MARXISM—IS IT RELIGION?*
ROBERT C. TUCKER
T 1s the paradoxical fate of Mary's
thought to have exerted an influence
upon the modern scene comparable to that
of @ new faith. Paradoxical, because Marx
set out with a repudiation of the religious
consciousness as “the sigh of the oppressed
creature.” Unlike such socialist predeces-
sors as Saint-Simon, who coupled his doc~
trine with the call for a new Christianity,
Marx proclaimed the criticism of religion
as the first great step in a “merciless criti-
cism of everything existing” which was
supposed to disclose, indirectly, the princi-
ples of a new world. The task, as he came
to see it, was to be the first to transform
socialism “from utopia into science.” Nev-
ertheless, history will remember him not as
the author of a scientific theory but as the
apostle of a secular creed.
Partly in response to this paradox, West-
ern philosophical scholarship has lately en-
tered upon a new phase in the assessment
of Marx. It is increasingly realized that the
critique of Marxism does not end with the
demonstration that its economic doctrines
are riddled with fallacies, that its central
predictions about the trend of development
of modern industrial society have been in-
validated by real events, and that histori-
cal materialism in general is scientifically
insolvent. The final question is not that
which forms the title of Max Eastman’s
book, Marsism—Is It Science? That ques-
tion having long ago been decided in the
negative, a further one arises: “Marxism—
Is It Religion?” Here a new critical ap-
proach is called for—a search for the moral
and philosophical meaning of Marx. The
purpose of this essay is to outline very
*A slightly shorter version of this paper was
read at the History of Philosophy session of the
American Philosophical Association, at Philadel-
phia, in December, 1956,
briefly certain elements of such an ap-
proach.
In one of his early works, Marx wrote of
the Hegelian philosophy as follows:
Hegel's interpretation of history presupposes
an abstract or absolute spirit which evolves in
such a way that mankind is only @ mass, con-
sciously or unconsciously the bearer of this
spirit, Within empirical, exoteric history he
therefore assumes that there is in progress a
speculative, esoteric history.
‘This passage is quite significant, and not
only as an expression of Marx’s under-
standing of Hegel. It also tells us some-
thing very important about the system
which was then taking shape in the mind
of Marx. For his system too was to be con-
structed arcund the idea that an “esoteric
history” is in progress within “empirical,
exoteric history.” This, along with the dia-
lectical idea, belongs to the core of He-
gelianism which lives on in Marx.
Despite the fundamental elements of
continuity, Marx’s system is his own and
differs in more than one important respect
from Hegel’s. The differences initially grew
out of the fact that Marx exchanged He-
gel’s concept of the absolute spirit for
Feuerbach’s concept of man, Feuerbach
had argued that not only the theological
god but also its various philosophical sur-
rogates, including the Hegelian absolute,
were self-projections of man. This was
Marx’s point of departure, but his direc-
tion was back to Hegel. For Marx went on
to reinstate a Hegelian interpretation of
history within the framework of this reduc-
tion of the absolute spirit to man. Only
now it is man and not the absolute spirit
which is conceived to have an “esoteric
history” in and through the “empirical,
exoteric history” of flesh and blood men,
125126
the proletarians. “Philosophy,” as he puts
it, “finds in the proletariat its material
weapon.”
For Marx, then, as for Hegel, the overt
historical process has a philosophical sym-
bolism, an inner scenario of which the mass
of men are oblivious even though they play
their various parts in it and contribute in
this way to its enactment. Finally, the sys-
tems of Hegel and Marx have a further
vital clement in common. This is the idea
that the esoteric history is a process of
self-realization. Our central problem,
therefore, is to analyze the idea of seli-
realization in its Hegelian and Marxian
forms.
