Addendum on Marxist Eschatology

Saturday

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Yesterday in Marxist Eschatology I wrote:

Marx is the greatest exemplar of a perennial tradition of human thought that has been with us from the beginning and which will be with us as long as civilization and human life endures. This tradition wasn’t always called Marxism, and it won’t always be called Marxism, but the perennial tendency will remain. There will always be individuals who are attracted to the perennial idea that Marx represents, and as of the present time Marx remains the most powerful advocate of these ideas.

While on my other blog in Marx and Fukuyama I wrote:

With Marx, we can identify a “bend in the road” of history at which point Marx might be proved right or wrong. For some people — wrongly to my mind — this point was identified as the end of the Cold War. To my mind, it is the full industrialization of the world’s economy. Thus Marx’s thesis has the virtue of falsification.

This calls for a little clarification, since if interpreted uncharitably it might be found contradictory for Marxism to be a perennial idea and to be falsifiable, since what distinguishes a perennial idea is that it is not falsifiable — at least, not in a robust sense of falsification.

Karl Popper was the philosopher who formulated falsifiability as a criterion of scientificity (I’m not certain he was the first, be he has definitely been the most influential in advancing the idea of falsifiability, especially in contradistinction to the logical positivist emphasis on the verifiability criterion), and he discussed Marx at some length. Here’s nice summary from one of Popper’s later works:

“As I pointed out in my Open Society, one may regard Marx’s theory as refuted by events that occurred during the Russian Revolution. According to Marx the revolutionary changes start at the bottom, as it were: means of production change first, then social conditions of production, then political power, and ultimately ideological beliefs, which change last. But in the Russian Revolution the political power changed first, and then the ideology (Dictatorship plus Electrification) began to change the social conditions and the means of production from the top. The reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of revolution to evade this falsification immunized it against further attacks, transforming it into the vulgar-Marxist (or socioanalytic) theory which tells us that the ‘economic motive’ and the class struggle pervade social life.”

Karl Popper, Unended Quest, “Early Studies,” p. 45

I should point out that I agree with Popper’s arguments, and that Marxism construed in the narrow sense that Popper construed it was falsified by the events of the Russian Revolution. Lenin’s “weakest link of capitalism” theory was instrumental in the reinterpretation of Marxism that Popper mentioned. Beyond Lenin, Mao made even more radical changes by shifting the focus from the industrial proletariat to the agricultural peasant. It is a testament to the extent to which the twentieth century was not fully industrialized that it was Maoism rather than Marxism or Leninism that was the form of communism that reached the masses during the last century.

However, I think that there is a species of Marxism that lies between Popper’s narrowly conceived Marxism and the vulgar Marxism reinterpreted in the light of apparent falsification, and this is a Marxism that has been generalized beyond the historically specific conditions of the Russian Revolution, and even beyond the Cold War, which had almost nothing to do with democracy or communism and almost everything to do with national rivalry and the great game of power politics.

I have called a generalized Marxism a species of Marxism, and herein lies to clue to the distinction between Marxism and a perennial idea in the strict sense. Marxism (of one variety or another) is a species that falls under the genera of collectivist political thought. The latter — collectivist political thought — is a perennial idea, and lies beyond falsification. It is neither true nor false, but an ongoing influence, just like its implied contrary, which is individualist political thought. Individualism also lies beyond falsification, and is neither true nor false but remains an ongoing influence in human affairs.

Most forms of capitalism are individualist in orientation, though not all: oligarchical capitalist societies (like medieval Venice) had little to do with individualism. Thus a generalization of capitalism does not always lead to individualism. A generalization of capitalism, depending on its subtle differences in tone of market activity from one society to another, may lead to individualism, but it may also lead to a profoundly hierarchical crony capitalism, or to some other socio-economic formation.

Speaking generally for ideas, and not just communism and capitalism, and indeed not just political and economic ideas but all ideas, the generalization of an historically situated and therefore specific idea usually leads to a perennial idea if the generalization is sufficiently radical. The generalization of capitalism may or may not lead to individualism, but it will eventually lead to some perennial idea which lies beyond falsification, whether that idea is patriarchalism or something else. The generalization of Marxism, I think, leads more directly to a perennial form of collectivist thought, which at its greatest reach of generality is scarcely distinguishable from a vague sentimental connection to others.

