Introduction To Marxism - Kolakowski

“Introduction.” The Main Currents of Marxism. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1978. Leszek Kolakowski.i Karl Marx was a German philosopher. This does not sound particularly enlightening, but it is not as commonplace as it may at first appear. Professor Jules Michelet used to begin his lectures on British history with the words: ―Gentlemen, England is an island.‖ There is a good deal of difference between knowing it is an island, and interpreting its history in the light of that fact, which thus takes on a significance of its own. That Marx was a German philosopher may imply a certain importance to the interpretation of his philosophical and historical thought as a system unfolding in terms of economic analysis and political doctrine. This kind of presentation is never self-evident or uncontroversial. Moreover, although it is clear now that Marx was a German philosopher, in 1918 this was not necessarily the case. In the days of the Second International the majority of Marxists considered him the author of an economic and social theory which, for some, was comparable to a number of metaphysical and epistemological outlooks; others took the view that it had been furnished with a philosophical basis by Friedrich Engels, meaning that Marxism in the proper sense was a theory of parts each of which was elaborated by Marx or Engels respectively. We are all familiar with the political background to an interest in Marxism in the present, because it is regarded as the ideological tradition on which communism is based. Those who consider themselves Marxists, and those who oppose them, are primarily concerned with the question of whether communism, in its ideologies and institutions, is the legitimate heir of the Marxist doctrine. The three most typical answers to this question may be expressed in the following simplified terms: (1) modern communism is the embodiment of Marxism, thus proving that Marxism leads to enslavement, tyranny and crime; (2) modern communism is the embodiment of Marxism, and this means liberation and happiness for humanity; (3) or, communism as we know it is a profound deformation of Marxist gospel and a betrayal of the fundamentals of Marxist socialism. The first answer is simply mainstream anti-communist orthodoxy, the second is traditional communist orthodoxy, and the third is indicative of critical and revisionist Marxism. However, the question is wrongly formulated, and attempts to answer it are not worthwhile. Additionally, it is impossible to answer questions like, ―How can the problems of the world today be solved in accordance with the principles of Marxism?‖, or ―What would Marx say if he could see what has been done?‖ Both of these questions are stillborn and there is no rational way of seeking an answer to them. Marxism provides no specific method for solving difficulties that Marx did not put to himself, or that did not exist during his time. If his life had been prolonged by ninety years he would have had to alter his views in ways that we have no means of conjecturing. Those who hold that communism is a betrayal or distortion of Marxism are seeking to absolve Marx of responsibility for the actions of those who identify themselves with his spiritual posterity. In this same way the heretics and schismatics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accused the Roman Church of betraying its mission and sought to vindicate St. Paul from association with Roman corruption. In this way, admirers of Nietzsche sought to clear him of responsibility for the ideology and practice of Nazism. The ideological motivation of these attempts is clear, but their informative value is next to nothing. There is abundant evidence to suggest that all social movements are explained by a variety of circumstances and that the ideological sources to which they appeal, and to which they try to remain faithful, are merely one 1

of the factors determining the form they assume and their patterns of thought and action. It is certain in advance that no political or religious movement is a perfect expression of that movement’s essence as laid down by its sacred writings; while on the other hand, these writings are themselves passive, but exercise an influence of their own on the course of the movement. What normally happens is that the social forces making themselves the representatives of a given ideology are stronger than that ideology, but are nonetheless dependent upon its structure. The problem for the historian of ideas is not the comparing of the essence of a particular idea with its practical existence in terms of social movements. Rather, it is a question of how, and as a result of what circumstances, the original idea came to serve as a focal point for different and mutually hostile forces; or what the ambiguities and conflicting tendencies in the idea itself were, and how these led to its developing as it did. It is well known, and the history of civilization records no exception, that all important ideas are subject to division as their influence spreads. There is no point in asking who is a true Marxist in the modern world, because such a question can only arise within an ideological perspective which assumes that the canonical writings are the authentic source of truth, and that whoever interprets them rightly must therefore be possessed of the truth. There is no reason why we should not acknowledge that different movements and ideologies, however antagonistic to one another, are equally entitled to invoke the name Marx—except for some extreme cases beyond our interest. It is useless to inquire about which historical figure was a true Aristotelian. It may have meaning for devotees of Aristotle, but it is without relevance to the history of ideas. The historian may wish to inquire about what it was in Aristotelian philosophy that made it possible for so many historical intellectuals to appeal to the same source. In other words, the historian treats ideas seriously and does not regard them as utterly subservient to events (for in that case there would be no point in studying them), but one does not believe that they can endure from generation to generation without a change in meaning. The relationship between the Marxism of Marx and that of the Marxists is a legitimate field of inquiry, but it does not enable one to determine who the true Marxists are. If, as historians of ideas, we place ourselves outside ideology, this does not entail placing ourselves outside the culture in which we live. On the contrary, the study of the history of ideas, and especially those ideas which have been and continue to be the most influential, is an exercise in cultural self-criticism. I propose studying Marxism from a perspective similar to the one Thomas Mann adopted in Doctor Faustus regarding Nazism and its relation to German culture. Mann would have been entitled to say that Nazism had nothing to do with German culture, or that it was a gross denial and a travesty of that culture. In fact, he did not say this: instead, he inquired as to how phenomena such as the Hitler movement and Nazi ideology could have come to pass in Germany, and what the elements were in German culture that had made this possible. He maintained that every German could recognize, with horror at the bestialities of Nazism, the distortion of features which could be discerned even in the noblest representatives (and this is an important point) of the national culture. Mann was not content to pass over the question of the birth of Nazism in the usual manner, nor to contend that it had no legitimate claim to any part of the German inheritance. Instead, he frankly criticized the culture of which he was a part and a creative element. It is not enough to say that Nazi ideology was a caricature of Nietzsche, because the essence of a caricature helps us to recognize the original. The Nazis ordered their Übermensch to read The Will to Power, and it is no good to say that this was mere chance and that they might equally well have chosen the Critique of Practical Reason. It is not a question of establishing Nietzsche’s guilt, because as an individual he was not responsible for the use made of his writings; nevertheless, the fact that they were thus used causes alarm and cannot be 2