In Hegel’s interpretation, the scenario
of history is the seli-realization of spirit—
the Welfgeist. Spirit, he says, is activity or
energy endowed with a drive toward seli-
realization, which may be defined in the
most general terms as “the development of
itself explicitly to what it is inherently and
implicitly.” Its characteristic mode of self-
realizing activity is cognition, which is con-
ceived by Hegel as an appropriation or
active conquest of whatever appears exter-
nal via the conscious recognition of it as
belonging to the self, as subjective. Thus,
Anowing is a peculiar subject-object rela-
tionship in which the object is destrayed as,
object by being recognized as pertaining to
the subject, so that the progress of knowl-
edge is at the same time the growth of the
spirit’s self-consciousness: All knowledge,
in other words, is ultimately self-knowl-
edge. It is an “internalization” or “de-
alienation” of what at first had seemed ex-
ternal and alien (objective) to the know-
ing subject.
In the historical process of humanity,
the spirit seeks and gains knowledge of it-
self by becoming incarnate, “alienating”
itself, in a succession of dominant national
cultures, each of which is founded by a
great man of action (e.g. a Caesar) and
ultimately comprehended by a great philo-
sophic mind (eg., a Hegel). In each such
cycle of the growth of self-knowledge, the
spirit first “relinquishes,” “alienates,” or
ETHICS
“externalizes” itself in the form of a par-
ticular national culture, and then reappro-
priates its alienated being by the act of
bringing it to full and clear consciousness
in a philosophical system. In short, the
spitit’s self-realization is a cyclical two-
phase process of disintegration and reinte-
gration on a new and higher plane. This,
according to Hegel, is the manner in which
the spirit develops itself explicitly to what
it is inherently and implicitly, namely,
“self-contained existence” ot unity with
self, which, is, he says, the essence of spirit
and the meaning of freedom.
‘The classical Aristotelian conception
views self-realization as a natural unfold-
ing, an inwardly unimpeded process of ac-
tualizing of the individual’s generic poten-
tialities, the basic principle of the process
being the same at all organic levels from
plant life to man. It is crucial for the un-
derstanding of Hegel to see that he has
abandoned the classical ground. He is hi
self quite explicit on this point. “The spir-
itual,” writes Hegel in his Logic,
is distinguished from the natural, and more es-
pecially from the animal, life, in the circum-
stance that it does not continue a mere stream.
of tendency, but sunders itself to self-realiza-
tion, But this position of severed life has in its
turn to be suppressed, and the Spirit has by its
‘own act to win its way to concord again.
This might be described as the Romantic
view of self-realization.
A postulated “division of the spirit
against itself” creates a subjective impedi-
ment to the spontaneous unfolding of its
potentialities, to its actualization as spirit.
‘The toad of self-realization becomes, in
Hegel’s expressive phrase, “a highway of
despair,” strewn with boulders which the
self places, so to speak, in its own way. As
a consequence, “the spirit is at war with
itself.” That is, the spirit’s drive toward
self-realization works itself out in a succes-
sion of inner conflicts expressing the stru
gle of the divided self to overcome the di-
vision and achieve a “second harmony.”
Hegel here has given us, in cosmic projec-
tion as it were, a profound picture of theDISCUSSION
painful quest of an unhappy consciousness
for peace within itself, for unity as a self.
Briefly, the Weltgeist is a neurotic person-
ality.
Expositions of Hegel’s dialectic often
proceed from his somewhat misleading at-
tempts in various places to give it a purely
logical formulation (‘‘the dialectical move-
ment of the proposition,” etc.). But to dis-
pel the aura of mystification surrounding
this notion, it seems necessary to view it
from the psychological standpoint. Accord-
ing to Hegel, the message of dialectic is
that “Contradiction is the very moving
principle of the world.” The interpretation
of this depends upon the meaning of ‘“con-
tradiction.” ‘The foregoing analysis sug-
gests that this term should not be con-
strued here in the logical sense but, rather,
as “inner conflict” of the peculiar neurotic
kind in which Hegel has discerned the im-
mediate motive force of the spirit’s self-
development.
