critique of social reality
presupposes its accurate empirical description, analysis and understanding. On the
other hand, critical self-reflection is implicit in all phases of valid analysis and
interpretation.

An adequate philosophical foundation of the idea of critique requires a more

general theory of truth than the customary correspondence theory. It requires also
a clarification of a basic value standpoint that underlies all criticism. The
consequence of such a generalization of the idea of critique will be a broadening of
the field of its targets in modern society.

Critique is not something external to social science knowledge, it is not something

that may (but need not) coexist with description, analysis, explanation and
understanding. All social inquiry is incomplete that is reduced to a mere
description, or to structural analysis without examination of the change of those
structures. Equally incomplete is research that seeks merely to explain and
understand actually given phenomena without exploring the alternative
possibilities.

A paradigm of the completely developed social science involves the following

necessary elements:

1) The researcher is aware of his basic theoretical and methodological

assumptions, is ready to state them explicitly and defend them in a dialogue, but is
also prepared to revise and improve them in the light of new experiences and
powerful counter-arguments.

2) These basic theoretical assumptions together with all relevant preceding

knowledge give a definite a priori meaning to a selected research program.

3) Problems formulated in the research program determine the scope of relevant

phenomena that should be examined and described.

4) In order to understand the meaning of described social phenomena it is

necessary to discover agents’ motives, intentions, long-range aspirations.

5) In order to explain the described phenomena it is necessary to establish laws and

rules that govern them.
6) Objective determinants established by causal analysis and subjective
determinants revealed by interpretation of phenomena determine the framework
of historical possibilities of subsequent social development.

7) A fully developed social science does not exhaust its task by providing answers
to questions about what exists, what is its meaning, why is it the way it is, what is
its potential, and how it could change in the future. It also tries to answer questions
about what is negative (inadequate, irrational, unjust, inhuman) in the existing
social reality, what are its basic limitations with respect to its own potential.

8) Discovery of the basic limitations of existing reality is the negative dimension of

critique. The positive dimension of critique is the discovery of the optimal
possibility of its future change. The optimal does not coincide with the most
probable; on the other hand, its probability must be greater than zero, otherwise it
would not belong to the realm of objective possibilities.

9) Since a fully developed social science theory cannot be separated from practice,
inquiry does not end with the establishment of the true picture of examined reality
with its limitations and future possibilities. Social science must mediate between
existing reality and its optimal future possibilities by examining specific phases of
the process and possible practical steps which lead from the one to the other.

Obviously critique plays the central role in all these specific phases and structural
elements into which social research can be analyzed: from building the theoretical
standpoint to a rational selection of the research program, to interpretation and
explanation, to discovery of the negative features of reality and finding ways to
overcome them. The centrality of the notion of critique in social science follows
from the fact that critique is not one among other forms of conscious activity, it is
specifically human conscious activity. Critical consciousness is the consciousness of
the negative. Human consciousness involves invariably a moment of the negative in
more than one sense.

First, consciousness of an object is consciousness of both its being and its non-
being. To be aware of an object as a process means to be aware of the negative in
it.

Second, identity of the object involves the negation of everything that is different
from it. From a logical point of view any definite class of objects divides the
universe of discourse into two parts, one of which is the negation of the other.
From a historical point of view any realization of one possibility implies the
abolition of all other possibilities. As Spinoza said: Omnis determination negatio est.
Projecting of real possibilities can be best understood as the progressive
elimination of logical possibilities.

Third, while we observe an object as an actually existing phenomenon, we are also

aware of those of its structural and dispositional properties that constitute its
potential. Our consciousness of the object is thus polarized into consciousness of
what the object is and what it could be but is not yet.
Fourth, all perception is anything but disinterested. Selection of relevant data is at
the same time the elimination of everything else. We immediately experience
phenomena in the light of our taste, needs, practical interest. We see them often as
ugly, unpleasant, dangerous. Furthermore we judge them from the point of view of
our moral, legal, political, aesthetical and other standards. Our judgments,
whether about immediate affective reactions or judgments mediated by general
communal norms, enter our perception and cannot be easily distinguished from
purely receptive sensory elements.

Fifth, specifically human consciousness involves a negative attitude toward itself:

this is critical self-consciousness. With the exception of some perfectly self-assured
imbeciles all other individuals invariably experience as negative certain impulses,
affects, habits of thinking including methodological rules of inquiry, norms of
conduct, including moral norms of the community to which they belong. In the
absence of critical self-consciousness no self-development would be possible.

Those social scholars who advocate value-free social science express their readiness
to suspend their practical interests as well as moral and political norms of the
cultural traditions to which they belong. Even if they could succeed in this (which
is questionable) they cannot avoid constant selection and critical evaluation of
observed data, nor permanent application of epistemological values which regulate
various phases of inquiry, nor can they escape constant critical reexamination of
their own research activity.

Critique in this general sense means discovery of the limitations and realization of
the possibilities of their transcendence.

What limitations are we talking here about? These are first, limitations in the
description and explanation of reality, second, limitations in the interpretation of
the meaning of that reality, third, limitations in reality itself.

Such a conception of critique presupposes a corresponding triple conception of

truth. Truth is the intended end-product of inquiry. It is present to a growing
degree in incomplete results of fragmentary and unfinished investigation. Critique
is the examination and reexamination that leads to this final product.

Truth is usually understood as correspondence or some kind of adequacy of our

statements and theories to objective reality. This conception fits very well with the
mainstream analytical-empirical orientation in contemporary social science. It
contributes significantly to a tendency of reification of knowledge. Objective social
reality is constituted by observable invariant patterns of overt behavior and its
products – social institutions. Motives, intentions and aspirations are excluded
since they cannot allegedly be tested in a satisfactory intersubjective way. The
consequence of this elimination of subjectivity from the concept of reality is the
lack of understanding of what is going on. The resulting picture of society is very
incomplete and unreliable in its predictions, especially in times of crisis and
powerful movements. In order to grasp subjective forces that mould history within
objective constraints one should take into consideration another dimension of
truth: truth of interpretation, adequacy of the scientific model of a social reality (of
ideal types) to the meaning intended by the agents themselves.

Schutz‘s postulate of adequacy of inquiry requires: “Each term in a scientific

model of human action must be constructed in such a way that a human act
performed within the life-world by an individual actor in the way indicated by the
typical construct would be understandable for the actor himself as well as for his
fellowmen in terms of common-sense interpretation of everyday life.”[4]

This kind of adequacy allows understanding of subjective forces of a social reality.

A picture of reality that omits that essential dimension of social life is very
incomplete and very unreliable in its predictions.

Nevertheless when both adequacy requirements have been met, when explanation
and understanding have been blended in our account of social reality, we still do
not know how much is the actual state adequate to its own potential, to what extent
it has become what it optimally could be. To the extent to which we want our
knowledge to be praxis-oriented rather than passive, we will, therefore, be
concerned about a third kind of adequacy, a third dimension of truth: how true is
the examined social reality to an ideal standard. When the ideal standard is the one
chosen by the agents themselves, critique is internal, when it expresses the basic
value standpoint of the research – critique is external; both are needed.

Now the notion of truth that embraces all three dimensions of adequacy can be
stated explicitly in the following way.

The concept of truth involves the relation of adequacy between two structures:

a) adequacy of a proposition or theory to objective reality; b) adequacy of a

proposition or theory to a subjective reality (motives, aspirations); c) adequacy of
reality itself to a theoretical standard of its evaluation. Truth in the first two senses
is truth about reality; in the third sense it is truth of reality. A social theory is,
then, true to the extent to which the following three conditions have been fulfilled:

1) The theory offers accurate description and a valid explanation of objective

social processes (i.e., it is adequate to the actually existing objective state of
society),

2) The theory enables us to properly interpret the meaning of social events and
symbolical forms (i.e., it is adequate to the given spiritual situation in the society),

3) The theory reveals basic limitations of given society and its optimal possibilities
of future development (i.e., it is adequate to a social ideal which expresses the
potential for development of the given reality).

Those who still defend the views of neutrality of social science would refuse to
study negativity and would insist that description, explanation and understanding
do not involve any critical evaluation. To this it could be replied: first that a social
researcher cannot completely succeed in “putting himself into brackets” as a
practical being, interested member of community; second, that various kinds of
values orient our research all the time, and that critique is implicit in all phases of
inquiry.

Consider first the analytical-empirical paradigm of social study. The starting point
of research is not collection of positive facts, nor even laying down of hypotheses.
Dewey was right in establishing that all inquiry starts with the explicit formulation
of a problem. However, we become conscious of a problem in the conflict of new
data and preexisting theoretical views. Yet the problem is not only how to interpret
and explain new data, but it could also be: how to improve our theoretical
standpoint and to revise some of our assumptions. A process of critical
reexamination of one’s basic methodological presuppositions is going on all the
time: in actual research – when some of them turn out to be inadequate, or in a
dialogue with representatives of other orientations – when lacunae in one’s initial
position become apparent.

The choice of a research program is anything but value-free, autonomous and

purely rational. Without a constant critique of various pragmatic interests that
determine the choice and direction of inquiry, social science would more or less
become a victim of ideological mystification everywhere.

The choice of hypotheses is another step in inquiry that is not regulated by any
strict rules. Of course methodological rules determine derivation and testing of
consequences. But there are no rules that lead us to decide how many hypotheses
will be taken into consideration and when we shall decide that we exhausted all
possibilities and that we can stop further testing. In the absence of a critique that
challenges early closing of a problem, most results of a hypothetical-deductive
inquiry would have to be considered very problematic.

Another question is reliability and validity of empirical data. Before they can be
accepted as true evidence they have to undergo extensive critical testing
(comparing them, matching data obtained by one method with those obtained by
another method, etc.).

A crucial issue in the analytical-empirical paradigm of social science is the status of

a law. Laws are indispensable to explanation of phenomena. However, if they are
only empirical generalisations lacking any necessity, all explanations are
unreliable. On the other hand they become dogmatical if we interpret social laws
as expressions of natural necessity. An interesting alternative is a pragmatical
strategy of their justification. A statement that has the status of a law is so well
theoretically entrenched and has so often been empirically confirmed that we
decide to defend it in the conflict with surprising new data until we exhaust all the
possibilities (that are offered to us by scientific method) of challenging truly factual
character of data and/or modifying without essentially transforming the statement
of the law.

To conclude this section: critique is an immanent and indispensable element of all

description, causal analysis and scientific explanation – those phases of inquiry
that deal with objective dimensions of examined social reality.
5

What is the role of critique in interpretation, in the study of subjective dimensions

of social reality?

The task of social scholars is here to build up interpretative schemes which will
help to understand what an act means for the agents and those persons who
interact with them. Using the method of ideal types-building the scholar attributes
“typical” goals and purposes to fictitious, “typical” individuals in everyday life.
Phenomenologists and hermeneutic social scholars know very well that those
constructions must not be arbitrary. Alfred Schütz introduced the postulates of
logical consistency and of adequacy in order to justify them. “Fulfillment of the
postulate of logical consistency warrants the objective validity of the thought-
objects constructed by the social scientist … Compliance with the postulate of
adequacy warrants the consistency of the constructs of the social scientist with the
constructs of common-sense experience of the social reality.”[5]

These two postulates hardly suffice to overcome the arbitrariness in building

interpretative schemes. Husserl believed that phenomenological description must
rest on certain basic a priori structures of meaning which do not hold only for this
or that everyday’s world but for the world in general. The attempt to build a
transcendental phenomenology as a fundamental science of transcendental
subjectivity failed, in the view of Schutz.[6] He attempted himself to explore some
basic structures that constitute any form of social life, from Greek polls to
contemporary industrial society. These are face-to-face interactions or interactions
in the world-of-contemporaries. However, these are an inadequate basis for the
interpretative schemes of individual social researchers: there is no mediation
between them. The mediatory role could be played by the structures that
characterize specific historical types of society. Here lies one of the basic
limitations of the phenomenological method: no structure is conceived historically,
in its genesis, transformation and disappearance.

The most difficult problem for interpretative social science is the impossibility to
make a distinction between adequate and false consciousness that people have
about their own activity and the activity of others. Interpretative social science
assumes that every individual is able to understand his acts and be aware of his
motives. But what happens if the agent is wrong concerning his true motives, if he
lacks true self-understanding? Schutz does not even consider this possibility. For
him an in-order-to motive is simply “an act that an individual projects into the
future perfect sense and in terms of which the action receives its orientation.”
There is nothing in the phenomenological method that allows a critical attitude
toward individual self-understanding, or toward subjective meaning. In this way
are entirely ignored all such important insights as Hegel’s analysis of “false
consciousness,” Marx’s critique of ideology, Sartre’s analysis of “bad faith,”
Freud’s discovery of the mechanisms of repression, resistance, self-deceit.

The consequences for the interpretative approach are very serious. Schutz‘s
postulate of adequacy required that theoretical models of the social scientist be in
agreement with interpretative schemes of agents themselves, in other words, with
their self-understanding. If individuals in a society deceive themselves and live in
illusions as to their own intentions and motives, all such rationalizations must come
to expression in the interpretative model of the scientist. Then such a model is
clearly ideological: instead of revealing truth about a social reality, the model
would contribute to its mystification.

It follows, then, that interpretation must be critical all the time. It must be a
critique of mythical and ideological consciousness. To do this a bridge must be
reestablished between analysis of objective social structures and interpretation of
subjective processes. In order to discover true motives of an action it is necessary to
know objective history of a community, its active forces and pressures, biographies
of important individuals, forgotten and repressed past, subjective determinants.

Critique of ideology cannot be separated from the critique of reality that produces
ideological consciousness. Critique of social reality is entirely missing in either
analytical – empirical or interpretative approaches to social science. When it is
there in exceptional individual cases, it lacks any theoretical foundation. For
example Schutz writes on equality: “The ideal of equality of chances ought to
secure the individual the right to search for happiness and maximum of self-
realization that his situation in social reality allows.” [7] There is nothing in Schutz’s
philosophy that supports talk abort social ideals, about what ought to be in reality,
about happiness, or self-realization as supreme values.

The richest and most adequate theoretical framework for a critique of reality one
can still find in Marx; in that sense his thought can indeed be characterized as the
critical philosophy of our epoch. However, two fundamental objections are
necessary.

First, Marx has to a considerable extent neglected the analysis of subjectivity,

especially of those elements of culture and of spiritual life that cannot be fully
explained by the social basis, that are autonomous, creative, unpredictable. His
great contribution is a philosophical ground for the critique of all ideology. But the
description and analysis of the subjective structures of: actual social consciousness,
self-consciousness, symbolic forms, traditional culture, was underestimated by
both Marx and his early followers. It is therefore indispensable to take into
account and interpret within a new totality all that was contributed theoretically
and methodologically by phenomologists and hermeneuticians.

Second, in Marx’ positive knowledge about objective social structures is a moment

of critical science. In order to be able to say what is not human in reality, in order
to be able to project most human future possibility one must know what reality is,
what is its structure, what social forces mould events, what are objective
tendencies of historical processes. Marx was clear about that, but many among his
followers were not. They allowed a hiatus between what is and what ought to be.
The apologists would declare that the ideal was already realized. The utopian
rebels would reject the ugly present reality in the name of the future ideal without
mediating the ideal by a solid knowledge about the structures of existing reality
and by a projection of real, feasible, short-range possibilities.
The importance and present day relevance of what Marx has to offer in order to
ground social criticism can be best evaluated in comparison with other
alternatives.

There is a plurality of philosophical positions that can serve as the theoretical

foundation of a critique of reality. A simple typology would rest on two
distinctions. One is between the static and the dynamic (historical). The other one
is between the absolute and the relative. Thus we would have the following four
positions:

First, a static relativism characteristic for pragmatism and structuralism. Value

assumptions constitute disparate paradigms of morality analogous to Bachelard’s
different types of rationality or Kuhn’s paradigms of science or Levi-Strauss’
codes for expressing specific social structures. A critique of reality is possible from
the standpoint of a set of moral rules which are characteristic for each particular
society. There is no universal “good” and no sense in which one morality could be
judged superior to the others.

Second, if we wish to overcome relativism we could accept absolutism in the sense

of Kant or Scheller. There is a transcendental concept of man and his practical
reason, there is a historical autonomy of good will, universal moral law. In Scheller
basic values are projected into a special absolute realm of validity.

Third, for those who reject static conceptions of either a formalistic ethics of duty
or of an axiology of values “in themselves,” another open possibility is Hegel’s
historical absolutism. There it is possible to compare and criticize different moral
systems and to interpret them as particular moments of development. However,
the basic assumption of an absolute spirit ultimately denies history and possible
creation of new values in the future.

Fourth, there is the possibility of a historical relativism in the spirit of official

Marxism. Marx’s thought is often ambiguous, even contradictory when ideas from
different writings, different periods, different theoretical battles are compared.
Official Marxist ideology offers a historical and relativistic conception of morality.
Morality evolves in history but is always determined by the objective life
conditions of a definite social class. This overemphasis on class character of human
beings brings us back to relativism. One can find it not only in the Orthodox
Marxism of the Second and the Third International, but also in the structuralism
of Althusser. Instead of seeing in future what Hegel saw in the past – a process of
human totalization, of a progressive enrichment and emancipation, both Orthodox
Marxists and Althusserians conceive history as a series of modes of production
separated by revolutionary discontinuums and cultural (“epistemological”) gaps.
Marx was himself responsible for this relativistic interpretation. For example
Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach, “Man is the ensemble of social relationships”
has clearly relativistic implications. On the other hand, his critique of alienated
labour, of alienated politics and of ideology helps to develop a universal humanistic
value standpoint that transcends both false dilemmas of relativism and absolutism,
and of static structuralism and historicism.
Critique is free from relativism when it rests on strong convictions, in spite of all
respect for the views of others. But it is also free from dogmatism when those
convictions are in principle open for possible revision whenever they meet
powerful counter-arguments. The underlying assumption here is that dialogues
with the opponents make sense – whether they lead to further affirmation or to
revision and further self-development of one’s point of view. Without such a free,
symmetrical communication one could not discover what is truly universally
human.

The universally human is the invariant in the variable. It is constituted by certain

specifically human dispositions which are responsible for all spectacular
development and ongoing emancipation in history. Such are rationality, creativity,
communicative power, ability to cultivate our senses and get an increasingly rich
experience of the world, capacity for mutual recognition and care. These
dispositions constitute a universal human potential for praxis which is always
realized in new, not fully predictable ways. Such a point of view is not static:
history of humanity is a process of ever greater differentiation and enrichment. On
the other hand this is neither historism that passes from one particular to the
other. There is an evolving human identity that remains continuous in all historical
transformations. To preserve and further develop this identity, to create historical
conditions for equally bringing to life this potential for praxis in all individuals –
constitutes the highest good, and the basic ground for critical evaluation of social
reality.

This view could be attacked in at least the following three ways.

First objection would be that by virtue of the very fact that it introduces value
judgments into social science, the latter becomes ideological. The reply to this
would be that only those value judgments are ideological which express the
particular interest of a specific social group, class, party, nation, race, religion, or
sex. Value judgments which claim universal validity are compatible with scientific
objectivity – unless it can be shown that the claim was false.

Second objection is that even if the claims to universal validity of statements about
universal human potential cannot be falsified, they also cannot be confirmed – and
have therefore metaphysical, non-scientific character. The point is, however, that
statements about universal human creativity, rationality and communicability are
testable. They would be manifested in each individual under specifiable conditions.
Generating such conditions would then allow us to effectively test those statements.
In that sense they belong to a general scientific theory of human being in history.

Third objection is that any conception of man that is applied as a value standpoint
of critique must be dogmatic and exclusive of other possible standpoints. The
answer to this is that dogmatism must be overcome in two ways. Each case of
application allows revision of what has been applied. On the other hand, one enters
the dialogue with spokesmen of other philosophical views ready to recognize a
strong counter-argument, open for mutual influences, interaction and such a
consensus that would require improvement of one’s own initial position.

7
If the idea of man as a being of praxis is the fundamental standpoint of radical
critique, then it clearly follows that the targets of criticism will not only be:
violation of civil rights, despotic domination, usurpation of the surplus value from
property less workers, let alone distorted communication. All these are only
specific cases of distorted praxis, of an activity in which individuals fail to be what
they could be. From that point of view the dimensions of social life that Habermas
allocated to his three knowledge-constitutive interests can be only distinguished
but by no means separated. The field of critical social theory is the totality of work,
authority and communicative interaction.

Distorted speech takes place under the conditions of alienated labour, of political
and cultural domination. Even if allowed to participate in a discourse about the
production program of an economic enterprise, a worker lacks knowledge of
necessary data, lacks competence to speak in public, and since he is so vulnerable
he may also lack courage. He has no chance of taking part in a free, unrestrained
symmetrical speech either in his workplace or in political society at large – short of
a thoroughgoing social revolution.

Consequently, an ideal form of life is not just an ideal speech community but more
generally, an ideal community of praxis, i.e., a community in which equal social
conditions would be secured for each individual to bring to life his specific
potential for praxis.

There is, by all means, a normative element in the idea of praxis. But it is not
arbitrary – it is implicit in the very structure of human activity in history. It is true
that for each moment of genuine creativity there have been ages of dull mechanical
repetition. For one individual who has fully actualized his creative potential there
are thousands who have been disastrously crippled. And yet praxis has always
been actually there in human history. Countless anonymous individuals who never
had the leisure to indulge in a deliberate search for novelties, managed to create
language, basic social institutions, initial technology and an impressive popular
culture. As a matter of fact praxis is the necessary condition of history; in its
absence human history would be undistinguishable from the history of any other
living organisms – slow, repetitive, entirely based on the laws of biological
evolution.

The ideal community of praxis is not a completed, idyllic community devoid of all
contradictions (resembling perhaps a strangely naive description of communism
given by Marx in one passage in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that all
his critics love to quote, usually without bothering to quote other passages
incompatible with it). This is a community that resolves some basic conflicts of our
epoch, while preserving certain tensions and limitations which seem to inevitably
accompany man as a natural and social being, and the destiny of which beyond the
horizon of our epoch can hardly be conjectured. It is not clear, for example,
whether we can ever get rid of all routine work, of all scarcity, of all heteronomy in
social life, of all dimensions of inequality.

And yet, in comparison with our present state of affairs there are two essentially
new emancipatory break-throughs in the ideal community of praxis for our epoch.
First, the abolition of any monopoly of alienated, dominating power (political,
economical and cultural) opens a space for universal free participation in the
decision-making on public issues.

