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Title: The Dialectics of Ambiguity
Author: Ron Tabor
Date: 2004
Language: en
Topics: dialectics, marxism, history, critique, historical materialism
Source: Retrieved on 2005-05-11
Notes: Published in The Utopian, Volume 4.

Ron Tabor

The Dialectics of Ambiguity

Introductory Note

This article is the latest in a series of essays devoted to a critique

of Marxism from the left. I began the articles in the early 1990swhen I

was affiliated with Love and Rage, a group that described itself as a

revolutionary anarchist federation. Prior to that time, I had been a

Marxist for many years and a member of two organizations that (in their

distinct ways) opposed the then-extant Communist societies as

representing the perversion of Marxism (and Leninism) and attempted to

uphold what they considered the true interpretation of that

worldview.During that time, I believed that Marxism and Leninism

embodied an outlook that stood for the liberation of the working class

and all other oppressed people, and the establishment of a truly

liberated—democratic, cooperative and egalitarian—society, one that is

directly governed in all aspects by its members. More specifically, I

thought that the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia in October 1917

represented a true proletarian revolution, one which was, moreover,

supported by the peasantry, the vast majority of people in the Russian

Empire.However, the circumstances in which it had taken

place—particularly the nature of Russian society, the material

destruction caused by World War I and the years of revolution and civil

war that followed, the failure of other socialist revolutions in

Germany, Hungary and elsewhere, and the viciousness of the attempted

counterrevolutionary struggle—resulted at first in the bureaucratization

of the revolutionary regime and ultimately in its total overthrow at the

hands of a bureaucratic elite organized and led by Joseph Stalin.

After some years of study and consideration, I eventually concluded that

this position was untenable. Rather than seeing the establishment of

totalitarian, state capitalist (Communist) systems as the negation of

Marxism, I came to believe that these societies in fact represented its

fulfillment, although this had not been explicitly perceived, let alone

advocated, by Marxist ideologists. As a result of reaching this

conclusion, while still maintaining my opposition to capitalism and

advocating the establishment of a liberated society, I became attracted

to anarchism. I was particularly drawn to its hostility to the state and

its opposition (in contrast to Marxism) to utilizing a state apparatus

to achieve its goal. I was also intrigued by its under-standing of

hierarchy, which subsumes questions of class,national, racial and sexual

oppression under a broader category without insisting on the

primacy/determining nature of anyone of them. Lastly, I was impressed by

what I believe to be implied by anarchism (if not always consistently

adhered to by anarchists themselves): a philosophical skepticism that

repudiates the belief in the Truth of any one political/philosophical

orthodoxy, in other words, its commitment to a form of ideological

pluralism. For this and other reasons, I participated in and joined what

eventually became Love and Rage.

Once in this organization, however, I began to discern that some of its

members, and one leader in particular, seemed to be attracted to certain

authoritarian aspects of Marxism.Having been involved in Students for a

Democratic Society in the 1960s, and having watched the evolution of its

politics from a kind of libertarian social democracy in its early years

to a form of militant Stalinism at the time of its split in1969, I was

concerned that Love and Rage not undergo a comparable life history. It

was with this in mind that I began a series of articles that I called an

anarchist critique of Marxism. Aside from offering the benefits of my

own experience (such as they might be) to those younger activists in

Love and Rage and elsewhere on the left who might be open to them, I

also wanted to clarify my own thinking, in a kind of settling of

accounts with past beliefs. I particularly wished to explain why the

practical results of Marxism—the actual outcome of Marxist-led

revolutions—had been hideous totalitarian regimes rather than the

liberated, democratic and egalitarian societies that Marxists

proclaimed, and still proclaim, to be their goal. In the same vein, I

wished to explore why so many Marxists (the vast majority, it seems

tome) have been so bent on supporting, defending and justifying such

regimes, as well as others that were not the result of Marxist-led

revolutions, despite their obviously undemocratic and brutal character.

Finally, I wanted to understand why so many people involved in radical

politics, including anarchists themselves, have been drawn to this type

of authoritarian thinking;why, for example, some young anarchists today

view Che Guevara and the Weathermen, arch-Stalinists and elitists if

there ever were any, as heroes.

I now believe that Marxism must be held responsible for the

establishment of totalitarian state capitalist Communist regimes and

that this,not its claim to stand for the creation of liberated

societies, is its real meaning. In other words, Marxism leads to

totalitarianism. Of course, the question of historical responsibility is

a complicated one. State capitalism in Russia and elsewhere was

established under specific historical circumstances, not all of which

can be blamed on Marxism. But Marxism, which prides itself on being the

true understanding of history, its dynamics, direction and outcome, can

be held responsible for what Marxists did under these circumstances,and

why so many Marxists supported and support, and even seek to replicate,

the dictatorial regimes that Marxists established in the name of

freedom. As I see it, Marxism was a necessary, if not sufficient, cause

of such societies. If Marxism had never existed, Russia, the countries

of Eastern Europe, China,etc., might well have experienced centralized,

industrializing,so-called modernizing, governments intent on enabling

these countries to resist colonialist domination and imperialist

penetration and to compete on the capitalist world market. But the

specific nature of the regimes that were established in these

lands,including the official state ideologies, mandated atheism,

one-party rule, ideological campaigns, leadership cults, purges and

gulags,and particularly the extreme nature of the violence they

practiced, must, I think, be held to Marxism’s account.

In light of this, a critique of Marxism seems to me to be a preliminary

step in the process of developing an outlook that consistently promotes

the establishment of a free society. If we are to build a mass radical

movement that really stands for what it claims to, we need to figure out

what went wrong before.

When I initiated the series, there was some concern that I was wasting

my time (and that Love and Rage was wasting space in its newspaper).

Many people presumed that Marxism was dead, as it appeared to be in the

aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union and the other state

capitalist regimes in Eastern Europe, and in the light of China’s

evolution toward a more traditional form of capitalist economy. But

since I had lived through the 1950s and early 1960s, when Marxism (at

least in the United States) was also declared to be deceased only to

revive with great vigor in the late 1960s, I believed that my efforts

were not totally in vain. It was with this in mind that I was somewhat

reassured (if that’s the right word), to learn that one of the large and

apparently influential anti-war coalitions to emerge in the buildup to

the war in Iraq— the International Answer coalition—was dominated by the

Workers World Party, the embodiment of a particularly virulent form of

Stalinist Marxism. That this characterization of the group is apt was

revealed in the fact that one of the key points of unity of this

coalition was/is that no criticism of Saddam Hussein and his regime be

allowed. Although the anti-war protests have subsided and the

International Answer coalition has since kept a low profile, I believe

it will be only a matter of time before some sort of oppositionist

movement revives (which I am for), and the Workers World Party again

raises its head (which I am against). So much for Marxism being dead. Of

course, there are other organizations that defend more democratic

interpretations of Marxism, but I consider that efforts to contest the

Marxist terrain with hard-line Stalinists are futile. This is because,

as I’ve tried to show in these articles,I believe Marxism itself, in its

fundamental philosophical assumptions and in other aspects of its

outlook and program, is totalitarian.

Previous essays in this series have discussed Marx’s theory of the

state, his conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat and his

analysis of capitalism. In this article, I wish to take up his theory of

history, what Marxists refer to as “historical materialism.” Since the

theory, in its claim to explain the totality of human history,

encompasses a vast territory, I cannot even pretend to analyze it in its

entirety. I do wish to discuss some of its key tenets and

characteristics.

Historical Materialism: Marxian Summaries

Significantly, nowhere in the huge corpus of Marx and Engels’ writings

is there a fully elaborated presentation and explanation of the Marxian

theory of history as a whole. Instead, what we have are, on the one

hand, a few frustratingly brief summaries of the theory, and on the

other, detailed examples or, in more pretentious language,

exemplifications, of their historical conception, that is, relatively

worked-out studies of particular historical events that purport to be

applications of historical materialism. I include in this latter

category Marx’s monumental analysis of one socio-economic formation in

particular, Das Kapital / Capital. While some commentators, both within

and outside the left, have discerned a contradiction between the theory

of historical materialism and Marx’s analysis of capitalism, it seems

clear to me that Marx meant his theory of capital to be consistent with

his broader analysis of history. If there are contradictions between the

two, these are contradictions within the theory of historical

materialism itself.

It might appear to be convenient that there exists only a handful of

synopses of the Marxian theory of history from its originators. This

way, various analysts who might disagree on other issues relating to

Marxism might at least agree on what Marx and Engel’s conception

explicitly states. But, as we shall see, this is not the case.

In order to see why this is so, it is worth reproducing here two of

those statements of the overall theory. I begin with what is generally

considered, by both those who deem themselves to be Marxists and those

who don’t, to be the best—succinct but inclusive—presentation of the

theory. I am referring to the passages in Marx’s preface to one of his

preliminary studies of capitalism, A Contribution to the Critique of

Political Economy.

Marx writes as follows (please forgive the length of the quotation):

The general conclusion at which I arrived and which,once reached,

continued to serve as the leading thread in my studies,may be briefly

summed up as follows: In the social production which men carry on they

enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of

their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage

of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of

these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of

society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political

superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social

consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the

general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of

life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their

existence,but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their

consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material

forces of production come in conflict with the existing relations of

production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with

the property relations within which they had been at work before.From

forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn

into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the

change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is

more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations

the distinction should always be made between the material

transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be

determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal,

political,religious,aesthetic or philosophic—in short ideological forms

in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as

our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself,

so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own

consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be

explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing

conflict between the social forces of production and the relations of

production. No social order ever disappears before all the productive

forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new

higher relations of production never appear before the material

conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old

society. Therefore, mankind always takes up only such problems as it can

solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find

that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions

necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process

of formation. In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the

ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production as

so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society. The

bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the

social process of production—antagonistic not in the sense of individual

antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of

individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces

developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material

conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation

constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of

human society. (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,

Karl Marx, Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago, 1904, pp.11–13.)

I will also reproduce here another, briefer explication of the Marxian

theory. This is from Friedrich Engels’ 1888 preface to the Communist

Manifesto:

The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to

state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus, belongs

to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the

prevailing mode of economic production and exchange,and the social

organization necessarily following from it,form the basis upon which is

built up and from which alone can be explained, the political and

intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history

of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding

land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles,

contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes;

that the history of these class struggles form [sic] a series of

evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the

exploited and oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its

emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the

bourgeoisie—without at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating

society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions,

and class struggles.

This proposition...is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory

has done for biology.... (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx

and Frederick Engels,International Publishers, New York, 1948, p. 6.)

Marxian Ambiguity

Although these two passages are generally considered to be

consistent,there is, in fact, a significant difference between the two

presentations of the theory. This is that while Engels emphasizes what

is often considered the most important proposition of Marxism—that the

history of humanity (since the dissolution of primitive communism) has

been a history of class struggle (this contention is also very

prominently articulated at the beginning of section I of the Manifesto

itself)—Marx doesn’t explicitly mention the class struggle at all.This

reveals what I consider to be a major characteristic of the Marxian

theory of history and Marxism as a whole. This is its lack of precision

and its resultant ambiguity: almost every category and concept is vague.

Historical materialism in fact consists of a large number of broad

generalizations that may appear to be valid at first glance, but which

break down when subjected to serious scrutiny. In other words, despite

its claim to be scientific (Engels, as we saw, compared it to Darwin’s

theory of evolution), the Marxist theory of history is ambiguous, even

rubbery, and can be subject to a variety of interpretations, both of its

overall meaning and of its specific tenets.

For a conception that insists on its scientific character, this is a

serious weakness. After all, one of the crucial characteristics of a

truly scientific theory is its precision. This enables it to beheld to

account, that is, proved or disproved, or, if one prefers, verified or

falsified. (I don’t wish to get into a discussion here of precisely how

scientific theories are validated, to what extent they can be said to be

proved or disproved.Suffice it say, that most people, particularly

scientists and philosophers and historians of science, believe that

theories that purport to be scientific can be held to some criteria of

verifiability, and that this distinguishes scientific theories from

those that are not.) Most theories in physics, such as Newton’s laws of

motion or Einstein’s theory of relativity, are actually a series of

mathematical equations. They also make very precise predictions, which

can be verified or not to determine their validity. (This is true even

of probabilistic theories such as quantum mechanics.) While the

neo-Darwinian theory of evolution cannot be summarized mathematically,

it can be expressed in precise terms, at least precise enough so that

the theory can be tested: it too makes predictions (such as the

appearance of intermediate life-forms in the fossil record), that can be

confirmed or not. Even hypotheses in the social sciences that aspire to

the level of scientific theories (however few and limited in scope they

maybe),must be stated in terms sufficiently precise to be subject to

verification. Although historical materialism appears to make

predictions, it is not, and cannot be, expressed precisely enough to be

held accountable. From the point of view of Marxism,this

(unacknowledged) ambiguity is useful, even necessary. On a whole range

of questions—are historical events uniquely determined or not, is

consciousness directly determined by socio-economic structures or just

conditioned by them, is socialism inevitable or merely necessary in

amoral sense—Marxism tries to have it both ways, to walk on both sides

of the street, as it were, and Marxists continually shift from one

interpretation of the theory to another in both their use of it and

their efforts to justify it. As a result, Marxism only appears valid if

it is given the benefit of the doubt. In other words, in order to

believe that Marxism is true, one has to want it to be true, and to look

for things that appear to confirm it, while denying or explaining away

things that don’t. If subjected to a truly skeptical and critical

critique, Marxism does not hold up.

Historical Materialism: An Attempt at a Systematic Summary

Before we proceed to a more detailed analysis of historical materialism,

it might be worth summarizing its basic propositions in more systematic

form for those who may find the passages from Marx and Engels cited

above somewhat confusing. Here is my attempt.

The underlying motive force—the determining factor—of history is the

development of human productive technology,the tools and other equipment

that, along with human labor,enable human beings to transform the

products of nature and nature itself to fulfill our economic needs. The

material“means of production” are produced by labor and can be seen as

material embodiments or “congelations” of it. Labor, for Marxists, is

the unique and defining characteristic of the human species. As human

beings transform their natural and social environments through their

work, they transform themselves. A key aspect of this evolution is the

development of the instruments of labor—tools, machines, etc.,

technology in general—that multiply its power. Over time, these means of

production tend to become more productive. Taken together,this

technology and human labor constitute the “forces of production.”

Any given type or level of productive technology gives rise to and

requires a unique set of production relations, a specific arrangement of

human beings (such as the ownership of property), through which this

technology is controlled and utilized. These are called the “relations

of production.”

A specific set of these forces and relations of production constitutes

a “mode of production.” The mode of production constitutes what Marxists

call the “material base” of society.

Modes of production are of two general types, exploitative and

non-exploitative. Under exploitative modes of production,the level of

technology is sufficient to make possible the production of a limited

social surplus. This is the basis for the condition of “relative

scarcity,” which enables some, but not all, members of society, to live

without having to work. This,in turn,enables tiny, non-laboring classes,

to rule over and exploit laboring classes, appropriating the social

surplus both to maintain their dominant position and for their own

personal consumption. The division of society into exploitative and

exploited, ruling and ruled, classes gives rise to a conflict between

them, the “class struggle.” For this reason, exploitative modes of

production are said to be “antagonistic.” Under non-exploitative modes

of production, society is not divided into ruling and ruled classes.

