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Understanding of Karl Marx

Sidney Hook

Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx

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Part II: The Philosophy of Karl Marx

Marxismus ist ein revolutionäre Weltanschauung, die stets nach neuen Erkenntnissen ringen muss, die nichts so verabscheut wie das Erstarren in einmal gültigen Formen, die am besten in geistigen Waffengeklirr der Selbstkritik und im geschichtlichen Blitz und Donner ihre lebendige Kraft bewährt. – Rosa Luxemburg [1]

‘Our theory is not a dogma but a manual of action’, said Marx and Engels. – Lenin [2]
 

Chapter IX: The Marxian Dialectic

A witty Frenchman once said that Marxism like Christianity has its bible, its councils, its schisms, its orthodoxies and heresies, its exegesis sacred and profane. And like Christianity it has its mysteries of which the principal one is the dialectic. This is not an infrequent judgement. There has hardly been a critic of Marx who has not regarded the dialectical principle as either a piece of religious mysticism or of deliberate mystification. In the writings of Marxists it appears more often as a magic symbol than as a clearly defined concept.

Yet the apparently mysterious character of the Marxian dialectic is due to nothing more than the Hegelian terminology with which Marx, out of piety to Hegel’s memory, invested it, and to the refusal of Marx’s critics to translate its meaning from the technical idiom of philosophy into the ever fresh experience of change, growth and novelty. Thus it becomes clear that although there is a significant continuity between the thought of Hegel and Marx there are profound differences.

I: The Scope of Dialectic: Hegel was a man of vision who belied his own insights in order to assure the Prussian monarchy that its existence was part of the divine plan and, indeed, its final expression. Since the reasons he adduced were the most transparent rationalisations, both his system and his methods fell into disrepute. Attempting to prove that all of existence was rational, therefore, necessary, and, therefore, good, he failed to make the existence of any particular thing intelligible. There was not much difference between his ruthless optimism which assured the rising German bourgeoisie that this was the best of all possible worlds and the sentimental pessimism of his arch-enemy, Schopenhauer, who held it was the worst. For neither system admitted that the world could significantly change one way or the other. For Hegel, change was merely appearance, for Schopenhauer, illusion.

Marx was an empiricist. If change was not real, nothing was real. Even if permanence and invariance were characters of existence, they could only be recognised in change and difference. The dialectic method of Marx is a way of dealing with what is both constant and variable in every situation. It is the logic of movement, power, growth and action.

The dialectic method is not opposed to scientific method but only to pseudo-scientific philosophies which overlook the specific context and tentative character of the results won in physical or biological investigation and seek to apply their findings to other realms without making the proper qualifications. It is not science but mistaken philosophies of science which use the ‘principle of the conservation of energy’ or the doctrine of ‘the struggle for existence’ to construct systems of social physics or social biology. The dialectic method is wider than scientific method if the latter is narrowly conceived to assert ‘only that exists which can be measured’, for although it accepts the findings of science as an accurate report of the structure of the external world, it recognises that there are other realms of experience, such as the arts and practical affairs, in which qualities and activities are the fundamental organising concepts and not quantities. It distinguishes between types and levels of existence, investigates their interrelation, and synthesises them in their order of temporal and structural dependence. In physics, the dialectic approach begins with the end-products of scientific analysis – its equations and abstractions – and instead of declaring as the metaphysical materialists do, ‘these alone are real’, asks such questions as how these relational formulæ are derived from concrete problems of practice, and how the invisible, inaudible, intangible world of mathematical physics is related to the many-coloured world of familiar experience. In biology, it accepts the descriptions of the ways in which the structure of organs condition their present functions, but seeks for the evidence of past functions in present structure and attempts to discover how at any given time both the specific structure and the specific function of any organ are related to the functioning of the organism as a whole. Behind the facts and figures of social life, it sees the grim realities of the class struggle; in the struggle, possibilities of social development; in possibilities, plans of action. Marx used it to solve problems in political economy with which the unhistorical ‘classical school’ wrestled in vain; Lenin, to correct the one-sidedness of both Bukharin and Trotsky on the trade-union question.

