_French_philosopher_Engraving_of_the_19th_-_(MeisterDrucke-1023203).jpg) |
| Portrait of August Comte, the founder of positivism |
[Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3]
Marxism
Without its Head or its Heart: A Reply to David North
By Frank
Brenner and Alex Steiner
Chapter notes for the 2025 edition
· The Use and Abuse of Objectivism
Chapter
notes for the 2025 edition
In
Chapter 3 we explore the profound difference between
the Marxist conception of Science and the ordinary everyday notion borrowed
from the practice of the natural sciences. The political implications of confusing the
two are vast. We will say a bit more about what those differences are shortly,
but first it is important to understand how our attempt to discuss this
theoretical problem was responded to by David North. In his polemic against us he spent many pages
trying to make the absurd claim that our investigation of his misuse the
Marxist understanding of Science meant that we were opponents of science. In a
similar vein he maintained that our critique of the objectivist theory and
practice that guided the ICFI was a denial of objective reality. He literally
made the claim that when we speak of “objectivism” we are denying objective
reality and are attacking the ICFI for basing their politics on the objective
world and on the laws governing that world.
One would think that only an idiot would lend credence to such a
caricature of our argument without further investigation. But that is exactly what happened with the
overwhelming majority of members and supporters of the ICFI. And that was not because the members and
supporters of the ICFI lacked intelligence or the capacity for thinking. It was because they have been trained for
decades to be uncritical hand-raisers and to never rock the boat when it comes
to challenging the pronouncements of Mr. North.
The ordinary,
everyday conception of science has been moulded by the mechanical science first
developed by Galileo and Newton four centuries ago. That conception of science
is in sharp contrast to the much broader understanding of Science that was
recognized by Marx and that arose out of the tradition of German philosophy as
it was developed by Hegel and his predecessors. The German word Marx employed, Wissenschaft,
has a much broader meaning than its common English equivalent, “science”,
particularly as that term is applied to the natural sciences. According to the Hegel dictionary, “…it is
applied more widely than ‘science’ now is: e.g. the systematic study of art,
religion, history, ethics, etc, is a Wissenschaft.”
On the
other hand, there is a much narrower scope to the ordinary notion of “science”. It is based on an understanding of mechanical
science that sees the world as governed by immutable laws. It postulates that
if we can discover those laws and know everything about the initial conditions
of any object in the universe, we would be able to predict its future behavior perfectly
100% of the time. The principles of that science had a profound effect far
beyond the science of physics as it decisively influenced the culture of the
Enlightenment and all that followed it. When such principles were extended to
the social realm it signified that the future was already pre-determined and
any notion of human agency or free-will is an illusion. The absolute dichotomy between the laws of
nature and society and human agency was the conundrum brought about by the
Enlightenment. It was the contradiction Marx identified and sought to overcome
when he wrote in his Third Thesis on Feuerbach,
The
materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing
forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to
educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society
into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The
coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or
self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary
practice.
The
Enlightenment, while holding fast to the model of mechanical science, also
expressed the radical idea that human emancipation against arbitrary rule was
not only possible but was the driving force of historical progress. These two
threads of the Enlightenment were clearly in conflict.
By the
middle of the 19th century an ideology was born whose roots were
embedded in that strand of the Enlightenment most influenced by the science of
mechanics. That ideology was named positivism and its first champion was the
philosopher August Comte. The positivist philosophy fit the conservative
impulses of the petty bourgeois following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in
Europe. It was no accident that the reactionary authorities throughout Europe
persecuted the remnants of the Hegelian school — the milieu in which the young
Karl Marx began his political education — who were by then the only viable
opponents of positivism.
Here is
how Marcuse characterized Comte’s positivism and how it differed from the
revolutionary strand of the Enlightenment:
The
Enlightenment affirmed that reason could rule the world and men change their
obsolete forms of life if they acted on the basis of their liberated knowledge
and capacities.
Comte’s
positive philosophy lays down the general framework of a social theory that is
to counteract these ‘negative’ tendencies of rationalism. It arrives at an
ideological defense of middle-class society and, moreover, it bears the seeds
of a philosophic justification of authoritarianism.
We further
explored in Chapter 3 the political implications of substituting the positivist
conception of science for Marx’s. In a
nutshell the positivist notion of science as it was applied in the Marxist
movement signified an adaptation to the status quo. We explored the history of the embrace of
positivism within the Second International and how it set the stage for the
betrayal of the socialist project. In
more recent years the positivist understanding of science as it applies to
history and economics has become a formal academic discipline known as
“Analytical Marxism”. Yet even
self-professed Marxists who don’t identify with this intellectual trend have
adopted, if not consciously, a positivist approach to science. It is this
theoretical abortion that David North has been defending for decades with hist
so-called “science of perspectives”. But
unlike any genuine science, even science understood in the narrower sense, in North’s “science of perspectives” one’s
prognoses are always confirmed and there is no room for correcting any errors. Look
as much as you want in the archives of the World Socialist Web Site and you
will never find an admission of an error or a course correction.
We noted
that North’s adoption of the positivist notion of science leads directly down
the road to an abstentionist political practice, one that we analyzed in detail
in Chapter 1 and which was expressed in more extreme forms in recent
years. The ICFI today has adopted a
hands-off policy when it comes to the actual struggles of the working class while
criticizing all manifestations of such struggles from the side, as if they have
a perch on Mount Olympus and are having a good laugh at the stupidity of the
human actors. Their answer to what they see as the imminent threat of fascism
in the U.S. is to tell workers to abandon their existing organizations and join
the WSWS-approved mythical “Rank and File Committees”.
Chapter
3:
Their
Science and Ours
In the section of his essay, What is Objectivism?, North denies our
charge that in the theory and practice of the International Committee, Marxism
has been replaced by objectivism. It is
a curious reply to what we said because nowhere does he quote anything we wrote
about this issue. North launches into this topic by claiming that our critique
of his and the International Committee’s “alleged abandonment of dialectics and
the fight against pragmatism is a subterfuge.”
North goes on to characterize our charge of objectivism in the following
manner:
What you refer to falsely as
“objectivism” is the Marxist striving to reflect accurately in subjective
thought the law-governed movement of the objective world of which social man is
a part, and to make this knowledge and understanding the basis of revolutionary
practice. For all your talk about “dialectics” and the “fight against
pragmatism,” everything you write demonstrates indifference to the requirements
of developing a working class movement whose practice is informed by Marxist
theory. (30)
In other
words, North is claiming that when we decry him for being an “objectivist” that
we are actually denying the necessity for practice to be based on an assessment
of objective reality. North provides no
evidence for our supposed rejection of objective reality. He indulges in a bit
of subliminal sleight-of-hand by substituting the word “objective” for
“objectivism” and claiming that we are opponents of a practice based on a
cognition of objective reality because we have written a critique of his “objectivism”. It is hardly necessary to comment at all on
such a crude distortion of our position.
