7
Kees van der Pijl
My argument in this chapter is that historical materialism, as a synthesis between idealism and (naturalistic) materialism, only in our own era is becoming an organic, rather than ‘artificial’, ‘willed’, mode of social consciousness. The socialist labour movement, as a movement of manual workers committed to overturning the rule of capital, certainly was Marxist in name and inspiration. However, in hindsight, it must be considered a preliminary phenomenon – the left wing of the bourgeois democratic movement against clerical-monarchical rule rather than the main force of something new. For the greater part of the period between Marx’s lifetime and today, what passed for historical materialism was actually naturalistic materialism, the idea that everything including ideas is a manifestation of physical forces (‘matter’). The Marxism of the Second International as well as Soviet Marxism, to name only the main currents, are illustrative here.
It took until well into the twentieth century before mental and manual labour achieved the degree of integration, and the common form as wage labour for capital, on which the assimilation of historical materialism is premised. Today, the objective conditions for an understanding of society’s creative capacity to shape its own destiny are becoming reality; just as the globalisation of the discipline of capital is bringing to light the limits of society’s present course.
Naturalistic materialism emerged (in sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century Western Europe) when the emancipation of manual labour intersected with the transformation of contemplative philosophy into experimental natural science. Materialism indeed may be considered the organic perspective arising out of the initial encounter between emancipating physical labour and practical philosophy in industry. The idea that everything social and political derives from the transformation of nature will come most naturally to people engaged in this process themselves.
Idealism, on the other hand, which holds that all aspects of reality derive their substance, meaning, and tendency from mental forces (‘spirit’), would be more akin to those engaged in intellectual functions – in church and state, or any other context in which, usually by reference to some legitimating principle, a unit of social cohesion has to be ‘managed’ and ‘planned’. In other words, for those whose encounter with social forces striving for emancipation poses problems of a managerial nature from which the element of a shared experience, as in the case of natural science and labour in industry, is absent.
Of course, elaborating either materialism or idealism into theoretical systems was always the work of intellectuals. But as Gramsci notes (1971: 389), while idealist tendencies in Marxism were the work mainly of ‘pure’ intellectuals, materialism has been strongest among intellectuals ‘more markedly dedicated to practical activity and therefore more closely linked … to the great popular masses’. Only when the managerial perspective merges with the productive one in what Sohn-Rethel (1973) calls ‘social synthesis’, and mental and manual labour are reunified into the ‘collective worker’ as a result of the socialisation of labour (Marx’s Vergesellschaftung), the social setting for the assimilation of historical materialism really crystallised. Let us trace the main outlines of this history, beginning with the origins of modern naturalistic materialism and its relation to the emancipation of labour.
Natural science and the emancipation of manual labour
Materialism as such was already formulated in the abstract by the Greeks of Antiquity. Thus Democritus, in Bertrand Russell’s rendition (1961: 89), maintained that ‘the soul was composed of atoms, and thought was a physical process. There was no purpose in the universe; there were only atoms governed by mechanical laws.’
However, throughout Greek-Hellenistic civilisation, civic life was still entirely divorced from physical labour. Its social ideal was contemplation, which was primarily ethical and aesthetical – the quest for the good and the beautiful. Labour was the slaves’ predicament. ‘Thinking’ therefore stood in a relation of straight antinomy to ‘work’. This remained so until the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, when in the early monasteries, religious men and women began to earn their own living with manual labour after the eastern example. In the course of the European Middle Ages, there emerged an organic, corporatist concept of society in which a mutual dependence of knowledge and labour replaced their dualistic opposition.
This new concept of society, which is associated with Thomas Aquinas († 1274), arose in conjunction with the guild organisation of trades and crafts. The guilds over the next few centuries became the vehicles for advancing the interests of their members in the context of municipal government. The process of social emancipation of manual labour now becomes irreversible, and the world of work begins to be reflected on in a critique of the ‘non-productive’ idleness of the feudal upper classes. In the humanist utopias of Thomas More (†1535), Campanella (†1639), and Johannes Andreae (†1654), the ethical ideal is projected on the world of productive activity, interpreted as the opposite of the frivolities of the feudal rulers and their greed for wealth (Meeus 1989: 44–5).
At this juncture, a paradigmatic shift of perspective occurred when Galileo (†1642), in the attempt to verify the revolutionary hypotheses of Copernicus about the orbits of the planets, began to use self-made instruments, such as the telescope, in an active mode of research that involved observation and experiment. ‘Labour’, physical effort, now was made part of thinking, leaving behind purely contemplative thought. ‘The classical hierarchy of vita contemplativa and vita activa thus was overturned, but also the hierarchy within the vita activa, in which language and being active (praxis) had towered high over vulgar bodily labour’ (Meeus 1989: 48). The new pragmatic activism, which reoriented thought towards the practical improvement of human life, was generalised into a materialist doctrine by Francis Bacon (†1626).
