With salvation having become the struggle for universal recognition, only the success of the endeavor can judge this process. The end of history is the goal and purpose of the struggle.
We will make human beings and history in the process, recognizing that “no pre-existent value can point the way” (R, 134). Provisional morality joined to the absolutization of history yields the doctrine of historical efficacy. Hegel’s gloss on this vision involves the historical transfiguration of Christian doctrine.4
“Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man,” comments Camus. Hegel has sought to give expression to this aspiration in the context of a post-Christian world in which the supernatural is no longer believable. Thus he divinized the process of history itself, assuring us of salvation at its completion. But no standards remain by which to guide historical action, save those resulting from a mystical insight into the process —a faith, perhaps, in its rationality, where rationality is itself divinized. We are no longer talking, therefore, of history as the succession of events by which the collective biography of humanity takes shape, but of an absolutized process in which fact and value are mystically merged. Insight is called for to give direction to action, the only criterion by which it can be judged being the success it achieves, retrospectively considered. This is no longer human history. It is sacred history, justified by the success of those who have won the right to interpret the process. This rationale, prepared by Hegel, nurtures the tradition of revolutionary messianism of which prophetic Marxism is both spiritual heir and material embodiment.
MARX
It is common knowledge that Marx claimed to have found Hegel on his head and to have turned him right side up. By this is meant that Hegel’s doctrine is an idealism, the substance of which is geist; that is, mind or spirit. Marx rejects the idealism of history seen as the self-development of geist, while accepting the notion of the dialectical nature of historical development.
To turn Hegel right side up is to see that what people think, and the consequent history of ideas or spirit, is essentially a reflection of what people do. That people’s collective struggle to produce and reproduce their life determines their mode of life and thought. Put somewhat crudely, economics determines the superstructure of habits, beliefs, values, and political and legal forms.
Here is not the place for a detailed analysis of Marxism. Rather we must attend to Camus’s interpretation. Further, Camus makes no claim to have offered a full analysis of Marx’s thought. He does not even emphasize the textual adequacy of his analysis as it concerns the writings of Marx himself. I think it fair to say that Camus believed the aspects of Marxism he was highlighting were attributable to Marx himself. But that is not essential for his thesis. What is essential is that his vision of Marxism—and Marxism— Leninism and Stalinism—constitutes a fair and accurate analysis of what has passed for Marxism in Western thought for 100 years. For Camus’s analysis, above all, focuses on a mode of thinking that has influenced, even directed, contemporary history. It is not primarily a scholarly study of historical texts. This point should be underscored precisely because Camus’s presentation is somewhat simplistic when dealing with certain details of Marx’s thought— especially as concerns his supposed economic determinism—while right on target as an exploration of the mainstream Marxian legacy.
Parenthetically, Camus is quite sympathetic to the analyses Marx offered on the nature and condition of exploitation under capitalism, as previously noted. Thus, “Marxism and its successors will be examined here from the angle of prophecy,” and from the perspective of “the Marxists who have made history” (R, 189).
If Marx turned Hegel on his head, emphasizing the primacy of material reality, he did not reject the structure of Hegelian thought or the centrality of the dialectic. Hegel was the linchpin of the modern era because he offered a totalized vision of history. This historicized Christianity, with its providential design, “cunning of Reason,” and envisioned day of ultimate reconciliation, provided a comprehensive framework within which the struggles of the mod-crn world could find meaning.
The absolutization of the historical process is precisely what Camus means by historicism. His critique of Marx, stripped of all the peripheral issues, comes down to claiming that Marx bought the entire structure of the Hegelian schema. He rejects both Hegelian idealism and Christian divinity, seeing both as forms of false consciousness or ideology, but his atheism is simply Hegelianized Christianity in different dress. “Marxist atheism is absolute. But nevertheless it does reinstate the supreme being on the level of humanity. . . . Socialism is therefore an enterprise for the deification of man and has assumed some of the characteristics of traditional religions” (R, 192).
Having joined Hegel in rejecting formal principles, most particularly those of morality, which he saw as ideological covers for legitimating injus-ticc, Marx was left without any standard of judgment other than practical success. That success had to be defined in terms of the alleviation of the
injustices done to working people, which had been the initial source of his outrage. But it was no longer possible to offer a moral defense of this outrage. Certainly not Christian or bourgeois morality. Thus either his outrage expresses a subjective and idealistic moralism or it must be seen as an expression of the objective process of dialectical development whose truth will be established by the consummation of history: the classless society. Hence this doctrine of the revolutionary consummation of history becomes the necessary truth of the original sense of moral outrage.
On Liberation
There is no need to recapitulate Camus’s presentation of the Marxian system. What is crucial is to locate those key doctrines, adapted from Hegel, that bring about the dialectical inversion of what, in Camus’s eyes, began as a liberating revolt only to end in an apologia for oppression. These are two contradictory dimensions of the absolutized historical dialectic: the deification of production and the mission of the proletariat. Together they give substance to the central Marxian myth: the revolution, which is supposed to put an end to exploitation and oppression, ushering in the definitive reconciliation of matter and spirit, of essence and existence, that is the classless society.
Thus the doctrine of the revolution, which both consummates and justifies the historically inevitable development of the dialectic, has two main dimensions. It is propelled by the development of the forces of production, which provides the material base for the ascension into posthistory. And it is assured of realization by the proletariat, whose historical mission is to bring salvation out of bondage and destitution. When put so baldly, one might ask, What could possibly give rise to such a messianic vision? What evidence could ever justify this scientific socialism? Since the answer to the second question is obviously none, we are really dealing with a religious faith, whose structure seems to replicate well Judeo-Christianity’s cosmic drama. Is this Marxism conceivable outside the Christianized West? Camus doubts it. But I have already noted both the Judeo-Christian origins of prophetic Marxism as well as its similarity to bourgeois thought. Let me try to pull together the historical sources, as they converge in this historical messianism.
As a child of the industrial revolution, Marx merges his outrage at the suffering of the people, their exploitation by a relatively small class of proprietors of the means of production, with an unbounded faith in the liberating possibilities of industry. In the prophetic tradition, he rails against injustice and demands that his people, the working people, be set free. He sees history making possible for the first time the material liberation of humanity from toil and slavery to nature. But slavery to nature is being replaced by slavery to others. The present situation is all the more intolerable now that the means of liberation are at hand.
The precondition of this liberation is the fullest possible development of industry’s productive forces. Only this can free humans from bondage to nature. Marx is “the prophet of production” (R, 204) because he sees it as the necessary condition of definitive human liberation. In fact, he often speaks as if it is also the sufficient condition, but then he is guilty of merging production with the historical dialectic itself. That reading leads to the narrow deterministic interpretation of Marx. Although “progress resembles ‘that horrible pagan god who wished to drink nectar only from the skulls of his fallen enemies’… at least it is progress” (R, 205), without which liberation is not possible.
But there is a basic ambiguity in this notion. Is progress simply the growth of the productive forces, or is it the qualitative transformation of the conditions of existence? Marx intends the latter, which it is the task of the dialectic to bring about. But he often speaks as if that transformation will inevitably result from the unfettered development of the productive forces. His faith in the liberatory possibilities of production seems to blind him to its oppressive potential. He blames the division of labor for exploitation without seeing to what extent this division is furthered, and even made necessary, by the development of those forces of production.5