There is no class struggle, and economic production and all aspects of

social life are carried out in a cooperative manner. Such modes of

production are “non-antagonistic.”

Each exploitative mode of production contains its own specific

internal dynamics—its “laws of motion” and “contradictions”—which need

to be investigated and analyzed in their own right, while still

embodying the general tendencies or “laws”of human society and history

as whole. Such laws of motion/contradictions determine the nature and

history of the societies based on the specific modes of production, so

that in general it can be said that under exploitative modes of

production the products of human beings, and particularly the means of

production and the laws governing their growth and development, dominate

human beings and determine their lives. Under exploitative modes of

production, humanity is thus dominated by its products.

The distinct modes of production tend to succeed eachother in time, so

that history in its broad outlines can be seen as a series of ever more

productive modes of production. This succession is impelled by the

tendency of technology and human labor (the forces of production) to

become ever more productive as history progresses.

The material base of society gives rise to specific political and

social structures—states/forms of government—as well as distinct

patterns of culture and modes of thought, such as art,religion and

philosophy. Taken together, these are referred to by Marxists as the

political and ideological “superstructure” of society. As a result, any

given mode of production creates and includes a unique superstructure

that corresponds and is appropriate to it.

Although the material base of society is said to determine the

superstructure, the superstructure is not a purely passive entity. It

has its own relatively autonomous internal dynamics and,in its turn,

reacts upon the material base, helping to shape its development. The

base and superstructure are said to relate to and determine each other

in a “dialectical” manner.

This dynamic between base and superstructure is a specific example of

the more general fact that, for Marxists, human thought and

consciousness in general—ideas, religious and philosophical conceptions,

ideology—grow out of and reflect material conditions. As Marx puts it:

“social existence deter-mines...consciousness.” Yet here, too, thought

or consciousness is not a mere reflection, a mirror or echo, of material

conditions. Through its impact on human activity, the class struggle in

particular, it has an effect on and helps determine the nature and

development of those conditions. Thus, the relation between social

existence and social consciousness, like that between base and

superstructure, is “dialectical.”

The relationship of forces and relations of production is not always

an entirely cooperative one. In the early period of the development of a

given mode of production, the relations of production tend to encourage

the development of the forces of production. However, at a certain stage

in the history of that mode of production, the relations of production

start to impede the development of the productive forces, turning into

what Marx calls their “fetters.” This leads to an intensifying

contradiction between the forces and relations of production. This

contradiction is reflected in an increase in the class struggle between

the exploited and exploiting, dominated and dominating, classes.

At some point, as the forces of production continue to grow, they

break apart the old relations of production and, via a relatively rapid

economic transformation, a new mode of production is established. This

transformation is reflected in the political and ideological sphere,

that is, in the realm of the superstructure, as a period of violent

class struggle, or social revolution.

Eventually, the forces of production develop to a point at which they

are capable of overcoming relative scarcity altogether. This is the

stage brought about by capitalism. Under this type of society, the

dynamic under which the laws of motion of the mode of production

dominate the lives and thoughts of those who live under it reaches its

apogee. Here the market has become freed of extra-economic constraints

and the means of production develop at a rapid rate. Because of this,

the lives of human beings are governed by the laws of motion of the

production and exchange of commodities, what Marx calls the “fetishism

of commodities.” Living labor is dominated by dead labor. This situation

leads not only to an increase in the oppression and exploitation of the

laborers; it also leads to a colossal increase both in the power of the

means of production and in the size and social weight of the laboring

class. Taken together, these developments make possible the elimination

of exploitation and the division of society into social classes and the

creation of a fully cooperative,that is, communist, society.

This transformation from capitalism to communism is carried out by the

proletariat, the working class created by capitalism and brought to its

true—proletarian, socialist—consciousness by the struggles it has waged

against the capitalist class. The necessary outcome of the class

struggle is the establishment,in the course of the revolution, of the

“dictatorship of the proletariat,” the “proletariat organized as the

ruling class,” that nationalizes the means of production in its own

hands,suppresses the capitalist class and its hangers-on and proceeds to

establish a planned and truly cooperative society.

Under communism, the means of production, rather than dominating the

direct producers as they do under exploitative modes of production, are

subordinated to and controlled by them. This will lead to an even

greater growth of the forces of production, making possible the

shortening of the working day. This will enable all members of society

to participate in all aspects of the administration of society. The

increase in the forces of production will gradually result in the

elimination of relative scarcity and the social antagonisms that it

engenders,and the establishment of truly equal and cooperative relations

among all people. As this process proceeds, the state, the relic of

previous class-divided societies, “withers away.”

In the above summary, I have tried to represent the Marxian theory of

historical materialism in the fullest, most logically consistent way I

have been able to, given the limitations of space. Since I have had to

interpret their theory and to interpolate ideas found elsewhere in Marx

and Engels’ writings, rather than in just the passages quoted above,

some people may take issue with my rendition. Despite this, I believe I

have done justice to the Marxist conception and have avoided setting up

a straw man that will be easy for me to shoot down later. Let’s now

proceed to a more detailed evaluation of their theory.

Two Definitions of Materialism

I noted above that one of the chief characteristics of historical

materialism (and Marxism as a whole), is its ambiguity. This pertains

even in its title, specifically, its use of the word “materialism.”

Although the term appears to be precise, it is in fact used in two

distinct senses within Marxian theory. To Marxists, the two meanings are

understood to be compatible—indeed, necessarily linked. But this is not

the case. The first, and more basic, use of the term is its

philosophical one; it pertains to that part of Marxist theory that has

come to be known as“dialectical materialism.” This is the philosophical

description of what Marxists believe to be their scientific outlook,

both its specific propositions and its methods. In philosophical

language, “dialectical materialism” is both an ontology,that is,a theory

of being, a theory of the true nature and structure of reality, and an

epistemology, a theory of knowledge. Non-Marxist philosophers would call

this“metaphysical materialism,” a term Marxists usually object to since

they deny that their world view is metaphysical at all;to them,Marxism

is scientific, whereas bourgeois philosophy (that is, all other

philosophical outlooks), is “metaphysics.”

In simple terms, this philosophical materialism asserts: (1) that the

fundamental element of the universe is matter—molecules, atoms and their

component parts—rather than spirit, ideas, or some other ideational

substance; (2) that ideas are an outgrowth of matter, specifically, the

motion and structure of material entities—the firing of neurons, the

movement of atomic particles (molecules, ions, protons, neutrons and

electrons)—in the human body, particularly the brain.For materialists,

it is the impact of matter on and within the body, both over time and at

any given time, that gives rise to ideas. Marx and Engels considered

their outlook to be the extension and result of a long line of

philosophical thought, beginning with the pre-Socratics (Greek

philosophers prior to Socrates), particularly Democritus, who believed

the world was made up of atoms. It also included the later Greek

philosopher, Epicurus, and his Roman follower, Lucretius, the British

empiricists,Francis Bacon and John Locke, the political philosopher,

Thomas Hobbes, the radical French materialists of the Enlightenment,

such as Diderot, d’Holbach, and d’Alembert, and Marx and Engels’

immediate philosophical predecessor, Ludwig Feuerbach. For Marx and

Engels, their own outlook is saved from what they considered to be the

one-sided, mechanical flaws of these earlier philosophies by the

contributions of the German Idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and

particularly Hegel.

Although Marx and Engels used the same label (materialism)to describe

their theory of history, the sense of the word as used in this realm is

somewhat different. Here it refers to the production and distribution of

what are commonly called “material goods,” that is, economic products.

But this label, as applied narrowly and more broadly to the theory of

historical materialism as a whole, is a bit of a misnomer since these

entities are not the only elements or factors involved in historical

development that can be considered to be material. What about factors of

geography or climate? These are certainly material elements, but they

are not, narrowly speaking, economic.One could,it seems to me, come up

with a theory of history that bases itself on these phenomena, and one

could legitimately, I think, call such a theory a form of

materialism,say “climatological” or “geographical” materialism. Nor does

this exhaust the possibilities of materialist theories of history.

To Marxists, the state and state structures are also material entities.

Lenin, in his famous pamphlet, The State and Revolution, describes the

state as consisting of “special bodies of armed men having prisons,

etc., at their command.” (Collected Works, Volume 25, Progress

Publishers, Moscow, 1964, p. 389.) These are clearly material entities,

and by extension, one could develop a theory of history based on the

changing nature of the states that have characterized different

societies. Insofar as the state can be described, as Lenin did, in

material terms, this theory of history might also be called a form of

materialism. Such theories do exist. They are the ones that, for

example, see human history as the story of the evolution of bourgeois,

pluralist democracy. However, since the creators of such theories are

not Marxists—indeed, they are usually opponents of Marxism—they do not

describe their theories in materialist terms, but in idealist ones, such

as The Discovery of Freedom (an actual book by Rose Wilder Lane, Laissez

Faire Books, 1984). Yet one could legitimately recast these theories in

materialist language. They would then be materialist theories of

history, but they would not be what Marxists call “historical

materialism.”

Conversely, a theory of history based on the progressive evolution of

socio-economic formations (as Marx’s is), need not be materialist. As I

discussed in my articles on Marx’s theory of capital, although

technology exists in material forms—as factories, machines, tools,

etc.—these entities do not fully describe what technology is. As the

information and bio-technology revolutions have brought out more clearly

than before,technology has an ideal component; it includes the

scientific theories, designs, mathematical expressions, including

computer programs, etc.—in short, the ideas—that such machinery and

equipment are based on and express or represent. Indeed, one could

argue, the ideal expressions are more fundamental than the material

entities, and consequently, a theory of history based on the development

of technology (which is really what Marx and Engels’ theory is), could

be more accurately cast in idealist terms, that is, as a form of

intellectual evolution. We would then have an economic (or

technological) theory of history that is not materialist.

What I am trying to get at here is that Marx and Engels use the term

“materialism” in two distinct senses—one philosophical,as a label for

their ontology and epistemology, and the other more prosaic, meaning

economic—and that the two are not necessarily connected nor implied by

each other. There is no reason why metaphysical/ philosophical

materialists must necessarily subscribe to what Marxists call the

materialist conception of history, nor why those who defend a

materialist conception of history must logically be required to be

philosophical materialists. As we know, there have been materialist

philosophers who were not Marxists and who defended other theories of

history. Likewise, there have been Marxists, even within the organized

Marxist left, who have held to Marx and Engels’ theory of history, but

have not defended “dialectical materialism.” (Karl Liebknecht, Rosa

Luxemburg’s comrade in the left wing of German Social Democracy and in

the Spartacus League, was one such figure.) Indeed, among Marxists,

there has been a relatively long-standing trend of thinkers, such as the

Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski,who draw a distinction between the

thought of Engels, supposedly the “scientistic” inventor of

(deterministic) dialectical materialism,and that of Marx, who developed

the (non-deterministic) theory of historical materialism but supposedly

gave little thought to metaphysical questions, or at least did not agree

with his longtime friend and collaborator. (See Kolakowski, Main

Currents of Marxism, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York,

1978.)

One result of this confusion of terms has been to allow the aura and

prestige of philosophical materialism to accrue to historical

materialism. In other words, since many people(including scientists,

science writers and philosophers), consider science to be materialistic,

calling the Marxist theory of history a form of materialism has helped

Marxists maintain that their theory is scientific, and hence to give it

an authoritative character that it has not earned on its own

account.Since the Marxist theory is a form of materialism, so the

argument goes, and since science is materialist, ergo historical

materialism must be scientific.

Marxian Theory: Explanatory or Predictive?

This is not the only large-scale ambiguity that characterizes the

Marxist theory of history. Another resides in the question of the

purpose of the theory itself: is historical materialism simply a method

of investigation and a corresponding mode of explanation/interpretation

of historical and social events or does it have predictive value?

In Marxist theory, this question should not even arise. Since Marxism

is, in its own view, scientific (and therefore correct),and since,

according to Marxism, the development of human society follows certain

objective laws that determine its history, Marxism offers both the

correct explanation/interpretation of past events as well as accurate

predictions about the future course of social development. Indeed, it

specifically predicts that capitalism will be superseded by socialism,

that this will occur through a proletarian revolution and, getting even

more precise, that this will necessarily happen through the

establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (See Marx’s letter

to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, Letters to Americans, International

Publishers, New York, 1953. ) This idea is central to Marxism, and

specifically to its claim to be the “unity of theory and practice.” It

is key to its insistence that its variety of socialism is scientific

rather than “utopian.”Whereas the socialist thinkers on whom Marx and

Engels pinned that label developed their conceptions of cooperative

society as moral ideals, conceived of and to be implemented outside of

the historic process (through the actions of humanistic individuals,

such as Robert Owen, who established and managed model communities, or

by convincing people with power to put them into effect), Marx and

Engels insisted that their idea of socialism was grounded in history and

the very structure of human society. It reflected the underlying dynamic

of history and grew out of the historic process itself, rather than

having to be inserted into it, as it were, from without. They therefore

sought to base their notion of socialism, along with their strategy and

tactics, on an understanding of history as whole, and more precisely, on

an analysis of the dynamics of and the economic and social trends

discernible within capitalist society (e.g., the concentration and

centralization of capital, the growth of the proletariat, the expansion

of state intervention in the economy,etc.). In their own eyes, Marx and

Engels did not advocate socialism as a moral goal. They insisted that it

would necessarily (that is, inevitably) develop out of capitalism

itself. In short,in contrast to the utopians, who advocated socialism as

a “good thing,” Marx and Engels predicted socialism.

But,in fact,Marxism can be understood and embraced in two ways. The

first is as it was explicitly propounded, complete with predictions,

specific theses and strategic/programmatic goals. The second is simply

as a framework for investigating,explaining and interpreting history and

the nature and dynamics of human society more generally, without any

claim to have predictive value, to advocate socialism or to be a guide

to practical activity to attain such an end. While this ambiguity has

existed within Marxism since its inception, it has become much more

apparent as capitalism has developed. Asa result, today Marxism can be

viewed as consisting of two fairly distinct variants. The first is its

traditional—ideological and programmatic—form, that is, as the

world-view of avowedly Marxist organizations and individuals, those who

advocate and carry out political activity to achieve socialism.The

second is a largely analytical variety, which uses Marxist theory, its

conceptions and terminology as tools for investigating and interpreting

social life.