Thomas Hobbes, who was Bacon’s assistant before he went to Florence to see Galileo, systematised Bacon’s materialism. In the process, however, he demarcated it sharply from the realm of the metaphysical; he also argued, obsessed as he was with civil disturbance, that speculation about metaphysical questions was politically seditious.
The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, or contempt.
(Hobbes 1968: 116–17)
According to Engels, Hobbes ‘sacrificed the physical movement to the mechanical and the mathematical; geometry is proclaimed as the chief science’ (MEW 22: 293). Applied science left metaphysics alone and adopted an agnostic perspective. As a result, it was possible that highly religious men such as Isaac Newton could apply the new-found principles of inquiry of the material world without reservation – also because it was actively encouraged from above. This happened through the Royal Society set up after the Restoration (and of which Newton and Boyle were members), in order to improve agriculture, manufacture, navigation, medicine, etc., and also through the Anglican church. Sprat, the bishop of Rochester, subscribed even to the goal of ‘liberation of humanity from the clusters of misconceptions’ – on one condition: that God and the soul would remain exempt from scientific inquiry (Trevelyan 1961: 289–90). Locke, too, settled for agnosticism when he stated that it is not man’s concern to know everything, but to know those things that matter to his practical life (quoted in Meeus 1989: 49). Thus scientific endeavour became organically related to labour while its materialist assumptions were politically neutralised.
The class of manual labourers that was formed in the industrial revolution developed a consciousness of itself on the terrain prepared by the Magna Carta and Locke – a tradition of native liberty, guild loyalty, and self-regulation against the encroaching state. It shared the practical materialism of the philosophers and inventors, but did not find in materialism a ready doctrine that would further orient its emancipation politically. In the 1790s, following the revolution in France, ‘the ambiguities of Locke seem[ed] to fall into two halves, one Burke, the other Paine’ (Thompson 1968: 100). Yet the democratic radicalism of the Painite variety, too, placed self-regulation before everything else and was closer to the manufacturing bourgeois than to the worker (ibid.: 104).
Materialism accordingly did not become a revolutionary doctrine in England – also because the early separation from the church of Rome and subsequent protestantism reduced the clerical-conservative aspect of state power. Skilled machinists were taught by adult education courses and widely read professional magazines; at London University (established in 1827), science figured prominently in the curriculum, while theology, in contrast to Oxford and Cambridge, was not taught at all (Trevelyan 1961: 524–5). However, the pervasive Lockean tradition with its separation of state and society, politics and economics, militated against broadening the synthesis of applied science and manual labour. Craft workers’ struggles against machine production and the backlash produced in England by the French Revolution combined to push the working class on the defensive. ‘The twenty-five years after 1795 may be seen as the years of a long counter-revolution, and in consequence the Radical movement remained largely working-class in character, with an advanced democratic populism as its theory’ (Thompson 1968: 888).
This balance of forces allowed the British manufacturing bourgeoisie to impose, within the broader liberal setting, a harsh regime on the workers. Bentham, Ure and others, writing in the 1820s and 1830s, developed theories centring on discipline as they elaborated patterns of labour organisation grafted on the subordination of man to machine. But discipline was not a state task; it fell to the factory-owner himself, whose tasks accordingly required him to be ‘a man of Napoleonic nerve and ambition’ (Ure quoted in Meeus 1989: 126).
In France on the other hand, the unity between state and church (while demarcating itself from Rome under Richelieu) did retain the original feudal-clerical nexus. Here the state found itself in the position of a collective social subject, driving forward the social development which in England proceeded, after 1688, by legal rather than executive state support. Certainly the transformation towards an experimental, empirical natural science took place in France, too. But an understanding like the one between the Anglican Church and the new natural science here was impossible because of the tight imbrication of state power, the feudal order and the religious monopoly of the Gallican Church. Therefore the new thinking in France retained a claim to universality, exemplified in the rationalism of Descartes (†1650); while simultaneously containing the practical-empirical aspects of the thinking of his English contemporaries, Bacon and Hobbes.
In the system of Descartes, the rational mind is sharply distinguished from the material world. Instead of relegating the moment of rationality to the practical world of experience, as happened in England, rationality is universalised into a comprehensive category. Materialism (the mechanical operation of forces in space, including the human body) in the mirror of this comprehensive rationality equally pertains to all aspects of life. In England, the technical rationality of the engineer and the material world of production were joined in the industrial revolution; in France, the world of production presents itself as a concern of the state. As Lefebvre argues (1976: 29), the French state and its raison d’Etat, shaped in the seventeenth century under the Cardinals and Louis XIV, and philosophical rationalism, mutually conditioned each other. Typically, Descartes held that by applying the new natural science, the craftsman’s knowledge would become a public possession, too (Meeus 1989: 49).
