A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes (8 page)

From Hegel, he took the idea of becoming in a dialectical process (thesis, antithesis, synthesis).

According to Hegel: the idea of history which is achieved precisely by antinomies and which is proper to man, as I remind you that for Hegel, nature is always the same, it repeats itself.
The planets always run in the same way, and the evolution of the lower species, insects, animals, is extremely slow and invisible.

How does the world appear, according to Marx?

The first aspect is its
materialism
.
Marxism is the negation of religion.
He considered religion as a product
of men to run from danger.
And this is an instrument of the higher class to dominate the lower class.

Materialism constitutes the negation of idealism, of all metaphysics, of all recourse to ideas.
For Marxism, there is only the
brutal, concrete reality of life
.

Second aspect: Marxism defines itself by the well-known formula,
consciousness depends on being
.

For a classical philosopher, consciousness was a primary, elementary thing.
Everything was for consciousness, and nothing could determine it.

Marx proceeds to a new reduction of human reason.
It is a sociological reduction of thought.

The reductions in succession being:
1.
[
word missing
] reduction
2.
anthropological reduction
3.
phenomenological reduction (Husserl)
4.
sociological reduction (Marx)
5.
Nietzsche, who reduces philosophy to life.

In order to understand the evolution of thinking, one must know these reductions.

Sociological reduction means that consciousness is determined by existence.
This means making consciousness an instrument of life, which gradually developed, beginning with the lowest species by a
process of adaptation, of dialectical development, finally by a natural process as with everything.

This means that consciousness is a function of our necessities, of our relationship with nature.
But since man does not depend only on nature but also and above all on society, on historic conditions produced by that society, consciousness is formed by that society.
Consciousness is therefore above all a function of human history.

The third aspect: need creates value.
If you are, for example, in the Sahara Desert, a glass of water can signify an enormous thing for you, while if you are in Vence with the water of the Foux, then it loses its value.

This thesis seems absolutely correct to me.
Observe that, for example, it is at the basis of my critique of painting and contrary also to all forms of anarchy, all nihilism, and finally, to arbitrary, existentialist theories, according to which it is not the cause incarnated in a necessity which creates value, but the goals that man proposes in complete freedom.

For example, according to Sartre, a man needs water in the desert because he chooses life and not death.
For Marxism, a living being is obliged to choose life and one cannot speak here of free choice.

HISTORY
according to the Marxist interpretation.

The history of humanity comes from the necessity to technically dominate nature.

Now, the growing consciousness of humanity lets him organize a society and a state which are above all a system for the production of goods.

In this organization, one man must be subject to another, such that it is through the exploitation of one man by another that one arrives at the accumulation of goods.
The man who forms a group is subject to the laws of the group, which wants to be strong, and this strength is the consequence of the exploitation of man by man.
For example, the army which obeys a single man through generals, etc., or slaves or finally castes, different stages of the feudal systems, classes.

It is man who obliges man to work.

We thus reach the basic notion, so dear to Marxists.

This basis is the mass of the exploited.
The dominant class forms the superstructure which creates philosophy, religion, law, which in a word,
organizes consciousness
.
All of this actually serves secretly to maintain the exploitation.

Religion, for example, establishes that authority comes from God and the unfortunate of this world will find Paradise.
The profound and unique meaning of religion is quite simply to transfer justice to another world.

Christianity, which began as a revolution of slaves in Rome, nevertheless had a metaphysical component: God.
But through the church He became an instrument of exploitation.

When we look at prevailing morality, we see that it is mainly concerned with maintaining the right of ownership and imposing bourgeois morality on the proletariat.

The essence of philosophy resides in a contemplative attitude.
It does not want to change the world.
It escapes into metaphysics.
In short, it is reason separated from its foundation, a superstructure which seeks to hide its dependency.
It seeks absolute values and it is not concerned with necessities.
Our law is a system which seeks to consolidate the right of ownership and exploitation.
You see here that Marxism reveals myth, just like Freudianism or Nietzsche.
It consists in showing that behind our socalled “noble” feelings hide complexes, cowardice, and finally, the filth of life.
One of the great merits
of Nietzsche, who effectuated an extremely perspicacious critique of pure attitudes, is to have shown that our mind is made of the same material as everything else.

All this leads us to discover, so to speak, man’s first nature.
The second is a nature deformed by men, by the necessities of this system of exploitation that they call society, whose purpose is to produce goods by using other men.
We are in an economic system which deforms our consciousness.

You have seen how religion, morality, philosophy, law are made in order to mystify and to keep the slave in his bondage.

Here we move on to the well-known theory of
surplus value
.

Capitalists, that is to say, members of the upper class, buy labor as if it were merchandise, thus at the best possible price.
This better price represents the bare minimum that the worker needs to eat and to father children.

Surplus value
is formed this way because the worker produces much more than what he is paid; the rest goes to capitalism.

The worker always produces more than what he is paid.

Such is
surplus value
.
The worker’s labor is subject, like all merchandise, to Adam Smith’s famous economic law, according to which if supply is greater than demand, the value of the merchandise decreases.

It is this law which explains the process of devaluation.
To curb devaluation, supply, that is, production, must be increased.

If the currency is devalued, we need more francs each time.
As the surplus value goes into the capitalist’s pocket, then the workers, being poor, must offer their labor each time at lower prices.
This is how the devaluation of labor and the increase of capital are produced, an anonymous force, outside the human element: that which produces the famous
alienation
.