‘This emerges especially from his often
repeated point that a dialectical contradic-
tion is one which involves the “seli-sup-
pression” of the subject in which it is pres-
ent. Only in terms of the inner dynamic of
Romantic self-realization as described
above does this position become truly in-
telligible. Thus, each resting place of the
spirit along the road of self-realization rep-
resents a new but still incomplete solution
of the conflict between its “essence” and
its “existence,” between the postulated
tendency toward an all-embracing unity
with itself and its factual present condition
of disunity or self-alienation; that is, some-
thing still appears obdurately external or
“alien” to it, and must be internalized or
brought within a new wider integration of
self. Hence the given solution is inherently
unstable: The spirit is impelled to suppress
or “negate” itself as presently constituted.
In this sense, “its own nature is the cause
of its abrogation.” But inasmuch as the
given solution came about as the negation
of a previous solution, the fresh act of self-
suppression (qua self-alienated) illustrates
the fundamental dialectical idea of “nega-
127
tion of the negation.” On this view, we
may say that dialectic is the formal pat-
tern implicit in the process of self-realiza-
tion as Hegel conceives it. It is a repre-
sentation of neurotic inner conflict, trans-
formed by the metaphysics of spirit into a
universal regulative principle of change in
nature and history.
Hegel suggests that the pilgrimage of the
spirit through history has a final destina-
tion where it attains “the victory and rest
of unity.” This vision of a terminal state
of peace in the spirit’s hostilities with it-
self discloses an important aspect of the
relation of Hegel's thought to the religious
experience. In his view, philosophy and re-
ligion share an identical goal, the goal of
salvation, although they approach it by
different avenues. Of the two, philosophy
is ranked the higher by virtue of the as-
sumed superiority of speculative concep-
tual knowledge over the “pictorial” expres-
sions of the purely religious consciousness.
Spirit, in the person of man, reaches full
knowledge of itself, and therefore full har-
mony with itself, in the form of an ulti-
mate philosophical system which Hegel, it
would appear, equated with his own, Thus,
the esoteric history of the world, a history
of the spirit’s self-realization, is conceived
as culminating in a final form of philosoph-
ical experience wherein all the internal an-
tagonisms of the spirit are completely
transcended and resolved. This is the stage
of “absolute knowledge,” and Hegel de-
scribes it as man’s redemption.
Under the powerful influence of Feuer-
bach, Marx experienced the break with
Hegelianism as a kind of “break-through
to real existence” or changing of worlds, as
a transition from the spirit world of ideal-
istic philosophy to the “real world” of
practical human affairs, from the library to
the market place. But he then proceeded to
reconstruct the philosophy of spirit on a
new “worldly” foundation; he created a
Hegelianism of the market place. And the
vital nucleus of this reconstructed Hegeli-
anism was precisely the Romantic idea of
self-tealization through the struggle of a128
divided self to resolve its inner conflict and
recover its lost unity. However, Marx’s
shift to a worldly orientation brought
about three important differences in the
way in which this idea is worked out in his
mind as compared with Hegel’s. First, the
creature conceived to be divided and alien-
ated from itself is man; the neurotic per-
sonality, that is, migrates from the Welt-
geist to the generalized human psyche.
Marx consigns the absolute to the realm
of the departed, but reincarnates its di-
vided self in his conception of earthly man.
Second, Marx recasts the notion of self-
alienation in terms of what he calls its
“economic expression.” Like Hegel, he
starts by equating the self’s essence with
its activity. The “species-essence” of man
is equivalent for Marx to man’s “self-ac-
tivity” or “life-activity” as a species. But
if Hegel’s spirit is an activity of knowing,
Marx’s man is an activity of making, a
“material activity.” Man is komo faber.
‘The object which he makes, the product of
his labor, is, then, “his objectified being.”