dismissed as irrelevant to the understanding of what was in his mind. Saint Paul was not personally responsible for the inquisition at the end of the fifteenth century, but the historical inquirer, whether Christian or not, cannot be content to observe that Christianity was depraved and distorted by the conduct of unworthy popes and bishops; but rather must seek to discover what it was in the Pauline epistles that gave rise, in the fullness of time, to criminal actions. Our attitude to the problem of Marx and Marxism should be the same, and in this sense the present study is a historical account and an attempt to analyze the strange fate of an idea which began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalin. The Marxist chronology is problematic because many of what are now considered Marx’s most important works were not printed until the 1920s, 30s, or even later. This is the case regarding: The German Ideology; The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature; A Contribution to the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy; and finally Engles’s Dialectic of Nature. These works could not affect the epoch in which they were written, but today they are regarded as important from a biographical standpoint, and as integral components of a doctrine which cannot be understood without them. It is still disputed whether, and how far, what are considered to be Marx’s mature ideas, as reflected especially in Das Kapital, are a natural development of his philosophy as a young man, or whether, as some critics hold, they represent a radical intellectual change: did Marx, in the 1850s and 60s, abandon a mode of thought and inquiry bounded by Hegelian philosophy? Some believe that the social philosophy found in Das Kapital is pre-figured by the earlier writings and is a development of them, while others maintain that the analysis of capitalist society denotes a breakaway from the utopian and normative rhetoric of the earlier period; and these two views are correlated with opposing interpretations of the whole body of Marx’s thought. Marx was not an academic writer, but a humanist in the Renaissance sense of the term: his mind was concerned with the totality of human affairs, and his vision of human liberation embraced, as an interdependent whole, all the major problems with which humanity is faced. It has become customary to divide Marxism into three fields of speculation—basic philosophic anthropology, socialist doctrine, and economic analysis—and to point to three corresponding sources in German dialectics, French socialist thought, and British political economy. However, many are of the opinion that these clear delineations are contrary to Marx’s own purpose, which was providing a global interpretation of human behavior and history, and to reconstruct an integral theory of humanity in which particular questions are only significant in relation to the whole. As to the manner in which the elements of Marxism are interrelated, and the nature of its internal coherence, this is not something that can be succinctly defined. Marx attempted to discern those aspects of the historical process that confer a common significance on epistemological, economic and social ideals; that is, he tried to create instruments of thought or categories of knowledge that were sufficiently general to make all human phenomena intelligible. If we attempt to reconstruct these categories to display Marx’s thought in accordance with them, we run the risk of neglecting his evolution as a thinker, and of treating his corpus as a homogenous block. It is better to pursue the development of his thought in its main lines and only afterwards consider which of its elements were present at the outset, albeit implicitly, and which may be regarded as transient or accidental. The present conspectus of the history of Marxism will be focused on the questions that appear at all times to have occupied a central place in Marx’s independent thinking: how is it possible to avoid the dilemma of utopianism versus historical fatalism? How can one articulate 3

and defend a viewpoint which is neither the arbitrary proclamation of imagined ideals, nor the resigned acceptance of the proposition that human affairs are subject to an anonymous historical process in which all participate but none are able to control? The surprising diversity of views expressed by Marxists in regard to Marx’s so-called historical determinism is a factor that makes it possible to present and schematize with precision the trends of twentieth century Marxism. It is also clear that the answer to the question concerning the place of human consciousness and will in the historical process goes far towards determining the sense one ascribes to socialist ideals, and is directly linked with the theory of revolutions and crises. The starting point for Marx’s thinking was provided by the philosophic questions found in the Hegelian intellectual inheritance, and the breaking up of that inheritance is the natural background to any attempt at expounding on Marx’s ideas. i

This typescript was prepared by James Nauenburg MARS, University of Detroit – Mercy (Fall, 2008)

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