Originally published in 2000 by Les Éditions le Seuil, Marx, une critique de la philosophie by French philosopher Isabelle Garo was recently reissued by the publisher. Why choose to republish, more than twenty years later, this work of Marxist exegesis?
In France, the ongoing editorial work surrounding the publication of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, paired with a certain regain of interest in Marx and Engels from young scholars, continues to deepen and renew the philological engagement with Marx and Marxism. Decolonial, feminist and ecologist problematics notably inform these re-readings, complicating previous depictions of a productivist and Eurocentric Marx, while actualizing Marxist analytical categories in the name of pressing contemporary preoccupations (11-15). Yet, this rather dynamic moment for the study of Marxism is paired with a lack of available engagements with the entirety of Marx’s works, outside of some highly specialized scholarly exegesis, often devoid of the political impetus of Marxist thought (8). The ideological conjuncture characterizing the publishing world and its incessant production of quickly consumed essays further contributes to the disappearance of serious and dynamic studies of Marx’s entire oeuvre (9).
At this rather paradoxical moment for French Marxist discourse, Garo thus correctly judges opportune to once again render accessible this essay, a vulgarization aimed at complicating – rather than simplifying – Marx’s works (13). Marx, une critique de la philosophie is here driven by the same intention underlining the rest of Garo’s body of work, which is to rigorously read Marx’s thought as a living thought rooted in its own history and specific struggles. Such a reading, in turn, is indissociable from the ongoing effort to understand and overcome capitalism (10-11), as her recent books Karl Marx à vingt ans – De la colère au communisme (2022) and Communisme et stratégie (2019) also aptly demonstrate.
In order to sustain both a dynamic engagement with Marx and an accessible exposition of his entire works, Garo’s essay is structured around the question of representation. Following an intuition developed earlier in her doctoral thesis (Garo 1996), Garo deems the question of representation crucial to highlight the role of ideas and representative bodies (monetary, political, cultural) in Marx’s analysis of the social totality (15). As a classical theme of German idealism, representation also constitutes a privileged terrain to investigate Marx’s relation to philosophy. First elaborated at a time when Marx’s thought was further and further circumscribed to theoretical discussion, cause and consequence of the diminution of Marxism’s concrete revolutionary possibilities, Garo’s research aims at reopening the political dimension of his thought (21-24). The question of representation indeed allows Garo to follow Marx’s critique of philosophy – sustained, she argues, throughout his oeuvre – as well as the locus of his own incessant engagement with theoretical debates, the elaboration of conceptual categories, and the study of social and economic totality (32-33).
Garo’s presentation is mostly chronological, interwoven with biographical elements. Chapter one reviews Marx’s first philosophical discussions up until the 1844 Manuscripts, in which his engagements transition from liberal-democratic to communist (41). Garo here first highlights Marx’s involvement in the debates on religion, in particular through his well-known proximity with the Young Hegelians. While engaging seriously with the latter’s critique of religion and of the Prussian state, Marx is gradually unsatisfied with their calls for reform, and their transformation of the problem of objective contradictions into an opposition between an unhappy political consciousness and the irrational Prussian monarchy (43). Marx instead tries to explain the persistence of religious beliefs as representations that have a social function. Maintaining the systemic character of Hegel’s philosophy, he thus admits the separation between the being of representation and the representation of being (50), but sees this separation as the product of social organization, and its overcoming as a practical question.
The critique of religious representation opens up the question of other representations structuring and transforming social life, and religious critique leads to the critique of law and politics (55). Focusing notably on On the Jewish Question, Garo expounds Marx’s critique of the state, understood not as the Hegelian resolution of the contradictions of civil society, but as real abstraction able to disguise and maintain them (59). The modern democratic state can relegate religion, the unequal effects of private property and social distinctions in the realm of the private life of the bourgeois individual, but cannot abolish them. Following his first meetings with Engels and the growing diffusion of socialist ideas in Europe, Marx pursues his analysis of the social and economic causes of human alienation, this time deepening his understanding of labor as exteriorization and objectivation of human essence (67).
