Marxism Lecture Three: History, old and new [PDF]

by Marxist theorists Kautsky and Plekhanov). .... That is, Marx rejects both (old) materialism and idealism as one-‐si

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Marxism     Lecture  Three:  History,  old  and  new     1. Marx’s  ‘materialist  conception  of  history’  (materialistische  Geschichtsauffassung)     N.B.:  Marx  never  actually  uses  the  term  ‘historical  materialism’  (the  term  was  coined  by  Engels  and  later  popularised   by  Marxist  theorists  Kautsky  and  Plekhanov).         Distinguish  between  two  key  senses  of  ‘Marx’s  theory  of  history’:     i) the  ‘materialist  conception’  itself  –  i.e.  a  broad  view  of  what  human  history  is  /  what  it  is  to  study  it.     ii) a  specific  account  as  to  what  Marx  thinks  has  happened,  is  happening,  and  will  happen;  may  divide  into:   a)  a  view  as  to  the  trajectory  of  human  history  (horizontal);  b)  a  view  as  to  the  way  in  which  societies  are   structured,  the  way  they  function  and  maintain  themselves  in  existence  (vertical).         Here  is  the  rose,  here  dance!       With  his  materialist  conception  of  history,  Marx  both  takes  over  and  transforms  a  Hegelian  approach:     -­‐ Hegel  cites  Latin  Aesop’s  hic  rhodus,  hic  saltus;  ‘With  little  change,  the  above  saying  would  read  (in  German):   “Hier  ist  die  Rose,  hier  tanze”’  (allusion  to  the  ‘rose  in  the  cross’  of  the  Rosicrucians,  who  claimed  to  possess   esoteric  knowledge  with  which  they  could  transform  social  life)   -­‐ Hegel:  the  material  for  understanding  and  changing  society  is  there  in  society  itself,  not  in  some  other-­‐ worldly  theory:  “To  apprehend  what  is  is  the  task  of  philosophy,”  rather  than  to  “teach  the  world  what  it   ought  to  be.”   -­‐ Marx,  in  18th  Brumaire  (1852),  cites  hic  rhodus,  hic  salta  [sic]  in  order  to  make  a  point  about  the  context  of   human  (revolutionary)  action:  “a  situation  is  created  which  makes  all  turning  back  impossible,   and  the  conditions  themselves  call  out:  Here  is  the  rose,  here  dance!”   -­‐ Marx  seems  to  connect  this  with  the  point  of  the  Aesop  fable  that  he  and  Hegel  both  cite,  i.e.  that  it  makes   more  sense  to  look  at  what  people  actually  do  than  to  accept  uncritically  what  they  say  about  themselves:     ‘Just  as  our  opinion  of  an  individual  is  not  based  on  what  he  thinks  of  himself,  so  we  cannot  judge  of   such  a  period  of  transformation  by  its  own  consciousness;  on  the  contrary,  this  consciousness  must   be  explained  rather  from  the  contradictions  of  material  life…’  (1859  Preface  to  A  Critique  of  Political   Economy)     -­‐ Like  Hegel,  Marx  will  offer  a  view  of  history  which  i)  tries  to  understand  what  is,  and  draws  goals  from  reality   rather  than  trying  to  bring  reality  into  line  with  (external  or  abstract)  goals;  ii)  emphasises  human  action  as   taking  place  under  conditions  which  are  not  under  the  individual’s  control;  and  iii)  sees  historical   development  as  propelled  by  ‘immanent’  contradictions  or  antagonisms  (not  e.g.  from  new  intellectual   discoveries  or  arguments).   -­‐ Marx  re-­‐emphasises  human  beings  as  the  authors  of  history  (cf.  Lecture    Two,  ‘The  mystical  substance   becomes  the  real  subject  and  the  real  subject  appears  to  be  something  else,  namely  a  moment  of  the   mystical  substance.’):     ‘In  direct  contrast  to  German  philosophy,  which  descends  from  heaven  to  earth,  here  we  ascend   from  earth  to  heaven.  That  is  to  say,  we  do  not  set  out  from  what  men  imagine,  conceive,  nor  from   men  as  narrated,  thought  of,  or  imagined,  conceived,  in  order  to  arrive  at  men  in  the  flesh.  We  set   out  from  real,  active  men  and  on  the  basis  of  their  real  life  process  we  demonstrate  the   development  of  the  ideological  reflexes  and  echoes  of  this  life  process.’  (The  German  Ideology)  

