Marx and Marxism

Peter Worsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134451531
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Karl Marx probably had more influence on the political course of the last century than any other social thinker. There are many different kinds of Marxism, and the Twentieth Century saw two huge Marxist states in total opposition to one another. In the West, Marxism has never presented a revolutionary threat to the established order, though it has taken root as the major theoretical critique of capitalist society in intellectual circles, and new interpretations of Marx's thought appear each year.Peter Worsley discusses all these major varieties of Marxism, distinguishing between those ideas which remain valid, those which are contestable, and those which should now be discarded. Rather than treating Marxism purely as a philosophy in the abstract, he concentrates upon the uses to which Marxism has been put and emphasises the connections between the theoretical debates and political struggles in the real world.

1
The Materials and their Synthesis

(i) The German Non-revolution: Philosophical Idealism

Marx came from a bourgeois background, from a professional family in a small town. He was born in 1818, his father a lawyer in Trier, a very ancient Rhineland city and centre of the Mosel wine-growing district. Capitalist industry, the big city, and the industrial bourgeoisie, were yet to appear in Germany. Marx himself came of impeccable Jewish, indeed rabbinical descent. His father had had to convert to Christianity in order to hold public office, but was in any case no traditionalist, being deeply inspired by the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment which had long influenced the Rhineland. The effects of the twin revolutions abroad – the economic Industrial Revolution in England and the political Revolution in France – had further affected the Rhineland long before it was more directly and brutally affected by the shockwaves emanating from France when it was invaded and annexed by Napoleon. The whole of Germany, moreover, was then reorganized by Napoleon: in 1790, there had been some 400 bits and pieces which made up the ‘Holy Roman Empire’. He combined them into 16 princedoms to form a ‘Confederation of the Rhine’, and after his defeat 40 states remained in Germany. The Rhineland went to Prussia. The work of political integration begun by Napoleon was thus by no means entirely undone, neither was the cultural modernization and integration symbolized by the Napoleonic legal Code, which laid the basis for a modernized society: tithes, feudal rights, church properties and guilds were removed, and civil equality (though an unrepresentative constitution), and a liberalized and expanded administrative system were introduced.

But there was still no overall political entity called ‘Germany’, and there would not be until Marx was in his fifties. The work of integrating Germany was ultimately to be accomplished not by liberal forces imbued with the ideals of the French Revolution, but firstly and much more prosaically, through the economic unification of the German states into a customs union, the Zollverein, and finally through the military-political supremacy of Prussia, where capitalist industry was weak and the landed aristocracy strong. It was Prussia which was to use its military machine to weld all the pieces together to form a centralized state administered by a bureaucracy notorious for its impersonal efficiency in carrying out whatever the ruling class decided. The new Imperial Germany had to carve out a place for itself in a world already dominated by more advanced pioneer capitalist Powers, notably France and Britain, through industrial modernization based upon scientific innovation, through cooperation between the State and the banks to develop industry; and finally through military conquest in which Prussia successively defeated Austria and France, and in 1914 took on Britain.

In Marx’s day, all this could scarcely be envisaged. Those who dreamed of German unification did not expect or hope for it either via capitalist industrialization or via militarism. Rather, they thought it would come about through the putting into practice of the ideals of the French Revolution.

(ii) The French Revolution: Social Theory and Socialist Theory

Napoleon’s innovations had consisted of much more than a merely structural administrative rationalization. They had been based on the ideals of the French Revolution, though under Napoleon the more radical social changes, experiments and movements had been brought to a halt, and what had been achieved hitherto consolidated.

