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Understanding of Karl Marx
The theoretical constructions of orthodox Marxism were built out of phrases and propositions drawn from Marx’s own works. Indeed, Kautsky, Hilferding and others denied that their orthodoxy constituted an interpretation. In their eyes it was a faithful exposition of the doctrine. Nevertheless, there was a definite shift in the fundamental character of their expositions. Marxism was no longer regarded as essentially the theory and practice of social revolution, but as a science of social development. The official theoretical emphasis implied that it was not so much a method of making history as of understanding it after it had been made. It was offered as something sachlich and free from value judgements, determining action in the same way that a mountain slope determines the movement of a glacier. It was objective and scientific in a strict sense. It carried the authority not only of power but of knowledge. It tried to prove its position by popularising the deductions from the labour theory of value in Das Kapital rather than by underscoring the revolutionary philosophy of the Communist Manifesto in which the labour theory of value in its distinctive Marxian form was not even mentioned.
The continued stabilisation and expansion of capitalism, together with the programmes of peaceful, evolutionary methods of social reform projected by the German Social-Democrats, made the conception of socialism as an objective science of social development not only plausible but an effective talking point in winning converts from the parties of law and order. Gradually, reliance upon ‘processes at work in the order of things’ became translated into the mythical language of the ‘inevitability’ of the development of capitalism into socialism. Human need, evolution and action, which Marx had taken as his starting points, now became theoretically – in strict logic but not in open avowal – a superfluous addendum to a self-contained system of social mechanics. Man was mortal; no less so the society in which he lived. And just as in one case human effort could only moderately influence the fatal day, so in the other. Cry out as the orthodox Marxists did against this interpretation of Marxism as a confusion of social determinism with social fatalism, it followed from their theories that the class struggle was a fact as objective as the force of gravitation, and that the social revolution was as ineluctable as an eclipse. Small wonder that this disguised natural necessity should have led to the characterisation of ‘orthodox’ Marxism as ‘astronomical’ socialism!
And now an amazing thing happened. It was no longer necessary, said the theoreticians, for a Marxist to be a socialist. Marxism was wissenschaft; socialism weltanschauung. Marxism was the science which proved that socialism as a state of society would come. All opposition and allegiance to socialism as an ideal were equally epiphenomenal. Socialism was coming! If you welcomed it, well and good – it might come a little sooner. If you did not, it would come anyway – perhaps a little later. In neither case would your attitude make a difference – or much of a difference. Into such a paralysing doctrine did this pan-objectivistic interpretation of Marx eventuate.
Here is a citation from a key work of one such orthodox Marxist, which reveals the incidence of this position. Rudolph Hilferding prefaced his important treatise, Das Finanzkapital, as follows:
The theory of Marxism as well as its practice is free from judgements of value. It is, therefore, false to conceive as is widely done, intra et extra muros, that Marxism and socialism are as such identical. For logically, regarded as a scientific system and apart from its historical effect, Marxism is only a theory of the laws of movement of society formulated in general terms by the Marxian conception of history; the Marxian economics applying in particular to the period of commodity-producing society. But insight into the validity of Marxism which includes insight into the necessity of socialism is by no means a matter of value judgements and just as little an indication to practical procedure. For it is one thing to recognise a necessity, and another thing to work for this necessity. It is quite possible for someone convinced of the final victory of socialism to fight against it. [1]