The existence of this second variant, or mode, is in part the result of

the fact that Marxism offers a fruitful framework for analyzing human

society. This is particularly so when some of the extreme contentions of

the theory are modified into more considered statements. Who denies that

economic and social life conditions (rather than uniquely determines),

human consciousness? Who denies that the economic and structure of any

given society greatly influences the nature of its political system and

the culture it manifests? Who denies that societies can be analyzed in

terms of the social classes that constitute them, that there have been

and are struggles between such classes and that these struggles

significantly affect the evolution of those societies? Moreover, while

emphasizing the preponderant role of economic and social factors,

Marxism also attempts to integrate into its framework other phenomena,

such as political structures, ideologies, religions, art and philosophy,

and even the personalities of historically prominent individuals. As a

result of these and other features,Marxism has had a major impact on the

development of the social sciences as a whole, both through its own

contributions and by provoking reactions to itself. Specifically, given

its insistence on socio-economic processes and structures as the root

causes of historical events, Marxism has played a significant role in

opening up, or at least significantly expanding,certain fields of

investigation, such as economic and social history generally and, more

specifically, the study of the lives,conditions and struggles of members

of the lower classes,subjects that were largely ignored before Marx and

Engels began their work.And because of its effort to integrate

political, ideological and cultural phenomena into its analyses, Marxism

has also stimulated other areas, (e.g.,the history of art and science,

literary criticism), by supplying an alternative standpoint from which

to analyze the issues involved.

This analytical mode of Marxism actually emerged within the Marxist

movement itself. Explicitly Marxism-inspired research was carried out by

individuals—political figures, theoreticians and academic

researchers—who were avowed Marxists and were members of or loyal to

Marxist organizations, such as the Socialist or Communist Parties.Much

of it was also, at least in theory, pursued with the purpose of guiding

the political struggles of individual Marxists and Marxist

organizations.However, beginning in the 1930s, with the theoretical work

of those who would eventually constitute the Frankfurt Institute for

Social Research, (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin,

Herbert Marcuse and others), and at an accelerated rate in the late

1960s and the’70s, Marxism, no longer explicitly attached to Marxist

organizations and consequently less dogmatic, diffused into the academic

community at large. This development has given rise to what may be

called “academic Marxism.” Not surprisingly, this variety of Marxism

focuses on Marxist theory as a method of investigation and a mode of

explanation/interpretation of history and other economic, social and

cultural phenomena, and ignores or downplays claims that such theory has

predictive value.

While this academic Marxism has grown and prospered, the more

traditional version has continued to be the official ideology of avowed

Marxist organizations, inspiring and, at least in principle, guiding

their activities designed to promote social change and eventually to

bring about socialist revolutions. Integral to this variant, as we have

seen, is the insistence that Marxist theory has predictive value, that

it can make accurate predictions about the future development of human

society.

The emergence of academic Marxism and the de facto split between it and

the traditional forms of Marxist “praxis” have brought the distinction

between the two ways of interpreting Marxist theory into greater relief.

Yet, this division or ambiguity was present within Marxism from fairly

early on in its history and remains a notable characteristic of

traditional Marxism to this day.Among the manifestations of the

analytical mode of Marxism were various works of Marx and Engels and

later theoreticians that presented Marxist analyses of specific

historical events without attempting to use these explicitly to prove

the programmatic claims of Marxism.These efforts, such as Engels’ The

Peasant War in Germany, Marx’s The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850

and The 18^(th) Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and Karl Kautsky’s The

Foundations of Christianity, were meant in part, if not primarily,to

explicate the Marxist theory of history and to demonstrate its cogency.

The idea, apparently, was that by revealing historical materialism’s

ability to provide compelling explanations of historical events, one

thereby proved its overall validity, its truth value. Other examples of

this analytical mode within what I have called traditional Marxism were

attempts,embodied in letters, articles and books, on the part of Marx

and Engels and their followers to explain why history was not unfolding

in the way they had originally predicted: why, for example, the

socialist revolution hadn’t occurred, why the working class was not (at

least not at that moment) revolutionary, why capitalism seemed more

resilient than Marx’s theory suggested, why it seemed (at least to some)

to be over-coming its internal contradictions, etc. Although these

analyses purported to orient Marxist practice in the present, there was

very little strategic or programmatic about them. They had more the

character of urging Marxists to hold on, for the time when the

proletariat would, once again, be revolutionary and Marx’s predictions

be borne out. Still another example of such interpretive Marxism arose

among Marxists active in or concerned about countries not deemed ripe

for socialist revolution (such as pre-revolutionary Russia). Here

researchers utilized Marxist theory simply to analyze their societies,

and if the results were put to political uses at all, they were often

intended to advocate policies that favored one or another type of

capitalist development. Many of the contemporary Marxist theories of

monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and related phenomena, such as

“underdevelopment,” also have this primarily explanatory or interpretive

character.

Despite this, for Marx and Engels and virtually all Marxists in the

heyday of the Marxist movement (Kautsky, Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Martov,

Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, et.

al.), Marxism was, by definition,the “unity of theory and practice” and,

hence, predictive; to them,a purely analytical, theoretical or academic

Marxism was a contradiction in terms. Marx himself was explicit about

this. As early as 1844, he wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach: “Hitherto

philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to

change it.”

Today, this position cannot be so easily maintained. Part of the reason

for this is that Marxism has spread beyond the explicitly Marxist

organizations and milieu, into academia and beyond; Marxism now speaks

with many more voices than it once did. But equally important is the

fact that so many of the predictions of traditional Marxism have not

been borne out: capitalism has not evolved as Marx thought it would, the

international proletariat has not become revolutionary, the global

socialist transformation has not occurred,what many thought to be

socialist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe have collapsed, China is

no longer the bulwark of militant Marxian socialism, as Maoists once

believed,etc. If anything, the working class has become less

revolutionary, the industrial proletariat, on which Marx pinned his

hopes,has shrunk relative to the size of the working population as a

whole, the global Marxist movement has dwindled,and Marxism today has

very few supporters even among its supposedly natural constituents, the

workers. Yet, these developments are explicable in terms of Marxist

theory itself. In other words, Marxist theoreticians have been able to

come up with reasonably convincing analyses that explain why the world

has not developed as Marx and Engels believed it would.Ironically, then,

analytical Marxism has enabled Marxism to survive, even to prosper,

despite the collapse of its specific predictions and the severe decline

in its traditional political and organizational manifestations.

The ambiguity of Marxist theory has thus turned out to be a source of

strength. For if Marxism is merely a mode of explanation and

interpretation, it is not refutable. As long as the crucial facts are

successfully integrated into its analyses,and as long as these analyses

seem plausible and logically consistent, Marxist interpretations of

history, or of anything else for that matter, become almost a question

of taste—does one find them compelling or not?—and Marxism can-not be

held to account. In any case, it is certainly a lot easier to come up

with after-the-fact explanations than to be able to predict future

social developments. Here, too, Marxism’s ambiguities redound to its

advantage: where any given historical or social event appears to violate

specific Marxist tenets or predictions, Marxism can be given credit for

its empiricist integrity, that is, its commitment to the facts and its

willingness to recognizing the richness, the concreteness and the

“dialectical nature” of history. As a mode of analysis,then, Marxism can

be quite fecund. But the fact that Marxist explanations may “make sense”

is not proof that Marxism as a whole is correct, that its theory of

history is true,or that its claims be scientific are valid. Despite

this,this is usually how Marxists argue. Indeed, as I have mentioned,

Marxists have utilized Marxist theory to explain why other aspects of

Marxism have not been borne out. This proves, so Marxists claim, that

despite the failure of many of its prognostications, Marxism is still

right.

This ambiguity works to Marxism’s advantage in yet other ways. Even when

Marxists defend the propositions of traditional Marxism, they constantly

shift from “tighter” interpretations to “looser” ones and back again.

Sometimes socialism is inevitable; at other times, it is merely highly

likely or even just possible. Sometimes social existence determines

consciousness; at other times,it just shapes and conditions it.Sometimes

the material base of society determines the super-structure; sometimes

it merely engenders its overall nature. The superstructure is both

determined by the base and “dialectically” determines it. The structure

and dynamics of capitalism explain both why the proletariat is

revolutionary and why it is not. Etc., etc. Given such flexibility,

Marxism can be made to provide equally valid Marxist explanations for

entirely contradictory phenomena. As a result, it cannot really be

proved or disproved, and it is not, therefore, scientific.

Let’s look at some of the specific aspects of historical materialism in

light of this.

Tenets of Historical Materialism

1. The Class Struggle

In section I of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles.” (Communist Manifesto, p. 9) (Engels in his preface corrects

this with the caveat “since the dissolution of primitive tribal

society....”)

This seems to be clear and definite enough, but we have already seen how

Marx, in his summary of historical material-ism in the Preface to the

Critique of Political Economy, fails even to mention the class struggle,

let alone to stress it. This suggests that the notion of the class

struggle, however important it may be to be to Marxists, may not be well

integrated with the other aspects of Marxist theory. In any case, a look

at the conception of class struggle will reveal that the idea is not as

precise as it may seem at first glance.

The problem starts with the very definition of class. Given the

centrality in Marxist theory of the question of economic production, for

Marxists, social classes—probably the most important social category in

Marxist theory—are defined by their respective positions in the

productive process, specifically, by their relation to the means of

production. Ruling/exploiting classes are those social groups that own

the means of production. Ruled/exploited classes are those groups that

do not own the means of production, but instead are under the domination

of and are exploited by those that do. This seems simple enough, but it

does not hold up consistently across the various types of society that

Marxists have considered.

For example, under feudal society, the ruling class, the feudal

nobility, did not actually own the land. Instead, the members of the

nobility held tracts of land as fiefdoms, that is, in a kind of

trust—use in exchange for (military) service—from those above them in

the feudal hierarchy. Insofar as the land could be said to be owned at

all (and even this is questionable), it was owned by the individual at

the apex of the feudal aristocracy, the monarch, who in turn held the

land in trust from God. It was only as feudalism declined, and

capitalist commercial relations developed, that the land came to be

considered the private property of those who had held it historically.At

the other end of the social scale, the serfs are generally considered by

Marxists to be tied to the means of production,bound to the land and to

the lords immediately above them,and owing a variety of labor and other

services (taxes and dues) to them. Yet, the serfs were in fact highly

differentiated as to the degree of their enserfment and by the extent

and nature of the services they were required to supply. In fact,some

peasants were not serfs at all, some serfs were relatively well-to-do,

while some feudal estates were worked by slaves.As a result, to make the

Marxist definition of class “fit” the case of feudalism, we have to

broaden the definition of ruling class to those who own or control the

means of production,while we have to narrow the empirical range of the

historical phenomena of serfdom toward an “ideal type,” a supposedly

typical serf, and exclude or downplay those who don’t quite fit the

category.

It is also worth noting here that the use of the term “feudal-ism”or the

“feudal mode of production” itself is a misnomer.Feudalism, properly

speaking, refers to the internal structure of the nobility and the

state—the hierarchical relations of lords and lieges,the holding of land

in trust from social superiors in exchange for service—rather than to

the economic nature of the society. Feudalism, in this strict sense,

only exist-ed in parts of Western Europe—France, England and parts of

Germany—and in Japan, a rather small section of the world.A better term

would be “manorial economy.” (See Europe Emerges, by Robert L. Reynolds,

The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1961.) In an attempt to deal

with this difficulty (as well as others), some Marxists, such as Samir

Amin,have proposed to introduce a broader category, a “tributary”mode of

production, into Marxist theory. This mode includes all societies

between primitive communism and capitalism.(See Samir Amin, Class and

Nation, Historically and in the Current Crisis, Monthly Review Press,

New York and London, 1980.)

There is a similar problem with the Marxist definition of class when we

look at what Marxists call the “Asiatic” mode of production, or

“Oriental Despotism” (a category Marx described and attempted to analyze

but which he was not able to effectively integrate into his overall

theory). In these societies, the dominant classes did not directly own

the land, nor were the peasants serfs. The land was owned and farmed by

peasant families, who (along with artisans and merchants) were exploited

by the ruling elites—primarily state bureaucracies—by means of taxation.

Even under capitalism, the Marxist definition of class is problematic.

In an early stage of the industrial revolution, the definition seemed to

fit the facts—capitalists owned factories,while workers were alienated

from the means of production,that is, owned no land or tools, and were

forced to sell their labor-power to the capitalists in exchange for

wages. Yet, with the development of the modern corporation and the

diversification of stock ownership among broader sectors of the

population, the definition of capitalist becomes blurred. Many

individuals in the middle class (and sections of the working class, even

if only indirectly through their pension plans), own stocks; most

corporate executives are salaried personnel (in addition to being owners

of stock in their own and other companies), and the traditional

capitalist entrepreneur who directly managed his own firm, has declined

in social significance. Moreover, while small businesspersons do own the

means of production, they are not part of the ruling class. And of

course,there are significant sectors of the ruling class who are not

capitalists at all; professional politicians, top military officers,

government bureaucrats, corporate lawyers and other consultants, as well

as wealthy artists, actors, film directors, and figures in the sports

world, whose precise social position is harder to define. By the same

token, the social differentiation of the working class, the

proliferation of the service sectors of the economy and the expansion of

the professional middle classes have made the definition of proletarian

more difficult to pin down. In all these cases, we can maintain what we

might call the spirit of the Marxist definition of social class only by

broadening it and making it more flexible, in other words, by giving it

the benefit of the doubt.

The conception of the class struggle is also not as cut and dried as it

may initially seem. Engels defines class struggles as “contests between

exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes.” This, too,

seems clear enough, but let’s ask some questions. We can all agree, I

suspect, that when the majority of workers in a given country carry out

a revolution or a general strike, this can properly be called the “class

struggle.” This seems to be, as Engels’ definition implies, a contest

between one class and another, meaning a struggle between each class as

a whole. But how about when the workers in a particular industry,

corporation or just one factory go out on strike? This is certainly not

a contest between the capitalist class, as a class, and the working

class, as a class. And what about when a worker calls in sick on a day

he or she is not really ill, just to take a day off? Is this the class

struggle? Or when a worker sabotages the assembly line or simply vents

hostility at a supervisor? And what are we to consider a struggle in

which white workers strike to prevent the hiring of Black or other

minority workers, or men strike to prevent the hiring of women, or

native-born workers strike to prevent the hiring of immigrants? Is this

the class struggle? Marxists would most likely contend that all these

actions are forms of class struggle, although “partial” or “distorted.”

But more critical observers might disagree. And similar arguments can be

made about all the other modes of production. How many peasants need

riot before it is the class struggle? How many slaves need to break

tools or run away for these actions to be the class struggle? Or are

these actions the class struggle by definition? Here we can glimpse the

tautological character of much of Marxist theory. Since, according to

Marx and Engels,the history of humanity (excluding primitive communism),

is a history of class struggles, everything that happens in society is

either the class struggle, a manifestation of the class struggle, or an

effect or reflection of the class struggle. As we saw in the case of the

question of class, the Marxist conception of the class struggle can be

sustained only if it is helped along.

This might be considered to be knocking down a straw man,but even bigger

problems arise when we analyze Engels’ claim that, apart from the era of

primitive communism, “the whole history of mankind has been a history of

class struggles.” This is a bold statement.And, it seems to me, it can

only be seriously maintained if one broadens the definition of class

struggle to such an extent that it becomes virtually meaningless, or if

one looks at history entirely a priori through the lenses of Marxist

theory, or both. Because if one looks at history empirically and if the

idea of class struggle is taken literally and seriously, Engels’ claim

is absurd. It makes some sense if it is taken to mean simply that class

struggles (and here I mean abroad definition of class struggle) have

occurred throughout history and have played an important role in

influencing its direction and outcome. But Engels says much more than

this.

