Quick Notes on Karl Lowith's critique of Marxism in "Meaning and History"

1.) Lowith critiques Marx for having a kind of Christian, "eschatological" or "messianic" conception of history--insofar as there is a suffering subject (the proletariat) capable of "saving" humanity from a kind of sin (exploitation/alienation), and insofar as there is a history that points towards a radical break in which such "salvation" occurs. Lowith claims that we can find this thread "far less in his historical studies ('The Class Struggles in France from 1848-1850,' 'The French Civil War,' and 'The Eighteenth Brumaire') than in the 'Communist Manifesto' and 'Capital'" (33, first page of Lowith's essay on Marx). But Lowith bases almost all of his claims on works written in the period from the Dissertation to the "Manifesto" and completely ignores "Capital" (most of it, actually, seems to come from the "1844 Manuscripts"). Which means, if we take Althusser seriously, that Lowith's claims are all centered around the earlier, "humanist" Marx mostly previous to the "epistemic break" of the "Theses on Feuerbach," and so they ignore the mature thought in "Capital."

2.) Lowith conflates the "eschatological" with the "messianic." He says, towards the beginning of the essay, that Marx's (early) thought on the coming revolution points towards an end of time in an eschatological way--therefore reminiscent of the linear and teleological Christian timeline in City of God, etc. But he also later calls his thought "messianic." I think that's a totally different claim. So I agree that if we read Young Marx's stuff as being eschatological (and we probably can) then that's problematic and belongs to a certain tradition of Christian historiography. But if we can read that early stuff as "messianic" (and this would be reading Lowith against himself) then we could maybe situate the YM in an interesting conjunction with Benjamin in certain ways (I'm thinking of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History").

3.) In ignoring "Capital" and focusing almost exclusively (but tacitly) upon the "1844 Manuscripts," Lowith looks at issues of "history" but ignores, like I said, the problematic of history as it shows up in "Capital." But we also get in "Capital" what Negri calls the "highest point of development of the materialist idea of time" ("Time for Revolution" 30). If that's true, then if we want to know the proximity or distance of Marx from "eschatology" OR "messianism," then we can't just look at Marx's use of "history," but also his materialist notion of "time." Negri's going to say we get a radically different notion of time than the Christian eschatological tradition gives us (he roots the problematic of time in labor).