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For study purposes only, relating to class.
CONTEMPORARY RADICAL IDEOLOGIES
[Note bold marking in text are mine, as well as highlights of sentences and phrases.]
The state does not exist for
the citizens; on the contrary, one could say that the state is the
end and they are its means.
. . . All the value man
has, all spiritual reality, he has only through the state. . . .
Society and the state are the very
conditions in which freedom is realized.1
HEGEL
Chapter II. A. James Gregor
THE FOUNDATIONS IN HEGEL AND MARX
Much of the intellectual substance of contemporary radical ideologies finds its first full expression in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Forbidding in its complexity, obscure in its cryptic prose, Hegel’s philosophy has been the well-spring for many of the philosophical and doctrinal ideas expressed in the ideologies that have revolutionized our time. In this sense Hegel is father to the series of revolutions that have characterized the twentieth century. An attempt will be made to trace his influence through classical Marxism to Leninism, fascism, and National Socialism and from these to the ideologies of the socialist, communitarian, and racist revolutions of the countries outside the complex of Western nations. In ideologies that have developed through protracted intellectual elaboration, specifically Leninism and fascism, the dependency is relatively clear. In ideologies that remained immature, such as National Socialism, or are still immature, such as the various forms of African socialism, the relationship to Hegelianism is more obscure. Historically, almost all contemporary radical ideologies are rooted in Hegelianism; philosophically, all have tacitly or explicitly accepted its view of man and society. This is not to suggest that Hegelianism was the first philosophical system to articulate such a view, for much the same conception was explicitly formulated as early as Plato. The contention here is simply that Hegelianism provides the immediate point of origin of contemporary radicalism.
The brief and inadequate outline of Hegel’s social and political
philosophy presented here is an illustration of the kinds of
justificatory arguments that appear and reappear in the radical
collectivisms with which we shall be concerned. Hegel offers what
shall be referred to as a “normic conception of man,” an account of
man and society that permits emotive terms like freedom,
self-development, right, and obligation to take on specific
conceptual content. The dynamic quality of such expressions permits
a licit transition from descriptive propositions to moral
imperatives. The emotive force of expressions such as freedom
remains constant while the conceptual meaning undergoes significant
change. What results is a paradigm argument in social and political
philosophy—and a social and political conception radically different
from that of classical liberalism.
Hegel
• Hegel’s prose, it is true, leaves much to be desired: His treatments are prolix, pedantic, and all too frequently mystifying, and the bulk of his writing is patently, in the most pejorative sense, metaphysical. But for all that, Hegel was intensely preoccupied with the political events of his time, a time of revolution. In 1819, in a letter to G. F. Creuzer, Hegel said that of his fifty years, thirty had been fraught with profound social disorder. He had lived through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic period, the Restoration, and the subsequent dislocations. In his essay on the English Reform Bill, written just before his death in 1831, he said that there were forces in operation which would one day precipitate not reform, but revolution. “We find ourselves,” Hegel contended, “in a significant epoch, a turning point, in which the spirit is in movement, in which it has transcended its previous form and advances to another. All previous ideas, concepts, the ligaments of the world, have been dissolved and fall away as a dream. A new forward movement of the spirit prepares itself.”2 It was a period that began with the “glorious mental dawn” of the French Revolution, a dawn that augured the birth of the Idea of Freedom.3 “All thinking beings [shared] in the jubilation of this epoch.” It is the epoch in which we live: the age of secular ideology.
The central problem for political philosophy was posed by the French Revolution, in which the principle that animated an age made its appearance. That principle was freedom and the problem posed, but unresolved by that revolution, was: “How is the political realization of freedom to be achieved?”4
Hegel’s entire political philosophy (if not his entire philosophical enterprise) was concerned with the realization of the individual’s freedom and its relationship to community life, “Recht,” inadequately rendered in English by “Right,” or “Law” meant for Hegel not only codified law, but also morality, ethical life, and world history. In Hegelianism “the system of right is the realm of freedom made actual ....“ Political freedom was to find its expression in a “community of persons seen not as a reduction of the true freedom of the individual but as its amplification.”6 Even in his early theological writings, Hegel advanced the concept that the individual’s freedom could not contradict the ultimate freedom of the whole but would be fulfilled only within and through the whole. This conception was advanced as an answer to Rousseau’s search for a “method of associating” that would defend and protect the individual, but in which the individual would still obey only himself and re- main as free as before.
All the elements of Hegel’s mature political philosophy are found in these early works, written before he was thirty years of age. They contain a conception of the individual in which
…. a human being is an individual life insofar as he is to be distinguished from all the elements and from the infinity of individual beings outside himself. But he is only an individual life insofar as he is at one with all the elements, with the infinity of lives outside himself. He exists only inasmuch as the totality of life is divided into parts, he himself being one part and all the rest the other part; and again he exists only inasmuch as he is no part at all and inasmuch as nothing is separated from him.7
It is this conception that animates Hegel’s analysis of knowledge (truth “is the whole; the union of the particular and the universal”), 8 love (“In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate ),9 and the true community (where “personal individuality and its particular interests not only achieve their complete development and gain explicit recognition for their right . . . but, they also pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal… )1O
This central conviction, the unity of the individual and the
collectivity, characterizes Hegel’s entire conception of the
individual and society. As early as the “Fragment of a System”
(1800) he contended that living beings must be thought of as
“organizations.” “True independence consists alone in the unity and
in the interpenetration of both the individuality and the
universality with each other.”1’ The true being of living
individuals is determined not only by their real relations but is
actually constituted by relations with other things and other
persons. The individual becomes an entity by being brought into
opposition with other things, and he becomes a conscious human being
by entering into relationships with other human beings.’2
To explicate Hegel’s system adequately would involve an elaborate
inquiry into his metaphysics, an inquiry not warranted for this
discussion—nor possible in the space provided. For our purposes an
adequate appreciation can be obtained by a consideration of those
activities that exemplify “self-consciousness in its immediate
actuality”: language and labor. Language, for Hegel,
is that element in which the “complete isolation of independent
self-existent selves is at once fluent continuity and universally
communicated unity of the many selves It is “the perfect element in
which the inwardness is as external as the externality is inward It
is the express unity of the individual with the universal. “Language
is both subjective and objective. It is the objective medium in
which subjective minds can meet.”8
Perhaps it is possible to make Hegel’s point in less Hegellan terms.
In considering the nature of language, one realizes that speaking
necessarily involves establishing criteria for correct usage. That
is, in order to speak clearly and meaningfully to others, language
must be intersubjective or “universal.”4 Speech must obey the rules
of correct usage. It is only in terms of a given rule that one can
attach a specific sense to words. Without such a regulative one
remains confined by subjectivism, which “is private and not
communicable . - . [in] abstraction from community.” 15 The
individual who uses language follows the rules, and to say that he
follows a rule is to say that he undertakes an appropriate act on
appropriate occasions. Rule-following language behavior entails the
possibility of making a mistake, and it does not make sense to
contend that an individual in complete isolation from other
individuals can significantly charge himself with error. To say of
someone that he is following a rule means that one can ask whether
he is doing what he does correctly or not. Otherwise there is no
place in his behavior in which the notion of a rule can find a
foothold. There is, consequently, no sense in describing his
behavior in such a fashion since anything he might do is as good as
anything else, whereas the point of the concept rule is that it
should permit us to evaluate what is being done.