The emancipation of labour in eighteenth-century France required that the workers be liberated from the guilds, which had become obstacles to further development. They ‘confined labor, production and sale of commodities to licensed corporations with their own internal monopoly of training, goods and services’ (Schama 1990: 85). French materialism offered a programme including this liberation along with the liberation of all other aspects of life. Thus Holbach, one of the most explicit materialists, in 1770 wrote that
the source of many evils visiting mankind everywhere must be sought in the misconceptions and the religious imaginations. The gods emerged out of the ignorance about natural causes. … No less dangerous are the prejudices that have turned people blind to their governments. The real foundations of rule were entirely unknown to the peoples.
(Holbach 1971: 72–3)
In the same spirit, Voltaire in 1776 published a critique of religion, La Bible enfin expliquée, a signal subject also for later materialists.
François Quesnay (†1774), one of the contributors to the Encyclopédie (which among other things made the guilds’ craft secrets public), offered a materialist economic doctrine distinguishing between productive (essentially, agricultural) and non-productive activity. Physiocrat economics was premised on laissez-faire, and advocated a free labour market against the mercantilism of Colbert and the feudal world of the guilds on which it was grafted. Turgot, one of the Physiocrats, as minister of Louis XVI on the eve of the Revolution, in vain attempted to dissolve the guilds and eliminate feudal labour duties.
However, in the French Revolution, the workers’ interest had not yet differentiated itself from that of the bourgeoisie. The doctrine of the Rights of Man tended to appeal to all citizens belonging to the ‘productive classes’ as well as to the radicalised aristocrats of whom Holbach was a representative. Indeed the political culture of France until recent times has remained deeply bourgeois – characterised by individuality and subjectivity, as well as by a pervasive, atheist materialism. As in England, the French working class and the democratic movement at large developed their basic orientation before Marxism could make an impact. The fact that ‘industry’ in France long retained a typical craft and small workshop association, with the strong state the dominant, constraining social force, favoured Proudhon’s anti-authoritarian socialism and anarchism among the workers (Abendroth 1972: 34–5).
By its effective confiscation of society, the French state towered over this (petty) bourgeois universe as collective rationality incarnate. The Cartesian articulation between rationalism and materialism was embodied in the engineer-state theorised by Saint-Simon (Therborn 1980: 117–18). While the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition and its Lockean universe spread throughout the English-speaking world along with its expansion as a capitalist heartland, the rational engineer-state model evolved into the norm for those societies which resisted peripheralisation by state-led industrialisation. In these societies, progressive theorising tended to evolve within the matrix set by the French example. That is, rationalism relating to or even identified with the state (actual or future); and anti-clerical materialism animating a modern, ‘developmental’ view of the world. But this type of thinking, rationalist and materialist, occurred in a more backward social setting precluding the type of synthesis achieved in France, let alone the synthesis between idealism and materialism wrought by Marx.
Under these conditions, the moment of ‘rationality’ becomes an entirely idealist construction. As Gramsci notes (1971: 115–16), ‘What is practice for the fundamental class becomes “rationality” and speculation for its intellectuals’ – Kant, Hegel, Croce, or Pitirim Sorokin. On the other hand, materialism emerges as its counterpoint, equally radical but in unproductive antinomy to it. Thus in Germany, materialism emerged in the 1830s with a burst of analyses of religion in the spirit of Holbach and Voltaire – Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Bruno Bauer’s Critique of the Synoptic Gospels, and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (see Therborn 1973: 7). These men, too, were progressive intellectuals but without a mass following. The industrial revolution picked up seriously only after unification, in the 1870s. And as Kuczynski writes (1949: 137), it was made from above, by the state, while the different modern classes (bourgeoisie and workers) ‘dangled at the tail of this development, instead of driving it forward’.
Feuerbach did develop naturalistic materialism further, though. Thus he provided democratic militants with a compelling doctrine that seemed to point beyond the ‘critical’ confusion of tongues among Hegelians. A theology student drawn into radical political clubs during his studies of Hegel and natural science, Feuerbach’s work on Christianity is not just a political tract. It is a scholarly treatise on how ideas emerge from the material foundations of life. Thinking in Feuerbach’s view is merely the highest form of a general principle in nature, that of reflection. Not unlike fire reflects the qualities of wood as it burns, mental images reflect the qualities of their object (Biedermann 1986: 39–40). Applied to religion, the belief in God is argued to be the (unconscious) exteriorisation of the essence of man, a reflective enlargement of primitive self-consciousness (Feuerbach 1971: 76).
This was the materialism that was adopted by the progressive classes, both bourgeoisie and workers, in early nineteenth-century Germany. Further to the east, not only the bourgeoisie was lacking; states were often incompetent in carrying out a comparable revolution from above. This turned the democratic intellectuals into champions of capitalist industrialisation. First an industrial society had to emerge, before, on its foundations, a more just order could be erected. Certainly Marxism now had become an ideological force, but it was paradoxically adopted as a ‘doctrine of modernisation’ (e.g. in Lenin’s attacks on the Narodnik populists). Indeed in Russia, as Gramsci noted in an article of 1917,
Marx’s Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It stood as the critical demonstration of how events should follow a predetermined course: how in Russia a bourgeoisie had to develop, and a capitalist era had to open, with the setting-up of a Western-type of civilization, before the proletariat could even think in terms of its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution.