Normally, when one uses the term class struggle in the Marxist sense,

one means struggles between the chief classes—the ruling class and the

exploited class—that constitute any given mode of production. Under

supposedly slave modes of production, say, slavery during the Roman

Republic and the Empire, this would mean struggles between slaves and

slave owners. Thus, Engels’ statement would imply that the history of

Rome was, or was dominated or determined by, the struggles between these

two classes. But, unless one means by the “class struggle” things like

working slowly, breaking tools or running away (or the mere fear of a

slave revolt), there really wasn’t that much of a class struggle between

slaves and slave owners during this period. Most significantly, there

were (unfortunately) very few substantial slave uprisings. I know of

only three: two in Sicily, ca. 135 and 100 BC, and the revolt led by

Spartacus in 73–71 BC. It’s possible there were more but that I, in my

ignorance, don’t know about them, or that the Romans, for a variety of

reasons, didn’t write about them.But surely if the history of Rome can

seriously be said to be “a history of class struggles,” there ought to

be more than this. This relative lack of significant slave revolts is

perfectly understandable given the nature of slavery (the fact that

slaves were from many areas and spoke different languages, that they had

little opportunity to communicate with one another beyond relatively

small groups, let alone to organize themselves, that the owners held out

the possibility of manumission to obedient slaves,that slaves were

subject to cruel punishments, including torture,maiming and execution,

for even slight infractions, etc., etc.), and the military skill of the

Romans. But the fact remains, there wasn’t that much of an ongoing class

struggle between slaves and slave-owners in Rome.(See Keith R. Bradley,

Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World 140 B.C.-70 B.C., University of

Indiana Press,Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989.)

Perhaps if we include the conflicts between the Roman patricians and the

Roman peasantry and other lower classes, what Marx and Engels in the

Communist Manifesto refer to as the“plebeians,” Engels’ contention might

seem to be a more accurate description of Roman history. This may have

been true at various times under the Republic, but by the end of that

period, this was no longer the case. This was largely because by then

the Roman/Italian peasantry had been destroyed, not by a struggle

between it and the patricians, but largely as a result of the wars by

means of which Rome expanded (both the depredations of the conflicts and

the long-term service of the peasants in the army, which prevent-ed them

from working their farms). By then, the Roman army had become one of

professionals who owed their loyalty to their immediate commanders, and

the social conflicts of Rome had morphed into conflicts among these

generals and the various cliques among the ruling class that supported

them. Unless this entire process is seen as somehow representing the

class struggle, Engels’ claim, in relation to this period too, seems

forced indeed.

As for the other major component of the lower classes, the“proletariat,”

it was hardly a class in the Marxist sense of the term,and the

proletarians were not a chief element in the mode of production. They

were a mass of mostly unemployed people who survived on periodic public

distributions of food. They certainly played a role in the internal

struggles of Rome,but mostly as pawns of various factions and groupings

within the elite classes.That there were struggles among various social

groupings in Rome is true. That these struggles constituted “the class

struggle” in the Marxist sense of the term, or that they defined the

history of Rome are highly dubious propositions. In this light, Marx and

Engels’ discussion of the class struggle in the Communist Manifesto has

more of the character of a rhetorical device than a scientific

analysis.Unless one means by the class struggle every struggle waged

within and between the various social groupings in the ancient world,

including struggles among elites, city-states and ethnic groups (e.g.,

Greeks versus Persians, Athenians versus Spartans, Romans versus

Carthaginians, Greeks, and Jews,Jews versus Egyptians and Philistines),

the Marxist dictum that human history is the history of class struggle

is, when applied to that period, either a gross exaggeration or

down-right false.

Much the same can be said about the class struggle under feudalism.

There certainly were peasant uprisings, but there werenot that many, and

it is stretching things to say that the history of feudalism is simply

the history of the struggles between“lord and serf ” or, in the same

vein, between “guild master and journeyman,” as the Communist Manifesto

puts it. There were also periodic struggles between towns persons and

the feudal nobility, but I doubt the history of feudalism as a whole can

legitimately be described as the history of this conflict. Certainly, at

the end of the feudal period the struggle between the emerging

bourgeoisie (primarily merchants) and the feudal nobility becomes

increasingly important (although,insofar as the monarch tended to ally

him/herself with the bourgeoisie against the rest of the nobility, this

has as much the character of an intra-elite conflict as the class

struggle),and might plausibly be characterized as dominating the history

of feudalism (if society can truly be said to be feudal) during this

period. But taking feudalism as a whole, it is simply not true that the

history of feudalism is the history of class struggles.

Nor can the history of capitalism simply be described as the history of

class struggle. What is true is that in the early period of capitalism

and throughout much of its history, the class nature of society became

much more obvious, class lines more definite, and the struggle between

the classes more open—less ensnared, as it were, in the various

non-economic trappings of previous societies—and in general more

powerful and socially salient. In short, with the advent of

capitalism,the class struggle did become an increasingly important

factor on social life. It is this, I think, that had such a profound

effect on Marx and Engels. In particular, they were most likely

influenced by the fact that the French Revolution (and the succeeding

Napoleonic period), which had turned French society upside-down and had

dominated the political and social life of Europe for over 15 years, had

occurred relatively recently;that there had been a revolution in France

in 1830 and a substantial uprising of agrarian workers in England in the

same period; that they had lived through, indeed, had participated in,

the revolutions of 1848; that they had witnessed the Chartist agitation

in England, etc. Given the size, social impact and relative frequency of

these events, it was natural to generalize to the history of capitalism

as a whole and, more daringly, to the entire history of humanity

(excluding primitive communism). In other words, Marx and Engels, it

seems to me, looked at the most recent history of European

society,during which social classes and the class struggle between them

did play a paramount role, and generalized from there.Their

generalizations were of two kinds. First, from the idea that the class

struggle was a crucial factor in the history of early modern Europe,

they assumed that it was determinant.Second, they decided that what was

true of this period was true of all past history (except the era of

primitive communism), and would be true of the future. But these

generalizations do not necessarily follow. Thus, while it may be true

that in much of the history of capitalism the class struggle, in the

narrow sense of the term, has played a crucial role, it is not true that

the history of capitalism is the history of the class struggle, or that

it has been determined by the class struggle, let alone that all history

is or has been determined by the class struggle.

In fact, in the period after 1848, the outbursts of militant and

revolutionary class struggle that had occurred so regularly in the

previous 60 years gave way to a long period of relative inter-class

quiescence. There were wars between states (the Austro-Prussian and

Franco-Prussian Wars), as well as struggles to unify nation states

(Germany and Italy), but rather few mass outbreaks of the class struggle

(lower classes against upper classes) within states. The Paris Commune,

which occurred in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and which has

assumed considerable importance in Marxist theory because of Marx’s (not

quite accurate) account of it as rep-resenting the dictatorship of the

proletariat, was much more the exception than the rule. This long-term

lull in the class struggle was the cause of considerable chagrin on the

part of Marx and Engels, which is reflected in their correspondence. The

period did see the rise of mass working class organizations—trade unions

and political parties—and the growth in the influence of Marxism and

socialist ideology in general,but these organizations showed far more

tendencies toward accommodation with the capitalist state than

revolutionary opposition to it. And by the end of the 19^(th) century,

reformist trends in socialism (including within formally Marxist

organizations), were far more powerful than the revolutionary ones. Nor

was any significant sector of the working class consciously and

consistently revolutionary. As a result, a major concern of Marxist

theorists at this time (and in fact the entire period up to the outbreak

of World War I), was to explain why there wasn’t more class struggle and

to assess the meaning of this for Marxist praxis. This was the origin of

the openly revisionist, reformist point of view, put forward by Eduard

Bernstein among others, in the Second (or Socialist)International in the

late 1890s. It was also, in part, the purpose of the various theories of

state capitalism and imperial-ism,aside, of course, from the need to

explain the post-1885scramble on the part of the major European powers

to carve up Africa. Lenin’s theory of imperialism (much of it derived

from the English theorist, J. A. Hobson), is, to a considerable extent,

intended as an account of how imperialism serves to displace the class

struggle from within modern capitalist societies and to transform it

into a conflict among national states,that is, among the imperialist

powers, and one between those states and the colonized peoples.

This concern of Marxist theorists continued throughout the20th century.

Despite periods of radical class struggle, including the Russian

Revolution of 1917, the wave of abortive revolutions that followed it,

and the Spanish Revolution (1936–39),these revolts appeared to be

overwhelmed by conflicts between different nations and would-be nations:

the Balkan Wars, World Wars I and II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars,and

struggles for national liberation generally. Certainly since the

1950s,theories of imperialism (“monopoly capitalism,”“late-capitalism,”

the “permanent arms economy,” etc.), most of them indebted to Lenin,

have been invoked to explain the relative absence of the class struggle,

as traditionally defined,within the imperialist/capitalist countries and

the corresponding quiescence and political conservatism of the working

class. All these theories represent variants of the notion that the

class struggle was “displaced” from the imperialist “center”to the

“periphery” and transformed into national liberation/anti-imperialist

struggles. It is to Marxists’ credit that they championed and often led

these struggles. But this has also served to hide the theoretical

maneuvers that this has entailed. These inter-imperialist and

imperialists-vs.-colonized conflicts certainly included class struggles.

Some may even be accurately described as representing the class struggle

in national forms, but to say that all these struggles simply were the

class struggle, or that the history of this period was determined by the

class struggle, is a gross simplification.

In light of this, we can discern two closely related ways of defending

the Marxist insistence that all of human history (since primitive

communism) has been the history of class struggle (beyond the tendency

to exaggerate the importance of the class struggle at any point in

time). One is to claim that all of the events that have occurred in

history, including the struggles between sections of the elite, wars

between national groupings and states, etc., even if they are not,

narrowly speaking, class struggles, really are the class struggle,

although in distorted in form. The other is simply to contend that all

these events somehow reflect the class struggle, that is,that underneath

everything, the class struggle makes everything else happen,even if it

is not actually discernible. Both of these have the advantage of greater

flexibility than the bald insistence that history simply is the history

of class struggles. But they are, in fact, fudges. They both broaden the

definition of “class struggle” to such an extent as to render it

meaningless, while at the same time defining history tautologically in

Marxist terms: in other words,since, according to Marxism, the history

of humanity is the history of class struggles, everything that happens

either is, or reflects, or is caused by the class struggle, even if this

is not apparent.

This reveals a kind of mystical tendency that underlies Marxism. History

is impelled by a hidden force—here, the class struggle—that is not

always obvious,but always makes itself felt. It works in a mysterious,

underground way, and only those with special knowledge—those initiated

into the intricacies of Marxist theory—can comprehend it. In a previous

article, I described this notion at work in Marx’s theory of capital, in

which the logical development of value/labor—its dialectical

evolution—defines and governs the development and internal workings of

capitalism. In either form, this idea reveals the truly idealist nature

of Marxist theory underneath the materialist trappings.

Aside from imprecision and resultant flexibility, the ambiguities of the

Marxist notions of class and class struggle suggest another, and much

profounder, ambiguity that resides both within the theory of historical

materialism and within Marxism as a whole. This is the question of

whether history is a deterministic process or merely a contingent one.

Is history determined and therefore predictable, or is it “open” and

hence unpredictable; are various outcomes possible? This question is at

least implied by the difference between the two presentations of

historical materialism cited above,specifically, the fact that Engels’

presentation stresses the class struggle, while Marx’s doesn’t even

mention it. This is because the notion of struggle, and therefore the

class struggle, implies contingency; the outcome of any given struggle

is not determined;either party can win or lose. Thus, a historical

conception that stresses the class struggle is a contingent or “open”

one, while one that stresses the inexorable development of the forces of

production and omits or downplays the question of class struggle is

deterministic and “closed.” Some commentators have seen this ambiguity

as a contradiction between Marx’s theory of capital and the theory of

historical materialism. Others have viewed it as a conflict between

Marx’s and Engels’ worldviews: in their interpretation, Marx,the real

Marxist, defends a contingent theory of history while Engels, a mere

“positivist,” puts forward a deterministic one.

To me, the answer is obvious. The contradiction underlies Marxist theory

as a whole. It is another example, perhaps the most fundamental one, of

the fact that Marxism, in regard to all the crucial questions it

addresses and claims to answer,wants to have it both ways: history is

both contingent and determined; consciousness is determined by material

conditions, but not entirely; the base and superstructure interact

dialectically, but the base “ultimately” determines the super-structure;

socialism is inevitable, but not exactly.

We shall see similar ambiguities in Marx’s theory of the mode of

production, to which we now turn.

2A. The Mode of Production

According to Marxism, the various forms of human society that have

existed throughout history have been based on a series of modes of

production that determine the nature, the internal dynamics and the

resultant history of those societies.To paraphrase Marx, each mode of

production consists in part of the relations of production—“definite

relations” that are “indispensable and independent of their [men’s]

will”—that they “enter into” when they engage in “social production.”

These relations “correspond to a definite stage of development of their

material powers of production,” or what Marxists call the “forces of

production,” and their “sum total constitutes the economic structure of

society.” This structure,made up of the forces and relations of

production, is the “real foundation, on which rise legal and political

superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social

conscious.”“The mode of production in material life determines the

general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of

life.”A bit later on in this passage, Marx lists these modes of

production:

In broad outline, we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal

and the modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the

progress of the economic formation of society.

Here, once again, instead of the precision required of truly scientific

theories, we get vagueness and ambiguity.

To begin with, there is the matter of definitions. What exactly does

Marx mean when he refers to these different “methods of production” that

represent or correspond to different“epochs in the progress of the

economic formation of society”? Although these “epochs” are generally

taken by Marxists to represent distinct modes of production (which, with

their corresponding “superstructures,” represent distinct forms of

society), the nature and defining characteristics of each of these

epochs/methods/modes are not specified. Marx seems to assume that his

readers will understand what he means by them. Thus, when Marx refers to

the “ancient” methods of production, Marxists have generally assumed

that he was talking about an economy based upon slavery as it existed

among the Greeks and the Romans, what they call a slave mode of

production. But the “ancient” world consisted of far more than just

Greece and Rome: Egypt, the societies of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley,

Persia, leaving aside more distant areas, such as the civilizations in

the Indus Valley and in China (let alone the “uncivilized” parts of the

world). In addition, slavery was never the predominant form of labor in

the ancient world asa whole. It always existed side by side with other

forms,including free labor, so that the majority of the direct

produc-ers were not slaves. Indeed, even at the height of the Roman

Empire, when slavery and the slave trade were in full flower,and in the

political and economic center of that imperium, that is, Italy and

Sicily, where slavery was strongest and where,conceivably, it might be

said that an actual slave mode of production existed, slaves constituted

no more than one-third of the population. (See Michael Grant, The World

of Rome, The New American Library, New York and Toronto, 1960.)

Moreover, slavery was primarily a juridical category that obscured a

wide variety of types of work and workers. Aside from those slaves who

worked large agrarian estates, some slaves were granted the right to own

property, tools,machines, etc., and worked independently. Many of these

were highly skilled, such as architects, artists, and scholars.They kept

at least part of the profits of their work/enterprises,which they could

use to purchase their freedom. (See M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy,

University of California Press,Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973.) Thus,

even slave-based economies did not simply conform to what is commonly

understood as a slave mode of production. Given all this,what exactly

does Marx mean when he refers to the “ancient methods of production”?

