The dialectic of understanding

NORMAN LEVINE

The Dialectic of Understanding

Incorrect methodology sometimes yields fruitful results. Professor Skolimowski's contribution to the Marx problematic, his short essay "Open Marxism and Its Consequences," is a case in point. He has the dubious distinction of having arrived at some insightful conclusions by means of a fallacious methodology. By using four concepts as barometers--history, dialectics, praxis, and alienation--Skolimowski attempted to classify the variants of Marxism into three categories: right wing, moderate, and left wing. The right-wing variant is characterized by an advocacy of historical determinism, by seeing the laws of dialectics universally applicable to both the physical universe and societal evolution, by understanding praxis as essentially industrially productive labor, and by limiting alienation to the capitalist system, ending with the overthrow of private property. The left-wing variant is more anthropologically and humanistically based. It does not believe in historical inevitability, but rather understands all history to be man-made. It does not posit the physical universe as functioning dialectically, but instead limits the dialectic to the socio-historical world as the clash of contradictions and the play of negations. The left-wing variant comprehends prams as human objectifcafion, as the authentic self of man in its objective appearance; it realizes that alienation is synonymous with reification --that is, a social system in which external or material forces take precedence over human essence and anthropological need. The moderate variant is a middle position, a point of compromise between the extremes. STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM

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Skolimowski's methodology suffers from formalism, it is static, it is an example of Arthur O. Lovejoy's rigid approach to intellectual history. Skolimowski has fallen victim to the corpuscular theory of ideas. Fie presents them as being atomic. Nevertheless, by following the wrong path he does perceive a valid divergence in the interpretation of Marxism. He correctly places this border between the extrinsic and the intrinsic, between the objective and the subjective interpretation of dialectical materialism. At the center of the Marxian system is the notion of praxis. For Marx, man was the subject of history, the one who predicated. In the Paris Manuscripts of 1844, Marx referred to history as the "autogenesis of man," the movement in time of the objectifying powers of species being. The. theme of praxis remained constant throughout Marx's entire life, forming the basis of the Grundrisse and Das Kapital. In these later works Marx was concerned with the form and method by which society produces the sustenance for its survival. Nevertheless, the notion of human activity formed the axis around which he constructed his own system of political economy. In the economized Marx, praxis appeared in the modality of human labor, the endless power by which man modified nature to satisfy his needs. Marx was concerned with the production of distinctive socio-economic formations--feudalism, village communalism, or capitalism. The source of these formations, the generative power of these formations, was always species objectification. History was a reflection of human

praxis. In terms of Skolimowski's classifications, Marx would fit into the left wing. The dialectic, for Marx, was always limited, always confined to the human-social realm. Marx never speculated about the autonomous laws of the physical universe. Whenever he studied or contemplated nature, the natural world always appeared as a condition, a laboratory for human labor. That is, nature appeared in the works of Marx not as presenting its own inherent necessities but as something humanized by labor, as something that man modified to gratify his own species requirements. Furthermore, alienation was a condition, a function, rather than a specific historic datum. Not exclusive to capitalism, alienation appeared whenever the conditions of production, the means of production, were separated (by whatever cause) from immediate access to human labor. Therefore, alienation existed under feudalism, under capitalism, or even under state socialism, or wherever the means of production were not available to immediate human access, but rather were monopolized by private ownership or state administration.