Second, considerable reduction of socially obligatory work and a kind of education

the primary purpose of which is the discovery of potential talent, will increasingly
liberate all individuals for unstructured, innovative, spontaneous activities.

Such an ideal community of praxis is not merely a postulate of reason or

expression of hope but a real historical possibility of our epoch. Its idea gives basic
orientation to critical social science. On the other hand critical social science may
indicate the way of its practical realization (which would be different in each
particular society).

Status quo social scholars tend to dismiss any discourse about ideals as utopian.
However the fundamental problem of social science today is not that it suffers from
too much unfounded, unscientific, utopian critique of reality. Its true problem is
that it is not sufficiently critical and that, under the mask of neutrality and
freedom from any values, it simply serves well established practical interests and
invisible traditional ideological values.

NOTES

1. See Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New
York and London, 1976).

2. Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interests

Boston, 1971), p. 308.

3. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination

4. Schutz, Collected Papers, (The Hague, 1964) vol. I, p. 44.

5. Schutz, Ibid., vol. I, pp. 63-64.

6. “Husserl’s attempt to account for the constitution of transcendental subjectivity

in terms of the operations of a consciousness of a transcendental ego has not
succeeded” (Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. III, 1966), p. 82.

7. Schutz, Ibid., vol. II, p. 273.

Mihailo Markovic 1989

Yugoslavia: Current Crisis and Future Trends.

Tragedy of National Conflicts in “Real Socialism”
The case of the Yugoslav Autonomous Province of Kosovo
Source: Praxis International, November 1989.

In both of the multinational “real socialist” societies, Yugoslavia and the Soviet
Union, it was officially claimed that the national question was successfully solved.
It turned out that this was not so. Old national conflicts appeared, at least
temporarily, unresolved. Under the conditions of accelerated material growth and
progressively improving standards of living, they assumed a latent form. They
flared up soon after those societies entered a period of serious economic and
political crisis.

The attention of the world is at the moment focused on the series of bloody
national conflicts that broke out in the Soviet Union in 1989: Kasakhstan,
Usbekistan, Aserbaijan, Georgia, Armenia. These were preceded by the violent
demonstration of Albanians in the Yugoslav province Kosovo in 1981, which were
repeated in the Spring of 1989. The study of this case is not only interesting in itself
as a tragic episode in the history of Albanians and Serbs, it also indicates possible
developments and tragic complications of this type of conflicts in general.

The conflicts that today constitute the problem of Kosovo are deeply rooted and
very complex. The following dimensions should be distinguished:

1. National: Two nations claim the same territory – one, Albania, on ethnic
grounds, the other, Serbian on historical and cultural ones.

2. Political: The political system of Yugoslavia is flexible and decentralized enough

to accommodate a full autonomy for its Albanian minority. This minority demands
more, i.e. the status of a republic, which means another sovereign Albanian state
on Yugoslav territory.

3. Socio-economic: Kosovo is the least developed area of Yugoslavia and suffers

from mass-unemployment and poverty. Considerable aid is given to it, but in view
of the high birth rate of the Albanian population, the gap in all indicators per
capita is growing.

4. Ideological: For definite historical reasons most Albanian people from Kosovo
have not participated in the National Liberation war and have not accepted the
new socialist regime in Yugoslavia. A large part of the opposition in Kosovo is
closely connected with conservative emigrant organizations in the West. Another
part of the opposition identifies itself with the Stalinist Enver Hohxa’s regime in
Albania with has been very hostile to Yugoslavia since the 1948 conflict between
Communist parties of the USSR and Yugoslavia. Both are incompatible with the
political cultures existing now in the rest of Yugoslavia.
1. Serbian-Albanian national conflict

It is important to emphasize that race, blood or biology have nothing to do with

this conflict. It is entirely the product of tragic historical circumstances. Serbs and
Albanians have lived for centuries in reasonably good neighbourly relations. As
shepherds and farmers they were quite compatible and they fought together
against Venetians, Greeks and Turks. The fact that once Albanians were defeated
by Turks and that they gradually accepted Islam – whereas Serbs and
Montenegrins have not – was of decisive importance. Probably it can be
understood if one takes into account that the Albanian people under Skenderbeg
gave Turks a very strong and valiant resistance for a quarter of a century and,
after the death of their leader in 1468, were crushed, destroyed and probably
demoralized, whereas Serbs lost the decisive battle (on Kosovo) already in 1389
and had enough time to adapt (from 1389 till 1459) to the loss of statehood without
a loss of national and religious identity.

Religious differences have greatly contributed to growing hostilities between the

two peoples during long centuries of Ottoman supremacy. The region which was
invaded and eventually conquered by islamized Albanians, also happened to be the
cradle of Serbian culture, the center of the Serbian Orthodox church, the locus of
the crucial event in the entire Serbian medieval history, the symbol of Serbian
national and cultural identity. That is why Serbs cannot give it up.

Unfortunately nationalists on both sides make an already difficult problem nearly

insoluble by denying any validity to the opponents’ claim. Serbian nationalists
would like to have the territory without nearly four fifths of its population. They
sometimes behave as if one could indefinitely rule Kosovo by force or expel all
dissatisfied Albanians to Albania. Albanian nationalists, on the other hand, annoy
Serbs by claiming that they have always lived on that territory, that Serbian
toponyms “properly interpreted” are Albanian, that great medieval monasteries
and frescoes were built and painted by Albanians, not by Serbs; that heroes of the
Kosovo battle were in fact Albanians. Thus the legendary Milos Obilic turns out to
be a certain Miljes Kopilji in someone’s sick mind.[1]

At the moment the conflict seems nearly unresolvable in any peaceful democratic
way. It is not clear when the emergency state in Kosovo will end, as it indeed must.
It is not clear how successful the constitution of Serbia will be that makes the legal
and security system of Kosovo a part of the legal and security system of the
republic of Serbia. In particular, it is unclear whether non-Albanians will be able
to survive in Kosovo with all legal protection if they would continue to feel
surrounded by hatred and hostility. On the other hand, it is uncertain how long the
Albanian majority in Kosovo can wish to live under the conditions of an
emergency state, and how much time it could take before it decides to part ways
with the megalomaniac projects of a Great Albania.

New, more sober, realistic, and tolerant attitudes might emerge as a consequence
of the realization that in the long ran neither prolonged hostility nor an emergency
state meets any rational interests.
2. The political aspect of the Kosovo problem

Already in 1968 the Albanian minority of Kosovo had demanded the status of a
republic for the autonomous province of Kosovo. The unchallenged Albanian
leader at that time, Fadil Hohxa, had raised the issue with Tito himself. Tito flatly
refused. On the eve of the Albanian national holiday of 27 November 1968 mass
demonstrations broke out in Prishtina, the main town of Kosovo. The principal
demand was “Kosovo – republic,” but among the slogans there were some
explicitly chauvinistic ones, for example, “Death to Serbian oppressors.” Huge
crowds gathered in Prishtina from all parts of Kosovo. Fearing further escalation
into a mass rebellion, state leadership summoned some military forces and the
demonstrators withdrew. There was no use of violence, no political consequences
for anybody, no publicity about the event.

What was refused de jure was given de facto, Tito made sure that the Yugoslav
Constitution was changed in 1974 in such a way that Kosovo got a number of
prerogatives of a sovereign republic: complete political, economic, cultural
independence from the republic of Serbia (only in name did it remain its part), its
own flag and language, direct participation in the decision making at the federal
level, veto power on any federal decision, the right equal to those of the republic in
delegating its representatives to top leading functions, including those of the head
of the state and the president of the party; the right to pursue its own foreign
policy (which was amply used for collaboration with Enver Hohxa’s Albania in
spite of continuing hostility of that state to Yugoslavia).

This did not entirely satisfy Albanian nationalists. After Tito’s death, in early 1981,
another round of mass demonstrations broke out in Prishtina (on March 11, April
1-3) and in several other Kosovo towns. Demonstrations were well organized, well
synchronized in different places and it became clear that they were the expression
of a powerful separatist movement. The demand was again “Kosovo – republic.”
What threatened to develop into a mass uprising was halted by another
intervention of the army and special security units. Unfortunately this time
violence was used on both sides and possibly several dozen people (officially nine)
were killed. It was never discovered who were the organizers of the movement.
Regrettably, hundreds of students were arrested and given long jail sentences for
belonging to various small Marxist-Leninist organizations, committed to
unification of Kosovo with Enver Hohxa’s Albania.

Federal authorities who behaved with strange indifference and aloofness toward
the problem of Kosovo during the entire period between 1968 and 1981, began to
pay more attention. But until 1988 their position was rather ambiguous. On the
one hand, they were adamant in rejecting the demand “Kosovo – republic.”
Demonstrations of 1981 were characterized as a “counter-revolution,” which was
one-sided, to say the least: they were the product of a national rather than a class
movement. On the other hand, federal authorities were reluctant to introduce any
changes in Kosovo. The same cadres remained in leading positions although there
was increasing evidence that (beginning with Fadil Hohxa, Bakali, Veli Deva,
Nimani and others) they were directly involved in the nationalist movement.
Schoolboys went to jail, no leaders of the underground movement were ever
discovered. Immediately after the 1981 demonstrations, the head of federal
security, Stane Dolanc, was quick in declaring that the state of Albania was in no
way involved. Later Albania and its intelligence were increasingly blamed for
active support of the nationalist movement in Kosovo. For years federal authorities
did nothing serious to stop expulsion of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo and
the policy to make Kosovo an “ethnically pure” province.

Things began to change in 1988. The Serbian minority in Kosovo organized a

movement of its own, outside of all official organizations. Thousands of them
would travel to cities outside Kosovo, organize mass meetings and publicly
complain about the violations of their rights and injustices done to them by Kosovo
authorities. Local people would express their sympathy and revolt against the
indifferent attitudes of their politicians.

This process of self-organization coincided with a significant change of Serbian

leadership in October 1987. The new chairman of the Serbian party, Slobodan
Milosevic, endorsed the initiative of Kosovo Serbs and invited people everywhere
to an “anti-bureaucratic” revolution – against the injustices of the system, against
incompetent and corrupt functionaries, against the Constitution of 1974 and,
especially, against its discrimination against Serbian people. The main points of
attack were the division of the republic of Serbia into three parts and the
constitutional obstacles to Serbia’s having state functions on its entire territory as
did other republics. Milosevic’s policy won very strong mass support not only in
Serbia proper but also in the autonomous province of Vojvodina and in the
republic of Montenegro, where very strong popular movements wiped out entire
leaderships. Fearing that similar movements could develop among large Serbian
minorities in Bosnia and Hercegovina (1.5 million) and in Croatia (700,000) the
Central committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia endorsed minimal
Serbian demands for constitutional changes.

After several months of bitter fighting, after another round of Albanian mass
demonstrations (in November 1988 and in March 1989), after another emergency
state in Kosovo and violent clashes, which costed many human lives on both sides
(Albanian demonstrators and militia), the changes of the Constitution of the
republic of Serbia were accepted by both republican assembly and the assemblies
of autonomous provinces in March 1989.

The change does not affect the autonomy of the province, not even some
prerogatives that go well beyond autonomy (direct representation in federal
organizations and the veto right). But it does deprive the province of some of its
sovereign rights provided by the Constitution of 1974. Its legal and defense system
is now a part of the legal and defense system of the republic of Serbia. The future
change of the republican Constitution will no longer be dependent on the
consensus given by the Assembly of Kosovo, as it was the case until now.

Every loss of privileges that were once granted in the past cannot but cause
dissatisfaction among Albanian people. On the other hand, Serbs in Kosovo may
also have reasons to be less than happy. Their precarious status in Kosovo was not
dramatically improved. Their only achievement is that now when their human
rights are violated they can eventually appeal to the Supreme Court of the republic
of Serbia, whereas until now the ultimate legal forum for their appeals was the
Supreme Court of Kosovo. But the large majority of judges as well as of managers
and officials will continue to be Albanians.

Whether a majority of Albanian people in Kosovo will eventually accept the

changes and adapt to a situation which is still favourable for them is uncertain at
this point. What is certain is that a political conflict will remain for some time
between the Yugoslav state and the nationalist movement in Kosovo.

At the surface the issue of the conflict is whether Kosovo will be given the status of
a republic within the Yugoslav federation.

Official arguments against that solution are the following ones. First, according to
the Yugoslav Constitution a republic is a sovereign state. Albanian people already
have their state and it is not desirable to create another one on Yugoslav territory.
It is true that there are two Korean and two German states but these are the
necessary products of a war and of the division of the world among superpowers.
Such necessity does not exist in this case. International law after the Second World
War guarantees inviolability of borders in Europe. Second, according to the
Yugoslav Constitution there is a distinction between “nations’’ and
‘’nationalities”; the latter corresponds to the customary concept of national
minorities. The former have the right of self-determination, including secession,
the latter have not. Third, the Albanian nationality in Yugoslavia already enjoys
more rights and privileges than any other minority in the world, therefore it is
unreasonable and not acceptable to demand even more. Fourth, the problem is not
only Kosovo. The percentage of Albanians in Western Macedonia exceeds that in
Serbia. Thus giving Kosovo the status of a republic would become a dangerous
precedent. To these other arguments can be added: Kosovo has always been a part
of the Serbian state, except under occupation. Albanians in Kosovo have abused
autonomy of the region and have not granted to the Serbian minority in Kosovo
the same rights which they themselves enjoyed. The position of that minority
would be threatened even more if the autonomy of the province turns into
sovereignty.

The real issue, however, is not the status of a republic. The real issue – as
everybody concerned knows – is the program of the League of Prizren, a political
organization of Albanian people created in 1878. The goal of the League was the
unification of all lands where any Albanians live into a great Albanian state. That
is far more than Kosovo: it includes parts of Montenegro, Serbia and half of
Macedonia with its largest cities: Skopje, Bitolj, Prilep, Ohrid, Kumanovo. This
means not only more than doubling the territory and strength of a very unfriendly
neighbour – Stalinist Albania – but it also means dismemberment and destruction
of Yugoslavia. It is hard to believe but it happened: the government of Yugoslavia
has tolerated and officially participated at the celebration of the hundredth
anniversary of the Prizren League in Prizren June 5-11, 1978.

The Second League of Prizren was created under fascist occupation in 1943. The
Third League of Prizren was formed in the USA in 1946. Historical conditions and
the location of the center changes, but the goal remains the same: a very extreme,
over-ambitious, unrealistic goal of taking from other countries all lands in which
any Albanians live. Very different, even incompatible forces collaborate on that
program: from the right wing Bali Komb’tar which collaborated with the fascists
during the last war, to the Albanian intelligence service and a network of Marxist-
Leninist organizations which assume that the present-day Albania is the only true
socialist society in the world. Those forces would have to clash at a later stage but
at the moment they are all united around the slogan “Kosovo – republic.”

Constitutional changes in the republic of Serbia do not mean much to the ordinary
citizen of Kosovo, but to the nationalist movement they dealt a terrible blow. The
movement knew only success during the entire post-war period. In the beginning,
until 1948, preparations were made for the unification of Kosovo with Albania;
later, federal authorities displayed an extraordinary permissiveness toward
Albanian nationalists, expecting an eventual improvement of relations with
Albania. On the other hand, as the leading Macedonian politician Lazo Kolishevski
revealed, the internal Yugoslav policy in all those years followed the rule: “The
weaker is Serbia – the stronger would be Yugoslavia.” And the principal means to
keep Serbia weak would be to preoccupy it with the problem of Kosovo. Had not
Albanian nationalists been over-impatient and had they not miscalculated the
possibilities of their offensive in the Spring of 1981, they would have without a
doubt, achieved their goals of ethnic purity: Kosovo, Western Macedonia and a
number of communes in Montenegro and Southern Serbia. Time seemed to be on
their side. In 1988 and 1989 the process of the emergence of a Great Albania was
stopped and reversed. With the reawakening of strong national feelings among
Serbs, with the reintegration of Kosovo into the Serbian state the chance is gone, at
least for several decades.

This is what Albanian nationalists cannot and will not accept. The future of the
political conflict in Kosovo will depend on whether the masses of Albanian people
in Kosovo will be ready to continue to pay a heavy price for a romantic nationalist
dream or whether they will be realistic enough to reconcile themselves with a
relatively favourable status quo.

3. The socio-economic crisis of Kosovo

An already explosive political situation in Kosovo is further complicated by the

fact that it is economically the least developed region of Yugoslavia. Potentially, it
is rich. It has huge reserves of coal and abundant amounts of minerals; most of it is
a fertile plain, suitable for agriculture. And yet it had the bad luck of staying
within the borders of the stagnant and decaying Ottoman state until 1912. Scarcity
of capital in royal Yugoslavia precluded any substantial economic development
until the region began to receive generous financial aid from the republic of Serbia
(in 1956) and from the federal government (in 1957). Since the Sixties Kosovo also
received substantial aid from the Federal Fund for aid to underdeveloped regions.
At this moment that aid amounts to $1,425,000 daily.

As a result Kosovo achieved an impressive progress measured in absolute terms. Its

rate of industrial development was one of the highest in Yugoslavia: 6.7%
throughout the period of 1965-1985. Its social product increased six times in 40
years. While in 1961 it was only 1.8% of the total social product of Yugoslavia it
grew to 2.2% in 1985. In some important aspects the economy of Kosovo is in a
more favourable position than the Serbian economy: according to the value of
equipment per employed worker, expenditure of electricity and machine power
per worker, and also according to the growth rate of agricultural production.

Measured per capita all data look much worse. In 1947 the social product of
Kosovo per capita amounted to 45% of the Yugoslav average. In 1961 it dropped to
37 % and in 1986 to a mere 28 %. The gap between the most developed Slovenia
and the least developed region of Kosovo increased considerably; the ratio between
them was 1:4 in 1945, and grew to 1:7 now.

Why is there such a difference between the results of the two methods of
measurement? Why does the gap between the most advanced regions and Kosovo
grow (per capita) in spite of all the material aid?

The simple answer is: Kosovo has the highest birth rate in Europe – slightly over
3%. The population growth rate in Kosovo is three times higher than in the rest of
Yugoslavia. In 1948 there were 498,000 Albanians in Kosovo, in 1981 the number
was 1,227,000 and in 1989 it approaches 2 million. The birth rate is higher than the
capacities of the society, with all existing solidarity, to properly feed, nurse,
educate, employ and socially protect.

There are three basic grounds of such a trend. First, the conditions of a rural,
tribal society with material scarcity, isolation, illiteracy and ignorance. Second,
deep roots of a traditional patriarchal structure in large communities, in which
women live deprived of freedom, of almost any rights, programmed to spend their
lives in hard labor, in serving men, and raising children. The fact is that highly
educated Albanian women who live in cities give birth to 2.2 children on the
average, whereas the figure is 6.5 for uneducated Albanian women in the
countryside.[2] Like some other religions, Islam strongly resists any family
planning. Third, one of the objectives of the nationalist movement is to use
demographic means in order to conquer space and bring forth a unified, ethnically
pure state. That the third factor is a very powerful one, can be seen from the fact
that the population growth rate on Kosovo does not decrease proportionally to
economic development, as it happened in other high population growth rate areas
(in Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina).

The immediate consequence is a very abrupt rise in the density of population. In

1921 only 40 inhabitants lived on one square kilometer. In 1981 the number was
146, by the year 2000 it will reach 230 (and by the year 2021 – 317). Kosovo will
become one of the most densely populated regions in Europe.

Another consequence is that all efforts to develop and modernize the country and
to improve life conditions of all its citizens remain futile. Kosovo suffers at the
moment from high unemployment (35.5%)[3] compared to 13.9% for Yugoslavia
and only 1 % for Slovenia. The fall of the standard of living, which is rather
alarming for Yugoslavia, as a consequence of a crisis, here is drastic because of the
high birth rate. The quality of all social services (education, health, social security)
inevitably deteriorates. Finally, since enterprises cannot afford investments into
equipment for the protection of the environment, ecological threats assume
alarming proportions.
Another problem is that scarce financial and human resources have not been used
well in the past. Bad investments have been made; luxury goes together with
misery; at the second largest Yugoslav university in Prishtina many more students
study Albanian language and literature than engineering and other subjects that
are indispensable for a developing country.

Such a socio-economic situation adds fuel to an already explosive state of affairs.

Young philologists and historians, who will never see a job in their life unless they
move to other regions of Yugoslavia, are natural recruits for any opposition
movement.

4. The Ideological conflict concerning Kosovo

Developments on the Balkan in the late thirties and in the beginning of the Second
World War created a very asymmetrical ideological situation in Kosovo as
compared with Albania and Yugoslavia.

For Mussolini Albania was a natural space of colonial expansion. Surely, that was
only the continuation of Venetian and Italian interest in Durres, Valona and other
Albanian towns on the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea. In 1938 Italy invaded
Albania, overthrew the king Ahmed Zogu and turned Albania into its colony.
When together with Nazi Germany Italy invaded Yugoslavia and occupied
Dalmatia, Montenegro and Kosovo, its military forces were received with
enthusiasm, as liberators, by the local Albanian population. This led to a
paradoxical situation: Enver Hohxa’s partisans and the Yugoslav liberation army
were allies in the struggle against the same enemy. Kosovars, as Albanians from
Kosovo like to call themselves, happened to be on the other side of the barricade.
The pro-fascist organization Bali Komb’tar was destroyed in Albania by Albanian
partisans. In Kosovo Bali Komb’tar survived as the leading political organization of
the Kosovars.

The fact is that Kosovars did not accept the National Liberation Movement,
therefore neither did they accept the socialist regime that was established after the
war. The partisan units formed in Kosovo in 1941 were composed almost
exclusively of Serbian and Montenegrin workers and miners. Only in the fall of
1942 did some 100 Kosovars join the partisan units Zejnel Ajdini, Emin Duraku
and Bajram Curri. Things did not change even after the capitulation of Italy, when
the German army replaced the Italian Army as the occupying force. According to
the report of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia for
Kosovo from January 31 1944:

“Albanian masses consider fascist occupiers, especially German liberators as

greatest friends because they gave them schools in their mother language, clerks
and administrators, they returned their land, gave them their flag, the right to
carry weapons, to plunder, to expel, even to kill all those who were not Albanians .
. . Nearly ten thousand Albanians were mobilized to defend the borders...” [4]

By the end of 1943 Bali Komb’tar created a special “Kosovo regiment’’ (Regjiment
i Kosoves) which is responsible for mass murders in Prizren, Kosovska Mitrovica,
Pec and in the concentration camp in Prishtina. In 1944 an SS division
“Skenderbeg’’ was formed which wore German uniforms and fought with German
weapons.

