Marx and the Millennium:
a short guide to the universe
Frank Williamson
ISBN: 0 9534000 0 X
£6 ($10 US)
from Frontline Books, 255 Wilmslow Road, Manchester M14 5LE, UK
238pp
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The Internet Review of
Books
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Vol 1, No 004: June 10, 1999 |
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Marx and the Millennium: Frank Williamson ISBN: 0 9534000 0 X £6 ($10 US) 238pp |
[Marx not 'determinist'] [The contradiction of seeking after knowledge] [A 'definition' of dialectics] [Kinds of 'materialism'] [The Cominform — in 1927] [Common sense about commonsense]
t
the beginning of his revolutionary career, in his Introduction to a Contribution
to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (1844), when he was just 26
years old, Karl Marx was calling for "a negation of hitherto existing philosophy".
Before he died, with Engels he had provided just that. The anti-Marxist philosopher,
Karl Popper acknowledged that "A return to pre-Marxian social science is
inconceivable." (The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol.2, Routledge,
London, 1966, p. 82) But those who followed after and called themselves Marxists
achieved the inconceivable, transforming Marxism back into what it had superseded.
Marx drew a line under all preceding philosophies, drew up a balance, and declared the account closed.
Those who followed after erased the line, opened up the account once more, and proceeded to make deposits and — more seriously — withdrawals, which placed the revolutionary movement back into the debt of those whom Marx and Engels had superseded.
Marx showed that progress was not achieved by exhortation, that classes were not opposed because one side was wicked and the other purest gold, that the "good guys" of one age would inevitably become the "bad guys" of the next. In his own words (written at much the same time as his Critique), "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
The comic travesty of Marx's propositions which allowed Popper to "refute" them finds its justification not in Marx, but in the followers of Marx: Popper maintains Marx is "determinist", when Marx merely outlined the necessary conditions for historical development. At no time did he say that if such conditions were fulfilled the development became inevitable. Yet this triumphalism (eg Khrushchev's drunken boast that "we will bury you") still survives, despite the fact that it was the Soviet Union's own bureaucracy which destroyed and buried the flawed but inspiring attempt to create socialism in one country.
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No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed |
How could this brilliantly conceived method have become fossilised into a dogmatic belief system, similar both in kind and content to those systems it had negated? It is commonly maintained that this was due to "distortions" which may be laid at the door at this or that demon of socialist history, whether it be the renegade Kautsky or the despot Stalin, leading to its establishment as the official secular religion of the first socialist state. Yet the process had begun long before the Revolution.
Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in 1903 that "Both Marx and Engels found it necessary to disclaim responsibility for the utterances of many who chose to call themselves Marxists!" (Stagnation And Progress of Marxism, 1903)
Marx himself had warned, writing a quarter of a century before, that his "historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe" should not be turned into "a historico-philosophical theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself . . . events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historical surroundings lead to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon," (of their differences), "but one will never arrive there by using as one's master-key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists of being super-historical". (Letter to the editorial board of the Russian magazine, Otechestvennye Zapiski [Fatherland Notes], November 1877, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953, pp. 378-379)
In a letter to J. Bloch in 1890, Engels had criticised "Marxists" (the quotation marks were his) who in mechanically taking on board the model of European economic development outlined in Capital, had produced "the most amazing rubbish". He continued: "Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly". (Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, pp. 488-489)
Engels had warned against an attempt to erect an all-embracing theory upon any philosophical foundation: "the formation of an exact mental image of the world system in which we live is impossible for us, and will always remain impossible. If at any time in the development of mankind such a final, conclusive system of the interconnections within the world - physical as well as mental and historical - were brought about, this would mean that human knowledge had reached its limit, and, from the moment when society had been brought into accord with that system, further historical development would be cut short - which would be an absurd idea, sheer nonsense.
"Mankind therefore finds itself faced with a contradiction: on the one hand, it has to gain an exhaustive knowledge of the world system in all its interrelations; and on the other hand, because of the nature both of men and of the world system, this task can never be completely fulfilled. But this contradiction lies not only in the nature of the two factors - the world, and man - it is also the main lever of all intellectual advance, and finds its solution continuously, day by day, in the endless progressive development of humanity, just as for example mathematical problems find their solution in an infinite series or continued fractions. Each mental image of the world system is and remains in actual fact limited, objectively by the historical conditions and subjectively by the physical and mental constitution of its originator." (Anti-Dühring, Part I- Philosophy: (iii) Classification. Apriorism)
Yet it is the extravagant claims for Marxism, as the be-all and end-all answer to every problem, which turned it into exactly such a world view, and ultimately the sort of religion which Marx described to be the opium of the people.