The dialectic method is applicable to all levels of existence. On each level it reflects the novelties in the behaviour of its subject-matter. When it deals with the structure of the atom, it does not introduce, as idealists do, will or purpose or feeling (Whitehead); when it deals with the rise and fall of civilisations, it does not interpret the historical process in terms of biological stimulus-and-response, as is the fashion with the ‘vulgar’ behaviouristic materialists (Watson).

Wherever the dialectic method is applied, it presupposes not the attitude of contemplation but of action. Freed from its idealistic mésalliance, it is genuinely experimental. It seeks objective knowledge of natural and social fact from the standpoint of the doer not the spectator. Indeed, the very meaning of what it is to possess objective knowledge of any ongoing process, involves the prediction of a future outcome, to achieve which, human activity enters as a necessary element. That is why Marx claimed that only in practice (Praxis) can problems be solved. Any problem which cannot be solved by some actual or possible practice may be dismissed as no genuine problem at all. The types and varieties of practice are determined by the existential context in which problems arise.

II: Some Contrasting Conceptions of Dialectic: A few words are necessary to distinguish the Marxian dialectic from older meanings of the term. Ancient dialectic – the ‘eristic’ of the Sophists – as well as medieval dialectic, was not a method of demonstrating known truths or of discovering new truth. It was in the main a method of disputation whose primary aim was to trip up a speaker by showing that the implications of his statements were self-refuting. It seized upon ambiguities of terms, elliptical expressions, awkward grammatical constructions, to twist a meaning from words which was quite foreign to the intent of the one who uttered them. In this way dialectic was a method of proving anything, or more strictly, of disproving everything, since it showed that the speaker was contradicting himself and therefore talking nonsense. It was used in court room and public assembly and sometimes at philosophical exhibitions of low order. In common parlance this kind of dialectic is often used as a synonym for sophistry.

There was a more honourable sense of the term ‘dialectic’ in ancient thought, illustrated by the writings of Plato. Dialectic is the process of thinking by which the dramatic conflict of ideas, as they arise in dialogue or monologue, is resolved by definition, differentiation and re-definition until one ultimate, luminously self-evident insight is reached in which the original conflict of ideas is harmonised. For Plato, ideas are not mental events or physical things. They are meanings, essences, forms, and have no reference to existence. Dialectic, therefore, is the process by which the structure of logical systems is discovered.

In Hegel the dialectic method is not only a process by which logical ideas develop; it is a process by which all things in the world develop. For according to Hegel the very stuff of nature, society and the human mind is through and through logical. Plato’s world is a frozen pattern of mathematical logic; Hegel’s world is historical and organic. But in order to explain the rationale of historical development in physical nature and human culture, Hegel is compelled to endow his logical ideas or principles with efficient power. Just as in traditional theology thoughts in the mind of God created the world, so in Hegel’s system the whole furniture of heaven and earth is the result of the development or unfolding of logical ideas. Marx abandoned the Hegelian dialectic because its logical processes were just as mysterious as the creation of Genesis. Despite the grinding of his elaborate intellectual machinery one could get no more out of Hegel’s logic than was already in the world. The real task for the empirical philosopher, according to Marx, was not to show that the content of history was logical but that the content of logic was historical. This could be done only by taking logic in the widest possible sense so that it included all the processes by which knowledge was attained, and showing how the problems and purposes of knowledge were always set in some concrete historical context.

In contradistinction to Hegel, Marx’s dialectic method was applied primarily to human history and society. Here he succeeded in doing what Hegel had failed to do. Without denying the enormous complexity of the factors involved, he offered a guiding thread into the mazes of the social process. If followed, it leads not only to a fruitful exploration of the past but to a course of action which may free mankind from its major social evils. The detailed application of Marx’s dialectic method is to be found in his economic theories, the materialistic conception of history, and his philosophy of state and society. In this chapter the dialectic method will be expounded as it applies to the general questions of culture, and an attempt will be made to derive and state the formal characters of the method without forbidding terminology.