No partisan unit was able to move into Kosovo or to spend a night there. During
the 7th offensive against the National Liberation Army in Serbia, some units
passed the Kosovo border in order to avoid encirclement and destruction by
Bulgarian and Quisling Serbian troops. They were massacred. That happened to
the hospital of the 13 Serbian brigade in late June 1944 and to some other units of
the same brigade in early July.

In August 1944 the headquarters of the National Liberation Army and partisan
units of Serbia addressed the Kosovars with a special proclamation:

“Together with fascist aggressors you rose against neighbourly people and
disgraced yourself. Because of such behaviour you have not until now acquired the
right to live with other people of Yugoslavia in brotherhood and equality. Now the
conditions are ripe to correct errors and to redeem the shame.” [5]

At the same time Serbian divisions, encircled by superior enemy forces, attempted
to move from Upper Jablanica to Kosovo. But the border of Kosovo was resolutely
defended by both organized military units and armed Albanian people. The
legendary partisan commander Koca Popovic, who led Serbian units, gave up this
operation of liberation of Kosovo in order to avoid mutual bloodshed.

The same story was repeated in October 1944 when 24 Serbian divisions tried to
pass over the mountain of Kopaonik in order to cut the lines of retreat of German
forces from Greece along the valley of the river Ibar. Albanian villages in the
mountain perceived partisans as bitter enemies, shot at them from everywhere,
removed all people and all food from their homes. Exhausted, suffering heavy
losses in manpower, with nearly all munition wasted, those liberation army units
fell easy prey to the SS “Skenderbeg” division and were decimated by it.

Eventually in November 1944 larger forces of the National Liberation Army

penetrated Kosovo and liberated it. Many Albanians who feared massive revenge
were relieved. Some joined the National Liberation Army, many more were
mobilized for the defensive offensive against the Germans, that was supposed to be
an opportunity for rehabilitation. However, a large part of those mobilized
Albanians – some 30,000 soldiers – rebelled in Drenica under the leadership of
Saban Poluza. Apparently, they were told by Poluza that they would be sent to
camps and that their wives and children, homes and lands would be taken from
them. Even if the story was not true, the fact that Kosovars were ready to believe
such rumors about partisans speaks for itself about the ideological gap between
Kosovars and other Yugoslavs who gave massive support to partisans everywhere.
The Drenica uprising broke out in December 1944 and took thousands of lives
until February 1945.

This was a very unpromising start of the new life in Kosovo. The beginning, in
what concerns the majority of its Albanian population, was even worse than what
we saw in some other East-European countries where the new regime did not
emerge as the product of an indigenous mass movement (as in Russia, China,
Cuba, and the rest of Yugoslavia) but as the result of the presence of the Soviet
Army.

Kosovars did not fight for socialism, let alone for Yugoslavia. A tragic consequence
of historical events misled them into believing that their fate was closely connected
with that of the German Reich. Many ordinary people were realistic enough to try
to adapt to the new situation. However, Bali Komb’tar survived. It managed to
organize a congress with 200 participants on My 26, 1946. A strategy of long term
infiltration and conquest was adopted. Bali intellectuals used the schools and
scientific institutions, especially the new university in Prishtina, in order to
systematically develop a spirit of ideological hostility for the social system existing
in Yugoslavia. This ideological current enjoys strong political and material support
from numerous right-wing emigrant organizations as well as of conservative
circles in both Eastern and Western countries.

Quite different and incompatible forces act in this case as ideological allies. Those
in the West who support any policy that could weaken “communism” see in the
situation in Kosovo – for the first time in history – the possibility of a region
seceding from a communist country. Those in the East who struggle for the World
Islamic State naturally support the creation of such a state in Yugoslavia. A
particularly strange bedfellow in this alliance is the Albanian government and its
intelligence service. But they are also ideological enemies of the existing system in
Yugoslavia and, at least initially, support any course that leads to its destruction.

5. External forces interested in Kosovo

In the analysis offered so far the emphasis has been on the distinctions between
principal dimensions of the problem. Not enough has been said about historical
forces and particular interests which have so far been determining the nature of
the conflict.

That the small Albanian nation has so far been so successful in its struggle for a
unified Albanian state on the Balkan, that it had until recently the upper hand in
the very heart of the bigger and stronger Serbian nation, is a situation which one
can explain only by taking into account a number of powerful factors that were
interested in supporting Albanians.

First was the Ottoman Empire. Once it succeeded in converting brave and militant
Albanians to Islam, it had every interest in substituting them for unreliable and
rebellious Serbs in a number of strategic regions, Kosovo being one of them.

Second, Austro-Hungary. As a rival of the Ottoman empire it was often a natural

ally of Serbs – an unreliable ally to be sure, using Serbian manpower in its many
wars with the Turks and leaving them at their master’s mercy whenever it was
convenient to make peace. Once the Serbian state was created in the nineteenth
century it became a permanent obstacle to Austrian-German Drang nach Osten.
Therefore Austro-Hungary fought at the Berlin Congress in 1878 to prevent
unification of Kosovo with Serbia, although it was partly liberated by the Serbian
army in January 1878. In 1912 Austria sought the creation of an autonomous
Albania that would embrace a large part of Kosovo (Prizren, Pec, and Djakovica)
and Macedonia (Debar, Struga, and Ohrid) and would rely on Austria. Serbia was
quite instrumental in Austrian military defeat and dismantling in 1918, but the
Serbophobic Austrian lobby survived until this very day. Its presence was felt in
German policy toward Kosovo during the period of 1943-45, in the German-
Austrian mass media war against Serbia during recent developments in Kosovo, in
vicious accusations against Serbia by Otto von Habsburg and his entourage in the
European Parliament. If such totally biased attitudes cannot be justified, it is
understandable: Austria lost too many battles in Serbia, and the disintegration of
the empire was directly caused by the collapse of the Thesaloniki front in 1918.

Third, Italy and the Vatican. Already in late Middle Ages Venice established itself
along the entire Adriatic coast from northern Dalmatia to Albania. Once a unified
Italian state emerged in the nineteenth century it considered all that area as its
living space and clashed over it with Serbia and later with Yugoslavia
continuously. Italy agreed to enter the war on the side of Entente only under the
condition to get sovereignty over parts of Dalmatia and Albania, and the position
of protectorate over the rest of Albania (according to a secret pact of London from
April 26, 1915). At the Peace Conference in Paris 1919-20 the new Yugoslav state
resolutely opposed the London pact, which contributed to the ultimate solution (in
November 1921) to form an independent and sovereign Albania. However, fascist
Italy managed to occupy (1938-1941) not only Dalmatia and Albania, but also
Montenegro and Kosovo. Capitulation in 1943 marked the end of Italian
imperialism in this part of the Balkan.

However, the Vatican remained a very strong hidden factor. It has always been
particularly active in the bordering areas of the Catholic Church. There was a
time, before the Turkish invasion, when the majority of Albanians were Catholic
(and a small part still is). That in itself would be a sufficient reason for the
Vatican’s interest in Kosovo. Another one is its long range interest in weakening
the Orthodox Church. Supporting Muslims in Kosovo, Sanjak and Bosnia and
Hercegovina serves a double purpose. Firstly, winning them over significantly
strengthens Catholic Croats and Slovenes in the struggle against orthodox Serbs.
Kosovo is seen as an area in which for an indefinite time Serbs would have to
exhaust all their national forces. Secondly, if an independent Great Croation state
would be formed again (comparable to the abortive one created by the Nazis in
1941) there would be a good chance of eventually converting to Catholicism all
non-Catholics, including Muslims.

Fourth, Great Britain. British foreign policy for centuries was motivated by an
overwhelming interest in containing possible Russian influence in the Balkans.
Serbs were invariably regarded as a pro-Russian agency. Such a judgment was
more mistaken than true. It is true that Serbs feel a natural affinity for another
great Slavic nation and that often in history they fought on the same side – against
Turks, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians. But they never identified their policy
with Russian policy. Immediately after the successful uprisings in the nineteenth
century they went their own way and adopted their basic political culture from
France and, to some extent, from England, not from autocratic feudal Russia.
They did not follow the Bolshevik revolution in 1917-1918 and, as we shall see,
paid dearly for it. In March 1941, while the Soviet Union was still on friendly
terms with Germany (on the basis of the 1939 Treaty) Serbs followed the British
advice and chose a war without any chances of a treaty with Hitler. In 1948 they
rebelled against Stalin, and it is safe to say that precisely Serbian resolute
resistance and readiness to fight another partisan war against the “big brother’’
impressed Stalin enough to give up the idea of invading Yugoslavia.

As a consequence of this misperception of Serbs, British policy toward Serbia was

systematically biased and less than friendly, both in the nineteenth and twentieth
century. It is true that they gave important material support to the National
Liberation Army in 1944, but the fact is also that the two Yugoslav individuals
whom they trusted at that time were: a Croat, Tito, and another Croat Subasic, the
prime minister of the Yugoslav government in exile. The present Serbian policy in
Kosovo has been met by English journalists and diplomats with open disapproval
and enormous misunderstanding. And the reasons are again the same. Milosevic
resembles Gorbachev; Serbs try to save socialism in a similar way “Perestroika”
does; Serbs violate the human rights of Albanians and “oppose liberal reforms
undertaken by northwestern republics.” The ultimate consequence of so many
British misjudgments could be the loss of a friend. Serbs begin to care less about
traditional allies and rely more and more on themselves.

Fifth, the Communist International. It was mentioned already that the Albanian
movement in Kosovo got full support of Comintern. That is only one element of the
generally hostile attitude of Comintern toward Yugoslavia. The reasons probably
were the fact that the victorious Serbian army and the creation of Yugoslavia
precluded apparently the inevitable revolution spreading over defeated Austro-
Hungary in 1918; hostile attitudes of the Serbian Royal house toward Bolsheviks,
especially because of the assassination of the Russian Czar and his family; full
support given to the officers of the White Army by the Belgrade government, and
the regime’s destruction of the Yugoslav Communist party in 1921. Yugoslavia
was considered one of the most militant anti-communist countries of Europe and
Serbs were condemned as the dominating nation in it. Croats, Macedonians,
Albanians and all other Yugoslav nations and national minorities invited to rebel
and tear the state apart. This policy was changed in the mid-Thirties under the
threat of fascism. It was renewed by Stalin after 1948 and then again to some
extent by Mao, who until the end of his life supported morally and materially
Albania as his only ally in Europe, and for years insisted on a vicious progaganda
campaign against Yugoslav “revisionism.”

Sixth, the United States. Serbs have always admired their great distant ally, the
United States of America. In both world wars they fought on the same side.
Wilson, the American President, played an important role in the 1918 Paris peace
conference’s decision to create a new Yugoslav state, rather than to restore Austro-
Hungary, which the British considered a more effective barrier to the Bolshevik’s
expansion in Europe. It was Roosevelt who in 1943 prevailed over Churchill’s
obsession with opening the second front in the Balkans – which would have made
Yugoslavia the stage of another prolonged bloody civil war, comparable to that in
Greece. Yugoslavia received substantial aid from the USA after its break with
Stalin, during the Fifties. At this moment the official American policy is one of full
support for a stable Yugoslavia. And yet some agencies of great powers tend to
pursue other, less official policies at the same time. Therefore it comes as a shock
to many Serbs to find out that many active American politicians, diplomats,
scholars and journalists are quite biased on the Kosovo issue, hostile to the present
Serbian leadership and to its policies, and almost unanimously supportive of the
Albanian demand “Kosovo – republic.” [6] How does one explain such an attitude
which is not only destabilizing but potentially destructive for Yugoslavia? A
possible explanation is that one ultimate motive of contemporary American foreign
policy is the concern about the Soviet Union and world communism. The fact is
that the general policy of the Serbian leadership really tends to renew and rebuild
society on a genuine democratic socialist tradition. This is a project comparable to
that of “Perestroika” and opposite to projects of reprivatization in the economy
and of introducing a parliamentary multi-party system in politics, projects that
flourish in other parts of Yugoslavia and open the prospects of returning to the
Western “free world.”

Another possible explanation is that, independently of what happens with the rest
of Yugoslavia, it is believed in some conservative circles that eventual secession of
Kosovo under the guidance of the Third (American) Prizren League would give
NATO an important base in the heart of the Balkan, from which one could
overthrow the regime in Tirana and give birth to a unified and large anti-
communist Albania.

Seventh, Pan-Islamic fundamentalism. The Albanian nationalist movement in

Yugoslavia enjoys generous support from a number of pan-Islamic fundamentalist
organizations in the world. Some of them are internationally known and respected,
like the World Islamic League (Rabita in Arab) founded in Mecca in 1962 with the
goal of unifying Muslims all over the world. What is less known is that this
organization has declared a holy war (jihad) against communism in 1976. Partly
for that reason and partly because it is of sunni origin and stems from Saudi
Arabia, this fundamentalist organization is regarded with some sympathy in the
West. Other Islamic organizations are associated with drugs and armament trade
and with terrorism (e.g., “Gray Wolves” in Germany). Some collaborate with
Ustashi or are led by former Ustashi officers (e.g., the “Croatian Islamic Center”
formed in 1973 in Toronto, led by Rais Kerim, a former ustasha and a war
criminal).7 They are all connected with various intelligence services, both Western
and Eastern- European ones.

Kosovo separatists receive from these sources large amounts of money (needed,
among other things, for purchase of non-Albanian farms in Kosovo), weapons
(which have so far hardly been used), and help in organizing protest rallies and all
other kinds of propaganda activities abroad.

Eighth, a bureaucratic coalition within Yugoslavia itself. The Comintern policy of

disintegrating Yugoslavia because of “great Serbian hegemony” [8] was replaced by
a policy of systematically weakening of Serbia within a federal Yugoslavia. Tito
obviously believed that Yugoslavia could be maintained as a stable state provided
that the republic of Serbia would be cut in size comparable to that of Croatia, that
it would be internally unstable, and that its possible economic success would be
controlled and halted. To that end dozens of pre-war Serbian enterprises had been
moved to other republics in 1947-8, the growth rate of Serbia had been set lower
than that of some more developed republics in the First five year plan, the
contribution of Serbia to the Federal Fund to underdeveloped regions had to be
unreasonably high, and when in 1972, in spite of all that, the Serbian economy
gave evidence of an impressive development, its most able managers were purged –
under the pretext of being too liberal and technocratically minded. There is no
doubt, according to presently available evidence, that the Albanian nationalist
movement in Kosovo was handled incredibly gently by the top Yugoslav
bureaucracy. A part of its leadership remained underground and unknown to this
day. But the main strategists, advisors and protectors in different moments were
top functionaries of Kosovo, people like Fadil Hohxa, Mahmut Bakali, Javid
Nimani, Veli Deva and, recently, Azem Vlasi. These people were promoted and
supported by Tito himself, and, after his death, by other top functionaries like
Bakaric, Dolanc, Mikulic, Vrhovec, Stambolic, Kucan, Dragosavac, Krunic, and
Stoisic. If in the first few post-war years that was a part of the project of giving
Kosovo to Albania and of creating a Balkan Federation, later the only rationale
was keeping the republic of Serbia divided and weak, under permanent tutorship
from outside. This policy collapsed in 1988-89, both because Albanian separatists
went too far (with the violation of non-Albanians’ human rights, with sabotage,
strikes, demonstrations and use of violence) and, on the other hand, because
Serbian people were no longer ready to suffer discrimination and humiliation, and,
after decades of utter apathy, they became a very active and strong political force.

The “unprincipled coalition,” as it was characterized by the young Macedonian

leader Vasil Tupurkovski, has lost its grip on Yugoslav policy and on the
developments in Kosovo. But its voice is very loud and far-reaching. It expresses its
frustration and anger, it laments over “the collapse of Avnoj-Yugoslavia,” it paints
a sombre picture of Yugoslavia’s future, it misinforms foreign diplomats and
journalists, it viciously attacks younger, able politicians who give a new hope to the
Yugoslav people.

Ninth, the Albanian state. Normally, Albania has always been interested in
annexing Kosovo. During the War a conference was held in Bujan on Albanian
territory on January 1-2, 1944, with the participation of some Kosovo Communist
party leaders, and including Albanians, Serbs and Montenegrins. The conference
decided that after the war Kosovo should join Albania. The headquarters of the
Yugoslav National Liberation Army objected to the decision that the primary task
at the moment was to struggle and liberate the country and not to decide about
what would belong to whom. Later the resolution was cancelled altogether. But
Enver Hohxa and his followers continued to regard it as a legal ground for the
annexation of Kosovo. During all those years after the 1948 break Albania actively
supported the nationalist movement in Kosovo. When in the Seventies Kosovo
became a largely independent federal unit with the right to conduct its own foreign
policy, it started a very intensive cultural collaboration with Albania. Kosovo was
flooded by Albanian literature, educational textbooks, scholars, writers and
university lecturers. Albanian intelligence got an almost unlimited freedom of
operation in Kosovo. The Albanian counter-intelligence was supposed to take care
of it and it did not. According to the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution Serbian
intelligence did not have any right to interfere or to control matters. An immense
indoctrination took place in those years with the full blessing of the “unprincipled
bureaucratic coalition” of Yugoslavia. Albania did everything to persuade
“Kosovars,” especially younger intellectuals, that the state of Albania was their
true fatherland and that they should make any conceivable sacrifice for it. In this
they fully succeeded. And yet Albanian leaders have reasons to be less enthusiastic
about what would happen after the possible secession of Kosovo. They would have
to face a bitter class struggle against the fiercely anti-communist Hali Komb’tar
and similar organizations. The situation would look like present-day Afghanistan
with the only difference that the Albanian government has no one to back them
and Islamic mujahedins could expect massive support from several sides. All those
wild projects and scenarios have been made irrelevant by the developments during
the Spring of 1989.

6. Conclusion.

The Future of Kosovo For such a complex situation as the one in Kosovo, with so
many dimensions and factors, with so much passion and intense hatred, with so
much outside interference, it is nearly impossible to see a solution that would be
both reasonable and realistic. One based on violence is feasible and realistic, at
least from a short- range perspective, but is unreasonable in the long run. Another
one based on the idea of decoupling, of a territorial and political division of
Kosovo, sounds reasonable but has no chance of being accepted by any party. Is
there any other alternative?

We shall briefly examine the first two alternatives.

a. The tough solution is the one which in a similar situation would have been
applied in most civilized countries during the nineteenth century (the British
treatment of India and other colonies, French handling of North Africa and
Vietnam) and in less civilized countries to this day (the fate of Turks in Bulgaria
and of Hungarians and Serbs in Romania). The existing autonomy of Kosovo
would be abolished – on the ground that it was abused. The existing generous aid
to the region would be replaced by purely economically motivated investment of
capital. Citizens of Albania who for years lived in Kosovo without accepting
Yugoslav citizenship would be expelled. Unemployed Kosovars would be invited to
move out of Kosovo to other republics. Compulsory family planning would reduce
the birth rate in Kosovo. Since Kosovo is a part of Serbia, all security functions
would be in the hands of Serbian security units. Acts of sabotage, of grave
violations of the law by underground political organizations would be brutally
suppressed. Huge amounts of armaments accumulated in private hands would
have to be confiscated in order to prevent a possible shift to terrorism and mass
uprisings.

No matter what results such a policy might produce instantly, it is doomed in the
long run. Like Afghans, Albanians are proud and brave people, impossible to
conquer for good. Their revenge would take place sooner or later. Besides, a
majority ethnic group that condemns itself to the role of a collective policeman
cannot afford to develop any genuine democracy and is bound to become rather
confused about its own identity.

The use of violence would also be a bad strategy for Albanians. As already
happened in 1981 and 1989 any acts of violence invite large scale repression.
Besides, any movement labelled “terrorist” quickly loses moral support in the
world and is eventually doomed.
b. When national relations are so poisoned as are those between Serbs and
Albanians, a rational solution could be decoupling. Members both of the majority
and minority would have an opportunity to decide if they wish to continue to live
together or wish to separate. The point is that the principle of self-determination
would have to be recognized both for Albanians (who constitute only 8% of the
Yugoslav population but nearly 80% of all people who live in Kosovo) and for
Serbs and other non-Albanians (who constitute nearly 20% of the total Kosovo
population). The territory would have to be divided and the population exchanged
– permitting those who wish to continue to live on the same territory to do so. An
important criterion for the division of territory would be to make sure that the
most important old cultural monuments remain with the nation that created them.
Fortunately, most objects that are of vital importance to Serbian culture are
located in a peripheral range of Kosovo along the Montenegrin, Serbian and
Macedonian borders (the Patriarchy of Pec, Decanica, Prizren). This area then,
would be separated from Kosovo, provided that a properly prepared referendum
would endorse such a solution. Albanians from Kosovo would have a chance to
decide on the same referendum whether they wish to remain an autonomous
province of Yugoslavia (outside of Serbia), or to secede. In either case Albanians
would have to give up their claim to other territories where Albanians are not a
majority (e.g., in Macedonia). On paper such a solution might look fine. It can
hardly be contested that it is just and based on equal realization of an essential
principle for all concerned. Of course, even in theory one could object that
complex problems cannot be solved using only one principle (that of self-
determination). There might be several relevant principles (peace, justice, stability
of borders, etc.) clashing with each other.

In practice the solution meets insuperable obstacles.

First, an exchange of population is hardly feasible. People tend to stay where they
are – if they can. Without the exchange the idea of self-determination in Kosovo
does not make sense. Both the Albanian minority within Yugoslavia and the
Serbian minority within the Albanian majority in Kosovo – must be granted equal
rights. Numbers cannot count. If the number of Kosovo Serbs is small in relation
to Albanians, the number of Albanians is even smaller in relation to 24 million
Yugoslavs.

Second, secession of a part of a country is hardly feasible. It is unknown in recent

practice and it is incompatible with the 1975 Helsinki convention, which asserts
inviolability of state borders in Europe.

Branko Horvat, a Yugoslav economist who is otherwise sympathetic to the

Albanian cause and supports the idea of granting Kosovo the status of a republic,
holds that secession is impossible. His strongest reason is that “security of
Macedonia and of Yugoslavia as a whole would be threatened. The vital Morava-
Vardar valley communication line would be strategically imperiled and Macedonia
cut out.” Taking into account Bulgaria’s aspiration to Macedonia “it is clear what
this would mean.” [9]

The fact is that Macedonia would be endangered much more than that. The
question of Kosovo is closely connected with the aspirations of the Albanian
minority in Macedonia. After all, at the moment of the constitution of the
autonomous province of Kosovo (in 1945), the percentage of Albanians in the
republic of Serbia was smaller (8.15%) than in the republic of Macedonia
(17.12%). Secession of Kosovo would be immediately followed by the demand for
secession of Western Macedonia. Bulgaria and Albania could simply agree to
divide Macedonia among themselves. That would have to be done by force, and
force is the only thing to stop them.

