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Understanding of Karl Marx
Rétablir la vérité historique n’est pas seulement une question de conscience; c’est aussi une question d’un intérêt pratique immêdiat. – Sorel
The world today stands in the shadow of the doctrines of a man dead barely fifty years. The social philosophy of Karl Marx, comparatively unknown and ignored in his own lifetime, exercises a stronger influence upon the present age than the social theories of any of our contemporaries. History is being made in its name. A new philosophy of life, avowedly Marxist in inspiration, is slowly emerging to challenge the dominant attitudes and values of Western and Oriental cultures.
And yet, as soon as one devotes oneself to the study of Marxian doctrine, one discovers that there exists no canonic formulation of its position. Marx’s literary activity, extending over a period of forty years, is for the most part extremely controversial. None of his writings contains a definitive and finished expression of doctrine. He himself lived to say, ‘Je ne suis pas un marxiste.’ Various conflicting interpretations of his philosophy have split the ranks of his professed followers as well as those of his critics. There has been a greater eagerness to discuss the truth of his doctrines than to establish their meaning.
The situation is no different today than it was when Marx was first discovered by ‘bourgeois’ thinkers. The academic German professors, after the conspiracy of silence against Marx had been broken in the 1890s, charged that Marx’s conclusions were vitiated by the presence of irrelevant moral considerations. Later, neo-Kantians as well as religious socialists made the contrary charge that Marx’s conclusions were vitiated by the absence of such judgements. Some said that Marx was overemphasising the importance of revolutionary will; others, that he was paralysing human effort in a monstrous economic fatalism. Both were agreed that his thought was a contradictory mess of analyses, prediction, faith and passion. Each critic had his counter-critic; and every attempt at synthesis brought forth another campaign of polemics. Add to these academic lucubrations not only the denunciatory defence of the ‘orthodox’ Marxists, but the shrill outcries of preachers, publicists and minor literati, who rushed to refute Marx without stopping even to read him, and the atmosphere of the discussion is set. To some it appeared to be an intellectual circus; to others, another illustration of the class war.
Of itself, however, this diversity of interpretation is not an unusual thing in the history of thought. There has been hardly a single thinker of historical importance who has not paid a price for having disciples; who has not been many things to many men. There is no canonic life of Christ as there is no canonic interpretation of Plato. But in Marx’s case, the natural diversity of interpretation was reinforced by the introduction of an explicit political axis into the discussion. In addition, a peculiar way of arriving at those interpretations complicated matters. The unity of his thought was sought solely in his conclusions and not in his method of arriving at them. The systematic results were examined and not the systematic method. It was uncritically assumed that unity and simplicity were synonymous; so that in the face of complex findings, often apparently contradictory, it was concluded that his thought lacked unity. Simplicity, however, is an attribute of content; unity, of organisation. If Marx’s thought possesses unity, it is to be found not in his specific conclusions but in his method of analysis directed by the revolutionary purposes and needs of the international working class. The method, to be sure, is to be checked in the light of his conclusions; but the latter are derivative, not central. They are tentative and contingent. They may be impugned without necessarily calling the method into question, especially when the new results are won by a fresh application of the method. Just as it is possible to dissociate the Hegelian method from the Hegelian system (as Marx and Engels repeatedly insist), so it is possible to dissociate the Marxian method from any specific set of conclusions, or any particular political tactic advocated in its name. This is another way of saying that there is nothing a priori in Marx’s philosophy; it is naturalistic, historical and empirical throughout.
To distinguish between Marx’s method and his results is not to separate the two any more than to distinguish between the essence of scientific method and the scientific findings of any particular day – which are sure to be faulty and incomplete – is to deny any organic connection between them. Ultimately the validity of scientific method depends upon its power to predict, and, wherever possible, to control the succession of natural phenomena. It is this progressive power of prediction and control which justifies us in retaining scientific method even when we have discarded or modified the physics of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Newton. Similarly the validity of Marx’s method depends upon whether it enables us to realise the class purposes on whose behalf it was formulated.
But here the similarity between ‘science’ and ‘Marxism’ ends. This does not mean that Marxism is not a ‘scientific’ method, that is, adequate and efficient to secure its goals. The distinction sought flows from the recognition that the natural sciences and the ‘social sciences’ are concerned with two irreducibly different subject-matters. This difference in subject-matter compels the further recognition that values – class values – are essentially involved in every attempt to develop a methodology and programme of social action. The distinction therefore means that in so far as Marxism is a method of thought and action designed to achieve a class goal, it is something more than science, or less; for science, as such, although it may be used on behalf of class purposes, has no class character. The truth or falsity of its propositions have nothing to do with the class struggle even when the class struggle is the objective reference of its propositions. It is not denied that the direction scientific research has taken has often been determined, to a not inconsiderable extent, by the economic, political and ‘moral’ interests of the classes which have endowed laboratories and subsidised scientists. But since this applies to the false theories which have arisen as well as the true, the difference between the true and false cannot be explained by class or social considerations. To affirm the contrary is to confuse categories.
In Marx’s theories, on the other hand, a class bias and a class goal are presupposed. His doctrines do not merely describe the phenomena of class society and class struggle. They are offered as instruments in waging that struggle, as guides to a mode of action which he believed would for ever eliminate class struggles from social life. As instruments they can function effectively only in so far as they approximate objective truths; but as objective truths, they cannot be effective instruments without reference to subjective class purposes. Marx’s philosophy is a dialectical synthesis of these objective and subjective moments. By subjective is meant not unreal or uncaused – for obviously class purposes are conditioned by the socio-economic environment – but a mode of response which is directed by conscious will or desire. The range of possible class goals which can be willed at any moment in history is determined by objective social factors, but neither the willing nor the specific choice at any definite moment of time can be explained without introducing other factors. These latter we call subjective in relation to the first set; but in relation, say, to what a particular member of a class wills, they are objective. To overlook this distinction and to speak of Marxism as an ‘objective science’, is, therefore, to emasculate its class character. The disastrous consequences of such a procedure both in logic and historic fact will be examined in subsequent chapters.
Last updated: 20 February 2020