Yet it is on the basis of this crude distortion that North proclaims,
Your
usage of the word “objectivism” is incorrect, and reflects a basic disagreement
with materialism. (30)
As North
completely ignores what we actually said about objectivism, let us reiterate a
few remarks we made on the subject:
North’s
letters to Steiner (see the appendix to Steiner’s document) lay out this
objectivist standpoint in the clearest possible terms: Kautsky and Plekhanov
were victims of objective conditions, their betrayals had nothing to do with
their attitudes to revolutionary theory. If this is true, then we are at a
complete loss to understand why it is that Lenin and Trotsky, who were subject
to the same objective conditions, didn’t betray. And the implications for today
are obvious: if the theoretical practice of figures of Kautsky and Plekhanov’s
stature made no difference to their ultimate fate, then why should we be any
different? This sort of ‘defense’ of classical Marxism turns into a
rationalization instead of a guide to action. And typically ‘orthodoxy’ turns
out to be anything but orthodox, in this case ignoring some of the most
important lessons of the history of Bolshevism.
What
objectivism routinely downplays is the significance of consciousness. The
practice which goes with an objectivist outlook is abstentionism, which in the
IC’s case takes the form of a retreat from any involvement in the working class
into a journalistic existence on the internet.
The Use and Abuse of Objectivism
The issue that we highlighted in raising the charge of
“objectivism” was therefore not the dismissal of objective reality, but the
relationship between the objective and the subjective. Nor is our use of the term “objectivism” some
kind of departure from its long accepted meaning within the Marxist movement.
As proof, we can cite none other than North himself, from his 1988 book The
Heritage We Defend:
The standpoint of objectivism is
contemplation rather than revolutionary practical activity, or observation
rather than struggle; it justifies what is happening rather explains what must
be done. This method provided the
theoretical underpinnings for a perspective in which Trotskyism was no longer
seen to as the doctrine guiding the practical activity of a party determine to
conquer power and change the course of history, but rather as a general
interpretation of a historical process in which socialism would ultimately be
realized under the leadership of nonproletarian forces hostile to the Fourth
International. Insofar as Trotskyism was to be credited with any direct role in
the course of events, it was merely as a sort of subliminal mental process
unconsciously guiding the activities of Stalinists, neo-Stalinists,
semi-Stalinists and, of course, petty bourgeois nationalists of one type or
another.[1]
In characterizing the practice that goes along with an
objectivist outlook, North added the following prescient remark:
Thus Marxism ceased to be an active
political and theoretical weapon through which the vanguard of the working
class established its authority among the masses and trained and organized them
for the socialist revolution. Rather, it was merely “confirmed” by an
abstraction called the “historical process,” working in quasi-automatic fashion
through whatever political tendencies were at hand, regardless of the class
forces upon which they were objectively based or and no matter how notorious
their past or reactionary their program.[2]
Twenty years ago, North had important things to say about
objectivism as a standpoint that always minimizes the role of the conscious
element. Today he deliberately tries to obscure that understanding of
objectivism by pulling a number of quotes out of context.
This is particularly true of the use North makes of a
quotation from an early work of Lenin which contrasts the attitude of the
materialist with that of an “objectivist”.
The
objectivist speaks of the necessity of a given historical process; the
materialist gives an exact picture of the given social-economic formation and
of the antagonistic relations to which it gives rise. When demonstrating the
necessity for a given series of facts, the objectivist always runs the risk of
becoming an apologist for these facts: the materialist discloses the class
contradictions and in so doing defines his standpoint. The objectivist speaks
of “insurmountable historical tendencies”; the materialist speaks of the class
which ‘directs’ the given economic system, giving rise to such and such forms
of counteraction by other classes. Thus, on the one hand, the materialist is
more consistent than the objectivist, and gives profounder and fuller effect to
his objectivism. He does not limit himself to speaking of the necessity of a
process, but ascertains exactly what
class determines this necessity. In the present case, for example, the
materialist would not content himself with stating the “insurmountable
historical tendencies,” but would point to the existence of certain classes,
which determine the content of a given system and preclude the possibility of
any solution except by the action of the producers themselves. On the other
hand, materialism includes partisanship, so to speak, and enjoins the direct
and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in any
assessment of events. [Collected Works,
Volume 1 (Moscow, 1972), pp. 400-01, emphasis in the original] (31)
 |
| Lenin in 1900, photo by Y. Mebius |
Lenin’s point in this piece is that an “objectivist” while
noting the facts, becomes a slave to those same facts and fails to delineate
the significance of those facts from the standpoint of the working class,
whereas a materialist [ i.e. a revolutionary Marxist] assesses the facts from
the standpoint of locating the historical forces that could overcome them. North’s introduction of this quote is
provided without any context and for good reason. For Lenin is here arguing against the
mechanical materialist notion of historical inevitability that we ourselves
have raised in bringing up the issue of objectivism.
North does not bother to inform the reader that the Lenin
quote is an excerpt from the early work of Lenin, The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of it in Mr.
Struve’s Book, which is a critique of the treatment of Narodism by the
legal Marxist Peter Struve. To properly
understand Lenin’s intent in this piece it is necessary to know something about
the historical background behind it.
Narodism was a populist movement that thrived in the latter part of the
19th century in Russia and attracted a following among the
revolutionary intelligentsia. It was for
all intents the major revolutionary movement prior to the rise of Marxism on
Russian soil. The Narodniks looked toward
the peasantry as the revolutionary class and through them hoped to put an end
to the Czarist autocracy. They theorized that Russia could advance to a form of
socialism based on the ancient peasant communes that once played an important
role in the economic life of Russia, some of whose vestiges still remained in
the 19th century.
The first Russian Marxists argued against the Narodniks that
capitalism would inevitably gain a bigger and bigger foothold in Russia and
with it would develop a powerful working class. It would be the working class
and not the peasantry that was fated to be the agent of revolutionary change
whose goal would be not the ancient peasant commune reborn but a bourgeois
democratic revolution that in turn would prepare for a socialist revolution at
another stage. The position of the “Legal Marxists”, defended by Peter Struve,
represented the most retrograde strand among these early followers of Marx.
