Löwy’s Theory of Revolution is primarily a test case for his own particular spin on historical research methodology, which is not particularly novel but is very much presented as a bespoke treaty to understand Marx for his context with respect to the economic and social structure, political superstructure, ideological superstructure, and precise historical “conjecture” of his day. This may seem simplistic at the moment but in my opinion pays huge dividends later in understanding how “early socialism”, let’s say, survives and is reborn in Marx. But all is not structural. Löwy relies on the concept of the “partial autonomy” of the thinker’s ideas, which splits the difference between “idealist history of thought and mechanical ‘economism’”. This is a thing I imagine Owen Alldritt will have a problem with, but I like it just fine.
Structuralism (and in particular, a desire to pick up its lessons while moving beyond its aporia) does haunt this book a bit in general. The theory of revolution that falls out of this exegesis on the “young” Marx’s thought borrows from Althusser his “epistemological break” (I know, bear with me). From footnote 21 on page 13:
I share [Althusser’s] general view of Marx’s youthful writings as a theoretical “long march”. I share also with Althusser the hypothesis of an “epistemological break” (a political break, too, in my opinion) which is observable in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology. Having said that, it will be quite plain that my “reading” of Marx is not at all the same as that of the author of Reading “Capital”.
And then later (page 50), curiously also in a footnote (number 100), Löwy continues:
My working hypothesis was…that the great ideological break in Marx’s evolution took place between 1843 and the Jahrbücher [that is, the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, which Marx published with Arnold Ruge until their public break]…more thorough analysis of the texts showed me, however, that there was comparative “philosophical” continuity between 1843 and the Jahrbücher articles, and a crucial break between these articles and Marx’s writings after August 1844.
This is essential to keep in mind, given Löwy’s animating interest here in splitting the difference (or, being charitable, resolving it) between a few antinomies: firstly, the split between a “philosophical” and a “political” communism (and Marx’s traversal of the same), that between the proletariat and its intellectuals, and finally between idealism and materialism. Some of these are more salient/satisfactory than the others. I will address each in turn.
1. Philosophy and Politics
To be reductive, this is the main ‘conflict’ to be found in Löwy’s account. In its basic form, there is a passage Löwy’s Marx undertakes, kicked off by his sympathies with the wood-thieves of Moselland (and yes, the Silesian weavers’ revolt) and ending with his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme which sees him progressively shedding his allegiance to the philosophical communism of Feuerbach and the True Socialism of Moses Hess in order to move far beyond them to a communism of the masses, which is explicitly based on Marx’s own real-life experiences with the proletariat and its organizations, in particular the French proletariat after his move to Paris, which saw him adopting the proletariat as his identified class.
Marx is shown here to be increasingly ‘fed up with’ the dilettantish contemplative stance of Ruge and the other Feuerbachians, who were interested primarily in the resolution of various contradictions between the heart and the head, the French and the German, the feminine and the masculine, the contemplative and the rational, etc. For Marx, these all gradually are shown to be essentially useless issues, a communism of the mind, owing primarily due to the backwardness of German capitalism and the overdevelopment of the Germans’ philosophical attitudes. Other than that, Löwy’s Marx gradually excises Young Hegelian dilettantism and breaks free of German torpidity (which has convinced itself of its vitality) by, quite literally, going West: first to Babouvist-Jacobinist-Blanquist Paris, and finally alighting upon the England of the Chartists, and thereby becoming “more political”, that is, more directly active in the promotion of proletarian theory and culture. The intellectual work produced along the way is the point: work from the standpoint of the proletariat is descriptive and damning in equal measure.
One can make the argument here, and throughout the text, that Löwy only fitfully manages a sort of fictitious abyss between the inchoate concepts of the proletariat, which are fundamentally truths, and the refined theories of the intellectual, which are oftentimes false. This produces in his account the tendency for his work to fall into a sort of valorization of proletarian “folk” knowledge, unassailable in its authenticity. Which, personally, I don’t mind—given the regular reminder of the considerable level of development of the 19th century proletarians. As such, the mature theory of revolution is a question of making the proletariat revolutionary from within and without, of canalizing inherent revolutionary potentials into a force which will make the heavens shake.
This tale opens up onto weighty questions about the relationship between the proletariat and its intellectuals, of which Löwy, as a dyed-in-the-wool Lukacsian, has much to say.