For an individual in complete isolation, then, an evaluative procedure seems at least psychologically impossible. The isolated individual who claimed to be following a rule, that is, appropriately employing language, would have to specify for himself the conditions that could count as correct or incorrect usage. When a word is used referentially, for example, we learn the rules of its usage by having others indicate examples or by observing others employ it and then performing before their scrutiny. They confirm our use when it is correct and rebut it when it is incorrect. For the isolated individual this procedure seems impossible. His only appeal, it would seem, is to veridical memory states. But to say that we have correct memory states requires that we can say that what seems correct to us is, in fact, correct. That is, we have some technique for distinguishing right from wrong other than memory itself. If all we have is the impression that our memory seems right and we cannot certify that memory by some external criterion, it seems that the concepts right and wrong, correct and incorrect, cannot apply. The distinction between seeming to be correct and actually being so is lost for the isolated individual, and no standard for describing language behavior as rule-following can be forthcoming. A mistake is a contravention of what is established as correct, and as such it must be recognizable as a contravention. Others must be in a position to indicate the error. If this is not so,, one can perform as one likes, and no external check obtains; that is, neither correct nor incorrect usage is established. Establishing a standard is not the sort of activity that it makes sense to ascribe to any individual in complete isolation from other individuals. It is contact with others that makes possible the intersubjective check on one’s actions that is inseparable from an established standard.
Any conceivable external check on language usage would in volve, for
the isolated individual, antecedent knowledge of the meaning
of concepts such as meaning, language, use, and words. The
development of a private language would, in effect, require
an antecedent, and established, language.
The analysis of referential terms undertaken by Hegel in The
Phenomenology of Mind illustrates the social character of
language as he conceived it. His analysis indicates that the uses of
language necessarily entail the point of view and interests of other
persons involved in the “language-game” and suggests that conscious
life tends to move in the direction of rigorous inter- subjective
rules. To assign the name “Spirit” to this rule-governed association
of thinking subjects is to do no more than call our attention to the
fact that language is a highly developed and objective expression of
symbolic communication within a social group. It is a complex symbol
system that, when internalized, constitutes the thinking of the
individual subject. Thinking, in this view, is implicit speech, the
internalized employment of symbols standardized by the rules for
correct usage. Since the employment of rules entails a social
situation, sociality constitutes not only the ultimate necessary
condition for, but the very development of self-conscious individual
personality itself.
It is clear that Hegel intends an acknowledgment of the dependence
of man’s true humanity on his involvement with others. To
acknowledge the role of interpersonal collaboration in establishing
rules and accrediting the rule-following behavior that makes the
self-centered animal creature that man is upon his entry into this
world a truly human being is to recognize the necessary unity of men
under law and in Spirit.
Only in an environment of other persons, who freely acknowledge us as we acknowledge them, can we be finally freed, not merely from outside pressures, but also from the restrictions of our particular personality. It is this acknowledgement, however dim and confused, which is for Hegel the foundation of Reason, Reason being a subjectivity which is intersubjective and therefore objective. Quite obviously the realms of meaning, of scientific verity, of well-conceived planning and execution, are all realms which have a public as well as a private status, which are inseparable from that use of language to which Hegel is to give so important a place. Phenomenology therefore passes over into Psychology, the study of the individual functioning in a way which presupposes a social setting and experience.’6
Hegel’s discussion of labor has essentially the same implications.
Labor commences with an effort to satisfy individual needs. But it
immediately becomes obvious that the satisfaction of human needs,
which are distinct from animal needs in that they can multiply
without limits, inevitably comes to involve others. In the effort to
satisfy his needs the individual man is compelled to enter into a
law-governed association with others. To this extent everything
private becomes something social. Hegel describes such associations
in the following fashion:
Particular spheres of action fall into groups, influence others, and
are helped or hindered by others. The most remarkable thing here is
this mutual interlocking of particulars, which is what one would
least expect because at first sight everything seems to be given
over to the arbitrariness of the individual, and it has a parallel
in the solar system, which displays to the eye only irregular
movements, though its laws may nonetheless be ascertained.17
The entire labor process is concerned with the self-development of
man. In his activity, mediated through the instrument of labor, the
individual defines himself against an objective world. He projects
himself into the object and suffuses the object with himself. The
object of his labor becomes in a significant sense an extension of
himself. Yet even the most primitive labor is shared labor,
labor that is inextricably bound to a community. Every commodity
embodies a social relationship. Thus in every instance of concrete
labor a general social principle finds expressionsion. Evidence of
the sociality of labor reveals itself in the immediate labor
process, in the division of labor and its increasing
rationalization, in the rules governing the ownership of property
and in commodity exchange. The labor process involves the
intersubjective elements of appropriate techniques; the division of
labor is an embodiment of rational productivity; the ownership of
property necessitates a reciprocity of rights and obligations; and
commodity exchange requires an assessment of exchange value governed
by rule. If man is to proceed with self-development, he must become
increasingly involved in the community of labor, in the real
rule-governed relations established by a working society.’8
To enter into such real relations in a concrete community, to speak
a language, and to engage in productive labor is not to diminish
“freedom.” This entry is the first moment in the dialectical
development of real freedom. Only an entirely abstract conception of
man could conceive him as free outside the real relations that
constitute the determinations making him a person. Such an abstract
notion entails a notion of man in which every relation is understood
to constitute a constraint, every rule a restriction.’9 Only in such
an abstract system would the state and society be conceived as
antagonistic to the “self” or “true individuality” of man. The
theoreticians of these abstract systems contend that every law is a
constraint and every constraint a moral infraction. At best, the
result of such a conviction is a speculative and pious anarchism. At
worst, it is the fanatic and destructive anarchism that brought
terror to individuals and destruction to institutions during the
French Revolution.20
The idea which people most commonly have of freedom is that it is arbitrariness—the mean, chosen by abstract reflection, between the will wholly determined by natural impulses, and the will free absolutely. If we hear it said that the definition of freedom is ability to do what we please, such an idea can only be taken to reveal an utter immaturity of thought, for it contains not even an inkling of the absolutely free will, of right, ethical life, and so forth.21
But the caprice of the individual is not freedom. In fact, the theoreticians of “negative freedom”—in particular Rousseau— have always posited a minimum of social constraint, embodied in the notion of the social contract, as the necessary condition of any significant or effective freedom. For the state of nature, which is conceived as the state of perfect freedom, is in fact “the state of injustice, violence, untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and emotions” in which no effective freedom is found. The restraints that constitute the necessary preconditions for effective freedom are the laws of nature, which in effect means “reason” For only within the confines of reason could man make the transition that substitutes justice for instinct as the controlling factor in his behavior and transforms “a stupid and dull-witted animal [into] an intelligent being and a man.”22
In order that reason may function in this critical fashion language
is necessary, and language, in turn, necessitates the antecedent
existence of a rule-governed association of men. Reason and law
could not be the consequence of a contract, for the very possibility
of a contract presupposes the possession of reason on the part of
the contracting parties. The notion of a social contract is a
pernicious fiction because the idea that individuals can
collectively opt to enter into a society implies the antecedent
exercises of reason, which is itself predicated upon the existence
of society.23 The very idea of reason, the only context in which
freedom can be spoken of without manifest contradiction, implies
virtual law and morality. Correct language usage implies
rule-following behavior, and the concept of following rules implies
a disposition to accept the judgment of others as our equals at
least in principle. The procedural canons of rule-following behavior
imply a readiness to prescind from caprice and willfulness and to
accept the judgment of others unless significant reasons can
be mustered against it. Significance cannot characterize subjective
whimsy or arbitrary preference, or privilege. When the question at
issue is correct usage, it is inappropriate to make determinations
of correctness or incorrectness rest on personal preference.