Questions also surround Marx’s reference to the feudal methods/mode of

production. We have already seen that the term feudalism refers

primarily to the social/political structure of the nobility—its manner

of holding land in return for services—rather than to a specific form of

economic production.Moreover, within feudalism in this more precise

sense there also existed other forms of labor besides that of serfs,

e.g.,that of the artisans organized in guilds in the towns and cities,

and that of slaves. And what about other agricultural societies, such as

Tsarist Russia, which were similar but not identical to feudal

societies, properly speaking? Here, too,Marx never specifies.

Beyond problems of definitions, there are other issues. For example, has

all of humanity passed through, or is all of humanity destined to pass

through, each of these “epochs?” This question was to become a major

point of contention within the Marxist movement itself, specifically,

within the Second and Third Internationals, when it came to discussing

the nature of Marxists’ strategies in those countries which were not

deemed to be fully capitalist. For example, was the revolution in Russia

(and, later, China) to be a bourgeois revolution leading to the

establishment of a democratic republic and a fully capitalist economy,

or could the revolution pass through the “bourgeois democratic” stage

rather quickly (or skip it altogether), and become a socialist

revolution? Or, in another Marxist mode of expression, is the feudal

mode of production inevitably succeeded by the capitalist mode of

production or can it be transformed, under appropriate circumstances,

into the socialist mode of production? Marx himself never really

answered this question, and Marxist theory on this point, as on many

others, is subject to a variety of interpretations.

Also, have these methods/modes of production existed in pure form or

have they always been intermixed, as it were,with each other? If we take

the world as a whole, it is obvious that, with the exception of

capitalism (and this only relatively recently), each of the

methods/modes of production listed by Marx existed in the context of, or

surrounded by, other methods/modes. In fact, for much of human history,

as Marx well knew, these other modes (hunting/gathering, nomadic

herding, free peasant agriculture), taken together, predominated.Even if

we take each of the modes that Marx mentions as self-contained wholes,

they rarely existed in pure forms. As we saw, although slave production

may have dominated in parts of the ancient (so-called “civilized”)

world, it was not the pre-dominant form throughout. Likewise, under

feudalism, not all of the productive laborers were serfs—we have already

mentioned slaves, while Marx himself referred to the masters,journeymen

and craftsmen in the guilds, leaving aside the relations found in the

incipient commercial and merchant capitalist sectors that existed

alongside, or, better put, in the interstices, of feudal society,

narrowly conceived.

There are still more questions. For example, do each of these epochs

succeed each other in time? Marx’s use of the term“progress” and his

discussion of the forces and relations of production imply that these

methods/modes/epochs occur in order of ascending productivity,

reflecting the growth of humanity’s “material powers of production,” and

this is consistent with the rest of his theory. Unless this were so, why

would the “material forces of production in society come into conflict

with the existing relations of production,” converting the latter “from

forms of development of the forces of production” into “fetters”? This

only makes sense if the forces of production have a general tendency to

increase, in other words, if technology tends to develop and to increase

labor productivity throughout history. And, if the forces of production

do tend to grow, the various methods/modes/epochs of production that

Marx names ought to represent distinct stages based on ever more

powerful technology, and they should therefore succeed one another in

order of increasing technological development. But he never actually

says this.

Further, are the transitions from one mode of production to another

necessarily accompanied by “social revolutions”? As elsewhere, Marx’s

discussion of this point is ambiguous. He never fully and precisely

describes what he means by “social revolutions.” Nor does he explicitly

state that the transition from each of these methods/modes of production

to another entails such a revolution, although his discussion implies

that it does. Thus, after mentioning that the relations of production

eventually turn from being forms of development of the forces of

production into their fetters, he writes, “Then comes the period of

social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation, the

entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.” From

their other writings, we do know that Marx and Engels believed that this

pattern was an accurate description of the transition from feudalism to

capitalism and, by extension, the transition from capitalism to

socialism, but they never elaborated this conception in relation to the

other modes of production. Indeed, from Marx’s limited discussions of

the ancient world, one can infer that in his view feudalism resulted

from the fact that the class struggle in Rome resulted in the “common

ruin of the contending classes,” the fact that the class struggle in

Rome was, in effect, unconsummated. Was this asocial revolution?

2B. The Stages of History

Integrally related to the concept of the mode of production in Marxist

theory is the question of the “stages of history.”Despite the lack of

clarity in Marx’s presentation and the myriad questions it raises, Marx

and Engels’ writings have generally been understood, certainly within

the Marxist movement,to mean that they believed that human society has

developed,in whole or in part, through distinct stages, namely,

primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and, ultimately,

socialism, in that order, with the Asiatic mode of production

constituting a kind of evolutionary dead-end or detour (waiting on the

sidelines until capitalism or socialism liberates it from its torpor).

This interpretation is certainly consistent with other tenets of Marxian

theory, particularly the claim that the forces of production tend to

grow over time, as well as the corresponding contention that labor

evolves through increasingly productive forms: slave-labor, serf-labor

and the(formally) free labor of capitalist society. In other words, the

idea held by many Marxists that human society has evolved through such

precise stages, based on increasing labor productivity and distinct

forms of the exploitation of labor,seems to be implied by and is

consistent with Marx’s discussion, but Marx himself never explicitly

said this. Despite this ambiguity over the Marxian provenance of the

theory of the stages of history, let’s look at it to see whether it can

withstand scrutiny.

First, the schema implies that primitive communism was generally

succeeded by slave-based societies; in other words, that when

class-divided, state-based societies were first established,these

societies rested on slave modes of production. Was this the case? I

don’t think so. Many early state-dominated societies, such as those

established in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, in Egypt and in the Indus

Valley were not primarily based on slavery and the laboring populations

did not consist entirely or even mostly of slaves. Moreover, as we saw,

even in Greek and Roman societies, which Marxists generally describe as

being based on slave modes of production, slavery was not the only, or

even the dominant, type of labor.

Second,the Marxist conception implies that slave-based modes of

production were replaced by feudalism. We’ve already seen that

feudalism, properly speaking, only existed in parts of Western Europe

and Japan. If so, what about the people who did not experience feudal

society? They appear to be left out of the schema altogether. Even if we

just focus on the relation between the Roman Empire in the western

Mediterranean and northwestern Europe (the lands of feudalism

proper),the theory has problems and can only be made to fit into the

Marxian schema with a great deal of fudging. Thus, in the later periods

of the western half of the Roman Empire, in various regions and for a

variety of reasons (particularly the decline of trade in general, and

there-fore of slaves), slave labor was replaced by the labor of coloni,

essentially tenant farmers bound in a variety of ways to the land.

Although Marxists may see these laborers as forerunners of feudal serfs,

they weren’t serfs; nor was society in this part of the world feudal.

Feudalism is generally thought to have been established much later,

beginning in the 9^(th) and 10^(th) centuries, at the time of the Viking

invasions, and in a far different location, namely northwestern Europe

and England (and under different circumstances,Japan). This is an

awfully long and geographically attenuated transition, and can only be

made to correspond to the Marxian view by omitting entire regions and

historical periods from consideration.

Third, even assuming that Marx and Engels’ description of the ancient

world and feudalism is correct, (that is, that the Roman Empire can be

described as a slave-based society and that it was replaced by

feudalism), it is not true that the change from a slave mode of

production to a feudal mode of production represented the replacement of

a less economically developed society by a more economically advanced

one. While in theory the labor of serfs might be assumed to be more

productive than that of slaves (insofar as serfs, in contrast to slaves,

have some positive incentive to work—a portion of the crop they

cultivated belonged to themselves), it is not true that feudal

agriculture was generally more productive than the large, slave-worked

estates during the Roman Empire. And, taken as a whole, feudalism was by

no means a more advanced form of society, even in the Marxist sense of

the term,than what it had replaced. There was considerably less trade,

the social division of labor was less developed and the standard of

living, certainly for the upper and middle classes,was not as high. In

what sense,then, can feudalism be described as more advanced or as being

based on more developed forces of production? At the very least, the

question is debatable. And if this is so, the succession of slavery by

feudal-ism cannot simply be described as occurring because the forces of

production grew to such an extent that they could not be contained by

the relations of production (slavery) so that the latter became their

fetters. Nor can the transition between the slave and feudal modes of

production be accurately described as occurring through a social

revolution,except in the most general sense of that term, that is, that

social conditions changed significantly.

Fourth, and what about the rest of the world’s peoples/societies whose

histories in general cannot be characterized by the Marxian schema? None

of the methods/modes of production listed by Marx, with the exception of

the “modern bourgeois” (and that only relatively recently) ever existed

on a truly international scale. They were all relatively localized, and

many, if not most,of the world’s people’s lived outside them. What

happens to their history, or don’t they have any, or doesn’t it matter?

Specifically, what about those peoples and parts of the world that

experienced the various forms of the Asiatic mode of production

(sometimes called “Oriental Despotism”),whose internal dynamic,

moreover, cannot be described in Marxist terms? In Marx’s view, the

Asiatic mode of production was economically—but not

politically—stagnant: the forces of production did not tend to develop

within these societies. And what do we make of the people who lived

instate-dominated societies in the Americas, or those who lived in

hunter-gatherer, herding, and other types of communities. Where do these

people fit in Marx’s schema? And what does this imply about the Marxist

theory of history? As this suggests, Marx’s historical schema is

militantly Eurocentric in character. The history of the world is seen

entirely from a Western European point of view. The history that

matters, the history that, for Marx and Engels, has real meaning, is the

history of “Western Civilization,” as that civilization (the capitalist

societies of Western Europe, Great Britain and North America) sees

itself. The history of those parts of the world lying outside the

mainstream of history, as defined by Marx,doesn’t matter. This is a

question we will return to later.

Fifth, do the forces of production that are to characterize the later

and more productive societies necessarily develop within the societies

that precede them? For example, did the forces of production

characteristic of the state-dominated, class-divided societies that

succeeded primitive communism necessarily develop within primitive

communism itself? It may have been true that such primitive societies

were economically advanced enough to produce a relative surplus. But

what if the capacity to produce that surplus was the direct result of

the establishment of a state? Specifically, what if the existence of the

state itself was the source of the ability to produce the surplus

through its power to mobilize the large masses of labor need-ed to build

the structures—dams, dikes and aqueducts—required to irrigate fields and

make agriculture more productive? In this case, new forces of production

need not have existed beforehand within the previous society.

Moreover, even where this contention of Marx’s seems to holdup, as in

the development of capitalist methods and relations of production within

feudalism, the truth is not so simple. In some sense, the expansion of

trade and the growth of the mercantile class that carried it out (the

forerunner of the modern capitalist class), occurred outside the bounds

of feudal society, properly speaking, rather than within it. This was

particularly true of the “putting out” system that is generally

considered, and described by Marx, to be the origin of the so-called

free labor contract and the specifically capitalist method of

production. This took place, and necessarily so, outside the

restrictions of the system of guilds, that is, in some sense out-side

the feudal system, rather than within it. Indeed, the very growth of

towns and cities, particularly after the so-called “communal

revolution,” through which the towns won their independence from the

feudal lords, had this characteristic.

What this discussion reveals is that the schema we have been considering

is just that, a schema. Empirically, it doesn’t fit the facts. As we

have seen, the epochs/methods/modes of production that Marx lists did

not in fact succeed each other in ascending order of

economic/technological progress. The transitions between each of these

societies were not always motivated by the growth of the forces of

production and their eventual conflict with the relations of production,

nor did they necessarily entail social revolutions, except in the most

general sense of the term. Not to mention the fact that the

characterization of some of the modes of production don’t accurately

reflect the nature of the societies they are meant to denote: the

ancient world(even the so-called civilized part of it) was not based on

a slave mode of production, the term feudal (or feudalism)doesn’t denote

a distinct mode of production at all, while it isn’t at all clear that

all or even most societies in Asian are accurately described by what

Marx refers to as the “Asiatic”methods of production. The entire

conception is obviously a very abstract and arbitrary construct into

which a great many historic developments are uncomfortably crammed,while

a large number of others are ignored altogether. It may seem plausible

at first glance, especially if one doesn’t know too much about history,

but it falls apart upon further scrutiny. For more sophisticated

Marxists, it can only be made to work by being manipulated—stretched,

tightened, pushed, prodded, redefined, etc.,—as needed. Like much else

in Marxist theory, the schema only makes sense if one wants to believe

it, gives it the benefit of the doubt and tries to fit historical

developments into the prescribed pat-tern. It is a daring generalization

that provides much mate-rial for thought and a framework for historical

investigation and interpretation. But it cannot sustain the claim to be

scientific, let alone to be able to base predictions of future social

development on it.

Of course,it can be argued that it is I who have set up this schema and

so made it easy to criticize. Marx, as we saw,merely “designated” in

“broad outline” the “Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal and the bourgeois

methods of production as so many epochs in the economic formation of

society,” and he never assembled them in precisely the form that I’ve

presented and criticized. Yet, the schema is consistent with, and a

reasonable interpretation of, Marx’s overall theory. It is also how most

Marxists have understood it. And if it is not what Marx and Engels

intended, just what did Marx have in mind when he wrote the passage?

Some commentators have seen it as a kind of program for research, a

starting point for further investigation. But if it is merely this, then

it can only have a highly tentative character until it is verified by

that investigation. And, in fact, most research since Marx’s day

refutes, rather than confirms it,which is why some Marxists, such as

Samir Amin, have sought to modify it. As such, it cannot be used to

prove any-thing.It doesn’t demonstrate the validity of historical

materialism and it certainly doesn’t demonstrate that socialism is

inevitable. In fact, this passage (Marx’s schema, list or what-ever it

is), has the same ambiguous characteristic and plays the same rubbery

role that all his major concepts do.Sometimes it is presented as an

accurate description of the main contours of human history; at other

times it is simply part of Marx’s method, a program for research or

something else equally as vague. It is whatever any particular Marxist

wants it to be, as long as it serves to justify Marxist theory. (I know,

it’s dialectical.)

But let’s leave this question and turn to another central issue in the

theory of historical materialism. This is the relation-ship between the

base and the superstructure, along with the closely related question of

the relation between social existence and consciousness.

3. Base and Superstructure, and Social Existence and Consciousness

According to Marx and Engels, all societies can be under-stood as being

divided into two parts: (1) an economic, or material, base, consisting

of the forces and relations of production, which is the foundation of

any given society; (2) apolitical and ideological superstructure, made

up of the state, religion, art, philosophy and cultural in general,

which is built upon the economic base and is determined by it. At first

glance, this seems clear enough, yet here, too, as in the rest of the

Marxian theory, it doesn’t withstand close analysis.

For one thing,the state does not fit clearly and comfortably into either

of the two categories. Generally speaking,Marxists have considered the

state to be part of the super-structure. This implies that it is a

secondary phenomenon,something that is based on something else that is

more fundamental. Yet, even according to Marxist theory, the state is in

many ways primary; it is a prerequisite of and necessary for the

establishment of the mode of production on which it is supposedly based.