Struve and his co-thinkers took the thesis of the inevitability of capitalism
in Russia and transformed it into a very conservative apology for the Russian
bourgeoisie.
 |
| Peter Struve |
What Lenin is getting at in his critique of Struve is that
the criticism made of the Russian populists by Struve and other “Legal
Marxists”, that the Narodnik’s theory of society was unscientific and based on
the method of subjective idealism, was actually an attack on Narodism from the
right, dressed up in the language of Marxism and materialism. Lenin recognized that Struve and the Legal
Marxists were employing a pseudo-Marxist terminology in order to convince the
public that objective conditions were paving the way for capitalism in Russia
and therefore it was useless to struggle against the inevitable political
supremacy of the bourgeoisie. Whereas
Lenin agreed that objective conditions were paving the way for, indeed had
already introduced capitalism in Russia, he opposed Struve’s position that the
working class must therefore simply bow down to these facts and accept its fate
as an exploited class. In the section
immediately preceding the quote provided by North Lenin writes the following:
We must object to a remark which Mr. Struve
directs against Mr. Mikhailovsky. “According to his view,” the author says,
“there are no insurmountable historical tendencies which, as such, should serve
on the one hand as a starting-point, and on the other as unavoidable bounds to
the purposeful activity of individuals and social groups”.
That is the language of an objectivist, and not
of a Marxist (materialist). Between these conceptions (systems of views) there
is a difference, which should be dwelt on, since an incomplete grasp of this
difference is one of the fundamental defects of Mr. Struve’s book and manifests
itself in the majority of his arguments.
There is
a very specific historical and class content to Lenin’s use of the term
“objectivism” in this essay. Contrast that with North’s explanation:
Lenin does not use the term “objectivism” as
an epithet directed against those who study the socio-economic processes that
constitute the basis of revolutionary practice. Rather, he strives to impart a
richer, more profoundly materialist content to the study of the objective world
by demanding that it identify the class dynamics of any given social situation,
and, on that basis, define as precisely as possible the political tasks of the
revolutionary party. Lenin’s vast theoretical output was characterized principally
by his unrelenting determination to ground the perspective, program and
activity of the Russian workers’ movement in a precise and comprehensive
understanding of objective reality. (31-32)
In reading North’s description,
one would never guess that Lenin is here criticizing the misuse of the Marxist
criticism of populism and subjective idealism by a mechanical materialist
defender of the bourgeois order. North’s piling up of the adjectives “richer”,
“more profound” to qualify the already qualified “materialist content …of the objective
world” (indeed does an objective world have any other kind of content?) conveys
the impression that Lenin is here waging a battle on behalf of materialism
against the forces of subjective idealism. An unpacking of the context of this
essay however shows that the target of Lenin’s polemic was a form of mechanical
materialism – objectivism – not very different from the one North espouses.
Thus North deliberately distorts both the context and significance of Lenin’s
remarks for his own polemical purposes.
Yet at one time the author of The Heritage We Defend knew better. There, after quoting this same
article by Lenin, North wrote the following:
The above-quoted lines were directed against
the school of “legal Marxism” which, while correctly establishing the
capitalist nature of Russian economic development in the 1890s, habitually
referred to “insurmountable historical tendencies” as if they operated outside
of and independent of the class struggle. For objectivists, classes exist
merely as programmed, unconscious executors of economic forces. Thus, the legal
Marxists acknowledged and established the necessity of capitalist development
in Russia, but would not recognize nor countenance the historical and political
legitimacy of the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie.[3]
The
North of 1988 does a good job here of rebutting the North of 2006.
As we
pointed out, our usage of the term “objectivism” is hardly an innovation. We
were applying the definition in the way it has always been understood in the
polemical writings of the International Committee. The issue first emerged in
Steiner’s 2004 document, Dialectical
Cognition and Revolutionizing Practice.
While the word itself does not appear in that essay, the critique of
Plekhanov in that essay identified him as a mechanical materialist who believed
in the inevitability of socialism emerging as a result of the maturation of
objective conditions. North sharply
differed with our assessment of Plekhanov, claiming we were somehow diverging
from Marxism and materialism by bringing up the philosophical shortcomings of
Plekhanov. Yet an examination of the manner in which Plekhanov’s role was
understood within the International Committee in the mid-1960s clearly shows
that it is North and not us who departed from the assessment of Plekhanov. Take for example, this excerpt from a review
of a biography of Plekhanov published in 1964 in the theoretical journal of the
International Committee. The review was written by Tom Kemp, a leading party
intellectual in the British Trotskyist movement:
Plekhanov's manner of presenting the problem
of the coming Russian revolution was thus a mechanical one. It depended upon
the maturing of objective conditions in the economic sphere and upon the
destruction of the autocracy in the political sphere. The task of socialists in
the immediate period was first and foremost to hasten the downfall of Czardom.
Beyond that, as capitalism developed and the proletariat grew, the conditions
would be prepared for the socialist revolution. This emphasis on objectivism conditioned Plekhanov's political
responses to the developments of the last phase of his life, notably the
revolutions of 1905 and 1917. [our emphasis]
It made him see the tasks of socialists as essentially propaganda in character;
to enunciate principles rather than programmed of action. Caught up in the
discussions which took place inside the Russian Social Democratic Party over
the party organisation and policy, his positions seem to lack consistency until
it is seen that he was trying to maintain his own 'orthodoxy' which, in the
end, won but a handful of adherents.[4]
Kemp’s
article, to say nothing of North’s own writings, confirm that our use of the
term objectivism is entirely consistent with how that term has been
traditionally used within the Trotskyist movement. It is North who is departing
here from the heritage of Trotskyism.
It is
much the same story when North raises the case of the employment of the term
“objectivism” in the International Committee’s critique of Pabloite
revisionism.
As a
matter of historical fact, the method of “objectivism” – which may lead
depending on circumstances to one or the other political form – found its most
developed expression in the Fourth International in the revisionist theories
and politics of Pablo and his acolytes, Mandel and Hansen. Pabloite revisionism
made a specialty of invoking demagogically, in an entirely abstract manner, the
image of an all-powerful wave of revolutionary struggles that would –
regardless of the political leaderships of those struggles and the masses’
level of consciousness – sweep all obstacles before it and conquer power. (36)
North
proceeds to quote Cliff Slaughter,
“The
fundamental weakness of the SWP resolution is its substitution of
‘objectivism,’ i.e. a false objectivity, for the Marxist method. From his
analysis of imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, Lenin concluded that
the conscious revolutionary role of the working class and its party was
all-important. The protagonists of ‘objectivism’ conclude, however, that the
strength of the ‘objective factors’ is so great that, regardless of the attainment of Marxist leadership of the
proletariat in its struggle, the working-class revolution will be achieved, the
power of the capitalists overthrown.” [Trotskyism
Versus Revisionism, Volume 3 (London, 1974), p. 161] (37)
Then
North declares:
“Objectivism” as it is defined here by Cliff
Slaughter in opposition to the Pabloites has absolutely nothing to do with your
use of the term as an epithet directed against those who attempt to base
revolutionary politics on a correct Marxist
analysis of socio-economic phenomena. (37)
But this
is as much a distortion of the historical record as North’s use of the quote
from Lenin. To begin with, nowhere did we ever use the word “objectivism” as a
term of abuse “directed against those who attempt to base revolutionary
politics on a correct Marxist analysis of socio-economic phenomena”. This is a
constant refrain of North’s throughout his document: he obviously feels that
repeating this crude distortion often enough will eventually make it ring true.