The intellectual pioneers of the Enlightenment – that free-thinking movement led by people like Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot, out of which the ideas that were to guide the Revolution emerged – had argued that people and societies could be and should be guided and governed by the logic of Reason, rather than according to tradition or religion. But Reason was also to be applied to the fulfilment of basic ethical ideals. Since the citizen was the basic building block of society, all citizens should be free to pursue their interests unless they infringed upon the like freedom of others. Individual liberty, then, was not an absolute. Ideally, combinations of individuals to promote the interests of organized groups intermediate between the level of the individual and the State were wrong. Such ‘sectional’ interests should not be pre-eminent; rather, the common will of the whole, in the form of the majority, should rule. Conflicts of interest and minority interests were, in political theory, usually dismissed as resolvable in principle, since liberty and equality could be interpreted and converted into practical policy by lay people equipped not only with a scientific approach to social affairs, but also informed by a new civic ideal. Conflicts between individuals, conflicts between sectional interest groups, and even conflicts between the distinct ideals themselves, would therefore dissolve under the beneficent influence of Reason and goodwill, and the readiness to accept the majority will of the people, e.g. in the form of direct plebiscites to determine what that will was.

Just as the American Declaration of Independence resoundingly begins by appealing to universal propositions: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, so the ethical principles of the French Revolution were conceived of as absolute principles, of metaphysical status, and were treated, therefore, in a virtually religious way. Reason was actually worshipped as a ‘goddess’ during the French Revolution, and Comte could crown the new social science he dubbed ‘sociology’ with a bizarre cult of the worship of humanity. But if these were absolute values, they were thought of as deriving from a scientific view of social evolution, and not – like religious injunctions, such as the Ten Commandments – as emanating from somewhere outside humanity, i.e. from God. They were seen, rather, as rules for behaviour entailed in the social necessities of living and working together to achieve common ends. If this was religion, it was a quite secular and humanity-centred religion, and in fact only minimally used the familiar imagery of gods and cults.

If supernatural authority was no longer acceptable, traditional secular authority was equally unacceptable. Instead of monarchs ruling by divine right the modern State, it was thought, should now express the common interests of the people as a whole. Hence radically new institutions were needed – the political ‘club’, forerunner of the modern political party; direct elections to General Assemblies of representatives of the people, and direct consultation of the entire people themselves through plebiscites; an army to defend the new society made up of citizens instead of mercenaries or professional soldiers, and so on.

The purely intellectual power of scientific Reason was thus to be used in the service of ends which were derived from a new central idea: democracy. But democracy possessed three dimensions: liberty, equality and fraternity; hence rival theorists and interest groups could emphasize one dimension out of this revolutionary triad more than the others, or give them different interpretations. Today, living at a time when the real possibility that humanity may soon destroy itself is always with us, it is perhaps difficult in the West to recapture the optimistic excitement inspired by those ideas, though as recently as the time of the student revolt of the late 1960s similar feelings enthused at least many of the young. They were powerful enough to inspire Beethoven to dedicate his ‘Eroica’ symphony to a Napoleon whom he thought to be a liberator, and for Wordsworth, later a quite conservative Poet Laureate, to rush off to France to join in a revolution of which he wrote:

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

But to be young was very heaven!’

Amongst the innumerable factions within this vast general movement were some who emphasized the element of fraternity rather than the celebration of ‘possessive individualism’. Like the Levellers and the Diggers in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, they looked forward to a communist society. As long as people owned property privately, they argued, some would be rich and others poor. Equality would never be fully achieved unless people were economically equal as well as juridically (before the law) or constitutionally (as citizens). An alternative system was therefore needed in which, in place of a society where some owned the means of production and others worked for them or starved, everyone would have access to the means of subsistence, and would not only be able to support themselves and their families but would be free from the domination of moneylenders or banks and thereby be better able to cooperate with others to produce for the common good.

The communist element in the French Revolution, led by Babeuf, was violently suppressed, as the Diggers and Levellers had been. Since industrial capitalism in France was very much less developed than in Britain, France was predominantly a country of peasants, its urban producers mainly artisans and labourers. Their ideal of a just and cooperative society was therefore often limited to the model of a more egalitarian small independent workshop. It was not yet the collectivistic socialism of large-scale factories and socially owned farms. But the communist ideal could scarcely be kept within these limits at a time when monarchs were falling like ninepins, and when peasants were finding the traditional exactions of their lords beginning to be replaced by newer kinds of exploitation, since they now either had to work for capitalist owners of large farms or, for the majority who had their own plots, in competition with these new capitalist landowners. In the cities too, artisans had to compete with a new and very rapidly growing form of urban capitalist enterprise, the factory.