This was a strange revolutionary theory indeed. It could explain the past and predict the future but had no function in the present. Experimentally there was nothing to distinguish it from a theodicy which, refusing to fathom the divine ways in any present event, read all of past history ad hoc and predicted nothing in the future but the Revolutionary Day of Judgement. And thus this brand of ‘orthodox’ Marxism became to all who welcomed socialism a religion of consolation, and to those who opposed it, a doctrine of despair. It was the ideology not only of the German Social-Democracy, but of the Second International which the German party dominated. [2]
Until 1895 the official theoreticians sought to justify themselves by appealing to Marx’s closest collaborator and literary executor, Frederick Engels. It was Engels who during Marx’s lifetime interpreted his central doctrines and after his death edited his manuscripts. But this was no ordinary labour that Engels took upon himself. The exact intellectual relationship between the two men has yet to be adequately tracked down. Certainly there is no justification for the easy assumption made by the self-styled ‘orthodox’ that there is a complete identity in the doctrines and standpoints of Marx and Engels from the beginning of their friendship on. The indisputable fact that they were minds of different order would make that unlikely. Nor is there any more justification for holding with critics like Masaryk, Arturo Labriola and Mondolfo that there was an essential difference between them. The truth seems to be that Engels gave a characteristic emphasis to the doctrine of Marx – an emphasis, however, which had far-reaching consequences upon the development of the doctrine in the hands of the official party theoreticians. Already in his Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (one section of which was written by Marx) we find a treatment of mooted problems of metaphysics, science and ethical practice from the point of view of a monistic system rather than of a unified method. But more important still, in bringing to completion and publishing the second and third volumes of Das Kapital Engels gave final currency to the notion that the economic theories of Marx constituted a hypothetic-deductive system of the type exemplified by scientific theories überhaupt, instead of being an illustration of a method of revolutionary criticism. In so doing Engels failed to develop the important sociological and practical implications of Marx’s doctrine of the ‘fetishism of commodities’. He devoted himself to the task of explaining how the law of the falling rate of profit could be squared both with the empirical fact that the rate of profit was the same irrespective of the organic composition of capital, and with the labour-power definition of exchange-value.
Nowhere, so far as I know, does Engels properly comment on Marx’s own words in the preface to the second edition of the first volume, that political economy ‘can remain a science only so long as the class struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated or sporadic phenomena’. [3] It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that Marx did not conceive Das Kapital to be a deductive exposition of an objective natural system of political economy, but a critical analysis – sociological and historical – of a system which regarded itself as objective. Its subtitle is Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Criticism demands a standpoint, a position. Marx’s standpoint was the standpoint of the class-conscious proletariat of Western Europe. His position implied that a system of economics at basis always is a class economics. An implicit value judgement becomes one of the abscissae in terms of which its analytic equations are written.
Engels’ interpretation of the economic doctrines of Marx as a closed deductive system was a matter of relative emphasis. It was controlled on crucial occasions by his revolutionary political instincts and corrected in his important letters on historical materialism. Engels, however, was living in London. And out of fancied political necessity the leadership was just as willing to revise him as to revise Marx. Indeed, Engels lived to see his very writings censored and distorted in order to make him appear to be supporting the party line. The revision of his introduction to Marx’s Klassenkämpfe im Frankreich, the last publication of Engels, is a case in point. Even his protest at being made out to appear as a ‘peaceful worshipper of legality at any price’ [4] was coolly ignored.