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Marx did not outline a belief system |
While he drew conclusions from his method, this served the purpose of demonstrating the unbreakable link between theory and practice. As Georg Lukàcs pointed out half a century ago: "Admit for the sake of argument that all of the particular affirmations of Marx have been shown to be factually inaccurate by modern scholarship. A serious Marxist can recognise all this new evidence, reject all the particular theses of Marx and yet not be forced for a moment to renounce his Marxist orthodoxy. For orthodox Marxism does not mean an uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's research, it is not the exegeses of a 'sacred book', or 'faith' in this or that thesis. In Marxism, orthodoxy refers solely and exclusively to the question of method. It implies the scientific conviction that the Marxist dialectic is the right method of investigation ..." (What Is Orthodox Marxism?)
The collapse of the Soviet Union, and hence of the Marxism which had become dogmatised as its State religion, has caused Marx's method to be no longer fashionable among the literati, as once it was, for instance, in the heady days of pre-war Popular Frontism, when Victor Gollancz hosted the Left Book Club and poets like Stephen Spender (later to play a significant role in the CIA's anti-Communist literary fronts) proclaimed the imminence of revolution. But as H.G. Wells once said of Christianity, Marxism in the sense of materialist dialectics, what Lukàcs called "orthodox Marxism", cannot be said to have failed, since it has hardly been tried.
In his interesting attempt to reinstate Marxism in the centre of contemporary philosophical thought, Frank Williamson makes a brief reference to dialectics. He explains that dialectics "refers to the method of establishing the truth through discussion and the opposition of ideas and arguments. It is usually associated with Plato who used such dialectical discourse to test the validity of certain ideas. A dialectical approach also recognises that things change, that we are not living in a static world. The dialectic employed by Marxists lays particular emphasis on change, stressing the evolutionary process which is at the heart of all matter, of all living creatures and of all human societies; even the laws which Marxism and science uncover are all subject to change. We all inhabit a world in which change is the one constant feature."
He goes on, "Having defined 'dialectical' . . ."
Unfortunately, he has done no such thing. Dialectics was indeed the name applied to the method used by the platonists in argument, but this is a long way from the technique used by Marx, which drew upon Hegel and, ultimately, upon the Judaeo-Christian rabbinic method epitomised by the often deliberately contradictory teachings of Jesus. If the constancy of change were the only claim made for the Marxist method, then it would hardly have inspired so many millions, nor attracted the opprobrium which causes its opponents to continue to expend so much energy in declaring that it is dead. Heraclitus declared as long ago as five centuries before the birth of Christ that "Nothing endures but change".
Actually, Heraclitus provided a good example of what is almost Marxian dialectic: "Sea is water most pure and most polluted: for fish, drinkable and life-giving, for human beings undrinkable and deadly." It is almost Marxian, since it acknowledges the contradictions at the heart of reality, but falls short because there is no dynamic.
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The dynamic of the dialectic |
This is what Marx and Engels called "the negation of the negation", demonstrated by the fact that in assuming its hegemony over the world, capitalism created its own grave-diggers (and one might add, in stifling dissent in the Soviet Union, its bureaucrats hastened its overthrow).
Williamson then goes on to define what he means by materialism: " . . . we are compelled to accept the primacy of matter. Matter came first and our ideas about matter came later". But this does not highlight the distinct difference between Marxian materialism and all those mechanists whose contribution to an understanding of the world Marx welcomed, but which he saw as a barrier to an understanding of the true nature of material reality. Even a high churchman like Cardinal Newman accepted the primacy of matter: to think otherwise, he reasoned, was tantamount to claiming "that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons. . . " (Apologia Pro Vita Sua).
As Marx pointed out: "The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism - which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such." (Theses on Feuerbach)
It was also used mainly as a stick to bash those who believed in God. Engels described the vulgar materialists of Marx's own time as "metaphysical", because they were governed by a determination to use all data to disprove the possibility of a supreme being, not by seeking to increase their understanding of the world in order to change it: "All the advances of natural science ... served them only as new proofs against the existence of a creator of the world; and, indeed, they did not in the least make it their business to develop the theory any further."
The irony is that while Marx's materialism made obsolete the vulgar rationalism of his predecessors, the Marxist successors to Marx have reinstated the obsolescent and declared it to be the very latest thing, not realising that what they have done has negated the very essence of his work.
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Reinstating the obsolescent - as the very latest thing |
As Marx put it: "In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven." (The German Ideology) It is tempting to believe that Marx's somewhat fanciful metaphor is grounded in the demonstration by Jesus that "the kingdom of heaven is within you", that mind and spirit have a material base. The existence of the two states is not denied, but the one is rooted firmly in the other.