Instead what we pointed to was the inadequacy of such an approach. Of
course an analysis of socio-economic conditions is a necessary prerequisite for
Marxists, but that is all it can be, as the example of the Legal Marxists,
Plekhanov and many others demonstrates. “Objectivism” is a diagnosis of a general
philosophical-political standpoint. It always represents a dichotomy between
the objective and subjective factors of history and leads to adaptation to
existing reality in the name of “objective facts”, about which there is little
we can do. Pabloism in the 1950s and 1960s represented one particular form of
objectivism. The “objective facts” to which Pabloism capitulated was the
apparent hegemony of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, which to them precluded the possibility of building independent
revolutionary parties for an entire historical period. Therefore, the search
was on for a substitute for the working class and the revolutionary party and
this was soon proclaimed to be either Tito in Yugoslavia, Ben Bella in Algeria,
or Castro in Cuba.
As we
have seen, the objectivism of Struve and the Legal Marxists in Russia at the
turn of the last century took a very different form. Rather than looking for a
substitute for the revolutionary role of the working class, the Legal Marxists
proclaimed that the inevitable laws of historical development led to the
hegemony of the bourgeoisie in Russia, and consign the working class to the
subservient role of supporting the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie. Their perspective left no independent role
either for the working class or for Marxists. The Legal Marxists eventually
followed the logic of their position and joined the political parties
associated with the bourgeoisie.
The
objectivism of North and the International Committee has taken yet a different
form. We have characterized it thus:
The
practice which goes with an objectivist outlook is abstentionism, which in the
IC’s case takes the form of a retreat from any involvement in the working class
into a journalistic existence on the internet.
It is revealing that North nowhere denies that the IC has retreated into a largely journalistic existence. Rather his only reply is the shameless distortion that when we employ the term “objectivism” we mean it in the sense of dismissing the need for a study of objective historical conditions.
The Embrace of Positivism
Politically, objectivism is grounded in a philosophical
outlook that is inimical to Marxism. The profound difference between the two
can be further assessed if we examine the closely related conception of science
as the objectivist sees it and as Marx conceived of it. Let us first of all
examine North’s conception of science. North chastises us in the following
paragraph:
You tell
us that “Marxist science is not a science in the conventional sense: its aim is
not only to understand the world but also to transform it.” But to what extent,
Comrades Steiner and Brenner, is the revolutionary, i.e., historically
progressive, transformation of the world dependent upon a correct understanding
of it? You need to think much more carefully about the answer you give to this
question. Whether you call it “conventional” or “unconventional,” Marxism can
be considered a science only to the extent that the goal of its
world-transforming practice – the ending of capitalist exploitation and the
establishment of a socialist society – is based on a correct understanding of
the laws of social development, rather than a mere desire for change, let alone
a “will to power.” In Marxism, the means by which revolutionists seek to
transform the world is rooted in and inseparable from their understanding of
the objective laws that govern the movement of society. This is a critical
codicil of Marxist theory that cannot be violated without inviting political
catastrophe and, I must add, moral shipwreck. (33)
North is here trying to paint us as opponents of science. He
completely avoids the issue that we have raised, namely what, if anything, is
the difference between the Marxist conception of science and the conventional
understanding of that term? North even mocks us for raising the question, as if
only a muddle-headed mystic could possibly imagine that the question has any
meaning. This is inexcusable and cannot be explained on the basis of ignorance.
It is well-known that the German word Marx employed, Wissenschaft, has a
much broader meaning than its common English equivalent, “science”,
particularly as that term is applied to the natural sciences. For example, the textbook,
A Hegel Dictionary, provides the following definition of Wissenschaft:
It
applies to the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften),
but is less closely associated than ‘science’ with the natural sciences and
their methods. Thus it is applied more widely than ‘science’ now is: e.g. the
systematic study of art, religion, history, ethics, etc, is a Wissenschaft. Hence it is natural to
regard philosophy, as long as it is systematic as a Wissenschaft. [5]
For
Hegel and German idealism as a whole, science was not merely contemplative but
was intrinsically tied to the realization of freedom in history. For Marx too,
science always meant Wissenschaft
rather than the narrow construction it eventually became in Anglo-American
philosophy. Marx shared the ideal that science in this broad sense, Reason writ
large, is to be realized in the historical process, even as he rejected Hegel’s
view that freedom could be realized within the framework of bourgeois
society. Science for Marx was inherently
critical and revolutionary. Thus, in the
Poverty of Philosophy he writes,
Just as the economists are the scientific
representatives of the bourgeois class, so the socialists and the communists
are the theoreticians of the proletarian class … In the measure that history
moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer
outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to
take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece.[6]
 |
| Marx as a young revolutionary |
This
historical understanding of science was emasculated in the latter part of the
19th century at the hands of the positivists. Positivism arose as a philosophical and
political movement in reaction to what it considered the dangers of an idealism
that was then still tied to the idea of Freedom. As Marcuse discusses in his study of the rise
of social theory, Reason and Revolution,
The Enlightenment affirmed that reason could
rule the world and men change their obsolete forms of life if they acted on the
basis of their liberated knowledge and capacities.
Comte’s positive philosophy lays down the
general framework of a social theory that is to counteract these ‘negative’
tendencies of rationalism. It arrives at an ideological defense of middle-class
society and, moreover, it bears the seeds of a philosophic justification of
authoritarianism[7]
Positivism
in its further development sought to eviscerate philosophy from science. Henceforth, science would be narrowly defined
as the endeavor of a class of specialists who employ the tools of empirical
observation to arrive at a series of immutable laws. Furthermore, the
categories which delimited the scope of each science were presupposed. Thus was born the notion of science as a
“value free” enterprise. The positivist definition of science was borrowed from
the practice of the natural scientist but a practice that was comprehended in a
crude empirical fashion. This model of science, taken from a poorly understood
conceptualization of the natural sciences, was systematically applied to the
social sciences. As Marcuse explains,
The
science of society is, in principle, not to be distinguished from natural
science. Social phenomena are ‘exact’ to a lesser degree and more difficult to
classify than natural phenomena, but they can be subjected to the standard of
exactness and to the principles of generalization and classification; for this
reason the theory of society is a real science.[8]
But the
rise of the new positivist science of society is incompatible with a
dialectical theory of society.
