Peter Emmerson

 4.2.2 Marx

Comte’s breakthrough was given further impetus by Karl Marx and his followers. Marx is another who has been vilified and for similar reasons as Comte and Nietzsche. However, the reaction to Marx has been less one-sided as 20^th century world politics exemplifies. Marx believed himself to be a scientist of history like Comte. Whether this was successful is very much open to question, particularly since the 1930s when writers such as Orwell unmasked the tyrannical style of communism that evolved under the umbrella of Marxism in the USSR and elsewhere. The proliferation of Marxist oriented beliefs continued until the 1960s since when the attempts to explore the possibility of a communist state have gradually dissipated. What is remarkable is the rate of collapse in socialist-oriented states: if anyone in 1964 had predicted the break-up of the USSR by the 1990s they would have been treated with contempt. Whilst there are many reasons for such changes, I feel a major contributor to the difficulties of the theory and its political applications is that Marx was guilty, like Comte, of using too little science in his analysis of human history, which left room for sufficient idealism to invalidate his model.

Like that of Comte, Marx’s theory leads us to question idealism without fully realising the potential of his message. Both wanted to historicize knowledge but both left undisturbed deeply entrenched idealistic modes of analysis that patterned and, as far as I am concerned, distorted their understanding of social experience: for Comte it was the laws of nature; for Marx it was primarily the Hegelian dialectic. Both are expressions of a law-like universe that has at its core a belief in absolute truth.

Marx’s incorporation of the reworked Hegelian dialectic allowed him to grossly over-simplify historical processes. Hegel made an important step away from pure theometaphysics by confronting the problem of history, rather than ignoring it, in arguing that historical change was a universal feature of human life, driven by conflict over differences in belief: confrontation and violence results from profound differences in opinion held by people. Marx accepted this dialectical theory of history without fully testing its practical viability. This is poor science. Yes, he remodelled the dialectic to a focus on a scientific problem, the issue of human differential access to wealth. Yes, this historicizes Hegel’s model even further by giving priority to the work done by people rather than the ideas they have; but he didn’t go far enough in detaching himself sufficiently from the idealistic character of the model to gain enough reality congruence to do science; instead, he produced a more material theometaphysics. As mentioned earlier, the irony is that in his argument that market capitalism is mere ideology, Marx’ great humanitarian effort is as guilty of ideological slight of hand as his adversary Adam Smith, on whom he rounded for among other things his unquestioning acceptance of the ideal of private property. As far as I can see, both theories are energized by ideals that limit their usefulness as scientific models for testing, and thus their ability of solve practical human problems.

By developing a model where the rules of the social game are governed by idealistic dialectical forces, Marx was able to justify the existence of the two great classes of capitalism, the bourgeoisie (ruling class) and the proletariat (working class), as the manifest expressions of the nature of oppression, and, as the practical means by which emancipation could be achieved. By characterising capitalist society as essentially comprised of two massive, identifiable, social structures that ghosted their way through history until it was time for them to play out their revolutionary destinies in the dialectics of history, Marx had in fact enhanced the influence of idealism in his model and concomitantly, lowered its reality congruence. The idea that any structure, whether physical or social is fixed is a myth. Science tells us that structures are in a permanent process of change. They can appear stable but they are in fact just disposed to very slow, almost imperceptible, rates of change: for the most part rocks that comprise structures such as mountains change very slowly and in relation to a human lifetime may not appear to change at all. Darwin showed that natural selection may well take thousands of generations for small mutations to occur in life forms. The psychologist James Gibson pointed out, that distant things move relatively slowly in comparison to those much closer: if we extrapolate this idea further, the heavens do not move at all. From a scientific point of view, social processes vary significantly in terms of their rate of change.

I want to argue that capitalism is a process where figurations, not classes, coalesce and dissipate, never to reform in quite the same way again. Marx’s classes only gave the impression of clearly identifiable structures because he was viewing them from too great a distance, the distance that idealism can provide, total detachment or objectivity. If I am right, the prophecy that the revolution would occur at some historical moment when capitalism was pregnant with class-consciousness was always doomed to failure, not because of alienation and false-consciousness as the Marxists would have us believe, but because the model is overidealistic. Such an unrealistic model characterized by the struggle between two social-structural monoliths, does not correlate with the fluidity of human social experience and was therefore unviable as an attempt to scientifically analyse human groups; it was more about faith than hard evidence.

However, one aspect of Marx’s model that does offer useful insight into the workings of human figurations is his reworking of the concept of ideology. For Marx it was not only fear of unemployment and starvation that demanded compliance from the working class; their exploitation took place at another less tangible but highly influential level. Just living in a capitalist system meant being conditioned to accept capitalist values, which were transmitted through various mediums such as the family, religion, education, news media, the justice system. Thus, the members of capitalist society, whether bourgeois or proletarian, were thoroughly bonded to its belief system, which immunised them from alternative, less oppressive, more natural social models. The notion of ‘natural’ is another important ideal that patterned Marx’ theory, a belief that in a state of nature man is benevolent à la Rousseau, rather than competitive and greedy, as per the alternative version proffered by Hobbes.

The problem for Marxism is how to break down the conditioned conservatism of the alienated proletariat to enable them to throw off the chains of capitalist oppression and achieve a state of nature? Deideologization was a key feature of his strategy. All capitalists are corrupt because they are ideologists who spread positive propaganda about the unnatural, unjust system they govern with a set of values and cultural practices that are based in self-interest and profit as opposed to the good of all. In this process values are stated as if they are absolute truths; thus we get statements by capitalists that people have a right to private property or that competition is beneficial to everyone. What Marx’ model of ideology does is warn us about the potential that established figurations have for managing what we know. By drawing our attention to the way in which social institutions can be used to define the truth he opens up the possibility for challenging those truths as ideology and brings further to our attention the debate on the socio-historical nature of knowledge as something relatively uncertain, albeit through an idealistically flawed model.