Alienated man, that is, he who cannot be himself, is obliged to serve as a machine instead of having his normal life.

This theory is fine, but in my view, it does not apply to capitalism.

Capital is used to create other wealth, but this exploitation of man by man is not done so much for the happiness of the individual.
Capitalism is not
exclusively beneficial to the capitalist, since if the capitalist is able to consume his money, he cannot buy more than one hundred hats or a yacht, etc., each year.
Where does the rest of his money go?
To other factories, other industries, etc., and this is the way that humanity’s technical power becomes greater each time.
This exploitation of man by man is a fundamental necessity for human progress, which is extremely difficult for the individual.

And now we move on to the “sweets,” that is, to

Revolution

Capitalism has this particularity: large capital consumes the smaller, and is concentrated in a very small group of men.
Marx anticipated that because of this evolution of capital, on the one hand a small group of multimillionaires would form, and on the other, an enormous crowd of proletarians which [
sentence incomplete
].

And this is how the proletarian revolution is going to happen, which is an inevitable necessity.

Where in this regard is Marxism in 1969?

The big crisis in Marxism stems quite simply from the fact that—as shown by the situation in the
East—one works badly and produces very little.
And why?
Life is hard; if you do not force men to work, naturally they will not work.

The paradox requires, and it is such an obvious paradox, all the bad faith of a certain left-wing faction not to recognize it: the only country in the world which has more or less liquidated the proletariat, except among the Blacks, is the glorious United States, that is, the capitalists.
The Socialists, on the other hand, are going bankrupt everywhere for the simple reason that no one is interested either to produce, nor to force others to do so, because there is no interest at stake.

Today the only hope for communists is for communism to work better in highly developed countries, which is sheer nonsense, since I only need to talk to my masseur five minutes to see that this is absolutely impossible, since man becomes even more egoistical in a rich society than in a poor society.

The Chinese
.
This is pure Stalinism!
Each Chinese person, in news reports on China, shouts like a soldier.
It is a terror.

Chinese production evidently increased, but it has not at all increased as one would believe!
These last years were a great disillusionment.

Marxism gives hope to the dispossessed.

Marxist thought has served overall to unmask [
sentence incomplete
], but all philosophical thought is generally utopian and leads nowhere.

For me, the Marxist question was absolutely badly put because they asked it from the moral point of view of “justice.”
But the real problem is not moral, it is economic.
To increase wealth is the priority, the distribution of wealth is a secondary thing.

They ask the question from the moral point of view because it is easier, naturally, and permits making lovely sentences.

We see, for example, that in the West the capitalist system succeeded in increasing production enormously, thanks above all to technology, so that the standard of living increased for everyone, whereas they get nowhere with the loveliest sentences.
Production drops.
Everything stays at the same level, everything slacks off in bureaucracy and anonymity.

There is an elementary thing: if you allow men to deploy all their energy and their intelligence, inevitably one will dominate the other, one will be superior to the other.
But in this case, you obtain a huge amount of energy, whereas if you want equality
between men, then naturally you must curb this possibility of superiority.

The future of Marxism?

I imagine that in twenty or thirty years, they will discard Marxism.

If the upper class remains as stupid and blind as it is now, and if it relinquishes power to the masses, then we must prepare for a period of regression which will last until the production of a new, strong upper class.
But if the right stands firm and does not allow that “guilty conscience,” which is actually typical of Marxists, to be imposed on it, then the matter can be resolved by huge galloping advancements in technology, which, according to my rough calculations, can radically change the world in twenty or thirty years.
We shall have little wings to fly...

Fascism is a revolution backwards.

The big defect in the upper class is that it is essentially a class of consumption.
Consequently, it is accustomed to conveniences, becomes lazy, delicate, and degenerate.
But now the upper class is increasingly composed of engineers, producers, scientists, intellectuals, lastly, some working people.

I notice a misuse of language by the left which made fascism a terrifying thing.
So, the word
“worker” does not mean a physician who works hard from morning to night, but rather it means a street sweeper who works for five minutes and then looks at the wall,
etc.
You see that even language has been falsified.

Leftists are imperialists.
They do not understand that they are aristocrats and the first thing that a revolution will do will be to liquidate them, as they did in Poland.

According to Marxism, we are faced with a distorted humanity.
It is exploitation which is the source of power.
It is our consciousness which is distorted, because it adapted to a system of exploitation it does not want to admit to.

Marxism is an attempt at demystification.

In a philosophical sense, Marxism does not posit an exact idea of the world, but only a liberation of consciousness so that it may react in an authentic and not deformed way to the world and man.

Realization of Marxism

1.
Marx’s thesis is that Marxism is an absolute historical necessity which occurs due to inexorable economic laws, by the concentration of capital in a little group that will be annihilated by the huge mass of the destitute.
Marxists want to introduce the dictatorship of the proletariat, not democracy but dictatorship.

What they call “popular democracy” is a camouflage.
This dictatorship of the proletariat must definitively destroy the bourgeoisie and nationalize the means of production (mines, farmland, factories, industries, all forms of exploitation of the worker by the employer).

In this first phase, that of dictatorship, it is the State which must dominate everything, to limit individual freedom and to introduce revolution into the world.
In this first phase, each person will be paid according to his services.

2.
The second phase is the “celestial” phase of Marxism.