Chapter VIII: Marxism as Method

What shall we do in face of these conflicting interpretations of Marx? Add another? Who will decide among them? Why not shelve his theories, then, as a set of more or less ambiguous doctrines which exercised great influence over men because it permitted them to do what they wished to do in any case? Such a procedure, however, would fail to explain why the appeal was to Marx and not to St Simon or Proudhon or Bakunin. There must have been aspects, at least, of Marx’s doctrines which lent themselves to these different interpretations. The possibility we wish to entertain here is that the views considered above (which are by no means exhaustive) are, with the exception of Lenin’s, one-sided emphases upon phases of Marx’s thought and suffer from a common failure to appreciate the nature of Marx’s dialectical method.

The significance of Marx’s method as the clue to his doctrines is rendered all the more important by the vogue of critical interpretations whose chief point is that these doctrines are contradictory. And it is true that if they are considered in independence of the method they illustrate and the historical context in which they arose, they do appear contradictory. From these apparent contradictions has been born Sombart’s zwei Seelen theory of Marx – as a thinker and as a hater; and the even more popular Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde conception of Marx as a professional revolutionist and a fuzzy metaphysician. But the most elementary methodological caution has here been overlooked. The full import of a doctrine is not to be sought only in the formal analysis of isolated texts. It is to be derived from a consideration of these texts in relation to the positions and views they oppose. Just as the meaning of a proposition becomes clearer when we formulate its logical contradictory, so the import of a man’s thought becomes more manifest when we know what the doctrines are which he is opposing. If the doctrines which he is opposing are themselves opposite, then we can expect that against one will be urged the accepted points of the other. If the critic has no clear idea of the positions which are being attacked, he runs the risk of converting the relative emphasis of different occasions into absolute contradictions. This is true of all the ‘critical annihilations’ of Marx with which I am acquainted.

Marx came to critical self-consciousness by settling accounts with the varied intellectual traditions and attitudes of his day. He did not write textbooks and fill them with cold-storage truths. His writings were programmes of action; his analyses a method of clearing the way for action. None of his works can therefore be understood without a comprehension of the opposing positions to which he makes explicit or implicit reference. Against the idealism of Bruno Bauer and his Young-Hegelian associates, Marx presents the argument for materialism. Against the passive materialism of Feuerbach, Marx defends the principles of activity and reciprocity which were central to Hegel’s dialectic. Against the fatalism of both absolute idealism and ‘vulgar’ (reductive) mechanism, Marx proclaims that human beings make their own history. As opposed to the revolutionists of the phrase, however, he adds that history is not made out of whole cloth but under definite, limiting conditions. It was as easy to characterise Marx as completely Hegelian in his method because he attacked the assumptions of atomic empiricism as to indict him as a ‘soulless’ materialist for seeking a causal explanation of values. To the wahre Sozialisten, who sought to initiate a movement of social reform on the basis of absolute ethical principles like ‘social love’ and justice, Marx declares that every realistic social movement must be a class movement. To simon-pure trade unionists struggling for a ‘fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’, he insists that every class struggle is a political struggle. Stirner’s glorification of hard-boiled egoism with its perpetual declensions of ‘I, me and myself’, he reveals as the social defence mechanism of a petty-bourgeois soul desiring to save ‘its own’. Against the classical school of economics, which had regarded its economic categories as valid for any historical system, he urges that economic categories are not Platonic Ideas but are as transitory as the historical relationships which they express. Against the historical school of economics, he vindicates the necessity of analysing the structure of political economy independently of speculative fancies about its origin. As opposed to the anarchist ideal of complete decentralisation, he defends the principle of authority. To the Lassallean cult of the state, he counters with the idea of its ultimate disappearance. He was as critical of petty-bourgeois opportunism of the right as he was contemptuous of the ultra-left sectarianism of men like Most and Bakunin. The critics who made so much of Marx’s contradictory positions never made an attempt to find a point of view from which these alleged contradictions turned out to be applications of the same principles and purposes to different historical situations.

These historical situations as well as the wider social horizons against which Marx’s problems were formulated cannot be treated here. A complete treatment of Marx’s thought would have to include them together with an account of the industrial transformations, the political mass movements as well as the cultural developments of his age. Only then would we be applying Marx’s historical method to Marx’s own work. [1] Even so, the distinctive feature of Marx’s thought would hardly be in evidence, for Marx’s age presumably was the background of other thinkers from whom he violently differed. It is primarily that distinctive feature which I wish to discuss.

