RAYMOND ARON
19
Leninism is of no interest to any serious person,
to
any scholar. To adopt an
expression of my friend Jon Elster, under what conditions can one be simul–
taneouslya Marxist-Leninist, intelligent, and honest? One can be a Marxist–
Leninist and intelligent, but in that case one is not (intellectually) honest.
There is no lack of sincere Marxist-Leninists, but they lack intelligence. Elster
is writing a book that attempts to "make sense of Marx"; not an intellectual
biography but an interpretation of Marxism, derived from the texts, which
will, so to speak, sum up the Marxism that is valid, or at least usable today.
My project is, or was a few years ago, entirely different: to clarify the
basic philosophical speculations of the young Marx, to grasp the broad out–
lines of economics as he presents them in the
Critique,
the
Grundrisse,
and
Capital ,
and to derive from these two parts the various possible Marxes and
the characteristics of the prophet-revolutionary. I doubt that I still have the
time to write this essay, sketched in my 1976-77 lecture course at the Col–
lege de France. ]t would fill an empty space in the body of my writings. But,
all
things considered, the loss does not seem to me to be serious, even for me.
As
I
write, a new Marxological dispute is developing.
It
has been pro–
voked by the sudden interest that British analytic philosophers have taken in
the Marxist philosophy of history. They are reconsidering the celebrated
text of the
Preface
to
Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy,
the
text that contained, according to Marx himself, the essentials of his conception
of history, a text that the Marxists of the Second International had endlessly
analyzed, and that Lukacs, and following him, the existentialists, had despised.
On the other hand, the economic works, written between the
Grundrisse
and
Capital,
have not yet been published. Understanding of the totality of Marx's
economic thought would require many years of Marxology. Specialists are
aware of an economist named Marx, richer, more subtle, and more interest–
ing than the author only of
Capital.
But the useful Marx, so to speak, the one
who may have changed the history of the world, is the one who propagated
false ideas; the rate of surplus value that he suggests leads to the conclusion
that nationalization of the means of production would allow recovery for the
workers of enormous qualities of value seized by the possessors of the
means of production; socialism, or at least communism, eliminates the cate–
gory of "the economic" and the dismal science itself.
As
an economist, Marx
remains perhaps the richest, the most exciting of his time.
As
an economist–
prophet, as a putative ancestor of Marxism-Leninism, he is an accursed
sophist who bears some re ponsibility for the horrors of the twentieth cen–
tury.
I should also regret the development foreseen in the
Introduction
and
in
History and the Dialectic of Violence.
Discussion of books by analysts no
longer excites me very much. The two controversies that have produced the
