New Departures in Marxian Theory

Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135987572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Over the last twenty-five years, Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff have developed a groundbreaking interpretation of Marxian theory generally and of Marxian economics in particular. This book brings together their key contributions and underscores their different interpretations.

In facing and trying to resolve contradictions and lapses within Marxism, the authors have confronted the basic incompatibilities among the dominant modern versions of Marxian theory, and the fact that Marxism seemed cut off from the criticisms of determinist modes of thought offered by post-structuralism and post-modernism and even by some of Marxism's greatest theorists.

Part I
Marxian philosophy and epistemology

1 Marxist epistemology

The critique of economic determinism

Introduction

An unsettled and unsettling dilemma has beset the Marxist theoretical tradition: the problem of the relation between Marxism and economic determinism. The historically predominant tendencies within the tradition have affirmed and elaborated variations on the theme that economic aspects of the social totality determine its non-economic aspects. Words and concepts such as base-superstructure, forces-relations of production, objective-subjective social conditions, proximate-ultimate-last instance determinism and moral-material incentives were borrowed from Marx and Engels or newly invented to specify the identity of Marxist theory and economic determinism. The continuing felt need among Marxists to make this specification is itself a response not only to non-Marxists’ criticisms of economic determinism (qua “Marxism”) but, more to the point here, a debate with other Marxists’ rejection of the identity.

Our argument in this chapter focuses on showing how and why all sides to the debate over economic determinism within Marxism failed to resolve it. We contend that a major contributing factor to this failure was the consistent posing of the debate in terms that clashed fundamentally with the most basic tenets of a Marxist epistemology or theory of knowledge. Our thesis is twofold: that the unresolved dilemma over economic determinism within Marxist theory has involved a distinctly non-Marxist epistemology, and that displacing the latter in favor of a Marxist epistemology leads directly to overcoming that persistent and pernicious dilemma.

What precisely was the non-Marxist epistemology involved in that debate? Participants on all sides generally contested from the common and traditional standpoint of the presumed existence of two distinct realms of life: that of “reality” (“being,” “materiality,” “practice,” etc.) and that of “thought” (“idea,” “concept,” etc.) where all thought aims to grasp the truth of that “reality.” The participants divided over what that essential truth might be; and they still do. The consistently predominant view has been labeled “classical” or “official” Marxism in recognition of the general endorsement it has received within and by most Marxist political parties and groups. On this view Marx is understood to have discovered the truth, namely, that the economic aspect of social reality determined the non-economic, specifically the various political and cultural aspects. Proponents of this view undertake to elaborate how this determination process works in concrete situations and to polemicize against alternative, “false” theories of social reality.

A significant minority Marxist tendency found the predominant view too dogmatic, mechanical, unidirectional, narrowly reductionist. In the writings of Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Reich, the Frankfurt School theorists, Marcuse, and Sartre, to take some major examples, this minority tendency has found basic philosophical support for its rejection of the identity of Marxism with economic determinism.¹ However, it is more accurate to refer to minority tendencies than to suggest one unified position. Some of the minority offered a humanist position in which the essence of history was “man,” or “the human existential predicament,” or the “human project,” etc.² Others held back from any such full-fledged humanism, focusing their work rather on demonstrations that specific non-economic aspects of social reality do help shape history, do influence the economy itself and do therefore serve to undermine any economic reductionism in Marxist social theory.

The contest among these positions produced many variations on their respective themes, none of which resolved matters. One variation, inaugurated by Engels, did come to serve as a widely held middle ground occupied by those who both acknowledged that the debate touched something of great importance, yet were also willing to live with it in its unresolved form. Engels’ letters offer an interpretation of Marx’s and his own earlier works to the effect that they only meant to say that the economic aspects ultimately or in the last instance determine the noneconomic:

It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely active, while everything else is only passive effect. Economic relations, however much they may be influenced by the other—the political and ideological relations, are still ultimately the decisive ones.

(To Starkenburg, Jan. 25, 1894)

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasize the main principle vis-á-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction.

(To Bloch, Sept. 21, 1890)

This formulation does indeed grant to both sides of the debate some theoretical space to pursue their respective arguments about the truth of social reality. It also permits both sides to present a united front toward non-Marxists, since both can jointly proclaim their allegiance to a notion of the ultimate or last-instance determinism exercised upon society as a whole by its economic elements.³

The history of the unsettled debate presents a picture of recurrent shocks and crises renewing and sharpening the intensity of the debate followed by relapses into repetitions of but slightly altered positions. Marxist political groups, conditioned in significant ways by the various positions in the debate, forever found and find themselves forced to make basic strategic and tactical decisions involving the assessments of the precise and ever-changing mutual effectivity of the different aspects of their social environment. In such circumstances struggles over the specific strategic or tactical centrality of some non-economic aspects often develop into theoretical assertions of the primacy, even over economics, of such aspects as the political or class consciousness of the workers, the power of nationalist, sexist, racist, or religious beliefs, the effectivity of parliamentary and military bodies. Against such theoretical developments loyalists reaffirm their commitment to the economic determinist argument. The debate flares up again; the loyalists drive some out of the ranks of Marxism altogether; the Engels middle ground is once again rediscovered. Marxist political practice, having shaken the theoretical debate, is in turn shaken by the flare-up of and fallout from the debate. The stage is thus set for the next round.