2       Hence,  Marx  on  history  has  to  be  seen  together  with  Marx  on  the  nature  of  human  beings:       - Human  beings  (cf.  Lecture  One)  are  needy  beings,  who  will  act  on  the  world  to  satisfy  their  needs,   transforming  it  and  themselves  in  the  process  (cf.  Enlightenment  emphasis  on  mastery  over  ‘nature’);  this  is   the  basic  motor  of  human  history  (cf.  animals,  who  have  no  ‘history’  in  a  comparable  sense).    But:   a) M’s  claim  not  that  humans  are  primarily  selfish  and  acquisitive  in  the  way  seen  under  capitalism   (‘materialistic’,  in  everyday  sense).    Fromm  (1961):  ‘the  passion  for  money  and  property,  according   to  Marx,  is  just  as  much  economically  conditioned  as  the  opposite  passions.’;  ‘it  is  one  of  the  great   differences  between  Marx  and  most  writers  of  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries  that  he  does   not  consider  capitalism  to  be  the  outcome  of  human  nature  and  the  motivation  of  man  in  capitalism   to  be  the  universal  motivation  within  man.’   b) The  idea  is  not  simply  the  Enlightenment  one  of  ‘rational  man’  conquering  a  wild-­‐yet-­‐passive  nature:   labour  is  ‘man’s  effort  to  regulate  his  metabolism  with  nature’;  ‘truly  human  history’  will  begin  only   when  the  ‘antagonism  between  man  and  nature’  is  eventually  solved  (Fromm;  cf.  Bellamy  Foster  on   ‘metabolic  rift’).     Marx  contrasts  his  approach  to  history  with  both  the  Hegelian  tradition  of  ‘German  idealism’    and  what  he  calls  the   ‘old  materialism’.    E.g.  (from  his  ‘Theses  on  Feuerbach’):     ‘The  chief  defect  of  all  materialism  up  to  now  (including  Feuerbach’s)  is  that  the  object,  reality,  what  we   apprehend  through  our  senses,  is  understood  only  in  the  form  of  the  object  or  contemplation  (Anschauung);   but  not  as  sensuous  human  activity,  as  practice;  not  subjectively.  Hence  in  opposition  to  materialism,  the   active  side  was  developed  abstractly  by  idealism  –  which  of  course  does  not  know  real  sensuous  activity  as   such.  Feuerbach  wants  sensuous  objects  really  distinguished  from  the  objects  of  thought;  but  he  does  not   understand  human  activity  itself  as  objective  activity.’     - That  is,  Marx  rejects  both  (old)  materialism  and  idealism  as  one-­‐sided:  materialism  neglects  subjective   human  experience;  idealism  neglects  the  embodied,  real  activity  of  human  beings,  reducing  them  to  res   cogitans  (‘thinking  things’)  and  proceeding  as  if  abstract  mental  activity  a)  sprang  up  out  of  nowhere,  and  b)   held  the  key  for  social  change.    Fromm:         ‘Marx  actually  took  a  firm  position  against  a  philosophical  materialism  which  was  current  among   many  of  the  most  progressive  thinkers  (especially  natural  scientists)  of  his  time.  This  materialism   claimed  that  the  substratum  of  all  mental  and  spiritual  phenomena  was  to  be  found  in  matter  and   material  processes.  In  its  most  vulgar  and  superficial  form,  this  kind  of  materialism  taught  that   feelings  and  ideas  are  sufficiently  explained  as  results  of  chemical  bodily  processes,  and  “thought”  is   to  the  brain  what  urine  is  to  the  kidneys.’     - Marx  defends  ‘naturalism  or  humanism  [which]  is  distinguished  from  both  idealism  and  materialism,  and   at  the  same  time  constitutes  their  unifying  truth.’  (EPM).     2. The  structure  of  society  and  the  course  of  history     Alongside  basic  ‘historicist’  and  ‘humanist’  methodology,  Marx  has  a  particular  view  about  way  society  is  structured,   which  connects  to  a  view  about  how  the  course  of  history  runs.    Various  sorts  of  accounts  possible  here  (e.g.  cyclical;   teleological).    Whether  M’s  is  strictly  ‘teleological’  is  matter  of  controversy  (depends  what  you  mean),  but  he  is   advancing  a  view  of  patterned  development  (cf.  Khaldun)  which  is  presented  as  tending  towards  a  classless  society.          