The species of Marxism that I have posited — midway between Marxism narrowly conceived and Marxism generalized to the point of a vague feeling of cooperative common cause — is falsifiable, but it is not falsifiable by experiment. It is only falsifiable by history. It shares this property with other theses in the philosophy of history. This is one of the fundamental distinctions between the natural sciences and at least some of the historical sciences: theses in some of the historical sciences are falsifiable, but they are not falsifiable on demand. One can only wait and see if they are eventually falsified. With the passage of time the inductive evidence of an unfalsifiable thesis in the philosophy of history increases, but is never confirmed. Thus the philosophy of history, contrary to most expectations, is the most science-like of the branches of philosophy.

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Marxist Eschatology

Friday

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Why do I keep writing about Marx? I have already discovered that repeatedly writing about Marx confuses people. Indeed, it confuses some people so completely that if you write a long, detailed criticism of some Marxian idea, those who don’t take the time to read or don’t have the capacity of understand simply assume you’re a Marxist because you’re writing about Marx. Why not get “Karl Marx” tattooed across my knuckles, then? It’s a fun idea. People who read me, but don’t read me closely, sometimes think I’m a Marxist, while people who see me but don’t look closely sometimes think I’m a John Bircher. Really. I was in a coffee house in a trendy part of Portland some years ago having a long and detailed conversation about logic with a friend, and someone asked us if we were from the John Birch Society. I guess it must have been due to our clean-cut looks and the moral earnestness of our discussion. I once asked one of my sisters why people often mistake me for a reactionary, and she said I wasn’t “flying the flag,” and that if I wore my hair in dreadlocks and dressed the part, people would probably think differently. I realized later how right she was.

For my part, I continue to write about Marx because Marx is the greatest exemplar of a perennial tradition of human thought that has been with us from the beginning and which will be with us as long as civilization and human life endures. This tradition wasn’t always called Marxism, and it won’t always be called Marxism, but the perennial tendency will remain. There will always be individuals who are attracted to the perennial idea that Marx represents, and as of the present time Marx remains the most powerful advocate of these ideas. And so it is necessary to grapple with Marx. I might even be willing to go so far as to say of Marx what Hegel said of Spinoza: To be a philosopher, one must first be a Marxist.

I have on many occasions written about the eschatology implicit in Marx, which is a pretty straight-forward secularization of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die. Recently in Missing the point I used this famous phrase to describe the dead-end ritualism of mass labor under advanced industrialized capitalism, but it is just as true of Marx’s original vision. Some time ago I quoted a famous passage from Bertrand Russell to this end (Mythologies of Industrialized Civilization). This post was cited in a discussion on The Rational Responders web site. No one told me about the discussion; I found it by following the links back from hits to my post. Some seemed to agree with me, while others thought I got it all wrong, and Russell too.

It was one of the central features of Karl Löwith’s philosophy of history that modernity itself consists of a number of secularizations of originally theological concepts, and Löwith clearly implied that this rendered much modern thought essentially illegitimate. This implication was sufficiently clear that Hans Blumenberg wrote a long book, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, in order to rebut Löwith. Unfortunately, Löwith and Blumenberg are not well known in Anglo-American analytical philosophy, so their works are little discussed. Marx seems to slot in well with Löwith’s secularization thesis, but if secularization is a legitimate historical process, what’s the problem?

I just argued yesterday in Areté and Selection that the medieval world was the direct ancestor of modernity, and if this is indeed the case, then no one should be surprised that many modern concepts of our secular civilization are secularizations of medieval concepts derived from a primarily theological civilization. This is just what happens when a theological civilization gives way to a secular civilization. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think that I will begin referring to that which preceded industrial-technological civilization as religio-philosophical civilization.

In any case, to get around to my main point of today’s post, I was thinking about Marx’s own conception of Marx’s communist millennium that would be a worker’s paradise in which:

“…nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook, A. Idealism and Materialism

Marx was careful to be vague about the coming worker’s paradise under communism partly because he didn’t want to held to any overly-specific predictions, and partly because he wanted to avoid being called a Utopian. In social science circles, to be called a Utopian is the end the discussion with one’s exclusion as a serious thinker. Marx knew it, dismissed other social theorists himself as utopians, and forcefully argued that communism would come about as a result of inevitable historical processes, not in order to fulfill our dreams of a more just social order in the future.