Phrasing the distinction somewhat differ-
ently, we may say that whereas the He-
gelian spirit “produces” itself as a mental
object, an object of cognition, Marxian
man “produces” himself as a material ob-
ject, an object of use (what Marx was
later to call a “use value”). This is the
essence of Marx’s “materialism.”
In both instances, the producing process
is an externalization of the producer's be-
ing. However, in Marx’s case the external-
ization of man’s being in the form of the
product of his labor is not, per se, an alien-
ation of self—and this is where the struc-
tural analogy between the Hegelian and
Marsian schemes breaks down. For Marx,
the externalized being of man becomes an
alienated being only under a certain postu-
lated set of life circumstances, which he
calls “the political-economic condition.”
This is the system of private property re-
lations, which results, he maintains, in the
expropriation of the object from the pro-
ducer. In this condition, the worker experi-
ences his “objectified being” as something
ETHICS
which “exists outside him, independent,
alien. to him, and . . . opposed to him as an
alien power.” As Marx elsewhere expresses
it, in this condition “the activity of the
worker is not his self-activity. It belongs
to another, it is the loss of himself.”
In his concept of the proletariat, Marx
represented this economic self-alienation of
man as a real fact, indeed as ¢he real fact,
of the contemporary world. The prole-
tariat, as he conceives of it, is not simply a
vast mass of utterly destitute people who
toil for a bare subsistence and have noth-
ing to lose but their chains; that is only
the “exoteric” aspect. In Marx’s philosoph-
ical concept, the proletariat is “the com-
plete loss of Man” or “a dehumanization
that is conscious of being dehumanized
and therefore strives to overcome it.” The
proletariat, in other words, is for Marx the
supreme manijestation of seli-alienated
man. And this suggests the meaning of the
phrase quoted earlier, that “Philosophy
finds in the proletariat its material weap-
on.” For Marx attributes to this proletariat
a dynamic tendency toward the recovery of
its lost humanity, the reappropriation of
its alienated being, the transcending of its
divided state. He represents this tendency
in terms of the Hegelian dialectical princi-
ple of self-suppression. Just as the Hegeli-
an spirit is impelled to “abrogate” itself
qua self-alienated, so the Marxian prole-
tariat endeavors to abolish itself qua pro-
letariat. Since it is, by definition, the nega-
tion of man, its act of self-abolition qua
proletariat will be, then, the “negation of
the negation.” But here the final act of ne-
gation appears as the universal revolution.
The third important difference is con-
nected with this Marxian thesis that man’s
self-alienation is caused and enforced by
existing “circumstances.” The logic of the
revolutionary idea is implicit in this prop-
osition. For if man is divided against him-
self solely because society as now consti-
tuted compels him to be, then the quest for
unity decrees the overthrow of “all exist-
ing conditions,” making way for what
Marx calls “conditions of unity.” In otherDISCUSSION
words, the reunification of self is visualized
as a by-product of the revolutionary trans-
formation of society. The upshot of this
reasoning is that the basic conflict, which
always remains an inner conflict in the con-
text of Hegel's absolute spirit, in Marx
takes on the aspect of a conflict between
the inner and the outer, between the hu-
man self and its social conditions of exist-
ence. Thus does the quietistic Hegelian
philosophy issue in the Marxian gospel of
salvation by revolution. Exoterically, the
anticipated universal revolution is an “ex-
propriation of the expropriators.” But eso-
terically, it is the doorway to the tran-
scendence of human self-alienation and
hence to what Hegel had called “the vie~
tory and rest of unity.” Therefore, Marx’s
esoteric message to his devotees is this:
“Tf you want to become one and whole, to
be born again in harmony, you must first
destroy the environment which makes you
a divided being, alienated from yourself.”
But Marx was too authoritarian in his
fiber to let matters rest with a mere hypo-
thetical imperative. He was not content to
preach the gospel of salvation by revolu-
tion in the hope that sufficient numbers of
individual men might take heed and act ac-
cordingly. He felt the need for a proof, for
an irrefutable “scientific” demonstration
that the cataclysmic event was bound to
happen. This meant to him that he had to
work out a scheme of history which would
show the universal historical process to be
driving relentlessly toward the revolution-
ary denouement beyond which lay man’s
unity. But how could he do this? Marx
thought he had found the answer in the
movement of “circumstances” themselves.