We may begin by contrasting Marx’s philosophy of culture with the most fashionable cultural theories of Spengler, who in one sense is the greatest right-wing disciple of Hegel, as Marx is the greatest among the left-wing disciples. According to Spengler each culture is an organic whole of institutions, habits, ideas and myths; it is marked off in the same unmistakable way from all other cultures as one individual is from another. Although each culture has its own life-cycle, the formula of all cultural cycles is the same. It is a movement, to use Spengler’s own terms, from culture to civilisation, from life to death. When a culture grows old and cold, thought replaces feeling, mechanics life, law individuality. Each culture runs its own course in independence of all others; there is no significant diffusion of its cultural pattern. It is the morphology of these cultural patterns which interests Spengler most. Just as it is the whole nervous system which sees through the eye, the whole body which moves the arm, so it is the whole pattern of a culture which underlies its art, its religion, its mathematics, even its kitchen pots and pans.

When we inquire, however, what determines the character type or pattern of a specific culture, why the categories of finitude, quality and natural order are central to Greek culture while contemporary Europe and America are so much concerned with process, quantity and experience, why the ‘world-feeling’ of medieval culture is so different from that of the Renaissance – Spengler, like Hegel, answers in terms of metaphysical abstractions. It is the soul or spirit of a people which expresses itself in its culture, and the spirit of a people in turn is an expression of spirit as a primary metaphysical reality. Indeed, Spengler even appeals to ‘the style of the soul’ to account for the fact that different peoples have produced different types of mathematics. Spirit, soul, style, destiny – all these are one. They are the ultimate determining force of whatever exists. They cannot be explained; but they explain everything else:

Style is not... the product of material, technique and function. It is the very opposite of this, something inaccessible to art-reason. It is a revelation of the metaphysical order, a mysterious must, a Destiny. [3]

Here we have a conception of culture which is not empirical but essentially mystical (as are all objective idealisms); which at best accounts for the organisation of a culture, not its development; which is fatalistic and denies to human beings genuine creative power; and which is distinguished for its cool disregard of the immense importance of cultural diffusion and social heredity in Western history.

The key weakness of Spengler’s architectonic construction is to be found in his use of the terms ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ to explain differences in culture. If spirit determines an existing culture, what determines spirit? And if spirit is self-determined, why cannot the culture-complex be self-determined? If spirit is the source of such different institutions as slavery, feudalism and capitalism, how account for the fact that they appear when they do, and in the order they do? Every culture shows a conflict between different groups which develop their own ideologies. How can the spirit of the age or people or nation account for these different expressions? Why did the reformation succeed in Northern Europe and fail everywhere else? Why did the ‘spirit of freedom’ liberate Europeans from slavery and feudalism only to reimpose slavery upon the Negroes in America? It is clear that to invoke the soul of a culture as an explanation of a material culture is to invoke a mystery.

Marx’s philosophy of culture already contains the kernel of truth which Spengler wraps up in masses of pseudo-erudition. Like all students of Hegel, Marx realised that every culture is a structurally interrelated whole, and that any institutional activity, say religion or law, can be understood only in relation to a whole complex of other social activities. But in two respects he advances beyond his early master and those who have either followed or plagiarised him since. He does not claim that a culture is organic through and through and that one principle can explain all its existing aspects, from the latest frills in the culinary arts to the most recent development of theoretical physics. He admits the presence of relatively independent factors which do not all possess the same weight, although they all arise out of antecedent social processes and function in determinate ways in the existing social process. But more important, he seeks for the causes of cultural change within the social process itself and not in the realm of metaphysical abstraction. His method is realistic and materialistic. He holds that any explanation of cultural change must fulfil two conditions. First, it must suggest some way in which the theory can find empirical verification. To proclaim that society must change is not enough. That is too vague. The conditions under which the social order changes must be indicated and the determinate possibilities of change at any moment stated. Secondly, it must do justice to the consciousness of human beings that they actively participate in making their own history. That is to say, when the determinate possibilities of social change have been presented, the probabilities that one direction will be taken rather than another, must be shown to be, in part at least, a function of class interests and purposes.

III: The Dialectic of Social Change: Marx’s own hypothesis that the development of the mode of economic production is the central but not exclusive causal factor of social and cultural change will be examined in detail later on. There are first to be considered certain problems of culture and knowledge confronting all philosophies of history. Marx’s dialectical method really grew out of his reflection upon them.

