Marxism

Is it Science?

Max Eastman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000370393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

First published in 1941, Marxism: Is it Science? was written to present the author's criticisms of Marxism and, in doing so, to further exemplify his 'Method of Instruction' first proposed in an earlier work.

The book is divided into six parts to provide six complete presentations of Marxism and why the author considers it unscientific. The six different approaches, varying in focus and complexity, work together to give the reader a detailed overview of Marxism and the authors critique of it.

PART ONE THE WORLD AS ESCALATOR

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161059-1

THE WORLD AS ESCALATOR

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161059-2

MARXISTS profess to reject religion in favor of science, but they cherish a belief that the external universe is evolving with reliable, if not divine, necessity in exactly the direction in which they want it to go. They do not conceive themselves as struggling to build the communist society in a world which is of its own nature indifferent to them. They conceive themselves as traveling toward that society in a world which is like a moving-stairway taking them the way they walk. Their enemies are walking the same stairway, but walking in the wrong direction. This is not a scientific, but, in the most technical sense, a religious conception of the world.

PART TWOTHE TROUBLE WITH MARXISM

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161059-3

THE TROUBLE WITH MARXISM

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161059-4

IT TOOK a revolution in Russia to wake up the English-speaking world to the importance of Karl Marx. Marx regarded England as a model of the mature workings of that capitalist system which he analyzed, and he would regard present-day America as a supermodel. Nevertheless, it is just in England and America that Marxism never found a home. It never took firm root among our radical-minded intellectuals; it never became the official philosophy of our organizations of the working class, as it has almost everywhere else in the world.

There must be some reason why in the countries most advanced economically this most advanced economic theory and program never took hold. I think the principal reason is that Marx was educated in the atmosphere of German metaphysics. He began life as a follower of Hegel, and he never recovered from that German philosophical way of going at things which is totally alien to our minds. Hegel scorned the English for speaking of Isaac Newton as a great philosopher—for regarding his discoveries, that is, as the highest kind of knowledge. We, on the other hand, regard the professorial apostle of “German thoroughness,” who cannot even suggest a plan for building a dam across a creek without starting in with the creation of the world, and getting us to agree about the essential nature of being and the relations between Pure Reason and the Categories of the Understanding, as a comic type to be caricatured on the stage. In this methodological difference of opinion we are right. Ou’ methodology, like our economic development, is the more advanced. Science in its mature forms casts loose from philosophy, just as earlier it cast loose from religion and magic. It contents itself on the theoretical side with specific solutions of specific problems, and on the practical side with methods of procedure for accomplishing specific things. If these solutions and methods imply some general attitude toward the universe at large, then that is conceded tentatively and with reluctance. A quick recourse to skepticism, a readiness to say “I don’t know” when large general questions come up about Being and the Nature of the Universe—a readiness to say “I don’t know” whenever as a simple matter of fact you do not know—is the surest mark of an advanced scientific mind, whether practical or theoretical.

Marx gave the world as important a gift of scientific knowledge as any man of the modern era; he is one of the giants of science. Nevertheless, he did not have this mental attitude. His approach to his problems was philosophical. It was German-professorial in the very sense that seems unnatural to us more skeptical and positivistic Anglo-Saxons. He wanted to revolutionize human society and make it intelligent and decent. He investigated its history and its present constitution with that end in view, and drew up a plan by which the thing might be accomplished. But instead of presenting his thoughts in this simple and clear form as a specific plan for the solution of a specific problem, he started in by deciding in general what the universe is made of and how it operates, and then gradually worked down toward a demonstration that by the very nature of its being and the laws of its operation this universe is inevitably going to revolutionize itself. It is going to revolutionize itself in just the manner outlined in his plan, and therefore as intelligent parts of a universe of such a kind it behooves us to get to work on the job. That method of approaching a job is alien to the Anglo-Saxon mind, especially to hard-headed and radical specimens of the Anglo-Saxon mind. That is surely one reason—and I think it is the main reason—why Marxism does not take firm root in our culture where its lessons are most neatly applicable.

In this I do not mean to boast of any inherent superiority of the Anglo-Saxon brain cells. The more advanced simplicity of logic with which Englishmen like John Stuart Mill approached social problems, however tame their solution of them, was doubtless closely associated with that more advanced industrial development of which Marx himself was so clearly aware. It is important, however, that those young Americans who wish to approach Marx as a teacher—and to some extent they all ought to—should not be “buffaloed” by his philosophical mode of approach. They are very likely to in these days, because those most interested in propagating the ideas of Marx, the Russian Bolsheviks, have swallowed down his Hegelian philosophy along with his science of revolutionary engineering, and they look upon us irreverent peoples, who presume to meditate social and even revolutionary problems without making our obeisance to the mysteries of Dialectic Materialism, as a species of unredeemed and well-nigh unredeemable barbarians. They are right in scorning our ignorance of the scientific ideas of Karl Marx and our indifference to them. They are wrong in scorning our distaste for having practical programs presented in the form of systems of philosophy. In that we simply represent a more progressive intellectual culture than that in which Marx received his education, a culture farther emerged from the dominance of religious attitudes.