3     N.B.:  much  contemporary  writing  on  ‘Marx’s  theory  of  history’  (e.g.  the  work  of  G.  A.  Cohen)  focuses  almost   exclusively  on  a  thumbnail  sketch  given  in  his  1859  Preface  to  A  Critique  of  Political  Economy:     ‘in  the  social  production  of  their  life,  men  enter  into  definite  relations  that  are  indispensable  and   independent  of  their  will,  relations  of  production  which  correspond  to  a  definite  stage  of  development  of   their  material  productive  forces.  The  sum  total  of  these  relations  of  production  constitutes  the  economic   structure  of  society,  the  real  foundation,  on  which  rises  a  legal  and  political  superstructure  and  to  which   correspond  definite  forms  of  social  consciousness.  The  mode  of  production  of  material  life  conditions  the   social,  political  and  intellectual  life  process  in  general.  It  is  not  the  consciousness  of  men  that  determines   their  social  being,  but,  on  the  contrary,  their  social  being  that  determines  their  consciousness.  At  a  certain   stage  of  their  development,  the  material  productive  forces  of  society  come  in  conflict  with  the  existing   relations  of  production,  or  –  what  is  but  a  legal  expression  for  the  same  thing  –  with  the  property  relations   within  which  they  have  been  at  work  hitherto.  From  forms  of  development  of  the  productive  forces  these   relations  turn  into  their  fetters.  Then  begins  an  epoch  of  social  revolution.’     From  this,  the  following  model  of  history  and  society  may  be  distilled:     Society  appears  as  composed  (across  history)  of  two  basic  layers:     i) Economic  ‘base’   a) ‘productive  forces’  (labour  +  means  of  production  –  inc.  technology  and  raw   materials)   b) ‘relations  of  production’  (e.g.  feudal,  capitalist,  communist)   ii) Superstructure  –  legal  and  political  apparatus  etc.,  plus  ‘ideal’  spheres  of  morality,  religion,   philosophy,  etc.     But  N.B.:  these  are  not  discrete  layers;  this  is  another  distinction  between  ‘ways  of  looking’  (e.g.  ownership   is  a  material  and  a  legal  –and  hence  ‘superstructural’  fact).     Cohen  (1978)  then  extracts  two  main  principles  of  Marx’s  theory  of  history  :     a) The  ‘development  thesis’:  the  productive  forces  will  tend  to  grow  over  time.   b) The  ‘primacy  thesis’:  i.  above  conditions  ii.;  i.  a)  conditions  i.  b).     Historical  change  is  then  explained  as  follows:     i) The  relations  of  production  that  will  take  hold  at  a  given  time  will  be  those  best  suited  to   further  the  development  of  the  productive  forces  (Cohen:  ‘functional  explanation’.    N.B.   same  applies  to  general  relationship  between  base  and  superstructure,  inc.  forms  of  thought   –  although  Cohen  has  less  to  say  about  that);   ii) The  productive  forces  will  expand  until  the  incumbent  relations  begin  to  impede  (‘fetter’)   their  development;   iii) Eventually,  the  expansion  of  the  productive  forces  will  break  through  the  fetters  and   necessitate  a  social  revolution.    C.f.  Marx  and  Engels  in  The  Communist  Manifesto:     ‘At  a  certain  stage  in  the  development  of  these  means  of  production  and  of  exchange,  the  conditions   under  which  feudal  society  produced  and  exchanged,  the  feudal  organisation  of  agriculture  and   manufacturing  industry,  in  one  word,  the  feudal  relations  of  property  became  no  longer  compatible  

