Emergentist Marxism

Dialectical Philosophy and Social Theory

Sean Creaven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136013508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

In tackling emergentist Marxism in depth, this well-written volume demonstrates that critical realism and materialist dialectics are indispensable to theorizing the functioning of complex social and physical systems. Author Sean Creaven investigates Marx's dialectics of being and consciousness, forces and relations of production, base and superstructure, class structure and class conflict, and demonstrates how they allow the social analyst to conceptualize geo-history as embodying a tendential evolutionary directionality, rather than as simply random or indeterminate in terms of its outcomes.

For those interested in social and political theory, Marxism and communism and contemporary social theory, this outstanding volume is an in important read and a valuable resource.

1 Critical realism and dialectic

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to offer an appraisal of Bhaskar’s realist philosophy, as this has progressed through its critical realist and dialectical critical realist ‘stages’ of development. This is no mere academic exercise, since it is my contention that prior to Bhaskar’s ‘idealist turn’ of transcendental dialectical critical realism post-2000, his philosophy provides ontological, epistemological and ethical supports for an emancipatory social science and politics, and is, therefore, quite consistent with and complementary to Marxian dialectics. Thus, Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist systems provide concepts and analytical tools, I contend, that do indeed under-labour for Marx’s materialistic social theory.

Bhaskar’s groundbreaking critical realist critique of the ‘epistemic fallacy’ does undermine the philosophical foundations of idealism and empiricism in the philosophy of science. His central critical realist ontological concepts of stratification and emergence, which undergo further development in his dialectical critical realist system, do allow the transcendence of the false dilemmas posed by reductionism (of the micro and macro variants). Moreover, they do allow of a productive solution to some major dilemmas of Marxist thought (such as the relationship between freedom and necessity, voluntarism and determinism, and agency and structure in social analysis). Additionally, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism is a welcome and progressive development of his critical realism, not least because he rehabilitates dialectical analysis in philosophy and social theory, and to an audience often unfamiliar with and sometimes hostile to dialectics, and in a fashion which is broadly consistent with Marxian dialectic. In doing so Bhaskar articulates a corpus of dialectical concepts (especially his ‘absenting absence’ dialectic, his modes of negation and his classes of real contradiction), which are of practical utility in substantive social theorizing, including on the terrain of socio-historical materialism.

Crucially as well, Bhaskar’s philosophy, at this stage in its development, provides conceptual tools that allow of a defence of Marx’s own belief (in opposition to positivism) that it is perfectly possible to move from questions of fact to questions of value, or from descriptive statements to evaluative statements (i.e. to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’), in social analysis and in politics. This is indispensable to any notion of social science as a critical and emancipatory discipline, which is capable of under-labouring political struggles for a better society. Finally, Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist philosophy articulates a humanistic moral realism (based on ethical naturalism), which is not only defensible but also provides rational normative grounds for endorsing Marx’s emancipatory political project of abolishing hierarchically organized social relations. My argument is that whereas Marx’s social theory demonstrates how human emancipation is practically possible (given the structural contradictions and dynamics of capitalism), Bhaskar’s humanist dialectic demonstrates why such emancipation is a moral necessity.

Nonetheless, I want to argue that it is doubtful whether Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist systems can be viewed as indispensable to establishing the ontological coherence of Marxian social science, which is certainly the claim that Bhaskar wishes to make for dialectical critical realism. To establish these points I will address a number of issues. First, I will consider the relationship between Bhaskar’s critical realist and dialectical critical realist systems, exploring how and to what extent the latter overreaches and transcends the former, and the adequacy and utility of Bhaskar’s critical realist dialectical concepts. Second, I will consider the nature of the relationship between Marxism and Bhaskar’s dialectic. Here I will ask: Does Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism amount to a ‘transcendence’ or ‘outflanking’ (albeit sublative) of Marxian dialectic? Is dialectical critical realism indispensable to Marxism for the formal specification of its dialectics? Is dialectical critical realism, in other words, foundational to Marxism? Or is Bhaskar’s dialectic better understood as some kind of intervention on the terrain of Marxian dialectic – either as specification, restatement, refinement, extension, deepening, development or ‘over-reach' of Marxian dialectic, or perhaps as a combination of some or all of these things? Bhaskar wishes to make the former claim for his dialectical critical realist philosophy. My argument (elaborated in this chapter) is that this position is indefensible and that the latter interpretation is appropriate.

