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Understanding of Karl Marx
The system of thought associated with Karl Marx, and which is loosely designated as Marxian, differs from all other social theories and methodologies in that it is the fighting philosophy of the greatest mass movement that has swept Europe since the rise of Christianity. [1] It cannot be neatly cut from its highly-charged historical context and examined exclusively in the light of its verbal consistencies. For it is not an armchair philosophy of retrospection, but a philosophy of social action; more specifically, a theory of social revolution. Developed in the course of a lifetime of social action on the battlefield of the class struggle, it bears evidence of the occasions which provoked it and the purposes which directed it. Marx began his adult life as a revolutionist, fought like one and was exiled in consequence of being one. And although he died of the effects of eating dust for so many years in the British Museum, during those years he never lost touch with the daily struggle of the working classes throughout the world. He had participated in the fighting of 1848, but his own best weapons were the weapons of dialectical criticism.
Not only were Marx’s doctrines developed in the course of the social struggles and experiences of his own lifetime; after his death they were taken up by others in the continuation of that struggle. A whole movement sprang into existence with Marxian slogans and arguments. More accurately, the existing working-class movement in Germany became in name, if not in fact, Marxian. This movement had a life greater than any member within it and a task to perform unique in the history of social revolt, viz, consciously to develop a philosophy which would aid it in winning its battles. This task demanded not a set of petrified dogmas but a revolutionary flexibility in theory and practice. There soon developed a literature, tradition and mode of analysis directly inspired by the writings and personality of Marx. The dangers of doctrinal orthodoxy in the early years, before the German Social-Democracy had won a free field for action, were not great. Marx was alive to guide it. Its problems were his problems. And after his death, Engels acted as its official mentor. But before many years had passed, the movement was confronted by new specific tasks and problems. They flowed naturally from the altered conditions – social, technical, national and psychological – which the expansion of industrial capitalism brought with it in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Active response to changed conditions was immediate, for no movement can live without flexible readjustment to a shifting milieu. Things were done first to meet the demands of the moment and justified later. The interpretation of the causes and consequences of such action was formulated in Marxian terms. No programme of action was so foreign that it could not be brought under Marxian formulas; no declaration of policy or principles so recondite that it could not be supported by some text.
What happened was merely this. Confronted by new conditions which generated new tasks and new conceptions of those tasks, followers of Marx decided upon the reasonable thing to do and defended it as the orthodox Marxian method of doing it. But what determines the policies which men, confronted by a common problem, regard as ‘reasonable'? When it is not a question of the logical fitness of means to ends, the ‘reasonable’ policy is derived ultimately from something they wish to do. That is to say, their purposes and values are logically, if not psychologically, prior to their immediate programme of action. It was natural, then, that with the development of different aims and purposes there should arise different interpretations of Marx. In almost every European country successive generations brought forth new attitudes and perspectives. Some few men like Bernstein in Germany, Sorel in France, and Struve in Russia developed within the span of their own lifetime conflicting conceptions of the nature of Marxism. Nor must it be imagined that all of these interpretations were unusually artificial or far-fetched. The very individuals who combated them in the name of orthodoxy, fell back upon a conception of Marx which was itself a selected portraiture, one which possessed many of the defects of the views opposed and few of their virtues. The defects were a failure to consider all the available texts and contexts, to evaluate their relative weight, to distinguish between the method employed and the tentative character of the results won by the use of that method, and most important of all, an inability to grasp the central importance of Marx’s class bias. The virtues were an openly avowed flexible policy to the passing events of the day, an attempt to steer a straight course in the new currents of science and philosophy, and a refusal to regard fundamental theoretical issues as finally closed.
These conflicting doctrinal interpretations of Marxism were not mere variations on one intellectual theme. There were different patterns of social response projected by different groups in a struggle to dominate the socio-economic scene. They were ways of making history, innocently paraded as methods of reading it. They told more about the orientation of these groups to the living issues which agitated them than they did about Marx.
Significantly enough, the history of Marxian interpretation offers a curious confirmation of the Marxian criticism of all cultural ideology: different social classes react differently to the same social object. These differences express themselves first, in disparate emphases of interpretation, then, in conflicting evaluation, and ultimately, in opposite modes of social action. Their class point of view becomes an objectified part of what they are trying to understand. But if this be so, one asks in irritated bewilderment, what is the common subject-matter of all these interpretations? What is the objective historical reference of these varying interpretations, and is objective truth about such reference possible?
