Accueil
[Chapter 4 : The emergence of Hess ethical socialism]
"Both because of the disorderly conditions of his life as an exile in France and Belgium, as well as due to his eclectic mode of thinking, Hess expressed his thought in dozens of articles and short pieces of varying quality and many repetitions. His thought therefore has to be culled from these numerous sources and a rather drastic process of selection applied to this disparate corpus of ideas, philosophical snippets and ideological exhortations. The picture which emerges again suggests how central were Hess ideas for the formation of the mature thought of German socialism, especially in its Marxian version. His acquaintance with French conditions helped him to form his amalgam of German philosophy and French political and social ideas without which the thought of Karl Marx would have remained inconceivable.
In one of his first published articles, On the Present Crisis of German Philosophy (1841) Hess continued a line of thought originally developed in The European Triarchy. He claimed that Hegelian philosophy found its legitimate heir not in the academic Hegelian school, which to Hess was nothing more than a set of scholastic footnotes at the margin of Hegel's own philosophy. It was Arnold Ruge, Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer who vindicated the historical and philosophical truth of Hegelianism in their transition from theory to praxis. This transition may be an apparent contradiction to the contemplative nature of Hegelian philosophy, but the picture is more complex: Hegelian philosophy had proven that “all that had hitherto been thought, conceived and perceived as truth originated, and had to originate, in human self-consciousness.” In this way Hegel exposed the historicity and temporality of all those categories which had been considered to be eternal verities; but he also paved the road for a revolution in human consciousness." (pp.79-80)
"In another article, The Riddle of the 19th Century (1842), Hess points out that the French Revolution left unresolved the tension between its two basic ideas—the idea of equality and the idea of liberty; Jacobinism is nothing else than a “primitive, naturalistic and crude” method of overcoming this dichotomy through an unmediated unity. In yet another article, On the Problem of Centralization, Hess expresses the idea —later elaborated upon by both Marx and Tocqueville- that the French Revolution occurred in the political and institutional context of the centralized French state, as it had been developed since the time of Louis XI. The paradox of the modern age was that in Germany the modern age was introduced via Luther’s ideas on the freedom of the spirit, whereas in France modernity came into being through the centralizing efforts of the absolutist monarchy. The consequences of these different powers can be seen, according to Hess, in the fact that in Germany idealist philosophy became the heir of Lutheran freedom of the spirit, while in France, the tyranny of the Revolution as well as the Jacobin terror were themselves an outcome of the centralized and absolutist structures of the French monarchy. Far from praising Jacobin terror as revolutionary justice, Hess saw it as a carryover from the centralist tradition of absolutism. He considered the perversions of the French revolution were thus part of the prerevolutionary heritage. [...]
In Germany, politically underdeveloped and lacking an institutional infrastructure for a modern state, modernity was spread by spiritual means—through philosophy and theorizing. " (pp.81-82)
"In France, Hess summed up, theory follows praxis, while in Germany it is the other way round—praxis will follow theory. It is for this reason that an all-European view of social developments is necessary, as only such a synthesis could combine the disparate developments in the various European countries.
In June 1842 Hess added the third element to this synthesis: England. In an article entitled On the Approaching Catastrophe in England, Hess tried to go beyond the daily occurrences in Britain’and suggested that the English malaise was only one expression of a deeply seated structural crisis of European society; it has its material root:
This hidden malady appears to have broken out in England earlier than expected: it is the distorted relationship between the rich and the poor, the antagonism between the aristocracy of money and poverty. This is a Damocles sword cutting ever deeper wounds into our innermost social life, and out of it we can easily deduce the root of all our social miseries.
The problem in Britain has no easy solutions, and the liberal reformers were mistaken in looking for merely political answers within the realm of parliamentary representation :
The root of evil is deeper than problems of taxation and Corn Laws, deeper than the political disagreements among the parties, deeper even than the defects of administrative arrangements as pointed out by the Chartists, those most radical political reformers. All the political reforms will be mere palliatives for a malady which is not, in the last resort, political : it is social. No form of government gave rise to this social malady: no form of government could remedy it.’