Pioneer theorists of communism had advocated much more than the socialization of production, however. They envisaged the reorganization of the whole of social life, not merely the economy. They had spent much time and ingenuity inventing new ‘utopian’ imaginary communities, and in some cases in actually setting them up. Some envisaged new forms of the family; others its abolition. Some like Fourier, advocated entirely new kinds of community life, where people would live in large community dwellings called ‘phalansteries’. And this serious and influential socialist even went so far as to suggest not only that ‘human nature’ would change, but even that new species of animals would emerge: ‘anti-lions’, ‘anti-bears’, and ‘anti-tigers’ which would happily work hard for human beings. Everything, it seemed, was up for grabs.

(iii) The German Non-Revolution: Idealist Philosophy

Karl Marx emerged from high school imbued with the ideals of the age: ‘to sacrifice oneself for humanity’. It was to remain his fundamental ideal throughout his life. Like other young middle-class intellectuals then and now, his choice of university studies was influenced both by family expectations and by the social and political climate of the time. Hence when he entered the University of Bonn in 1838, he initially embarked on legal studies. But he soon gave this up for philosophy. His studies of the law, however, which he saw as the codification of social relations, were to inform his later thinking, especially his distinction between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’.

Philosophy was not a rather marginal academic field of study, as it tends to be today. lt was as pre-eminent in the Germany of the time as social theory had become in France. And the kind of philosophy that was dominant was characteristically German, i.e. idealism. The centrality of thought – of the power of ideas, or as Hegel reified it the Idea – was the centrepiece in this conception of the world, not, as a later, more biologically influenced generation was to emphasize, because the mental equipment of human beings and the advancement of human culture depended upon the evolution of the brain; not even because the stock of factual knowledge or technical skills were being so strikingly added to at the time. Rather, what distinguished humanity was its capacity to conceptualize, to construct categories of thought.

Hegel had died five years before Marx began his studies in Berlin, but his ideas still dominated the thinking of the younger generation. Marx himself was, he declared, a Hegelian. In Hegel’s thinking, the progress of humanity was seen in terms of the gradual refinement and ‘realization’ of the uniquely human capacity to understand not only the natural world of which human beings were a part, but also to understand the principles which underlay the development both of the natural world and of society. No other species possessed this ability, which made it possible for humanity to organize social life rationally.

French thinkers had developed the notion that humanity had progressed through successive stages of social development. Condorcet, for instance, in his Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit (1775) had recognized no fewer than ten ‘epochs’. Societies in the contemporary world, evolutionists argued, could be classified as being at one or other of these stages; some advanced, others less so. The overall direction of evolution in general was indicated by the most advanced countries. It was an idealist evolutionism in that human progress was seen not in terms of technological or economic growth, but that these themselves were the outcome of an improvement in human mental mastery of the world, as a movement of improved and more efficacious thinking which would make possible a superior moral and social life. But it emphatically rejected any notion of a fixed ‘human nature’: it was preoccupied with growth, progress and change. In Hegel’s thinking, expressed at a very high level of abstraction, all phenomena were seen as processes, rather than as things with fixed qualities. Things, whether rocks, people or societies, were actually constantly coming into being, being renewed, or declining towards extinction or transformation into some other form of matter. It was only our inadequate ways of thinking that led us to ‘freeze’ things, as it were, like a snapshot taken at one point in time, to fix what was not really fixed at all, by a process of mental abstraction, and thereby to make a world full of artificially fixed things out of a world that was in reality full of things-in-process. Hegel called this reification, literally: making things.