For it is the relic of a religious attitude to attribute your plan for changing the world to the world itself, and endeavor to prove that the “inner law” of this world is engaged in realizing your ideals. Marx was an implacable enemy of religion, and he was also—or thought he was—in revolt against philosophy. He liked to repeat the saying of Ludwig Feuerbach that “the metaphysician is a priest in disguise”; and he expressed many times the desire to get philosophy out of the way of his revolutionary science. It was with this motive that he so vigorously insisted that the world consists of matter and not spirit. But the essence of philosophy in its kinship with religion is not to declare that the world is spirit, but to declare that this world of spirit is sympathetic to the ideals of the philosopher. Marx banished the spirit, but retained in his material world the now still more extraordinary gift of being in sympathy with his ideals. He retained, that is, the philosophical method and habit of thought. It was not that he wanted help from the universe, but he did not know how else to formulate his colossal plan for controlling social evolution except to implant it as “historic necessity” in evolution itself. The combination of affirmative and confident action in a given field with a general attitude of scientific skepticism was unknown to him.

An engineer wishing to convert a given form of society into a more satisfactory one would begin by making a very rough outline of the kind of society he proposed to build. With that rough blueprint in mind he would examine the existing society, and he would also examine all past societies, and find out what are the forces which control them and the general laws of their change. When he had finished that investigation and acquired that knowledge, he would draw up a procedure or plan of action, a scheme for getting the thing moving (supposing that his investigations had proven it possible) in the direction of his proposal. That is an engineering approach to the problems raised by Karl Marx. It separates the choice of a goal, which is primarily an act of passion, from the definition of existing facts and the discovery of their laws of motion; and it presents its plan of action as a plan of action pure and simple. It does not undertake the task of proving that the objective world is by virtue of its own inner logic destined to carry that plan out—a task impossible of accomplishment by any mortal brain. We do not know what the world is destined to do, but we know what we can in our own era try to make it do, and try with good assurance that success is possible. That is all anybody needs to know in order to act, or does indeed ever know when he acts with a hazard sufficient to make his act interesting.

Marx did not draw up any detailed plan of the future society he proposed to build. He merely made a few highly general and wholly dogmatic assertions about how wonderful it would be. Indeed his faith in the benign drift of his material universe was so great that he was for the most part ready to dispense with any plan at all. The working classes, he said in one place, “have no ideal to realize: they have only to set free the elements of the new society….” And even in that sole fragment where Marx did enter with some detail into the future plans of the communists, the Criticism of the Gotha Program, we find him demurring against any disposition to give these plans a guiding role. He calls them “juridical conceptions,” and says that they are a mere by-product of economic evolution. His goal, he permits us to know, is a society without classes and without government by force, and one in which wealth shall be distributed according to the formula: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” But he insists upon presenting the conditions which make it reasonable to strive for such a goal, and show by what stages one might move toward it, as causes of its inevitable advent.

This failure to distinguish condition from cause is the most general of those unconscious devices by which Marx and his followers keep up the attitude of a philosopher while presenting the thoughts of an engineer. But it will be obvious upon a moment’s reflection that this must be so. An engineer is compelled to regard his own act as a cause, and to distinguish this from the conditions by which his act is limited—the ‘qualities of his material, its resistance to stresses, strains, etc. The philosopher, wishing to show that his act is identical with what the universe as a whole is doing, is equally compelled to ignore the distinction. He has no other recourse, if he intends to act creatively, but to present the conditions which make his plan possible as causes which make its success inevitable. That is why Marx’s blueprints of the proposed society are so sketchy, and yet are laid down as though Marx had prophetic insight and were able to write a history of the remote future of the world.

It was in examining the existing society and all past societies, and trying to find out what forces control them and in what manner they change, that Marx did his really great work. This work divides itself into two sections: first, an explanation of the dominant part played in all human culture and all its history by a gradual change and development of the technique of wealth production; and second, an analysis of our contemporary capitalist method of production—or, in other words, the Theory of History and the Marxian Economics.

The Theory of History was summarized in this way by Friedrich Engels, the close friend and cocreator of Marx’s ideas:

“Marx discovered the simple fact (heretofore hidden beneath ideological overgrowths) that human beings must have food, drink, clothing and shelter first of all, before they can interest themselves in politics, science, art, religion and the like. This implies that the production of the immediately requisite material means of subsistence, and therewith the existing phase of development of a nation or an epoch, constitute the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal outlooks, the artistic and even the religious ideas are built up. It implies that these latter must be explained out of the former, whereas the former have usually been explained as issuing from the latter.”