Judgment requires that one assume a rigorous neutrality, abjuring
personal privilege which is not warranted by relevant and accredited
superiority. One must be prepared to admit one’s fallibility and to
accede to one’s opponent when relevant reasons so require. Conscious
life tends to move in the direction of impersonal, intersubjective
rules that entail a virtual morality. If these are “limitations,”
they are limitations that produce “the consciousness of and the
desire for freedom in its true, that is, rational and ideal form. .
. . Thus the limitation of impulse, desire, passion—pertaining
merely to the particular individual as such—of caprice and
willfulness, . . . is the very condition leading to liberation; and
society and the state are the very conditions in which freedom is
realized.”24
The paradigm of association for Hegel is membership in a language
group. Being a member of a body politic, or a language community, is
not the result of a contract. Being politically related is like
sharing common language rules. Both the body politic and language
are logically prior to their component members. The unit of analysis
is something general, collective. One does not understand society or
language by studying the individual; the individual becomes
comprehensible only within the context of a collectivity. Both
language and society have a history that transcends the confines of
empirical individuality. The individual who seeks to reconstitute
language from his own perspective or to generate a private language
of his own has missed the point of language. Language grows out of
and exemplifies the historical experience of a given community. Only
when the individual has come to a mature awareness of this and has
made a historical language of his own can he begin to conceive of a
change in its elements. Such change must respect the historic and
objective conditions that determine both the form and content of
language and make it the matrix within which effective thought takes
place.
The state, in the comprehensive sense in which it is understood by
Hegel, also has a determinate history. It is the concrete form
…under which everything that is, is subsumed—is that which
constitutes the culture of a nation. . . . This spiritual content is
something definite, firm, solid, completely exempt from caprice, the
particularities, the whims of individuality, of chance. . . . This
spiritual content then constitutes the essence of the individual as
well as that of the people. It is the holy bond that ties the men,
the spirits together. It is one life in all, a grand object, a great
purpose and content on which depend all individual happiness and all
private decisions.25
It is this content of the state that gives determinate being to the empirical individual—and this content is governed by rules either in the form of habit or codified law. Social institutions, originally extrinsic to the individual, appear as constraints only to the immature consciousness innocent of the knowledge that the communal will provides the substance of thinking and acting effectively26 and that the web of rule-governed associations provides the essence of meaningful individuality. The necessary connections among persons, organized into morality and law, exemplify their fundamental spiritual freedom in “reason.”
Recht, for Hegel, means an intersubjective order that is the
necessary expansion of freedom. The collective reasonable will
utilizes the contingencies of individual impulse and passion as the
material for its own organizing activities. Organized will is
reasonable since it must conform to the procedural requirements of
intersubjective order. In other words, it must meet the minimal
requirements of publicity and neutrality and be raised above what is
merely personal and finite. The organized will is expressed in the
categories and canons of science and logic, the rules of legal and
moral conduct and esthetic taste. Only upon assimilating all that
the state contains, by recognizing in the existing order the
essential elements of himself as a person, is the individual in a
position to operate as a rational human being in full and conscious
freedom. “The rational, like the substantial, is necessary. We are
free when we recognize it as law and follow it as the substance of
our own being.” Only the will that obeys the law is free, for it
obeys reason, which is the very substance of man. All true laws are
the embodiment of reason. Thus the collective will expressed in
codified law in the state is a matter of trained intelligence. It is
the absolutely rational element in the will. Existing law-governed
states, of course, only approximate (and often most inadequately)
the Idea of the State. Thus, the system of laws prevailing in
pre-Revolutionary France presented a “confused mass of privileges
altogether contravening thought and reason—an utterly irrational
state of things, and one with which the greatest corruption of
morals, of Spirit was associated 27 Realization of this “shameless
destitution of right” manifested itself in revolution. World
historical individuals, those who serve the World Spirit, undertook
to restore reason to the state. But these individuals were
successful, could only be successful, insofar as they themselves
embodied reason. Their will was not their subjective will but the
substantial will of their historic community. They acted to bring to
pass that which the times required. No act, no law can be imposed
that violates that will, a will that is “still hidden beneath the
surface but already knocking against the outer world as against a
shell. …28
The reason to which Hegel appeals is historical. Reason (as
the creator of world history), in its self-articulation, traverses
stages in its development. Thus, language, a manifestation of
reason, was not the product of abstract reasoning. Language arose
from historical need through a dialectical development. Similarly,
society and the state are not the product of abstract reason. They
develop dialectically. Community satisfies need. In satisfying those
needs both language and the state conformed to the historic
peculiarities of the constituent community—determinations of race,2
geographic circumstances, and economic conditions. The well-spring
of action is need; man makes himself in activity. But activity takes
place only within a determinate situation. Every age has conditions
of its own and is an individual situation; decisions must and can be
made only within, and in accordance with, the age itself.30
Hegel’s reasonings constitute a justificatory argument attempting to
support a presumption in favor of a rule-governed collectivity over
the empirical individual. His argument is that unless man is
understood essentially as a unity in diversity, as a derivative of a
prior collectivity, one is driven into paradox. Any alternative
definition of man makes the use of words like freedom bizarre. The
isolated man, the social atom of the contract theorists, has
freedom—but in order to have freedom in society, the individual
submits to restraint. This conception of freedom is
self-contradictory, for freedom is acquired only by compromising the
individual’s freedom in the social contract. Further. more, the
atomistic conception of the individual and his freedom renders
certain social phenomena incomprehensible. If the state is
understood to be the consequence of a contract that an individual
enters into to enhance his personal well-being, that is, in order to
protect his life and property, then the state’s demand for
sacrifice, even to the extent of risking property and life in war,
becomes incomprehensible. The security of life and property cannot
reasonably be understood to be based on their own sacrifice.8’
Hegel has therefore proposed a redefinition of the concept “man.”
Man is a “communal being” (a “Gemeinwesen”), a being that
finds fulfillment only in a superindividual whole (em
Aligemeines), the totality of the historical life experiences of
a people.82 This A ilgemeines is a complex interrelationship
of custom, rules, and laws. It is the vehicle for the transmission
of the spiritual patrimony of a people. It is the necessary ground
of language morality, art, and religion. The individual man becomes
a person only within such a system. “All the value man has, all
spiritual reality, he has only through the state,” for
the state is the ethical will of
the national community, the form into which national culture
is cast.83
All these arguments are mustered to support the proposed definition of man, which in turn entails an initial presumption in favor of the rule-governed community. This is manifest in Hegel’s claim that “the actual world is as it ought to be” and that “rational insight . . . reconciles us to the actual From this initial presumption we can derive a procedural maxim: “Nonconformity, qua nonconformity, is an evil,” for Hegel’s conception of man requires that nonconformity, the violation of established customs and rules, requires justification. It is non- conformity, rather than conformity, that requires an explanation.