Hegel’s great predecessor, Kant, had distinguished between the world as it ‘really’ is and the categories we use to order and understand that world. He assumed these categories to be eternal properties of the human mind. But Hegel argued that there was no separate real world ‘out there’, beyond and quite apart from our mental categories. The world, rather, can only be known through our mental activity, and the concepts we use to make sense of the world are constantly changing: historical, not fixed categories. Knowledge was relative, not absolute.

His general conception of process and change was summed up in his notion of the dialectic. From this point of view, as Marx was to put it later, ‘the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement’. Gradual change is going on all the time, some of it repetitive. But from time to time slow, cumulative secular changes lead to more fundamental changes in the nature of the entity, watersheds as it were. These changes were not just changes of quantity or degree, but qualitative changes of kind. The fundamental transitions of birth and death were biological instances of such qualitative macro-changes. So were the life and death, analogically, of societies.

The model was summed up in the famous image borrowed from logic in which the thesis – the initial statement or positive proposition – always contains elements which give rise to radical reformulations of the proposition, and eventually to negative counter-propositions – antitheses. The final stage is reached when a new synthesis occurs – the ‘negation of the negation’ – which overcomes both thesis and antithesis by putting in their place a synthesis which is superior to and subsumes both. Applied to society, the implications of this rather abstract and abstruse philosophical image were that no society is ever free from internal conflicts, and that over time these will gradually grow and harden to the point at which a decisive change has to be made.

In studying society, then, as in the study of Nature, it was essential to separate those elements which were positive and contained potential for future growth from those which were in decline. Knowledge itself can never, therefore, be absolute, not only because new facts are always being discovered, but also because periodically we ask new kinds of questions which can only be answered by producing new kinds of facts. To take a modern instance, after Freud began writing, the facts about childhood experience and sexuality – both previously virtually ignored as unimportant or taboo subjects – assumed an importance they had never previously possessed. Thus when we change our basic assumptions, our framework of thought, a ‘Gestalt-switch’ occurs – a radical change in the entire way we see the world which affects, too, the way we think of the details of that world.

Knowledge was also relative in a second way: because even physically, when we look at a house, we have to look at it from some perspective, either from this side or from that: one can never see it from all sides at once. Human knowledge, then, is always relative, always knowledge from a particular point of view. (This does not mean that the house does not exist at all.) The successive stages in the emergence and maturation of Mind – the human spirit – began with perception of the immediate situation around the thinker; then progressed to consciousness of the self; and finally, with the full flowering of Reason, permitted understanding of the world as a whole, its laws of motion, and of the place of humanity in that world.

In the dialectical movement of history, the higher forms of thought eventually won out. Since these growth elements are already present, though not yet dominant, within older forms of organization, whether of matter or of society, it might seem that Hegel’s philosophy would justify what was later to be called ‘uninterrupted revolution’. But the now-conservative Hegel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin and virtual official philosopher of the Prussian State, could not go that far. His intellectual daring was circumscribed by his social commitments. So he used the device which was to become standard for conservative evolutionists: evolution was declared to have already reached its highest stage – usually seen as a society now dominated by Reason. This usually meant, in reality, a society run by a class or stratum of professionals, usually like the writer: mandarins, sages, technocrats, scientists, practical social scientists, disinterested politicians, or managers working for the good of those they manage, and purporting to create and execute policy, or to advise the ultimate decision-makers as to what was good and what was not, not on the basis of ‘value judgements’, but on the basis of non-partisan, purely ‘objective’ considerations say, of cost-benefit, or, as we now say, calculations of the likely outcomes of different scenarios. The elite is seen as qualified for this task because it has been rationally selected by examination or via some other kind of ‘meritocratic’ performance believed to reflect brainpower, rather than by virtue of older and now invalid bases of traditional rule, such as birth, property qualifications, or religious authority.

In the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte in France believed in rule by an elite of thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Materials and their Synthesis
• Chapter 2. The Model of Capitalism: British Political Economy
• Chapter 3. Social Evolution
• Chapter 4. Socialism: Ideal and Reality
• Marxism, Sociology and Utopia
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index