(Gramsci 1977: 34)
Marx of course developed his historical materialism as a critique of Feuerbach, both in the famous ‘Theses’ and, with Engels, in other works. Historical materialism is defined primarily in opposition to the naturalistic materialism of Hobbes, Holbach, and Feuerbach. Since, as I have indicated already, the mainstream Marxist labour movements have all tended to confuse the two, let me briefly sum up the differences, in particular on the issue of epistemology, the theory of knowledge (‘where do ideas come from?’).
Marxist versus materialist epistemology
In his critique of Feuerbach’s theory of religion, Marx argues that the particular, historical society in which people live constitutes the source of religious projections; not some naturalistic ‘essence’ of man. This goes to the heart of the difference between the physicalist epistemology of naturalistic materialism and the social-historical one of Marx and Engels. In the words of the Dutch Marxist, Anton Pannekoek, ‘the fundamental tenet of materialism that the spiritual is determined by the material world, means something completely different in the two doctrines’.
To bourgeois materialism it means that ideas are the product of the brain, to be explained from the structure and the transformations of brain matter, and hence, ultimately, from the dynamics of the atoms in the brain. To historical materialism, it means that the ideas of man are determined by social circumstances; society is the environment which through his senses impresses itself on him.
(Pannekoek n.d.: 25)
People never face nature as happens in a physics laboratory (and since Heisenberg we know that even there they don’t passively ‘face’ it). Primitive man, when confronted, say, with lightning, at the same time experiences a supernatural phenomenon which is part of a social construction of reality. When we deal with electricity today, it is likewise part of a broader social and economic reality, including a life-style aspect which in its magical connotations is surprisingly close to man’s myth-enclosed past. At any rate, a whole set of social arrangements is folded into the electric power that reaches the individual. The ‘economies’ which support each of the steps by which electricity reaches energy consumers, are likewise implicated in the socket they plug into (I intentionally use terms from Bohm 1983 such as enfolding and implication, which in my view are part of an epistemology akin to historical materialism but derived from modern physics). Society is nature transformed by labour, and in modern society, we have no other way of confronting nature than in its social forms. Therefore, as Ilyenkov writes (1982: 127), ‘socio-historical properties of things very often merge in the eyes of the individual with their natural properties, while transitory properties of things and of man himself begin to seem eternal properties bound with the very essence of things’.
From the different relationships between the material and the spiritual, different concepts of science are derived as well. Along with the development of tools, people train their physical and mental capacities in order to respond adequately to their environment. Science, the chief product of thinking, thus becomes a productive force in its own right, but of course always as part of an entire configuration of social arrangements, collective beliefs, and conventions – never in a straight, unmediated confrontation with nature. To quote Pannekoek again,
Historical materialism considers the work of science, its concepts, contents, laws and forces of nature principally as creations of the spiritual labour of man, even if they owe their emergence to nature. Bourgeois materialism, on the contrary, considers all this (seen from the scientific viewpoint) as elements of nature itself, which are merely discovered and brought to light by science.
(Pannekoek n.d.: 26)
Historical materialism therefore cannot be applied in a positivistic way, which assumes that the mind registers, by reflection or otherwise, what nature holds up to it. Both knowledge and ‘material reality’ are part of a comprehensive process of interactive movement; the stage of positive knowledge of a fixed reality external to the ‘observer’ according to historical materialism simply cannot be reached.
The persistence of materialism in the labour movement
As indicated above, when Marxism became available as a doctrine for the labour movement, the English (including English-speaking North American etc.), French, and some smaller national democratic movements already had largely developed their basic outlook. But even in Germany during Marx’s lifetime, the budding labour movement almost by necessity placed its hopes on what the state could offer it; notably the tendency represented by Lassalle. Because the late-industrialising contender state historically constitutes itself as the architect of social development, substituting for autonomous social forces, these forces in turn tend to see their own fate through the prism of state intervention (Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme made sufficiently clear what he thought of this strategy, but he paradoxically was a lone voice in the movement claiming to follow him).
After Marx’s death, it fell on Friedrich Engels to explain Marx’s often difficult and certainly incomplete intellectual legacy to a new generation of labour leaders. The rapidly growing workers’ parties and trade unions faced the task of developing a trained cadre who could handle the day-to-day problems of the industrial workers as well as place their struggles in historical perspective, and they turned to Engels for guidance. Against the backdrop of a veritable ‘second industrial revolution’ in Germany, interacting with spectacular advances in natural science, Engels tended to emphasise the materialist side of Marx to the point of subordinating the second element, dialectics (to which I will turn presently). In his notes and editorial approach to the later volumes of Capital he saw to press, or in the Anti-Dühring (a popularised, didactic polemic intended to provide an overview of historical materialism), Engels tended to consider dialectics as an aspect of objective, material reality, reflected in the human mind as dialectical thinking. Also, his interpretation of some of the new mathematics and natural science in formal-dialectical terms (penetration of opposites, transformation of quantity into quality, etc.), while unsuccessful and often tried as a thought experiment only, was received as codified Marxism (van Erp 1982: 80–1).