The redefinition of man proposed by Hegel is vindicated, like stipulative redefinitions in general, by arguments illustrating its utility, economy, and theoretical fruitfulness. The arguments that support the redefinition are not formal. They are attempts to vindicate the proposed use. Once the redefinition is vindicated, its use involves assuming a normative position: Man is essentially a social animal. Everything we value in man presupposes his membership in a rule-governed association of virtual equals. In this sense the model, even though couched in descriptive language, has a normative character. Deceptively descriptive, it implicitly recommends. The consequence of such a recommendation is the subversion of the liberal maxim: “Restraint, qua restraint, is an evil.” Conformity to rule, for Hegel, is not conceived as restraint but as fulfillment. Association in the “tranquility of law” is not the loss of freedom; it is not only its necessary precondition, but its fulfillment as well. The model society was one in which the individual found in
…the idea of his country or of his state . . . the invisible and higher reality for which he strove, which impelled him to effort. . . the final end of his world or in his eyes the final end of the world, an end which he found manifested in the realities of his daily life or which he himself co-operated in manifesting and maintaining. Confronted by this idea, his own individuality vanished; it was only this idea’s maintenance, life, and persistence that he asked for, and these things which he himself could make realities.34
A general theoretical bias follows from these conceptions. If the bias is formulated as a proposition about the essential sociality of man and conjoined with descriptive propositions, it will deliver the normative assessments that we have identified as peculiar to social and political philosophy. It permits Hegel to talk of a “living union” of individuals in association, “happy and beautiful associations” in which the individual realizes the “fulfillment of his nature.”35 The state, the confines within which all these associations are effected, can be spoken of as a living, organic unity, which “as the mind of a nation, is both the law permeating all relationships . . . and also at the same time the xnanners and consciousness of its citizens.”36 All these propositions are advanced with emphatic commendatory force.
This conception of man, in which the collectivity is understood to
constitute the true essence of the individual, was conjoined by
Hegel with the conviction that an elite minority, possibly a single
“world historical individual,” could intuit the course of history.
They could anticipate the requirements of the immediate future and
their will was the true and ultimate will of the community. Against
the immediate interests of the men of their times, such men
represented the real will of history— and history was their sole
vindication.
If the individual was nothing more than the particular expression of
his historical community, those individuals who could anticipate its
progressive unfolding were authorized to speak in the name of each
individual’s most profound interest. The ordinary individual lives a
life in conformity to rule and custom; the world historical
individual, as the motor of history, stands outside the confines of
common rule and law. He speaks in the name of what man, in the
unfolding logic of history, must be.
Hegel had seen “the World Spirit on horseback” when Napoleon rode
through Jena. Napoleon was but the first of the Hegelian world
historical individuals that modern times would see. Since his time
they have appeared with surprising regularity. To vindicate their
role, they have often made appeal to arguments not unlike those made
popular by Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Marx
• Hegelianism exercised its most profound influence in Germany during the period of Karl Marx’s sojourn at the University of Berlin The social and political philosophy of classical Marxism bore the imprint of that influence, for whatever theoretical modifications Marx made in the Hegelianism he inherited, he never substantially altered Hegel’s normic conception of man and society. Of course, Marx was never a Hegelian in the strict sense, but in the sense important for the present discussion he remained a Hegelian in orientation.
As early as 1837 Marx, then nineteen years of age, gave himself over
to dialectical idealism; in 1839, he was still engaged in a
passionate defense of Hegel.87 More significant for our purposes is
the evidence of the persistent influence of Hegelian normic concepts
in Marx’s work throughout the formative years immediately preceding
the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Not that
elements of Hegelianism ceased to influence the theoretical bias of
Marx after that date, but Marx from that point on makes a conscious
effort to avoid the language of the neo-Hegelianism of his formative
period. Why such a change took place will be discussed later.
[ Karl Marx’s Communistic Roots from Hegelian “communal reality”]
Marx’s writings of 1841 to 1845 include all the
elements of Hegel’s conception of man, society, and the state. The
central notion is that man is not to be conceived as an “atom,” but
rather as a “communal being” (a “Gemeinwesen”) who attains
true humanity only insofar as he establishes real relations with
other men in a community. “The
individual is the social being. His life
. . . is . . . an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s
individual and species life (Gattungsleben) are not
different. . . . Man, much as he may therefore be a particular
individual . . . is just as much the totality. 38
These notions were common to all
the left-wing Hegelians. Moses Hess, a left-wing Hegelian
himself and a mentor of both Marx and Engels, identified these
conceptions as the species traits of modern German philosophy.
According to Hess, “The individual. . . according to contemporary
German philosophy, is the species, the All.
Every man . . is the state,
humanity. Every man is the species, the totality, humanity
Social life, then, is the medium in which, man establishes real
relations with his equals and thereby realizes himself as a human
being. “Only as a social being,” Hess contended, “is the human being
truly and really alive.”40
[ Common understanding of Left-Wing Hegelian Thought and Society in Germany]
This essentially Hegelian
conception of man and society was all but universal among the young
Hegelians who were the companions of the young Marx.
Once Marx’s conception of man is
understood, the normative commitments that characterized all his
subsequent work become comprehensible. For the young Marx it
was the task of philosophy to foster the realization of “rational
freedom.” The state or society that failed to foster that rational
freedom was understood to be a bad state or society. “Philosophy,”
Marx contended, “interprets the rights of humanity and demands that
the state constitute itself a state of human nature.” The state is
to be the instrument of human freedom, human realization. Whatever
force Marx’s subsequent ethical injunctions possess is derived from
this commitment, for Marx held that the accession to rational
freedom could only be the consequence of a correct appraisal of the
nature of man—and the conformity of the state and society to that
appraisal. For Marx, human nature to which the good state must
conform was not to be understood as a pervasive universal form or
abstract essence in which particular human beings participate; nor
was it to be understood as a mere aggregate composed of “monads” or
the “irreducible ultimates” of metaphysics. The individual man is
neither an abstract essence nor a particular thing; he is rather an
existence that is social activity, a variable in an
interactive context.
A good state would be one that rested on the full awareness that the
nature of man is that of a social being, a “real species being.” The
true state would be the “essence of the community” 41 and,
consequently, would fully reflect the essence of man. “. . .
[C]ontemporary philosophy,” Marx contended in 1842,
“constructs the state out of the idea of the totality (Idee des
Ganzen). It conceives the state
as a great organism in which legal, moral and political
freedom attain their realization and the individual citizen obeys in
the laws of the state only his own reason, human reason.”42 This is
simply a modest reformulation of Hegel’s conception of society and
the state. “Hegel’s social ideal is the free state, the state whose
citizens accede to the general will which finds expression in law
because it is the ‘spirit of their spirit,’ because they rediscover
in its laws their own rational (and general) will.”
[ Note the great organism of state from some intellectuals of the Meiji Restoration and era, which made up a large part of their ideological concepts of government during the Meiji Era, mjm]
This formic conception of man, the state, and society generated all
the imperatives that characterized Marx’s political and
philosophical writing of the early period. The normative ideal that
Marx entertained during this period was “human emancipation,” and
human emancipation meant that “at those times when the state is most
aware of itself, political life seeks.
to establish itself as the genuine and harmonious species-life of
man.” This is a transliteration of the Hegelian ideal in which
through “reconciliation of the atom [that is, the ego] and its
othernesses individuals are what we call happy, for happy is he who
is in harmony with himself.”44
Marx’s normic conception was originally a very vague model of social
man. The model provided a descriptive frame of reference, simpler
than the being it was understood to model and calculated to resolve
paradox and facilitate insight into the more complex and elusive
real being. His contention was essentially that valued traits of
individual members of the species man were not explicable and
analyzable in meaningful terms if the proffered explanation and
analysis restricted itself to the individual’s personal traits and
the individual’s environment exclusive of other members of the
species. The model Marx advanced was conceived as (1)
intuitively more tenable than the atomistic model of liberal
political theorists; (2) having specific empirical referents;
and (3) being more useful in the articulation of systematic
social theories.
