On the Subject of the Dialectic by Bruno Bosteels

Indeed, another way of addressing the complex question of how to situate this writer's theoretical work would be to draw out all the consequences of the otherwise unsurprising fact that for Revueltas, by the early 1970s, Marxism was caught in a deep crisis. In this sense, too, Revueltas is much closer to Althusser than either one of them-or, for that matter, any of their critics-would be willing to admit. "Marx in his Limits,"19 the heading under which, in the 1970s, Althusser collected many of his thoughts that were to be published only after his death, could thus very well serve as a subtitle for the posthumous Dialéctica de la conciencia as well. Revueltas is certainly not proposing an uncritical return to some pristine orthodoxy or hidden doctrinal kernel of the early Marx. The aim is rather more contorted, as can be gleaned from the proposed plan of study that is included in the latter half of the book by way of framing its impressive range of notes, quotes, and interpretive glosses, most of them written between 1968 and 1971 in Mexico City's Lecumberri prison. If Revueltas sought to come to terms with the fundamental concepts of alienation, consciousness, and the philosophy of praxis implied in the Manuscripts of the young Marx, this was primarily in order to provide himself with the means to understand the dogmatic and revisionist deformations of the dialectic in the latter half of the twentieth century, at the hands of so-called vulgar, uncritical, or non-reflective Marxism. Marx's theory of alienation and ideology thus serves as a critical tool with which to analyze, and hopefully undo the effects of, the ideological alienation of Marxism itself.

Along this complex trajectory Revueltas found a symptomatic turning point precisely in the split between the early Marx and other Young Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach or Arnold Ruge. As he wrote in his "General Plan of Study": "It is a question of leading this investigation toward a clarification of the current crisis of Marxism. The point of departure for this investigation is situated at the moment of transition when Marxism discerns itself as such, separating itself from critical philosophy by extending the latter to society and its economic foundations. "20 In the operations with which critical philosophy becomes first dialectical, and then materialist, a logic of the social is contained that, once it is cut off from the concrete understanding of society as a contradictory totality, might paradoxically serve to explain the principles of its very own deformation. Revueltas finds this process at work not only in the official doctrine of Stalinism or in the inertia of many Soviet-oriented Communist parties, but also in the ideological radicalism of another typical product of the 1960s: the ultraleftist groups, or grupúsculos, throughout much of Europe and Latin America. One of the early titles for the main text in Dialéctica de la conciencia hinted precisely at this secondary aspect of the crisis of Marxism: La locura brujular del marxismo en México (ensayo ontológico sobre los grupúsculos marxistas).21 This ambitious plan to arrive at a dialectical ontology of group formations, which is much indebted to Sartre's project in his own unfinished Critique of Dialectical Reason (the first volume of which is significantly subtitled Theory of Practical Ensembles), obviously did not come to full fruition in Revueltas's notes for Dialéctica de la conciencia. But the reader will find long passages in which the internal crisis of critical consciousness, as explained through the notion of thought's self-alienation and disorientation, is tied to the proliferation of extreme left-wing groups, all proclaiming their fidelity to an hyper-ideological form of Marxism.