Therefore, a synthesis of the fundamental ontological concepts of critical realism and dialectical critical realism with Marxian dialectic offers the prospect of a promising way forward for critical emancipatory theory. For, although both ‘overreach’ one another in certain respects, the former does not ‘transcend’ or ‘found’ the latter in any ultimate ontological sense. For some this is what Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism is all about. Yet this is not so, because Bhaskar is concerned not with synthesis but with preservative sublation of Marxian dialectic (along with critical realism and all previous dialectical philosophy) within the conceptual framework of dialectical critical realism. But there are, I believe, stronger grounds for holding that elements of critical realism and dialectical critical realism substantiate and enrich the ontological materialist dialectics of the classical Marxists, rather than the other way round. Preservative sublation, I contend, should be of the operational parts of Bhaskar’s realism within the conceptual framework of Marxian dialectical materialism, not vice versa. For unless this is done, crucial errors (of irrealist slippage viz transcendental dialectical critical realism and agnostic compromises with irrealism) cannot be decisively dispelled.

The purpose of this chapter is to establish these arguments. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to explore the key tenets of critical realism and dialectical critical realism, indicating their advantages to philosophy and social theory, and obviously to Marxian dialectics.

Bhaskar's critical realism

Bhaskar’s critical realist philosophy was built on ontological and epistemological foundations. Ontologically, Bhaskar argued for a conception of reality as intransitive (independent of human agency), transfactual (in possession of causal powers) and stratified (composed of various levels necessarily related to each other). Bhaskar’s depth realism distinguished between three basic domains of reality – the empirical, the actual and the structural. The empirical is the world that is apprehended by humans as sense-data. The actual is the world of empirical phenomena (whether experienced or unexperienced by human beings). The structural is the world of natural necessity, the essential properties and causal powers of things that give rise to the empirical and actual domains of the experienced and potentially experienceable. This structural domain is not uniform, but is multi-layered, with lower-order structures (such as the brain and central nervous system) giving rise to higher-order structures (such as mind and consciousness). The relations between these strata are based on ontological rootedness (of higher on lower) and emergence (with higher being made possible by the causal interaction of the lower).¹

This stratified ontology allowed Bhaskar to formulate a productive alternative to reductionism (the view that the objects of the higher sciences are ultimately decomposable into those of the lower sciences) and dualism (the view that reality is composed of different substances – such as mind and matter – which are autonomous of each other and interact in a quite external and inessential way). On the one hand, reductionism is rejected because the generative mechanisms comprising a particular stratum, though generated by those of its root stratum, are nonetheless sui generis, a new form of complexity, with its own distinct properties and powers (such as the mind’s capacity to think, which is not a property of the individual cells that compose the brain). On the other hand, dualism is rejected because stratification and emergence also means that the relations between the objects of knowledge are not inessential or contingent, but are necessary, with the higher-order strata only relatively autonomous of their root stratum.

Epistemologically, Bhaskar argued for an anti-empiricist and anti-positivist naturalism in the philosophy of science, according to which there ‘is (or can be) an essential unity of method between the natural and social sciences’.² Yet Bhaskar’s naturalism correctly recognized both methodological and structural constraints on this unity. The methodological constraint is the impossibility of experimental closure in the social sciences (given that one cannot study social relations in a laboratory). The structural constraint is simply that the social sciences and their objects of knowledge (social relations) are internally rather than externally related, quite unlike the relations between the socially generated natural sciences and their non-social objects of knowledge. Notably, Bhaskar’s naturalism is not the position that the methods of the social and natural sciences are identical, or that the methods of the social sciences should be derived from those of the natural sciences. Rather, it consists of two rather different propositions. First, that the goals of each are the same (causal explanation of phenomena). This is on the grounds that both social and physical reality are composed of unobservable structures, whose generative mechanisms govern the phenomenal forms that may be apprehended through the senses as objects of human experience. Second, that ‘it is the nature of objects that determines their cognitive possibilities for us’,³ so that the form of possible science in both the social and natural domains is given by the properties (enablements and liabilities) of their respective objects of inquiry.⁴

