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Marxism and the Paradox of Contemporary Political Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
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With all the volumes that have been written about Marx and Marxism in recent years, there has beenlittle or no attempt, in the English-speaking world at least, to relate his thinking to the general development of modern European philosophic speculation. Fundamentally this is because Marx has received short shrift as a philosopher. Both English and American commentators have been almost entirely concerned with his role as “social scientist” and polemicist, and hence have concentrated their attention upon his historical materialism and his critique of capitalist society.
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References
1 Exceptions to this statement include: Hook, Sidney, Toward an Understanding of Karl Marx (New York, 1933)Google Scholar, and From Hegel to Marx (New York, 1936)Google Scholar; Marcuse, Herbert, Reason and Revolution (New York, 1941)Google Scholar; Acton, H. B., The Illusion of the Epoch (London, 1955)Google Scholar, and Tucker, Robert, ”Self and Revolution” (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, 1957)Google Scholar. For a variety of reasons, however, none of these works is completely satisfactory. Marcuse's, which is still in many ways the most useful, is written within a Marxist frame of analysis.
2 Marx would have preferred it this way. He had concluded very early in his life that philosophy was dead, and that the task of the future was to make the ideals of the philosophers real. In other words the real tasks were those which could best be carried out by social scientists andrevolutionaries. Thus, Marx and Engels were quite happy to leave their early philosophic works to the gnawing of the “mice.” These had served to clear their minds, to enable them to understandthe nature of reality and thus to point the way to the real tasks. See: Marx, Karl and Engels, F., The German Ideology, trans. Pascal, R. (New York, 1947), pp. 1, 2, 15, 199Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as GI. Marx, Karl, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in Marx, Karl and Engels, F., Karl Marx and F. Engels on Religion (Moscow, 1957), pp. 42, 49Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as KMR.
3 By the statement “philosophy is dead” Marx meant, as do the positivists, that given a correct world view philosophic speculation had lost its function. In arguing that the task of philosophy was now to make philosophy real, Marx was referring to the ideals of the “left Hegelians” and the French and British ”Utopians” who, he felt, had correctly understood the nature of a truly humane society without having developed a correct, that is, scientific, world outlook. See the references cited in note 2.
4 Marx, of course, argued that a scientific world view described not only what was but what should and must be.
5 Plamenatz, John, German Marxism and Russian Communism (London, 1954), p. xixGoogle Scholar. By “philosophy” Plamenatz means the tasks which logical positivists set for themselves.
6 Richard McKeon notes as follows: “The refutation of philosophies is … a simple process.… Since the doctrine refuted is the doctrine of another anddifferent philosophy it is presented and analyzed for purposes of refutation according to a method different from the one by which it was established, or it is made to depend on different principles.… So presented, the fundamental terms in which the doctrine is expressed are never found to be clearly or relevantly defined; its principles are always arbitrary… its method is haphazard and committed to obvious fallacies; and the final doctrine elaborated is never adequate, seldom important, andusually false.” Freedom and History (New York, 1952), p. 21Google Scholar.
The approach to thought in terms of the sociology of knowledge is integral to both Marxist and non-Marxist social science, and its foundations rest on the assumptions of modern philosophy itself, as we shall see later. Of course, all modern social science is more or less Marxist, that is, is founded on the kinds of analyses to which Marx turned after 1846. Thus, in some sense, the treatment of Marx by modern social science is the supreme irony. He has been “hoist with his own petard.”
7 See Plamenatz, op. cit., and Sabine, George, A History of Political Theory (Revised Edition; New York, 1950), pp. 751–798Google Scholar. See also Federn, Karl, The Materialist Conception of History (London, 1939)Google Scholar.
8 Or rather that Hegel had. See specifically his analysis of Stirner, Max. Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, 1/5 (1932), especially pp. 220–249Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as MEGA.
9 It is only in recent years that Marx's, pre-1846 writings have come to the attention of philosophers and that translations of his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (London, 1959)Google Scholar, and The Holy Family (London, 1957)Google Scholar have made these works available to those who do not read German. (Hereafter cited as EPM and HF respectively.) Their concern, however, has thus far been largely abortive since it has developed into a sort of “fetishism” of the concept of alienation. For a review of some of the literature, see Bell, Daniel, ”In Search of Marxist Humanism,” Soviet Survey, 32 (04, 1960), 21–32Google Scholar. It should be noted that while I regard the early writings of Marx as essential to the understanding of his later work, and regard the later writings as a culmination of the earlier, there are those who see a sharp break between the two periods. The issue will be dealt with later in the essay.