The question is if there is any government in the world which would voluntarily
give away strategic territories to unfriendly neighbours.

The worst that could happen to a utopian compromise or solution is that neither
party would accept it. A division of Kosovo would now not be accepted either by
the Serbs or by the Albanians. The former are convinced that they should not give
up most of a region that played such a crucial role in their history and which was
taken from them by force. The latter cannot at present easily give up a great
romantic dream about the unification of all Albanians.

Is there any other alternative?

There is – provided that people come to their senses and renounce their maximal
demands.

Serbs, who are now in a much stronger position than a year ago, or ever since
1941, will have to understand that Kosovo cannot again become ethnically Serbian,
that it is necessary to maintain autonomy of the province and as soon as possible to
reaffirm respect for human rights for all citizens of Kosovo, entirely independently
of what nationality or religion they belong to. Generous material aid to Kosovo
would be needed for the foreseeable future in order to solve vast socio-economic
problems. Yet the aid should no longer have the form of unconditional cash
payments to the Kosovo leadership, but instead it should consist of economically
reasonable investments going from bank to bank and from enterprise to
enterprise. Family planning is necessary to prevent overcrowding of Kosovo and a
growing gap between advanced and backward regions. But it must be done in a
gentle, psychologically acceptable way, and by Albanians themselves, using
primarily educational means. Special programs should be created to attract
Albanian students to universities all over Yugoslavia and to employ Albanians
from Kosovo in other republics.

Albanians would have to be prudent enough to renounce the impossible program

of creating a Great Albania from the parts of existing Balkan states. Each of those
states – Yugoslavia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary – have millions of
Albanians as minorities living in their countries. Albanians would have to settle to
that. And rather than jeopardizing their autonomy in Kosovo by abusing it, they
should make best use of their rights and liberties and the material aid that would
be available in Yugoslavia and Serbia.

Notes
1. An historian, Muhamed Piraku, is the author of this “discovery.” He was
criticized by another Albanian historian, Emin Plana, at a conference at the
University of Prishtina in early 1989. (“Slobodna Dalmacija” July 6, 1989; p. 17).

2. Jasar Redzepagic, “Prilog pedagosko-andragoskom posmatranju problema

visokog prirodnog prirastaja stanovnistva u nas,” delivered at the conference
Regions of Yugoslavia with high population growth rate, Pristina May 18-20 1989, p.
21.

3. Statistical Yearbook of Yugoslavia for 1988 (Belgrade 1989).

4. Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o Narodno-oslobodilackom ratu jugoslovenskih

naroda (Collection of documents and data about the National Liberation War of the
Yugoslav people), tom I, knj. 19 (Beograd 1969), str. 414-416,

5. Ibid, I, 19, str. 618-620.

6. By the end of June 1989 the House of Representatives of the American Congress
adopted an amendment to the bill on American aid to foreign countries in which
Yugoslavia is criticized for violation of the rights of ethnic groups and for alleged
limitation of the autonomy of Kovoso. The congressmen were obviously
misinformed. The fact is that all ethnic groups in Yugoslavia enjoy human rights,
including self-government, to a higher degree than minorities in other countries,
and what was limited in Kosovo was not the autonomy of the province but some
aspects of sovereignty.

7. Dejan Lucic, Tajne Albanske Mafije (Secrets of Albanian Mafia), Jugoslovenski

dosije (Beograd 1988), pp. 66-67, 82.

8. As late as March 1937 the Yugoslav representative in Komintern, Ivan Grzelic

“Fleischer,” criticized Milan Gorkic, the general secretary of the Yugoslav KP in
the name of Komintern for an article in Proleter, an organ of CK KPJ, in which
the view was expressed “without any qualifications” that Yugoslavia should not be
torn apart and disintegrated; Duga, No. 401, 8 July 1989, Belgrade, p. 88.

Praxis 1964

Why Praxis?

Written: 1964;
Source: Anarhosindikalistićka konfederacija;
Translated: Zdravko Saveski.

There are so many journals today, but too few people read them! So, why another
journal?
Despite the abundance of journals, it seems to us that we don’t have the one that
we want: a philosophical journal that isn’t narrowly “expert,” a philosophical
journal that isn’t just philosophical, but also discusses the actual problems of
Yugoslav socialism, the contemporary world and man. We don’t want a
philosophical journal in traditional sense, nor do we want some general theoretical
magazine without a central thought and without physiognomy.

The idea to start such a journal hasn’t emerged from a pure desire to realize just
another theoretically possible physiognomy of a journal; the idea has emerged
through the conviction that a journal of this kind is a vivid need of our time.

Socialism is the only human way out from the difficulties in which humanity has
entangled itself, and the Marx’s thought – the most adequate theoretical basis and
inspiration for revolutionary activity. One of the basic sources of the failures and
deformations of socialist theory and practice during the last decades should be
sought in the overlooking of the “philosophical dimension” of Marx’s thought, in
the overt or covert negation of its humanist essence. The development of an
authentic, humanist socialism is not possible without the renewal and development
of the Marx’s philosophical thought, without a deepened study of the works of all
significant Marxists and without a really Marxist, non-dogmatic and revolutionary
approach to the open issues of our time.

The contemporary world is still a world of economic exploitation, national

inequalities, political non-freedom, spiritual emptiness, a world of misery, hunger,
hatred, war and fear. The old problems are joined by new ones: nuclear
devastation isn’t just a possible future; it already poisons our lives everyday. The
greater and greater achievements of man in creation of means of “subjugation” of
nature are more and more successfully transforming him into a supplementary
instrument of his instruments. And the pressure of mass impersonalism and of the
scientific method of “cultivation” of the masses is more and more opposed to the
development of a free human personality.

The conscious efforts of progressive human forces to overcome the present

inhuman condition and to achieve better world should not be underestimated. The
significant successes achieved by struggle should not be forgotten either. But it
should not be overlooked that in those countries too, where there are efforts to
realize a genuinely human society, the inherited forms of inhumanity aren’t
defeated and deformations emerge that didn’t exist earlier.

The philosopher cannot observe all these occurrences indifferently, not because in
hard times everybody should help, and among others the philosopher too, but
because in the roots of all that hardship lie problems whose solution is impossible
without participation of philosophy. But if contemporary philosophy wants to
contribute significantly in resolving the contemporary world crisis, it should not be
reduced to the study and interpretation of its own history; it shouldn’t be the
scholarly building of all-encompassing systems; even worse, just an analysis of the
methods of contemporary science or description of everyday use of words. If it
wants to be the thought of the revolution, philosophy must turn to the important
concerns of the contemporary world and man, and if it wants to reach for the
essence of the everyday life, it should not refrain from seemingly moving away
from it, going into the depths of the “metaphysics.”

In accordance with these observations, we want a journal that would not be

philosophical in that sense according to which philosophy is just one of the special
areas, one scientific discipline, strictly separated by the rest of them and from the
everyday problems of human life. We want a philosophical journal in that sense
according to which philosophy is the thought of the revolution, ruthless criticism of
all that exists,[1] a humanist vision of the really human world and an inspirational
force for revolutionary activity.

The title “Praxis” is chosen because “praxis,” that central notion of the Marx’s
thought, expresses most adequately the conception of philosophy we have sketched.
The use of the Greek form of the word doesn’t mean that we understand this
notion in the way as it is understood somewhere in the Greek philosophy. We do
that because we want to detach ourselves from the pragmatist and vulgar-Marxist
understanding of praxis and to state that we are oriented to the original Marx.
Moreover, the Greek word, even if it isn’t understood exactly in the Greek sense,
can serve as a reminder that, in contemplating, like the ancient Greeks, on the
most mundane issues, we don’t overlook what is profound and which is essential.

The issues that we want to discuss transcend the frame of the philosophy as a
profession. They are issues in which philosophy, science, art and social activism
come together, issues that don’t concern this or that fragment of man, nor just this
or that individual, but the man as a man. In accordance with the orientation on
issues that cannot be enclosed in one separate profession, therefore neither in
professionally understood philosophy, we will tend to gather contributors. We
don’t want only philosophers to take part in the journal, but also artists, writers,
scientists, public servants, all of those who aren’t indifferent to the vital problems
of our time.

Without understanding of the essence of Marx’s thought there is no humanist

socialism. But our program is not through interpretation of Marx’s thought to
come to its “correct” understanding and only to “defend” it in this “pure” form.
We don’t want to conserve Marx, but to develop vivid revolutionary thought
inspired by Marx. The development of such thought requires broad and open
discussion, in which non-Marxists would also participate. That’s why our journal
will publish the works not just of Marxists, but also works by those who work on
theoretical issues that concern us. We maintain that in understanding the essence
of Marx’s thought, its intelligent critics can contribute more than its limited and
dogmatic proponents.

The opinions presented in concrete works should not be attributed to the editorial
board, but to the assigned authors. As the readers will have a chance to see, even
members of the editorial board do not agree on everything. Publishing of whatever
work in the journal, no matter if the author is a member of the editorial board or
not, doesn’t mean that the editorial board agrees with the author’s viewpoint; it
only means that the editorial board considers the work as a relevant contribution
to the discussion of actual problems of the contemporary world and man.
The Croatian Philosophical Society publishes the Praxis journal, and its seat is in
Zagreb. It is reflected in the composition of the editorial board too. However,
problems of Croatia today cannot be discussed separately from the problems of
Yugoslavia, and the problems of contemporary Yugoslavia cannot be isolated from
the big questions of the contemporary world. Neither socialism nor Marxism is
something strictly national, so Marxism cannot be Marxism, or socialism –
socialism, if we enclose ourselves in narrow national frames.

In accordance with these statements, the journal will discuss not only some
specifically Croatian or Yugoslavian themes, but also and in the first place the
general problems of contemporary man and contemporary philosophy. And the
approach to these themes will be socialist and Marxist, meaning internationalist.
Along with contributors from Croatia, we will strive to gather contributors from
other Yugoslav republics and from other countries, and from other continents, and
along with the Yugoslav edition of the journal (in Croato-Serbian language), we
will publish international edition (in English and French). The purpose of the
international edition isn’t “representation” of Yugoslavian thought abroad, but
stimulation of the international philosophical cooperation in discussing decisive
issues of our time.

We don’t think that our journal can “solve,” not even put on discussion all the
acute problems of the contemporary world. We shall not attempt such a thing. We
shall try to concentrate on some of the key issues. That is why the journal will not
be formed only on the basis of individual, accidentally received contributions, but
in the first place the editorial board will highlight some issues which it considers
significant and appropriate for discussion. We hope that contributors and readers
will help us in choosing those themes.

Directing the journal towards acute issues of the contemporary world and
philosophy, the editorial board will strive to ensure that relentless criticism of the
existing reality is nurtured in the journal. We maintain that criticism that goes to
the root of things, not fearing whatever the consequences, is one of the important
features of every real philosophy. We also think that no-one has a monopoly on the
truth, or a special right on any kind or field of criticism. There is no general or
specific issue that would be only an internal issue of this or that country, or private
issue of this or that social group, organization or individual. However, we maintain
that the primary task of the Marxists and socialists of individual countries is, along
with the general problems of contemporary world, to illuminate critically the
problems of their own countries. The primary task of Yugoslavian Marxists, for
example, is to critically discuss the Yugoslavian socialism. By such critical
discussions Yugoslavian Marxists can best contribute not only to their own, but to
the world socialism too.

If our journal “appropriates” the right to criticism that is not limited by anything
except the nature of the criticized entity, that doesn’t mean that we demand a
privileged position for ourselves. We maintain that the “privilege” of free criticism
should be common. We don’t want to say by this that every outcome of free
criticism has to be “good”: “The free press remains good even when it produces
bad products, for the latter are deviations from the essential nature of the free
press. A eunuch remains a bad human being even when he has a good voice.” (K.
Marx).[2]

If everything can be an object of criticism, the Praxis journal cannot be exempted

from that. We c.annot promise in advance that we would agree with all objections,
but we shall welcome every public critical discussion of the journal. We maintain
that even the wholly unfavorable criticism doesn’t have to be a bad sign: “This cry
of its enemies has the same significance for philosophy as the first cry of the new-
born babe has for the anxiously listening ear of the mother: it is the cry testifying
to the life of its ideas, which have burst the orderly hieroglyphic husk of the system
and become citizens of the world.” (K. Marx). [3]

Of course, our goal isn’t to cause an outcry against us. Our basic desire is to
contribute in accordance to our possibilities to the development of philosophical
thought and realization of a humane human community.

Translator’s notes

1. This expression, ruthless criticism of all that exists, is used by Marx in his Letter
to Arnold Ruge of September 1843. The whole expression states: “If constructing
the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more
clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of
all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives
at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.”

2. See Karl Marx “On Freedom of the Press.”

3. See Karl Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung.

Why Praxis International?

Source: Praxis International, 1 (1981), 1, pp. 1-5. (Editorial)

Transcribed: by Robert Stallaerts.
At the moment there is no international journal of Marxist humanist orientation
despite the increasing urgency for it, and despite the fact that the progressive
movements in the 1960’s brought to life a whole generation of young intellectuals
and social scholars who re-opened basic issues of Marx’s theory and the
contemporary world. Such a journal can play a decisive integrative role, it can
provide an indispensable level of mutual communication and dialogue, it can
encourage the development of a systematic critical consciousness about the
essential limitations of present day societies, and about optimal historical
possibilities for human emancipation.

These needs can be met by Praxis International, a journal that will seek to carry on
the spirit and work of the Yugoslav journal Praxis in the new historical conditions
of the 1980’s, and on a larger international scale, in all those countries where
progressive intellectuals and independent critical Marxists share similar
aspirations and commitments.

The publication of Praxis which began in 1964 has become impossible in

Yugoslavia since 1975. Although the theoretical orientation of Praxis was always
clearly Marxist and its commitment to democratic socialism explicit, the journal
came under increasingly strong attack by political authorities. The journal’s
critique of the limitations of Yugoslav society, including existing bureaucratic
structures, social inequalities and excessive reliance on a market economy, was
condemned as unacceptable political activity, and as “destructive” criticism. Both
the journal and the summer school at Korčula associated with it were stopped in
early 1975, but the community of Praxis continues to function, and hopes to
resume publication of the journal under more favorable conditions in Yugoslavia.

The critical philosophy generated by Praxis, and by independent intellectuals in

other countries, continues to be developed and refined regardless of the political
conditions in any individual country. No amount of repression can kill a
substantive and relevant critical orientation; it dies only when it exhausts its
creative potential. While continuing in the same spirit and including many of the
editors and contributors to Praxis, the new journal Praxis International is
confronted with a different historical situation and essentially different tasks.

One of the most important tasks during the 1960’s was the affirmation of authentic
Marxist thought in its dialectical and humanist character in opposition to
dogmatic, apologetic and Stalinist distortions. It was a period of great turmoil, of
unsuspected practical possibilities, and of a growing realization of the utter
inadequacy of “official” forms of Marxism. Dogmatic forms of Marxism were
entirely inapplicable for understanding and critically assessing such complex
events and processes as the spontaneous French working class movement in May
1968, the student movements and protests throughout the world, the defeat of the
leading military superpower in Vietnam, the Prague Spring, and the military
invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union, workers demands for
participation and self-government, the growth of the women’s liberation
movement, and the recognition of the rights of ethnic minorities. All of these events
and movements shared in common a demand for human emancipation, and a
refusal to accept unjust, oppressive and authoritarian forms of social life whether
labeled “capitalist” or “socialist.”

During this period a general philosophical and social theory needed to focus not
only on the relentless criticism of existing institutions, but also on all those
ideological tendencies that sought to preclude the possibility of critical theory. It
needed to understand the new emancipatory movements, their deeper historical
meaning, and the strengths and weaknesses of these trends. Praxis contributed to
the development of such a theory. Although it gave a high priority to the open
discussion of specific issues in Yugoslav society, it had a general theoretical
character from the start, encouraging discussion of such fundamental issues as: the
meaning and prospects for socialism, human freedom, equality, the analysis of
history, reification, creativity, the nature of social revolution, bureaucracy and
technology in the contemporary world.

Working on such issues, Praxis has helped to restore the creative potential of
Marxism. It drew inspiration from the works of Gramsci, Korsch, Lukacs, Bloch,
Marcuse, Fromm and Goldmann. The latter four contributed to Praxis and
participated in the Korcula summer school. Both the journal and the summer
school became a focal point where independent East European and Western
intellectuals could freely exchange views and explore themes that were emerging in
the 1960’s. Historical conditions have changed during the 1970’s, and demand a
different type of response. Throughout much of the world, conservative and
reactionary forces have been able to gain the upper hand — at least temporarily.
Progressive intellectuals have come under increasing attack and repression. Many
of the emancipatory movements of the 1960’s have become diffuse and
disorganized. The results of the 1960’s were powerful enough to expose the social
forms of repression, violence and domination. However, they were not sufficiently
deep, enlightened and passionate to produce genuine socialist changes. But the
crisis is far from being over. Its forms and causes are more complex than those of
earlier crises, and we are confronting a new type of crisis situation.

The upheavals in the 1960’s indicated that there is a deep legitimation crisis of
political power. They signified the beginning of a lasting process of erosion of the
ideologies which were used to justify virtually unrestrained use of coercive power
in national and international politics. It has become evident that the immense
dominating power of existing social systems is inextricably combined with a
growing vulnerability and impotence. Existing social systems meet with several
kinds of impediments. They confront an awakened, resistant Third World whose
basic demands for genuine autonomy are legitimate even when they are
compromised by nationalist, racial or religious biases. Furthermore, a point has
been reached where old ideological clichés are beginning to lose their earlier
credibility, and fail to secure consent to unjust policies. This is happening at a time
when the advanced industrial powers — more than ever since the Second World
War — require aggressive policies in order to continue exponential economic
growth.

An entire epoch of the development of material production based on cheap labor

and on apparently unlimited, easily available natural resources is now
approaching its end. The mode of production based on the necessity of accelerated
increase of material output and material consumption presupposed unlimited
wealth of resources, unlimited pollution of the natural environment, and a
widespread acceptance of a manipulated market in the sale and distribution of
goods. With the growing awareness of the falsity of such premises, there is also a
growing recognition of the need for restructuring the entire economy and lifestyle
in advanced industrial countries. This is no longer merely a crisis of
overproduction which can be resolved by state intervention within the existing
social framework. This is no longer a crisis caused by the inability of society to
continue to develop productive forces. This is a crisis of a society which can
develop productive forces — and indeed in a most impressive way — but for only
one primary purpose: accelerated growth of material output and increasingly
wasteful consumption.

We are entering into a new era in which irrational profit-oriented production will
have to be replaced, and in which the development of human productive power
desperately needs to be liberated from alienated labor in order to satisfy a variety
of human needs. Such a demand for a revolutionary change in the nature and
purpose of human work and human communities requires a profound
transformation of social institutions and individual lifestyles. It requires the
democratization and humanization of all aspects of social life. Even those who are
defenders of the status quo are beginning to realize that unless there are basic
changes in existing social institutions, we will be confronted with dangerous,
ominous consequences for the human prospect. Just at a time when on the surface
there appears to be political stability, there are many signs of a slow but
consequential drift into an uncertain process of dysfunction, decay of social,
economic and political institutions, and moral disintegration.

This deteriorating process is taking place in advanced capitalist countries as well

as in the world that calls itself “real socialism.” These two worlds share not only a
typically bourgeois concern about exclusively quantitative aspects of production
and consumption, but also share a pattern of economic and social domination over
the producers. There are, of course, crucial differences between the capitalist
societies and the contemporary socialist societies, and in the specific crises that
characterize them. Thus, world capitalism is now moving into a massive economic
recession, accompanied by unemployment and continuing high inflation which
erodes the purchasing power and undermines the living standards of working
people. Increased exploitation in the economic sphere, as well as deepening
political alienation, are marks of the present crisis. There is a growing distrust of
traditional politics, and increasing doubts about the ability of the system to satisfy
human needs and wants. On the other hand, in contemporary socialist societies,
the drastically bureaucratic character of social institutions and organizations
blocks development and results in exorbitant forms of waste. There is a conflict
between ideological imperatives and actual social thought, between emancipatory
needs and the barriers to their realization. This very condition has the potential for
creating a deep legitimation crisis and has given rise to aggressive imperialistic
foreign policies.

The travesty of socialism in Eastern Europe and the failures of advanced capitalist
countries cannot but have far-reaching repercussions on developing countries. In
these countries unbearable sufferings caused by starvation, misery and criminal
political repression bring about rebellious mass movements that often seek
ideological inspiration in traditional religious beliefs rather than in the idea of
socialism. On the other hand, this particular form of the Third World revolt tends
to provoke imperialistic interventions disguised under the veil of “struggle for
modernization” or “international revolutionary solidarity.”

This historical situation which is pregnant with dangerous destructive tendencies

calls for a more forceful, imaginative, and articulated development of critical
analysis, and for mobilization of progressive theoretical endeavors. The 1970’s
have brought into focus a number of issues that were not adequately discussed in
Praxis. These include: the crises of post-industrial society, the global consequences
of the ecological crisis, alternative technologies and the humanization of work,
working class demands for more control and self-determination, the meaning of
the present day struggles for human rights, the demands for equality and freedom
for women, the erosion of prevailing forms of legitimation, new forms of misery
caused by imperialistic economic and political domination, the problematic role of
religion and ethnic identity in revolutionary situations, the growing cynicism about
the real possibilities of reform and revolution, and the analysis of new social
movements.

However, even those questions which are not new require new and more
articulated answers. The critique of Stalinism, the demonstration that it is not
socialism requires a more detailed and systematic examination of what socialism is
and in what sense it can and must be democratic. The reluctance of Marxists to
identify and to describe in detail the nature of socialist alternatives has helped
Stalinism to pass as a legitimate interpretation of Marxism. If the tradition that
Marx initiated is to be a living one, and is not to degenerate into dogmatism or
scholasticism, then it becomes essential to confront honestly what in this tradition
can be reconstructed, what needs to be modified or even abandoned. The demand
for the relentless criticism of all existing reality requires us to apply this to
Marxism itself.

