At the center of Marxism's conception of itself is the view that it is a "materialism." This materialism emerged in the course of Marx's determined opposition to two different types of "theories." On the one hand, he opposed and sought to differentiate his views from other forms of materialism, e.g., from "vulgar," mechanical, or bourgeois materialisms. This, however, was only a secondary opposition. The overshadowing context in which Marx's materialism arose was his opposition to everyday idealism, expressed in a critique of traditional religion, that was extended into an opposition to the dominant German philosophical idealism, and especially Hegelianism. This critique of idealism is essentially a critique of the idea that mind or consciousness determines or is independent of the other spheres of life; it is also a critique of the Enlightenment premise that social changes proceed from prior changes in understanding or consciousness. The Marxist critique of ideology, which is also part of its rejection of idealism, entailed the transformation of Destutt de Tracy's positive appreciation of "ideology" into a negative symbol. This inversion derived from the fact that de Tracy's concept of ideology² rested on the idealistic assumption that changes in ideology were the key to social transformations; it premised that if one changed the present belief system, eliminating its errors, and educating the populace into the newly purified ideologies, a better society and state would result. Marx, who recurrently mentioned de Tracy's work polemically, had picked up de Tracy's word, "ideology," fully explicated its idealistic assumptions, but then evaluated these negatively rather than positively. Marx thus inverted de Tracy's notion of ideology and then used it as a way to generalize the Left Hegelians' critique of religion. The focus now moved from the critique of religion to a more general ideology critique. This allowed a critique of secular belief systems, including rational philosophies and metaphysics, even of those defining themselves as "sciences." It is via Marx's devalution of ideology that he moves from an explicit critique of religion to a critique of rational secular philosophy and of the social science of political economy. These, he holds, are also ideological because they believe themselves autonomous when, in fact, they are dependent on other social conditions.

An essential beginning for Marx, what he faced as a given, was an entrenched idealism that existed on different levels: on the level of everyday Christianity with its stress on the godly, sacred, spiritual; on the level of German culture with its concepts of Geist and Kultur; and on the level of the continuous tournament of technical German philosophical idealisms that became entrenched institutionally as the everyday sub-culture of German universities of the time, and which made a certain affirmation: ideas (spirit, mind, consciousness) are all-powerful, independent, and self-controlling.

Marxism first defined itself by drawing a line between itself and idealism. Affirming itself as a "materialism," it opposed idealism in two ways; first, by asserting the contrary of idealism and, secondly, by negating idealism. For example, one may say of a political party, "It is good for the people." Opposition to this statement can take, at least, two different forms: one can reply, "No, that party is bad for the people." Here opposition takes the form of asserting the contrary. In the contrary, two alternative attributes are set forth as tacitly encompassing all the alternatives, each of which has been asserted explicitly and with equal clarity, and an object cannot be both but must be one or the other.

The second form of opposition, negation, rather than holding that the political party is "bad," simply says that it is not-good. Note, this does not say what the party is, but only what it is not. This may seem to be a trivial distinction, but it isn't; for while negation may entail the contrary, it need not. That is, if we say X, a political party is not-good, we may or we may not hold that it is bad, for we may be tacitly making a different type of affirmation altogether. For instance, to hold that X is ''powerful'' or "active " are cases of the negation that X is good; but they do not necessarily affirm that X is bad. Indeed, a negation may imply that an affirmation (good) and its contrary (bad) are both irrelevant, and that X is neither; it may focus X on an altogether different dimension, say, on a "potency" rather than an "evaluative" dimension. A negation, then, leaves open the question of what is being affirmed and thus has an inherent ambiguity.

In negation one might affirm the contrary, thereby accepting that the object must be characterized on the dimension tacitly implicated in the initial affirmation; or negation may imply the rejection of this dimension and focus on another dimension, and a specific point on this second dimension. Negation, then, includes the possibility of a contrary, but does not limit itself to it.³ A familiar instance of this in current discourse is the relationship between "reason" and "violence." In liberal discourse, reason and violence are commonly treated as contraries, implying that they art at opposite poles of one dimension. This further implies that if you settle a dispute by violence you cannot settle it with reason, or if you choose reason you cannot choose violence. A different contention, however, would be that (made, for instance, by Roy Edgely)⁴ violence does not exclude the rational; that violence may or may not be rational; and hence the contention is that the negation of the rational, the nonrational, is not necessarily the violent but may include the non-violent. That is, certain settlements of disputes may be neither rational nor violent; for instance, throwing dice to see who wins; and certain settlements may be both rational and violent.