The labour leaders, involved in the same social development but also keen on simplification and concerned to offer the workers a doctrine close to their direct experiences, in their correspondence with Engels encouraged this naturalistic-materialist tendency. Mehring and Kautsky in Germany, Plechanov in Russia, and Labriola in Italy, all corresponded with Engels (Anderson 1978: 16), and his letters in the 1890s (more particularly those to Bloch, Schmidt and Borgius see Engels 1972) indeed contain such famous statements as those on ‘economic causation in the final instance’ later elaborated on by Althusser.
Thus, pressed on the one hand by leaders concerned with practical organisational tasks, and in the setting of an industrial revolution deeply affecting a hitherto landed society, Engels in his concern to codify critical theory into doctrine tended to present a materialism more positive, objective, and obeying a compulsive logic, than anything Marx (and he himself in an earlier phase) had ever contemplated. However, as Avineri has argued (1968: 144):
considering only the objective side of historical development and not its subjective elements, is open to all of Marx’s criticism in his Theses on Feuerbach. … Such a view ultimately sees in man and in human will only an object of external circumstances and, mutatis mutandis, of political manipulation.
For Labriola, this verdict is perhaps not justified (Gramsci contrasts him in this respect with Plekhanov, see Gramsci 1971: 386–7). But Kautsky’s influence on German and European Marxism (he was the editor of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value and the author of a series of authoritative works, e.g. on agriculture) is plainly in the naturalistic-materialist tradition. Even before he shifted to a centrist political stand around 1910, Kautsky’s thinking assumed an automatic process of (economic) transformation, in which the party was admonished to wait for events to come about (G. Fülberth in Kautsky 1972: xix). Kautsky actually rejects Bernstein’s claim that there is a contradiction between Engels’s last letters and the main body of Marxism. As evidence he (Kautsky) refers to the revised, 1894, edition of the Anti-Dühring. There Engels says that the root causes of all social changes and political transformations are to be found not in ideas or philosophy, but in the economy (see Kautsky 1974: 535–6).
This line of argument was also followed by the Marxist labour movement in Russia. Plekhanov’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism of 1908 (which incidentally was inspired by Labriola but also includes a critique of the latter’s ‘idealist distortions’) built straight on Feuerbach. It claimed that Marx and Engels ‘completed’ Feuerbach’s materialism (Plekhanov 1969: 31; cf. Gramsci’s judgement of Plekhanov as a ‘vulgar materialist’, 1971: 387). Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, written also in 1908, placed Plekhanov, Engels, Feuerbach and Joseph Dietzgen in a single tradition (Coll. Works 14: 27). Although Lenin after the shock of August 1914 turned to the study of Hegel that led to the ‘Philosophical Notebooks’ and inspired works like his Imperialism, and all subsequent writings (cf. Löwy 1981: 72), the 1908 tract became the foundation Soviet Marxist orthodoxy. Actually it was only the translation and propagation abroad of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in 1927 that prompted Pannekoek to write his critique, Lenin as a Philosopher.
In this booklet, Pannekoek demonstrates that Lenin, in his angry polemic against the founders and followers of neo-positivism (Mach and others), did not so much defend Marxism, but the materialism of Feuerbach (Pannekoek n.d.: 8, 65). As a trained physicist and professor of astronomy, Pannekoek easily demonstrated that Lenin in his argument with the new natural scientists had strayed far beyond his competence, confusing key concepts such as matter, energy, nature, and so on. One might indeed say that the pre-World War I generation of labour leaders which rose to prominence as Marxism spread further to the East (for all their differences, Lenin, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Preobrazhensky, and Bukharin – see Anderson 1978: 17) were equally influenced by modern industrial society and the new natural science that accompanied it. As a consequence they entrenched in a materialism (and a corollary positivistic scientism) which turns Marxism into a footnote to bourgeois economics.
This has remained the dominant tendency in Soviet and Western Marxism. Ernest Mandel in Belgium, considered by many the paramount representative of contemporary Marxism during his lifetime, most obviously pursued this line of analysis (1962, 1972). Louis Althusser (1965, 1974 – incidentally the French translator of Feuerbach) in turn developed a variety of Marxism which, its sometimes original language notwithstanding, is basically a rehash of the antiutopian, positivistic, and naturalistic-materialist version of the Marxism of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. Dialectics is absent from this interpretation, alienation considered a concept belonging to a youthful Marx still under the spell of pre-Marxist ideology.