In other words, Marx’s conception of communism is closely parallel to the line I have consistently argued about the industrial revolution, and, by extension, globalization, since I have also argued that globalization is simply an extension of the industrial revolution — its continuation, and eventually, some decades hence, its completion and fulfillment.

The industrialization of the world’s economies has not come about because of utopian plans for a better, healthier, and more just society, and it did not come about as the result of the nefarious plotting of hidden powers who pull levers behind a curtain. The industrial revolution came about as an historical process that escalated due to a feedback loop of science, technology, and industry. This process is still incomplete. As the process continues its march around the globe — again, not as the result of utopian dreams or evil conspiracies — it creates what we now call globalization, as institutions that first appeared in Western Europe begin to appear elsewhere in the world. But the institutions are symptoms, not causes. People who see only the surface of things see the institutions of industrialized societies as the causes of changes; they are not the causes; these institutions follow from deep structural changes in economic organization.

I don’t think that Marx would have disagreed with me too strenuous only this, and I don’t think that he would disagree all that much with the next claim I will make. I have called the industrial revolution a macro-historical revolution, as it initiates a new stage in human history. There have only been two previous fundamentally distinct forms of human society, and these were hunter-gatherer nomadic societies, and settled agricultural societies. If communism had come about as Marx believed it would come about, then this too would have qualified as a fundamentally new form of human society, and communism would have inaugurated a new macro-historical division. The material conditions of life would have changed for the greater part of humanity. This is simply to put Marx’s idea in my terminology.

I have also argued that Marx’s theory has not really received its experimentum crusis, because the industrial revolution has even in our time not yet been completed. We cannot say that Marx was wrong in his essential argument until globalization has transformed the world entire into an industrialized economy, and then, under these conditions, no communist revolution occurs that expropriates the expropriators. People who still argue today about whether Marx was right or wrong, whether he has been refuted or validated by history, are missing the point: the conditions do not yet obtain under which Marx can be judged to be right or wrong. Thus Marxism must remain an open question for us if we are going to maintain our intellectual integrity.

Given, then, that the fulfillment of Marx’s prophecy is still a live option for history, I ought to count it among the macro-historical possibilities that I began to delineate in Three Futures, where I identified singularization, pastoralization, and extraterrestrialization as historical forces that could sufficiently transform the basic organization of human societies to the point that a new macro-historical division is defined by the transformation. I ought, then, to speak of four futures, except that I am working on another possibility that I hope to discuss soon, which would define five futures — or, better, five strategic trends that suggest transformation on the civilizational level if extrapolated to a sufficient degree.

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Globalization and Marxism

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Redeeming a promissory note

In Yesterday’s Marxism Lite I quoted the eminent Marxist historian Hobsbawm from a BBC radio interview as follows: “Globalisation, which is implicit in capitalism, not only destroys the heritage and tradition but it is incredibly unstable, it operates through a series of crises, and I think this has been recognised to be the end of this particular era,” ( “Marx popular amid credit crunch” 20 October 2008).

Eric Hobsbawm

I remarked in a note that this quote deserves a fuller exposition, so now it is time to redeem in gold the promissory note. And although I can’t do justice to all that is implied in this single sentence, I can at least make some remarks, perhaps redeeming the note in silver if not gold.

Sentimental forms of exploitation

Hobsbawm mentions the destruction of heritage and tradition wrought by globalization, and this has been a perennial theme of Marxism. In one of the many famous passages from the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes:

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. ”

One doesn’t ordinarily think of Marx as a sentimentalist, but here Marx sounds as though he prefers the “feudal, patriarchal, idyllic” relations of the pre-industrial past to “callous cash payment”, and that exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions is a better thing than exploitation that is “naked, shameless, direct, brutal.” While this would be a good place for a digression on Freud concerning the future of such illusions, we will leave this for another time (another promissory note to redeem). Of all people, Marx sounds closest to Edmund Burke in this passage, even down to the metaphor of nakedness and the implied comfort of illusions; perhaps the resemblance is intentional, an allusion, as Marx had no doubt read Burke. But one would scarcely be more surprised to find Marx quoting de Maistre.

Edmund Burke and Karl Marx tête-à-tête in prose

Edmund Burke, in his Reflections in the Revolution in France, similarly expressed himself on sentimental forms of exploitation thus:

“All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.”