One of the most important commitments of Praxis International is to examine

systematically contemporary revolutionary experiences and to develop a theory of
the overcoming of capitalism, of social transformation of economy, of worker’s
self-government, of participatory democracy, of the nature of socialist
enlightenment and of a new socialist culture. The examination of such issues
requires a discussion of principles which are themselves based on solid theoretical
foundations.

A philosophy of praxis will have to make its basic concepts more rigorous and
determinate (the concepts of human being, of praxis, history, emancipation,
equality, creativity, alienation, reification, social justice, rationality, critique,
dialectic, etc.). From the praxis standpoint, philosophy must overcome a false
“abstractness” and “purity.” It must become a theory that unifies the most general
insights with specific scientific knowledge; it must at once be empirical,
interpretative and critical. Such a concrete theory must also be lived, it must
mediate between principles and practical engagement. If the name of the journal
— Praxis International — carries any symbolic message, it is this aspiration to the
unity of theory and emancipatory action, a commitment to radical change based on
theoretical understanding. Practice does not merely affirm a ready-made theory; it
also reveals the limitations of theory and demands its reconstruction.

In its striving toward maximum possible rational and critical consciousness, Praxis
International will encourage dialogues with creative contributions from different
and even opposing philosophical trends. The journal will also include contributions
from historians, sociologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists,
anthropologists, linguists, artists and others who are concerned about the
fundamental meaning and purpose of their own work. But the journal will also
inevitably clash with all forms of apologetic, mystifying, and doctrinaire thought.

One of the most important tasks of the journal is to contribute to the development
of a genuinely international spirit in present-day culture. The Yugoslav multi-
national community of Praxis exemplified that spirit by cultivating cooperation
and solidarity among representatives of the different nations that comprise
present-day Yugoslavia — even during the worst years of ethnic strife in
Yugoslavia. The task is much broader now. Ideological and political demarcation
lines often coincide with national borders; ideological hostility is all too frequently
conjoined with nationalist and racist antagonisms. In an age of the growing
bankruptcy of official ideologies, dominating powers resort to nationalist
propaganda in order to suppress any dissent. However, an encouraging tendency
in the existing situation is the growing sense of the need to develop an international
community of independent, critically oriented intellectuals, of reaffirming and
cultivating bonds of solidarity. The more we commit ourselves to developing a
comprehensive understanding of our contemporary conditions and to fostering
emancipatory social trends, the more the risk of social and intellectual isolation is
overcome.

Hence, the double task of Praxis International: it will do all that a journal can do to
protect the integrity and dignity of intellectual work and to develop a critical
consciousness as an international endeavor. It will dedicate itself to furthering the
type of theoretical understanding that is a necessary condition for a relevant,
forceful, imaginative, emancipatory praxis.
 Rudi Supek 1971

Utopia and Reality

Written: 1971;
Source: Open Society Archive;
Translated: Slobodan Stanković
Transcribed: Zdravko Saveski.

Transcriber's note: This is Supek's opening speech on 1971 Korčula Summer

School, organized by the Zagreb philosophical bimonthly "Praxis". Supek's
opening speech and a number of reports were published in the No. 1-2 issue of
Praxis (January-April 1972).

“Utopia And Reality” – two notions which can leave one completely indifferent if
Utopia is imagined as a vision of a very distant future or as a dream which
transcends reality, if we take Utopia as a subject of the imagination and
speculation without any connection with reality or even without any possibility of
being involved in reality. [The notions also leave one indifferent] if we take reality
as something firm and permanent, something which follows a certain inertia,
deprived of all possibilities and efforts designed to make the impossible possible,
and then to turn the possible into reality.

As soon as a creative act is involved, there is the human tendency toward change
and transformation [and] these two notions begin their mutual relationship, to
condition and check each other. Their relationship could grow to a passionate
interdependence and dramatic activity especially if a revolutionary action is
involved. In that moment we begin to measure reality by [ideas of] utopia, while
utopia begins to merge with reality: things which seemed to us incomprehensible
attain the highest sense of existence.

By passing through the hours of the revolutionary transformation of society and

by sharing the longing for radical changes in reality, we become conscious of a
number of contradictions provoked by revolutionary actions in the fields of
history, social organization and human relationships. These are the contradictions
which have been especially provoked by the confrontation of reality and Utopia, by
a confrontation between a present still under the command of the past and inertia,
and the future which is strolling between the possible" and the impossible.

So long as the revolutionary action is in full swing, Utopia comes closer to reality,
and impossible things appear within reach of the possible. However, when the
revolutionary swing begins to weaken, Utopia gradually separates itself from
reality and disappears from the horizon. We are then confronted with a road
which we believed we already passed. When the revolutionary action is in full
swing, then a man is the closest to another man, inhuman things are abandoned as
inimical ones, "I" begins to merge with "We," and personal desires with collective
strivings. To a certain extent the mediation between the freedom of an individual
and the freedom of another individual by means of "just," "democratic," "legal"
institutions seems superficial. The spontaneity is at its peak. However, when the
revolutionary swing begins to decline, men begin to drift apart, group interests
come again to the surface, definite social structures become visible: things which
were dynamic and explosive retreat before static and petrified things. The
relationships among people turn into relationships of power while the
revolutionary vanguards become ruling oligarchies. How [can we] preserve the
spontaneity of the movement, freedom of social identification, the nearness of
ideals, and other things?

At this point we meet the contradiction between political pragmatism, which

claims to possess a sense of reality, to take into account "historical conditions," to
adapt the political action to the demands of concrete and "objective situations" on
the one hand, and on the other the revolutionary humanism which derives virtue
and strength from Utopia, [which is] in harmony with revolutionary means and
revolutionary aims, which believes that the construction of social consciousness is
more important than the construction of the social basis, which places human
relationships before various institutions and constitutions. This contradiction
might become a permanent and fruitful dialogue between the real and the Utopian.
What is bad in this contradiction is the moment when political pragmatism wishes
to integrate Utopia into its own daily and temporary practice, when it tends to
become the sole judge designed to appraise the nature of all ideals and Utopian
strivings, and when it begins to identify the existing reality with a picture of the
future or its individual actions with the true movement of history. In this way it
not only monopolizes political actions or [monopolizes] a stage of the revolutionary
movement, but it also designates the sense and interpretation of the realization of
socialist society. That is, [it monopolizes] things which belong to all people and
society, in other words – free engagement and association. In such a case the
transformation of a society and people, of their relationships, is implemented by
means of decrees, coercion and illusions, rather than by means of their
consciousness and free volition. The realization of the liberation of people is
attempted only by political means: the "political soul" begins to devour, as Marx
warned, the "social soul", of the socialist revolution. In such a case we can talk
about a mystification of the social consciousness and about an enslaved Utopia.

True, dogmatism has attempted to bureaucratize utopia: by means of decrees it

has established which stage of socialism has been realized and even claimed that
socialism was "constructed" and that it is now on its way "from socialism to
communism." In so doing dogmatism did not even need to ask for advice from the
people or from specialists. A group of power-holders has proclaimed all this from
"above" in the same way as Moses gave commandments to his people. We wonder
whether the "utopian consciousness" does not go hand in hand with such acts of
proclamation as displayed in the Old Testament or with the decisions made by the
prophets? We are rather inclined to believe that in question here is a kind of
"enlightened absolutism" which cannot act without the pressure of the state
apparatus. This is how we touch well-known problems which have thus far been
very much discussed, namely the "wise leaders" of the revolutionary movement
and socialist democracy. It is necessary to warn that the bureaucratization of
Utopia conditions a special kind of "charismatic authority" in socialism, which
appears as a form of decadency in the socialist revolution. [Charismatic authority]
is perhaps even an inevitable consequence of a revolutionary stir and can be only
partially prevented through a condemnation of the "personality cult." This is why
we think that the Utopian elements in the revolutionary movement must remain
deeply connected with its spontaneity and democracy, as well as resistant to all
attempts by the authorities to make of it its own servant.

The bureaucratization of Utopia has brought about the identification of socialism

with the limits of the power of the ruling political class and because of that only
that socialism is proclaimed "true" and "correct" which exists within the limits of
its power. In the areas in which its power ends, for instance in other socialist
countries which also develop socialism, it is considered that socialism there is not
"correct," and is even condemned as "revisionistic" or as a "betrayal of
socialism." We wonder again whether this intolerant and quasi-religious mentality
of the ruling socialist bureaucrats, this production of solely "true believers" or
heretical movements and their anathematization, whether all this represents an
element of the Utopian consciousness or not? Is it riot a natural consequence of the
already mentioned fact that the monopolization of the socialist revolution has
based its legitimacy on the Utopian section of its consciousness? [And because of
such a claim to legitimacy] the ruling group makes efforts to legalize its actions in
the name "of a socialist revolution" which is "historically and objectively"
represented only by that group.

In any case this situation has become unmentionable. Even the contradiction itself,
which has been the subject of so many speculations concerning the identity
between the "subjectivity" of the revolutionary movement (i.e., of its vanguard)
and the "objectivity" of its historical realization, begins to decay precisely because
of certain necessities which stem from the very historical development of the
socialist society. First of all, we should recall that the socialist, or more concretely
the communist, movement started from a generally recognized principle: every
national movement has the right to its own road to socialism, i.e., pluralism in the
realization of socialism [was a] consistently defended [principle] which is obviously
in strong contradiction to the already mentioned attempts designed to retain a
monopoly over "the only correct road to socialism." Today it is difficult to deny
that a Soviet type of socialism exists, that a Chinese socialism, a Cuban or a
Yugoslav socialism exists. (The word "socialism" is not used here as a term for a
socialism already realized, but rather as a denotation that these countries have
passed through a socialist revolution!) It is therefore impossible not to make
comparisons between individual socialist countries, regardless of the fact that these
countries exclude each other by means of "political dialectics." By making
comparisons, however, we are compelled to employ an objective criterion, to create
a position from which political voluntarism and subjectivism would be excluded; in
this way the very act of comparison would enable us to free the captured vision of
the future, that bureaucratized ideal, that degraded Utopia, [the Utopia] which is
as necessary as bread if one really wants to achieve socialism. The claims made by
the ruling bureaucracies that their practices represent "the objective laws of
historical development" would in this way receive their real meaning, i.e., they
would appear as a naive mystification of a difficult historical birth, with the cradle
of the newly-born child turning into the bedstead of Procreates.

The recognition of the plurality of the roads leading to socialism, along with the
creation of an objective criterion concerning socialist development, would again
permit that critical and rational spirit to affirm itself, that spirit which is alone
capable of linking the possible with the necessary, and utopia with reality. This
spirit is only capable of introducing within the Marxist way of thinking that
sharpness and vision which – under the conditions of an ever-increasing
complexity of social development – could turn a definite vision of the future into
the strongest weapon of revolutionary action. Such action has been completely
paralyzed by dogmatic obscurantism and left to the mercy of the "wise
leadership."

This means that Marxism must be returned to its real origins, must be put within
everyone's reach. There can be neither a socialist revolution nor any socialist
achievements, no true transformation of society, without free engagement, without
a free connection between reality and Utopia. To place Utopia at everyone's reach
means to create a mass movement, to give it the form of a real collective will of the
spontaneous transformation of human relationships.

While discussing all this I would like to warn that frequently we meet a type of
[politically] engaged individual who makes efforts to prevent any approximation of
Utopia and reality. [We meet] individuals who have been trying to present socialist
reality as a distant and indefinite future. For such people Utopia is a form of
intellectual escape from reality. Therefore they take that form of socialism which is
the least suitable for any critical analysis or direct participation in a concrete
society. Recently a prominent philosopher was asked where, in his opinion, one can
find real socialism, and he answered "in China." The next question was what he
knew of socialism in China, and he answered: "Very little!" Does not this attitude
reveal a wish to escape from our own reality, the European reality'; Certainly [the
European reality] is for us an object of direct action regardless of the question of to
what extent and according to which existing socialist model we are obliged to look
for the possibilities and dilemmas of the transformation of this socialist reality. Do
we have the right permanently to maintain undefined, indefinite, distant and
abstract relationships between the "socialist reality" and "socialist Utopia?" Do
we not live within an historical reality, with experience of long-standing, not only
in connection with the capitalist society but also with the socialist one, which
obliges us to resolve contradictions in our own historical area? Here the
contradictions and the prospects of a possible evolution are the most visible and
[are most] suitable for confirmation in a clear way. Things which form the Utopian
section of socialist theory and practice must become the subject of our thoughts
and knowledge. It is not permissible to neglect the socialist experience in Europe.

Regardless of how contradictory all this sounds, it is precisely our links with, and
inspiration by the Utopian form of the radical will which obliges us to make
critical, analytical, and scholarly research of the socialist reality. We should here
recall Marx' angry abandonment of Weitling's Utopian prophecies. [Marx said]
that "ignorance is of no use to anybody" in relation to the capitalist reality.
Dogmatism and bureaucratism have today burdened the socialist way of thinking
by a huge inertia, by a pseudo-knowledge and quasi-reality. We cannot remove
this inertia if we do not develop a critical way of thinking, both in connection with
the knowledge which we can acquire by comparative studies of the existing
achievements in socialist countries and by confrontation of these "achievements"
with the worked out vision of the goal, of the future which these societies would
like to achieve.

While speaking about this necessity, I cannot but remember two thinkers whose
messages as Marxist philosophers and engaged people lead us to critical research
of the essential problems concerning our hope in socialism. These two philosophers
are, Gyorgy Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann. They are both examples of thinkers
completely devoted to the cause of socialism, but inspired by critical thought. For
them [critical thought] meant a permanent confrontation between the real and the
possible, between the necessity and the Utopian; for them this meant a passionate
dialogue between man and his history. Gyorgy Lukacs in his theoretical
deliberations placed the accent on a "possible consciousness" while Lucien
Goldmann, who considered himself a pupil of Lukacs and his continuer, followed
him in the vision of a humanistic socialism. Lukacs was more directly engaged in
the communist movement and was following the stages, often under pressure, of
the socialist revolution after October [1917] until the present days. Goldmann was
freer, less tied to the discipline of the movement, but they had both equally striven
to give the best parts of their life to the realization of the socialist vision. I would
not dare to judge their contribution at this time. However, I would like to say that
through their death we lost two most significant persons in contemporary Marxist
philosophy and in the socialist movement. We have lost two men with whom we
were very closely tied: Gyorgy Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann were members of the
Praxis Editorial Council. Lucien Goldmann, in addition, was one of the most
dynamic animators and most precious participants in our Korcula School. Their
death has shocked us deeply because their disappearance is a great loss for the
world which we would like to create. Please let us give them the honor of one
moment of silence as an honor to our comrades and friends Gyorgy Lukacs and
Lucien Goldmann. Glory to them!
 Rudi Supek 1977

Explanation Supporting the Request for a Subsidy for

the Korčula Summer School

Written: 1977;
Source: Open Society Archive;
Translated: Zdenko Antić
Transcribed: Zdravko Saveski.

The Korčula Summer School Committee met on 17 December 1976 and decided once
again to request a subsidy for its regular 1977 session, on the following basis:

1. Last year [1976], the Republican Self-management Committee [of Croatia] for
Science granted the Korčula Summer School the sum of 40,000 dinars [2,222 dollars].
The decision to grant this subsidy reached us late, at the beginning of July, but we had
already taken all necessary measures to hold the session in the usual manner. On 22
July, however, we were informed that the grant would not after all be forthcoming, and
at the Republican Assembly of Self-management Interest Communities [of Croatia] a
delegate stated that this decision had been taken in consequence of a “political
deviation” within the Self-management Interest Communities, without explanation what
kind of “political deviation” was in question. We did not ask for an explanation but we
understood this action as an attempt to make political considerations the basis for taking
away a financial subsidy that has been legally approved on the basis of a self-
management decision.

2. In submitting this request we would like to point out that we have always acted in
conformity with the academic and constitutional provisions of our society, and that we
will be guided by the following principles:

First, we have a permanent obligation to conduct the summer school within the
framework of the instruction and training given our post-graduate cadres in philosophy
and sociology.

Second, one of the summer school’s objectives is to engage the best lectures available,
from Yugoslavia and if possible from abroad.

Third, the summer school will consider and discuss the most topical problems of
contemporary philosophy and socialism, eschewing dogmatism and selective limitation
of topics.

Forth, the summer school will respect the free exchange of opinions and free discussion,
since progressive thought can develop only as a result of a creative dialogue among
scholars, whose ideas on certain contemporary problems necessary differ.
Fifth, in addition to academic cadres the school intends to invite well-known politicians,
who will be given an opportunity to explain the meaning of certain political programs
and present trends in Yugoslavia.

The Korčula Summer School Committee has always been guided by the above
principles, and that is why the school acquired such a good reputation in Yugoslavia and
in the world. Suspension of the regular work of this school during the past two years, in
1975 and 1976, not only made it impossible to fulfill our academic obligations but also
interrupted a very fruitful scholarly work, which contributed greatly to the development
of scientific and Marxist thought and to the reputation of Yugoslav socialism in the
world. A question should be posed here: whose interest would be served by a further
suspension of the summer school regular activity?

3. It is well known that since the very beginning our position has been that we should
develop good relations and conduct open discussions with scholars from both Western
and Eastern countries. Consequently, Marxists from all socialist countries except the
Soviet Union have participated in the work of the summer school (since the Soviets
only accept invitations to institutions, or collectives, but not individuals). Cooperation
with Marxists from other socialist countries became difficult after the occupation of
Czechoslovakia, and ceased almost completely when a campaign against so-called
“rightist deviation” was launched in these countries during which the Korčula Summer
School was attacked. We mention just one example of such an attack, in a Soviet
publication on Yugoslav philosophy published in Moscow in 1974 under the title
Contemporary Problems of Marxist Philosophy, a publication of the state enterprise
“Progres.” This book, so far the only publication in the USSR to deal with Yugoslav
philosophy, contains the following passage:

For Yugoslav philosophy the period from 1948 to 1958 was one of search and of
rationalization in regard to certain theoretical problems of Marxism. During this decade
Yugoslav philosophy developed generally on the basis of Marxism-Leninism. At the
end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, a sharp disagreement arose among
Yugoslav philosophers, dividing them into ‘orthodox’ and ‘authentic Marxists’ who
supported a philosophy of dialectical Marxism, and ‘creative interpreters’ and critics
from the ranks of the so-called ‘neo-Marxists.’ According to a well-known Yugoslav
Marxist who has written a number of works on Yugoslav contemporary philosophy, A.
Stojković, this disagreement intensified and broadened in scope because many of
Yugoslavia’s philosophers began to orient themselves toward Western philosophical
schools and bourgeois interpretations of Marxism, and have expanded their cooperation
with such philosophers as H. Lefebvre, E. Bloch, A. Schaff, L. Kolakowski, Z.
Baumann, L. Goldmann, E. Fromm, K. Kosik, H. Marcuse, and others, all gathered
around the Zagreb magazine Praxis… At the end of 1963 a group of Zagreb
philosophers and sociologists founded the Korčula Summer School, a yearly
symposium whose aim was to promote exchanges of opinion and ideas among Marxists
from East and West – bourgeois Marxists and supporters of an ‘authentic Marxism.’
Shortly thereafter the magazine Praxis began to be published in Zagreb in two editions
– a Yugoslav one and an international one (in English, French, and German). Since its
editorial board included philosophers from various countries, Praxis in fact provided a
theoretical foothold for international revisionism and anti-Marxism. (3-6)
As can be seen, this 1974 Soviet publication, which maintains that the main objective at
the present moment is to “struggle against rightist deviation,” considers that well-known
Marxists in Yugoslavia and Europe gave “a foothold to international revisionism and
anti-Marxism,” while those Yugoslav philosophers who stand on the positions of
“Marxism-Leninism” and are waging war on Praxis are hailed, and that their orientation
is deemed correct is confirmed by the fact that they are receiving subsidies for their
writings and occupy responsible social and party positions. Even though those who
support the Soviet Marxist-Leninist positions in philosophy enjoy full freedom in
Yugoslavia, and upholders of creative Marxism are persecuted, it is interesting to hear
what another voice has to say about the Korčula Summer School, a voice from Italy. In
an article entitled “A seminar Open to Marxists from All over the World” (Rinascita, 21
September 1973), a professor at the Rome University, Lucio Lombardo Radice (who is
also a member of the Italian CP Central Committee) made the following statement:

As far as I know the Korčula Summer School has existed for about 10 years, holding
seminars at the end of August in which a broad range of highly qualified scholars
(mainly philosophers, sociologists, and historians) from the Universities of Zagreb,
Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, and Skopje took place. This is the only institution of its
kind in the socialist countries. The school invites representatives of various Marxist
groups from capitalist and socialist countries. Participation is open to anyone who wants
to come, and anyone may open the “green door.” The discussions are absolutely free,
and the confrontation of various views is sincere.

The Yugoslav Marxist scholars who have run the school for 10 years are not united in
their philosophical and political views. They are, however, fully united on one point:
that in stressing that form of socialism called “self-management” they are being sharply
critical of “etatistic” socialism.

Professor Lombardo Radice knows very well, as do other Marxists in Europe, that the
present witch-hunt against “rightist revisionism,” or against creative Marxism, is being
waged with the objective of justifying “etatistic socialism” and weakening the
philosophical foundations of democratic, self-managing socialism.

4. The unity between theory and practice is one of the fundamentals of Marxism, and
nowadays it is perfectly clear that Soviet Marxism-Leninism (represented by such
authors as Stalin, Mitin, and Judin) is an integral part of “etatistic socialism” and is the
real source of its dogmatic and positivistic character. It is also perfectly clear that only
on the basis of creative Marxism could the concept of self-management socialism be
developed. Neither the campaign being waged against Praxis nor the statements made
about it in the Yugoslav press can hide this simple truth. This can be confirmed by the
numerous writings of Yugoslav Marxists who support Praxis published in foreign
languages. In addition to the international edition of Praxis, we would like to mention a
few other works: in German Die Revolutionaere Praxis (Freiburg: 1970), edited by G.
Petrović; Jugoslawien Denkt Anders (Vienna: 1971), edited by B. Bošnjak and R.
Supek; in French, Etatisme et Autogestion (Paris: 1973), edited by R. Supek; in English
Self-governing Socialism (New York: 1974), edited by B. Horvat, M. Marković, and R.
Supek; in Italian, La Rivolta di Praxis (Milan: 1969), edited by G. Petrović; in Spanish,
El Socialismo Yugoslavo Actual (Mexico: 1975). The following have contributed to
these collections: B. Bošnjak, V. Cvjetičanin, M. Đurić, D. Grlić, Z. Golubović, B.
Jakšić, M. Kangrga, V. Korać, A. Krešić, I. Kuvačić, V. Milić, M. Marković, G.
Petrović, N. Popov, V. Rus, R. Supek, S. Stojanović, P. Vranicki, Lj. Tadić, M. Životić,
and others. In all these works the tie between creative Marxism and self-managing
socialism is proved. Not listed here are other books in foreign languages by M.
Marković, G. Petrović, P. Vranicki, Lj. Tadić, S. Stojanović, M. Životić, R. Supek, and
others. The many contributions to the foreign periodicals made by these authors prove
the same. Thus to present the philosophers and sociologists around Praxis as “enemies
of self-managing socialism,” as has been done in the Yugoslav press, is merely to
perpetuate a lie, using the Stalinist tactics that did so much harm to socialism in the
world.

