1/03/2009
If it is true that the state as we know it is the instrument of a class, we may assume that it “will wither away” with the disappearance of classes. But Lenin carefully points out “it has never entered the head of any socialist to ‘promise’ that the higher phase of development of Communism will arrive.” This means that Marxism, rather than an affirmation of a future that is necessary, is much more a judgment of the present as contradictory and intolerable. It operates in the tangle of the present and with the means of action offered by the present…
Marxism has nothing in common with the joyful cynicism of “at all costs.” First of all, it should be observed that the categories of “ends” and “means” are entirely alien to Marxism. An end is a result to come which one proposes for oneself and seeks to realize. It ought to be superfluous to recall that Marxism very consciously distinguishes itself from utopianism by defining revolutionary action not as the adoption of a certain number of ends through reasoning and will, but as the simple extrapolation of a praxis already at work in history, of a reality that is already committed, namely, the proletariat. It is not a question of representing a “society of the future.” Rather than the awareness of a goal, there is the espousal of an impossibility, in which the present world is grasped in contradiction and decomposition; rather than a fantastic conception of paradise on earth, there is the patient analysis of past and present history as a class strugle; and finally there is the creative decision to pass beyond this chaos through the universal class which will relay the foundations of human history. Revolutionary action can acquire a perspective by drawing out the lines of proletarian development into the future. But Marxists patently refuse to assume “ends”; none of them, says Lenin, can “promise” the last phase of communism - because one can only validly think what one has in some way lived, the rest being nothing but imagination.
Marxism has nothing in common with the joyful cynicism of “at all costs.” First of all, it should be observed that the categories of “ends” and “means” are entirely alien to Marxism. An end is a result to come which one proposes for oneself and seeks to realize. It ought to be superfluous to recall that Marxism very consciously distinguishes itself from utopianism by defining revolutionary action not as the adoption of a certain number of ends through reasoning and will, but as the simple extrapolation of a praxis already at work in history, of a reality that is already committed, namely, the proletariat. It is not a question of representing a “society of the future.” Rather than the awareness of a goal, there is the espousal of an impossibility, in which the present world is grasped in contradiction and decomposition; rather than a fantastic conception of paradise on earth, there is the patient analysis of past and present history as a class strugle; and finally there is the creative decision to pass beyond this chaos through the universal class which will relay the foundations of human history. Revolutionary action can acquire a perspective by drawing out the lines of proletarian development into the future. But Marxists patently refuse to assume “ends”; none of them, says Lenin, can “promise” the last phase of communism - because one can only validly think what one has in some way lived, the rest being nothing but imagination.
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