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The right-wing variant of Marxism was represented by Kautsky, Stalin, and in the contemporary world Mao Tse-tung. Lenin was an ambivalent figure appearing in two different modalities: first, as an economic determinist in his Materialism and Empirico-Criticism, and, second, in an Hegelianized form in his Philosophical Notebooks. But the founder of right-wing Marxism was Friedrich Engels. It was Engels who initially revised Marx, who did what Marx would never have attempted. It was Engels who applied dialectics to nature, separated dialectics from its human-social roots, and made the laws of nature themselves dialectical, and therefore turned history into a macrocosmic determinist scheme. When Engels did this, when he committed the Engelsian fallacy, he completely inverted and significantly revised the essence of Marxism. In the Engelsian presentation, the right-wing variant, it was no longer man who was the subject of history, but rather history itself which became subject, history and nature themselves which predicated. History was no longer the objectification of man; rather, history and nature themselves determined human behaviour and evolution. With Engels and the right wing in general, there was a shift, a gravitational emphasis upon the extrinsic as opposed to the intrinsic, the objective as opposed to the subjective. The right wing diminished the role of praxis and replaced it with positivistic law. The essential boundary between the left wing and right wing is the distinction between human activity and externality, between species objectification and natural or historical inevitability. In commenting upon Skolimowski's exercise, Professor Alfred Meyer (see his reply entitled " E m p t y Formalism? ") wrongly places Marx within the fight-wing variant. Meyer's interpretation of Marx as an economic determinist, as a mechanistic materialist, represents a tradition of Marxist scholarship which is both outmoded and retrograde. During the Stalin era, Bolshevik and Western liberal interpretations of Marx paralleled each other. Both Soviet and liberal bourgeoisie interpreted Marx as attempting to discover the fixed, scientific laws of societal evolution, as indicating that history moved inevitably along a unilinear path from village communalism to feudalism to capitalism to Communism. Furthermore, Soviet and bourgeois scholars agreed that Marx placed the causal dynamics of history in objective, sociological laws, and both totally overlooked the themes of dehumanization, alienation, and estrangement. However, whereas the Bolsheviks claimed that Marx was correct, and that his predictions were realized and justified in the Revolution of 1917, Western liberals asserted that Marx was wrong, and that Lenin had not

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brought Communism into history but a new variety of left totalitarianism. Nevertheless, it was Stalin and his thirst for ideological uniformity which stamped Marxism as a form of mechanistic determinism. To classify Marx as right wing is to continue the Stalinist dogma. Before Stalinist totalitarianism hardened, a trinity of Marxists rediscovered the Hegelian roots of Marxism. Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci revealed a Marxism that was essentially critical human praxis. The work of these men, lost beneath the catastrophes of World War II and the Cold War, surfaced during the past decade and has become at this point a standard element in Western Marxist scholarship. Surprisingly, Meyer seems aware of their advances. Lukacs, Korsch, and Gramsci all resisted the Engelsian and Stalinist inversion, resisted the externalization and objectification of the dialectic. Conversely, they stressed the critical consciousness of men, limited the dialectic to the human-social realm, and understood history as reflecting the critical praxis of active men. In short, they re-introduced Marx as a member of the Marxist left wing. They were the vanguard against the right-wing canonization of Marx. The work of this unique triumvirate has impacted significantly upon contemporary Marxist scholarship. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Marcuse, Horldaeimer, Adorno, and Habermas were all indebted to their pioneering endeavors. By placing Marx on the right, Meyer has either overlooked or failed to account rigorously for these major endeavors. By reinstituting prams and objectification as central to Marxist philosophy, all these men have helped open a new epoch of Marxist thought. In the words of George Lichtheim, they have traveled "from Marx to Hegel." This Hegelianization of Marx, however, was not based upon the Hegel of the nineteenth century, of T. H. Green and the Philosophy of the State. Rather it derived from the radicalized Hegel of the twentieth century, the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind, of Alexander Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite. It was a Hegel cleansed of the obscurantism and mystification of Objective Spirit and reimmersed in the process of making reality conform to rational consciousness. Furthermore, not only has Marx's indebtedness to Hegel been recognized, but also the profound influence of Feuerbach on Marx has been clarified. In the work of William Dupre, Eugene Kamenka, Gajo Petrovic, Adam Schaff, and Leszek Kolakowski, the Feuerbachian notion of species being and anthropological naturalism has been identified in the thought of Marx. Not approaching Marx from a Hegelian perspective but conversely from a Feuerbachian perspective, these later men have laid the basis for a Marxist philosophical anthropology. In brief, then, contemporary Marxist exegesis is cen-