For Marxists, the state is first and foremost an instrument of

oppression, a tool by which a ruling and economically exploiting class

maintains its domination over the subordinate class or classes. Without

the state, the ruling class would have no means to maintain those

classes in subjugation. If there were no state, there would be no

exploitative modes of production, no class-divided societies and no

ruling classes. It would seem, then, that rather than being part of the

superstructure, and hence secondary, the state is even more fundamental,

more basic, than the economic base.

It is also not as easy to draw a clear line between economic and

political structures as the base/superstructure dichotomy suggests. In

many, if not most, societies, the state plays a direct economic role,

beyond its general function of maintaining the subordination and

exploitation of the lower classes. For example, in the societies in the

ancient Middle East (the Tigris-Euphrates Valley) and Egypt and

elsewhere, the state was directly responsible for the irrigation of

farmland—maintaining the dams and waterways, calculating the seasons,

predicting the onset of seasonal rains and the flooding of the river

basins—and mobilizing labor to carry out these tasks (as well as to

build monuments to the rulers/gods). If this isn’t an economic function,

what is? It was the basis for the agriculture of these societies, on

which these civilizations as a whole were erected. Were these states

just part of the super-structure, or were they part of the base or part

of both? In Rome,the state was responsible for the recruitment,

organization and maintenance of the Roman army, as well as for the

construction of the roads, bridges, aqueducts, etc., all of which were

necessary not only for the Roman conquests, but also for the famous Pax

Romana(Roman Peace), that was the basis for the expansion and

maintenance of trade (including the slave trade), throughout the

Mediterranean region during this period. In some sense, then, the entire

economy of the civilized world under the Roman Empire rested on this

foundation. These functions were economic ones. Was the Roman state not,

therefore, part of the economic base?

The question of the state under feudalism presents similar problems. In

feudal societies, political authority was so fragmented that it is not

clear whether there truly was a state at all, while the feudal hierarchy

was so integral to the structure of society as a whole that it is

difficult to distinguish between it and the rest of society. As a

result, it is hard to draw a distinction between economic and political

(and religious/ideological) realms,and hence, between base and

superstructure, at all (leaving aside the question of the Catholic

Church, which directly held up to one-third of the land).

It is only under capitalism, and laissez-faire capitalism in particular,

that the base/superstructure, economic/political distinction can readily

be drawn. And it is no accident that it is as only capitalism emerges as

a distinct form of economy that the field of economics, initially called

“political economy,” itself develops; and no accident, either, that many

of the representatives of the new field were advocates of laissez-faire

policies. Indeed, in their theorizing about the capitalist economy and

economics in general, they virtually exclude, as an a priori assumption,

the state from their purview. In other words, the early theoreticians of

the economics of capitalism (and this includes Marx), conceive of the

capitalist economy as an isolated phenomenon, that is, as distinct from

the state.

Yet, this act of abstraction, while perhaps necessary for the

development of the field and the continued elaboration of its

theoretical models, is in fact an arbitrary one that distorts the

reality it is intended to elucidate. Because even under capitalism, and

particularly as capitalism has evolved, the state has not been

independent of the economy, but has been and is heavily involved in its

management and direction.Even in the United States, where state

intervention has lagged relative to, say, European countries, the state

is integrally involved in the entire economy: the national banking

system capped by the Federal Reserve system, the regulation of the stock

market and much other economic activity, federal subsidies of

agricultural and other industries, the inter-meshing of government and

industry in arms production,the development and maintenance of the

infrastructure,public education, social security and other “welfare

state”programs, etc., etc. In other words, even under capitalism,the

distinction between base and superstructure, particularly when it comes

to the role of the state, is not nearly as clear-cut as the Marxian

dichotomy suggests.

But perhaps even more problematic than this is the entire question, in

Marxist theory, of the precise relationship between base and

superstructure and the closely related question of social existence and

consciousness. Here, we will see,once again, the ambiguous nature of so

much of Marxian theory. In fact, Marxism makes two competing claims

about this relationship. On the one hand, we are told that the base

deter-mines the superstructure, both its nature and its evolution.On the

other hand, we are told that the superstructure has its own internal

autonomy and helps determine (“reacts upon”) the development of the

base. This issue has given rise to a great deal of confusion in the

Marxist movement, and it is not easy to tease apart the issue. Not the

least reason for this that Marx and Engels’ formulations of the question

are hedged at every turn.

For example, in the passage from the Preface to A Contribution to the

Critique of Political Economy, Marx insists: “It is not the

consciousness of men that determines their existence, but,on the

contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” This,

particularly the word “determines,” is a very definite (and very bold)

statement. But right before this sentence, Marx writes: “The mode of

production in material life determines the general [my emphasis—RT]

character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.”

Here the word“general” undercuts the apparent precision (and the

audacity)of the overall contention. Does the mode of production

deter-mine the social, political and spiritual processes of life or

merely condition/influence them? Does it determine all of them or only

some of them, all of them to some degree, some of them entirely, but the

others not at all? And just what exactly is the “general character” of

the social, political and spiritual processes of life?

That this is not just my personal reaction is revealed in the fact that

Marx and Engels were never quite able to clarify what they meant, even

to their own followers. Indeed, as their correspondence shows, they were

frequently frustrated by how often they were “misinterpreted.” It got so

bad that in reference to those whom Engels calls the “French ‘Marxists’

of the late seventies” (who apparently produced what Marx and Engels

considered to be simplistic Marxist analyses), Marx used to comment:

“All I know is that I am not a Marxist.” (Engels, Letter to C.Schmidt in

Stuttgart, August 5, 1890, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected

Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, p. 415.)

The problem, I think, comes from the fact that Marx and Engels use the

word “determines” in two different, but not clearly delineated, ways,

and that they shift back and forth between them without so indicating

and without, I suspect,even being aware that they are doing so. On the

one hand,they use “determines” to mean “greatly influences or

conditions”; on the other, they use it to mean “uniquely causes” or“is

uniquely responsible for.” But these two meanings are, in fact,

qualitatively different. It is one thing to say that a given force or

“factor” conditions or helps, along with other forces or factors, to

cause a given social event or development, even if that one factor is

overwhelmingly dominant. It is another thing to claim that that one

force or factor is necessarily—solely and uniquely—responsible for that

event or development. I suspect that many people would agree that

economic processes, taken broadly, that is, the way a given society is

organized and functions socio-economically, what happens in the economy,

etc., greatly influence or condition how people in that society think

and act and, in so doing, shape history.Yet, very few would sign on to

the notion that these socio-economic processes uniquely cause or are

responsible for people’s consciousness and social evolution as a whole.

To pose all this somewhat more broadly, the ambiguity of the word

“determines,” as used by Marx and Engels implies, as we mentioned above,

two entirely different types of theory. To say that a given force or

factor participates, along with other forces or factors, in shaping

particular events reflects a theory of “contingency,” according to which

the outcome of a given process is not predictable beforehand but is

explainable after the fact. On the other hand, to say that a given force

or factor uniquely determines specific events reflects a theory of

necessity or inevitability, according to which the outcome is

predictable, at least if the precise state of the antecedent conditions

is known. Thus, the Marxist conception of history embraces

(uncomfortably) and vacillates between a contingent theory of history

and a theory of historical necessity.

The two meanings of the term “determines” reflect, I think,the fact that

Marx and Engels were pulled in two different directions concerning the

subject matter they were dealing with. As serious intellectuals and

students of history, they knew that historical events are

extraordinarily complex, that history is the outcome of a multitude of

events, processes, and influences (including the consciousness of its

participants),and that a unidimensional, monofactoral interpretation of

history could not do justice to this complexity. At the same time,they

were concerned to develop and defend a theory of history that they

believed to be scientific, one that reduces history to an analog of a

natural process. This ambiguity—this contradiction, to use Marxist

phraseology—is the counterpart of the two variants or modes of Marxism

we discussed above:Marxism as a method of investigation/interpretation

versus Marxism as predictive. As interpreters of history (and

contemporary developments), Marx and Engels wished to develop

sophisticated analyses that did justice to the complexity of events and,

consequently, encompassed a multiplicity of factors—economic, social,

political, ideological. Yet, as proponents of “scientific socialism,”

they wanted their theory to be predictive. This requires that one

“factor” be deemed deter-mining, so that the line of historical

development is traceable.

In other words, the two types of theory served two different purposes in

the Marxian worldview but were not really integrated; nor could they be.

As a result, the deterministic theory seems simplistic and “mechanical”

when applied to historical interpretation. If the economic base uniquely

determines the superstructure, how do you explain, for example, the fact

that the various Greek city states, presumably sharing the same

technology, organized their economies differently and had different

types of government? Or that modern capitalist societies have

experienced different types of government:presidential republics,

parliamentary republics, various types of dictatorships, etc.? Or that,

more arcanely, different tribes in Papua New Guinea, sharing the same

technology but each living in a deep gorge separated from the others by

impassable mountains, developed completely different types of number

systems? (See What Counts, by Brian Butterworth, The Free Press, New

York, 1999.) Or that some individuals—say, workers of the same age, from

the same ethnic group, with similar educations and background

experiences, working in the same factory, etc., might have entirely

different political outlooks? Sophisticated answers to these questions

require a lot more than the claim that the base uniquely determines the

superstructure, and that “social existence determines consciousness.”

Obviously, the superstructure is influenced/conditioned by the base and,

over any period of time, needs to be appropriate or adequate to it if a

particular society is to survive, but to say that the superstructure is

uniquely determined by, and reducible to the dynamics of,the base is

absurd. It leads to a kind of historical reduction-ism which so many

Marxists articulate and of which Marxism as a whole is often accused.

On the other hand, if history is indeed multifactoral and contingent,

how can one maintain the claim to be able to base a socialist program on

the projected future evolution of society? To be able to predict future

social developments requires both that one facet of the social structure

(for Marxism, the economic, the material base, the mode of production)

be the determining element in historical evolution and that its own

evolution be predictable. In the case of the socialist revolution, Marx

locates the determining factor as the internal dynamics of capitalist

development, the so-called “contradictions of capital,” and purports to

delineate,through an analysis of these contradictions, the specific

circumstances—the growth of the forces of production and the rapid

technological change it entails, the expansion of the world market, the

concentration and centralization of capital, the elimination of the

middle class, the ever-increasing size of the industrial working class,

and the supposedly concomitant development of internationalist

revolutionary socialist consciousness—that point toward the socialist

revolution, that make it, in a word they use so frequently,inevitable.

But if history is truly multidimensional and contingent, for example, if

some apparent accident of history,some autonomous phenomenon within the

superstructure,can unpredictably change history’s course, how can such a

projection of social trends be possible?

Marxists have engaged in various efforts to bridge the gap between these

two poles of their outlook. Yet, none is successful. One is to hide

behind the “dialectical” nature of the relation between base and

superstructure. “Dialectical” in this sense means that two or more

aspects of a given social process are, despite their apparently distinct

identities, integrally connected, totally intertwined, both conflicting

and mutually reinforcing and determining; indeed, they can only be

distinguished analytically. But if the relationship between two aspects

of a contradictory process is truly dialectical, then neither can be

said to be determinant vis a vis the other. If one aspect/factor

determines the other, the process is not truly dialectical.

Another way Marxists have attempted to finesse this and other

contradictions in their world-view is by claiming that Marxism is simply

a method. (See Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries, Abacus, London, 1999.)

But they never say precisely what this method consists of, nor do they

distinguish it from the other aspects of Marxism. Clearly, historical

materialism is more than a method; it makes very strong claims about

society, history and the nature of humanity, as well as proclaiming

programmatic goals. For Marxists, the alleged method actually assumes as

true the other tenets/contentions of their worldview, e.g., that social

existence determines consciousness, that the base determines the

superstructure, etc. In other words, it assumes that Marxism as a whole

is true. But by insisting that Marxism is only a method, Marxists

attempt to evade responsibility for demonstrating the truth of those

other propositions.

For his part, Engels often tries to square the circle through the use of

the words “ultimately” and “finally.” As in: “According to the

materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in

history is the production and reproduction of real life” (emphasis in

original—RT); and “amid all the endless host of accidents...the economic

movement finally asserts itself as necessary”; and “We make our history

our-selves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and

conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive.” But

who determines when this “ultimately” and“finally” actually occurs? What

this comes down to is that when analyzing any given event or period of

history, Marx and Engels and Marxists in general tend to concede

autonomy to the non-material spheres of social life, i.e., the

superstructure, and therefore to a contingent theory of history whose

outcome is not determined nor determinable. But arbitrarily,that is,

when it matters to them, when, for example, it is a question of

analyzing the transition from one mode of production to another, and

specifically, the transition from capitalism to socialism, they assert

that the material/economic dynamic is “ultimately” decisive. This way

they can have their cake (a sophisticated multidimensional analysis) and

eat it too(maintain their claims of the predictive character of their

theory and the scientific nature of their program).

The unresolved and in fact unconscious contradiction in the Marxian

outlook we have been discussing is apparent in all of Marx and Engels’

attempts to explain themselves. Perhaps the most famous of these is

Engels’ letter to J. Bloch, of September21-22, 1890 (Selected

Correspondence, as above, pp. 417–419),from which the above quotations

were taken. In this letter,Engels comes close to recognizing the

contradiction in the theory,but never quite gets there. He writes: “Marx

and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people

sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due it.We had to

emphasize the main principle vis a vis our adversaries, who denied it,

and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give due

to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to

presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical

application, it was a different matter and there no error was

permitted.” (Selected Correspondence, as above, pp. 418–419.)

The problems Marxism has had in attempting to integrate certain social

phenomena, such as racism/white supremacy,sexism/the patriarchy,

nationalism, religion, etc., into its theory reflect this ambiguity in

the Marxist conception. Are these phenomena part of the superstructure

or part of the base? Can they be explained in terms of, and hence be

reducible to,questions of (economic/social) class? If class and the

class division of society are fundamental, why hasn’t class

consciousness come to predominate among the workers, as Marxism

predicts? Where is the international proletarian solidarity Marxism

exalts? Why are the workers so prone to racism, sexism, national

chauvinism and religious sectarianism? Why, indeed, have we not

experienced the international socialist revolution and the establishment

of global communism? Over the decades, many Marxists have ascribed the

failure of socialist revolutions (either to occur or to be successful)to

problems with the workers’ consciousness, such as their contamination

with racism, sexism, nationalism and religious ideas. In such

explanations, these phenomena outweigh questions of class. But if these

factors are truly super-structural and hence secondary, why do they

appear to be determinant? Here, as elsewhere, Marxism is caught between

its desire for interpretive sophistication, what might be called its

empirical scruples, and its dogma, its desire to maintain the predictive

nature of its theory and the specifics (the inevitability of

socialism,the proletariat as the revolutionary class, the need for a

dictatorship of the proletariat, nationalization of the means of

production, etc.) of its revolutionary program.

The contradictory nature of Marxian theory can also be discerned in

Marxists’ attempts to explain consciousness within in any given

social/historical situation (leaving aside the fact that Marx and Engels

never even try to explain the precise mechanisms by which economic

processes create ideas or thought in general). As we’ve seen, according

to Marxist theory, “social existence determines consciousness.” This

might suggest, for example, that under capitalism, all members of

capitalist society, including the working class, would have bourgeois or

capitalist consciousness, since their social existence is bourgeois.