Before we despair of attaining objective truth about social questions, which are of necessity viewed differently by different social classes, let us pause for a moment to point out that this situation has its logical analogue in the predicament historians find themselves whenever they seek to offer a definitive explanation of an historical event. It is a methodological commonplace today that the history of man is not something that can be automatically read off from a chronological record. It involves interpretation, selection and construction. Its criteria of what is probable and relevant are ultimately drawn from the present. [2] The consequences of this commonplace, however, are startling. For as we go from one period to another, interpretations of the past are altered. The meaning of the past seems to be a moving shadow of the wider experiences and purposes of the present. Not only is this true of events which do not carry their meaning upon their face; it is just as true of the thought of men who have left a corpus of writings behind them. No better illustration of this can be found than the history of Platonic interpretation. How many philosophical portraits of Plato have circulated in the world mart! And how unmistakably do these portraits display the lineaments of their painters! Plato as a Moses-speaking Attic, as a Christian Father, as a mystic Pythagorean, as a dramatist of the life of reason; the first Aristotelian, the precursor of Kant, of Hegel, of Cantor and the modern theory of continuity; ‘the father of all orthodoxy and the source of all heresy’ – these are only some of the guises in which Plato has appeared in the history of thought. Here, as elsewhere, historical recovery is not the unveiling of ready-made fact in the stream of cultural tradition in the way in which excavation is the unearthing of definite material from the site of Troy. It is a selective emphasis whose verification is to be sought in some forms of contemporary or prospective activity.
But to return to Marx. If historical interpretation is contemporary orientation to living issues, why, it may be asked, was it necessary for the leaders of the working-class movement in Germany and other European countries to profess to be Marxian at all? Why did they not turn their backs upon the quest for the ‘real Marx’ and devote themselves to fresh analysis of the problems at hand? Why did they insist upon calling themselves Marxist even when dissenters within the ranks called attention to their un-Marxian practice? In part the answer is to be found in the immense prestige which names and symbols carry in mass movements. New ideas introduce preliminary confusion even when they prove themselves to be instrumentally effective in realising purposes. They are more likely to be accepted when they appear in the guise of old masks and slogans. Radicalism, too, is bound by the natural conservatism of habit. It learns soon enough that a movement without the means of adaptation to a changing environment is without the means of survival; but in the process of adaptation it clings all the more steadfastly to the symbols of its past. For the past is that of which it generally has most reason to be proud. The old faith once sincerely militant is still celebrated in a ritual; ideas and terms which once had definite practical import, become fetishes.
There were other reasons, aside from the ‘truth’ of the doctrine, which contributed to keep alive the tradition of Marxism among socialists even when, as we shall see, their political parties were far from being Marxist in their practice. There was, first, the natural dislike to substitute one doctrine for another in the midst of the class struggle. ‘Never swap horses while crossing a stream’ is a maxim that seems as plausible in politics as in war. Bernstein had good reason to recall it when meditating upon the fierce opposition which his attempt to revise Marx had called forth. The German Social-Democratic Party almost voted his expulsion for what turned out later to be no more than terminological differences. In addition, there was the inflaming example of Marx’s single-minded zeal and incorruptible revolutionary integrity. His hard-headed personal idealism, which was never stained by opportunistic compromise (in contrast with Lassalle), or warped by sentimental fanaticism (in contrast with Bakunin), provided a moral and political ideal which was all the more precious for being so difficult to attain. There was, too, the assurance of his intellectual genius to which even his enemies were compelled to make grudging admission. And who does not desire the glow of emotional security which comes from having a genius on one’s side? There was, then, even on narrowly practical grounds good reason why those who sought to change the existing order – if only with a programme of social reform – should still invoke the name of Marx long after they had given up trying to determine whether they were carrying on in his spirit. But the public avowal of Marxism necessitated taking over, defending and interpreting his doctrines. Later we shall discuss the fidelity of the interpretations offered. The most significant aspects of these interpretations – just because they affected the question of meaning – was the way in which they invariably expressed a present purpose and an immediately experienced class need.
At the turn of the century a virtual war broke out among socialists as to the real spirit and meaning of Marx’s thought – a war as virulent today as ever before. The most influential of these contending positions must be stated and criticised before the import of the interpretation offered here can be grasped. The following chapters are not so much an historical excursion as an attempt to reveal the premises, purposes and intellectual constructions of the four great movements which claimed to be carrying on in the spirit of Marx.
1. Marx himself says in The Communist Manifesto that the communist theories ‘only express in general terms the circumstances of an actually existing class struggle, of an historical movement going on under our own eyes’. They are not based upon ideas or principles set up or discovered by some ‘Weltverbesserer’. [See Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2. – MIA]
Last updated: 20 February 2020