The very
principles, however that make sociology a special science set it at odds with
the dialectical theory of society…The dialectical theory emphasized the
essential potentialities and contradictions within the social whole, thereby
stressing what could be done with society and also exposing the inadequacy of
its actual form. Scientific neutrality was incompatible with the nature of the
subject-matter and with the direction for human practice derived from an
analysis of it.[9]
Positivism
eventually metamorphosed into several branches, but all of them had in common a
stripped down theory of science and, as we will show, an aversion to
dialectics. In the 20th
century positivism, in the form of what was to be known as the school of
Logical Positivism, was to play a very important role in molding the attitudes
of generations of intellectuals.
 |
| Some of the leaders of Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists. Moritz Schlick, the leader of that school, was later assassinated by a Nazi. |
Marxist science, on the other hand, contrary to what North
maintains, is a special kind of
science. It is not like sociology or any of the social sciences. Nor is it like
physics or any of the natural sciences. It is distinguished first of all by the
fact that it is systematic, in the original sense of a Wissenschaft.
That means that it cannot, as is the common practice in sociology or physics,
take its categories for granted and simply work within the framework that is
defined by such categories. Rather, for Marx, every category is critically
examined. That is why instead of proceeding like the political economists do,
Marx does not simply accept the categories of the everyday world of economic
life such as commodities, money and capital. Instead Marx asks what these
entities are and peels away layer upon layer of the mysteries lurking within
them. This is only possible because for Marx science is inseparable from
philosophy, from a comprehensive inquiry into the ontological and historical
status of man and his world and the contradictory process whereby one social
formation gives way to another. Take the following justly famous passage from Capital in which Marx contrasts the
positivist science of political economy with his endeavor,
Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product.[10]
Note that for Marx, political economy is a science only in a very restricted sense. Whereas its best practitioners such as Smith and Riccardo did “uncover the content concealed within these forms”, they never thought to ask the question why this content is expressed in this particular form. In other words, they took for granted the categories that were handed down to them in their world of bourgeois social relations. Why did they stop at that point and why didn’t Marx? To answer this question is to get to the heart of the difference between science as a narrowly construed methodology working within pre-given boundaries, and science in Marx’s sense. The latter is summed up in Marx’s description of his employment of the dialectic in the Postface to the Second Edition of Capital,
In its mystified form, the dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists. In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary.[11]
In this sense science is indeed a search for truth, but certainly not an impassive or nonpartisan affair. Marx made the point very early on in his career that the search for truth, which is at one with the struggle for human emancipation, can only be realized when the theoretical project is united with a living social force. That force is the working class.
Here is how he put it in the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:
Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy. [12]
In this conception of science, we are at once collecting
factual evidence, making generalizations from that evidence and deriving the
regularity, interconnectedness that define the behavior of the phenomena under
investigation. But we do not stop there. If we did, we would simply be doing
what bourgeois social science does and imprisoning ourselves ideologically
within the confines of the “laws of motion of society”. While we recognize
these “laws of motion”, if we are taking the standpoint of a critical,
dialectical and revolutionary theory we also recognize the inhuman character of
the life that these laws prescribe. And when it comes to the “laws of motion”
of bourgeois society, these are at once as Marx described them, both objective
laws and “absurd”, i.e. they prescribe a way of life that is not worthy of our
human nature. Thus Marx observes,
If I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen because the latter is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a relation with linen, or with gold or silver (and this makes no difference here), as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society appears to them in this absurd form.[13]
The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought, which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of production, i.e. commodity production.[14]
As the above statement makes clear, Marx’s conception of science does not end with the articulation of the “objective laws of motion” of society. Marx is thus not simply trying to provide a more consistent account of bourgeois society than the bourgeois economists. His aim is different. He is uncovering the deformed modes of human relationships that are hidden behind these laws. He is looking at the internal contradictions hidden within these relationships and their transitions and transformations into their determinate negations. It is only because Marx goes beyond the parameters of non-dialectical social science that he is able to uncover the objective basis for the transition from capitalism to socialism. For Marx, we are not simply observers, but active participants in this process and in this way bring together the objective and the subjective, theory and practice. This difference in philosophical outlook explains why Lenin, looking at the same facts as Struve, can adopt such a diametrically opposed standpoint to those facts and those laws.
What happened from the time in the 1840’s when Marx, transforming the heritage of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and German idealism, articulated his revolutionary and dialectical vision of science, to the 1890’s when Struve could articulate his sclerotic, narrow and essentially apologetic version of science? The intervening decades saw the retreat of the working class movement, first as a result of the defeats suffered in 1848 and later the defeat of the Paris Commune. With the wave of political retrenchment there came about a cultural and philosophical backlash against the ideas that inspired these movements. Thus by the 1850’s, just two decades after the premature death of Hegel, his star had plummeted from being the leading philosopher in Germany to being a “dead dog”. With the passing of Hegel the dialectic was also consigned to the museum of historical antiquities.
What rose in its place were retrograde philosophical trends such as neo-Kantianism and positivism. Positivism in particular really took off in the second half of the 19th century. The project of positivism was to purify the scientific enterprise from what was considered obsolete hangovers from philosophy. This had implications not only for the practice of the scientist, but positivism soon carved out brand new disciplines from what was previously considered areas of philosophy. The rise of the social sciences, inspired by positivism, takes place in this period. The model upon which these new sciences were founded was the template created by Newtonian physics. Thus sociology was supposed to locate certain lawful relations within society that had the precision and certainty, and causal connections exhibited by the laws of Newtonian mechanics. But the social relations between people, unlike the laws of physics, are neither timeless and immutable, nor are they the product of forces outside of us about which we can have no role.
Furthermore, this rise of what was “value free” social science was not confined to the universities and the writings of bourgeois professors. They soon influenced and eventually dominated the thinking of the intellectuals of the Marxist movement organized in the Second International. The chief theoreticians of Second International Marxism, Kautsky, Plekhanov and Hilferding, were all heavily influenced by positivist notions of science. We owe to Hilferding, who in his time was considered the chief economic theorist of the Second International, the following classic positivist statement of the scientific method and its relationship to socialism:
To know
the laws of commodity-producing society is to be able, at the same time, to
disclose the causal factors which determine the willed decisions of the various
classes of this society. According to the Marxist conception, the explanation
of how such class decisions are determined is the task of a scientific, that is
to say a causal, analysis of policy. The practice of Marxism, as well as its
theory, is free from value judgments.