Yet, Marxism simultaneously insists that the working class, at least

after a certain point in capitalist development, will be revolutionary,

that is, that its consciousness will be militantly anti-capitalist and

socialist. Presumably, the new, revolutionary consciousness reflects

new, material characteristics of capitalism, but Marx never quite says

what these are. Marxists often contend that the working class becomes

revolutionary when the contradictions of capitalism become greatly

intensified, but intensity is a quantitative determination. Just how

intense do they have to become? Marx’s exposition of his theory in the

preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy implies

that the contradictions of capitalism will reach a qualitative point

when the relations of production turn from beings forms of development

of the forces of production into their fetters, but when precisely did

this occur, or hasn’t it yet occurred? Here, too, Marx is not specific.

At times, it seems as if Marx and Engels believed that this qualitative

stage in capitalist development would manifest itself as a virtually

permanent state of economic crisis, but Marx’s analysis of capitalism

doesn’t actually demonstrate the necessity or inevitability of this.

The result, it seems to me, is that for any given social class in any

given society at any given state of development, different,even

opposite, forms of consciousness can be explained consistently by

Marxist theory. When and where the working class is revolutionary, this

just reflects the working class’s central position in capitalist society

and the intensified contradictions of the system at that stage in its

development. When and where the working class is not revolutionary, this

might reflect the “hegemony” of the capitalist class (in the language of

the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci), or the influence of the labor

aristocracy or opportunist “misleaders” of labor over the rest of the

workers (as Lenin might say), or the effects of racism, sexism or

national chauvinism, the role of religion or,more generally, the

cultural history of the country in question. All these interpretations

of the workers’ consciousness are consistent with the Marxian conception

of history, specifically the claim that social existence determines

social consciousness. But taken together, they add up to the fact that

social existence does not actually determine social consciousness after

all.

This problem with Marxist theory is apparent even in Marx and Engels’

broader theoretical considerations. For example,they considered Great

Britain to be the model for capitalist economic development, while

France to them was the epitome of political developments. But how can

this be if social existence determines consciousness? The logic of the

theory is that the country that is the model for capitalist economic

development ought to be the model for its political development. If one

refers to the concrete historical circumstances and cultural traditions,

etc., that have made Great Britain a different country from France, as

Marx and Engels do, one is tacitly admitting that the basic claim of the

theory, that social existence determines consciousness, can’t be

sustained.

In sum, Marxist theory is so broad, so vague and so ambiguous that it is

capable of generating entirely opposite interpretations of any given

social phenomenon. All that is required is that the terminology be used

correctly, that a variety of factors be considered and that the economic

and social structure of society and the class struggle be accorded a

central role in the analysis, in terms of which the other factors are

explained.However useful a heuristic device the Marxist theory of

history may be, scientific it is not.

A Summary of Points

Let’s summarize some of the points I’ve made about the Marxian theory of

history and draw some other conclusions about the theory as a whole.

First, the Marxist theory of history, despite superficial appearances,

is extremely imprecise, the opposite of a scientific theory.

Second, despite its claims to represent a unified outlook, it straddles

two different standpoints that are philosophically distinct, even

opposed—an interpretive, contingent one; and a predictive, deterministic

one—between which Marxists shift when applying or defending their

outlook.

Third,the theory is an abstract construct that does not standup to

factual scrutiny. Definitions and categories are stretched and fudged

depending upon what is analyzed, while those facts that cannot be

crammed into the theory are ignored. Plausible claims (that economic

factors affects consciousness and are influential in historical

processes) are stretched and “absolutized” into contentions (that social

existence uniquely determines consciousness) that are not, and cannot

be, substantiated.As I have argued in other articles, the theory is in

fact idealist, without identifying itself as such or even being aware of

it. Despite its claims to be materialist, it really argues that the

fundamental, meaningful and determining facets of history are its own

definitions and categories, along with the“laws of motion” that these

definitions and categories, when set in motion according to the precepts

of the theory, create.Even the factors it believes to be material are

abstractions, that is, idealist categories: labor, the forces and

relations of production, etc.

Fourth, as I have suggested, the definitions, categories and various

tenets of the theory make most sense, and most accurately fit the facts,

when applied to the capitalist society of Marx and Engels’ day: the

definition of class, the centrality of the class struggle, the

distinction between the economic and the political/ideological realms,

the apparent determining role of the economic, the growth of the forces

of production (technology on the one hand and the working class on the

other) as underlying propulsive dynamic of society. What this suggests

(and this tends to be confirmed when looking at some of Marx’s early

writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of

1844, is that the theory was developed by analyzing what Marxists call

the transition from feudalism to capitalism and then generalizing

forward (to the predicted transition from capitalism to socialism), and

back-ward (to the entire history of humanity). In the Manuscripts,Marx

explains that the internal logic of the concept of private property

leads, when elaborated, to the development of all the categories of

political economy, that is, the structure and internal dynamics of

capitalism. If we change the concept of“private property” to the concept

of “labor” and project the theory backward (into the past) and forward

(into the future), we get the Marxist theory in a nutshell. Marx’s

conception then, interpreted in terms of itself but in contradiction to

its other claims, represents the standpoint of competitive capitalism,

the system in which it was developed. The theory is,by this judgment,

bourgeois rather than proletarian.

Fifth, the Marxist conception of history is Eurocentric. History is

described as if it were simply the “history of Western Civilization,” a

teleological conception in which the direction, goal and purpose of

history is the emergence and flowering of Western European—and its

offshoot, North American—society. Everything that can be is explained in

terms of this development, while everything that cannot is discarded as

not meaningful (non-historic) or ignored altogether. Most of us have

heard all this before, in our high school and college history classes.

Although Marx and Engels claimed to have transcended the historical

outlook of the Western Europe and North American bourgeoisie, their

theory is merely another version of the same thing, only with the claim

that the bourgeoisie and its economic system, capital-ism, will

themselves be transcended. For Marxism, the proletariat and socialism

are really the fruition, the true culmination,of Western Civilization.

Marx and Hegel

Beyond reflecting this general, almost classical, West European

standpoint, Marx and Engels’ historical conception,like much else in the

Marxian worldview, is directly indebted to that of Hegel. (See The

Philosophy of History, Dover Publications, New York, 1956) Hegel saw

history as representing the development of human consciousness toward

freedom, a spiritual state in which human beings recognize themselves

and each other as being embodiments of the mind/spirit of God, the

Absolute. This evolution goes through distinct stages, which are

represented by distinct forms of society. Each type of society embodies

a characteristic ethos, or ethnic/cultural worldview or “spirit,” which

in turn contains internal contradictions that impel it to evolve and,

except for the last stage,to transcend itself. Meanwhile, the actual

agents of history are so-called “world historic” individuals, such as

Alexander the Great, Napoleon, etc., who embody the specific cultural

ethos of their societies. In Hegel’s schema, there are three stages in

this evolution, each stage representing a different conception of

freedom. In the first of these, embodied in the societies of what Hegel

called the East—the societies of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, Persia and

Egypt—only one man is free: the king, presumed to be or to represent

God. In the second,embodied by the Athenian and Roman republics, some

men are free. In the third and final stage, represented by the Prussian

monarchy of Hegel’s day, or at least as he thought or hoped it would

evolve, all men are free. For Hegel, this society was a dialectical

combination of unity and plurality. It was a kind of corporate state

structure, with an internal differentiation of classes and sectors,

dialectically pursuing both their self-interest and that of the nation

as a whole, that reflected the unity-in-difference/difference-in-unity

that characterizes Hegel’s idea of freedom and the Absolute (God)

itself. (Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Oxford University Press, London,

Oxford,New York, 1967.) In Hegel’s conception, not only do we see an

upward progression, essentially, from slavery to freedom,through a

dialectical process, we also see that the political (or material) form

of each society reflects the particular notion of freedom on which it is

based. Not least, we can also discern the implication that only the

history of some societies, those encompassed in this schema, is

philosophically significant.The others fall outside the scope of “real”

history.

Here we can clearly see how much Marx and Engels’ conception owes to

Hegel’s. History goes through distinct stages,these stages occur in an

order of ascending progress, this evolution occurs through a dialectical

process, and the outcome of this evolution is human freedom. Moreover,

as in Hegel’s conception, this evolution traverses a series of distinct

levels of freedom, in which the material (for Hegel, political; for

Marx, economic) and the spiritual forms correspond. But unlike the

avowedly idealist construct of Hegel, in which each stage embodies an

ever broader idea of freedom and corresponding political structure, for

Marx and Engels, each type of society (mode of production) is based upon

a distinct form of labor, which (aside from primitive communism),

rep-resents a stage in labor’s progressive emancipation. Thus, we first

have slave-labor, in which human beings are fully bound to the means of

production and are seen as being part of the means of production; then

serf labor, in which the laborers are partially tied to the means of

production, the land, and are therefore partly free; then capitalist

labor relations, under which the workers are juridically free and

totally divorced from the means of production, but still subordinated to

them,then; finally, the socialist mode of production, under which the

laborers are fully and truly free; as a freely

associating,self-consciously cooperating group, they dominate and

control the means of production themselves. Not least, the Marxist

conception of history embodies the same Eurocentric outlook as Hegel’s.

The history that matters, the only history that is truly significant, is

the history that is encompassed in the Marxian schema:primitive

communism, slavery, feudal-ism,capitalism, socialism. Everything that

falls outside its scope is dismissed as meaningless and ultimately

irrelevant.

This latter thesis was given concrete form in a series of articles by

Engels, written during the revolutions of 1848. In these pieces,whose

purpose was to explain why the south Slavic peoples, the peoples of the

Balkans, i.e., Slovenes,Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Albanians etc.,

played what he considered to be a reactionary role in the events of

1848–49,and to argue against their demands for national rights and

independence, Engels referred to these ethnic groups as “non-historic.”

(For a fuller discussion of this, see Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the

“Non-historic” Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848,

Critique Books, Glasgow,1986.) In other words, they were outside the

main (and meaningful) course of human history, and their history (and

political demands), didn’t matter. Elsewhere, Marx, for similar reasons,

referred to these people as “ethnic trash.”

As I see it (and as I’ve discussed in previous articles),Marxism is a

type or variant of Hegelianism. To both Hegel and Marx, history, at

bottom, is a logical process that leads, via a series of contradictions,

through various stages to human freedom. Where Hegel saw this as

occurring through the dialectical development of human consciousness

toward its recognition that all human beings, indeed, all reality, are

manifestations of the mind or spirit of God, Marx sees it as occurring

through the dialectical evolution of human labor and its dialectical

interaction with human consciousness (as in the contradictions between

base and superstructure),toward a fully cooperative society, in which

humanity comes to control both the products of its labor and its own

destiny,and in which all human beings recognize and treat each other as

brothers/sisters. In both theories, history is progressive: it has a

meaning, a direction and a goal; it occurs dialectically and through

defined stages. Moreover, the goal/out-come of history is present,

although implicitly, at the beginning,as the underlying logic of a

fundamental principle or category: for Hegel, human consciousness; for

Marx, labor.In both theories, humanity has an essence, a kind of

philosophical substance,whose trajectory underlies and defines history.

For Hegel, this essence is consciousness or spirit(itself a piece or

manifestation of the mind or spirit of God),which creates the material

conditions of our lives and history. For Marx, the essence of humanity

is labor, which gives rise to consciousness. But the apparent opposition

between Marx and Hegel on this point is more apparent than real,because

the Marxian essence, labor, is just as much a category of thought, an

abstraction, as consciousness. It just seems to be, or can be claimed to

be, material. For Marx, labor is a logical category, almost a metaphor,

that has a life of its own.This is Idealism. It may not be a

self-conscious form of idealism, and its central category may seem, in

contrast to explicit forms of idealism, relatively poverty stricken,

that is, lacking internal differentiation (despite Marx’s efforts), but

it is idealism none the less.

As I discussed earlier, Marxism’s claims that its theory of history is

materialist were meant to give the theory scientific credentials, to

eliminate socialism’s utopian character, to make it more than an

abstract moral appeal for social justice. Hegel also considered his

philosophy to be scientific, but he meant it more in the sense of true,

logically consistent and complete,rather than in the sense of conforming

to the natural sciences,which he saw as mechanical, one-sided, and

lacking in self-awareness. But Marx and Engels were anxious to develop a

theory that was scientific in the sense of being analogous to the

natural sciences, a quest that was stimulated by Darwin’s theory of

evolution. Since they considered the natural sciences to be materialist,

they attempted to develop a materialist theory of socialism, which in

turn required materialist theories of history and capitalism, etc. Hence

their attempt to meld together, as they often admitted, French

socialism, British political economy, and Hegelian philosophy, under the

philosophical banner of materialism. Despite their efforts, their

conception remained merely a restatement, in materialist terms, of

Hegelian philosophy.

Of course, where Marxism is different from Hegelianism,where its claim

to be materialist expresses itself most palpably,is in its insistence

that social reality be radically transformed,that a totally just and

liberated society—the true kingdom of Heaven on Earth—actually be

established on Earth. For Hegel, freedom is only partially realizable in

social/material terms; to him, true freedom is a spiritual state. For

Marx, freedom was to be fully achievable in material reality. This, I

believe, is to Marxism’s credit. But while Marxism gains some-thing in

its attempt to restate Hegelian philosophy in materialist terms, it also

loses something.

To see this, it is necessary to recognize that Hegelian philosophy is,

at its core, a philosophical restatement of Christianity. Hegel saw his

philosophy as the truth of the Christian out-look, an

exposition/explanation of Christianity in its true, philosophical,form.

To him, Christianity, as a theology and an organized religion, is merely

a metaphorical or picturesque representation, designed to appeal to

ordinary people, of a deeper philosophical truth, of which his

philosophy is the true rendition. The Holy Trinity, to Hegel, is a

metaphor for the fundamental triadic structure of the cosmos, conceived

meta-physically: subject, object and the unity of the two that

simultaneously preserves the distinction between them; Creator, created

and their dialectical unity-in-difference/difference-in-unity. The

Absolute, which, as self-consciousness, requires another

consciousness,creates the Other, which then comes to recognize itself as

one with the Absolute. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. In this light, human

history represents the Cosmic Spirit or Mind reemerging through the

development of human consciousness to recognize spirit/mind in the

universe and itself as a part of that spirit/mind. The telos or goal of

history is thus this developing self-recognition of spirit or the cosmic

consciousness. This is why Hegel’s philosophy, both its method and its

content, takes a triadic form, and it is why, in his Lectures on the

Philosophy of Religion, Hegel places Christianity at the apex of

religious development, as “Consummate Religion.”

Yet, something is lost in Hegel’s version of Christianity. This is much

of its emotional content: God/Jesus as love. Hegel, as a philosopher

(and as a certain type of individual), celebrated thinking, and

especially philosophical speculation, as the highest form of existence.