5. Although the persecution of philosophers who stand for creative Marxism cannot be
justified, such persecution is still going on. After 19 Praxis supporters were ousted from
their universities they were forbidden to contribute scholarly works to magazines and
periodicals, or to publish books. The editorial boards of Yugoslav newspapers,
magazines, and radio and television stations have “black lists” mainly filled with the
names of Praxis supporters. The attempts to remove them from the public eye and the
academic milieu have gone so far that their names are no longer to be found in the latest
bibliographies. It is well known that in addition to physically liquidating Marxists Stalin
also undertook their intellectual liquidation by seeing to it that their names were no
longer mentioned in scholarly works, in spite of the fact that they were hailed in the
party press in earlier periods. It is regrettable, but examples of such Stalinist practices
can also be found here in Yugoslavia.

Not long ago two bibliographies appeared in Yugoslavia which demonstrate how the
science of Marxism is regarded from the point of view of the “Eastern variant” of
socialism and from that of the “Western variant.” The first of these bibliographies
appeared in a three-volume edition, Marxism – the Thought of the Modern Epoch
(Belgrade: 1976), edited by N. Pašić and M. Pečujlić. This bibliography was compiled
by Miloš Nikolić, an editor of the magazine Marxism in the World, which is published
by the Marxist Center of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of
Yugoslavia. He is thus an employee of the highest political body in the country. The
bibliography lists Marxist books and articles published between 1945 and 1975, taken
from 25 Yugoslav periodicals during those 30 years. It lists 1,300 items, including some
by foreign contributors. The first thing that struck us was that not one of 19 professors
who were fired two years ago from the Belgrade University is mentioned in this
bibliography. Names like M. Marković, Lj. Tadić, S. Stojanović, Z. Golubović-Pešić, V.
Rus, M. Životić, and others cannot be found, although their works were hailed in the
party press even when they were being accused of “rightist revisionism.” And other
prominent Praxis supporters did not fare much better. Predrag Vranicki was mentioned
eight times, A. Krešić four times, V. Cvjetičanin three times, V. Korać twice, R. Supek
twice, and D. Grlić, B. Bošnjak, and G. Petrović once each (Petrović, one of the most
productive philosophers, was mentioned as author of his doctoral thesis on Plekhanov in
1957. In other words, during the following 20 years he had published nothing worth
mentioning.) Another striking point is that on the basis of such criteria many unknown
and obscure authors are listed as prominent Marxists.

For purposes of comparison, we refer here to another bibliography, published by the

Review of Sociology (Zagreb, No. 6, 1976), compiled by Dr. Zlatko Gasparević, a well-
known bibliographer. It is a smaller work, since it reviews sociological literature only
and for a shorter period, from 1969 to 1973, and takes into consideration contributions
to only 15 periodicals. The following individuals head the list of scholarly
contributions: R. Supek, with 46 items; I. Kuvačić, 34; S. Šuvar, 26; Lj. Tadić, 24;
Mihailo Marković, 20; S. Vrcan, 20; V. Cvjetičanin, 19; E. Ćimić, 15; S. Milosavlevski,
14; Z. Mlinar, 18; Svetozar Stojanović, 16; Predrag Vranicki, 16; Velko Rus, 13; Z.
Golubović, 12; M. Životić, 12; V. Korać, 11; etc. (members of the Praxis editorial board
are underlined). When one compares this bibliography when the former, any comment
appears superfluous, although one could say that this is another example of how
scholarly work and individual freedom of expression are interpreted by the “Eastern”
and the “Western” variants of socialism.

A list of the scholarly works of the main critics of Praxis who are mentioned in a Soviet
publication and who contribute mainly to the Yugoslav party press is also interesting.
The picture is as follows: Muhamed Filipović, 1; Arif Tanović, 1; Fuad Muhić, 4;
Prvoslav Ralić, 2; Gligorije Zaječarević, 4.

Although a bibliography gives only a relative indication of the value of a scholarly

work, one must query the effect of these diametrically opposed pieces of information on
the domestic public (and one could also add on the international public, since during last
year’s conference on Socialism in the Contemporary World, held in Cavtat, a display of
Yugoslav Marxist literature was organized along the lines of the bibliography compiled
by Miloš Nikolić). And here the question arises: are there still people in Yugoslavia
who believe that history can be falsified? Stalin was the most powerful and best-known
communist leader who tried to falsify history, but in the end it was history that put him
in the right place. Intellectual oppression has always paralleled physical oppression.
Therefore, in the interest of self-managing socialism responsible members of Yugoslav
society should take measures to put an end to such oppressive practices.

6. It can also be said that the first biography mentioned above is what in sociology is
often called a “conspiracy of mediocrities,” destructive of any progressive and
productive organization. This “conspiracy of mediocrities” can be found almost
everywhere nowadays. Such a phenomenon is mortally dangerous for the cultural life of
a small country, since it eliminates the best brains from public life and paralyses all who
believe that individual integrity and scholarly ability are the main criteria by which to
appraise an individual. The consequences of such an atmosphere are cultural silence and
internal emigration: the peace of the cemetery – the ideal of a police or bureaucratic
system. It is possible that anyone who is not insane can believe that the Korčula
Summer School could imperil the cultural development of this country? Every Sunday,
in 5,000 churches, some 5,000 priests preach something that is not Marxism at all. Why
then cannot a group of Marxists once a year speak freely and discuss Marxism? Who
could be endangered by this? Perhaps those who have begun to make war on “rightist
revisionism,” since they believe the slogan “The Factories to the Workers” is
antisocialist? Or perhaps those who believe that intellectual freedom is a “bourgeois
prejudice”?

Nowadays we can no longer have the excuse that “for four centuries we have been
under Turkish yoke,” since our standard of living is presently equal to that of France in
1939. Therefore, as cultural workers and as patriots we are entitled to aspire to the
cultural level France had achieved at the corresponding period. The trend toward inner
emigration is not confined to individuals, but is also being manifested at the local and
republican levels. This trend is very strong, and certain bureaucratic forces support it
with the argument that we must defend ourselves from the “Turkish influence” of
others. Geographical isolation is just a facet of dogmatic and ideological isolation. The
Korčula Summer School was a good example of the fact that it was possible to work
broadly and openly not only within the frontiers of Yugoslavia, but also in the whole of
Europe. That is why it had such good results and why it was respected. Nowadays the
Yugoslav authorities are spending twice as much for certain other conferences as was
spent on the Korčula Summer School in the 10 years of its existence. Finally, it must be
recognized that free scholarship is the least expensive scholarship; free scholarship is at
the same time the most productive.

Zagreb, 1 March 1977.

Korčula Summer School Committee

Professor Rudi Supek, President
 Gajo Petrović 1965

Reification

Source: The Autodidact Project;

First Published: in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore,
Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan, Ralph Miliband (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1983), pp. 411-413;
Transcribed: by Ralph Dumain, 2005.

The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into
properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become
independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his
life. Also transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in
a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. Reification is a ‘special’ case
of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modem
capitalist society.

There is no term and no explicit concept of reification in Hegel, but some of his
analyses seem to come close to it e.g. his analysis of the beobachtende Vernunft
(observing reason), in the Phenomenology of Mind, or his analysis of property in his
Philosophy of Right. The real history of the concept of reification begins with Marx and
with Lukács’s interpretation of Marx. Although the idea of reification is implicit already
in the early works of Marx (e.g., in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts), an
explicit analysis and use of ‘reification’ begins in his later writings and reaches its peak
in the Grundrisse, and Capital. The two most concentrated discussions of reification are
to be found in Capital I, ch. I sect. 4, and in Capital III, ch. 48. In the first of these, on
COMMODITY FETISHISM, there is no definition of reification but basic elements for
a theory of reification are nevertheless given in a number of pregnant statements:

The mystery of the commodity form, therefore, consists in the fact that in it the social
character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective characteristic, a social natural
quality of the labour product itself ... The commodity form, and the value relation
between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no
connexion with their physical properties and with the material relations arising
therefrom. It is simply a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their
eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things ... This I call the fetishism which
attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities,
and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities ... To the
producers the social relations connecting the labours of one individual with that of the
rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they
really are, thinglike relations between persons and social relations between things.... To
them their own social action takes the form of the action of things, which rule the
producers instead of being ruled by them.
In the second discussion, Marx summarizes briefly the whole previous analysis which
has shown that reification is characteristic not only of the commodity, but of all basic
categories of capitalist production (money, capital, profit, etc.). He insists that
reification exists to a certain extent in ‘all social forms insofar as they reach the level of
commodity production and money circulation’, but that ‘in the capitalist mode of
production and in capital which is its dominating category ... this enchanted and
perverted world develops still further’. Thus in the developed form of capitalism
reification reaches its peak:

In capital-profit, or still better capital-interest, land-ground rent, labour-wages, in this

economic trinity represented as the connection between the component parts of value
and wealth in general and its sources, we have the complete mystification of the
capitalist mode of production, the reification [Verdinglichung] of social relations and
immediate coalescence of the material production relations with their historical and
social determination. It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which
Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters
and at the same time directly as things. (Capital III, ch. 48.)

As equivalent in meaning with Verdinglichung Marx uses the term Versachlichung, and
the reverse of Versachlichung he calls Personifizierung. Thus he speaks about ‘this
personification of things and reification of the relations of production’. He regards as
the ideological counterparts of ‘reification’ and ‘personification’, ‘crude materialism’
and ‘crude idealism’ or ‘fetishism’: ‘The crude materialism of the economists who
regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among
people, and qualities which things obtain because they are subsumed under these
relations, is at the same time just as crude an idealism, even fetishism, since it imputes
social relations to things as inherent characteristics, and thus mystifies them.’
(Grundrisse, p. 687).

Despite the fact that the problem of reification was discussed by Marx in Capital,
published partly during his life time, and partly soon after his death, which was
generally recognized as his master work, his analysis was very much neglected for a
long time. A greater interest in the problem developed only after Lukács drew attention
to it and discussed it in a creative way, combining influences coming from Marx with
those from Max Weber (who elucidated important aspects of the problem in his
analyses of bureaucracy and rationalization; see Lowith 1932) and from Simmel (who
discussed the problem in The Philosophy of Money). In the central and longest chapter
of History and Class Consciousness on ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat’, Lukács starts from the viewpoint that ‘commodity fetishism is a specific
problem of our age, the age of modem capitalism’ (p. 84), and also that it is not a
marginal problem but ‘the central structural problem of capitalist society’ (p. 83). The
‘essence of commodity-structure’, according to Lukács has already been clarified, in the
following way: ‘Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a
thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly
rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the
relation between people’ (p. 83). Leaving aside ‘the importance of this problem for
economics itself’ Lukács undertook to discuss the broader question: ‘how far is
commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the
total outer and inner life of society?’ (p. 84). He points out that two sides of the
phenomenon of reification or commodity fetishism have been distinguished (which he
calls the ‘objective’ and the subjective’): ‘Objectively a world of objects and relations
between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their movements on
the market)... Subjectively—where the market economy has been fully developed—a
man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which,
subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way
independently of man just like any consumer article.’ (p. 87). Both sides undergo the
same basic process and are subordinated to the same laws. Thus the basic principle of
capitalist commodity production, ‘the principle of rationalization based on what is and
can be calculated’ (p. 88) extends to all fields, including the worker’s ‘soul’, and more
broadly, human consciousness. ‘Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and
reproduces itself economically on higher levels, the structure of reification
progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the
consciousness of man’ (p. 93).

It seems that the problem of reification was somehow in the air in the early 1920s. In
the same year as Lukács book appeared, the Soviet economist I. I. Rubin published his
Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (in Russian; see Rubin 1972), the first part of which
is devoted to ‘Marx’s Theory of Commodity Fetishism’. The book was less ambitious
than Lukács’s (concentrating on reification in economics) and also less radical; while
Lukács found some place for ‘alienation’ in his theory of reification, Rubin was inclined
to regard the theory of reification as the scientific reconstruction of the utopian theory of
alienation. Nevertheless, both Lukács and Rubin were heavily attacked as ‘Hegelians’
and ‘idealists’ by the official representatives of the Third International.

The publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was a great

support for the kind of interpretation of Marx begun by Lukács but this was fully
recognized only after the second world war. Although the discussion of reification never
became as extensive and intense as that about alienation, a number of outstanding
Marxists such as Goldmann, J. Gabel and K. Kosik have made valuable contributions to
it. Not only have the works of Marx and Lukács been discussed afresh, but also
Heidegger’s Being and Time, which concludes with the following remarks and
questions: ‘That the ancient ontology works with "thing-concepts" and that there is a
danger "of reifying consciousness" has been well known for a long time. But what does
reification mean? Where does it originate from? ... Why does this reification come again
and again to domination? How is the Being of consciousness positively structured so
that reification remains inadequate to it?’ Goldmann maintained that these questions are
directed against Lukács (whose name is not mentioned) and that the influence of Lukács
can be seen in some of Heidegger’s positive ideas.

A number of more substantial questions about reification have also been discussed.
Thus there has been much controversy about the relation between reification, alienation,
and commodity fetishism. While some have been inclined to identify reification either
with alienation or with commodity fetishism (or with both), others want to keep the
three concepts distinct. While some have regarded alienation as an ‘idealist’ concept to
be replaced by the ‘materialist’ concept of ‘reification’, others have regarded
‘alienation’ as a philosophical concept whose sociological counterpart is ‘reification’.
According to the prevailing view alienation is a broader phenomenon, and reification
one of its forms or aspects. According to M. Kangrga ‘reification is a higher, that is the
highest form of alienation’ (1968, p. 18), and reification is not merely a concept but a
methodological requirement for a critical study and practical ‘change, or better the
destruction of the whole reified structure.’ (ibid. p. 82).

GP

References

Arato, Andrew 1972: Lukács’s Theory of Reification’.

Gabel, Joseph 1962: La réification.

Goldmann, Lucien 1959: ‘Réification’. In Recherches dialectiques.

Kangrga, Milan 1968: ‘Was ist Verdinglichung?’

Löwith, Karl 1932 (1982): Max Weber and Karl Marx.

Lukács, Georg 1923 (1971): History and Class Consciousness.

Rubin, I. I. 1928 (1972): Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value.

Schaff, Adam 1980: Alienation as a Social Phenomenon.

Tadić, Ljubomir 1969: ‘Bureaucracy—Reified Organization’. In M. Marković and G.

Petrović eds. Praxis.
 Praxis No. 1 1965

Review by Gajo Petrović

Source: Praxis, No. 1, 1965;

Transcribed: by Robert Stallaerts.

Robert C. Tucker: Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Cambridge University Press,
1961, 263 pp.

It is usually too simple a procedure to divide a book into its “good” and “bad” sides. But
there are books where such a procedure is justified, books which are so unequal and
contradictory that the reviewer without falling into self-contradiction can both “praise”
and “blame,” them. In my opinion Tucker’s Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx is a
book of this kind. It has its successful parts where the author corrects certain widespread
prejudices about Marx, but it also has parts which contribute to the generation of new
misunderstandings.

Tucker sees very well that one should distinguish between Marx’s authentic Marxism
and later Marxism; as the subject of his study he has chosen “Marx’s own Marxism —
its pre-history in German philosophy before Marx, its genesis and evolution in Marx’s
mind, and its basic meaning” (p. 11).

In discussing the prehistory and genesis of Marx’s thought Tucker rightly points out
both the decisive importance of Hegel, and also Marx’s own originality even in his
“Hegelian” phase. He also insists that after having suffered the influence of Feuerbach
Marx did not simply reject Hegel. Feuerbach in fact “cured” Marx of his Hegelianism
by giving him a life-long case of the disease, so that the new “anti-Hegelian” Marx was
in a sense “more Hegelian than ever” (p, 97). In stressing the decisive importance of
Hegel for the formation of Marx’s thought, Tucker does not diminish the impact of
Feuerbach, and he emphasizes the often overlooked influence of Moses Hess.

In studying the evolution of Marx’s Own Marxism Tucker rightly maintains that there is
“an underlying continuity of Marx’s thought from the early philosophical manuscripts
to the later stage.” (p. 7), and he opposes the thesis that it is possible to discover two
basically different Marxisms, even in the work of Marx himself. Accepting the division
into “original” and “mature” Marxism, Tucker maintains that “the foundations of
mature Marxism were laid in the act of creating original Marxism” (p. 167). In
accordance with this he criticizes not only those who deny unity in Marx’s thought, but
also those who like Herbert Marcuse assert that Marx’s early writings were “merely
preliminary stages to his mature theory, stages that should not be overemphasized” (p,
168).

Through an analysis of the texts of Marx and Engels Tucker successfully shows that
neither of them recognized the existence of two Marxisms and that Marx himself
regarded his manuscripts of 1844 as the birthplace of mature Marxism (p. 170). A
continuity connects Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Draft of the
Criticism of Political Economy and Capital, so that Marx’s Capital is “ simply a farm
in which he completed the book he started to write in his manuscripts of 1844. (p. 204).
In stressing the unity of all the “economic” works of Marx, Tucker rightly criticizes the
view that Marx was a political economist and asserts that Marx “always remained a
critic of political economy” (p. 204). He also rejects the assumption that Marxism is “a
scientific system of thought” (p. 12) and the view that Marx was the founder of
“dialectical materialism conceived as a doctrine of nature separated from human history.
According to Tucker dialectical materialism in this sense is “a development of the later,
scholastic period of Marxism,” a period which to be sure began within the lifetime of
Marx, but in the later writings of Engels, not in those of Marx.

Tucker regards self-alienation to be the central concept of original Marxism. Original

Marxism presented history as a story of man’s self-alienation and ultimate
transcendence of it in communism. (p. 188) Mature Marxism retells the tale in other
words. “It remains however, essentially the same story (p, 188).

We can largely agree with the ideas summarized so far. One should mention however
that these are not the original thoughts of Tucker although he expresses s them in his
own way. They show that he agrees with a number of contemporary thinkers who in
recent decades have revolted against the misinterpretation of Marx’s thought in
Stalinism, and returned to Marx himself in an attempt to rediscover his authentic
thought. There have been relatively few such endeavours in the English speaking area
so far (although some that there have been are very important, such as those of E.
Fromm). Thus the authentic thought of Marx is still insufficiently known there. Through
emphasizing certain of the basic truths about Mans thought, Tucker’s book can
therefore still play a positive role in the English speaking countries.

However the ideas presented above represent only the first step towards an
understanding of authentic Marxism. This is not to say that Tucker does not take more
than the first step. Going boldly into further analysis, he even achieves a considerable
degree of originality; unfortunately just where he is most original, he is also weakest.

In the section on German classical idealism Tucker shows a tendency to a doubtful

psychoanalytic approach in historico-philosophical analysis. He maintains that Kent’s
philosophy “identified the neurotic personality as the normal mama (p. 38). In a
reinforced form the same criticism its directed at Hegel. According to Tucker
Hegelianism is an anti-Christian “religion of self-worship” and a “colosal embodiment
and rationalization of pride” (p. 43). Solipsism is for Hegel “the philosophical goal and
ideal” (p. 54), and knowledge is for him “aggrandizement of the self through aggression
against the object” (p. 61), an “acquisitive process” through which the greedy knowing
self appropriates all the world forms as its private property (p. 62). The generic
tendency of man according to Hegel as interpreted by Tucker is megalomania (p. 66) !

Feuerbach’s opposition to religion is regarded by Tucker as “more anti-Hegelian that

anti-Christian.” Hegelianism is “a philosophical and religious affirmation of pride,”
whereas Feverbach’s philosophy, despite its apparent atheism, “contains elements of a
critique of pride” (pp, 93-94). According to Tucker Marx followed Feuerbach in such an
anti-pride orientation. Perhaps the essential difference between Marx and Hegel can be
most clearly seen in their attitude towards the acquisitive drive “For Hegel the
appropriation of the world cognitively as property of the ego is the way in which the
spirit’s self-alienation is overcome and freedom is achieved. For Marx it is just the
reverse. The acquisitive striving is the force that turns man’s creative activity into
compulsive alienated labour and depersonalizes him. It is the ground and source of his
alienation from himself.” (p. 143).

The supreme concern and the central theme of Marx’s thought was always man’s self-
alienation and its transcendence. In this Marx was “very modern and in advance of his
time” (p. 238). But how did Marx conceive self-alienation? In reminding us that
,,alienation” is “an ancient psychiatric term meaning loss of personal identity or the
feeling of personal identity” (p. 144), Tucker maintains that Marx used this term exactly
in this psychological-psychiatric sense. The process of self-alienation, as described by
Marx, is according to Tucker “a recognizably psychiatric phenomenon, a sickness of the
self” (p. 144).

Although at first he generally maintains that Marx conceived alienation as a

psychological, or psychiatric tear Tucker later corrects himself in making a difference in
this connection between “original” and “mature” Marxism. Whereas original Marxism
interpreted alienation psychologically, the conflict of the alienated man with himself
later became the conflict between “work” and “capital.” “Self-alienation was projected
as a social phenomenon, and Marx’s psychological system turned into his apparently
sociological mature one” (p. 175).

This change of system is especially reflected in that the “mature” Marx does not speak
about self-alienation any more. But this does not mean that the content of the idea
disappeared. Self-alienation was merely transformed into a social relation of production
and got a new name. The “division of labour” became “the comprehensive category of
mature Marxism corresponding to the category ,,self-alienation” in original Marxism”
(p. 185). After 1844. Marx “read the division of labour as alienation. That is, he found
the same meaning in the division of labour that he had preciously found in the idea of
alienation” (p. 188). In trying to substantiate this assertion, Tucker observes:

In fact, all the symptoms that Marx had previously treated under the heading of
“alienation” are now attributed to the disease of division of labour” (p. 190).