The social crisis in England had gone so far, that even religion could not console the misery of the masses, while in the past “misery, deprivation and agony were a cover for an other-worldly religion.” These are then the elements of the crisis threatening England:
Industry, which passed from the hands of the people to the machines of the capitalists ; commerce, which was dispersed among numerous small merchants, is being concentrated more and more in the hands of a few capitalist entrepreneurs or usurious adventurers ; usurious landed property, preserved through laws of inheritance in the hands of few aristocrats ; great concentrations of capital, growing in the hands of a few families and preserved by them—all of these conditions, which exist everywhere, but especially so in England, are the essential causes of the approaching catastrophe: and they are not political, but social, conditions... And while the French in their enthusiasm want to preempt history and are being excited by Fourierist, Saint Simonian and communist ideas, in England this same power—which is both destructive but also the great creator of all historical conditions, i.e., History—is becoming stronger and stronger and will eventually overcome the unsolved riddle of history..." (pp.83-84)
"The essay Socialism and Communism which was published in 1843 in a collection of essays edited by the radical poet Georg Herwegh [...] This volume was published in Switzerland and was not subject to the strict censorship regulations then in force in most of the German states [...]
This article is a long review essay of Lorenz von Stein’s Socialism and Communism of Contemporary France, which appeared in 1842. Stein was a moderate Hegelian, who was sent by the Prussian government to Paris to report on the various revolutionary theories and movements in France and assess their threat to the political structure in Germany. The book as published was an extension and elaboration of Stein's report, and on its publication it turned out to exert a rather paradoxical influence in German intellectual life. Despite Stein’s critique of the various French socialist and communist philosophies discussed by him, his account was generally fair and accurate, and thus became the major source in Germany for the dissemination of these theories." (p.85)
"Hess again suggested that Spinoza was to be seen as the founder of both German philosophical idealism as well as of modern French social philosophy with its atheistic foundations. The principle of the modern age is “the absolute unity of life, which appeared at first in Germany as abstract idealism, and in France as abstract communism,” Hess claimed. This abstract philosophy, devoid of any basis in social reality, is being made concrete, and thus the road is open to a new kind of communism, scientific communism." (p.86)
"According to Hess, the cardinal mistake of the eighteenth century was “that it did not negate the concept of the state”: Now French communism, and especially Proudhon, have “reached the negation of any form of political domination, the negation of the concept of the state and of politics—i.e. anarchy.” ! Modern French socialism returned to the ideas of Babeuf, but it reaches them through an adoption of the dialectical moment inherent in German philosophy. Hegelian philosophy enabled socialist thought to reach beyond the facile abstractions of individualism vs. collectivism and present a new model of a social humanism in which the conventional dichotomies of individual/society are being transcended through a new synthesis:
Through Hegel the German spirit reached the conclusion that personal freedom is to be found not in the uniqueness of the individual, but in what is common [...] to all human beings. Any property which is not a common human property, which is not common property, cannot safeguard my personal freedom: indeed, my own, inalienable property is that which is at the same time common property.’." (pp.87-88)
"It is the connection between the misery of the proletariat, being pauperized in the process of industrialization, and the socialist ideas which will give power and thrust to the revolutionary drive.'”." (p.88)
"One of the advantages of communism is the abolition of the antagonism between pleasure and work... The state of commonalty is the practical realization of philosophical ethics, which sees in free activity the one and true enjoyment, the supreme good—just as the state of private property is the practical realization of egoism and the lack of ethics... Communism is practical ethics [...]
This first form of communism originates directly with Sanscullotism. The equality envisaged by Babeuf was the equality of people utterly lacking anything: it was an equality of poverty. Wealth, luxury, the arts, the sciences—all these were supposed to be abolished and the cities were meant to be destroyed. Rousseau’s state of nature was the specter that was fluttering around in many heads. The wide field of industry was still unknown territory to communism. This was the most abstract communism, equality was going to be achieved by negative means through the suppression of all passions. This was an ascetic, Christian communism— but without any hereafter, without any hope for a better future." (pp.89-90)
"The [cartesian] “I” ceased to be an abstract entity and became an historical “I,” always to be found in concrete contexts. This is the contribution of German idealism from Fichte to Hegel to Hess thought which consequently sees human self-consiousness as the creative element in man’s world." (p.93)
"Hess was aware of the fact that both state and religion incorporated a certain amount of restriction on egoistic life in what he calls the “Kingdom of Animals” [...] of the war of all against all. This is the claim for universality and commonalty inherent in the claims of church and state for human allegiance; one should reject the claim that these two institutions do indeed represent such a universality, but one should also recognize that the claim itself is aiming at a goal which should not be denied." (p.94)
"Hess proposed his own philosophy of action (Tat), as an alternative to the abstractness of the French Revolution as well as the internalized subjectivity of German philosophical idealism. These two phenomena were seen by Hess as the major achievements of the modern spirit, but they had to be translated from the language of passivity and inwardness to the language of active consciousness:
“It is now the task of the philosophy of the spirit to become the philosophy of action. Not only thought, but all human activity, must be brought to the point where all oppositions fade away."
