Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3

This is the final portion of an examination of some principal themes in Bill Martin’s book, Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation. The first two parts of this essay have been published over the past two days and can be found below.

Marxism, Politics, and Evil:  A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”

John Steele

III

In this final section I want to work through a number of topics, including the adequacy of Martin’s take on Marx’s thought, and some characteristic moves and modes of thinking in Ethical Marxism. I will be critical here, because I think these are matters that are important to get right.

Marx

Let’s go back to the opening sentence of a passage quoted above: “In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests.” This doesn’t ring true, to my ears. Where does Marx talk about what leads or motivates people to question their circumstances broadly/deeply? And when does he talk about motivation on a broad scale by “material interests”? This is quite alien, it seems to me, to the way in which Marx approaches the question, and his conception of the relation between human activity and the materiality of their circumstances. He says, for example, in a wellknown passage, that history only poses problems for which there are solutions (“mankind…sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”) meaning that problems are revelatory of social contradictions which contain their own supercession, that solutions are immanent within the problems themselves. Now whether we believe that this Hegelian-derived view of history and social contradictions is on the right track or not, the relation of materiality to human practice and its possibilities is very different from the view that it is only material interests which motivate people, which I believe is really a mischaracterization of Marx.

This is an example of a view and portrayal of Marx in this book which is rather remote from the thinking of Karl Marx, to my understanding. Now I do not hold that our problems as revolutionaries would be solved or solvable if we just understood Marx or Marxism correctly. Far from it. On the other hand, it is of high importance from the standpoint of the emancipatory project to understand Marx aright, and it often looks to me that Martin does not.

A basic aspect of Martin’s delineation of Marx with which I take strong issue is his characterization of Marx as a positivist, as in the following passages.

As with the positivists, for Marx a ‘scientific’ theory of society and history would be purely descriptive, not normative…. Marx aimed to be scientific, not normative. It might even be said that Marx aimed to be scientific as opposed to normative. (34, 103)

Marx aimed to add the processes of human social and cultural development to a universal science of all material processes. The algorithms that represent (or govern) material processes that occur in different domains of the material world (the different fields of scientific investigation) are themselves related through algorithms: this is reductionism…. (411)

An algorithm is a process which will always produce the same result of a certain sort whenever it runs. (The easiest example is a set of rules for solving a problem which will invariably give the correct answer if followed precisely. Thus the process of solving a problem in long division which we all learned in grade school is an algorithm: you have simply to follow the sequence of rules, and the correct answer will be generated.) Martin represents Marx as believing that history works through an algorithmic process, and that he had discovered the algorithm of history (that is, the invariable rules governing the process, such that a certain outcome is predictable). (411, 429, 432, 479)

This is coupled (as it would have to be) with a portrayal of Marx’s view of historical processes as completely deterministic, so that the general future course of things would be determined with a great degree of inevitability. Thus Marx is described by Martin as simply talking “about the way the capitalist system works and that this systemic working would lead to things working out by and by [that is, leading to communism].” (104)

Is this Marx?

Is this a fair account of Marx’s thinking, or of Marxism? Yes, perhaps of some forms of Marxism, often dominant ones; but no, not of Marx’s thinking, and not of all Marxisms. On the one hand the sort of positivistic, utilitarian and even Hobbesian Marxism which is the object of Martin’s critique has certainly been a strand, even a prominent strand (especially within “actually existing” socialisms). But there is far more to Marx (and to the more vibrant strands of Marxism) than this, and some of Martin’s characterizations border on caricature.

So I think there is a basic inaccuracy here, a great deal of one-sidedness and misunderstanding of Marx. I’ll reiterate that Marx’s being right or wrong is in itself of not much moment. The importance of the question lies in the context of developing an adequate revolutionary thinking and theory. What is crucial is whether we have a theory or theories adequate to comprehend and bear fruit in the process of human liberation and the transformation of our social being. But then, Marx’s usefulness to this great enterprise will depend on what his thinking is, so let’s pursue that question for a moment. And here we need to make some basic distinctions.

