The very core of [Marx’s] theory was that work is profoundly dignified and unjustly despised. He rebelled against the degradation of work to the level of a commodity and of the worker to the level of an object. He reminded the privileged that their privileges were not divine and that property was not an eternal right. He gave a bad conscience to those who had no right to a clear conscience, and denounced with unparalleled profundity a class whose crime is not so much having had power as having used it to advance the ends of a mediocre society deprived of any real nobility. To him we owe the idea . . . that when work is a degradation, it is not life, even though it occupies every moment of a life. … By demanding for the worker real riches, which are not the riches of money but of leisure and creation, [Marx] has reclaimed, despite all appearances to the contrary, the dignity of man (R, 209).
In order to appreciate more adequately the problems and possibilities of the rebellious legacy to which Marxism has laid claim in the twentieth century, it will be helpful to give historical depth to its theoretical sources as well as brief consideration to the major countercurrent by which it has sometimes been tempted, and to which it has yet remained fundamentally opposed.
Let me begin with that countercurrent.
FASCISM
Hatred of the established order and suffering from the burden of individual freedom have been pervasive underground themes of the modern world. Romanticism was nurtured in this psychic subsoil, drawing sustenance from the disintegrating cosmic order and the rootlessness of market society. Ambivalently merged here are the yearnings for a lost community, the assertion of an omnipotent ego, and the temptation of an apocalyptic consummation, in which the burdens of individuality may be relieved. When these conflicting demands seek political expression, their unifying themes tend to be a frenzy of action grounded in faith in a lost community, while the ego vicariously (and unthreateningly) realizes its aspirations for omnipotence through iden-tification with the power of a heroic leader, the symbol of the individual’s mystical ties to the people. No wonder that fascism—and, even more pro-foundly, variations of Nazism—have emerged as such powerful temptations in this post-Christian era.
“To those who despair of everything, not reason but only passion can provide a faith, and in this particular case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair—namely, humiliation and hatred” (R, 178—9).2 It is the self that is humiliated; it is the world that is hated. The sense of being cheated is pervasive. Not moral outrage so much as resentment fuels this movement. Revenge is demanded. The sense of being cheated by life is made into a rule of action. Hence there must be enemies. In fact, the movement defines itself by them—lacking as it does any coherent sense of value and direction. That ” ‘hatred of form’ which animated Hitler” is but the flip side of the rejection of the value of particulars, and thus of relative values. “When Mussolini extolled ‘the elemental forces of the individual,’ he announced the exaltation of the dark powers of blood and instinct,” which constitutes a “biological justification” for “complete identification with the stream of life, on the lowest level and in defiance of all superior reality.” Thus “man was nothing but an elemental force in motion.” “Action alone kept him alive. For him, to exist was to act” (R, 179). But to no purpose other than action itself, by which the burden of individuality and reflection can be cut short before they begin. In fact, individuality is itself a sign of guilt. All the existential concerns threaten to become intolerable burdens that must be removed before they infect the soul or the body politic. Action must preempt the field, guilt undermine the possibility of reflective individuality or rebellion, while force shapes this headless rush into the chaotic future.
This preemptive strike at discrete and relative human values can thus be seen as one of the temptations of the modern world, given force by the psychic deadening of bureaucratic society as well as by the power of such a society to mold thought and suppress dissidence. Camus does not take fascism seriously as a theoretical response to the modern predicament, even dismissing it ultimately as an expression of rebellious thought. He does, nonetheless, take it seriously as a practical movement and a psychic temptation. It certainly has constituted one of the major responses of Western civilization to the disintegration of the prevailing order—a response steeped in resentment at betrayal and calling for revenge for the burdens that the rootless individual increasingly feels in an uncaring world.
HEGEL
If it is true that fascist revolutions “lacked the ambition of universality” and thus “do not merit the title” of metaphysical revolution (R, 177), the same cannot be said of Hegel. If ever thought aspired to totality, it was his.
“Hegel’s undeniable originality lies in his definitive destruction of all vertical transcendence” (R, 142). “For the universal but abstract reason of St. Just and Rousseau,” Hegel substitutes
“concrete universal reason. Up to this point, reason had soared above the phenomena that were related to it. Now reason is . . . incorporated in the stream of historical events, which it explains while deriving its substance from them” (R, 133).
In seeking to bring transcendent principles into the historical process, Hegel is, according to Camus, the watershed of the modern era. “Justice, reason, truth still shone in the Jacobin heaven, performing the function of fixed stars, which could, at least, serve as guides” (R, 133).
Divine transcendence, up to 1789, served to justify the arbitrary actions of the king. After the French Revolution, the transcendence of the formal principles of reason or justice serves to justify a rule that is neither just nor reasonable. This transcendence is therefore a mask that must be torn off. God is dead, but. . . the morality of principles in which the memory of God is still preserved must also be killed. The hatred of formal virtue [which Hegel inaugurated] . . . has remained one of the principal themes of history today (R, 135).
History is no longer subject to transcendent principles. It has become autonomous. If the value question has not been resolved, it has certainly been transformed. By identifying the real with the rational and the rational with the real, Hegel gives birth to the doctrine of historical efficacy, the central target of Camus’s critique. It should be noted that Hegel’s doctrine is ambiguous, to say the least, and has given rise to diverse interpretations. Not only has Camus noted this fact, but he has taken pains to underscore the conservative, even quietistic interpretation by which this doctrine has often been used to justify the status quo (R, 135, 151—2).
Its primary historical significance, however, lies in its revolutionary interpretation, in which particular emphasis is given to the identification of the rational with the real. Thus revolutionaries have not only delegitimized any state of affairs that does not live up to the demands of reason, but identified reason with the essence of historical development. Here we have a continuation of the rationalized absolutism of Rousseau and the Jacobins. No longer is there any transhistorical reference point, however, by which historical events can be judged and evaluated.
Reason has been thoroughly historicized while history has become self-contained and self-justifying. It is the new absolute.
With “truth, reason, and justice” now “abruptly incarnated in the progress of the world .. . these values have ceased to be guides in order to be goals. . . . From this moment dates the idea . .
. that man has not been endowed with a definitive human nature, that he is not a finished creation but an experiment of which he can be partly the creator” (R, 134).
“Values are thus only to be found at the end of history. Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgment of value. One must act and live in terms of the future. All morality becomes provisional” (R, 142).3
If morality is provisional, the end is not. Hegel grounds the movement of history in the “desire [of consciousness] to be recognized and proclaimed as such by other consciousnesses.”
Thus “it is others who beget us. Only in association do we receive a human value, as distinct from an animal value” (R, 138). At this point, Hegel is but a child of Rousseau and the Enlightenment, but his conception of psychology takes him farther. “Fundamental human relations are . . . relations of pure prestige, a perpetual struggle to the death for recognition of one human being by another.” Since we are not
unless we are recognized as such, in this world without transcendent significance, the struggle to be all that one can be—by a logic that Camus does not go into and that Hegel himself may not have been fully aware of—leads “everyone . . . [to want] to be recognized by everyone.” “The existence that Hegelian consciousness seeks to obtain”—no longer being obtainable from God or in an afterlife—”is born in the hard-won glory of collective approval.” This results in “the entire history of mankind [being] . . . nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power. It is, in essence, imperialist” (R, 138—9).