In philosophy a corresponding shift occurred from Marx’s naturalistic activism to a simplified materialism called dialectical but in reality mechanical. Here Engels’ own formulations lent support to a theory of knowledge which constituted a definite shift in emphasis from Marx’s own views as expressed both in the glosses on Feuerbach and Die deutsche Ideologie. In these writings Marx, true to his Hegelian tradition, pronounced crushing judgement on all mechanical materialisms which regarded man’s sensation and thought as the passive automatic result of the impact of the environment upon the animal organism. He claimed that the chief defect of all previous materialism was its inability to explain conscious activity in general, and cultural selectivity in particular. The political passivism of Feuerbach’s politics of love had one of its roots in his belief that sensations were literal images, knowledge-bearing, carbon-copy reports of the objective world. For Marx, sensations were forms of practical, sensory activity (praktische, menschlichsinnliche Tätigkeit). They were not knowledge but the stimulus to knowledge which completed itself in action. They could not be anything else. Otherwise the social interaction without which the world cannot be transformed becomes impossible. If men cannot react upon and change their conditioning environment, social revolutions can no longer be regarded as a form of human activity but are reduced to incidents in some scheme of rational mechanics or energetics. But all social action and change is mediated by ideas in the minds of men. Ideas, therefore, cannot be passive images; they must be active instruments. In his Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassichen Philosophie [5], Engels, in an attempt to safeguard the materialistic foundations of dialectical materialism, did not sufficiently stress the place and importance of this active practical element in the Marxian theory of knowledge. He accepted the crude formula of Feuerbach according to which sensations are images and copies (Abbilder and Spiegelbilder) of the external world without explaining how it is possible for ideas, if they are only reflections, to help transform or revolutionise things. Instead of taking sensations as the material clues to knowledge, he identifies knowledge with sensations, and defines truth as the agreement between these sensations and the external world. How human beings can escape the magic circle of their sensations, how they can determine whether their sensations correspond with the external world, how, in fact, they can know that there is an external world, becomes, on this hypothesis, a mystery.
True, Engels attempted to solve this mystery by appealing to experiment and practice. But since experiment, as he saw it, results in sensations which are again taken to be cases of immediate knowledge, Engels was no nearer a non-sensationalistic criterion of truth and existence than the modern followers of Hume, against whom he used the ‘argument from experiment’. In Marx the appeal to experiment and practice was legitimate, since as a close student of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes he had already discarded the belief in the immediacy of knowledge. He considered the chief contribution of German classical philosophy, as opposed to metaphysical materialism, to be its emphasis on the activity of mind and corrected its idealistic distortion.
In 1892, in the preface to the English edition of Socialism, Utopian and Scientific [6], Engels went back to Marx; he there takes a definitely experimentalist view in which his earlier theory of sensations is virtually abandoned. But the orthodox German socialists based themselves, in their theory of knowledge, neither on Marx nor on Engels’ final conclusions. They hardened into a systematic dogma the relative emphasis which Engels later abandoned. Their quotations are never from his last work. Instead of dialectical materialism, the materialism of the German socialists became sensationalist and mechanical, ignoring praxis.
And so the economics and philosophy of Social-Democracy became all of a piece with its politics. Only the revolutionary phrase remained as a foreign element in the new synthesis – an echo of the heroic days when Marx’s ideas were principles of action.
1. Rudolph Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (Wien 1910), p. x, italics mine.
2. The position of Kautsky and other leaders of the Centre and Right was ambiguous and often contradictory. Not only did these contradictions crop up in theoretical writings but even in pamphlets devoted to questions of revolutionary politics. Kautsky, for example, could write in Der Weg zur Macht: ‘The socialist party is a revolutionary party but not a revolution-making party. We know that our goal can be attained only through revolution. We also know that it is just as little in our power to create this revolution as it is in the power of our opponents to prevent it. It is no part of our work to instigate a revolution or to prepare the way for it.’ (English translation by Simons, p. 50) [Karl Kautsky, The Road to Power – MIA] Later on Kautsky drifted more and more to the Right. In his criticism of the Gotha Programme, Marx had written: ‘Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of one into the other. Corresponding to this there is a political transition period in which the state can be nothing else than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.’ [Critique of the Gotha Programme – MIA] In 1922 Kautsky wrote: ‘Between the time of the pure bourgeois and the time of the pure proletarian democratically governed state lies a period of transformation of one into the other. Corresponding to this there is a political transition period in which the government as a rule will take the form of a coalition government.’ (Der Proletarische Revolution und ihre Programm (Stuttgart 1922), p. 196)
3. Karl Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition, Capital, Volume 1. – MIA
4. Friedrich Engels to Karl Kautsky, 1 April 1895. – MIA
5. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. – MIA
6. Friedrich Engels, Introduction to the English Edition, Socialism Utopian and Scientific. – MIA
Last updated: 28 February 2020