It is in this context that Hess then took up the ambivalent role of property: from the individual's point of view, property is an external expression and testimony to the person’s activity—and thus an element of personal fulfillment. But it expresses only past activity which has been crystallized and objectified into a thing, into property. Therefore property is both an element of self-expression as well as of alienation:
It is in the form of material property that the notion of oneself as being active—no, of having been active—for its own sake, first occurs to the consciousness of the subject which is still in the state of reflection. The action of the subject never manifests itself as present, it never lives in the present, but only in the past. It goes forth constantly deprived of its real property, its present activity, because it does not yet have the capacity to manifest itself in its true form. It holds fast only to appearance, to the reflection of its properties, of its activity, of its life, as if this reflection were its true life, its real property, its own activity !
This is the curse that has weighed upon mankind throughout history until now: that men do not conceive activity as an end in itself, but constantly conceive of its gratification as something separate from it: because all history up until now has presented itself as nothing else than the evolution of the spirit which, in order really to evolve, must appear first as an opposition to itself." (pp.96-97)
"The basis of the free act is the Ethics of Spinoza, and the forthcoming philosophy of action can be only a further development of this work. Fichte laid the groundwork for this further development, but German philosophy cannot break out of idealism on its own. In order for Germany to be able to attain socialism, it must have a Kant for the old social organism, just as it had for the old structure of thought. ... The value of negation was perceived in Germany in the realm of thought, but not in the realm of action." (p.98)
"The people, as the Scriptures say, have to work in the sweat of their brows in order to maintain their lives of misery... Such a people, we maintain, needs religion: it is as much a vital necessity for its broken heart as gin is vital for its empty stomach. There is no irony more cruel than that of those who demand from utterly desperate people to be clear-headed and happy. So long as you have not raised the people from the state of beastliness, please leave them the consciousness—nay, the lack of consciousness—of a beast. So long as the people is worsted by material slavery and poverty, it cannot be free im spirit...
There exists only one freedom... Spiritual and social enslavement are one and the same, and it is possible to break out of its satanic grip only through reaching to a healthy sphere of life... A people which does not think independently will not be able to act independently. It is true that religion can turn the miserable consciousness of enslavement into a bearable one by raising it to a state of absolute despair, in which there disappears any reaction against evil and with it pain disappears as well: just as Opium does serve painful maladies. The belief in the reality of the unreal and in the unreality of the real can indeed endow the sufferer with a passive feeling of salvation, an animal-like lack of consciousness. But it cannot endow it with active energy, with a real potentiality for action which would enable him to rise up consciously and independently against his misery and emancipate himself from evil." (p.102)
"The aim of the present generation is to recreate the “bond between the individual and the community, and the problem of our age is nothing else than the abolition of the opposition between the individual and the species [...] or in other words: to restore the unity of man with himself, with his own species— and to achieve this without diminishing the multiplicity of forms in which the human species expresses itself.”." (p.103)
"Hess also looked askance at what he detected to be the authoritarian elements in French communist thought, and he saw this as another problematical legacy of Jacobinism. It was paradoxical, Hess maintains, that those French communists who pride themselves on their utter rationalism are also those most in need of an unquestionable authority, though “they rely not on the Scriptures but on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.” This was true of the French democrats in general, but even more so of those who espoused materialist, communist ideas:
But not only the religious democrats, but even the materialists need an external and super-human authority as an antithesis to egoism and arbitrariness, as their materialism is not organic but atomistic. In order to create the unity absent from human life, and lacking an all-encompassing principle which would organize all human life and lead it to praxis, they invent dogmatic systems... All the democrats are the same in the sense that instead of the actual unity of human organic life they look for a transcendental unity... For the materialist democrats, just as for the religious ones, social life is still something other-worldly: the religious democrats relate social life to God, while the materialists ascribe it to an individual who has discovered the stone of wisdom—to a legislator or a communist dictator. In short—this is still an external bond, a transcendental unity, authority—this is not man and human life. [...]