Granted, then, that if Marx is to be completely understood, his background must be explained. What else would we have to know about him? Obviously his purposes, his reaction to that environment and the logical interest of his thought in theorising about it. For only in terms of these purposes can we understand his problems. The purpose of Marx’s intellectual activity was the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. That shines through all of his writings. Even his learned economic treatises did not deceive the academic representatives of constituted authority in Europe – although they did succeed in de-revolutionising some of his avowed followers. One can hear Marx’s own voice in the words which Engels pronounced upon him at Highgate Cemetery in 1883: ‘Before all else, Marx was a revolutionist.’ [2] And it was as revolutionist that he approached his theoretical problems in sociology, economics and philosophy. For him they were primarily the theoretical problems of social revolution. [3] No presuppositionless treatment of the social sciences is possible. At their heart there lie certain irreducible values or Stellungnahmen which are, to be sure, historically conditioned by the social situation and the balance of class forces existing at any determinate period, but which cannot be logically deduced from it. Social science is class science; and what Marx means by science is not what is meant by the word today, but criticism based on the observable tendencies of social development.

The scientific approach to society involves the continuous application of ideals to the functioning of institutions and the continuous testing of those ideals by the social consequences of their application. Marx regarded those who restricted themselves to an objective description of social behaviour, in which all notions of ‘what ought to be’ are ruled out, as apologists of the existing order and of the ideals which social institutions embodied. And those who set up their ‘ought to be’ as a categorical imperative, in independence of the limiting conditions of the given historical situation, he dismissed as Utopians. Marx was disinterested in the outcome of his inquiries only to the extent of drawing proper conclusions from his premises. He did not conceal his interests and bias but used them in order to reveal more effectively the interest of those who made a cult of impartiality. How it was possible for him to assert that his position was not impartial, and yet at the same time objective, is a problem which we shall consider below.

Marx’s revolutionary motivation was no more uniquely his own than was his social background. Many of his contemporaries, both among the Utopians (Owen) and reactionaries (Lorenz von Stein), felt the impact of what was essentially the same problem. And as for his purpose – the social revolution – it was the common goal of large numbers of German exiles, Blanquist Frenchmen, expatriate Poles and Russians. For some it was a religion in comparison with which Marx’s faith seemed pale. It was the goal not only of a few individuals; it was the goal of a class. What, then, must we ask, is distinctive of Marx’s thought, if it is neither his problems, his purposes, not his conclusions? The answer suggested here is, that what is characteristic of Marx’s thought is the dialectical method by which he undertook to solve these problems and attain his purposes. [4]

To distinguish between Marx’s dialectical method and his conclusions is not to say that his conclusions are false; and to consider Marx’s dialectical method is not to imply that it is an abstract instrument. On any specific occasion in which it is applied, Marx’s specific purpose is part of it. None the less it is possible to describe the general character of the method and indicate its larger philosophical and social implications.

* * *<&h4>

Notes

1. Interesting beginnings have been made in Mehring’s biography, Karl Marx. Geschichte seines Lebens (Berlin 1919) [English edition, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, available here; in Gustav Mayer’s Friedrich Engels (Berlin 1920) [English edition, Frederick Engels: A Biography (London 1936); text of German edition available at here. – MIA]; in the histories of the socialist movement by Mehring and Beer; and in Riazanov’s Marx and Engels (English translation, London 1927). [available here. – MIA]

2. Engels’ speech at Marx’s grave is available here. – MIA

3. That Marx’s purpose was really one of the defining terms of his problems and not an irrelevant psychological detail is evidenced by the way in which he and Engels gauged the import of the social theories of their opponents; first, by their probable influence on the formation of revolutionary political organisation; second, by their freedom from the ‘muddled humanitarianism’ which tended to wean these organisations away from militancy; for example, for the possible disorganising influence of Feuerbach, see Briefwechsel zwischen Marx und Engels, Volume 1 (Mehring’s edition), pp. 7, 24, 45–48; and Deutsche Ideologie, passim. For the dangerous influence of Grün and Proudhon, Briefwechsel zwischen Marx und Engels, Volume 1, pp. 40–42 [English edition, The German Ideology, available here. – MIA

4. ‘The working out of the method which lies at the basis of Marx’s criticism of political economy I regard as something hardly less important than the materialistic conception of history.’ (Engels in a review of Marx’s Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy, reprinted in Feuerbach (Duncker edition) [Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen Philosophie (Vienna & Berlin 1927), p. 118 (available here – MIA)]. The method of abstraction, modified by historical description, which Marx uses in his economic analysis is only one specific application of the dialectical method.

Table of Contents

Last updated: 20 February 2020