In this present world of his self-alienation,
the division of man was the consequence
of a specific set of “circumstances,” the
system of exploitation as embodied in pri-
vate property relations. The secret of his-
tory, then, would lie in its tendency to in-
crease the degree of exploitation, so that
ultimately the very set of circumstances
which alienated man from himself would
push him to the breaking point of physical
129
toleration and compel him to rebel against
it. The outcome of' Marx’s decades of Her-
culean mental effort to demonstrate the
a priori historical inevitability of such a
tendency was Copital, This discloses the
nexus between the eatly philosophical
Marx and the Marx who set out to trans-
form socialism “from utopia into science.”
Capital was nothing other than an en-
deavor at all costs to compress the future
into a preconceived mold, to project exo-
teric history as a process which would nec-
essarily realize Marx’s esoteric idea. It was
written in a spirit quite alien to that of sci-
ence as a free activity of cognitive discov-
ery. Its fundamentally unscientific nature
is ultimately an outgrowth of that fact.
In The Varieties of the Religious Expe-
rience, William James devotes a memora-
ble chapter to “The Divided Self, and the
Process of Its Unification.” He describes
here the “twice-born” soul to whom the re-
ligious experience comes as a “unifying of
the inner self,” a deliverance from dis-
cord. “But to find religion,” he adds, “is
only one out of many ways of reaching
unity.” On the basis of the foregoing in-
terpretation, we may class esoteric Marx-
ism as one of the secular approaches to
unity which the modern age has brought
forth in profusion. Tts predecessor, Hegeli-
anism, is another. The Marxian teaching,
irreligious and in fact anti-religious in its
official character and attitude, is neverthe-
less relevant to religion, to religions
thought, in the nature of its underlying
concem—a concern not for the condition
of the economy but for the condition of the
soul. Were this not so, incidentally, Marx-
ism would have heen a dead issue and half
forgotten long ago, an object of merely an-
tiquarian interest on the part of historians
of European economic thought.
‘The impulse that lurks at its core is the
impulse to self-transformation, to be “born
again” in harmony. Its explosive peculiarity
is the message that the way for the self to
be born again, to change, to achieve its sal-
vation, is to revolutionize the existing struc-
ture of society. It is, therefore, a kind of130
religion of revolution, As Marx himself ex-
pressed the crucial point, “in revolutionary
activity, change of seif coincides with
change of circumstances” (my italics). His
argument, in other words, is that man can
change himself from a divided and self-
alienated being into an integrated person-
ality by a political act, the act of revolu-
tion, of destruction of the prevailing social
order. Here is at once the appeal and the
radical illusion of this doctrine. The appeal
lies in the vision of a spiritual regeneration
which will result automatically from a revo-
lution of social circumstances. The illusion,
of course, is that the regeneration, the
“change of self,” is possible on those terms.
Marxism was invalid as religion.
Hegel set up philosophical activity,
ETHICS
meaning particularly his own philosophical
activity, as the supreme avenue of salva-
tion, relegating conventional religion, with
its “pictorial” symbols as he called them,
to a subordinate, sub-philosophical cate-
gory. His disciple Marx, moving farther
in this direction, found the avenue of sal-
vation not in philosophical activity but
rather in political activity of a revolution-
aty kind—‘tevolutionary fraxis,” to use
his formula, ‘The fulcrum of this movement
from Hegel to Marx was, as mentioned
earlier, Feuerbach, who wrote in 18
“We must become religious again. Politics
must become our religion.” In our final
critical reckoning, original Marxism will
have to be seen in relation to this idea.
Soctar Scrence Division, Rano Corrorarion