This insecurity afflicts all of them: Cabet, the communist, does not tolerate besides his paper Populaire any other communist organ ; Louis Blanc does not hide his opposition to the freedom of the press ; the republicans of the National just as the socialists of Réforme are against the freedom of teaching ; the best among them fear the ‘anarchy of opinions,’ which they hope to overcome through the belief in authority.” " (pp.105-106)
"When man does not succeed in actualizing his creative potentiality, he seeks to find himself in imaginary external beings to whom he ascribes qualities of imaginary power: God or money. It is not true that man cannot worship both God and Mamon." (p.106)
"French socialism, for all its shortcomings, provided the basis, according to Hess, for the practical means for man’s self-development. The combination of the French and German elements Hess noticed from the experiences of German artisans and journeymen in Paris." (p.107)
"In England, the Industrial Revolution had already reached the stage where overproduction and massive pauperization were preparing the conditions for a new transformation of society:
This small nation on the island across the Channel produces more than it can sell in all the countries of the world which are swamped with its products. Nevertheless, it still does not produce one tenth of what it could have and might have produced if it would have found markets for its produce. And while its produce lies idle at home and abroad and is being wasted, part of its population lives, in the midst of all this wealth, a life of misery and deprivation, deeply mired in bestiality and without the most basic needs, without education, without bread, without clothes and without shelter. Men are cut off from their produce, and both disintegrate and perish.
Pious dreams about a return to an early, less acute situation of human relations are impossible. Nor could walls of tariffs protect local industries from the onslaught of cheap, modern industrial production." (p.108)
"Hess deviates from Feuerbach’s anthropology which sees man’s species-being as determined by nature. To Hess it is developmental, and hence grounded in man’s material relationship to his environment:
The essence of man, human intercourse, develops—like every essence—in the course of history through struggle and destrution. The actual essence of the human species—this interhuman intercourse—has, like everything else in reality a developmental history, the history of its evolution.
This historicity of the social world and of social organization starts with the end of natural developments. Nature, in contrast to history, is a given, while man is still in his process of becoming. What distinguished the modern age from all previous ones to Hess was the fact that contemporary man is much closer to the end of the historical process." (p.117)
"Human cooperation, too, is a potentiality, not a given, and it needs certain material conditions for its evolution. It is only in the present age, Hess argues, that men can imagine an harmonistic and cooperative society—not because they have not come across such an idea earlier, but because only in modern times have the forces of production developed in such a way that “the forces of nature do not stand vis-a-vis man any more as alien and inimical; he knows them and uses them for human purposes.”
It is of the nature of modern economic and technological development that contemporary crises do not derive from a shortage of natural resources available to men, but from overproduction, which is nonetheless unable to satisfy human needs because of chaotic organization. What humanity needs is to organize its enormous productive capacities, and this is a modern need, arising out of the revolutionary potentialities available to men since the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution for the first time emancipated man from natural poverty and presented him for the first time with rational models for the organization of production in a way which might satisfy all of humanity and not just certain classes or nations." (p.118)
"Theoretically speaking, the classical image of this inverted world is the Christian heaven. In the real world, the individual dies: in the Christian heaven he lives forever. Human life as species-life has been degraded in this world to a mere means for individual life... “If it were not for the hope of the life hereafter, I would not care at all for God and his dogmas”—in these few words, uttered by a devout man, all the essence of Christianity is to be found. Christianity is the theory, the logic of egoism—its egoistic practice is the modern Christian world of shopkeepers... The individual who wants to live through himself not for the species, but to live through the species for himself— such an individual must create for himself an inverted world. In our shopkeepers world, the individual is the practical goal of life, just as he is the theoretical goal of life in the Christian here." (p.120)
"What God is for theoretical life, money is for the practical life of this inverted life: the alienated and externalized essence of human potentiality and wealth, their commercialized life activity. Money is human value expressed in numbers—it is the mark of our slavery, the ineradicable sign with which our flesh has been branded—for human beings who buy and sell themselves are slaves. Money is the blood and sweat of those miserable ones... who bring themselves to the market place in order to exchange their inalienable life-activity for this caput mortuum called Capital and thus to live cannibalistically off their own flesh and blood. Indeed, we are forced to sell on the market and alienate our own being, our own life, our free life activity—in order to maintain our miserable existence. At the price of our personal freedom we constantly buy our individual existence.