Such an epistemology presupposes Bhaskar’s realist ontology of the world as existing independently of human beings and of their perceptions and conceptions, yet exerting directional guidance on the manner in which human beings can relate to the objects of experience. Such directional guidance is both cognitive (by contradicting or corroborating particular truth-claims) and practical (by allowing or enabling certain causal interventions in the world but ruling out or constraining others), this making it possible for human reason and abstraction to delve beneath the phenomenal forms of reality to its underlying structures. This epistemology also presupposes Bhaskar’s specific theory of the mind–body connection, i.e. his synchronic emergent powers materialism. As Andrew Brown observes, synchronic emergent powers materialism:

establishes that the ‘real essence’ generating thought is some (as yet little known) structure emergent from the brain and CNS [central nervous system]. This is an essence very different to that of the objects of thought such as electrons, atoms, molecules, etc. In this almost trivial and yet fundamental way, thought is non-identical with, or ‘non-isomorphic’ to, its object (a ‘reflection’ theory of knowledge is ruled out, in any literal sense). Science and everyday activity reveal that knowledge cannot be gained merely through passive contemplation but must be worked for; reality does not readily uncover its secrets to humanity. Critical realism is thereby led to theorize the process of knowledge acquisition in terms of the causal interaction of thought and object. Thought causes intentional human activity. Such activity impacts upon real objects, which, in turn, causally impact upon thought. On this view, an object may be essentially independent of the process by which thought attempts to grasp it. Hence, statements referring to real objects (ontological statements) are not always reducible to statements referring to the process of knowledge acquisition (epistemological statements).⁵

Bhaskar’s ontological and epistemological realism thus allows a distinction to be drawn between the transitive and intransitive dimensions of reality. The transitive is the epistemological dimension: the state of human knowledge of the world. The intransitive is the ontological dimension: the state of the objective world independently of our knowledge of it. Bhaskar refers to the failure to uphold this distinction as the epistemic fallacy. This is an error committed by non-realist philosophy of science, and it results from the failure to recognize that questions of natural necessity shape what kinds of human knowledge are possible, rather than vice versa (i.e. that human cognition or sense-experiences determine our knowledge of the world). The epistemic fallacy is, says Bhaskar, ‘the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge’,⁶ including statements about how we might acquire knowledge of the world.

Empiricist philosophy of science commits the epistemic fallacy, Bhaskar rightly notes, because empiricists regard as scientifically meaningful only the objects of sensory experience, so that statements about objective reality are reduced to statements about what immediate sense-data can tell us about that reality. From this perspective, since unobservable structures (such as subatomic particles, minds and class systems) cannot be apprehended by humans as raw sense-data, they cannot be treated as real objects of knowledge: mind states are really just brain states, subatomic particles are simply convenient hypothetic constructs of science, and class systems are simply collectivities of individuals acting on their rational economic interests. Idealist philosophy of science (in its subjective and objective forms) also commits the epistemic fallacy, as Bhaskar rightly suggests. This is because idealists either regard the objective world as constituted by consciousness (in which case non-cognitive objects are either unreal or caused by some kind of supermind), or as dependent on consciousness (in the Kantian sense that unknowable things-in-themselves are constructed as thought-objects in ways determined by human cognitive interests). In each case, ontology is reduced to epistemology, since either there is no world outside consciousness (or this world is a construct of consciousness), or the world outside consciousness is interpreted in ways determined by the inner rationality of the human mind.

Ontological depth, stratification and emergence

An important function of Bhaskar’s philosophy is to establish the case for endorsing a ‘depth model’ of reality in opposition to the claims of classical empiricism (the view that only ‘impressions’ or ‘sense data’ can be said to comprise the real) and ‘empirical realism’ or ‘actualism’ (the view that the real is comprised of both ‘impressions’ and ‘events’, the former being experiences of the latter). By means of transcendental arguments, Bhaskar has little difficulty disposing of the ontological claims of classical empiricism:

The intelligibility of sense-perception presupposes the intransitivity of the objects perceived. For it is in the independent occurrence or existence of such objects that the meaning of ‘perception’, and the epistemic significance of perception, lies. Among such objects are events, which thus must be categorically independent of experiences.... If changing experience of objects is to be possible, objects must have a distinct being in time and space from the experiences of which they are the objects. For Kepler to see the rim of the earth drop away, while Tycho Brahe watches the sun rise, we must suppose that there is something that they both see (in different ways). Similarly when modern sailors refer to what ancient mariners called a sea serpent as a school of porpoises, we must suppose that there is something which they are describing in different ways. The intelligibility of scientific change (and criticism) and scientific edu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Critical realism and dialectic
• 2 Materialist dialectics
• 3 Socio-historical materialism
• 4 Stratification and power
• 5 Marx versus Weber on the di alectics of history
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index