One of the obvious facts which a philosophy of history must explain is the continuity between one culture and another. The continuity of culture can mean nothing else than the development of its institutions. Their development, indeed, their very functioning, implies the continuous activity of human beings. This activity has a twofold aspect. It is conditioned by an antecedent state of affairs, and yet contributes either to perpetuating or transforming that state of affairs. The central problem of cultural change as formulated by Marx, is how it is possible for human beings conditioned by their cultural education and environment to succeed in changing that environment. The French materialistic philosophers had long since pointed out that human beings were over-determined by environment and education; but they could not explain in these terms how they themselves could be agitating for a revolutionary change to a different society.

The materialistic doctrine [wrote Marx] that men are products of their environment and education, different men products of different environment and education, forgets that the environment itself has been changed by man and the educator himself must be educated. That is why it separates society into two parts of which one is elevated over the whole.

The simultaneity of both change in environment and human activity or self-change can only be grasped and rationally understood as revolutionary practice. [4]

Refusing to dissociate social experience into something which is only cause, the external world, and something which is only effect, consciousness, Marx tries to show how social change arises from the interacting processes of nature, society and human intelligence. From objective conditions, social and natural (thesis), there arises human needs and purposes which, in recognising the objective possibilities in the given situation (antithesis) set up a course of action (synthesis) designed to actualise these possibilities. All change from one social situation to another, and from one social system to another exhibits 1) unity between the two phases, in that certain features are preserved (for example, the technical forms of socialised production under capitalism are preserved under communism); 2) difference, in that certain features of the first are destroyed (for example, the social relations of capitalist production, private property, etc); and 3) qualitative novelty, in that new forms of organisation and activity appear which change the significance of the old elements still preserved, and which cannot be reduced merely to a mechanical combination of them. The process of creative development continues for ever. There are no laws of social life which are invariant except the general schema of development. At a critical point in the complex interaction of 1) the social institutions from which we start, 2) the felt needs which their immanent development produces, 3) and the will to action which flows from knowledge of the relation between institutions and human needs, new laws of social organisation and behaviour arise.

The logic of the situation is not foreign even to natural phenomena. At certain critical points in the varying temperature of water new qualities, ice and steam, emerge. But Marx is never weary of repeating that the distinctive character of social development as opposed to the natural processes of development lies in the fact that human consciousness is involved.

We can now see how undialectical it is for some pseudo-Marxians to maintain that communism involves a complete break with the past. The very fact that the same language would be used rich with the connotations of past experience, precludes the possibility of such discontinuity. The existence of the great cultural heritage of the past would always constitute a challenge to reinterpretation in and for the present. Change there must be, and selective change. The impact of selective change, to be sure, will necessarily be destructive. But only to religious values and attitudes which stress prayer rather than knowledge and action, to social values which in expressing the snobberies of birth, station and economic power, stultify the widest possible development of creative personality – to all values which in exalting the mastery of technique over life (machinery for machinery’s sake, art for art’s sake, science for science’s sake, philosophy for philosophy’s sake) mistake the part for the whole, sacrifice the organic connections between one field and another, impoverish the world by clinging to the tried and established, and oppose adventure, experiment and growth. None the less, communist culture is not merely destructive to the inheritance of the past. It realises that Socrates and Bruno and Rousseau, conditioned by their time, were just as great rebels in their day as Marx was in his; that Aristotle, Ockham and Kant in relation to their past, were, at the very least, the intellectual peers of Marx. Only undialectical Marxists like Bukharin will speak of the ‘outspoken black-hundred tendencies of Plato’. [5] Does this mean that in accepting the heritage of the past communism accepts the theories of these men; fosters, for example, the style of Michelangelo and encourages imitations of the church music of Bach? Not at all. It reinterprets them in a new cultural synthesis. The permanent, invariant and universal aspects of human experience, as reflected in art and literature, reappear in a new context so that the significant insights of the past become enriched through the reinterpretation of the present. The dialectic of culture and history leads to the paradox that the past is not something dead, a pattern congealed into an eternal rigidity, which may have beauty but not life. The past grows whenever a new perspective in the present enables us to look back and see what has grown out of it. And when we know what has grown out of it, we can without exaggeration say that we understand it better than it did itself.