Hess went on to suggest that just as God is nothing else than the ideal sum total of human qualities, so capital is nothing else than crystalized human labor." (p.121)
"Ancient slavery was overtly coercive ; it was forcibly imposed on human beings ; the situation of the modern wage slave is apparently voluntary, as the worker freely sells his labor on the market. One of the consequences of this distinction is that while ancient slavery was merely material, grounded in natural conditions, modern servitude is much worse : It implies spiritual as well as material enslavement. According to Hess, it was Christianity, with its spiritualized theology postponing redemption to a nebulous hereafter that provided the theoretical foundation for the legitimization of this voluntary, modern slavery implied by capitalism :
Only through Christianity . . . could this modern world of shopkeepers reach the height of its degradation, unnaturalness and inhumanity. Man must first learn to despise human life in order to give it up by his free will. Man must first learn to regard actual life, actual freedom, as unworthy, in order to offer it up freely. Humanity has first to go through the school of serfdom in order to obey slavery in principle." (p.122)
"Hess thought that Hobbes’ state of nature was a distorted caricature of modern bourgeois society." (p.128)
"In modern society the distinction between the property owner and his property is blurred. Following Feuerbach’s transformative method, in which object turns into subject and vice versa, Hess commented:
The mutual immersion of the property owner with his property is the characteristic of real property... All that I have put into my property, what really is my living property, is interwoven with myself, must be so and should be so. But what, then, is he who is thus integrated in his innermost self with his so-called property, with his money, who identifies himself so much with his money that he cannot be separated from it any more ? A miserable naught...
You must strive to possess something which can be never possessed, because in your money you can possess only a soulless body... You must feel happy to possess a body which can really never belong to you...
This is the world of inverted consciousness, in which all human properties appear as their opposite:
The world of shopkeepers is a practical world of appearances and lies. Beneath the appearance of independence—absolute poverty ; beneath the appearance of the liveliest intercourse—the deadly total separation of every human being from his fellow-men ; under the appearance of sacrosanct property guaranteed to all, man is being robbed of all his possessions; beneath the appearance of universal freedom—universal serfdom.
Future communist society, in contrast, will be characterized by a wholly different view of property. It will give rise to a kind of property which, just like spiritual properties in existing society, will not be viewed as a object of exclusive possession. This, to Hess, was the distinction between true property, which ts truly inalienable, and bourgeois property which is false property: “spiritual goods are effective only in so far as they are integrated organically with human beings.” False properties, like money, are external to man, and they will be eliminated in future society. Human socialibility, togetherness, will become man’s main property as species-being:
Once people will associate and unite with each other, once an immediate nexus will appear among them, the external, inhuman, dead nexus—money—will have to be abolished...
No more will we be looking in vain outside of ourselves and above ourselves. No alien being, no third mediating party will again push itself among us in order to unify us externally and in an imaginary fashion, in order to “mediate” while in reality it separates and divides us." (pp.130-131)
"Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, and others all had their philosophical impact on Marx. But it was to Hess that he owed more than to anybody else his development of social critique." (p.133)
"A Communist Credo, printed in 1846 in the form of questions and answers, and a series of articles called “The Results of the Revolution of the Proletariat,” published in the Deutsche Briisseler Zeitung towards the end of 1847." (p.139)
"Hess took a strong position against utopian attempts to delineate in detail the nature and structure of future socialist society. His generation, Hess contended, could “only do the preparatory work for such a society. ”! Hess’ historical and dialectical thinking convinced him that the revolution would not be a single, dramatic act which would miraculously transform existing society into a fullblown communist one. Revolution to him meant the setting into motion of processes, which would then allow the necessary transformation to be made." (p.141)
"The changes in the productive infrastructure as well as the changes in the educational, cognitive super-structure should, according to Hess, be carried out at the same time and influence and enhance each other." (p.143)
"Property taxes do indeed hit property owners, but only gradually. Consequently the owners of property may be induced to accept them because, in clear distinction from outright nationalization, such a process allows the property owner to adapt himself, his life-style as well the arrangements he would like to make for his family. Hess was aware of the psychological dimension which should guide a proletarian government ; it should try to make the period of transition not too traumatic for the propertied classes. They should not be pushed against the wall but allowed to adapt, over time, to the new conditions. A smooth transition to socialism, radical as its ultimate outcome would be, should be preferable to a violent, overall nationalization." (p.144)
"Why should England be the first country ripe for revolution ? Mainly because the social revolution as envisaged by Hess would be the outcome of the conditions created by advanced competition. The revolution would not be a result of some “principle,” as some of the socialists of the Young Hegelian school maintained. It is a dialectical outcome of industrial development under the conditions of free enterprise. Hess indicated how such an ever-increasing competition brings about increases in production but also causes the decrease of wages to the utter minimum. Both developments lead to overproduction of commodities accompanied by underconsumption, caused by the lack of purchasing power on the part of the underpaid proletariat. This surfeit of goods leads to the limitation of production, unemployment, further lowering of wages, bankruptcies, and the destruction of whole industries. This goes on until the whole economy reaches a new —and lower— internal balance which then creates new economic growth. At the same time, because many of the smaller and weaker firms went out of business during the crisis, economic power is being concentrated in fewer hands." (p.147)
-Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess, prophet of communism and Zionism, New York University Press, 1985, 266 pages.