Garo then shows in chapter two that in The Holy Family, The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx continues his analysis of representation through his polemic with the Young Hegelians (especially Bruno Bauer) and his critical engagement with Hegel. Now equipped with a finer understanding of concrete human activities, Marx is able to develop a historical analysis of productive forces, social relations and the representations emanating from them. The concept of ideology is deployed – not without difficulty – to designate both the representations accompanying and reinforcing class domination and the ideological struggles reproducing social contradictions at the level of representations (96). European revolutions and the general political ebullition of the late 1840s lead to more theoretical innovations, described in the third chapter. In The Communist Manifesto and The Class Struggles in France, Marx indeed affirms and develops the role of political representations (120), studies the political imaginary of the peasantry and its support of Louis Bonaparte, and analyses the transformation of the republic into an organ of repression. The Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte pursues the analysis of the victory of the counter-revolution and of the working class’s revolutionary immaturity.
In chapters four and five, Garo is further able to show that representations are key to Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production, characteristic of his later political-economic writings. The capitalist economy indeed relies heavily on the logic of representation, born out of the production and exchange processes (189) – the fetish-character of the commodity and the money form hide the social character of production and labor as the source of value. Yet these representations are not only illusions, or untruths; they are active instances of the real, allowing its transformation or reproduction (199). Representations are now thought of as internal to the mode of production, as part of its function. They are part of a global reality which needs to be grasped in its totality, including the possibility of its overcoming. Marx’s critique of political economy is therefore also a departure from philosophical critiques of illusions. Using the analogy of the reflection (reflet) throughout Capital allows Marx to develop the insights first contained in the German Ideology, but, per Garo, with more flexibility than the concept of ideology or the distinctions of base and superstructure might indicate (200-204). The development of the critique of political economy is also the occasion for Marx to further reexamine his critique of human rights first developed in On the Jewish Question, as law is now understood as a form of functional representation between production and circulation, expressing the apparent equality between people – a true equality, but only in the limited sense of the contract, here again a distorted yet functional reflection (209-211).
In the writings of the later period, in particular The Civil War in France and The Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx revises his previous analyses on law, the state and politics, in light of recent historical developments. Against the prevailing social-democratic tendencies within working class movements, Marx argues that the proletariat’s struggle cannot be fought solely on the juridical terrain. While the law can be useful to influence power relations, it is in the last instance subjected to capitalist social relations (211). Marx’s interventions in the First International also reaffirm the political dimension of the transformation of the mode of production and indicate, following the experience of the Paris Commune, a reevaluation of previous analyses of the use of state power by the revolutionary working class; now, the state must be eagerly and quickly replaced (237-240).
Finally, Garo returns in chapter six to the centrality of the question of representation in Marx’s oeuvre, this time through the issue of method. Following remarks contained mainly in the Grundrisse, the 1857 Preface to Capital, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and the Theories of Surplus Value, Garo shows that Marx’s understanding of representations as mediations includes his own critique of political economy – the theory is both part of the historical totality and nonetheless able to grasp and display its movement. Certain representations, since they act not only as a consequence but also as a cause of parts of the social structure, might be able to escape the sole logic of reproduction. The relative autonomy of intellectual work, itself the consequence of the historical division of labor, allows for a certain degree of liberty (279-283).
Garo’s Marx, une critique de la philosophie, especially since it is situated on the terrain of Marx’s relation to philosophy, is also an implicit discussion of Althusser’s theses (22). Garo’s interpretation indeed goes against Althusser’s more strictly philosophical reading of Marx, his epistemological break, and his minimalization of Marx’s political implications (for more on this, see Garo 2011). Garo shows, rather, that the critique of political economy is at the same time a critique of traditional philosophy and a redefinition of political economy (160), refusing to turn Marx into a philosopher. Marx’s constant critique of philosophy is presented by Garo as the mean and condition of Marxian analysis (289). She also demonstrates the strong continuity within Marx’s oeuvre, despite his constant reevaluations and the evolution of his thought. Her ability to convey the contradictions and ruptures that fill Marx’s works while convincingly demonstrating their strong continuity is indissociable from her commitment to representation as an interpretative through-line.
Marx, une critique de la philosophie is a successful exposition of Marx’s thought, as the work manages to skillfully combine the presentation of the majority of his major works and important biographical elements with a strong interpretative thesis. Garo aptly covers an impressive amount of primary literature, and the contextual notes she adds breathes new life into an oeuvre too often caricatured or sclerosed. Marx’s thought is, with Garo, filled with political urgencies, acute to socio-historical developments and constantly reevaluated – encouraging us, in turn, to confront our own historical conjuncture.
Reviewed by Isabelle Le Bourdais