The picture of alienation painted by the young Marx is extremely highly valued by
Tucker: “No work of literature or psychiatry known to this writer has portrayed with
comparable descriptive power the destructive and dehumanizing essence of the neurotic
process of self-alienation” (p: 215). But Marx’s decision to treat self-alienation as
being, for all practical purposes, a social-relation of man to man, a decision allegedly
made in 1844, is regarded by Tucker as “fateful” (p. 215). Thorough this decision Marx
turned from philosophy to myth. From now an he represented the “internal Inferno” in
the alienated- man as an “external Inferno” in society (p. 226).

Tucker thinks that according to his inner nature alienation is neither a fact of religion,
nor a fact of political economy. “Inherently or in itself it is a fact of the life of the self, i.
e. a spiritual or, as we say today, psychological fact.... No matter how many individual
men may belong to this category it is always an individual matter” (pp. 239, 240).
Therefore alienation can not be overcome through social action, especially not through
violent action, but only by a “moral revolution” in the individual, “a revolution within
the self” (p. 241).

Tucker holds that Marx was originally within reach of the insight that alienation is
essentially a fact of individual psychology. This is seen from his assertion of 1845. that
man alienates himself from himself when he produces under the pressure of an “egoistic
need.” But Marx “failed to trace this egoism to its real source within the personality of
the alienated individual himself,” and this is why he also failed to understand that “it is
only there, and by the individual’s own moral effort, that the egoism can be undone and
the revolutionary “change of self” achieved” (p. 240).

However not only did Marx not arrive at an adequate understanding of means for
transcending alienation. In a very important sense, his whole system represented a flight
from it. “Magnifying the problem to the proportions of humanity in general, Marx
exempted alienated man in particular from all moral responsibility for striving to change
himself. Self-change was to be reached by a revolutionary praxis that would alter
external circumstances, and the war of the self was to be won through transference of
hostilities to the field of relations between man and man. Men were told, in effect, that
violence against other men was the only possible means by which they themselves
could become new men. Not moral orientation but escape was the burden of this
message. Marx created in Marxism gospel of transcendence of alienation by other
means than those which alone can encompass the end, a solution that evades the
solution, a pseudo-solution” (p. 241).

We cannot here enter into a discussion of all details of Tucker’s interpretation and
evaluation of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx. But we must say something at least
about his main interpretative thesis that the “original” Marx conceived alienation as a
“psychological,” and the “mature” Marx as a “social” fact, as well as about his basic
belief that alienation was a fact of individual psychology which can be overcome only at
an individual psychological level, through the personal moral efforts of individuals.

First of all it is an untenable view that the young Marx up to 1844. conceived alienation
as a fact of individual psychology. In his essay “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right to mention just one example, Marx says that man is “no abstract
being, squatting outside the world” that he is “the world of man, the state, society,” and
in accord with this he maintains that the task of philosophy, “once the saintly form of
human self-alienation has been unmasked, is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy
forms.” As such “unholy” forms, “law” and “politics,” consequently certain forms of
man’s social life are mentioned. In the same essay Marx maintains that man’s alienation
cannot be abolished through philosophical criticism only, because the weapon of
criticism cannot be a substitute for the criticism of weapons, and material force can be
overthrown by material force only. As such a material force Marx in the same essay
discovered the proletariat, and he proclaimed that the head of man’s emancipation is
philosophy and its heart the proletariat. How one can maintain then that Marx at that
time conceives alienation and de-alienation as individual psychological phenomena
which can exist only at an individual-psychological level?

It would be odd to the point of actually being ridiculous to maintain that Marx
conceived alienation as a fact of psychology, psychopathology, or psychiatry in his
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Tucker is himself obviously aware of this
when he observes that the lever of the metamorphosis of the psychological conception
of alienation into a socially interpreted division of labour should be sought in “Marx’s
decision in the manuscripts of 1844 to treat man’s self-alienation as a social relation
between the working man and another man outside him” (p. 185). However what
appears to Tucker as a special decision taken in 1844, is only one of the aspects of
Marx’s conception of alienation which had been developed in the Manuscripts, a
conception according to which self-alienation is not only (and not in the first place)
either a “psychological” or a “sociological” category, but is first and foremost a
category of general philosophy, a category of “ontology” and “anthropology.” Self-
alienation as it is analysed by Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is
something which can occur and actually does occur both with the individual man and
with society, and not only with the “psychological” aspect of man’s life, but also with
all the rest of them, with man as an integral being. This is why Marx even in this period
does not see the road towards de-alienation either in an “internal moral rebirth of
individuals, or merely in a social action changing “external circumstances,” but in a
simultaneous “internal” and “external” revolutionary transformation, in a revolutionary
praxis the essence of which is (as he observes in his third thesis on Feuerbach) in the
coinciding change of circumstances and self-change.

The decisive message of the whole work of the “young” Marx is that the revolutionary
change of inhuman “ external circumstances” is impossible without “inner” free,
humane personalities which are ready to fight for such a change, and the full
afflorescence of free personalities is impossible without a resolute change of inhuman
social “ circumstances.” The “mature” Marx remained faithful to his “ original”
viewpoint. The thesis that Marx originally conceived alienation psychologically is also
unfounded, and thus the thesis that the mature Marx conceived alienation as an
exclusively social fact is artificially constructed. The thesis that “division of labour”
means for the mature Marx the same thing as self-alienation for the “original” Marx is
in particular wrong. Neither for the “young” nor for the “old” Marx were self-alienation
and division of labour the same thing, but the division of labour is one of the forms and
expressions of man’s self-alienation, that form which characterizes the sphere of work
(and this is however merely one of the spheres in which self-alienated man exists).
Tucker says rightly that Marx ascribes to the division of labour all those characteristics
which in other places, in his early writings, he ascribes to alienation. But it does not
follow from this that self-alienation and division of labour are one and the same. It only
means that division of labour as one of the forms of self-alienation, has all the general
characteristics of self-alienation.

All Tucker’s objections directed against Marx’s alleged reduction of the problem of de-
alienation to the problem of the “external” circumstances, are unjustified for the simple
reason that Marx never reduced the problem in such a way. On the contrary one could
rightly object that Tucker in his insistence on the “moral revolution” and inner change”
as something which can be achieved quite independently from social “revolution” and
from “external changes” does not oppose to Marx a “higher” and “profounder”
conception, but only one variant of those one-sided, essentially conservative, and even
reactionary conceptions which Marx knew, had in mind and in his work transcended.

When he ascribes to the “mature” Marx the conception of alienation as a social

phenomenon, and appropriates to himself — a consistent development of the vague
anticipation of the young Marx about alienation as a psychopathological phenomenon
which can be abolished only through an internal moral change, Tucker in fact ascribes
to Marx a caricature of one element or aspect of his integral conception, and
appropriates to himself a caricatured form of another. However Marx’s conception is in
neither of the two aspects (and especially not in their caricatures), and it is not even a
synthesis of them. Alienation and de-alienation are for Marx primarily neither
psychological, nor sociological phenomena, they are ontologico-anthropological. That
philosophical angle of approach which is in-dispensable to see the phenomenon of
alienation in the right way obviously remained strange and inaccessible to Tucker.
Therefore, in rejecting the classification of Marx among “economists” and “scientists”
he does not know where to place him; so he counts him among “moralists,” more
specifically among the “moralists of a religious kind” (p. 21).

A choice between objective science and subjective morals seems unavoidable to those
who do not understand the essence of philosophy as an activity through which the
opposition between “science” and “morals,” between a mere factual “is” and unfounded
evaluative “ought” is transcended and abolished.

Praxis, 1965, 1, pp. 122-126.

On the Problem of Practice

by Predrag Vranicki

Productive life is, however, species-life. It is life creating life. In the type of life activity
resides the whole character of a species, its species character; and free, conscious
activity is the species character of human beings.
Karl Marx

It is quite natural and understandable that each epoch of human thought is constricted
by corresponding historical and thought traditions. Just as the traditions of the
generations that have gone are imprinted upon the consciousness of the living in all
fields of life, so are they too in all branches of thought. When we consider our
existence, and its meaning, the whole intelligent effort of mankind seems spread before
us as a very complex, often somewhat opaque, history of man’s consciousness, of his
theories concerning himself and concerning being in general.

His consciousness, thought and theory seem at first to be something separate from
man’s historical and material being. This is expressed in various theses concerning, an
assessment of, problems such as: the relation of theory and practice, the reflection of
practice in theory, the lagging of theory behind practice, the primacy of one rather than
the other.

Certain differentiations of thought also fall into certain traditions. Though further
analysis may show this to be conditional or untenable.

Thus, for example, the distinction between being and thought is a historical distinction.
If the category of being should by etymology and philosophical use denote something
that is, or that something is, then that categorial designation belongs as much to reality
in the sense of nature or history, as to thought. To identify nature or reality “outside
myself” with the category of being, to place it in opposition to the categories
consciousness, thought – is utterly inadequate.

It is quite understandable that the category of “being” can be, as indeed it has been, very
variously determined, given very different content and even confined, for example, to
the natural or the historical. But if only this last is acknowledged as being, then it is a
logical inference that thought and consciousness do not exist. This faces us with a
problem which is, it seems to me, insoluble on this basis.

The problem we are here trying to consider from this angle, the problem of practice or
praxis – is also greatly burdened by tradition. Even the formulation of the problem
given above shows the partial position from which many proceed. Just as a whole series
of limited, partial occurrences of a simple “practical” action, seem to us quite devoid of
any theory, so too do many theoretical preoccupations seem to be unconnected with
“practice,” seem even to be severed from, or opposed to it.

This is how things appear if we simplify this complex material which we are
investigating – the history of mankind, – man’s historical life. In single, simplified
examples there seem to be many cases when we have practice without theory, when
these two seem to be disconnected or in a one-way relationship. Historical reality is,
however, much more complex, and the category “practice” also shows very great
complexity.

What then we wish here to examine is not any particular practical activity but practice
as the basis of humanity, the philosophical characteristic of man.

In this sense, following Marx, we see man as par excellence a being of practice, a being
who freely and consciously transforms his own life. Practice is an eo ipso, polyvalent
category for it embraces all sides of man’s being. We do not need here to repeat what
has been said so many times since Marx, and what it is the precondition of all
speculation: that man exists and develops only by transforming his natural and social
reality and that in this way he transforms himself also.

What interests us here is the structure of the concept of practice in relation to theory,
and the structure of the real relations of man as expressed by the category practice.

“Practice” is something which essentially determines the character of man’s existence.

Here lies his ontological-anthropological meaning. If we did not consider history as a
lasting laborious conscious-unconscious process, sometimes with, sometimes without
perspective in each epoch more radically and deeply transforming natural and historical
being – then we should deny any possible rational approach to an explanation of our
origins, of the mainstream and the tributaries of life.

Animals too “change” the world, but only in proportion to their relatively un-
changeable structure. That is, unconsciously, unfreely. without aiming at development,
in a fixed, unplanned, unconsidered, non-revolutionary way. In such “change” there is
no historical process, there is a propensity to repetition, “temporality” is seen only as
biological growth and ageing, as biological changes, not as historical actions –
creations.
Man changes the world, in conformity with his own structure, however not only in
conformity with his physical and biological structure, but also with the historical. His
transformation of reality means at the same time the transformation of his power over
individual and historical structure. His changing of the world is not a circle but a
process.

And just for this reason man is the only creative being. So much is he a creature being
that his very being and essence are subject to his creation.

If we embrace the whole of this creativity of man by the concept of practice, then we
must conclude that man creates his own history, his historical life, according to the
possibilities of his own practice.

And these possibilities are always and only historically given: as the real instruments of
production, as the level of technical and scientific development, of social organization,
of the technical and cultural profile of individuals, of international relations and
influences, etc. Thus, if we turn to the existentialist formula that existence precedes
essence, we can perfectly easily reverse it, and say that at the same time essence
precedes existence. For man is not just an individual being creating himself
independently of the historical structures and processes of which he is a component
part. He is to just as great an extent created by all those relations which are historically
given.

Practice involves all sides of a man’s life so that man is essentially a “practical being.”
In his childish games, at work, in family relations, in scientific experiments, in artistic
creation, or in his historical acts, man is always in a practical, immediately sensuous
relationship to his object (nature, other men, etc.), and not simply in a contemplative
relationship.

If practice is essentially conscious, to a greater or lesser extent free, and planned,

creation, transformation of a reality which is not only reality of thought, but above all
reality of the medium of man’s being, that is, natural historical reality then, we repeat,
this concept embraces man in his t?talit? in his family, as a producer, in his political,
artistic and scholarly work etc.

In all these practical relations men conduct themselves more or less explicitly, and
consciously also in a theoretical way. Man cannot be in any kind of practical
relationship towards the world, not even on a very primary and simple level, without
some kind of “theory,” without certain purposes, attitudes, concepts, ideas.

However practical man’s life may in essence be it shows itself as such only by being at
the same time theoretical. The concept of practice shows in this way its three essential
sides: the sensuous-concrete the theoretical-abstract, and the emotional-experiencing.
Practice is not possible without some definite, emotional attitude in the sense that it
must satisfy some kind of need; nor is it possible if it does not sensuously change and
create objects and reality; and finally sensuous changing of objects is not possible if it is
not conscious, planned, theoretical and free.

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee in the
construction of her cells puts to shame many an architect. But what distinguishes the
worst architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect arises his structure in
imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process we get a
result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He
does not only effect a change of form in the material in which he works, but also
realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he
must subordinate his will.” (Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 5)

The defining of man as a practical being is only possible if practice is understood as a

unity of the sensuous and the theoretical activity. The functioning of a machine, (and,
even of the simplest tool) is theory put into operation, or the realization of theory. Just
as theory (even the simplest) is the sublimation of a certain human creativity, sensuous
and theoretical.

In practice the relationship of these two elements is mutual, functional, they condition
each other. The relative independence of abstract thought makes it possible for it to lag
behind or to anticipate concrete-sensuous activity. In the same way the complexity and
spontaneity of man’s sensuous activity (in the first place his productive and historical
activity) make it very difficult to produce a simultaneous theoretical view of all these
processes.

As the concept of practice embraces the sensuous and the theoretical – it is inadequate
to oppose theory and practice, as if they were two things which should be a unity;
practice itself, understood as a fundamental function of man, contains both in itself.

To separate them would be to allow the possibility of a kind of practice which did not
include consciousness, hypotheses and theory: as if a theory were possible which did
not involve the total experience of man’s sensuous activity.

Practice of this kind would be animal practice, and such a theory would be nonsense. It
is understandable that there will be nuances of degree here. There may be various
discrepancies of level in what, in the supreme creative moment of practice, is a basic
unity. In the same way theoretical activity may be separated out, if we consider
individuals who engage in it (in connection with the historical division of labour) but
not in reference to history as a totality, in reference to the creation of history as a
unified and total act or process.

To consider the two side by side would mean that man was not a total being, nor was his
history a total creation, but that he created various independent and parallel histories, –
of technics, physics, science, law, philosophy etc.

Although there is relative independence in all these fields of activity because of division
of labour as it has existed up to now, the above mentioned division would destroy the
dialectical unity of man as a being of practice, as an individual- and a historical being.

History as the unified life of man, is thus a unified history of the way man has changed
the world and created new historical structures: if by this we understand also natural-
historical reality, man himself and his highly varied creations (artistic, philosophic etc.).

From this it follows, as more detailed investigation of various epochs would show, that
any great discrepancy between man’s sensuous and theoretical activity (which is what
discrepancy between theory and practice is usually called) never existed nor can
possibly exist.

Every one of man’s historically determined levels, every level of his practice, is
constructed then of a corresponding level of sensuous, and theoretical action. Man’s
material, social and theoretical practice are found to have indivisible relations with and
effects upon one another.

History is the unified work of man. Not one of man’s activities exists by itself and for
itself alone. Not one can be understood without taking into account whole historical
epochs, man’s historical existence as a whole, the integrity and polyvalence of his
fundamental existence as a being of praxis.

Marx gave plastic expression not only to the thesis of the existence of one single science
– history, but also to the thesis that fetish consciousness is an expression of a definite,
low level of sensuous existence. “The extent to which the solution of a theoretical
problem is a task of practice, and is accomplished through practice, and the extent to
which correct practice is the condition of a true and positive theory is shown, for
example, in the case of fetishism. The sense perception of a fetishist differs from that of
a Greek because his sensuous existence is different. The abstract hostility between sense
and spirit is inevitable so long as the human sense, for nature, or the human meaning of
nature, and consequently the natural sense of man has not been produced through man’s
own labor” (E. Fromm,, Marx’s Concept of Man. With a Translation from Marx’s
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by T. B. Bottomore, New York 1961, pp.
148-149).

This thesis concerning the united character of human “practicality” or concerning

history as the development of human practice – regardless of whether, in the social
division of labour, some function more as “theoreticians” and others as “manual
workers” – should be adopted as fundamental to analyses and explanations of history.

If the fetishism of primitive people can be explained by the low level of development of
their sensuous transformation of reality – which only tells us that, including this fetish
consciousness, the level of their practice is low – one can demonstrate the same for
every other consciousness and historical being.

In the Europe of antiquity the development of crafts, navigation, warfare and other
actions which mean some kind of transformation – had reached a level which, in
consideration of the sensuous-transformatory and theoretical-explanatory was much
higher than that of the fetish conscious society. But even this level of historical practice
in antiquity had its very clearly defined limits: in the whole development of productivity
and technique, in social structure and organization and also in conceptions. The level of
man’s transformation of the world at that time and his practical experience could only
result in the conception of laws, of various kinds of causality and in abstract thought
which made itself the object of investigation and which evokes permanent wonder at the
great intellect of antiquity. But the level of control of natural processes (which is the
counterpart of transformation of reality) was still low, still largely conditioned by an
exterior-perceptive relationship towards the problems of reality. That is why their
principles have a sense character: air, fire, water etc., atoms and molecules being also
given on the basis of perception and thus conceived – in the same way their social
thinking is only an expression of one kind of social existence which is that of the polis,
and the structure of polis and tribes have clearly defined bounds.

There is no need here to repeat the example of modern history with its development of
concepts of mechanics and mechanisation. We shall only call attention here to this: that
only on that historical level of the development of practice where the working class
started becoming not only a conscious subject, but also the real creator of history – and
this meant that the development of human practice had reached a point where hired
labour, that is the proletariat, was possible – was the rounding off of a conception of
history made possible in which the sensuous-transformative, economic-productive
moment in human practice got its proper place.

As long as the main creators of history were classes or groups which were not closely
bound up with production – the economic moment and economic production could not
essentially enter into theoretical calculations. The given consciousness of given
historical being, of given historical practice had to lay emphasis mainly on what formed
the existence of “higher” forms of human activity. Overestimation of ideas, of
consciousness and other spiritual demiurges – was the inevitable consequence of a
given practical-historical existence.

Contemporary historical practice, with its very high level of transformation of reality,
and with it a high level of technics and science is increasingly creating a hitherto
unknown unity in our world, and with it mutual dependence, and thus also on the
theoretical, and social level concepts which correspond to this level of our “sensuous
existence.” Concepts of substance, teleology, various other mystic and pragmatic ideas
are disappearing. New conceptions of laws and objects take their place, new ideas of
interpersonal relationships, of coexistence etc.

Regardless, then, of to what extent and how the historical division of labour leads one
group of people more to sensuous and another more to theoretical activity – a certain
level of historical practice includes a certain realization of sensuous and theoretical
action.

And the most abstract philosophical thought basically contains in itself the complete
natural-historical transformatory and creative activity of man. Man’s practice, that is his
own history, his work has these two main sides which are the correlatives of each other.

The opposite of practice is not therefore theory, since practice in fact includes theory.
The opposite of practice is only “theory” which has no connection with practice, the
simple imaginings of a limited consciousness.

In the same way, in so far as the essence of man’s existence and development is
practice, that is, constant, tireless, laborious, free and creative transformation of the
reality in which man is moored – the verification of man’s hypotheses cannot be
anything else than that practice, that work, that human life which is an endless
confrontation of his thoughts and actions, a unity of the sensuous and the theoretical
activity.

Wherever we have creativity, free production – we have practice. If theory were

unilaterally determined by sensuous action and reduced to being simply a reflection
then man would not be a free, creative being, a being of practice. For practice involves
the directive moment, foresight, projecting, planning, control etc. Just because
theoretical thinking is both a creation and a material and sensuous transformation of
things we find in it only the other side of the unified practice of man.

It is here that we have the most profound definition of consciousness as conscious

being. Consciousness is the moment of man’s sensuous transformation of the world, and
that transformation is only made possible by consciousness. One proceeds from the
other, one conditions the other. That is why the level of human practice basically
corresponds to the level of his given historical consciousness and vice versa. That is
why essentially historical consciousness, the consciousness of definite historical
generations, can never be in advance of their existence, their historical being. The
consciousness of each generation is the consciousness of its historical being, for if this
were not so – historical practice would be impossible. A certain contradiction,
disagreement etc. between historical consciousness and sensuous existence may and
must always occur in given epochs. This is for the simple reason that man will never be
content with his existence, that the development of new forces (material and spiritual)
gives rise to new views, desires, and efforts. But this cannot lead to complete
discrepancy, for if it did it would mean the dissolution of man’s practice itself. In such a
situation there would be no perspective, no way out. Up to now there have only been
isolated examples of this – historically it is unimaginable.

If we have seen that man’s generic life is free, conscious action which is synonymous
with practice, then the wholeness, the totality of man is to be found in the unity of all
these moments.

In other words man is a “physical” and a “ spiritual” being, and it is only the necessary,
and up to a certain level, progressive historical division of labour that has led
individuals or groups to one activity or the other.

The fragmentation and crippling of the personality and a whole series of other
consequences which result from this division of labour are well known phenomena in
man’s development.

The situation in which men find themselves be they tethered to a machine or absorbed
in advanced specialisation means that they lose some of their important characteristics
as beings of practice, width, versatility, theoretical powers, and also some of their
sensitivity in a multifaceted relationship not only towards history but towards other
men.

Such fragmentation of personality has always been, and always will be the best
instrument for various inhuman deeds in the interests of various situations which are to
be forced on man.

That is why today, along with the essential task of transforming human practice as it has
been up to now, the practice of class domination and of domination over man in general
– priority must simultaneously be given to the reintegration of man as a being of
practice.
 Practice and Dogma

by Danko Grlić

“Practice” is a term which in a colloquial sense is very widely and very variously used.
When we speak of a doctor’s “practice,” we have in mind a very definite pursuit within
a limited period of time; when describing a businessman as “practical,” we think of him
as being able, resourceful and shrewd; when pointing out the value of our socialist
“practice,” we emphasize historical experience and assess developments which have
taken place throughout a whole country, even a whole system. When arguing for a
general cession of abstract theorizing and a commencement of “practical” action, we
mean all concrete acts in the sphere of sensuous material reality, as opposed to those in
the sphere of theory.

