From: OPE-L Administrator (ope-admin@ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu)
Date: Sat May 17 2003 - 17:10:26 EDT
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Marx and the "theory of history" From: Jurriaan Bendien <j.bendien@wolmail.nl> (by way of Rakesh Bhandari) Date: Sat, May 17, 2003 1:48 pm To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU From "Jurriaan Bendien" <j.bendien@wolmail.nl> Hi Rakesh, I have been following a bit of your interesting discussion on OPE-L. I have some further comment which you might consider at your leisure. I really wanted to develop this into a paper and perhaps present it at a conference, but that wasn't possible. I will just briefly outline the essentials. You wrote inter alia: "History is implied to have an inner drive for freedom--the forms of exploitation are progressively less unfree. In Cohen's version humanity (by which he really means Europeans) is driven along by the mandate to develop the productive forces." This is correct, as far as it goes, in my view. You can certainly find this strand of thought in Marx, but really it comes from Hegels philosophy, which was inspired a lot by the French revolution of 1789. This is covered quite well e.g. by Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History (London, 2000), chapter 5. Thus Hegels says for example, "we have recognised the Idea in its determinacy as the self-knowing and self-willing freedom whose sole end is itself" (op. cit., p. 66). History for Hegel is the unfolding of human freedom and the growth of rationality (indeed sometimes the implication seems to be that human freedom and bourgeois rationality are more or less the same thing, which is of course very attractive for academics and neoliberals, who love to see freedom unfolding everywhere with some help from the American armed forces; there is an ideological link from Strauss, Kojeve, Fukuyama etc. to the White House). Marx himself was quite aware that epochs of the development of the productive forces could be interspersed with periods of economic and cultural decline. I cannot give you chapter and verse here, since I do not have the texts handy, but, e.g. the so-called "dark ages" in Medieval times, of which Marx was well aware, and the very idea of the spectre of socialism or barbarism, raised originally by Engels already suggests this. (But let's keep it in proportion: technically the output per worker under developed capitalism is enormously greater than in precapitalist societies, so, by comparison, economic decline in precapitalist society was much less spectacular economically, yet more decisive, since the total social product was much smaller, and the gap between societies featuring economic growth and societies featuring decline was much smaller as well. Of course, for the people of precapitalist society economic decline might also be just as dramatic as today, because they might starve en masse anyhow). The dogma of productive force determinism and unilinear historical progress really dates back to fin-de-siecle Marxism and socialism. At that time, the European labour movement (see Walter Kendall, The Labour Movement in Europe) seemed to be growing steadily all the time, within what Chris Freeman and Fransisco Louca refer to as the third Kondratiev wave (As Time Goes By, London, 2001). This provides the backdrop for the outlook of Kautsky and others. Subsequently, of course, Stalin adopted productive force determinism as an ideology to justify accelerated and forced industrialisation/modernisation in the USSR, and what was originally only a loose strand of thought in Marx, became a systematic ideology of unilinear historical progress, through inevitable stages. The practical use of this ideology is rather obvious - as Stephanie Coontz once explained in a lecture at the IIRE, must have been 1988, if the march towards communism was depicted as an inevitable process, this both confidently justified the position of the communist officialdom, and simultaneously meant that the workers couldn't be "active subjects" in the sense of changing the course of world history (they could only be "active subjects" in the sense of fullfilling the five-year plan by producing ever more and more coal, steel, tractors, planes, tanks, buildings, roads and so forth, within the framework of factory discipline and obedience to the Communist Party). If there are indeed "iron laws of history" impervious to human intervention, then there is, quite simply, nothing much the workers can do to change their lot, except to follow the CP Central Committee which is omnipotent and all-seeing, being equipped with the infallible science of Marxism-Leninism to detect where history is leading us, in order to guide the way forward. If you study Gerald Cohen's life trajectory, you will find that he was originally politically educated in a milieu where Kautskyist and Stalinist-type Marxism predominated. This influenced his ideas about Marx's alleged "theory of history". But if you look at Marx's texts closely, you will notice that Marx NEVER even once used the term "historical materialism". This expression surfaced after Marx's death in German intellectual circles (the Germans having an affinity for philosophical "systems") and was accepted, together with the label "Marxism", by the old Engels, who was keen to popularise Marx's ideas in competition with other socialisms (although Engels himself hardly ever, if ever, uses the term "Marxism"). Marx and Engels were in fact quite competitive, seeking to propagandise their own views and combat other socialisms by ruthless (but often wrong) criticism (see e.g. Vincent Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism, London, 1987 and Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Volume 4: The Critique of Other Socialisms, Monthly Review Press). This is not unsurprising, because Marx specifically rejected the attempts by German intellectuals to turn his "materialist conception (Aufassung) of history" into a "general philosophy of history". Indeed, he goes further and suggests in all modesty that all his work on the development and dynamics of capitalism is but a "sketch" applicable primarily to Europe. In correspondence, he also explicitly rejects the idea of unilinear historical development (from memory, his letters to Vera Zasulich, who was wondering about how to apply his ideas in Russia). I personally researched this issue very carefully in Marx's texts as a student in 1981, and can therefore vouch for this, although I do not have all the quotes and circumstantial evidence handy in my present location. Gerald Cohen's book is useful in seeking to identify what precisely Marx is commited to, but in so doing he misses Marx's real approach and intention by a mile. Cohen's work on justice and morality is really much more fruitful. But WHY did Marx reject a "theory of history" or a "philosophy of history" ? This is an important question to consider, but few people do so. The reason is, that he aimed for a scientific approach to history, which meant that scholars had to go out and dig up the facts and construct data sets systematically, and systematically try to explain real historical events and processes, before trying to generalise from their findings, using the idea of the materialist interpretation of history as a guide, or methodology. In other words, they had to do some real hard research work and get their "hands dirty". Even then, Engels remarked how Marx and himself had often placed too much emphasis on economic developments, at the expense of "superstructural" or physical factors, so even as a research guideline, the materialist conception of history had to be elaborated and qualified more. As he grew old, Marx complained that scholars keen on his views tended not actually to do this. Instead, they wanted to quickly knock up a philosophical system of their own, combining bits of Marx's texts with what Marx and Engels derisively called their "skimpy knowledge" of history and various sciences. In fact, they went as far as to suggest that only students who had done some real research and successfully completed their doctorates, should be admitted to party positions. This false approach of a "theory of history" presented by Cohen, was actually counter to Marx's very nature, because Marx always continued to evolve in his ideas, breaking into and exploring new fields of inquiry, and in fact, he even found it incredibly hard to present them systematically in such works as Das Kapital, he was constantly rewriting and reformulating his expositions to get it precisely correct and nuanced, cautiously avoiding saying things which extrapolated beyond the available evidence. Which meant that he had far more drafts than published text. A typical example of Marx as the revolutionary theorist and visionary is his discussion with Samuel Moore about the possibility of studying the ups and downs of the business cycle mathematically; Moore replied that the data necessary were not available yet, in other words, Marx wanted to pursue a perfectly valid question, before it could be actually researched in practice. Furthermore, Marx believed that the materialist conception of history would itself have to be modified by the scientific findings which it inspired, and by new historical experience. After all, the world changes, and new experiences and new data might shed a different light on the course of human history, in which case his "outline" would have to be revised. (See in this context also Makoto Itoh's interesting discussion of historical materialism in The Political Economy of Socialism). In addition, the materialist conception of history had to be self-reflexive, it had to explain the roots of its own coming-into-being and development (this theme is covered to some extent in an excellent text by Goran Therborn, Science, Class and Society (Verso). So Marx and Engels were creative pioneers who opened up a new world of thought. But what happened subsequently was, that their work in social science became systematised and popularised into a socialist ideology, applied universally to political and scientific problems, sometimes to an absurd extent (because not underpinned by any real research), as under the regimes of Stalin and Mao. In part, Marx and Engels were themselves to blame for this, since they sought to apply their scientific insights directly to the problems of the labour movement, and ordinary people who are not wellversed in critical and self-critical scientific thinking just want a quick overview of the big picture, or the basic norms and values involved. Lenin, who was above all a revolutionary politician and party lobbyist, sensed this reality very keenly, and defined Marxism as "both a science and an ideology". He wanted to get Marxism into a form where it could be easily assimilated by workers and peasants, who in many cases were deeply religious and