Marx's opposition to German idealism, with the latter's affirmation that ideas (spirit, mind, consciousness) are all-powerful, independent, and controlling vis-a-vis other things, sometimes proceeds by negating idealism and sometimes by affirming its contrary. In short, Marx conflated the contrary and the negation. In affirming idealism's contrary—the less ambiguous and the more limiting response—Marx is led to affirm that ideas are weak, dependent, and controlled (epiphenomenal) elements. Instead of causing something, ideas are caused. The affirmation of the contrary, then, is the distinctive method of critique; it is the "transformative criticism" or "inversion" common to the Young Hegelians from whom Marx emerged. Thus in rejecting "Consciousness determines social being," Marx often affirms the contrary, namely, "Social being determines consciousness.

This is quite different from an alternative mode of opposition to idealism also used by Marx, that of negation, in which he would simply hold: rather than being all-powerful, ideas are not all-powerful, rather than being independent, ideas are not-independent; rather than being controllers, ideas are not-controllers. Marx's conflation of these two forms of opposition, of the negation with the contrary, was a consequential confusion. For to say ideas are not-all-powerful is not necessarily to say they are weak; and h, say ideas are not-autonomous is not necessarily to say they are dependent.

Marx's opposition to idealism thus opened in two different directions, sometimes toward negation and sometimes to an affirmation of the contrary, an inversion. Many of the problems of Marxist materialism are grounded in serious ambiguities born of his conflation of the contrary and the negative.

In the following there are alternating concrete examples of the differences between Marx's use of the negation and the contrary to oppose Germal1 idealism; they are taken from a single source, one of Marx and Engels's early critiques of idealism, The German Ideology.⁵ The juxtaposition of contrary and of negation, often only a few pages apart, documel1ts that there was indeed a confusion of the two.

Materialism as Negation: "Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness thus no longer retain the semblance of independence." (p 14)

Materialism as Contrary: "Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life." (p 15)

Materialism as Negation: "When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence." (p. 15)

Materialism as Contrary: "Our conception of history does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, . . . but only by the practical overthrow of actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug." (pp. 28-29) ". ..the removal of these notions from the consciousness of men, will as we have already said, be affected by altered circumstances, not by theoretical deductions." (p. 32)

To oppose idealism only by negating it is commendable from a standpoint concerned to be prudent and seeking to avoid insupportable overstatement. But negation is dramaturgically weak since it leaves open the question of what it is for and hedges on the issue of what is. Negation is a weaker, seemingly empty form of opposition, that presents no positive alternative to what it opposes but simply rejects it. It is "negative," in the sense of incomplete. The contrary, however, opposes the adversary and, at the same time, exhibits the alternative to his position; it does not simply seek to put him down but to raise up something and someone else. It is "positive." The contrary not only holds the opponent to be wrong but adds under its breath that he could not have been more wrong, and that the truth was the very opposite of what he had held. The contrary, then, has vividness and metaphysical overkill that gives it a dramaturgical edge.

To constitute itself as a positive alternative to idealism, Marxism was often led to affirm idealism's contrary which, on the sociological level, meant affirming that it was not ideologies but the forces and relations of production—the material, economic, and property institutions—that determine outcomes in society, "in the final instance." The only alternative to this, in opposing idealism, was to speak of the mutual interaction and reciprocal influence of infra- and superstructures, i.e., a version of holistic analysis, which in effect denies that there is any infra- or superstructure at all. The first formulation, stressing the dominance of "material" forces and organizing itself as the contrary of idealism, constitutes Marxism as a "factor model" counterposing its own single factor against other competing single factors. Holistic analysis, however, derives from an opposition to idealism grounded in its negation, and is open toward a version of systems or totality analysis.

The Marxist use of the contrary to oppose idealism had the effect of focalizing material conditions—certain relations and forces of production—as the necessary condition of socialist revolution. Materialism-as-contrary (of idealism) asserts something positive as a politics. Its strategy of revolution focused on the more advanced industrial nations and led to an expectation that they comprised the best investment for political struggle and the best arena for socialist transformation. Materialism-as-contrary became the basis for a decision by socialists concerning which societies they should invest themselves in and which they should not. In effect, then, the Marxism that came to be called ''scientific'' Marxism, epitomized by the Second International and Karl Kautsky, grounded itself in a positivistic Marxism that opposed idealism by affirming its contrary. Not only did this imply a conception of revolutionary strategy, but it also entailed a conception of the essence of socialism itself, seeing this as grounded in the construction of a new technology, new forces of production, the growth of science, and other "material" forces. Materialism-as-contrary, then, was what became "scientific" Marxism, particularly when combined with a determinist and wooden conception of social evolution stressing the inevitability of socialism. This conception had ambiguous political consequences. On the one side, it sustained political opposition by those in a weak minority, allowing them to carry on despite this weakness, feeling that history would ultimately send reinforcements if they could only hang on. But if such an "historical materialism" gave socialists the courage to endure, it also fostered their passivity and quiescence, leading them to expect that deliverance was in the historical works, quite apart from anything that they might have to do or to suffer.

