“These petrified relations must be forced to dance”: An interview with Dick Howard
Douglas La Rocca and Spencer A. Leonard
Platypus Review 50 | October 2012
On August 22, 2012, Douglas La Rocca and Spencer A. Leonard of Platypus interviewed Dick Howard, professor emeritus at Stony Brook University and the author of The Specter of Democracy: What Marx and Marxists Haven’t Understood and Why, among other books. What follows is an edited transcript of their interview.
Spencer A. Leonard: In The Development of the Marxian Dialectic (1972), you countered Louis Althusser on the question of Marx’s relationship to the Young Hegelians and, through them, to German Idealism as a whole. And you specifically instanced Lukács as a crucial forbearer in arguing that
[T]he dialectic is the key to Marx’s position—his theory and his practice… dialectical philosophy is the only kind that can break the monotony of word games and historical or philological research [typical of philosophy departments at the time], and the only one whose method does not, by its very nature, condemn it to be a defense of the established order.[1]
What at that time demanded the sort of return to Marx’s dialectic that you undertook? How do you see your work as fitting in with the larger New Left “return to Marx”?
Dick Howard: First of all, there was really no “Marx” to return to in America. There was only a Communism that had become completely irrelevant. That explains the subtitle of The Development of the Marxian Dialectic: “from philosophy to political economy.” What I wanted to figure out was how Marx started as a critical philosopher but ended up doing political economy. To see why I asked this question you have to remember the climate of the time. The 1844 Manuscripts were not translated into English until 1959 by Martin Milligan and, then, more influentially in 1963 by Tom Bottomore. These writings brought out things that were new, particularly with regard to the canonical Marx. Then, there is the concern with political economy: When I arrived in Europe as a graduate student, I discovered Althusser, as you mentioned. My first impression of Althusser, particularly of his For Marx, was astonishment. His idea that Marx discovers through his critique of political economy a “new continent” could not help but fascinate. I actually made an appointment to see Althusser at the École Normale because I wanted to attend his seminars. It was one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had—I talked, he listened, he said nothing. I talked some more, he listened, yet still he said nothing. Finally I stumbled out of there, and he said, “Well, of course, you can come to my seminar.” When I arrived on the first day, there was a sign on the door saying “Monsieur Althusser est souffrant.” He was having one of his nervous breakdowns. But, to return to the point, “how do we get from philosophy to political economy?” Althusser was a help there, but more important, as you mention, was Lukács. His 1923 collection of essays, History and Class Consciousness, was fundamental… and too hot to handle, even—it turned out—for its author. One has to remember Lukács’s background. He grew out of the fin-de-siècle Austro-Hungarian milieu, wrote on culture, wrote on literature, and then discovered Marx and Marxism, and became an active revolutionary who actually took part in the 1919 Hungarian revolution. (The same year also saw the publication of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy.) Both were condemned by the Communist International, but Lukács went to Canossa, accepted the condemnation, and took his book out of circulation. Why the condemnation? Here we come to the dialectic. Lukács developed his major thesis simply by reading Capital as a critical Hegelian. Thus he did anticipate many of the insights we find in the 1844 manuscripts, of which he was not aware. After he renounced the book, it disappeared. A few people knew it, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who read it early and who, in his Adventures of the Dialectic, makes Lukács, along with Weber, into the foundation stone of what he calls “Western,” i.e. non-Soviet, Marxism. Of course, Lukács had been a participant in Weber’s Heidelberg circle, along with another figure who would also become a heretical Marxist, Ernst Bloch. When I knew Bloch, when he was in his 80s or 90s, he would talk about some of the Heidelberg salons, evoking dinners at which he would wax on with a sort of mystical Marxism to which people responded, “What’s he saying?” Lukács would then clearly and precisely explain the dialectical core of Bloch’s mystical élan, if you will.
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