It is therefore false to suppose, as is widely done intra et extra muros,
that Marxism is simply identical with socialism. In logical terms Marxism
considered only as a scientific system, and disregarding its historical
effects, is only a theory of the laws of motion of society. The Marxist
conception of history formulates these laws in general terms, and Marxist
economics then applies them to the period of commodity production. The
socialist outcome is a result of tendencies which operate in the commodity
producing society. But acceptance of the validity of Marxism, including a
recognition of the necessity of socialism, is no more a matter of value
judgment than it is a guide to practical action. For it is one thing to
acknowledge a necessity, and quite another thing to work for that necessity. It
is quite possible for someone who is convinced that socialism will triumph in
the end to join in the fight against it. The insight into the laws of motion
which Marxism gives, however, assures a continuing advantage to those who
accept it, and among the opponents of socialism the most dangerous are
certainly those who partake most of the fruits of its knowledge.
On the
other hand, the identification of Marxism with socialism is easy to understand.
The maintenance of class rule depends upon the condition that its victims
believe in its necessity. Awareness of its transitory character itself becomes
a cause of its overthrow. Hence the steadfast refusal of the ruling class to
acknowledge the contribution of Marxism.
Furthermore, the complexity of the Marxist system requires a difficult course
of study which will be undertaken only by those who are not convinced in
advance that it will prove either barren or pernicious. Thus Marxism, although
it is logically an objective, value-free science, has necessarily become, in
its historical context, the property of the spokesmen of that class to which
its scientific conclusions promise victory. Only in this sense is it the
science of the proletariat, in contradistinction to bourgeois economics, while
at the same time it adheres faithfully to the requirements of every science in
its insistence upon the objective and universal validity of its findings.[15]
 |
| Rudolph Hilferding |
Hilferding’s
notion of Marxist science as a “value free” enterprise, having no necessary
connection to the struggle for socialism was typical of the thinking of Second
International Marxism and far from its most vulgar example.[16]
Hilferding himself exemplified the flawed brilliance and tragedy that marked
other leading figures of the Second International. He was in the ‘Center’ of
the German Social Democratic Party, and although he was opposed to the
abdication of the party in 1914, he did not openly fight the leadership. He
later became a harsh critic of the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution and
followed roughly the same political trajectory as Kautsky in the period after
the war. Intellectually he was a figure of considerable stature: the work from
which the above quote was taken, his Finance Capital, was one of the
major sources for Lenin’s study of imperialism. Yet Hilferding and Lenin,
while looking at what were essentially the same facts drew diametrically
opposed conclusions in terms of their political practice. This striking historical contrast
demonstrates that what North calls a “correct understanding” is never by itself
a sufficient condition upon which to base a revolutionary movement. [17]You
could have a “correct understanding” of society and react like either a
Hilferding or a Lenin.
Hilferding’s statement is illustrative of the rot that had taken hold of the Second International in the years prior to World War I. And that rot was simply the other side of the coin – dialectically speaking – of the open revisionism of Eduard Bernstein. Whereas Bernstein repudiated the conclusions of Marxist theory by denying that there was any objective basis for the struggle for socialism, Hilferding repudiated the methodological foundations of Marxism. Bernstein sought to substitute an ethical imperative having no objective grounding as the basis for socialist politics. Hilferding proclaimed that the objective basis for socialism was all that we need – in the process ignoring dialectics and what Trotsky called “revolutionary will”.
Yet Hilferding’s position was representative of the great majority of the orthodox Center of the Second International, of the Kautskys and the Plekhanovs. That is why even as Kautsky and Plekhanov – correctly – took up the battle against Bernstein’s open repudiation of Marxist theory – they were unable to maintain a revolutionary orientation in the face of the onset of wars and revolutions that beset the world in the first decades of the 20th century. Reflecting on the experience of the betrayal of the Second International in 1914, Lenin recognized that to some degree the orthodox defense of Marxism on the part of Kautsky and Plekhanov against the open revisionist Bernstein, masked over the theoretical atrophy that was eating its way through the orthodox Center. That is why, in his Hegel Notebooks, Lenin wrote the following remark,
Plekhanov criticizes Kantianism (and agnosticism in general) more from a vulgar materialist standpoint than from a dialectical-materialist standpoint, insofar as he merely rejects their views a limine, [from the threshold] but does not correct them (as Hegel corrected Kant), deepening, generalizing and extending them, showing the connections and transitions of each and every concept. [18]
What the ‘number one member of the Michigan branch of the Plekhanov fan club’ (as North once referred to himself in his correspondence with Steiner) cannot explain is the relationship between Plekhanov’s impoverished version of the dialectic and his political opportunism despite his adherence to Marxist ‘orthodoxy’. Indeed, he denies that there is any connection between them. But this relationship was pointed out over forty years ago in the theoretical work of the International Committee. The following is a cogent observation on this subject from the same essay we had previously cited,
His [Plekhanov’s] mechanical acceptance of Marxism led him to believe that proletarian self-consciousness would develop automatically; his Populist background left him with a belief in the mission of the intelligentsia, its role being now to raise class consciousness. When members of the socialist intelligentsia accepted Bernsteinism or took the workers as they were, with their existing level of consciousness, they committed a kind of treason. He was not able to understand the dialectics of this process in its full complexity. [19]
Although Lenin was well acquainted with the political shortcomings of the Second International, the extent of its theoretical atrophy only became clear to him at the moment of betrayal in 1914.[20]
What North has done in his attempt to ridicule our statement that Marxist science is something entirely different from the ordinary conception of science is essentially to erase the significance of the difference between a Hilferding and a Lenin. Furthermore, to make his case, North has to wipe out an important episode in the history of the Marxist movement, namely the ideological degeneration suffered by Marxism in the period of the Second International when dialectics gave way to positivism in philosophy.
But
although North avoids an explicit discussion of the subject, he provides us
with a fair account of his notion of science in the following remarks:
“Marxism, as a method of analysis and materialist world outlook, has uncovered laws that govern socio-economic and political processes. Knowledge of these laws discloses trends and tendencies upon which substantial historical ‘predictions’ can be based, and which allow the possibility of intervening consciously in a manner that may produce an outcome favorable to the working class.”
North is here quoting his own words from one of his summer school lectures. He advises us, in a footnote, that, “This is a passage from the fourth lecture, which included a substantial section devoted to the refutation of Sir Karl Popper’s attack on Marxism. Your document contains not a single reference to this lecture and its attack on Popper’s empiricism.” We will turn to North’s confrontation with Popper momentarily, but it is worth reflecting on the above statement from the summer school lecture, as it gives us a good indication of how North conceives the relationship between Marxists and the working class.