A socialist politics grounded in a materialism-as-negation, however, is ambiguous with respect to what is essential to socialist strategy and tactics, as well as what defines a socialist economy or society. Such negation-grounded Marxism remains flexible about political strategy or tactics or, for that matter, about the nature of socialism itself. Such a Marxism can acknowledge that the transformation of "material" conditions is an element, or beginning, that is indeed necessary for socialism and socialist revolution. This acknowledgement permits it continued membership in the Marxist community and asserts a "Marxist" identity, without, however, accepting the limits commonly imposed on the politics of Scientific Marxism. This materialism-as-negation can now attribute heightened importance to voluntaristic, theoretical, and ideological dimensions—to "consciousness"—and is less bound to define its enemies only in terms of their economies and technologies. Above all, it need not restrict its political ambitions to those societies that already have an advanced industrial basis. A negation-grounded Marxism, then, can seek revolution anywhere and at any time, without being limited by the presence of an advanced material base.

The most important historical case of a negation-grounded Marxism, Maoism, continually exhibited its own grounding in the negating dialectic by repeatedly emphasizing, as Mao himself did, that "It is always right to rebel." Here the "always" signaled that the right to rebel need not wait for the emergence of "appropriate" material conditions, or for prior industrial development. Mao's remark, "Power comes out of the barrel of a gun," similarly implied that it is struggle and combat, rather than science, technology, and other forces of production, that are the essential conditions for revolution and socialism. But if materialism-as-contrary Marxism inhibits and limits revolutionary militancy, and may thus become a kind of ritualistic socialism, materialism-as-negation Marxism escalates revolutionary militancy but runs the danger of losing sight of the goal, blurring the distinguishing essence of the socialism it seeks; for it now premises that socialism can be built anywhere, on any technological, material basis. In the Maoist case of a negation-grounded Marxism, the essence of socialism came to be defined in terms of new egalitarian relations of production, the struggle against the division of labor between mental and manual work and between the city and countryside, rather than in terms of the material forces of production.

The evolution of Marxist parties since the nineteenth century has been from a contrary-focusing to a negation-grounded socialism. The latter is context-freeing for Marxism and for socialist politics, allowing them to operate in less developed economies; at the same time, it is a context-freeing which threatens Marxism's identity with boundary dissolution. Materialism-as-negation Marxism was what came to be called Critical Marxism, Western Marxism, or Hegelian Marxism. Its essential characteristic is that it also stresses the importance of theory, of ideology, or consciousness, of militant struggle as necessary agencies of revolutionary change, no less than of material forces. In short, Critical Marxism focalizes exactly what had been repressed by Scientific Marxism, i.e., the "subjective" factor, just as Scientific Marxism focalized what idealism had been silent about, the "materialist" elements. The dialectic and oscillation between Scientific and Critical Marxism, is grounded then partly in Marx's original conflation of "negation" and "contrary," in his polemic against idealism.

1. I shall suggest, rather audaciously, that Marxism involved a fundamental logical confusion. Marx, I shall argue, confused two modes of opposition to idealism, conflating the "negation" with the "contrary" of idealism. As to the meaning of these terms, I intend to commit myself to no more than I explicitly state below. Moreover, in characterizing this conflation as a mistake, I mean only to suggest that the negation and the contrary are quite different forms of opposition with different consequences. Finally, if the mistake takes a logical form, it does not necessarily have its roots only in a logical miscalculation.

2. For further discussion of de Tracy's views see Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, pp. 11 - 14.

3. See, for instance, A. J. Greimas and Francois Rastier, "Les Jeux des Constraintes semiotiques," Du Sens (Paris, 1970), pp. 135 - 55. See also the discussion by Fredric Jameson, Prison House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 163-68, and Jameson's subsequent application of Greimas's model to the analysis of Max Weber, surely one of the more original discussions of Weber in a decade, in F. Jameson, "The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber," New German Critique, Winter 1973, pp. 52-89.

4. See R. Edgely, "Reason and Violence," in Stephan Korner, ed., Practical Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 113ff.

5. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 69.