Thus the liberal model of man and society leaves us with a
conception in which the individual is withdrawn into his private
interests and separated from the community. Society appears to act
as a continual restraint on the individual, as a limit to his
putative original independence. Moreover, the notion of man as a
self-subsistent atom is incorrigibly abstract and inherently
nonempirical.
[Liberalism’s identity of an autonomous self, represented in Hegelianism, as a analogy to the reality of an atom]
The specific property of the atom is that it has no properties and is therefore not connected with being outside it. . . . The atom has no needs, it is self-sufficient; the world outside it is absolute vacuum, i.e., it is contentless, senseless, meaningless, just because the atom has all its fullness in itself. The egotistic individual in civil society may in his non-sensuous imagination and lifeless abstraction inflate himself to the size of an atom, i.e., to an unrelated, self-sufficient, wantless, absolutely full, blessed being. . . . [but] every activity and property of his being, every one of his vital urges becomes a need, a necessity, which his self- seeking transforms into seeking for other things and human beings outside him.45
On the basis of these objections Marx maintained that the real
science of society could only be established by making “the social
relationship ‘of man to man’ the basic principle of theory.”46 Even
though one recognizes the general vagueness of the young Marx’s
redefinition of man, it can still be considered a conceptual model
and assimilated into the scientific enterprise. As such it would
have nothing of the normative features that characterize social and
political philosophies.
Positive social science tends to assimilate normative elements into
the category of contributing conditions or to treat them as derived.
Its task is the formulation and issuance of “if-then” or
“theoretical” propositions, descriptive or explanatory accounts
systematically relating recurrent phenomena for purposes of
prediction and control. The issuance of imperatives, or the
identification of ideals toward which men should aspire, are, not
among the legitimate obligations of social science. Marx’s analysis,
on the other hand, leads to the conclusion that “the doctrine that
man is the supreme being for man . . . ends, therefore, with the
categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which
man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being...”47
Much of Marx’s prose of this period is charged with imperative. “Man
is the highest being for man,” a value, is conjoined with the
injunction, “One must rekindle in the hearts of men their human
self-consciousness, freedom. Only this sentiment. . . can make out
of a society a community of men devoted to their supreme ends. •“
Marx’s model of man supported normative propositions as well as
purely descriptive ones.
The theoretical and normative bias of the young Marx offers striking
insight into the Hegelian genesis of Marx’s thinking about society.
Marx remains convinced that man is
and should be what Hegel had argued he is and should be. Man, for
Marx, is “the human world, the state, society.” The human
essence is “the ensemble of social relations.”49 The
distinction between Hegelianism and Marxism was largely the
consequence of Marx’s attempt to eliminate Hegel’s mysticism, which,
Marx felt, was the result of Hegel’s abuse of the language. Hegel
had reified predicates and made them subjects. Man’s consciousness
was shorn of all determinations and elevated to the status of
Consciousness—an immanent subject that somehow logically precedes
individual consciousness. Consciousness, Spirit, the Idea become the
true subjects of history; and individual, empirical men are only
“moments” in a mystic self-generating life process. Marx identified
this inversion of subjects and predicates as the secret of Hegelian
mystification.
For Hegel the essence of man—man—equals self-consciousness. [lt} is not real Man . . . who as such is made the subject, but only the abstraction of man--self-consciousness. . . Real man and real nature become mere predicates—symbols of this esoteric, unreal man and of this unreal nature. Subject and predicate are, therefore, related to each other in an absolute inversion. . .
Marx’s procedure here is not radically different from the conceptual analysis undertaken by empirical science. In their assessment of experimental concepts scientists use the measure of falsifiability of a concept as a rough standard of meaningfulness. In empirical science a concept is more informative when it is open to more occasions in which it might be falsified. That is, a concept which in principle is subject to more empirical tests is intrinsically more informative. Marx argued, in effect, that Hegel’s mistake was to conceive of his conceptual model in terms of essences—to think that behind the world of testable things and processes there was a permanent essence which should itself be the object of inquiry but which was forever insulated from empirical test. Marx presented his conceptual model of man with its essentially Hegelian structure in descriptive or empirical terms. His position seems to have been quite nominalistic. He argued that “it would be a contradiction to say, on the one hand, that all ideas have their origin in the world of the senses and to maintain, on the other hand, that a word is more than a word, that besides the beings represented, which are always individual, there also exist general beings.” Marx suggested that Hegelian essentialism argued “from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds [to] the general idea ‘Fruit,’ [which is conceived as the] true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., . . . what is essential to these things is not their real being, perceptible to the senses, but the essence . . . extracted from them and then foisted on them. . . . Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence is the ‘Substance’—’Fruit.’ “ What results is an empty abstraction that pretends to account for all conceivable events but is subject to no known test of verification, is unfalsifiable in principle, and, consequently, could not be considered informative in any serious sense of the word.
Marx held that general terms like “consciousness,” “reason,” or “history”
were names that covered a set of related things or processes;
[mjm – i.e. the Marxist progressions of states in history]
they were not something to be studied independently of the things
to which they refer. He objected to the Hegelian and neo-Hegelian
philosophy of his time because it reified general terms into
substantive essences. History, Marx argued, has become for
speculative philosophy “a metaphysical subject of which real human
individuals are but the bearers.” But, he continued, “history does
nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It
is man, real living man, that does all that, that possesses and
fights; ‘history’ is not a person apart, using man as a means for
its own particular aims; history is nothing but the activity of man
pursuing his aims.”52 Unless this is understood, history remains a
transcendent subject whose progress can only be pursued through
logical categories—and categories, rather than offering
explanations, must themselves be explained.
Marx offered a conceptual model of man that provided a set of
descriptive sentences which could be taken as premises for the
formulation of a comprehensive empirical theory. The premises that
serve as underived postulates for the theoretical system are broad
empirical generalizations that generate theorems of increasing
specificity. The latter are subject to empirical confirmation or
disconfirmation. Thus Marx maintained that the
…premises from which we begin are . . . real premises . . . which can be verified in a purely empirical way. . The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human be- ings. . . [who] must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.” . . . The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. . . . The first necessity therefore in any theory of history is to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implica- tions and to accord it its due importance... . The second fundamental point is that as soon as a need is satisfied (which implies the action of satisfying, and the acquisition of an instrument), new needs are made. . 53
The third premise states that men must enter into a special procreative relationship in order to reproduce their own kind.
All these premises presuppose that
individuals interact with one another and describe social
activities. “Social” is defined as “the cooperation of several
individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to
what end.” In satisfying their needs individuals produce their means
of subsistence, an activity that distinguishes men from animals.