It would appear that the last, “most abstract,” most general, and, therefore, probably,
most philosophical” distinction, has somehow become crucial in certain theses of
contemporary philosophical thought.

Indeed it is just the determination of the relationship to theory that is basic to many
arguments about the meaning and purport of the idea of practice. Thus, the related terms
“theory and practice” are often taken as being fundamental, even when attempts are
made to characterize practice, from a Marxist position, as a wider, more comprehensive
notion into which theory can be subsumed, when the fact that theory is immanent in
practice is considered to be the specific of human practice. Consequently, human
practice — from this paint of view — is always theoretical, and human theory is
inconceivable without certain “practical” repercussions, if it really is a “serious” theory,
i. e. a thought tending towards realization, and if it is expressed within co-ordinates of a
particular place and time, and not empty speculation and idle thought. Human practice
is thus distinguished from animal “practice” just because it is purposeful, planned,
ideally preconceived; a consequence of its having first been theoretical. A frequently
adduced proof of this argument is the well-known quotation from Marx’s Das Kapital,
though Marx is dealing with the analysis of the concept of labour, not practice, and
although the subject of Marx’s objection is the narrower concept, which, at best, can
only be part of universal human practice: “We presuppose labour in a form that stamps
it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver,
and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what
distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees, is this, that the architect raises
his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-
process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its
commencement. He does not only effects a change of form in the material in which he
works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus
operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.” (K. Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 5)

This thesis of Marx, extended to all spheres, taken as absolute, lop-sidedly interpreted
as the basic characteristic of the total sum of human practice has often resulted in
theoreticians unconsciously taking as basic and preponderant in defining the category of
practice relationship theoretical-practical, ideal-material, imagined-realized[1].

Regardless, however, of whether practice includes or does not include theory — or

whether both practice and theory can be comprehended only through same third thing,
which determines the possibility of establishing this relationship — the question
nevertheless arises: can practice be determined at all simply on the basis of its relation
(immanent or transcendent) to theory?

A particular concept may sometimes not be determined and wholly explained only
through a positive statement of the content immanent in it and it is extremely important
for the delimitation of its scope and the comprehension of its meaning that it also be
determined negatively towards that which is really opposed to it as its counter-concept.
What is, then, opposed to human practice?

If we intend to determine negatively this central concept of Marx’s thought according to

Marx’s fundamental views (although not always in accordance with certain of his own
observations and accidental distinctions, in some places where practice is even opposed
to theory) we could, I think, argue that human practice stands in opposition to all that is
passive, merely meditative, non-creative, all that is adaptation to the world, a yielding to
the nature of the world and to its particular social conditions. True human practice,
consequently, is not acceptance of the “facts,” of objective reality and its laws, of moral
or ideological imperatives or accepted norms, of something heteronomous, in which
man is always at a disadvantage and is the pawn of superior forces, spiritual or material.
Human practice — as opposed to animal adaptation — could be defined as the true
transformation of the world, a transformation which is historically relevant, as an active
interference with the structure of reality. Human practice is, therefore, not different
from animal practice” through being — or at least not only through being — always
theoretical as well, but primarily because it transforms the world, and does not conform
to it; the world being always — epistemologically speaking — its object. Human
practice is not creating itself and not created, because of particular conditions
transcendent to it, because it is not — to use the old terms of Spinoza — only natura
naturata, but also natura naturans. Consequently, put more simply, practice which
deserves this name, is always creative. It is not at all an ideal or actual state, but an
unceasing living process of alteration and transformation. However, this process is not a
process destined sometime to terminate in inactivity, it is not a process meant to stop
being a process, not even on account of those factual “imperfections” of modern reality
which aim at a conflict-free “perfection.” It seeks to attain no ultimate and final
“results,” no life of bliss in this or the other world, in paradise or some promised land.
Future practice, towards which contemporary practice is open and is leading us, will
again be transformation. Accordingly, thus practice will never completely satisfy “true”
human nature, and the belief in such concrete, wholly unalienated nature is itself a sort
of mythological alienation. Therefore, practice is a negation of that eschatological view,
which believes in the end of the world, the end of history, and the end of the possibility
of the “eternal” development of human nature, i. e. believes in the final “stabilisation”
of human nature and society.

Naturally, to define human practice (i. e. practice worthy of human beings) as

transformation is still not to define it adequately in content. Certain questions are
necessarily implied — in order to avoid a banal relativism — of the quality, purpose,
and meaning of this transformation. But, even without any closer definition, without
distinctions — which could, for instance in opposition to mere natural change, be
looked for in the sphere of historically relevant change, a change, consequently,
including the concept of progress as well — such an “empty” definition of practice as
transformation can also have quite concrete repercussions in the theoretical and
sensuous-real sphere of human activity.

Man’s fundamental vocation, his constitutive characteristic, and his mission (both as
theoretician and practician in a narrower sense) become so — to consider only certain
ideological repercussions of practice thus understood — no longer a passive acceptance
of everything that has once, somewhere been established as correct, no “transplantation”
of earlier theoretical postulates to our time (or simply their “elaboration” under “our
specific conditions”), no “application” of certain eternal principles to our reality, but a
revolutionary transformation of these principles. Man cannot, as for instance a
philosopher, have the ambition to transform the world if he does not at the same time
transform his own ideas and principles. It is, therefore, an inevitable pre-requisite for
him — in order to constitute himself as human — to be actively, personally, ceaselessly
engaged in fighting for possibilities of an invariably new, increasingly progressive, non-
standard thought and action. Practice, thus, ceases to be an inert insistence on something
existent, some status quo ante, or, again, a self-contented life in the past or present. On
the contrary, it is made up of such human penetration into all spheres of reality that it
transcends the existing, and includes elements of projection into what is, as yet non-
existent, into the future. Such human practice cannot be resignedly made to conform to
some general category, to the scheme of certain superhuman forces or material
conditions. For, this practice means self-awareness of the fact that the existence of these
forces is made possible, and the conditions created and changed, by man, the subject of
real historical changes, leading from the “kingdom of necessity” to the never
sufficiently free and never fully liberated “kingdom of freedom.” Practice is thus
opposed to everything established, dogmatic, rigid, static, once-for-all determined,
fixed, standard; to everything that has become dug into the past and remained
hypostatised. From this point of view, dogmatic practice cannot be practice at all;
therefore, it is, in fact, contradictio in adiecto, an insoluble contradiction, which can
only conditionally be used as a term, in order to make clearer the counter-term, i, e. anti-
dogmatic practice or, simply, practice. For, schema and dogma, invariable emphasis on
the same principles, a “faithful” adherence to whatever has once been proclaimed true
are nothing but a substitute for practical impotence. Therefore, a strict attachment to
any once-stated theses (even if they are the so-called fundamental theses) cannot be
made to conform to the sense of the concept, the quintessence of all that Marx meant by
human practice.

This is the reason why it is absurd to insist in Marx’s name persistently and in detail on
everything that Marx ever and on any occasion said or wrote. For, anything —
regardless of the freshness, revolutionary enthusiasm, and intellectual force with which
it may have been expressed — may sometime become dogma. And it may well be that
today, more than ever, the basic historical assumptions have been negated of any dogma
whatever that had its relative justification in certain historical conditions, as an
efficacious, though frequently simplified, slogan as a call to direct action. It its just
because these historical assumptions have been so clearly refuted today, that we often
find ourselves in a paradoxical situation when even some dogmatists agree “in
principle” that Marx’s thought is no dogma, that certain assumption should be
developed and not allowed to stagnate and should be restated for and because of a
different time. Therefore, even the dyed-in-the-wool high priests of dogma at times very
“resolutely” and “radically” argue that “quotation mania” and a talmudic approach to
Marx should be done away with. It is, thus, persistently repeated from all sides that
Marxist thought should have unfettered and full development. Even so — though
dogmatists will admit it less readily (perhaps now and then only, at intimate moments or
within the closest circle) — this line of thought is somehow not developing adequately.
The idea concerning the transformation (if we do not count all those changes for worse),
it has just slightly ossified, has become repetitive, has lost in vigour, freshness and
applicability to life. All those — and they are not many — who, like Plekhanov, Rosa
Luxemburg, Lukacs, Fromm, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Lefebvre, Bloch, Goldmann,
Kolakowski, and others, attempted, with more or less success, to develop the idea
individually, were either completely rejected by those holding the “official” Marxist
position, or were, at least, declared to be dubious theoreticians, replete with grave errors
and constantly “deviating” to the left or right.

It is, therefore, necessary with full force to ask the questions: why is this so, why is it
that this line of thinking, whose development- is so fervently desired by everyone, still
does not advance much or keeps deviating?

It is an undoubted fact, — as we have said — that in Marxist philosophy (as well as in

some humanities) a structure of thought has prevailed in which — both with dogmatists
and with those that verbally disassociate themselves from dogmatism — it is
emphasized, until it has become little more than a tedious platitude, that Marxist thought
should develop in keeping with the changes of the real world. At the same time,
however, as soon as anyone dares to say anything about some particular problem, which
reveals a different view, deviating, however slightly, from the one held by Marx, he will
find himself the target of a hail of ready, concerted, abusive or ironical attacks: he is “
correcting” Marx, we know well those who “complement” Marx, who claim the right to
“criticize” Marx, to be more contemporary than him, those primitive innovators,
woolly-headed abstract humanists, renegades, etc., etc. It is beyond doubt that no
reasonable person can argue that everything new is at the same time good, and that
everything new also means the overcoming of the old. Moreover, frequently (and most
often when Marx is involved), the question of authority is based on too simplified a
dilemma: either original thought or the complete recognition of somebody else’s
authority; as if the entire history of thought and reality so far had evolved only around
these two extremes. For, insofar as we do not tend to exaggerate, to paint everything
with too restricted a palette, discarding all nuances; insofar as struggling against
authority, we ourselves do not fall victim to the “authority” of inevitable and
unavoidable needs for radical decisions — we shall be compelled to admit that the
alternative: authority or one’s own attitude, in this most radical form, is only an
apparent antinomy. Because, there is no country, or social system, or ideological
climate, in which every germ of individuality has to such a degree been suppressed, that
persons become simply faceless executors of every desire, idea or accidental thought of
authority; in which persons become such cowards, genuflectors, and adulators that they
entirely lose any individuality.

There is, likewise, no philosophy nor any major theoretical venture in history which,
irrespective of its revolutionarity, is totally free of the authority of tradition.
Nevertheless, in spite of all this, the question of authority, even of supreme ideological
authority, is today an open issue facing Marxist philosophy. For, how — this, after all,
seems to be the crucial question, the answer to which is nearly always avoided — are
we to develop Marxist thought at all (not only “elaborate” it or scholastically
systematize and “complement”), if we cannot, in principle, have different, even
divergent views on some issues from those held by the classics. Marx is — it is almost
banal to repeat this truth acknowledged today by many bourgeois theoreticians also —
one of the greatest theoreticians, whose intellect, will, and talent frequently transcend
the horizons of his time; he is one of the towering geniuses of world history. However,
are we to exempt from history Marx of all people; who had such a genius for and
displayed such a profound insight into the essence of the historical; are we to declare
him to be outside time and space; someone whose thought cannot become obsolete ever
and anywhere, whose every word is inviolable law surpassing all historical reality, and
binding for all time and every historical moment? This can be effected only through a
Hegelian termination of history; if we shut out those new horizons of theoretical and
real historical progress, first so radically and daringly revealed by Marx.

Within the same context of the problem of absolute and eternal truths we may raise the
question, why — in order to preserve, at any price, an almost mythological belief in
everything said by the classics — in it very often passed over in complete silence (or, at
best, “camouflaged” by various “felicitous” formulations and ambiguous terms) that
Lenin actually had different views from Marx, and Marx from Engels in various, often
fundamental questions[2]?

To be “faithful” to Marxism-Leninism, so favourite a catchphrase, for many even now

means adhering to all of Marx’s and Lenin’s dicta; often completely ignoring the fact
that their views on some problems — particularly as concerns positive, scientifically
established theses (e. g, the tendency towards pauperisation of the working class,
scientifically deduced from the then obtaining figures on the constant decline of the
proletarian living standards) — are really antiquated, and that clinging to all their
statements (and not only to actual words, but also to the spirit of sonic of their theses)
now often at the same time means an inability to grasp certain essential characteristics
of the modern socialist and communist movement. In other words; it means not being a
Marxist. In discussions with orthodox dogmatists, such as the Chinese, for instance, we
shall, really not achieve much just by wrangling about who has remained more
“faithful” to, say, Lenin; because at times we shall find ourselves in the paradoxical
situation that in certain questions dogmatists will perhaps be able to find in his works
more appropriate quotations — and not only “dislocated,” and thus fogged, quotations
and views — than creative Marxists. But is it enough to demonstrate that Marx and
Lenin had different views on a problem from ours now, in order to make it an eo ipso
proof that we are wrong? And is not today’s trend towards discovering the “true” Marx,
the “original” Marx very often also burdened by the view that being a Marxist today
means finding confirmation for one’s theses only in Marx’s and Lenin’s writings? To be
sure, we can find in Lenin’s works a whole series of quotations about the need for,
among other things coexistence and peaceful co-operation with countries of different
social structures. But the Chinese can probably find just as many or even more,
quotations concerning the need for armed revolution, and for the ceaseless and
inexorable struggle. This was indeed often emphasized by Lenin — and quite rightly —
as an unavoidable pre-requisite for the establishment of a socialist society, under the
conditions of the preparation and eruption of proletarian revolution, under the
conditions of the birth pangs of the first socialist country, and of foreign intervention. If,
however, what we might call conditionally our “thought practice” does not diverge from
those co-ordinate systems, which were the only ones within which thought was
permissible and possible in the time of Marx and Engels, if we do nothing but argue that
it is a “dirty lie,” that we have at any time or in any place deserted classical thought, we
shall not only be brought to a position when we can do nothing but helplessly and
fruitlessly revolve within a scheme out of keeping with modern reality, but shall also
often find ourselves showing that it is the dogmatists who “are right,” who are more
“faithful” to the classics, more faithful to the spirit of tradition. For, dogmatic “practice”
is faithful, often more faithful than the most faithful religious “practice,” to the past;
because the schematism of dogmatic thought exactly lies in leaving thought in the past,
in leaving it static, in arresting real history and the history of ideas at certain fixed
constants.

To face this fact squarely, emphasizing no blind “faithfulness” as the highest virtue and
no attachment to the tradition of the classics as the sole standard for Marxism or anti-
Marxism, would be — it seems to me — one of the first (but not the only) pre-requisites
for any thought that wants to call itself creatively Marxist in our epoch. Today,
unfortunately, even within anti-dogmatic theses, discussions of these problems are
timidly and adroitly avoided, and a varying gradation of terms, from rigid ones, such as
disloyal betrayal,” to more liberal ones, like “creative application “, helps towards
settling the manner of thought into a mould which only obscures and certainly does not
raise questions of attitude to tradition. It is, indeed, most paradoxical that in different
variants “faithfulness” should remain the fundamental category and virtue of those
philosophers who believe that their thought follows in Marx’s footsteps; when such
faithfulness to their teacher was not shown even by those sterile philosophemes linked
to the closed idealistic systems, such as the neo-Kantians, neo-Hegelians, and others.
However, forcing on Marx some of our views, representing them as merely an
elaboration and completion of what he, allegedly, started but did not manage to finish
(having been too busy), is really not an occupation that could be considered worthy of a
Marxist thinker.

But there is a magic word for all this, shelving every such attempt at transformation. We
have got a magic formula, a reliable, tested label, blackening without redress every
effort towards creative individual thought. This word is revisionism. Transplanted from
a period when it really meant an attempt to weaken the essential revolutionary
aspirations of the masses, when it meant dulling the combative edge, capitulation before
burning issues, ideological confusion, and the betrayal of the proletariat, it still
exclusively retains the pejorative meaning of a false, distorted approach to
contemporary problems. And we seem very often to be afraid that this attribute might
— no matter by which side — be attached to us, it is as if we as individuals were still
apprehensive of being thus called [3]. We do not it appears ask ourselves whether it is
now negative to state openly, without any pharisaic scruples, that it is necessary to carry
out and keep on carrying out a real revision of certain views of the classics. Is not such a
revision an imperative of the present historical moment, in order to save the
fundamental humanistic core of Marxism, and in order that certain new revolutionary
values of socialist, and consequently creative, practice may be created under
contemporary conditions, and carried over into a new period, as Marx did in the
conditions of his time? Revising something, however, means taking personal
“responsibility.” And the fact that an individual (even society as a whole) might have to
rely on himself, gives rise to apprehension in face of the unknown. This apprehension is
revealed in the search for support in everything that can be found in the earlier thought
or experience of the great, in familiar systems and the heritage of ideas. Thus we shall
often find and “recognize” ourselves in that which we are not at all. This is only a
slightly modified theological attitude, and an instructive illustration of the possibility of
appearance of the religious, heteronomous man even outside religion. It is the attitude
that it is exactly that other thing which can solely guarantee our own existence. That
“other thing’ is always the superior, better, surer, more reliable thing; it is that fulcrum,
that constant which can be found either in God, or real human nature, or historical
determinants, in all those things that will take the responsibility and risk for everything
that we actually are.

The static quality of dogmatism and the dynamism and changeability of true Marxist
practice is also reflected in the attitude towards the function and scope of criticism. The
hierarchical gradation of individuals, statically determined in minute detail within a
particular society, requires also a precisely determined system in which one knows
exactly who may “criticize” whom, where, why, and when. If anyone, in any manner
tried to shake or even simply question that conservative, safe order, he would be met
with incredibly obstinate opposition. So-called criticism “from below” (as if anyone
could be “up” or “down” in criticism, as if those taking part in critical debate did not
always need to be equal) may, under this system, only go as far up as individual
managers; while senior leaders may only be subject to criticism by yet higher-level
leaders. Often completely ignoring public opinion, believing that there are those who
are “qualified” to criticize higher leaders, a number of these leaders will “laterally”
allow criticism to take even a “vertical < direction on the imaginary scale of critics and
criticized. However, at is characteristic of this “liberalism” that it often develops into a
more frenzied and rigid dogmatism than ever before, since its representatives reproach
themselves with their own liberality and broad-mindedness, which in the end brings
even them into question, although it was they who had so benevolently given their
approval to it in the first place. Then a hurried investigation of the life histories of such
critics starts — because it has always been typical of dogmatists to react not to what is
said, but by whom — conferences behind closed doors are called, threats about
familiarity with certain secret documents are made, hidden purposes and sordid aims are
mentioned, the critic is unmasked as a former enemy — and the question which he has
raised and the phenomenon which he has criticised do not attract a single word in the
general uproar. Unless we can discard this kind of approach to problems and individuals
in the sphere of ideas and reality, I. e. in practice, the possibility will always exist that a
“liberal” relationship will be turned into “disciplined” restriction, even persecution, and
an apparent and verbal humanism become open anti-humanism.

Out of the fixed, settled, unchangeable sphere of the existing, we shall not be led into
true socialist practice by anybody else, anyone from below or above, not be admitted by
any administrative permission, or by any pass confirmed at any level. Anti-dogmatic, i.
e. socialist or creative practice, or, which is the same, simply practice or praxis in the
Marxist sense of the word, can always and only be made and secured, and must always
be secured anew, by us ourselves, i. e, only by those who cannot as men recognize
anything human as “above” or “below” themselves. Woven into the fabric of his
practice will be every single word of ours backed by a true conviction concerning the
necessity of progress, every single action which is directed towards a real future from a
dynamic interpretation of real contemporary life. Only thus, by refuting and
d?molishing all ideological and material constants, all soured unchangeableness,
stability, petty-bourgeois self-satisfaction with the already attained, shall we be able —
as was so ingeniously done by Marx from the horizon of his world — to speak
dialectically and contemporarily to the modern world, and to transform impotent
dogmatic schematism into anti-dogmatic practice. In doing so, we must, however, be
aware of the fact that the critics of past and the builders of new practice will at the same
time be forging the critical weapons with which they themselves can be subjected to
criticism, ever anew and from ever new horizons. It is just this that is the true
humanistic meaning of revolutionary practice, and this practice can never, anywhere in
the name of anything be stopped. It is by reason of this that man, that finite, mortal,
impotent being is “practicall?” infinite, immortal and omnipotent.

Notes

1 Such a thesis, e. g. in the sphere of artistic creation or artistic “Practice” would

ultimately mean a confirmation of the Plotinian or Crocean conception, according to
which a work of art is in fact complete as internal expression. It is finished as imagined,
and everything else — as Plotinus would say — is slave work, not artistic work. Every
other work in concrete material is a technical pursuit, not decisive for the essential in
art, but a mere skill, a more or less successful realization of the artist’s ideal conception.
It is question, however, whether the artist actually first conceives the work of art in his
mind, realizing it only subsequently, or whether matter itself (e. g. colour, plastic
material, etc.) somehow in the course of realization also determines the fundamental
structure of the work of art. Therefore, this work does not owe its final form only to a
pre-conceived concept, but also to the matter from which it has been created, and which
changes and by its specific laws often determines in artistic creation the entire
appearance, meaning, and value of the work itself. The same head, “conceived” quite
identically in the ideal scheme, is artistically completely different if “realized” in
marble, or bronze, or wood. (This fact was in a sense taken account of by Plato, when
speaking about necessity, about constraint peculiar to matter as such).

2 Nobody will maintain, I think, that the question of the world revolution, for instance,
or the problem of the possibility of revolution in one isolated country is an accidental
issue for Marxism.

3 This attribute is sometimes attached to individuals, for fear that those same dogmatists
— who often call all of us as a whole revisionists, or used to do so — might “hold it
against us” because of our too “radical” views. It is, therefore, “necessary” that we
should somehow officially disassociate ourselves from those embarrassing individuals,
whose statements could be “drawn on” ijn a campaign against us, and who, after all,
have never asked for permission “from above.” The belief that everything published or
publicly said wears an “official” stamp is at the root of this corrupted attitude. As if
writers and thinkers did not always and in principle express and utter their own views
(for, if they merely “elaborated” some general directives, how could they ever be called
thinkers), and as if their every word had a governmental character, needing an
imprimatur from higher authority, in order to avoid “embarrassing” political
repercussions.