The mutual determination of theoretical debates and political practices within the Marxian tradition changes both, as the history of the tradition attests. However, what remains remarkable, and what prompts the present paper, is the repeated inability of participants in the debate to resolve it. Each flare-up posed and poses anew the problem of how to think through the relation of economic to non-economic aspects, only to relapse, with much frustration all around, into fruitless, vague disputations about which aspects influence the others more.

All participants in the debate over economic determinism and Marxism appealed to one or both of two distinct types of proof for their respective positions. First and foremost, there was and still is the empiricist proof. Disputants appealed to “the facts” as warranting their arguments, arguing that the facts revealed their truth to anyone not so extraneously biased as to be unable to face them. “History teaches” those who do not ideologically refuse to learn. “History,” from the empiricist standpoint, constitutes not a problem in and for theory but an independent universal measure of the latter’s validity.

There was and is also the rationalist proof offered from the rationalist epistemological standpoint of some within the debates. Its proponents operated from the presumption, however grounded, that Marx had discovered the truth of social reality, that his theory captured, and thus was identical to, the essence of that reality. For them disputes over that reality then properly reduced to disputes over the precise specification and formulation of Marxian theory.

All participants in the economic determinism debate resorted to empiricist and/or rationalist proofs corresponding to their epistemological standpoints in framing their arguments for or against the identity of Marxism and economic determinism. More importantly, most writers frequently utilized both proofs at different points in their texts. The reason for this, we suspect, is that empiricism, when pushed to defend itself, can and often does collapse into rationalism, and vice versa.

Consider the dilemma of a Marxist with his/her typical commitment to some sort of materialism. Confronted with the critical demand to justify the rationalistic notion that Marx’s theory is the truth of “the real,” the final recourse often has been that empirical testing—in the empiricist sense—has validated the truth of the theory. On the other hand, consider the dilemma of the empiricist Marxist confronting the critical demand to justify his/her epistemological standpoint. How do you justify your view of the “facts perceived” as independent criteria for the validity of the “theory,” given that both are alike products of the thinking mind? In reply to such a question Marxist empiricists often make the rationalist formulation that their notion of the two independent realms—that is, their theory of the theory-fact relation—is the essence or truth of the real world. We may here ignore the vulgar, circular proposition that the independence of facts from theory has been empirically proven, since, of course, such an empiricist testing presumes what it is supposed to test, thereby violating its own premise.

The Marxist debate over economic determinism exhibits, for example, rationalist arguments favoring economic determinism by means of increasingly rigorous conceptualizations of the logic of Marxist theory qua the truth of the social totality. There are, by contrast, empiricist arguments for the determination of social reality by non-economic aspects, be they political or cultural, however these may be defined. In general, it is no difficult task to find empiricist or rationalist arguments elaborating passages in Marx, Lenin, etc., to the effect that Marxism is or is not identical to economic determinism. Considering that all four types of arguments can be found in various combinations in most of the writers participating in the debate over the years, the unsettled and the unsettling quality of the unresolved debate may be judged as not particularly surprising.

This four-part typology of debating positions sheds some new light upon the Marxist theoretical tradition. For some rationalists, the essence of capitalist society conforms to the privileged determinant role of economics which they read in Marxian theory. Thus, for them the “mode of production” or the “commodity form” becomes the essence of reality, and their task becomes the careful specification and elaboration of Capital’s logic (which they see as identical to capital’s logic). By contrast, for some empiricists the economic essence of social life is to be found in the concrete-real, their “real data.” History becomes the data source with which Marxists prove economic determination in the last instance.

Now both of these economic determinist approaches carefully distance themselves from non-economic essentialisms, chiefly humanism. Nevertheless, contesting economistic and humanistic positions usually build upon the same epistemological standpoint. Thus, we may explain how rationalist-economistic tendencies, as well as their rationalist-humanistic antagonists, would both rediscover Hegel and Marx’s complex relation to him through a rationalist reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (for the humanists) and Science of Logic (for the economic determinists). By contrast, as shown below, we read Marx as sharing Hegel’s rejection of received epistemological standpoints, both empiricist and rationalist, although Marx and Hegel developed this rejection in different ways to different conclusions.

Upon examination, the epistemological standpoints at play in the debates display remarkable similarity to the long prior history of epistemological debate within traditional (or bourgeois) philosophy. Rationalism and empiricism have been at it within many other non-Marxian debates for a long time, even after some rather devastating critiques raised against them from such different non-Marxian quarters as the works, say, of Wittgenstein, Quine, Kuhn, and Feyerabend. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations criticized his own earlier writings as well as all traditional epistemological claims for the “truth” of one theory as against another:

He [Wittgenstein] was trying to demonstrate not that logic and mathematics do not rest on a realistic basis, but only that that basis cannot provide any independent support for them . . . The sources of the necessities of logic and mathematics lie within those areas of discourse, in actual linguistic practices, and, when these necessities seem to point to some independent backing outside the practices, the pointing is deceptive and the idea that the backing is independent is an illusion.⁴