One can immediately perceive the parallelism of this from Burke with the above quoted passage from the Communist Manifesto; not only the references, but even the rhythm and cadence, are similar. This sentimental side of Marxism, apparently tolerant of feudal exploitation so long as it is modestly draped in moral rhetoric, illustrates the lengths to which Marx (and his followers) will go to make a point, but it is a mere distraction from the more significant content of Hobsbawm’s above quote.

The development of the heretofore undeveloped world

For much of the twentieth century the political left engaged in ostentatious hand-wringing over the conditions in poor countries around the world. This hand-wringing was best exemplified in dependency theory, which held that poor countries were being “underdeveloped” (instead of simply being “developed”) as part of a nefarious capitalist scheme to keep them poor. Now, some of these countries are no longer poor; certainly, many are no longer as poor as they once were. Countries like India and China have begun to industrialize, and their industrialization is changing conceptions of economic development, international relations, and indeed civilization itself.

Globalization is nothing but the long-awaited development of the undeveloped and underdeveloped world. That globalization is attended by much lamentation and gnashing of teeth in both the developed and in the un- and underdeveloped world is in itself a demonstration that globalization is no respecter of persons and is as blind as justice. The peoples of the developed world complain that jobs are being “exported” to the industrializing nation-states, while the peoples of industrializing nation-states complain about the conditions of industrialization, notwithstanding the fact that industrialization in the twenty-first century is a very different beast than industrialization in the nineteenth century.

If any political entity not affiliated with the left attempted to obstruct globalization, they would be accused of attempting to keep poor countries poor, just as when any political entity in the US points out the counter-productive character of attempting to protect politically visible jobs (by singling out particular industries for protection) such an entity can expect to be pilloried by those claiming to speak on behalf of workers.

Industrialization before revolution

Many are the economists and political theorists who have rightly observed that Marx maintained that industrialization was a necessary preliminary to communist revolution. Marx himself was lukewarm about the enthusiastic Russian reception of Das Kapital, because Russia, being not yet industrialized and lacking an industrial proletariat, was not primed for revolution like heavily industrialized Western Europe. Lenin made some revisions to Marx and attempted to legitimize revolution in Russia from a Marxist theoretical perspective. Mao later went much farther, and made the obviously non-industrialized Chinese peasant the basis of his revolutionary movement. If Marx was right, and we can take him at his word, the communist revolutions in Russia and China were premature revolutions, and had Marx seen them he might well have predicted their failure.

If, as I have stated above, globalization is nothing other than the extension of the industrial revolution to regions of the world previously untouched by it, and if Marx was right that communist revolution must emerge from the industrialized armies created by the factory system, then globalization must precede any genuine communist revolution. Hobsbawm said that globalization is implicit in capitalism, but he might just as well have said that globalization is implicit in Marxism. In other words, Marx may yet be right, and he may yet be proved right at some distant point in the future, but the conditions under which Marx might be proved right (or wrong) have simply not yet obtained.

Marxism and its experimentum crucis

It is easy to imagine a point in time when all the world is industrialized, and Africa has followed in the footsteps of Asia’s present capitalist development (and, in a sufficiently warm world, Antarctica as well). At such a point in history, the world entire would be ripe for revolution, as financial crises today that are limited to the industrialized and developed world would at that time involve the whole world. When industrialization is world-wide, the mechanisms employed today to stabilize developed economies may no longer function and we could yet see escalating crises of the kind predicted by Marx. But this has not yet happened; it cannot happen until the world has industrialized, and the process by which the world is industrialized is globalization.

So, Marx may yet be proved right. But there is a twist. Depending upon the direction that history takes, Marx’s theories may never be tested properly because the conditions under which they could be tested may never obtain. Firstly, and most obviously, if the world never fully industrializes, the conditions under which communist revolution ought to take place will never obtain; hence, Marx’s theory can never be exposed to its experimentum crucis. Secondly, and (in my view) more interestingly, if human civilization establishes itself off the surface of the earth, and industrialization has the indefinite extent of known space into which to expand, the potential infinity of the human future will defy any “complete” industrialization, and hence, again, the conditions needed to test Marx’s theory the way he himself interpreted it may never obtain. An “open” future can never converge on an historical totality of industrialization, therefore the conditions under which communist revolution can take place and be successful would be pushed further and further into an indefinite future, never to be realized.

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