(Marx equates production with the acquisition of an instrument and
consequently defines man as a tool-making animal.)54 “The way in
which men pro- duce their means of subsistence depends first of all
on the nature of the actual means they find in existence and have to
repro- duce. . . . [It] is a definite form of activity of these
individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite
mode of life
on their part.” Marx follows this contention with a proposition of
far-reaching theoretical implication: “As individuals express their
life, so they are”—by which he means, “What they are . . . coincides
with their production both with what they produce and with how they
produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material
conditions determining their production” Thus Marx “set out from
real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process
[demonstrated] the development of the ideological reflexes and
echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain
are . . . necessarily sublimates of their material life-process,
which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their
corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the
semblance of independence.”05 In his maturity Marx formulated these
propositions in the following order:
(1) In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will. (2) [These] relations of production . . . correspond to a definite state of development of their material productive forces. (3) The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society. . . . (4) [This is) the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.50
Marx gave these propositions greater specificity by formulating a set of theoretical statements that related variables in a specified or specifiable way. He contended that each new productive force brought about a development of the division of labor. The division of labor, in turn, determined the development of economic classes. Membership in a specific class conditioned and determined the personality of the individual. In the Poverty of Philosophy, written in 1847, this chain of propositions is expressed in this sequence:
In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations. 57
Elsewhere the relationship between variables is telescoped into the following elliptical proposition: “The fundamental form of activity is, of course, material, from which depend all other forms—mental, political, religious, etc.”58 The direction in which the several variates influence each other is obvious. The sequence makes the new productive force or instrument of production a cause or determinant, the division of labor is its proximate effect and the appearance of classes, which subsequently deter- mine personality, is the ultimate effect.
The unit of analysis remains a collectivity, a structured totality of some sort. It is the dynamic constancy and structural properties of some collectivity that provide an account of the empirical properties of its components. Thus, for Marx, the observed behavioral traits of given individuals are accounted for by subsuming them under specific social classes.
[I]ndividuals are dealt with only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class relations and class interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains. . . . [T]he capitalist is merely capital personified. . . .59
The surface events of history are explained as a struggle between classes. Individuals represent, consciously or unconsciously, interests of their respective classes. These interests—the “great driving forces” of history—are, in turn, simply the reflections of developments within the economic base of society.6D Within the material substructure of society, when the productive forces find their development restricted by the confines of productive relations (property relations, developed to accommodate earlier productive forces), the entire social structure is subject to severe internal stress. A period of social revolution ensues with classes representing the now-divergent elements of the material base of society. Individuals represent the contending classes. They are the active agents of historical development, but in pursuing what they conceive to be their private interests, they serve what Hegel called the “cunning of history.” Historical events are “always governed by inner, hidden laws and it is only a matter of discovering these laws.”°1 Changes in the productive forces generate changes in the division of labor in society, and this change entails alterations in property or productive relations. (Marx contends that the “division of labor and private property are . . identical expressions . ,“ and property relations are “but a legal expression for the same thing.”)62 Existing relations of production find their advocates in the members of the economic class that profits from them. As productive forces develop, they generate change in the division of labor that becomes incompatible with the existing order of production handed down by history and sanctified by law. The tensions produced are expressed in the restiveness of a revolutionary class which represents the new forces. When those who defend the established relations of production resist the changes necessitated by the developments in the productive forces, social revolution bursts the now confining fetters of the old order to permit the growth of the new. This whole sequence is sometimes telescoped by the founders of classical Marxism into locutions like “the productive forces are in rebellion against the mode of production which they have outgrown.” This elliptical rendering can only mean that changes in the productive forces (apparently technological changes) generate changes in the division of labor which, in turn, find expression in class differences that condition and determine the material life interests of individual agents. The sentimental, philosophical, religious, and political attachments of individuals are explained as dependent variables that are the consequences of a chain of complex interdependency relationships determined ultimately by ordered development of the productive forces.64
The structure of the analysis
remains Hegelian. The individual is to be understood only as an
element in a specific collectivity.
The collectivity has determinate
character at any time only because it functions as an element in
some dynamic, dialectical “whole,” in this case, history. The
surface features of events, the whimsies, rational choices, and
accidents in history, really have a “logic” and an upward
progression, what Engels on at least one occasion called “the chain
of mankind’s universal progress.”65 The ultimate end of that
progression is “universal human emancipation’ ‘—personal freedom—a
value that both Marx and Engels harbored throughout their maturity
and to which Marx referred in his last manuscript as the realm of
freedom. In the four decades that separated the writing of the
German Ideology and Capital, this value did not change
for Marx. The ultimate end of the entire prehistory of man was the
freedom to be found “only in community with others. . . . In the
real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through
their association.”66
[difference between the Hegelian and the Marxist analysis]
The difference between the Hegelian and the Marxist analysis turns
upon the nature of the relations
that bind the individual to a collectivity and a particular
collectivity to the whole. For Hegel, the ultimate unifying
substance is ethical; the true community in which men find
fulfillment is the “actuality of the ethical Idea.”67 For Marx, that
which unites men in community is the historically developed material
need and the economic relations that need fosters. Hegel’s analysis
refers to ethical significance and Marx’s to empirical regularities.
Hegel’s avowed concerns are normative; Marx’s concerns are
essentially scientific. Hegel analyzes the ethical
significance of the Oriental political form; Marx seeks to
explain it. For Hegel, Oriental despotism meant that only the
despot could be ethically free; his subjects were ruled by
law and maxim, and social caste was imposed upon them. For Marx,
Oriental despotism was explained by the fact that because of
climatic and territorial conditions artificial irrigation by canals
and waterworks were the necessary basis of Oriental agriculture.
Because of the low population density and the vast territorial
extent of the irrigation system a highly centralized despotism was
necessary to maintain a viable productive system.68
[ Much of China’s history dealt with despotism (during the dynastic periods) forcing the masses to build vast artificial tributaries, dams, rivers and lakes—for irrigation and water supplies; many Chinese were forced into slave labor, although, some steps to implement all people from all economic division become involved in these massive efforts to signify unity and spirit for a monumental necessity – China is situated on a vast geographic territory.]
This does not mean that Hegel could not give plausible explanations
of historical development. He realized that men were motivated by
need to form communities; he argued that the decline of the Greek
communities of antiquity was to be explained by an increase in
material wealth and an increasing divergence of class interest.
[mjm- I hold this theory as well] He was equally aware of
the fact that constitutional law was frequently nothing but private
property exalted into statutes.69 Hegel also knew that when man’s
real relations with his fellow man were obstructed, they often
sought a fictive, compensatory fulfillment in religion; this offered
them in dream that which they did not possess in fact. Thus in his
youth he spoke of Christianity as the “realization of a moral ideal
[that] could no longer be willed but only wished for . . . a fantasy
- . - a consolation.” Later he spoke of the followers of Jesus
having sundered their living relationship with their community and
having snapped “one important bond of association, . . . they . . .
lost one part of freedom . . - a number of active relationships and
living ties.”70 The result was that their nature could not be
fulfilled and they sought restoration in the ideal world. Elsewhere
he argued that where the community does not provide the individual
with a sense of participation, of belonging to a higher and more
inclusive reality, the church might.71
A generation later Marx argued
essentially the same thesis. Religion offered man the “fantastic
realization” of the humanity that the degraded community in
which he found himself denied him.72 What Marx went on to argue was
that Hegelian notions of fulfillment in the family, civil society,
and the state were equally false. Marx and Engels claimed ultimate
fulfillment can come only in a community of men
openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which
have outgrown all control except that of society as a whole. The
social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of
production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the
community and of each individual. . . . Only from that time will man
himself, with full consciousness make his own history. . . It is the
ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of
freedom. . . . [This act of] universal emancipation is the
historical mission of the modern proletariat.73
To reiterate, because the “fundamental form of activity is . . . material, from which depend all other forms—mental, political, religious, etc.,” man’s fulfillment can only be forthcoming in a rationally organized productive community. For Marx, ethics was a by-product of the organization of the productive community. Again Marx is not concerned with the significance of historical codes of ethics; he is concerned with their explanation. “We maintain,” Engels wrote, “that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time.”74
[ Note that for Marx, Ethics was a by-product of (social and political) organization; remember he saw religion as part of the “superstructure,” a unneeded facet in the final stage of bliss – Communism!]