Marx, himself, was well aware of the fact that the art or culture of an historical period, although reflecting a definite form of social development, can make an aesthetic appeal which far transcends the immediate historical milieu in which it arose. Something, of course, is irretrievably lost when the persons for whom a work of art was originally created have disappeared and there is no way of fully reconstructing the prejudices and presuppositions which served as their criteria of aesthetic appreciation. But human experience is sufficiently continuous to enable us to translate the significance of past artistic achievement into some present mood, emotion or faith. Often we are able to regard an ancient work of art as a specific expression, in local idiom, of a wider social or aesthetic experience. In either case a critical discrimination results in making contemporary the significance of past cultural activity.

It was with this problem in mind that Marx wrote of the recurrent appeal of Greek art:

... the difficulty is not in grasping the idea that Greek art and epos are bound up with certain forms of social development. It rather lies in understanding why they still constitute with us a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment.

A man cannot become a child again unless he becomes childish. But does he not enjoy the artless ways of the child and must he not strive to reproduce its truth on a higher plane? Is not the character of every epoch revived perfectly true to nature in child nature? Why should the social childhood of mankind, where it had obtained its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that will never return? There are ill-bred children and precocious children. Many of the ancient nations belong to the latter class. The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not conflict with the primitive character of the social order from which it has sprung. It is rather the product of the latter, and is rather due to the fact that the unripe social conditions under which the art arose and under which alone it could appear can never return. [6]

The heavy overtones of German aesthetic theory of the nineteenth century, especially Hegel’s philosophy of art, can be heard in this passage; and its characterisation of Greek art may, therefore, produce a comic effect upon the contemporary reader. Nonetheless, it strikes a clear note on behalf of the relative autonomy of the aesthetic experience.

In discussing social change, Marx, however, presses the point of his dialectic a little deeper. Social institutions in the course of their own careers produce the means by which they are changed and generate the needs which ultimately inspire men to revolutionary action. Some important consequences follow. The conditions of extant social production must be accepted before they can be transformed. The evils generated by the private ownership of the means of production in an era of large-scale machine manufacture cannot be eliminated by rejecting the machine process and returning to hand industry, or to the soil, or, for that matter, to the bosom of the church. History may be reconstructed but it cannot be reversed. To attempt any such movement would result in more distress than originally called it forth. It could easily be shown, for example, that population, which is a function of the system of production, has grown to such an extent that its barest necessities could hardly be fulfilled today by a system of primitive hand manufacture and agriculture. It is not the machine which oppresses men but the social relations within which machine production is carried on. Periodic crises, unemployment and mass misery flow not from the former but from the latter. Consequently it is the social relations of production which must be changed. ‘But in every society’, writes Marx, ‘the relations of production constitute a whole.’ [7] If they are a whole, we cannot accept one aspect which we call good and reject another which we call bad. For the good and the bad are organically related to one another. We cannot preserve an open field for all business talent and economic initiative – the allegedly good side of capitalism – and eliminate overproduction – the bad side of capitalism; we cannot repudiate competition for the sake of a planned economy and at the same time accept the existing state. Here, one can achieve a genuine synthesis only by revolutionary action. It is the weakness of the reformer’s ideology at this point to seek to mediate irreconcilables, just as at other points it is the incurable defect of his Utopian half-brother, to break cultural and economic continuities. For one, all change is a slow evolutionary process upon whose lazy movement mankind floats forever forward; for the other, nothing develops but that it jumps. For Marx, however, revolution is the political mode by which social evolution takes place. When, where and how, cannot be settled in advance. It is always a question of concrete specific analysis. But when it takes place the political contrast between the old and the new forms of government is stronger and sharper than between the old and the new forms of art, literature and philosophy.

IV: The Dialectic of Social Psychology: We are now in a position to appreciate the profundity of Marx’s social psychology. All social activity revolves around the gratification of human needs and wants. But those needs and wants are more than a schedule of biological impulses. They are social and therefore historical. We explain their character and variations in terms of the productive processes in which man as a member of a definite social system finds himself engaged. Production both in time and logic precedes consumption. Only late in his career does man begin with a ready-made idea of what he wants. His consciousness is a slow reflection upon what he finds himself doing; only as a subsequent effect is there a reorganisation of his activity. Anthropologists have shown that art production precedes art appreciation. That production usually precedes appreciation is true in other fields too. In social life, Marx showed that production affects consumption and appreciation in three different ways. It furnishes the objects to be consumed; it determines the manner of consumption; and gives rise to new wants of consumption which, in turn, further other productive activities.