could not even read, and into a form which clearly defined and rationalised the political positions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He had nothing but contempt for those socialist politicians who tried to turn Marx's revolutionary ideas into a tepid, reformist mish-mash, without much knowledge at all of empirical trends or recent scientific findings. He specifically called his own brand of Marxism "revolutionary Marxism" around the turn of the 20th century. But in the process, an important insight is lost, which is simply that no specific political recipe was automatically entailed from Marx's scientific writings, amongst other things because Marx changed his political opinions over time, calling for revolution at one point, at other times suggesting that socialism might be arrived at peacefully through reform in specific countries, depending on circumstances which were constantly evolving. When Lenin falsely claims that Marx's analyses do lead to only one political conclusion, he is basing himself on the Marx of the Communist Manifesto, while agitating against reformist trends in the labour movement of his time, seeking to restore the revolutionary spirit to socialism. Lenin's approach is very clear in such texts of Lenin's as "The three components of Marxism" and so forth, where Marxism is defined as a combination of German philosophy, French socialism and English political economy. Lenin was very keen to prove that the ideas of Marx and Engels came from the "high road" of human thought, that they represented the best that contemporary intellectual thought had to offer. In one of Ernest Mandel's last texts, with the pretentious title "The place of Marxism in history", Mandel actually tries to mimick Lenin in this sense, filling the idea out a bit more with all sorts of interesting observations and data (in themselves often valuable). This, as Fritjof Tichelman pointed out to me, is a regression of Mandel's thought from his 1960 position in Marxist Economic Theory, in which he sought precisely to open up Marxist thought to new data and new findings, and synthesise the experiences of different countries. Point is, why should modern scientific socialism be based simply on 19th century philosopy, economics and politics from Germany, Britain and France ? Why should socialists not seek to assimilate "the high road of human thought" such as it manifests itself today in other European countries, the USA, China, Russia, Africa, Australiasia, or anywhere else for that matter ? This is exactly what authors such as Jim Blaut have tried to do, combatting Eurocentrism and deformed views of societies which Marx and Engels hardly studied, if at all. Mandel tried to build an International to do it, but it got bogged down by its own dogma. In saying this, I do notwish to imply that Lenin's ideas have no value, they do, particularly in the field of revolutionary politics and imperialism. But why do they have value ? Precisely because Lenin very carefully studied not just Marx's writings, but also lots of data available to him, in order to extrapolate trends and draw political conclusions about the nature of the epoch. For example, his notebooks on imperialism, aimed at making an intervention in the debates about the allegedly "progressive" character of imperialism, contained extracts from 148 books and 232 articles in four languages, mainly in German (he wrote a lot of this in exile in Switzerland - for an excellent discussion, see V.G. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, London 1974). Even so, who can say that Lenin's short pamphlet, abbreviated at the behest of Russian censors, can adequately capture the nature of imperialism in 2003 ? This is just dogma. Marx and Engels themselves regarded dogmatisation and fundamentalism as "vulgar thought", uncritical and shallow thinking, if not a recession into religious belief (however Engels notes at one point with satisfaction that Das Kapital had become "the bible of the working class", they had sacralised a piece of scientific research - bear in mind the strong influence of christian religious dogma on workers at the time). But nevertheless, this dogmatisation proceeded, up to absurdities such as the Lysenko case in the USSR. Marx and Engels however had quite a different relationship between theory and practice in mind. They basically aimed to inject scientific insight into a broad, democratic workingclass party featuring different trends of thinking, for the purpose of assisting the emancipation of the working class, with the idea that this emancipation could not even occur, if we didn't know what we had to be emancipated from (in which case we would be engaging in a Quixotic politics). Lenin does the same, except that he goes much further than that. One reason why he liked his "Benjamin" Nikolai Bukharin, was that Bukharin had the gift of ideological systematisation, Bukharin could convert analyses of reality into party-political doctrine more or less on demand. At the same time, Lenin noted that Bukharin wasn't a great dialectician (how could he be, if his task was to formulate party ideology in a systematic, doctrinal way ?). Ernest Mandel functioned in a similar way, although he was much superior to Bukharin, at least in my opinion. In various works, Isaac Deutscher introduced the concept of classical Marxism, to distinguish the Marxism of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg etc. from what came