03.23.08
Marxism not deterministic? Now you tell me
PHIL GASPER argues that Marx’s theory of history is vital for understanding social change, but it doesn’t claim that socialism is inevitable
While one can welcome attempts to clarify distortions of Marx the attempt to evade the determinism question is too little too late, and not really fair to the historical record which shows the dominance of ’scientific Marxism’ throughout the Second Internationale. To say that Marx has been misunderstood here requires explaining the fact that virtually the entire Marxist movement was wrong throughout. That tokens an extraordinary misunderstanding of Marx. Perhaps Marx wasn’t able to clarify his own ‘theory’. Popper and Berlin’s critiques of ‘historicism’ and ‘historical inevitability’ attempted to expose the contradiction in the thinking of the revolutionary left. Fair or not, the era Engels to Lenin was clearly in hopeless confusion as to the relationship of activism and historical laws.
KARL MARX’S key idea, in the words of his collaborator Frederick Engels, was that “the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved.” Moreover, all class-based societies are characterized by conflict between exploiters and exploited that can only be ended by their revolutionary transformation.
One of the most common misconceptions about Marxism is that it is a deterministic theory that sees the course of history as preordained by economic and social forces. According to one recent commentator, for example, “In Marx’s theory, the oppressed class does not need to hope for social justice as merely a tentative possibility, because the laws of history are on their side and guarantee the outcome.”
Misinterpretations like this are often based on isolated quotations from Marx’s writings taken out of context, such as the passage in the Communist Manifesto that declares, “the victory of the proletariat [is] inevitable.” But this statement is simply a rhetorical flourish aimed at spurring on the Manifesto’s readers, since a few pages earlier Marx and Engels had already pointed out that the class struggle has no predetermined result, and can end “either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”