My argument, which can only be formulated as a hypothesis here, would be that by its influence in academic circles, Althusserianism contributed to the restorative self-definition of the students as a separate class of intellectual workers in a way demarcating them from the workers with whom they rubbed shoulders in the May movement. However, dialectics, alienation/fetishism, etc., while legacies of idealist philosophy, are key components of Marxism. While in isolation, e.g. as managerial doctrine, contemporary idealism may generate such theoretical perspectives as systems theory (cf. van der Pijl 1998: chap. 5), in combination with a concept of class struggle and materialism it, on the contrary, can unify the perspectives of mental and manual workers, just as the original Marxism synthesises and transcends idealism with materialism.
Marxist versus idealist dialectics
Idealism, too, can be traced to Ancient Greek philosophy. Thus Anaxagoras maintained that mind, spirit, is the source of all motion, and governs all forms of life; it is ‘infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing’. All other substances, however, are composites of opposites (hot/cold, white/black, etc. – Russell 1961: 80). Later Greek philosophers complained that Anaxagoras did not make clear how the mind moves, or relates to the world of opposites. Socrates, one of the critics, became famous for his view that ideas advance through question and answer, as we know through the dialogues recorded by Plato – dialectics.
In Chinese philosophy, notably in the neo-Confucianist synthesis wrought by Zhu Xi in the twelfth century, there is a comparable doctrine of mutually penetrating opposites in elementary matter, qi; which is also subject to a higher spiritual principle, li. Significantly, this version of Confucianism, which was hegemonic in the prosperous era from the fourteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries, was also the basis of the famous examination system by which Chinese state officials were selected (Bor et al. 1995: 145; cf. Giles 1915: 335–7).
In the European Enlightenment the problematic surfaced again when Immanuel Kant sought to synthesise the rigid separation between mind and matter made by Descartes and other rationalists, and the scepticism of Hume, with whom the mind was reduced to a rather untrustworthy registration device of sense experience. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argued in the rationalist tradition that the mind at birth is equipped with transcendent, pure reason (knowledge which exists without having been experienced, hence ‘transcendent’). This reason allows experiences to be categorised. But partly conceding the sceptical counterargument, Kant held that reason cannot cover all aspects of reality, since reality ultimately remains beyond its reach as an object – a thing-in-itself (1975: 84ff.).
As Alfred Sohn-Rethel has argued (1973: 30), Kant’s philosophy of knowledge is the first instance of a theory of social synthesis, that is, a theory in which all separate (mental) activities and elements of experience are understood as elements in an organically developing, functioning totality. Kant defined ‘system’ as an evolving totality, the ‘unity of manifold knowledge under an idea’ (1975: 839–40). This is the foundation for systems theory, the preeminent form of contemporary idealism. But as Sohn-Rethel rightly emphasises, the synthesis here still serves as the basis for the separation of mental from manual labour. Management theory as well as Weberian sociology are grafted on Kant’s notion of how the mind processes the facts of experience into purposeful rationality. But management theory adds cybernetic regulation to Kant’s idea of organic development, in that control serves to feed back experience into the process. ‘Management endeavors to make purpose the equivalent of teleology, and thereby subordinate teleology to the experience regulated by purpose’, Grundstein writes (1981: xix).
The limits of the intellect in Kant’s perspective become apparent when it ventures into the realm of abstract totalities of thought, beyond what can be experienced questions regarding the beginning and end of time, freedom versus determination, etc. When reason tries to answer questions like these, it stumbles on contradictions it cannot solve, ‘antinomies’ (ibid.: 463ff.). Yet Kant in one respect made a great stride towards historical materialism, at least if we follow Lucio Colletti, who argues (1973: 118) that Kant
maintains the distinction between real conditions and logical conditions; so that, having recognized that thought is a totality, he considers it (precisely because the totality is only of thought) to be only one element or one part of the process of reality.
In other words, subjective idealism as such allows for the independent development of a reality beyond its control. Management theory in the same way acknowledges the fact that the reality it must direct obeys a logic of its own, hence the need for regulation; but at the same time it proceeds on the assumption of ‘the fundament of human regulativeness’ (Grundstein 1981: 1). It thus constructs an image of the relation between mental labour and manual labour based on the latter’s surrendering its autonomy.
In the thinking of Hegel, Kant’s perspective of (subjective) ‘pure reason’ guiding a reality ultimately beyond its grasp is transcended by placing historical, creative humanity at the centre of an evolving totality. For Hegel, the limitation of the grasp of the mind to what can be experienced is unacceptable. In his thinking, reality is entirely subsumed under the ‘mind’, indeed a World Spirit acting through, and realised in, the restless pursuit of knowledge by historical mankind. Marx appreciated the fact that Hegel conceived of history as the result of a labour process – even though this labour process was still one-sidedly conceived as a process of mental labour. The greatness of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its end-results – the dialectics of negativity as the dynamic and generative principle – therefore comes down to Hegel’s conception of the self-education of man as a process, the objectification as juxtaposition, as exteriorisation and suspension of this exteriorisation; that he, therefore, grasps the essence of labour and understands the objective human being … as a result of its own labour.