That production is necessary for continued consumption, on behalf of which it is undertaken, is too obvious to call for elaboration. But that production determines the manner in which human beings consume, the form and character of their wants, and often the highest reaches of their consciousness, runs counter to those social philosophies which draw a sharp distinction between man’s nurture – which is social and variable – and his original nature – which is biological and constant. Marx was the first realistic sociologist to challenge this sharp disjunction without making man a purely passive agent in the social process. Whatever the drives and impulses which constitute his animal nature, man’s human nature is revealed only in a socially determined context, in which the biological pattern functions as only one constituent element of the whole. And since the social context is historically conditioned, human nature, too, is an historical fact. ‘Hunger is hunger’, writes Marx, ‘but the hunger that is satisfied with cooked meat eaten with knife and fork is a different kind of hunger from one that devours raw meat with the aid of hands, nails and teeth.’ [8] Similarly, selfishness is selfishness, and power is power; but a selfishness and power that assert themselves in a system of commodity production, in which the legal right to prevent others from using land and machines means the material power to condemn them to poverty and death, are different kinds of selfishness and power from those which express themselves within a socialised economy, guaranteeing to all who are capable and willing to work, the right to life and subsistence.

Human nature is a complex of needs and desires. Man’s productive activities, by giving rise to new needs and desires – whether it be the need for rapid locomotion unknown to our ancestors or the desire for romantic love whose vogue is comparatively recent – result in a significant development of human nature. Processes of social transformation are thus at the same time processes of psychological transformation. The dialectic principle explains how human beings, although conditioned by society, are enabled through activity to change both society and themselves. Intelligent social action becomes creative action. ‘By acting on the external world and changing it’, says Marx, ‘man changes his own nature.’ [9] The normal individual, the natural individual who plays such a part in the writings of sociologists, is always a projection of the limited ideal of an historically conditioned society and of the dominant class in that society. Aristotle defined man as naturally a ‘political’ animal (literally, a city-dwelling animal); Franklin as a ‘tool-making’ animal. For Marx, man is all that and more. Once he acquires control of the conditions of social life, he can consciously make over his own nature in accordance with a morally free will, in contradistinction to man in the past whose nature has been unconsciously made over by the socially determined will of economic classes.

The emphasis which Marx placed upon the dialectic development of human nature and the possibilities of its growth has not prevented critics – even sympathetic ones – from charging him with a mechanical and rigid conception of its character. Almost at random I turn to a book which says:

Karl Marx laid out a complete span of historical sequence on the basis of economic determinism in which he reckoned almost not at all with the possibilities of change in human nature. [10]

One could fill pages with quotations to show how unjust such a characterisation is. One single sentence suffices. Arguing against Proudhon, who, interestingly enough, seems to have come alive again in the modern petty-bourgeois socialism of public works and social planning, Marx exclaimed: ‘M Proudhon does not know that the whole of history is nothing but the progressive transformation of human nature.’ [11]

V: The Dialectic of Perception: Human nature does not change overnight. It develops slowly out of the consciousness of new needs which, together with the limiting condition of the environment, determine new tasks and suggest new goals. But the new needs themselves do not emerge suddenly into human experience. They arise out of an attempt to gratify the old needs in a shifting environment and find conscious articulation only in the active practical process by which man both changes and adjusts himself to his environment. That is why the principle of dialectic, for Marx as for Hegel, finds expression in the active quality of individual perception and thought as well as in society and nature. Marx did not work out his views in detail, but his criticism of Feuerbach’s materialism contains suggestive hints of a dialectical theory of perception. This theory of perception was necessitated by his philosophy of history. If human beings are active in history, then, since all human activity is guided by ideas and ideals, human thinking must be an active historical force. That human stupidity is an historical force is a proposition which no one who has lived long can help believing sometimes. That human thought is active is a proposition which is characteristic of all philosophical idealism. But idealism is inadequate because it does not take into account the material conditions of intellectual activity, and the relation between thought and sensations. The materialists maintain that sensation depends upon something which is not thought. They swing, however, to a view which is the direct converse of the idealist error, and just as erroneous. They reduce thought to sensation; so that the ideas in a man’s head are regarded as passive effects of an external world – as experiences which just happen to him in the same way that he gets electrical shocks. There is one short step from the view that consciousness is merely a product of forces acting from without, to Democritus’ view that nothing exists but ‘atoms and the void’, to Hobbes’ reduction of all psychic phenomena to ‘ghosts’ and ‘apparitions’, to Feuerbach’s aphorism, ‘Der Nahrungstoff ist Gedankenstoff’, and to bring the variations in this record of absurdity down to the present, to J.B. Watson’s contention that there is no such thing as consciousness at all.