later, namely Marxism in the service of state policy, aimed at the forcible modernisation of peasant societies. The former he thinks was good, the latter mixed rational, scientific thought with primitive peasant magic. But I think that thorough historical investigation will show that there is actually no real basis for Deutscher's story, and that the real problem goes deeper, I think the very concept of Marxism as a unified theory has to be questioned. A Dutch socialist, Ger Harmsen, came close to this idea (he wrote a book called "Marx contra de Marxistische Ideologen" [Marx against the Marxist ideologists]. The basic problem of our time is that we live in a transitional epoch, an interregnum if you like, in which "the old" has proved not to work anymore (old dogmas have been smashed) but "the new" has yet to be born, to enter the stage of history. This is reflected in intellectual trends, as the elites gropes clumsily for new ideologies to justify their policies in the eyes of ordinary people ( and if for example neoclassical economics fails to explain very much at all, then we hive off into psychology and behavioural science, and devise all sorts of hybrid sciences, so long as the existence of class society and exploitation are denied). What we are seeing these days is that the elite intellectuals seize on all sorts of fads in order to grasp the world situation, or try to pick other people's brains for lack of any ideas of their own, if necessary through spying. For a scientific socialist, however, it is in my view not so much a question of decrying this trendy, fashion-following habit armed with Leninist vituperation and a handful of quotes, or to launch a search to discover new Marxist geniuses, but rather to do good, thorough social scientific research about what is really going on. We don't want to throw out the baby out with the bathwater, saying that Marxism was a complete waste of time. It wasn't, it changed the world and contributed to human progress. On the other hand, we are forced to innovate, since old recipes don't work anymore. The question then becomes one of how we could innovate along a consistent pattern, if you like, a Lakatosian research programme. But here Marxists often get stuck, because they are still trapped in sentimentally upheld orthodoxy and dogma, they furiously search for a consistent approach, that maybe is not even there. I have tried to show in this mail, that really there is no basis for this crisis in the writings and actions of Marx and Engels themselves. But the real questions which need to be freely discussed, and which mostly are not discussed, are: what is the overall aim and purpose of the materialist conception of history, and how do we best honour that ? What is the aim and goal of Marxist economics, and how do we best develop that ? What is the aim of Marxist politics, and how is it best pursued ? Why should we try to mimic Marx and Engels, or other Marxists ? What is socialism, really ? What are really the enduring core concepts of Marxism, never mind the dogma ? These sorts of foundational questions aren't discussed, mostly because we quickly see the old dogmatic reflexes returning, yet this gets in the way of innovation. The way I solved this for myself years ago, is simply to abandon the label and concept of Marxism, and to return to the original goal of Marx and Engels: the achievement of an egalitarian society without classes (socialism, or communism; but the term communism has been discredited after too frequent abuse) in which the direct producers rule. This has lots of advantages; you can criticise Marx, Engels and the Marxists without committing sacrilege; you can avoid those Marxists who believe they have all of the answers to all of the questions already; you are not bogged down by old languages; you can do your own research and thinking without worries of orthodoxy; you make room for innovation; you can think anew about the political and scientific issues from the point of view of your own experience, and take up new themes that you feel like looking at; you can recognise that people who don't care much about Marx can still make valuable contributions to socialism; you can get out of scholastic and philological disputes, and concentrate on understanding the real world; and so on. This doesn't mean throwing Marx out, but focusing more on those aspects of his method and theory which happen to be valuable or relevant today. This is similar to Gyorgy Lukacs's point in his book History and Class Consciousness, except that Lukacs tries to eternalise Marx's method as universally valid, whereas I think that if a method doesn't work in a particular area, you should abandon it, in favour of an alternative method that works better. I believe this way of seeing things will eventually win out; it is the only approach which, for example, recognises that substantive popular democracy was never a result of capitalism or of the market, but a political conquest of the working class (see on this for example Goran Therborn's interesting essay in New Left Review). I cannot claim to have innovated very much yet as a socialist, in the past decade or so, mainly because circumstances of life, including mishaps, have prevented me from doing a lot of the research I intended to do. But I hope to summarise my ideas some time and publish them at some stage. (you can post this if you like). Regards Jurriaan
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