First, there’s a differentiation to be made between the explicit statements of a theoretical program and historical schema which Marx sometimes makes (that in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy being the most obvious and wellknown⁵), and the actual theoretical and historical work which he carries out. Thus while of course Marx does make several grand programmatic announcements, many have noted that when it comes to concrete historical studies (notably The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil War in France), although he is certainly understanding historical events from within the theoretical framework he has developed, he does not reason from a schema, but through (in Lenin’s phrase) a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, which in turn represent complications in, and often problems for, his general program.

It’s really impossible to see how this procedure, which is entirely characteristic of Marx (including in Capital), is accurately captured by either description, or algorithm, or positivistic notions of science. These do not describe what “science” is for Marx, and they are very far from capturing the analyses that Marx actually carried out.

The adequacy of this sort of conception of Marx’s thinking is made even more implausible when we take into consideration the various phases of his thought. Marx, in company with most great thinkers, goes through several discernible stages in his thought. Everyone is familiar with the distinction between early and mature Marx (the 1844 MS, on the one hand, and Capital on the other, say). But there are differences here too; for example The German Ideology, usually cited as if it were an instance of Marx’s later thinking, expresses a rather crude and somewhat positivistic programmatic standpoint, which is almost completely absent from Capital. (Martin at one point says that Marx has an affinity with John Stuart Mill on the basis that “both claimed that their work could proceed on a ‘purely empirical basis’,” [362-3] drawing these words from The German Ideology but also claiming that Marx repeats the claim elsewhere, which I do not believe is the case (at least not in works later than German Ideology).⁶)

It is true that while the theory and program of Capital are certainly not positivistic, there is an expression in several places of a rather deterministic historical scheme. But this too becomes no longer characteristic given the changes that occur in Marx’s thinking in the 1870s, as he came to grips with the three phenomena of the Paris Commune; the growth of the workers’ movement in Germany and its associated Marxism (of which Marx was very critical); and the increasing study of Marx in radical Russian circles, and the questions raised for the application of Marx’s schema in this situation. All of these raised questions as to the projections which could be drawn from Capital (not to mention the earlier programmatic statements of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), and Marx’s responses to these newly arisen occasions (Class Struggles in France, Critique of the Gotha Programme, and his reply – and its various drafts – to Vera Zasulich) sketch a much more open and undeterministic stance and theory than is to be found earlier. (Martin does mention the correspondence with Zasulich [275-77], but only to criticize Marx’s failure to raise “the question of place.”)

There is far more that could be said in relation to this question – about the explanatory structure underlying Capital (which bears no relation to a descriptive positivistic idea of science), about Marx’s explanations of contemporary history, etc., and quite a bit has been written on these topics – but what I’ve said is probably enough to make my point.

Reverse implication to origins

Continuing for a moment the discussion of Martin’s picture of the figure of Karl Marx and his thinking, let me cite what I find to be some quite astonishing statements:

One of the paradoxes of Marxism is that Marx by himself is not so interesting or exciting…. (360)

For Stalin, but perhaps even for Marx, Engels, and Lenin, intellectual ferment was not a good thing. (352)

…for Marx, all you need to know about agriculture is that it represents an outmoded form of production. (274)

I term these statements astonishing in that I find it difficult to believe that these judgments, peppered through the book on a diverse array of subjects, could come from a straightforward reading of Marx and an attempt to understand his thinking. Perhaps we simply differ in what we find in Marx. But my guess is that glosses on Marx like these arise from a bent towards reading Marx through the history of Marxism, and in particular reading Marx (and Engels and Lenin) through Stalin – or rather, through a fear of Stalinism. This becomes clear, I think, in a passage like that on 189-90, where Martin argues for a strong link between “Marxism’s resistance to the ethical ‘as such’, and Marxism’s tendency, an inherent tendency I would argue, toward economism.” This passage continues,

Indeed,…the difficulty is that Marxism (or simply the thought of Karl Marx, to be direct about this) entails a critique of reification, and yet Marxism, especially when it becomes only a structural “science” of the causality of things and interests…seems itself to reify. In practice, especially in the practice of Stalin in the Soviet Union, but not only there, this orientation has had, again, dire consequences. (190)

This reasoning, along the lines of holding that the seeds of Stalin were planted by Marx, is an example of an all-too-common mode of argument in Ethical Marxism, one of “reverse implication” from the characteristics of a phenomenon back to the attribution of those characteristics to its origins.