After an early period of allegiance to Schelling and Hegel, Marx threw his idealism overboard. But he sought to save the idealist’s insight that knowledge is active. Otherwise his own historical materialism would result in fatalism. Marx reasoned that if knowledge is active and is organically related to sensation, sensation itself must be something other than a passive experience out of which the world is built up by the psychological process of association and the logical process of inference. Things are not revealed in sensation: sensations themselves arise in the course of man’s activity on things. The starting point of perception is not an object on the one hand, and a subject opposed to it on the other, but an interacting process within which sensations are just as much the resultant of the active mind (the total organism) as the things acted upon. What is beheld in perception, then, depends just as much upon the perceiver as upon the antecedent cause of the perception. And since the mind meets the world with a long historical development already behind it, what it sees, its selective reactions, the scope and manner of its attention are to be explained, not merely as a physical or biological fact but as a social fact as well. ‘Even objects of the simplest “sensory certainty” are given to man’, writes Marx, ‘only through social development.’ [12] All psychology, which is not a phase of biophysics or psycho-physics, thus becomes social psychology. For it is not perception alone, he adds, which is bound up with the practical material processes of social life, but the production of ideas and the higher forms of consciousness as well. Consciousness, therefore, is social before it is individual. And this is something which no mechanical, sensationalistic materialism can adequately explain:

The chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach’s) is that the thing – reality – sensation – has been considered only in the form of the object or of direct apprehension; and not as sensory human activity, not as practice, not subjectively. Therefore in opposition to materialism the active side was developed abstractly by idealism which naturally did not recognise real sensory activity as such. Feuerbach is willing to recognise sense objects which are really something other than objects of thought; but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity... He therefore cannot grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘critical-practical’ activity.

The highest point to which sensationalistic materialism can reach, that is, the materialism which does not conceive sensation as practical activity, is the standpoint of the single individual and bourgeois society. [13]

VI: The Future of Dialectic: A larger problem suggested by the social expression of dialectic is the question of what form the principle will take under communism. On this question a great deal of confusion prevails both in the camp of Marx’s critics and in that of his friends.

The three leading principles of the Marxian doctrine are obviously historically conditioned in the sense that they hold only for class societies. Historical materialism, which explains the general character of social life in terms of the economic relations in which human beings find themselves and by which they are controlled; the theory of surplus-value, which teaches that the greater part of what the worker produces is filched from him by those who own the instruments of production; the theory of the class struggle, which maintains that all history since the downfall of early Gentile society has been a struggle for state-and-social-mastery between different economic classes – these principles, of necessity, must be suspended in a collectivist society in which man makes his own social history, in which the total product of labour-power, although not returned to the individual worker, is disbursed and reinvested for the good of the commonalty, and in which economic classes have disappeared and only shifting vocational distinctions remain. Well then, what becomes of the possibility of social development under communism? What contradictions of social life provide it with driving force? Or is this the last word in human development, the idyll of the Kingdom-Come in which all evil, struggle and frustration disappear? (That is what professional critics of Marx, like Sorokin, charge Marx with believing!) What happens to dialectics? Hegel denied that it had any sway when it came to the Prussian state. When Marx condemned him, did he mean to say, only, that Hegel should have waited for the communist society before he proclaimed the end of history?