It is impossible to exaggerate the influence of this simple idea upon the subsequent development of historic knowledge. All thoughtful men have profited by it, and they will forever. It marks a turning point in the whole art of understanding history. Here again, however, the fact that Marx conceived himself to be writing a philosophy of history, an explanation of the whole thing as a single process, and one which was leading up to and with necessity including his proposed plan for the future, led him to state the case in a way that is unacceptable to a modern scientific mind. The fact that men have to eat and shelter and clothe themselves before they do other things, makes the productive forces a primary factor in explaining history, a factor conditioning all others. That is to say that no historic phenomenon can arise and endure which runs counter to the prevailing mode of production. This does not mean, however, that everything which arises and endures is explained by the prevailing mode of production. Again the idea of effective cause is confused with that of indispensable condition. It is confused by Engels in this most simple statement of the Theory, and it is confused still more explicitly by Marx in his Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, the classic passage. “The mode of production,” he says, “conditions the social, political and spiritual life process …” and in the very next sentence, as though but developing the same thought: “It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence, but on the contrary their social existence determines their consciousness.” There can be no doubt here that the limiting condition and the determining cause are being interchanged without discrimination, and this is true throughout the entire Mandan system.

In Capital, for instance, Marx turns to the investigation of our present-day method of production. He does so because this conditions and limits the success of any efforts that social reformers may make to improve our society. They may talk about liberty, equality, fraternity, and so on, but if these aims are inconsistent with the mode of production, all their noble talk will merely expand in the air. Now Marx is, as we have seen, interested in liberty, equality, fraternity—in all that is implied by these abstract slogans, and more too. He is interested in forming a society in which wealth shall be distributed according to need, work demanded according to ability. He sees at a glance that our system of production renders such a dream impossible. Capitalist production involves economic classes and the exploitation of one class by another inherently and eternally. It involves class struggle inherently and eternally. But there is nothing inherently eternal about capitalist production. It was a product of change; it evolved out of feudalism; it may not necessarily be the end of that evolution. One need not, therefore, simply abandon one’s plan for a better society as impractical, and fall back upon the sad enterprise of doctoring up in small ways the one we have. One may, by further investigation and exercise of ingenuity, devise a scheme by which the mode of production can again be changed, and thus new conditions created which will not be inconsistent with the ideal of a classless society. It was this latter step that Marx took, a step that made him the intellectual father of the Russian revolution and one of the most influential men in modern history. He devised the scheme—or the science, rather, for that is what it became—of engineering with class forces. He pointed out that by organizing and directing the struggle of the working class against the capitalists and their associates, by interlinking with this struggle in certain quite possible ways the struggle of the poor peasants and tenant farmers against the landlords, and by carrying it forward to a veritable “dictatorship” of these exploited classes, it would be possible to take possession of the instruments of production and change the system.

Marx saw clearly enough that this maneuver would be possible only in a crisis, only at a moment when the system had broken down so badly that the dominant classes were unable to rule and the exploited classes were driven by suffering to forceful and imperious action—only at a moment of actual or potential civil war. He was therefore concerned to find out whether the capitalist system of production does not inevitably produce crises, any one of which may become severe enough to make such action practical. There is little doubt that he did demonstrate the inevitability under our present capitalist system of the recurrent crisis of overproduction, and bound up therewith the inevitability of imperialist wars. His contribution to the understanding of business crises and the causes of war will not often be denied today, even by the most “bourgeois” economists. And thus he completed the scientific task set by his apparently utopian aims—the task of finding out how the existing system of wealth production might be changed in such a way as to make these utopian aims possible of attainment and reasonable to strive after.

It was not necessary for him, as an engineer, to prove that this change is inevitable. It was not even necessary to prove that social evolution is tending in that direction. He might, indeed, have believed with Spengler that it is tending in an opposite direction, toward decay and disaster, and that this deliberate and informed action—this new economic engineering science—is the only thing that can save us from the fate of the older civilizations. All he had to prove was that in spite of the limiting conditions his method of action is practical, and the occasions for its application will arise.

That is the sum and substance of Das Kapital as a part of an engineering science. Owing to his philosophical mode o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Part I. The World as Escalator
• Part II. The Trouble with Marxism
• Part III. The Religious Heritage
• Part IV. The Marxian System
• Part V. Marx’s Effort to be Scientific
• Part VI. Revolution as a Scientific Enterprise
• Part VII. Trotsky Defends the Faith
• Acknowledgments
• Notes and References
• Index