That relationship is something akin to being a good weatherman who is able to make predictions that assist the working class in avoiding a dangerous storm while taking advantage of a spell of sunshine to “produce an outcome favorable to the working class.” It is not at all obvious what North means when he refers to “an outcome favorable to the working class.” But what is clear is that North hangs everything on the ability of Marxists to make correct predictions, and that this in itself is sufficient to correctly orient the working class. What is missing from North’s equation is what Marx called “revolutionizing practice”, i.e. the transformative activity of the party and the working class.
History has provided the basic premise for the success of the revolution – in the sense that society cannot any longer be develop its productive forces on bourgeois foundations. But history does not at all assume upon itself – in place of the working class, in place of the politicians of the working class, in place of the Communists, the solution of this entire task. No, History seems to say to the proletarian vanguard (let us imagine for a moment that history is a figure looming above us), History says to the working class, ‘You must know that unless you cast down the bourgeoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civilization. Try, solve this task!’ Such is the state of affairs today.[21]
Now it
is of course true that Marxists must work out a prognosis about the direction
and tempo of socio-economic and political developments. And it is also true
that because Marxists base their prognosis not on superficial trends but on the
essential movement of capital whose laws work themselves out beneath the
surface of daily appearances, they have a more profound insight into the nature
of the crisis of capitalism and its possible resolution. But the entire purpose of working out a
prognosis is to serve as a guide to the conscious intervention of the party in
the struggles of the working class. In
that sense a prognosis is very
different than a prediction. A prediction is what a physicist or a
sociologist of the positivist persuasion does when he extrapolates “trends”
that exist completely outside of us. But
in the living struggle of classes it is not possible, without debasing the
entire project, to assume that developments will proceed according to laws that
exist outside of us. The reason is that in
the sphere of politics, particularly at a moment of revolutionary crises, the
subjective becomes a decisive part of the objective and the outcome can never
be predicted in advance. At least that
is how the relationship between the party and the class was conceived by
Trotsky when he presented his remarkable prognoses during the first five years
of the Communist International. We have
quoted parts of Trotsky’s speech to the Third Congress of the Comintern
previously, but it is worth repeating in the context of the present discussion:
North’s
comments on the anti-historicist Karl Popper are revealing of his own approach
to history and science. He introduces his remarks by noting that Popper was,
“Among the fiercest critics of the possibility of a science of society which
can make meaningful predictions about the future…” He noted that Popper, “…
rejected what he called “historicism,” by which he meant “an approach to the
social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their
principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the
‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns,’ the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the
evolution of history.” Popper wrote that he was ‘convinced that such
historicist doctrines of method are at bottom responsible for the
unsatisfactory state of the theoretical social sciences...’ [22]
In his lecture, North does present a number of valid objections to Popper’s
anti-historicism, but in the process he misses the central problem with
Popper’s attack on Marxism. The central
issue is that Popper’s depiction of what he called “historicism” is a vulgar
caricature of Marxism or what Marxists have meant by the term
“historicism”. For Popper “historicism”
is the attempt to apply a positivist model of the natural sciences onto the
social sciences.
Here is
the gist of Popper’s argument,
…we must
reject the possibility of a theoretical history; that is to say, of a
historical social science that would correspond to theoretical physics.
There can be no scientific theory of historical development serving as a basis
for historical prediction.
The
fundamental aim of historicist methods is therefore misconceived, and
historicism collapses. [23]
In his lecture North quotes these statements
and correctly disputes Popper’s contention that “there can be no scientific
theory of historical development.” But he lets pass completely Popper’s litmus
test for historical science, namely that a historical science must correspond
to (i.e. follow the model of) theoretical physics and match its predictive
capacity.
Popper’s contention is that history is too
complex, contains too many factors to be amenable to any law-governed
process. In rebuttal, North correctly
cites meteorology as an enterprise which is considered a science despite the
fact that it cannot produce the kind of exact predictions that are possible in
physics. Instead, meteorology is characterized by tentative predictions that
have only a statistical degree of accuracy. Indeed it is even the case that
with quantum mechanics, physics itself exhibits laws that are only expressed
through statistical norms. Yet no thinking person would object to calling
meteorology, let alone modern physics, a real science. Therefore, argues North, Popper’s rejection
of historical science on the basis that it cannot exhibit the kind of exact
predictability that is accomplished in physics is a false argument.
North’s arguments against Popper are
correct, but for all that they entirely miss the mark. All they demonstrate is that Popper’s line of
reasoning against historical science is false.
But they tell us nothing about what historical science is. Worse than
that, North’s line of argument reinforces Popper’s belief that the model of
science is the natural sciences, where predictability is the sine qua non of the genuine article even
if predictability is not always exact.
But historical science in the Marxist sense is not at all like
meteorology. What North entirely leaves
out of account is that whereas predictability is characteristic of a certain
form of science, namely the natural sciences, there is another criterion by
which we may judge whether a discipline is a true science. What about the ability to provide an explanation of a phenomenon in terms
that bring together a particular with a universal? [24]
When it comes to historical science, we are looking to the explanatory value of
a theory more than its ability to make predictions. And it is this explanatory
value that is critical for Marxism.
Popper’s anti-historicism must be rejected because it denies the
possibility of finding what had been called meaning in history – i.e. the
discovery of the rationality behind the multifarious contingent events that
comprise history. And without ‘meaning in history’ universal projects are off
the table, and no project is more universal than that of the revolutionary
transformation of society. At best we are left with pragmatic experiments that
may alleviate pain a bit but can never overcome existing social relations. That
in a nutshell is Popper’s formula for what he called the “Open Society”.
 |
| Karl Popper |
In contrast, it is the responsibility of
Marxists to develop a practice in the working class based on a prognosis about
the objective situation such that the working class will be brought closer to
an understanding of its historical role. That is not equivalent however to
obtaining a tactical advantage as a result of making a correct prediction.
Insisting on the predictive ability of historical science is simply falling
into the trap of identifying historical science as another one of the natural
sciences following the model of positivism.
It is a trap that has ensnared North.
But as we have shown, this positivist model
of science was not what Marx had in mind when he spoke of history as a Wissenshaft. To make this point clearer,
imagine for a moment that it would be possible to overcome Popper’s objections
and marry his vision of science with history, thereby producing a science of
history that “corresponds” to physics. What would the science from this
unlikely marriage look like? It would certainly not bear any resemblance to
what Marx or Lenin understood by a science of history. Rather what would emerge
from such a confluence is the positivist version of a “value-free” science that
was championed by Hilferding – in other words, a ‘science’ that ultimately
functioned as an ideological prop of the existing order.[25]
A new
generation looking to Marxism for answers to the crisis that besets us today
will not find it in a retread of the orthodoxy of the Second International.