Meanwhile in 1951 Quine attacked the “two dogmas of empiricism”:

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded.⁵

In the same vein Kuhn rejected, in 1962, any notion that “changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.”⁶ In 1969, Kuhn insisted again:

There is another step . . . which many philosophers of science wish to take and which I refuse. They wish, that is, to compare theories as representations of nature, as statements about “what is really out there” . . . I believe nothing of that sort can be found. If I am right, then “truth” may, like “proof,” be a term with only intratheoretic application.⁷

Feyerabend arrived at much the same point:

Theories may be removed because of conflicting observations, observations may be removed for theoretical reasons . . . Learning does not go from observations to theory but always involves both elements. Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.⁸

So the question is: What are empiricist and rationalist formulations doing inside the Marxian tradition generally and in the economic determinism debates in particular? To put this question in slightly different terms: Does Marx accomplish a basic break, including an “epistemological break,” from prior philosophy, as he thought he did, or does he not? It is precisely the task of this chapter to argue the notion of Marxism’s epistemological uniqueness vis-à-vis traditional epistemologies. We seek to develop a specification of that uniqueness out of the materials given by some of the greatest Marxist theoreticians, even though they, too, lapsed repeatedly into empiricist and rationalist formulations which were, and still are, the bulk of the intellectual air which everyone breathes. Our formulation of Marx’s epistemology permits, finally, a resolution to the economic determinism debates.

We reject empiricism and rationalism as epistemological standpoints in part because of their political and theoretical consequences. Empiricism starts out from certain givens, the “facts,” against which it measures, and thus justifies, the particular theoretical positions of any particular empiricist argument. In proceeding in this way there is a built-in tendency to consider these facts as conceptually neutral. Since, on our view, no facts are conceptually neutral, it follows that empiricist formulations within the Marxian tradition operate as vehicles for the unacknowledged, unrecognized entry of non-Marxist conceptualizations into Marxist theoretical work. Thus, for example, the empiricist concept of “experience” as an immediate register of facts against which to measure the truth of theory often operates to introduce bourgeois conceptions of “daily life” into Marxist theory. We understand Lukács’ famous attacks against “bourgeois immediacy” in this sense. He recognizes that proletarian revolution requires the proletariat to deny, to break the hold of what he called “immediately given everyday life” (the equivalent of the empiricists’ “facts,”) upon proletarian consciousness.⁹ Marx criticizes Ricardo on just this point: “When he analyses the value of the commodity, he at once allows himself to be influenced by consideration of all kinds of concrete conditions . . . One must reproach him for regarding the phenomenal form as immediate and direct proof or exposition of the general laws, and for failing to interpret it.”¹⁰

Such “givens” of bourgeois society, absorbed uncritically into Marxist theoretical practice, contain all manner of idealistic notions, alongside various materialist notions, with which bourgeois society invests the phenomena of its “everyday life.” Thus empiricist formulations within Marxism function as an open door welcoming bourgeois conceptualizations, bourgeois debates between empiricism and rationalism, into the Marxist theoretical tradition. We offer the following analogy: the uncritical import into the Marxian tradition of the bourgeois concepts (“givens”) of freedom, sex, class, race, etc., is rather like the uncritical import of advanced capitalist technologies into developing socialist societies. Of course, to reconceptualize critically is to transform, to change, any “given”; it is not a flat rejection.

Empiricism’s open door to bourgeois theory has rendered the Marxist theoretical tradition an often embarrassing, often irrelevant, and generally eclectic collection of disparate conceptualizations. Indeed, the traditional Marxist debate over economic determinism is itself the site of contests embodying epistemological standpoints taken over uncritically from bourgeois theory. We would make the same argument about the concept of economic determinism: an import not critically reconceptualized into Marxism from its bourgeois context.

We wish to exclude empiricism and rationalism by closing the door through which they arrived. The mistakes and failures of Marxist political practices which have sometimes been ascribed, to one or the other side in the debate over economic determinism are, we believe, caused in part by the interminably unsettled status of the debate. Indeed, the middle ground in Marxist political practice, which acknowledges the importance of non-economic aspects within the context of the primacy of the economic, is the practical counterpart of the theoretical middle ground inaugurated by Engels. Both such practice and such theory are characterized by vacillation tending towards opportunist swings between pro- and anti-economic-determinist positions. This is because both operate with a general concept of the basic relation between economic and non-economic aspects that wobbles between making one the essence of the other, or vice versa, depending on whether such practitioners or theoreticians think themselves to be in first, middle, or last instance determinant circumstances. Our notion is that the unsettled and unsettling status of all positions in the debate follow from replacing the specific epistemological standpoint which we read in Marx with uncritically imported bourgeois epistemological concepts.

The problem remains for Marxism: how to think through the relation between economic and non-economic social aspects without this essentialist lapse into contentions about more or less determinacy by one or the other. The problem remain...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Marxian Philosophy and Epistemology
• Part II: Class Analysis
• Part III: Marxian Economic Theory
• Part IV: Criticisms and Comparisons of Economic Theories
• Part V: History
• Notes
• References