As distinct from all other doctrines of Marx, the principle of dialectic still continues to operate in a communist society. It is not historically conditioned in the same sense as his other theories. It finds expression, however, on a more elevated plane. Although in advance no one can describe the detailed form it will take, it is clear that its general locus is individual and personal, and that whatever social change takes place, proceeds through cooperative conflict and not anti-social class struggles. The world still exists in incomplete process, and conflict ever remains at the heart of flux, but now, however, man wrestles not with the primary problems of social existence but with the more significant problems of personal development. Every social advance will create its own institutional abuses and problems, natural phenomena will still run their course indifferent to human welfare, and men will never be equally wise or beautiful. But the opportunities for the development of creative personalities will be more widespread than ever before. For it is a law of true creation that the mind flourishes best when the obstacles it has to overcome are not imposed upon it by material problems of subsistence but by the problems which arise in the course of the individual’s intellectual, emotional and spiritual development.

Marx was not a utilitarian. Nowhere does he promise ‘happiness’ in the future or fight for it in the present. He condemns capitalism not because it makes people unhappy but because it makes them inhuman, deprives them of their essential dignity, degrades all their ideals by setting a cash value on them, and inflicts meaningless suffering. He would have approved of Nietzsche’s savage thrust at Bentham: ‘Man does not desire happiness, only the Englishman does’ [14]; and he himself contemptuously remarks in Capital with an eye on the utilitarian bookkeeping of pains and pleasures that ‘with the driest naïveté, Bentham takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man’. [15]

This does not mean that Marx was opposed to human beings seeking happiness or that he denied the possibility of its existence. He felt quite rightly, however, that, of itself, utilitarianism could never serve as the basis of a fighting, revolutionary ethics. The reason is simple. Happiness arises through the gratification of needs, desires and ambition. It can therefore be attained either by increasing achievement in the way of effort or material goods, or by cutting down desire and ambition. Happiness comes, as William James somewhere says, either ‘by getting what we want or learning to like what we’ve got’. There is nothing to show that honest Christians, and all other people for whom religion is an anodyne, are less happy than those who do not, ‘like the Camel and the Christian take their burdens kneeling’ (Bierce). But there is a great deal to show that those who are prepared to struggle for their ideals even unto death, who pit their intelligence and strength against all remediable evils, who scorn the cheap Philistine worldliness which will risk nothing that endangers its fleshpots as well as the religious otherworldliness which forsakes the most precious of all human virtues – intelligence and courage – are noble, even in their very defeat. Marx’s own life with its ostracism, grinding poverty, refusal to compromise truth and revolutionary honour, is an illustration of what his ethical values were. He was surer that there were some things that a human being ought to do than he was that those things would bring pleasure and not pain. Nowhere does Marx put this more strongly than in his contrast between the revolutionary morality of the proletariat and the social morality of Christianity:

The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility ... but the proletariat, which will not allow itself to be treated as canaille, regards its courage, self-confidence, independence and sense of personal dignity as more necessary than its daily bread.

The social principles of Christianity are mealy-mouthed; those of the proletariat are revolutionary. [16]

In Marx as in Hegel the dialectic is, so to speak, the philosophical rhythm of conscious life. The dialectic method is a way of understanding this rhythm and participating in it. It expresses the tension, expansion and growth of all development. It does not sanction the naive belief that a perfect society, a perfect man, will ever be realised; but neither does it justify the opposite error that since perfection is unattainable, it is therefore immaterial what kind of men or societies exist.

Granted the principle of the imperfection of man, what then? [Asks Marx] We know in advance that all human institutions are incomplete. That does not take us far: that does not speak for or against them. That is not their specific character, their mark of differentiation. [17]

For Marx as for Hegel cultural progress consists in transferring problems to higher and more inclusive levels. But there are always problems. ‘History’, he says, ‘has no other way of answering old questions than by putting new ones.’ [18] Under communism man ceases to suffer as an animal and suffers as human. He therewith moves from the plane of the pitiful to the plane of the tragic.

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Notes

1. ‘Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history.’ (Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-Critique, Chapter VI. – MIA)

2. V.I. Lenin, Letters on Tactics, Collected Works, Volume 24. – MIA

3. Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, Volume 1 (London 1926), Chapter VII.

4. Third gloss on Feuerbach, Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band V, p. 534 [Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach. /ndash; MIA

5. Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (New York, 1925), Chapter VI. – MIA

6. Critique of Political Economy (Kerr edition), pp. 311-12 [Karl Marx, Grundrisse. MIA