As a result, his philosophy has a highly cerebral character. Although

Hegel talks about love, it is quite clear that he considers love, as an

emotion and hence pre-reflective, to be inferior to consciousness. This

is why, for Hegel, philosophy, which is an act and a reflection of

consciousness, is for an elite, while religion, picturesque and

emotional as it is, is for ordinary people, the masses. Despite this

denigration of love (and the emotions in general), love remains as an

element, albeit very subdued, almost repressed,in Hegel’s philosophy.

But in Marxism, this love or spiritual content is virtually

eliminated,banished, and exchanged for the soullessness of a would-be

materialism. The underlying philosophy remains idealist, since, at

bottom, labor functions as a category or concept whose development in a

(dialectically) logical manner underlies and determines human history.

Yet, the idealism is denied and the spiritual content—clearly present,

although in attenuated form, in its Hegelian progenitor—is repressed

even further. This is not to deny that Marxism has emotional content,

that it is inspired by concern for, or even love of, humanity.But in

Marxism, this emotional content coexists very uneasily with its

insistence on its scientific character. As would-be materialists,

Marxists are vehement in their denial that fundamental reality is

spiritual or has a soul. To them,“soul” or “spirit” (words with which,

as atheists, they are very uncomfortable) are primitive and picturesque

substitutions for “consciousness,” which itself is secondary phenomenon,

a reflection of the real stuff of the universe, matter. Marxism thus is

a kind of soulless idealism. Despite its materialist pretensions, its

fundamental reality is made of up abstract categories—labor, social

classes, modes of production, laws of motion, etc. But these categories

are without spirit, blind and pitiless. This combination of idealism and

soullessness is one of the reasons, I think, why Marxism tends to think

about and be concerned with humanity in the abstract, as Humanity,rather

than with human beings in the concrete, why social classes are seen as

more fundamental than specific human beings, and why individuals have

been treated as so expend-able (literally) by Marxist practitioners,

especially when they do not belong to the right class or have the

appropriate consciousness (that is, the “correct” politics). It is this

unconscious idealism that makes Marxism and Marxists so uncomfortable

with the concreteness, the “grittiness” of history. Like Hegelianism,

Marxism seeks to unify the concrete phenomena of history (the uniqueness

of specific events, the quirkiness of individual personalities), with

the noumena of its supposedly underlying laws, logic and hence meaning.

But despite Hegel and Marx and their respective dialectics, this can’t

be done. The result, for both Marxism and Hegel, is to subordinate the

concrete, the unique, the individual, to the lawfulness and the logic.

The laws and logic of history become more important than the events; the

categories of theory become more important than the phenomena they are

meant to explain. Marxism and Hegelianism are thus both reductionist;

they seek to reduce the concreteness of reality to the smooth, logical

and ultimately comfortable laws of history.

Marxist Messianism

As this discussion suggests, Hegelianism and Marxism are expressions, in

somewhat different forms, of the Judeo-Christian view of history and

outlook on the world. In this worldview, in contrast to others, such as

many of those from the East, history has a beginning, an end or goal

toward which it is heading, and therefore a meaning. If anything,

Hegelianism, with its spiritual, other-worldly con-tent, its insistence

on the supremacy of thought and its belief that true

reconciliation/unity with God occurs in spirit, is the more Christian

variant (at least as Christianity has comedown to us, rather than in

what may have been its original,and probably more revolutionary,

version). For its part,Marxism, with its materialist claims and

this-worldly character, its stress on the supremacy of matter and its

insistence that the transformation required by the goal of history

actually occur in reality, not just in thought, is the more Judaic.

More specifically, Marxism, as others have suggested, is are statement,

in modern, secular terms, of the Messianic vision of Judaism, with the

proletariat as the Messiah, the fully human (although anointed by God),

savior of the Jews and all humanity, and with Marx and, by extension,

the Marxists, as the prophets of the coming apocalypse. Marxism’s

emergence reflects the secularization of the modern world, brought about

by, among other things, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and

the development of modern capitalist society, which called into question

the tenets of the historic religions of the West. Despite this

secularization, which affected intellectuals more than others, the basic

Judeo-Christian out-look remained, and stills remains, as a kind of

“deep” structure, a sort of primordial collective consciousness, of

modern culture and psychology. The effects of two thousand years of

history do not disappear overnight. Thus, most people find it hard to

exist in a world that has no meaning. They need to believe that humanity

and our history are significant, that we and our story are not just

minuscule accidents in a vast cosmos that is indifferent to us. This

includes intellectuals, many of whom find the dogmas and mythologies of

traditional religion quaint, somewhat embarrassing and in conflict with

science. So, filling the need for certainty in an increasingly secular

world were radical ideologies that preserved the broad, underlying

assumptions of the Judeo-Christian outlook, while recasting them in

modern,purportedly scientific terms. Marxism is one of these.

One of the things that remained of the old religions, but without the

humility that is at least taught as required of created beings, is the

sense of certainty that so often accompanies dogmatic beliefs: we are

right and everybody else is wrong. This sense of certainty is very

apparent in (indeed, is an almost defining characteristic of), the

Marxist movement. Marx and Engels engaged in the most strident polemics

with all those who dared take issue with them, and this practice has

continued throughout the history of Marxism. Opponents are denounced in

the most vicious terms. To Lenin, let alone Stalin, political opponents,

even (or especially) within the Marxist movement, represented the “class

enemy,” non-proletarian, pro-capitalist elements infecting the working

class and subverting its movement, and therefore worthy of destruction.

And where Marxists have held state power, they’ve used the coercive

instruments of the state to their utmost to effect this; virtually all

opponents are jailed,sent to labor camps or “liquidated.” Although Marx

insisted that his personal motto was “Doubt everything,” this doubt does

not actually exist within, that is, truly internal to, the Marxian

worldview; it remains private, as a drive to continually prove the

validity of Marxism, where it exists at all.Marxism has an almost

Kabbalistic character, in the sense of being a kind of esoteric

knowledge that unlocks the secrets of the cosmos, which only a few, the

true elect, are able to understand. Most Marxists secretly enjoy this

sense of superiority, even when they themselves have not read, let alone

mastered, the crucial texts. I suspect that not many members of the

Communist Parties of the 1930s and 40s actually read Capital, let alone

understood it. But even those who didn’t knew that it was true.

This belief that they hold the key to the mysteries of the uni-verse,

the answer to all the philosophical questions that have bothered humans

from the beginning of our existence, gives Marxists a tremendous

arrogance and often results in unbridled fanaticism. It was such

fanaticism that characterized the ethos of the Bolshevik Party and led,

via the establishment of a massive, all-powerful state, to the

unspeakable atrocities of Stalinism, which so many well-intentioned

Marxists supported, excused and justified, and to the decades of

repression and violence that have always been the products of Communist

regimes, down to Castro’s Cuba today.

This sense of certainty often leads Marxists to adopt a Messianic

self-conception, especially when it becomes clear that the proletariat

does not respond as Marxist theory predicts. When the workers are not

revolutionary, or when they do not specifically embrace Marxist

policies, Marxists denounce them as being infected with petty bourgeois

ideas,or even, as Lenin did when faced with the revolt of the sailors of

Kronstadt and the general strike of the workers of Petrograd in early

1921, as not really being proletarians at all. From being prophets of

the coming proletarian Messiah, Marxists take on the Messianic role

themselves. As carriers of the Kabbalistic mysteries, they become the

saviors of humanity. This substitutionalism, in which Marxists think and

act int he supposed interests and name of the proletariat, emerges,as

almost a logical implication of Marxist theory itself, under

circumstances in which key Marxist prognistications (that the

proletariat will be revolutionary), are not borne out.

In contrast to what Marxists believe, Marxism does not represent the

true consciousness of the working class. Most workers, like most people

in society, are not ideologists; they do not think in consistently

ideological terms. Ideologies are primarily diseases of intellectuals.

Marxism as a worldview is an outlook of sections of the radical (mostly

middle-class) intelligentsia, alienated from contemporary society, angry

at its injustices, and frustrated by their own powerlessness. Without

property and without power to influence the world, they identify

themselves with the proletariat, (or at least Marxism’s image of it),

which is also without property and power.Longing to escape this

condition, they embrace a theory that ascribes the future and the power

to create it to the proletariat and, by extension, to themselves as

representatives of the proletariat and as embodiments of its “true”

consciousness. Marxism is therefore not the worldview, the supposed true

consciousness, of the working class. It is the worldview of

intellectuals who wish to reorganize society along what they consider to

be more rational, and more just, lines; who hope,in fact, that they or

people like them, might rule society in the name of reason and social

justice, and who see in the proletariat or some other large social class

the vehicle through which they might achieve this goal.

This character of Marxism explains why so many Marxists are not truly

committed to democracy. To Marxists, democracy has more of an

instrumental than a substantive value. Despite their protestations, they

generally value democracy only insofar as it facilitates their activity,

their ability to fight for their program. When they or other Marxists

with whom they agree seize control of the state, democracy no longer

matters; once they, who have the “correct” politics and are the “good”

people, are in power, democracy can only be a vehicle for

counterrevolution. Yet, here, too, Marxists delude themselves. They

believe that they are the true democrats and define their own rule as

inherently, intrinsically democratic. “When you have the substance of

democracy” (meaning their own rule), their argument usually goes, “the

forms are unnecessary.” It is for this reason that the brutal,

dictatorial nature of self-pro-claimed socialist regimes has never

prevented Marxists from supporting them. Beneath the rhetoric, Marxists

really don’t believe the majority of people, at least as presently

constituted, are able to run their own lives and govern society. (If

they were, they would all be Marxists and wouldn’t be duped by

capitalist propaganda.) Instead, they need a political and moral elite,

in possession of the true nature of society, history and the universe,

to make those decisions for them, at least until after a long

transitional period during which they are taught (by that elite) how to

do so.

The elitist nature of Marxism is occasionally clearly expressed in the

writings of Marxists themselves. In his book, The Crisis in Historical

Materialism (University of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis, 1981, 1990), a

rather desperate attempt to save Marxism by jettisoning a great deal of

it, Stanley Aronowitz is much concerned with what he calls the question

of “agency,”in other words, who (what social class or group), is to

carryout the socialist transformation of society. Specifically,

Aronowitz believes that Marx was wrong to “privilege” the working class

as the agent of the socialist revolution. To me, Aronowitz’s very

language (his use of the term “agency”)inadvertently reveals what

Marxism really is. It is the outlook of certain radical intellectuals,

painfully aware of their own powerlessness, looking for some social

grouping that possess-es the requisite muscle (an “agency”) to implement

their worldview.

Of course, this characteristic of Marxism is fundamental to all forms of

utopian thought, including anarchism. They all rep-resent the

consciousness—the projected hopes, visions and dreams—of socially

powerless intellectuals. This is why all utopian ideas contain the

potential for totalitarianism, the drive to impose a social schema on

recalcitrant individuals. But Marxism is particularly dangerous form of

utopianism,for several reasons. One is its self-deluded character: it

denies that it is utopian at all. Marxism, Marxists insist, is

scientific,and therefore true. The socialist revolution has been

scientifically predicted and ordained. Marxism and Marxists represent

History. Like the religious utopians that preceded them in history,

although without realizing it, Marxists believe that they are doing

God’s will. Ironically, they who think they have access to the truth, as

opposed to those who suffer from“false” consciousness, are the most

deluded. To put it in Marxist terms,they become the victims of the

fetishism of theory.

Another reason why Marxism is so dangerous is its commitment to the use

of the state (indeed, a state whose power has been exponentially

expanded by its nationalization of the means of production and its

monopolization of the means of the exchange of ideas), and its virtually

unlimited capacity for violence and coercion, to realize its vision.

Yet, here, too,Marxists are taken in by their own theory: they believe

that the state they aim to use to transform society, the so-called

dictatorship of the proletariat, is not really a state (it is no longer

a state “in the proper sense of the term” ) and is destined, moreover,

to wither away. But the dictatorship of the proletariat is a myth and a

contradiction in terms. Where society is truly, radically democratic,

where the vast majority of people actually do govern themselves, there

will be no state.And where there is a state, whatever it may be called,

society is not governed by its members. Communist regimes are not,and

never have been, proletarian dictatorships. They are, and have always

been, dictatorships of tiny elites claiming to rule in the name of the

proletariat. And Marxists’ belief that their rule represents that of the

proletariat, and therefore the interests of all humanity, and the

specific nature of the regimes that Marxism mandates that they

establish—characterized by the nationalization of property and the

repression of all opponents as inherently bourgeois and

counterrevolutionary—virtually guarantees that such dictatorships will

be totalitarian and brutal.

Yet a third reason for Marxism’s perilous character is its radical

opposition to all forms of traditional morality. Although Marxism is

extremely moralistic, its worldview studded with good and evil

(individuals, classes, social systems and ideologies), and is itself

rooted in the Judeo-Christian worldview, its insistence on its

scientific character forces it to deny or repress this aspect of its

outlook and to denounce traditional morality as an illusion and as a

tool of ruling classes (like religion as a whole). To Marxists, true

morality is the historic process itself,as they understand it. The moral

thing to do is to further that process. If that means the liquidation of

entire social classes, as the historic process ordains, then the moral

thing to do is to encourage that outcome, however difficult that might

be to one’s conscience (a hangover from one’s upbringing

under-capitalism). Engels himself said it (quoting Hegel): “Freedom is

the recognition of necessity.” As a result, the demands of traditional

morality go out the window, or, to put it more technically,are subsumed

under the exigencies of the laws of history.As many have charged,

Marxism does insist that the end justifies the means.But for many who

make this accusation, this is hypocritical. In fact, most people in the

political world, and particularly those at the head of governments or

with other access to powers of coercion, believe that the end does

justify the means and act accordingly. But they are usually constrained

by their own public commitment to traditional morality, by their own

limited power, and by the relatively limited nature of their goals. What

makes Marxism different is that:(1) it militantly repudiates traditional

morality; (2) it advocates the establishment of a state whose power is

virtually unlimited; and (3) for it,the stakes are always set at the

highest level. The goal of Marxism is to save humanity. Where this is

the issue, what weight can a few lies, the repression of dissent and the

jailing of some recalcitrant (undoubtedly petty-bourgeois) individuals,

or even the killing of a few million people really have. These things

become, as some Marxists have described them, mere “bureaucratic

excesses” or “distortions,” unfortunate “birth pangs” in the emergence

of the future communist society.

The Necessity of Utopia

The totalitarian potential of utopianism does not mean we should eschew

all utopian thought. In fact, utopias are necessary, as visions and

goals toward which we would like society to develop, and as guides for

our day-to-day activity and behavior. Without utopias, we would have

nothing but tepid liberalism, which accepts the brutal realities of

capitalism,wishing only to ameliorate its most egregious aspects (and

even liberalism is guided by a utopian vision, however attenuated it may

be), or, even worse, conservatism, which objects to much of the

achievements in material progress and the growth of civil liberties that

have been made. But we must be aware of the dangers of utopian thinking,

particularly the tendency to wish to impose utopian schemes on

individuals who do not accept them. As an essential part of this, we

vehemently reject the use of the state and other vehicles of mass

coercion as instruments to promote our desired goals. We should aim to

lead primarily by example, not by coercion or deception.