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tered on two modalities: the Hegelian excursion into critical praxis and objectification, and the Feuerbachian excursion into anthropological humanism. In this vein, Gerhart Niemeyer's opinion (see his reply entitled "Philosophical Inquiry or Ideological System? ") that there was no identifiable group of concepts known as Marxism appears to be a premeditated attempt to escape historical facticity. Professor Niemeyer maintains that there was no philosophy of Marxism until Marx's thought, in the person of Engels and Kautsky, combined with that of Darwin and Buckle. In point of fact, the task of tracing the origins or maturation of Marx's thought does not take one forward to Darwin or Buckle (indeed, the coalescence of Marx's thought with that of Darwin and Buckle was Marx's undoing) but back to Hegel and Feuerbach. The essential point is, however, that Marxism is a term which is descriptive of the totality of Marx's thought, or its specific determination. Marxism is a holistic philosophic structure composed of particular ideational concretions. To use the term Marxism is to assert that behind the descriptive term, regardless of its semantic shortcomings, is the thing-in-itself. Niemeyer's assertion that Marx did not give birth to a philosophy of Marxism at all amounts to an attempt to erase the term in the expectation of also erasing the thing-in-itself, which is merely a hope that Marx never articulated any economic or historical concepts at all. One might sympathize with Niemeyer's wish fulfillment, but it is hardly possible to overlook the existential presence of historical records. The Marxism of Marx might not be the Marxism of Engels or Kautsky or Stalin--in point of fact, it decidedly is not-but that in no manner indicates that Marx did not articulate his own Marxism. This discussion has so far concerned itself, not with Skollmowski's methodology, but with his content and insightfulness. By whatever avenue, Skolimowski has correctly categorized the two major schools of modem Marxism. He correctly places the line of demarcation between those who made man the subject of history and those who made man the predicate of history. Methodologically, however, Skolimowski's model derives from Arthur O. Lovejoy's theory of core ideas. According to Lovejoy, particularly in the introduction to his The Great Chain of Being, every Weltanschauung was composed of indesstructible, corpuscular ideas. These atomic ideas were constant, remaining unchanged regardless of the different periods of thought which an artist or philosopher traversed. In fact, in The Great Chain of Being, Lovejoy tried to demonstrate how the atomic, core idea of a chain of being remained a centrally accepted assumption from the days of

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the Greeks to the nineteenth century. This particular core idea was, within the time zone of Western civilization, eternal. Of course, there were other core ideas equally eternal to the time universe of the Western world. The four ideas--history, dialectics, praxis, and alienation--which Skolimowski uses to classify Marxism in his model are such core ideas. The fallaciousness of his methodology is readily exposed in his assumption that everyone who classifies himself as a Marxist also shares these atomic concepts. This is not the case. Meyer is right on this point. It is impossible, I believe, to find in the literature of M a t Tsetung any idea of alienation. Stalin's work is also free of the theme of alienation. In addition, neither M a t or Stalin spoke of praxis; rather, they spoke of pragmatism. But there is an enormous difference between praxis and pragmatism. Praxis relates to contradiction, to dialectical negation, to the transcendence of the conditional. Pragmatism relates to the testing o.f hypothesis against experiment, a method to arrive at a correspondence between human ideas and external objectivity. Thus there is an inherent contradiction in Skolimowski's model. In fact, there are not always four ideas in his classification scheme, sometimes only two. More importantly, Skolimowski's methodology is wrong because it is un-Marxian. Skolimowski commits the same error of judgment for which Marx attacked the British classical economists. Ricardo, Smith, and Malthus all accepted economic categories like profit, rent, and exchange as eternal. In accepting these economic categories as corpuscular, existing in unchanged form throughout all history, these English classical economists fell victim to the error of reification. Marx was an historicist. In his Theories of Surplus Value he attempted to show how the definitions of rent, profit, exchange, and even value were altered and modified by the economic totality of which they were part. For Marx, village communalism, feudalism, and capitalism were all unique economic totalities. They were each distinguished by the method and mode through which they related to the means of production. Value, profit, and rent were particular aspects of these unique totalities, and thus assumed different meanings within each economic whole. They were not eternal; rather, they were modes shaped and individuated by the total economic form in which they were placed. The Marxian attack on Ricardo, Smith, and Malthus was directed at their failure to operate in a form-content methodology, and their adamancy in restricting their definitions to eternal, and therefore nonhistorical, categor?es. In the same fashion, the atomic, corpuscular ideas of Lovejoy and Skolimowski are non-historical, outside the formcontent determination. C.C.--3