Marx’s focus on explanation and Hegel’s concern with significance
should not obscure the fact that some of the essential conclusions
reached by the two social and political philosophers remain the
same. Man is essentially a denizen
of a collectivity. To treat the individual as something apart
from his group is to court paradox and error. The individual
undertakes activity motivated by his own immediate interests but, in
fact, is responding to objective forces that operate below the
surface phenomena. Freedom is not in any sense understood to mean
freedom from constraint; it means behavior in conformity to law.
Engels recognizes his definition of freedom to be Hegelian. To be
free means to obey the law—the laws that govern nature and social
development. Behavior that does not conform to law is not freedom—it
is caprice. Similarly, the “laws” of morality reflect the particular
phase of historical development of a particular community. For both
Hegel and Marx obedience to these laws constitutes morality. Slavery
in antiquity was “moral” because it reflected a necessary moment in
the historical development of mankind. Thus, for Hegel, although
slavery was a perversion of the principle of freedom, philosophy
could comprehend and so justify the circumstance, since it was not
so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity
was emancipated.75 Engels could similarly argue that slavery was not
in accord with contemporary moral sentiments; yet he maintained that
without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without
slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Grecian
culture, and the Roman Empire, also no modern Europe. We should
never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual
development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as
necessary as it was universally recognized. In this sense we are
entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity [there is] no
modern socialism. . 76
Hence, without slavery
in antiquity, there could be no modern emancipation of man. At the
end of his life Engels could thus contend, “There is no great
historical evil without a compensating historical progress.”77
Morality follows a historically
determined course. At certain critical nodal points special
individuals must stand outside the morals of their time in order to
effect the higher purposes of history. When the community enters a
period of crisis, these world historical individuals are driven to
act in order to bring about that which the times require. Hegel
maintained that these men were heroes, since they did not derive
their sanction from the existing order but from a more profound
source:
[A source] whose
content is still hidden and has not yet broken through into
existence. The source of their actions is the inner spirit, still
hidden beneath the surface but already knocking against the outer
world as against a shell, in order, finally, to burst forth and
break it into pieces. . . . They see the very truth of their
age and their world, the next genus, so to speak, which is already
formed in the womb of time. . . . [In effecting their purpose] such
men may treat other great and even sacred interests
inconsiderately—a conduct which indeed subjects them to moral
reprehension. But so mighty a figure must trample down many an
innocent flower, crush to pieces many things in its path. . . .
[The] so-called prosperity or misfortune of this or that isolated
individual cannot be regarded as an essential element in the
rational order of the universe. . . .
For the history of the world
occupies a higherground than that on which morality has properly its
position. . . . What the absolute aim of Spirit requires and
accomplishes— what Providence does—transcends the obligations, and
the liability to imputation and the ascription of good or bad
motives, which attach to individuality in virtue of its social
relations. . . It is irrelevant and inappropriate from that point of
view to raise moral claims against world-historical act and agents.
They stand outside of morality.78
The interests they serve are the interests of the Spirit, whose aim
is freedom.
The founders of classical Marxism
articulated essentially the same argument. The underlying
substructure of society, its mode of production, necessitates a
supporting superstructure, the ethical components of which are
morality and codified law. [mjm—so I may be wrong that
Marx wanted to do away with the superstructure, maybe it was the
neo-Marxists? We will see, lets figure this out?] Forms of
conduct are good or bad at different stages of historical
development insofar as they support or impair the viability of a
specific economic substructure. In ethics as well as law, a system
of values provides the norms of conduct, and this system reflects
the ideas and interests of the controlling economic class, which
itself represents the needs of the economic system of which it is an
embodiment.
Communists, therefore, do not preach morality.
The personal virtues of individuals
correspond to positive norms of conduct established to satisfy
demands leveled by the economic conditions prevailing in a specific
historic context. As long as an economic system is viable,
morality means conformity to established norms. When a new
historical period commences, there is a “growing perception that
existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that
reason has become unreason and right wrong....”79 As a consequence
of this conception of morality, individual morality is treated as
though it belonged to a subordinate order of real existence. It is
sacrificed in the conflict of economic forces.
G. D. H. Cole 80 recognizes that
this disposition to so conceive individual morality is a consequence
of Marx’s (and Engels’) commitment to a
quasi-Hegelian conception of man as an
essentially
social being.
The ultimate moral justification of
behavior is its conformity to the “hidden laws” of social
development, for, as Engels argues, in the course of that
development “there has on the whole been progress in morality. . . .
A really human morality that stands above class antagonisms and
above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of
society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even
forgotten them in practical life.”8’ The really human morality is
realized only in that society defined as the association of free
producers in which man as man will be fulfilled. Marxian morality,
like Hegelian morality, finds the ultimate standard of justification
in history itself: in the final historic fulfillment of man as man,
in a community of men, for community is the essence of man.
[ Here is the feeling part, the emotions, of why Revolution was a forgone conclusion for Marx]
Thus, neither Marx nor Engels ever
lost sight of the ultimate normative character of history.
They never invoked moral sentiments because
they understood such sentiments to be nothing but by-products of the
forces governing the essentially moral process of history itself.
Revolution
was not inevitable because moral sentiments were aroused
against the order of things—rather, moral sentiments were aroused
because the order of things was involved in insoluble contradictions
and made revolution inevitable. The historical action of the
revolutionary proletariat was not the outcome of what this or that
proletariat or the entire proletariat itself considered the good
life—rather revolution would be the consequence of what the
proletariat was. The proletariat represented the next, and
final, stage of historical development. It represented productive
forces in rebellion against outmoded economic conditions of the
present. But that the revolution was, in some ultimate sense,
moral was implicit in everything they wrote. Marx speaks of
“advance” in the conception of equality and deplores the “defects”
in application of equal rights that will be unavoidable even in the
earlier phases of communism. Engels speaks of the “really human
morality” that communism will bring, and the “realm of freedom” was
always the normative ideal of classical Marxism.
[ Gregor illustrates Marx’s motivation in his personal to public life]
The distinctions between Hegelianism and classical Marxism arise out
of the endeavor on Marx’s part to produce a science of society.