Marx wrote in the ‘Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts’ of 1844.
Hegel adopts the viewpoint of modern national economists. He grasps labour as the essence, as the self-affirming essence of the human being; he only sees the positive side of labour, not its negative side. Labour is the actualisation [Fürsichwerden] of the human being within the exteriorisation, or the exteriorised human being. [But] the only labour which Hegel knows and recognises is abstract, spiritual labour.
(MEW Ergänz. Bd. 1: 574)
For Hegel, the fact that the mind runs into contradiction when it tries to answer the great existential questions of ultimate reality does not mean that reality is unknowable, on the contrary. That which lies at the other end of what is perceived by the senses according to Hegel is also a product of thought – what else could it be?
‘These very things, which are supposed to stand on the other extreme beyond our thought, are themselves things of the mind … the so-called thing-in-itself is only a mental figment of empty abstraction’, he says in the Science of Logic (which I quote here from the excerpts in Lenin 1973: 83). Contradiction to Hegel is not a borderland of thought where we should not venture, but the essence of being. ‘All things are in themselves contradictory’, Hegel writes. Contradiction should be recognised as the essence of things, from which their rationality can be grasped in the context of a comprehensive conceptual system.
Compared to it, identity is merely the determination of the simply immediate, the dead being; [contradiction] however is the source of all movement and liveliness; only insofar as something contains a contradiction within itself, it moves, has drive and activity.
(Lenin 1973: 128–9, emphases by Lenin)
Hegel’s aim was to transcend the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, and show that everything obeys an objective rationality which is eventually realised in human civilisation, the World Spirit concretised. ‘What is rational, is real, and what is real, is rational’ (Hegel 1972: 11; cf. Kojève 1968: 44). Hegel rehabilitates the principle of dialectics as a principle of development (rather than something out of bounds for rational thought). Consciousness ‘progresses from the first unmediated confrontation between itself and the object, to absolute knowledge’, he writes (Lenin’s excerpt, 1973: 88). However, this process is largely predetermined. ‘History’ is like a systemic, organic process of growth, its final shape programmed by the DNA contained in the primordial ‘World Spirit’. ‘Reason governs the world, and history accordingly must have run its course rationally’, he states in the Philosophy of History (1961: 48–9), the posthumous lectures in which he traces the course of rational freedom from ancient China to the Europe of his days.
The historical materialist concept of dialectics has taken this Hegelian interpretation of a ‘system’ evolving historically through the sustained human effort to transcend contradiction. However, it has added a ‘materialist’ counterpoint by interpreting this system as an open-ended succession of types of human society each structured around a particular labour process. Marxist dialectics thus includes: first, the argument that humanity does not face nature in contemplation, but practically, in the social labour process, and thus creates its own ‘material’ conditions of existence. This relates to the ‘enfolding’ of material nature in society referred to above. The epistemological inference here is, again, that there can be no static, positive knowledge of a fixed reality external to the ‘observer’ because subject and object are part of an evolving totality. Therefore, as the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach holds, unlike philosophers interpreting the world differently, people should set themselves the task of changing it; not as a moral imperative, but because that is how they relate to the world anyway.
Second, the assumption of the materiality of contradiction, i.e. the conflicting social forces involved in the development of society. The basic contradiction between humanity and nature (which mankind is part of and separate from) socially evolves through class struggles. With increasing social control over the forces of nature, the need to keep exploited classes in a state close to nature is lessened, their horizon widened, and emancipation may advance accordingly. Class struggles in historical materialism mediate all causation or determination – there is no way in which abstractions such as the ‘economic’ or the ‘political’ can operate but through people’s active involvement (however motivated) in these struggles.
Third, while the world-view of every ruling class claims universality for itself, in practice it covers a reality riven by social conflict. Every society tends to produce a particular, historically determined and hence transitory idealisation of itself, from which the real contradictions are argued away. This was how Marx approached Hegel’s theory of the state (supposedly the embodiment of the general interest), but also the theories of political economy of Smith, Ricardo and their followers, who tended to analyse capitalism as a basically harmonious, self-equilibrating market system composed of free, equal and equally self-interested individuals. But as Marx writes, under the surface, ‘in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear’ (1973: 247).
Historical materialism and collective labour
The conditions under which Marxism was originally formulated included its author’s philosophical training and participation in the main debates in Germany, as well as his political activity in the progressive Rhineland; his exile in France with its rich political tradition including socialism; and finally, his studies of political economy in the country of the industrial revolution, England. This has been noted often enough. Above, I have indicated why the actual labour movement, if it adhered to an explicit philosophical position at all, more often adopted naturalistic materialism than Marx’s historical materialism because manual labour in combination with experimental natural science was conducive to that perspective. On the other hand, classical German idealism also developed concepts of labour, but then, mental labour – with Kant, in what would turn out to be a managerial perspective, and in Hegel, a historical one, be it history within a rationalist construction.