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In the Grundrisse, Marx indicated that he was searching for economic categories. There was no production in general, but only production as it was manifest within an economic totality. There was no exchange in general, but only exchange expressive in art economic category. History was the passage in time of unique economic formations. The Marxian method of explanation was based on the relationship of form and content. Every economic epoch was a form, and this form determined the particular aspects of its content. To know the content, to understand the particular, it was necessary first to comprehend the form and the essence of the totality. The Grundrisse abounds in the analysis of Asiatic societies, of feudal societies. Marx studied these non-capitalistic, non-Western societies in order to compare them with contemporary Western capitalism. By such comparisons, Marx hoped to arrive at the essential form of capitalism. That is, by penetrating to the formal uniqueness of the Asiatic mode of production, and the formal uniqueness of the feudal mode of production, he hoped to recover also the formal uniqueness of the capitalist mode of production. In short, he would have arrived at the proper concept of capitalism. The grasping of the proper concept of capitalism was simultaneously the grasping of its essential form, and, in consequence, the comprehension of its particular contents and modalities. At the center of Marxian theology was the idea of mediation. Nothing ever appeared in absolute isolation, in absolute separateness. Everything was mediated by another, everything was related to something outside itself. To understand the individuated, the content, one must understand its mediation. To understand singularity, it was necessary to relate it outside itself to its form. The form negated the singular, but it also gave it definition. In writing the Grundrisse Marx acknowledged his indebtedness to Hegel's Logic. The language of the Grundrisse is thickly Hegelian, consciously Hegelian, and it is clear that Marx was seeking to borrow Hegel's dialectical logic as the schematic framework for an explanation of the capitalist system. Volume II of Hegel's Logic contains his Doctrine of Essence and the vitally important chapter on ground. For Hegel, Essence, or Becoming, must appear as form. Becoming, or Essence, must be determined. That is, Becoming must be related to something outside itself. This relating or mediation is restrictive, limiting, encapsulating. Out of this limitation, out of this mediation, there emerges Form. Without Form, there would be unidentifiable flux. It was this message of Hegel, this specific Hegelian category, which Marx borrowed and tried to use as the basic logic for an analysis of capitalist economic life. The doctrine of Form, then, as used by Marx in the Grundrisse and

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Das Kapital, should be used to explain and classify Marxism itself. The development and evolution of dialectical materialism must be explained by the use of dialectical logic. This Skolimowski does not do. Only by using Marxian methodology can we hope to understand the history of Marxism. Every man is an individuation, a singular content. He must be related to his epoch, the form. In short, the form must be comprehended first. Its critical concept, its essence must be grasped. Only then is it possible also to comprehend its singular determinations, the content. Only after understanding the mediation of the content is it possible to understand its individuation. A man's position, his relation to a particular form, is his meaning. It is not possible to classify Marxism by relating thought to extrinsic factors, to eternal or atomic ideas dwelling outside of history, because such entities do not in fact exist. It is possible to classify Marxism by comparing the position, the relationship to form, on the part of individuals within different historical categories. A Marxian methodology would require penetration into the essence and uniqueness of the historical formation, the nature of the mediation of an individual to that formation, and the grouping of individuals from different epochs in terms of the likeness or unlikeness of their mediations.

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