Unfortunately, this is all they will get out of North’s philosophical exercise.
What passed for Marxism in the Second International paved the way for the great
betrayal of 1914. The enormity of that
betrayal was unsurpassed in its time and was only overtaken by the even greater
betrayals of Stalinism a decade later.
Any attempt to return today to some idealized version of a “healthy”
Social Democracy will only pave the way for new betrayals in the future. What is needed today is not a return to
orthodoxy, but a return to Marx’s dialectic, the only comprehensive theory of
change to arise out of the Western tradition. [26]
Only then will philosophy rise beyond the level of mere contemplation and
become a force, wedded to the struggles of the working class, in changing the
world.
NOTES
[1] David North, The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of
the Fourth International, (Labor Publications, 1988), p. 188.
[2] The Heritage We Defend, p. 189.
[3] The Heritage We Defend, p. 190.
[4] Tom Kemp, Review of Plekhanov; the Father of Russian Marxism, Fourth
International, Fall-Winter 1964. We have
posted the essay at: http://www.permanent-revolution.org/archives/plekhanov_review.pdf
[5] Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, (Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p.
265
[6] MECW, Vol. 6, p.177
[7] Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, (Beacon Press, 1960), p. 342
[8] Ibid, p. 377
[9] Ibid, pp. 377-378
[10] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, (Penguin Classics, 1990), pp. 173-174
[11] Ibid,
p. 103
[12] Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to
the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, MECW, Volume 3, p.187. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
[13] Cyril
Smith has pointed out that a better translation of the German word Marx
employs, verrückte, is “crazy” rather than “absurd”. See his Marx at the
Millenium, (Pluto Press, 1996), p. 76.
[14] Marx,
Capital Volume I, p. 169
[15] Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study
of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, (Routledge, 1981), pp.23-24.
[16] Karl Korsch deserves credit for being the
first to point to this passage in Hilferding’s book as illustrative of the
theoretical degeneration of the Second International. Korsch in his 1923 book, Marxism and
Philosophy, identified positivism as the bacteria that had infected the body of
Second International Marxism. Korsch’s words are still relevant:
The minimization of philosophical problems by most
Marxist theoreticians of the Second International was only a partial expression
of the loss of the practical, revolutionary character of the Marxist movement
which found its general expression in the simultaneous decay of the living
principles of dialectical materialism in the vulgar Marxism of the epigones…
Nothing was further from [Marx and Engels] than the claim to impartial, pure,
theoretical study, above class differences, made by Hilferding. The scientific
socialism of Marx and Engels, correctly understood, stands in far greater
contrast to these pure sciences of bourgeois society (economics, history or
sociology) than it does to the philosophy in which the revolutionary movement
of the Third Estate once found its highest theoretical expression. (Marxism and Philosophy, NLB, 1970, p.
68-69)
Further developing Korsch’s critique of Second
International Marxism was the epochal book by Georg Lukacs, History and Class
Consciousness. In particular the two
brilliant essays in that collection, What is Orthodox Marxism? and Reification
and the Consciousness of the Proletariat provided the foundation, along
with Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks and the subsequent discovery and publication of
the early writings of Marx, for a rediscovery of the Hegelian heritage of
Marxism. Unfortunately the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the
Soviet Union cut off this possibility for decades to come.
[17] This is not to imply that the objective
situation will always be assessed in the same way by a Marxist and an
objectivist. Contrary to the tenets of
positivism, “facts” can never be separated from concepts and the dialectical
method is inextricably interwoven in the Marxist understanding of the crisis of
capitalism. The abandonment of the
dialectical method has resulted historically in such theoretical abortions as
the later Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism or Mandel’s theory of
neo-capitalism. Our point is that even in the case where the objectivist and
the Marxist substantially agree as to the nature of the objective situation,
they will draw different conclusions.
[18] V.I.
Lenin, Collected Works Volume 38, (Progress Publishers), p.179.
[19]
Tom Kemp, Review of Plekhanov; the Father of Russian Marxism, Fourth
International, Fall-Winter 1964 http://www.permanent-revolution.org/archives/plekhanov_review.pdf
[20] The
issue of Lenin’s critique of Plekhanov and of Second International orthodoxy
was discussed in great detail in Steiner’s document, The Dialectical Path of
Cognition and Revolutionizing Practice: A Reply to David North, http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/dialectical_path.pdf
[21]
Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 2, New
Park Publications, p. 6
[22] Lecture four: “Marxism, history and the
science of perspective”, by David North, 14 September 2005 http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/le4-all.shtml
[23]
Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London and New York: Routledge, 2002),
pp. xi-xii.
[24] Although we must reject the conservative
implications of the notion that World History as it is ‘is the image and
enactment of reason’, no one has presented the case for the explanatory power
of historical science more eloquently than Hegel:
‘We are
compelled to ask whether, beneath the superficial din and clamor of history,
there is not perhaps a silent and mysterious inner process at work whereby the
energy of all phenomena is conserved.
What may well perplex us however is the great variety and even
inconsistency of the content of history. We see complete opposites venerated as
equally sacred, capturing the attention of different ages and nations. We feel
the need to find a justification in the realm of ideas for all this
destruction. This reflection leads us to the third category [of historical
science], to the question of whether there is such a thing as an ultimate end
in itself. This is the category of
reason proper; it is present in our consciousness as a belief that the world is
governed by reason. Its proof is to be found in the study of world history
itself, which is the image and enactment of reason.’
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History:
Introduction, Translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge), p 33.
[25] Lest anyone think that a positivist theory of
history has no relevance for contemporary thought, that it is merely a remnant
of a turn-of-the-last-century Social Democracy, a perusal of the work of the
“Analytical Marxists” would prove salutary. This body of academic Marxism,
first developed by G.A. Cohen in his 1978 book, Karl Marx's Theory of History,
became very influential in the 1980’s.
Cohen and his associates worked out the logical implications of a
positivist theory of history and soon found that there was little left in Marx
with which it was compatible. Cohen originally started out as a defender of
historical materialism while jettisoning the labor theory of value and of
course dialectics. His version of “historical
materialism” was however a form of technological determinism that evoked some
of the work of the Second International but had little to do with Marx. Cohen’s
work spawned many other works which had even less to do with Marx. This is not
the place to explore the Byzantine twists and turns of this philosophical
misadventure but suffice it to say that Cohen and his associates were at least
honest enough to make explicit their rejection of the methodological building
blocks of Marxism.
[26] The contemporary evolutionary scientist,
Stanley H. Salthe, has written,
‘It is time to
consider the relations between emergence and the only theory of change
constructed in Western culture: dialectics.’
Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology, (MIT Press, 1993), p. 227.
No comments:
Post a Comment