10 For the above see Randall, J. H., Aristotle (New York, 1960)Google Scholar.
11 Copleston, F. C., Aquinas (London, 1955)Google Scholar. Also Jaffa, H., Thomism and Aristotelianism (Chicago, 1952)Google Scholar. The values emphasized, of course, differ in many ways.
12 And also that all knowledge is, by definition, scientific knowledge, that is, derived from and related back to observation. See Hobbes, Thomas, Leviatha, ed. Oakeshott, Michael (London, n.d.), pt. 1, chs. 1–15Google Scholar. My analysis of Hobbes and Liberalism relies heavily upon Marx's discussion of the development of modern Liberalism and his own relation to it. See, for example, HF, 167–79. See also Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1952)Google Scholar; Burtt, E. A., The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York, 1954)Google Scholar; and Popper, Karl, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston, 1957)Google Scholar.
13 It can be argued that just as the Hobbesian view derived from modern science, so Hobbes and Liberalism are related to the development of modern technology. To both classic and mediaeval thinkers the purpose of thought was to understand the natural order so that one might act in conformity with it. Since Liberalism, as we shall see, equates the right or good with individual desires, men's primary orientation is now legitimately directed toward changing the universe in order to be in a better position to satisfy these desires, that is, to secure a commodious life. Both classical and mediaeval thinkers, if not opposed to change and/or control over the environment, were, at least, not primarily concerned with this question.
14 The prototype for this position is, of course, David Hume. But, as is commonlyaccepted, Hume was merely developing the implications of the thought of Hobbes and Locke. See also Nagel, Ernest (ed.), John Stuart Mill's Philosophy of Scientific Method (New York, 1950), pp. 364–392Google Scholar.
15 The Leviathan.
16 Mill, John Stuart, “Utilitarianism,” in Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government (Everyman's Library: New York, 1958)Google Scholar.
17 By “modern science” I mean classical physics.
18 Weldon, T. D., Introduction to Kant's, Critique of Pure Reason (Oxford, 1945), pp. 1–53Google Scholar. Marcuse, , op. cit., pp. 16–28Google Scholar.
19 According to Hegel there exist two possibilities: (1) Either things in themselves have no effect upon the real world, in which case it is, in action, impossible to even conceive ofthem. (2) There is some relation between things in themselves and the real world, in which case science is impossible. See among others Marcuse, op. cit.; Loewenberg, J., “The Exoteric Approach to Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind,” and “The Comedy of Immediacy in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind,” Mind, XLIII and XLIV (1934–1935), 424–445, 21–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and J. H. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-Examination (London, 1958)Google Scholar. See also Engels, F., Anti-Duhring (New York, 1939), pp. 71fGoogle Scholar.
20 See Mure, G. R. G., An Introduction to Hegel (Oxford, 1940)Google Scholar.
21 For the Kantian critique of hedonism see Friedrich, C. J. (ed.), The Philosophy of Kant (New York, 1949), pp. 215–20Google Scholar. For the Marxian critique see Marx, Karl and Engels, F., Selected Works (Moscow, 1951), II, 346–348Google Scholar. Unless otherwise indicated all references to the selected works refer to this edition.
The Kantian analysis provides the basis of modern Protestantism. The limits of science permit us tobelieve what our moral experience compels us to believe. Modern Catholicism seems to escape the problem by ignoring it. While accepting the argument that Thomistic physics is bad physics, modern Thomists still base their philosophic arguments on a position which is intimately related to Thomist physics. See, for example, Copleston, op. cit., and his Contemporary Philosophy (London, 1956)Google Scholar. See also Pegis, Anton C. (ed.), Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 2 vols. (New York, 1944), I, xxxv–liiiGoogle Scholar.
22 Marx, Karl, Capital (Chicago, 1921), I, 24–6Google Scholar. Marx, and Engels, , Selected Works, I, 327–332Google Scholar; II, 324–368.
23 Ibid.,349.
24 Marx continually urged this point. See Marx-Engels, , Selected Correspondence (London, 1956), pp. 261, 290–291Google Scholar. See also Hippolyte, Jean, Etudes sur Marx et Hegel (Paris, 1955)Google Scholar.