The sort of move I mean is exemplified in some of Martin’s arguments concerning human meat consumption, as well as with reference to 20^th century or contemporary imperialism, where he will begin by pointing to modern industrial meat production, or to imperialism. Having taken it as clear that this is obviously wrong (“the immense cruelty done to animals in the current food-production system and through human participation on that system is a great wrong that calls us to ethical action” [213], for example), he will generalize or hypostasize the basis in either case: carnivorism as the basis of industrial food production, or commodity-production as the basis of capitalist imperialism. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that, given that the final form (industrial food production, imperialism) is clearly wrong or evil, this basis must be ethically wrong.

The argumentative move, in other words, begins from the wrongness (evil) of a phenomenon, X; the basis of X is then generalized; this generalized or hypostasized basis (carnivorism, commodity production) is then projected back to a beginning or seed of X, which is then itself presumed to be wrong or evil.

This beginning is often characterized by Martin as the crossing of a boundary or threshold by human beings, a step that brought them into the territory of evil. If this sounds a lot like myths of the fall of man and the original sin, he has no problem with such similarities: “My own view…is that myths of a human fall point to a time when humans first began to eat inhuman animals on a regular basis.” (87) And “the fall into alienation is the emergence of the commodity form and the process of commodification” (266). On a different subject: “a threshold had to be crossed which allowed one half of a population (male) to understand the other half of the population (female) as objects of domination.” (236)

To draw this out a little more: The argument is that commodity-production, with its concomitant reduction (Martin believes) of everything to a “mere thing,” marks the threshold after which “all bets are off” ethically: “If you will do this, what will you not do? If you will cross this line, what line will you not cross?” (245)

There is a similar line of reasoning in relation to the animal question, and in this case Martin holds that the step into carnivorism was also the threshold of commodity production as well:

At some point in this transition, there must have been a moment when a fundamental distinction between animals and humans began to be made, as regards cruelty and some sort of basic standing in the world, and here we can see the roots of reification…. We can see the beginnings of commodity production. (260)

The projection backward presumes, for its argumentative legitimacy, a causal process leading from this threshold beginning to the present form. And Martin clearly believes this to be the case:

The first forms of commodity production initiate humanity into a world of things. The emergence of capitalism places the reification of humanity on a purely calculative basis, and from there all human relationships are brought under the brutal cash nexus. (250)

Bad reasoning

There are many aspects of this form of reasoning which are both untenable and disturbing. It is also, we should note parenthetically, not very congruent with Martin’s opposition to “inevitablism.” For here he appears to presuppose a deterministic unfolding from that beginning point, indeed a sort of teleological determinism – the end (industrial meat production, imperialism) is presumed to be in the beginning (the “fall” into carnivorism, commodity-production).

The form of Martin’s reasoning here also has a disturbingly close similarity to that which is often used by opponents of abortion, who project backward, beginning from the wrongness of killing a person, to the threshold whose crossing results in a complete human being (the moment of conception is the obvious line-crossing boundary), and conclude that wrongness can also be imputed to any deliberate ending of life following the crossing of that threshold.

And in fact the form of reasoning employed in this sort of reverse implication to origins (as I’m terming it), has nothing to recommend it.

It certainly does not generally follow, from the fact that a certain characteristic is true of the end result of a process, that the same characteristic can be attributed to the origin or beginning of that process. If this were the case, then the properties of a fully grown oak tree would be true of the acorn which was its seed — a very unsound inference. To reason in this way is to ignore real changes which occur in the development of any phenomenon, and the emergence of new and unique characteristics at new levels of development.