The transformation of Marx's materialism back into the mechanistic rationalism of his predecessors once again demonstrates the way processes may be thrown into reverse, unless dialectics is applied to them to ensure they overcome the effects of Clausius' Second Law of Thermodynamics ("It is impossible for a self-acting machine, unaided by any external agency, to convey heat from one body to another at a higher temperature."). Actually, by functioning like the "external agency" necessary in a "self-acting machine" to convey energy from one body to another at a higher temperature, in the words of the Second Law, dialectics confirms Clausius' proposition, just as a parachutist, resisting the force of gravity, confirms its existence. Is dialectics, innate in all processes, an external agency in the sense meant by Clausius? Or is this another contradiction, in which something innate can act as something external? To ask the question is to engage in the process, confronting reality actively, rather than contemplatively.
On the cover of Williamson's book are a number of disparate images — Marx at the centre top, "whose unifying philosophy provides the basis for the book", and at the bottom Marx's phrase "innern Zusammenhang" — which he says illustrate its concepts. So a Soviet hammer-and-sickle is mirrored by a yin-yang symbol, "representing both philosophy and Chinese socialism", a "'dark satanic mill' representing the industrial revolution" (disregarding the fact that to Blake, the dark satanic mills of his Jerusalem were actually the universities) opposite a PC "for the electronic revolution and modern technology".
There are some irritating errors: he describes Mao being influenced by "Cominform advisers (mainly Russian, of course)" nearly 30 years before the Cominform was set up as a post-war successor to the Comintern, and again, later, "the Chinese Party had been compelled to abandon Cominform policies after Chiang Kaishek's treachery and had no opption but to find their own road and it was Mao who worked out the theoretical principles involved, which were a clear repudiation of those previously associated with Lenin". Quite apart from the confusion of two historically separate organisations, functioning in distinct ways, this is a travesty of the innovative nature of Mao's thought.
Mao was much influenced in his early days by the pioneer Chinese Marxist, Li Dazhao (Li Ta-chao), who said in a lecture in Beijing in May, 1924: "Europeans feel that, with regard to their culture, nothing can be added to Christianity; as for their view of the world, according to them only the world of the Whites exists." In this remark, Li, who influenced Mao's thinking on the importance of the rural masses in the Chinese revolution when the latter was still assistant librarian at Beijing National University, was echoing the conclusions of Marx and Engels, possibly unconsciously. They were aware that the history of North Africa, Arabia and Asia raised questions that their analysis of western societies could not answer: "The absence of property in land is indeed the key to the whole of the East. Herein lies its political and religious history. But how does it come about that the Orientals have not arrived at landed property, even in its feudal form? I think it is mainly due to the climate, taken in connection with the nature of the soil. . ." (Letter from Engels to Marx, June 6, 1853, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1953, p. 99)
A solution to this conundrum was sought in the now more or less discredited theory of the so-called "Asiatic mode of production" — discredited, not because there were not valid non-European modes, but because it is impossible to lump together such vastly dissimilar societies, from Asia Minor to the Chinese seaboard, and even including pre-Columbian America, as "Asiatic", as if they followed identical paths of development. The debate on this question was supposedly settled in Leningrad in 1931, but rather than acknowledging the incredible complexity and richness of human paths of development, this conference adopted a unilinear pattern of society.
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Ignoring Mao's contribution |
Since Marxism is due for a renaissance, it would be good to be able to hail this slim volume as a valuable contribution to that rebirth, but it is not. Poorly produced, with no index nor any contents list, it seems bedevilled by the "common sense" approach to its subject which has characterised a revolutionary movement dominated in the west by elitist dogmatists who seem to feel that the essense of materialist dialectics is beyond ordinary working class folk. He makes a self-deprecating reference to Stephen Hawkings' A Brief History of Time (which he describes as "notorious for being a best seller which is seldom read — or, if read, seldom finished", though in fact it is a model of clarity which lesser writers would do well to emulate), and explains that "common-sense explanations, accessible to the common-sense reader, are likely to be limited and, by their limitations, will at the best be inadequate and at the worst may be misleading; but this must arise naturally from any simplifuied explanations which avoid going into all the details".
The problem, however, is not the necessity for brevity, but in attempting to write down for this mythical "common-sense reader" the essence of the dialectic is neglected. As Engels pointed out in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, common sense is a very poor guide to the facts about the way the world is: ". . . sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research," he wrote. ". . . In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees."
Or as Gramsci put it: "Common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself."
In its failure to recognise this, Williamson's book is not so much a solution to the problems of our time, as part of the problem. IRB