4     with  the  already  developed  productive  forces;  they  became  so  many  fetters.  They  had  to  be  burst   asunder;  they  were  burst  asunder.’       This  account  is  then  subject  to  various  well-­‐rehearsed  objections.    Many  of  these  focus  on  the  ‘primacy  thesis’:     - Usually  recognised  that  simple  determinism  is  not  what  Marx  has  in  mind;  base  ‘conditions’  superstructure;   but  then  how  is  ‘primacy’  to  be  cashed  out?  Two  issues  here:     a) Worry  about  incoherence:  e.g.  Singer’s  chicken  –  how  can  one  aspect  have  ‘more  to  do  with  it’  than   the  other  (N.B.  this  is  just  bizarre).    Idea  of  mutual  asymmetrical  influence  not  difficult  (M  and  E??).      Nevertheless,  challenge  in  integrating  primacy  with  other  elements  of  Marx’s  story:  how  do   we  hold  together  (i)  mutual  indispensability,  (ii)  unity  of  the  ‘ideal’  and  ‘material’,  (iii)  causal   interaction,  (iv)  primacy  of  the  material?  (4-­‐stroke  engine  to  the  rescue?)     b) Worry  about  mysteriousness:  if  no  mysterious  trans-­‐historical  agent  invoked  here,  then  by  what   ‘mechanism’  do  the  productive  forces  ‘select’  a  set  of  relations  of  production  (or  the  ‘base’  a   particular  legal  and  intellectual  apparatus)?      Cohen:  it’s  like  evolution  by  natural  selection  (and  you  don’t  always  need  to  provide  a   mechanism,  or  ‘elaboration’,  in  order  to  uphold  this  kind  of  view);  objections  attack  the   analogy  (e.g.  Wolff  2003:  then  it  wouldn’t  be  adequately  predictive,  and  that’s  the  ‘whole   point’  of  the  theory  [SAYS  WHO?]).       • But  as  Wolff  himself  acknowledges,  Marx  is  not  so  rigid  in  his  predictions  as  often   assumed  (cf.  Eagleton  2010):  e.g.  he  notes  the  possibility  of  ‘common  ruination’  as   the  outcome  of  class  struggle.         Note:   - Many  of  the  usual  problems  raised  against  ‘Marx’s  theory  of  history’  seem  to  rest  on  a  narrow  account  of   what  that  history  is  (e.g.  Cohen’s  as  reconstructed  above)  –  and  M’s  specific  view  as  to  what  actually   happens  (and  will  happen)  in  history  is,  in  any  case,  only  one  aspect  of  his  ‘materialistic  conception’.    E.g.:       - Why  think  that  the  ‘whole  point’  of  the  theory  is  predictive?     - Worries  about  how  to  make  sense  of  the  ‘primacy’  of  the  material  often  seem  to  fail  to  have  grasped   the  fact  that  Marx  regards  material  and  ideal  as  a  unity  (and  himself  as  neither  an  idealist  nor  as  a   ‘materialist’  in  the  traditional  sense).   - N.B.:  M  emphasises  the  ‘material’  aspect  in  the  context  of  trying  to  get  away  from  a  particular  ‘idealist’   tradition  which  he  regards  as  one-­‐sided.        

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