Marx attempted to lay the
foundations of an empirical study of men in association. The
paradigmatic model that he sought to emulate was one which was
eminently successful in the natural sciences. As early as 1843, when
he was twenty-five years of age, he announced his intention of
studying the relations that obtained between individuals and groups
in society with the same techniques that produced the theoretical
propositions of chemistry; in his maturity, in his preface to
Capital, he again indicated his intention of studying society in
the same manner as the physicist studies physical phenomena. The
result was the postulational system briefly outlined above. Out of
the wealth of phenomena select variables were identified as primary
and having determinate causal priority. The specific scientific
merits of the attempt are not the present concern. Instead we have
focused on the fact that classical Marxism, although it shares some
of the essentials of the Hegelian analysis, entertains a much more
confining conception of morality and ethics than that of
Hegelianism.
Furthermore, because of its attempt
at rigor, classical Marxism tended to assimilate into its system the
concepts of race, people, nation, and state as dependent rather than
independent determinates. These concepts could have no
explanatory function in historical analysis, but instead they
required explanation in terms of the economy of any specific period.
Thus, although race is spoken of as a “factor,” and the Aryan and
Semitic races are characterized as “superior,” race is understood to
be determined, in the last analysis, by economic causes. The
superiority of the gifted Aryans and Semites is explicable on the
grounds of their plentiful meat and milk diet, and their virtues are
the consequence of their economic organization.82 Such differences
are induced and can be altered by historical, that is, economic,
influences. The same analysis is pursued with respect to “dying” and
“energetic” peoples. When Engels speaks of the Bohemian and South
Slavonian people and the “mighty” Germans, he is not to be
understood to be assigning causal efficacy to peoples as such.83
When he deprecates a people as a “phthisical body of men,” his
judgment is based on their lack of economic viability. A “dying” or
“retrograde” people is a people that does not possess the “very
first conditions of national existence”; they are opposed to the
“historical tendency” and can only be absorbed, subdued and
assimilated by the “physical and intellectual power of the
Germans.”84
Thus, the analysis of nationality and nationalism follows a similar and equally remorseless logic. Classical Marxism was ardently reductivist, monocausal, and unilinear. A primitive communist community was impelled by a qualitative improvement in productive forces to develop a larger territorial confine and the city-state was the consequence. When the economy matured and commerce increased, the city-state no longer remained an adequate vehicle, and the drive for empire began. The modern nation-state was the consequence of the rise of the bourgeoisie. Given the developments in the forces of production and the processes of exchange, the bourgeoisie required a large geographic base of operations protected by a strong state that maintained specific constitutional guarantees protecting individual property and enforcing contracts.85 The political structure of the productive community always provides an adequate vehicle for specific class interests. When society achieves that level of economic development required for the advent of socialism—the development of a world market, international trade, and the uniformity of the mode of production—national differences and antagonisms between peoples vanish. Knowing this, Communists have no national loyalties; they have no interests separate from those of the proletariat as a whole. They know no fatherland, Unlike other revolutionary socialists, the Marxists, as Marx understood them, bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. National sentiment, as such, is a bourgeois snare, although national liberation movements may be progressive in the sense that they move with the tendency of history. National sentiment is retrograde and reactionary when it attempts to retard historical development. Historical development means rapid industrial exploitation and expanding trade. Thus Engels, in discussing the
Mexican War in North America, considers American nationalism serving “the interests of civilization” by wresting California “from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it.” The “energetic Yankees have increased the medium of circulation, have concentrated in a few years a heavy population and an extensive trade on the most suitable part of the Pacific Coast, have built great cities, have opened up steamship lines, are laying railroads from New York to San Francisco. . . . Because of this the ‘independence’ of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer, occasionally ‘Justice’ and other moralistic principles may be injured, but what do they count compared to such world historic events?”86 He went on to argue, “When it is a question of the existence, of the free development of all the resources of great nations, then . . . sentimentalities . . . will decide nothing.” It is a question of “trade, industry and profitable methods of agriculture, . . . [the] level of social development of the individual peoples, . . . [the] influence of the more highly developed nation on the undeveloped one.” It is the destiny of advanced industrial nations to bind “tiny, crippled, powerless little nations together in a great Empire, and thereby [enable] them to take part in an historical development which, if left to themselves, would [remain] entirely foreign to them! To be sure such a thing is not carried through without forcibly crushing many a delicate little national flower. But without force and without an iron ruthlessness nothing is accomplished in history. 87
Such national conquest is justified by history, since it promotes industrial development. The expansion of the productive forces strengthens the revolutionary proletariat, which, in turn, is destined to abolish classes and consequently nationalities and nationalism in universal emancipation.88 Nationalisms are licensed only by serving the interests of the international prole.. tariat. Those nationalisms that serve the proletarian interests are commended; those that do not are deplored. Nationalism, as such, has no value—its historic import is derived. The class- conscious proletariat recognize nationalism for what it is. They use it when it is in the international and historic interests of their class, but they themselves are immune to its contagion. In the Communist Manifesto nationalism among the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries was declared already moribund, a residue of an earlier historic epoch that was about to dissipate itself forever.
[ Gregor’s definition of Marx’s definition of a state’s ultimate role]
Classical Marxism’s pronouncements on the state were equally unequivocal. The state, as such, was not an independent historical determinant. The state was a machine for class oppression generated by the productive forces of society. Increased production had riven society into mutually opposed classes, and the state was the instrument of ensuring internal stability.
The state is . . . by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it “the reality of the ethical idea,” “the image and reality of reason,” as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.89
The state represents the class interests of the oppressors in a a
state divided into the oppressed and their oppressors. Should a
state come to represent the interests of society as a whole, it
would become superfluous. It would render itself unnecessary. It
would proceed to “wither away of itself.” When society organizes
production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers
the “whole machinery of state [will be put] where it will then
belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning
wheel and the bronze axe.”90
Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the
state, that is, of an organization of the particular class, which
was pro tempore the exploiting class, for the maintenance of
its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially,
for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the
condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of
production. . . . When at last it becomes the representative of the
whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is
no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as
class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our
present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses
arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be
repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer
necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really
constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the
taking possession of the means of production in the name of
society—this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a
state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain
after another, superfluous, and then withers away of itself. . . .
The state is not “abolished.” It withers away.91
In a society in which the productive relations are compatible with the fully matured productive forces, there is no material base for the existence of classes. Where there are no classes, there can be no state, for the state is a machine for oppression. Where there is no state, there is a free association of producers, a community of rational freedom, the fulfillment of man as man.
Classical Marxism constitutes perhaps the most ambitious attempt in
the history of social and political philosophy to provide a
justificatory argument for a specific organization of society. Its
ultimate appeal is to a set of theoretical propositions supporting a
special interpretation of history.
That interpretation sees history impelled upon a dialectical course
which necessarily culminates in an ideal society. That
society is ideal because it is in accord with the very essence of
man—it is his fulfillment. History is infused with moral purpose.
One final but critical difference distinguishes classical Marxism
from Hegelianism. Both Marx and Engels were convinced that
capitalism itself would produce a majority of men aware of
the identity of their immediate interests with those of the
collectivity that constituted their essence. Much of what Marx and
Engels wrote supports the thesis that they were radical democrats,
that they were convinced that the forces in operation in capitalist
society would produce a majority of critically conscious human
beings who would identify their person interests with the interests
of their productive community. This consciousness would arise
spontaneously. It would be an “efflux,” a “reflex” of prevailing
material conditions. The tensions that transformed classical Marxism
into Leninism center around this notion of a spontaneous,
majoritarian revolution.
Bibliography:
A. James Gregor, “Contemporary Radical Ideologies, ch. 2 (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 24-58.