25 Engel's later writing is useful here, for he tried, in a number of works, to trace Marx's intellectual antecedents. While he is less sophisticated than Marx, he attempts to make some of the latter's assumptions more explicit. The argument that he departed significantly from Marx is without foundation. He submitted all of those philosophic writings completed while Marx was alive to the latter. His essay on Feuerbach quotes extensively from The Holy Family, and his Anti-Dühring contains nothing which stands in opposition to the Marx of 1843–1846.
26 Selected Works, II, 335–6Google Scholar. See also MEGA, 229–249. Given the “implicit” quality of Marx's, and to a certain extent, Engels’ writing, and the fact that, as with Hegel, the total system provides the proof of individual propositions, it is often difficult to provide direct references for particular points. Rather, these must be deduced from the structure of the total system. A basic assumption underlying these deductions is that the philosophic sophistication which Marx reveals in his early writings did not leave him after 1846, and that his awareness of the views of those whom Hegel felt he had transcended was a genuine awareness.
27 EPM, pp. 142–171. Selected Works, II, 326–334Google Scholar.
28 ibid., 351.
29 Capital, I, 107.
80 Thus, in Randall's terminology, Marx was a “critical naturalist.” The mechanistic nominalist views of the old materialists, so he argued, rendered them incapable of analyzing the activities of men. For to traditional materialism men could be no more than a particular relationship of atoms. To traditional materialism, then, man did not exist as such. See EPM, pp. 110–11; HF, pp. 172–6.
On another level classical economics is faced with the same problem. The starting point of classical economics is Hobbes. One analyzes economic relations in terms of individual men pursuing their own egoistic interest within the framework of a state which preserves the peace. But a refusal to recognizethat the social order which men create is real, prevents classical economics from understanding what it seeks to understand. See EPM, pp. 110–111; Selected Works, I, 339–341; Marx, Karl, The Poverty of Philosophy (London, 1956), pp. 115–172, 201–217Google Scholar.
31 Capital, I, 21–26. Selected Works, I, 350–351. It has been argued that the attempt to apply the dialectic to the natural world, as against the world of human history, is a gloss by Engels. This argument is untenable. See Capital, I, 338.
32 EPM, p. 113.
33 Marx's sociology of knowledge is a logical development of Liberal political theory, although he gives it new dimensions. If all knowledge is derived from sense experience, then human values are as well. Thus the history of the values which men have held is the history of theirexperience or, more precisely, a history of the world in which they live. To Liberal philosophers the history of these values was the history of increasing knowledge, the history of the elimination of error, and the history of changes in the objects of pleasure which are produced by an expanding technology. By treating the social relations which men establish with each other as part of the real world and as a basic unit of analysis, Marx provided the ingredient which permitted the translation of the basi Liberal assumptions into the contemporary discipline.
34 Marx, Karl and Engels, F., The German Ideology (New York, 1947), pp. 14ffGoogle Scholar. Marx, Karl, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” in Marx and Engels on Religion (Moscow, 1951), p. 51Google Scholar; F. Engels, s“Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity,” ibid., pp. 195–201;Marx, Karl, “The Jewish Question,” in Runes, D. D. (ed. and trans.), A World Without Jews (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; Capital, I, 109.
35 EPM, p. 149.
36 EPM, p. 102.
37 Ibid., 110–11.
38 GI, p. 7.
39 GI p. 17.
40 EPM, pp. 110–11.
41 GI, p. 19.
42 EPM, pp. 110–11.
43 EPM, p. 108.
44 HF, pp. 226, 237. Marx's psychology, as all modern psychology, is an outgrowth of Hobbesian metaphysics. The starting point of analysis is man's instincts or passions. Reason emerges from experience as the result of attempting to satisfy these passions. The Marxistanalysis, however, goes further and paves the way for the later development of psychoanalysis.
45 Adoratsky, V. (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Works (London, 1942), I, 356Google Scholar.
46 HF, p. 51.
47 Selected Works, I, 575–578. In other words, under Communism compulsion would be replaced by legitimate authority. Marx's definition of legitimate authority follows from the Liberal definition. His argument is that such authority is only possible in a Communist society.
48 This reply is implicit in Hobbes.
49 MEGA, pp. 222–249.