In Ethical Marxism, the idea of a threshold, a fall, the original evil of commodity production and an increasing evil with capitalism, involves a great deal of romanticization of pre-capitalist societies (see 102, 130, 149). Agricultural society “keeps people sane,” Martin says, while industrialization and mechanization “destroys human sanity” (55)

The ‘cell-form’ in Marx

The idea of a boundary or threshold is also related by Martin to another concept, that of the “cell-form” of a phenomenon, drawing this term from Marx:

The cell-form of a world that is upside-down is the commodity.…we might draw a line between [that is, connecting] the present functioning of systems and the cell-form of which Marx wrote. (250, 256)

In the Preface to the first German edition of Capital (Vol. 1), Marx analogizes the role of the commodity in capitalism to that of the cell of an organism, and terms the commodity-form the “economic cell-form.” (This is his only use of the term, to my knowledge.) He makes this analogy by way of explaining both why he begins with analysis of the commodity-form (although “to the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae”) and why previous investigators have not done likewise (“because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body”).

Martin, however, identifies this term with his own idea of the seed from which the present system grows, and attributes this to Marx and Engels:

One could argue that, for both Marx and Engels, part of what it means for there to be a given social system is that there is a prefiguration of the present in a “cell-form,” and that this cell-form can be seen in a threshold that is crossed by humankind. (239)

He then goes on to identify the “cell-form,” not only with his notion of a threshold, but with the irremediable fall of humanity:

…there is with Marx’s conception of the “cell-form” the notion that the first forms of commodity production let the cat out of the bag and there is little or no chance of putting the cat back in the bag. …there was a conjuncture, in prehistory, where the seeds of patriarchy, private property, commodity production, and even the state…and eventually capitalism were planted, in a single go. (243, 239)

It should be clear that the uses Martin makes of it have nothing to do with Marx’s use of this phrase. Indeed, looking to the analogy drawn in this metaphor to the cells of an organism, it’s clear that the cells of an organism only exist within the context of the whole organism; likewise with the relation of the commodity to the “organism” of capitalist society, from which Marx’s analysis proceeds by abstraction. (Continuing the comparison to the analysis of organic cells, Marx says, “In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.”)

This point is important not chiefly because it represents a misreading of Marx, but principally for the light it sheds on the character of the difference between Marx (and Marxism) and the manner in which Martin proceeds and the theory which he builds. For Marx the commodity is reached and known through abstraction from the whole of capitalism, and this “cell-form” in turn serves as a means of understanding the working of the whole at the most basic level of analysis. It is out of the sort of understanding of the present illustrated here that Marx draws his historical remarks (the path to the present) and – most importantly – his vision of future possibilities.

For Marx, communism is an inherent possibility of the present configuration of human society, of its contradictory social dynamic; his analysis points to this possibility. Communism is not for Marx, as it is for Martin (often), an ethico-religious vision, derived in some sense prior to any social analysis. And for Marx, I would argue, the ethical judgment on (that is, against) capitalism derives from the reality of this possibility or possibilities, not from an absolutist and logically prior judgment of capitalism or commodity-production as evil.

Obviously to say that Marx’s thinking differs in this way from Martin’s is not to decide the issue, but the way in which it differs does complicate both the picture drawn of Marx in Ethical Marxism and the use to which Martin often wants to put Marx’s “science.” For if Marx is to be simply used instrumentally for the achievement of a prior ethical project, then what is used will not really be Marx. Further, if we read Marx in this way, many of the sharp dichotomies set up by Martin – between fact and value, history and morality, etc. — fall away, at least within the ambit of Marx’s thinking.

One more thing

On the very first page Martin gives his approval to the thesis (pioneered in a neo-Aristotelean vein by G.E.M. Anscombe) “that there are basic ethical questions about which nothing can be said, and that it would be a violation of ethics to presume to give an ‘explanation’ as to why it is wrong to do certain things…that the violation occurs even in the idea that certain situations might become questions, brought into the discursive realm.” (1) At several points in the book, Martin’s judgment concerning a phenomenon is a simple “it is evil” or “it is wrong” (see for example 27, 43, 44, 353), and at one point he describes his aim as being “to establish the place of evil in social theory.” (33)

There are several problems, as I see it, with this way of proceeding. Most obviously, this sort of thesis would seem to lend itself all too easily to the confirmation of parochial prejudices of a particular time, place, or culture. But more broadly, such a stance seems to pose itself, as a matter of principle, against investigation and discussion of certain issues, to say in effect, “This is obviously wrong; end of discussion.”