2. Intellectuals and the proletariat
Löwy favorably cites Lenin’s remark that the communist (taken at its broadest definition to include agent provocateur, professional revolutionary, writer of books, etc.) has a singular role: to be the tribune of the people, who undertakes the linking and expansion of every limited demand and action with the greater struggle. This is well enough, of course. But Löwy goes deeper, to the question of how class consciousness may appear through the dialectically mutual actions of both the class and the intellectuals (again, this is exceedingly Lukacsian):
First! There is the emergence of psychological consciousness, in which the definitional identities of class-for and class-against take on an ambiguous but real character. Second! An intellectual undertakes in the theoretical creation of a weltenschauung which shapes these initial concepts and attitudes and actions and positions into a coherent—ahem—standpoint, and thereby establishes a working definition of —ahem 2—“imputed consciousness”, which the actual gestalt consciousness of the class orbits around, pushes and pulls. Floria Tristan’s thesis that the working class can be thought of (historically, socially, in a revolutionary manner) as a single entity is an important prerequisite here. Löwy then offers another expanded 5 step version of this process (he is very fond of lists):
the mass generates its rudimentary concepts and pursues episodic outbursts of a revolutionary character;
organic intellectuals from within the mass/class itself begin a preliminary and limited systematization;
conspiracies and utopian sects within the mass pursue theoretical and practical development further but are choked by the mass’ stunted development
sympathetic intellectuals from without develop ideological and theoretical frameworks off the back of these half-formed theories;
Aufhebung! one great thinker from the intellectuals from without (the “traditional intellectuals”) develops these bits and bobs to the hilt, thereby laying the rigorous foundations for thought from this standpoint—allowing experiences to become values to become actions, or, if you will, the development of a science.
If you’re still with me (and Löwy here), good. He sums this up best, using Marx’s remark on the thunderbolt animating the passive masses from The Jewish Question to wax poetic: "Coherent revolutionary thought cannot appear otherwise than from out of the problems, aspirations, and struggles of the class itself. Employing the same image, let us say that lightning can burst forth only from the clashing of clouds loaded with storm..."
We may say that the overall relationship here for Marx is a transition from viewing the proletariat as a simple crowd of poor, set-upon individuals who got dealt a shit hand by Fate, to a social group with a passive character needing animation (a la The Jewish Question) and finally to the view in 1844 Manuscripts in which the bourgeois, bourgeois society, and the world itself (“If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human” (!!!)) are the passive anvil under the proletarian hammer, Marx is with them, inside and apart, not bashing 2 great clades together but identifying one as the avenging class and the other struck stupefied under its coming onslaught. The material, here, is social. Revolutionary activity is “practical-critical”.
3. Idealism and materialism
Finally, we arrive at the theory of revolution! Yes, it’s practical-critical activity, the philosophy of praxis. Fistly, Löwy cites heavily from Marx’s definition of communism, the famous one from the 1844 Manuscripts:
"the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being...the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man...between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution."
He then goes on: communism is a positive humanism, or “humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property” which makes possible the “living of a universal life” (while, at the same time “communism has by no means originated from paragraph 49 of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie”). This is huge for Löwy, who also here makes an explicit move with respect to Marx’s historical interlocutors, especially Weitling, Dezamy, Owen, Fourier et al. which places this work on the same terrain as William Clare Roberts’ Marx’s Inferno while simultaneously leaving it in the dust (see again historical notes above): Marx’s practice, not just his thought, and that of the class, that which is changed simultaneously in revolution as it changes the world, is “at bottom, the transcendence, the sublation of the antithesis between 18th-century materialism (changing of circumstances) and Young Hegelinaism (changing of consciousness)”. In another passage, Löwy denounces the old utopian/scientific distinction, claiming that Marx has deranged the field of play with his philosophy of praxis: “here 'materialist communism' is no longer being counterposed to 'critical socialism', Owen to Bauer, but the real proletarian party, communist or working-class, to the various literary, philosophical, and utopian sects, Owen's included”.
In this framing, no single thinker’s fingerprint survives Marx’s own synthesizing of these two strains, and neither does the “famed” split between idealism and materialism. Partial autonomy reappears here, resplendent.
Anyway.