Therefore, if historical materialism is the synthesis between these two traditions, we may assume that the reunification of mental and manual labour constitutes a crucial condition of historical materialism becoming an organic mode of thinking for those striving for the emancipation of labour from the discipline of capital. Sohn-Rethel’s theory of ‘social synthesis’ is particularly apposite here.
The twentieth century is the century of the spread, along with capital itself, of a technocratic-managerial class of paid functionaries, the ‘cadres’ (Duménil and Lévy 1998). This class of cadres, as I have argued elsewhere (1998: chap. 5), arises in the process of capitalist socialisation, or Vergesellschaftung. By this concept, Marx means that the social labour process turns the elements of production (raw nature, human beings, tools, and knowledge) into collective, social arrangements which in turn structure and renovate the labour process itself. The division between mental and manual labour and their necessary reunification is one form of socialisation, and the parcellisation of tasks in both domains (always aimed at reunifying them under the discipline of capital) has progressed dramatically in the century now being closed. Work no longer requires the integral mobilisation of the capacities of design and execution; it becomes social in the sense of partial – shared with present and past social labour (Marx 1973: 832). Vergesellschaftung, then, includes:
The conscious technical utilisation of science, the planned exploitation of the earth, the economisation of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, social labour, the devouring of all peoples in the net of the world market and with it, the international nature of the capitalist regime.
(MEW 23: 790)
The element of alienation, the ‘exteriorisation of the human being in labour’ (implying loss of autonomy) that Marx speaks of in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts referred to earlier, is inherent in the form of free exchange and creates the need for a cadre acting to impose the discipline of capital. The collective worker of which Marx speaks, in fact is riven by class-like antagonisms required by disciplinary subordination under the ‘alien’ force of private capital.
In the 1920 and 1930s, the gradual rise of a cadre of qualified technicians, managers, and clerical personnel led to a qualitative change in the organisation of large-scale industry and advanced capitalist society, captured by the notion of the ‘managerial revolution’. In the New Deal by which the United States responded to the deflationary crisis of the late 1920s, early 1930s, managerialism and the large corporation capable of making economic concessions to the workers on account of rising productivity indeed seemed to triumph over the more classical pattern of owner-manager capitalism. However, the scientific management from which the managers derive their power is premised on the strict separation of mental and manual labour. Nevertheless, the fact that managers, too, are employees of capital, ‘proletarianised’ so to speak (even if, usually, very comfortably so), creates a totally new situation. Sohn-Rethel says of this transformation that ‘this tendential identity of form between manual and intellectual labour clearly is a development of tremendous impact … [it constitutes] the hidden source and focus of articulation of the transformation process in which contemporary society finds itself’ (1973: 21).
Indeed we may say that from this moment on, all political development revolves around the question how the mutual relation between the cadres and the workers will develop in the context of class struggles elicited by the imposition of the discipline of capital on society – in prosperity and in crisis, in peace and war. The significance of the students’ and workers’ movements culminating in ‘May 68’ in my view is that in this episode, for the first time, the themes of alienation, the collective worker, and the role of autonomy in overturning the discipline of capital and the state gained widespread popular resonance.
All idealisms represent, albeit in a distorted way, a real state of affairs and hence cannot simply be rejected and discarded, as the naturalistic materialists do. Thus the World Spirit of Hegel is recognised by Marx as something which indeed ‘transcends living individuality and buries it under itself …’. What Hegel expresses is a ‘real idealism of capital, in which a derivative becomes the original and unfolds its own law of motion’ (H. Reichelt, preface to Hegel 1972: xliii, xxx). Today’s neoliberal dogma, which keeps society on its course of planetary disaster, is the contemporary form of such a World Spirit. ‘Globalisation’ accordingly is not just a mirage. It is an idealisation of the global discipline of capital; something which has come about after a protracted series of defeats for those resisting that discipline, not because God, human nature or History prescribe it. Indeed in Gramsci’s words, ‘what the idealists call “spirit” is not a point of departure but a point of arrival, it is the ensemble of superstructures moving towards concrete and objectively universal unification and it is not a unitary presupposition’ (1971: 446).
The dialectical critique contained in historical materialism confronts all selfidealisations by contrasting them with the real contradictions – as in today’s globalised world, the exhaustive effects of the discipline of capital on society and the biosphere. In the process, critical theory gravitates into a field of force where it encounters social forces actually resisting this exhaustive discipline. Of course in the final analysis it then depends on the quality and timeliness of the argument and the political talent of all involved whether theory under those conditions can become an integral part of the forces of resistance and social transformation. However, history itself, as the sum total of social struggles through which humanity’s metabolism with nature evolves, inevitably renders obsolete any rigid doctrine, entrenched political posture, or fixed utopia. As Engels wrote in this connection,
all that is real in the sphere of human history becomes irrational in the process of time, and is therefore irrational by its very destination … and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality.
(Engels quoted in Stedman Jones 1973: 19–20)
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