This is not to say that it’s  sometimes not be appropriate to make this sort of simple judgment (“it is wrong”); but this is a matter of context, not of principle. And what makes this principle particularly problematic in the circumstances of this book, is the way in which it can interrelate to the “reverse implication” method described above. For here the end-phenomenon, from which the “reverse implication” begins, is first made the subject of a categorical judgment. The beginning “cell form” or boundary point is then also supposed to be subject to the same judgment. (“This is evil.”) But if the initial judgment is not itself supposed to be liable to any further discussion, then the reverse-implication procedure becomes even more dangerous.

In conclusion

To recapitulate the general thesis of Ethical Marxism in a very simplified form (and which I hope is not a caricature), Martin’s stance is that a moral impulse is needed as the beginning point of the revolutionary project, and that a more fully developed ethics is needed as both continuing impetus and guide toward a possible future “redeemed world,” the vision of which stems from “the religious perspective.” The role of Marxism is to provide a description of the lineaments of the present and to help map out the means toward this future (means which must themselves be evaluated ethically). If this is a fair, albeit extremely bare-bones, account, then there is a strong similarity here to a very familiar picture of a dichotomy of fact and value, of description and prescription, in this case with Marxism describing the facts and ethics supplying the values. Such a bifurcation seriously under-represents the role of explanation, which is certainly not strictly factual or descriptive, and the ways in which all of these – describing, explaining, valuing – interrelate and interpenetrate as aspects (moments, if you will) of an overall process which Marx terms (human) practice.

In fact I think we have to begin at least from this point, from a picture of human life and social activity in which thinking, evaluating, projecting, theorizing, and acting are aspects of a continuous social process, in which all social life is understood as essentially practical, and “all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and the comprehension of this practice.” (Thesis 8)

This may seem too much like the “work from what exists in the world and everything will work out bye and bye” stance which Martin criticizes strongly in Marx. But where else can we begin than from the existing world, understood not in a flat, descriptive, positivistic way, but in its dynamic motion, self-cleavages, differentiating processes, and the idealizing and idea- and truth-processes which human practice (praxis) creates – and of course with no guarantee or promise that it will all work out?

If I end here on what is in a sense all-too-familiar ground — an evocation of praxis, and of a particular strain of Marxism⁷ – this is surely an indication of the limitations in my own attempts to rethink the revolutionary project. I certainly hold by the above sketch as a minimal orientation, but, as may be obvious, the critical examination of Ethical Marxism put forward here has not been carried out from the vantage point of any worked out solution to the problems which Martin has attempted to solve.

*******

This is a strong aspect of wandering, even meandering, in the development of themes and topics in Ethical Marxism, and the book’s order is generally associative and train-of-thought rather than by topic and development or logical deployment of argumentation. Themes are dropped and then picked up later but in a different key, arguments are left undeveloped, and emotive expression sometimes seems to overwhelm the cognitive development of content. As anyone knows who’s read his work, this is Martin’s style, and it has its strengths and its charms; but it’s not a style of writing and intellectual construction which make it easy to be certain that one has, in a paraphrase or account such as I’ve attempted, captured exactly what he intends. If I haven’t captured his meaning, though, I trust that others will set me right.

More importantly, the question at issue in this book and in my engagement with it, is the shape of the communist project in the present era. Bill Martin has been striving (here and in previous and subsequent writings) to explore and put forward a view of what that project must encompass. I’ve indicated the ways in which I think the approach he wants to take is seriously flawed. But I’m conscious, too, of how incomplete are my own views and how pressing is the necessity of collective work on this urgent political and intellectual and practical task.

Notes

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Related posts:

1. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
2. Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
3. John Steele: Marxism, Politics, and Evil
4. Marxism or anarchism or —?
5. Some contributions to thinking in the present moment