请将“MARX’S MIDWIFERY

Cohen’s argument states clearly and argues explicitly for what many others have implied obscurely. For this reason, it is especially useful for confronting the basic assumptions according to which Marx’s political theory has been received. Cohen’s beginning point is his understanding of Marx’s debt to Hegel. Hegel had claimed for philosophy the goal of complete comprehensibility. To achieve its goal, Hegel argued, philosophy cannot merely arrive at rationally demonstrable solutions to the problems that confront it. In order for these solutions to be really comprehensible, philosophy must demonstrate that “the answer resides within the question,” or that “the solution develops out of the problem.” Hegel’s requirement of comprehensibility is also a good summation of his dialectical method: “The completion of the development of a (genuine) problem, and only that, provides its solution. Its solution is the consummation of the full development of the problem.”7

Marx, according to Cohen, turned this thesis about the aim and procedure of philosophy into a political maxim. On this political construal, any genuine practical problem will find its solution in the full development of the problem itself. Applied to the practical problem with which Marx was most concerned, the problem of capitalism, this maxim becomes the conviction that “the solution-providing proletarian revolution is the outgrowth of the problem, of the contradictions of capitalism itself.”8 As the contradictions of capitalism develop, so too does the agency that will deliver us from capitalism. And this coevolution is not a lucky coincidence. The development of the contradictions just is the development of the salvific agency of the proletariat.

This conviction, in turn, is supposed to explain Marx’s repudiation of utopian socialism and his appreciation of the original utopians, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owen.9 Utopian socialists respond to the problem of modern capitalism by fleeing from it, in their imagining of alternative forms of society and in their practice of setting up secret societies and experimental colonies. They testify to the reality of the social problem. They emerge from a felt need to negate the present, and the audience they find for their imagined communities indicates the breadth of the dissatisfaction. Nonetheless, their negation of the present is an abstract one, since it identifies nothing in the world as it is that might lead to the new world. A truly scientific politics, by contrast, would trace the emergence of socialism from out of the social problem itself. Rather than trying to build a new society to imaginary specifications, it would seek only to help the present society give birth to the new one developing within it.

Without disputing either its presence in his writings or its centrality for Marx, I wish to flesh out Cohen’s characterization of this obstetric conception of politics in such a way as to wrest it away from some of his criticisms of Marx’s politics. I think Cohen misinterprets Marx’s relationship to utopian socialism. Cohen claims that Marx affirms the vision of a better world contained in the writings of the utopians, and he quarrels with them only because they could not see that this better world was being brought about by the very capitalist world they criticized. While there is a sense in which this is true, it is not the sense identified by Cohen. The ends of socialism, insofar as these are common to Marx and the utopians, are not what Cohen takes them to be. Moreover, because he has misidentified these aims, Cohen cannot but fail to see the intimate connection between Marx’s conception of these aims and the obstetric conception of politics. When the “content” of socialism is seen to be the universalization of republican freedom, a natural and unobjectionable connection emerges between socialism and Marx’s midwifery.


The Ends of the Socialist Movement

Marx certainly conceived politics in obstetric terms. Although I have not emphasized it, or used Cohen’s terms, my argument in this book supports Cohen’s contention. Marx leads his readers into the Hell of political economy in order to clarify the problems facing socialism, and hence the historic task of the proletariat. The study of political economy is necessary, not because political economy contains elements of the solution to the social problem, as Proudhon thought, but because political economy does not contain any such elements. Political economy articulates the problem facing the laboring classes, even if it does so unaware. Hence, Marx would agree with Cohen’s interpretive claim that “all the socialist theorist has to do is to make the task facing the proletariat more explicit.”10

However, Cohen also claims that the content of socialism remained essentially the same from the utopian socialists to Marx. Here, Cohen is self-consciously forwarding the tradition according to which Marxism has three sources and component parts, German philosophy, French socialism, and British political economy.11 If French socialism is a source and component part of Marxism, then something of French socialism must be preserved in Marxism. According to Cohen, this remnant is the actual content of the desired transformation of the world. As Cohen puts it, these socialists propounded

a vision of a better society, one lacking the manifest injustice and misery of capitalism; one, too, that was rational in its workings because planned, rather than market-driven and therefore anarchic and irrational, as was capitalism . . . The problem with the utopians was not that they were too optimistic in what they thought could be accomplished. . . . Rather, the socialists were utopian in the sense that they lacked a realistic conception of how socialism would come to be: they did not see that it was to be produced by social reality itself.12

Thus, the socialist vision of a better society is essentially constant. What is essential or basic to socialism is its commitment to the “principles” or “values” of community and equality.13 “The problem” posed by capitalism, the genuine problem to be solved, “is to turn the world into a home for humanity by overcoming the scarcity in the relationship between humanity and nature which induces social division.”14 Marx did not transform or criticize this vision, says Cohen. He tried to show how capitalism was producing the material conditions for the realization of this vision, including the agency that will bring it about.

There are places where Marx seems to support Cohen’s reading. The most explicit of these is in Marx’s first draft of The Civil War in France. Addressing those “patronizing friends of the working class” who denied that the Paris Commune had a socialist character since it did not “try to establish in Paris a phalanstère nor an Icarie,” Marx writes that,

All the socialist founders of sects belonged to a period in which the working classes themselves were neither sufficiently trained and organized by the march of capitalist society itself to enter as historical agents upon the world’s stage, nor were the material conditions of their emancipation sufficiently matured in the old world itself. . . . The utopian founders of sects, while in their criticism of present society clearly describing the goal of the social movement, . . . found neither in society itself the material conditions of its transformation, nor in the working class the organized power and the conscience of the movement. . . . From the moment the working men’s class movement became real, the fantastic utopias evanesced, not because the working class had given up on the end aimed at by these utopians, but because they had found the real means to realize them, and in their place came a real insight into the historic conditions of the movement and a more and more gathering force of the militant organization of the working class. But the last two ends of the movement proclaimed by the utopians are the last two ends proclaimed by the Paris revolution and by the International. Only the means are different.15

This seems to say exactly what Cohen says. The final aims of socialism remained the same, from the time of the utopians, in the early decades of the century, right up through the Commune in 1871. Marx affirms those ends as the ends of the International.

But what are those ends? I have left out the crucial bit. The “last two ends of the movement proclaimed by the utopians” are “suppression of the wage system with all its economical conditions of class rule.”

These ends are not Cohen’s “vision of a better society.” In order to see this, we need only recall the argument of this book, which provides all of the material we need to explicate the final ends of utopian socialism, insofar as these are affirmed by Marx. When Marx refers to the “suppression of the wage system,” he is referring to the abolition of wage labor, and hence of the exploitation of labor power by capital and of the reserve army of the unemployed, which are its concomitants. This aspect of capitalism was analyzed by Marx in parts three, six, and seven of Capital, and his arguments regarding it have been presented by me in chapters 4 and 5 herein. It encompasses the violence with which capital seizes the labor process, the fraudulence of the wage form, which makes this violence disappear behind the appearance of a free contract, and the accumulation of social misery that accompanies the dependency upon wages.
”翻译为中文