Socialism and science have long failed to emulsify, despite numerous attempts – some of them earnest, well-intentioned efforts – to integrate the two. This failure, sad to say, was institutional as well as intellectual, and there are good reasons why the graft refused to take. Not least among these reasons is the indifference of most natural scientists to the idea that there could be a “science” of society and history, and, more pointedly, to the idea that Marxism could provide one. As Zbigniew Jordan archly puts it,
(t)here may be some advantages in being able to consider the liquefication of gases, the melting of metals, and social or political revolutions as different instances of one and the same law, but these advantages are not relevant to what the scientist does.1
(Some notable exceptions to this generalization are dealt with below (Chapter 4); the instance of Darwin is significant enough to merit separate treatment (Chapter 3)). A rather less obvious reason is that Marx himself gave would-be scientific socialists so little to go on (see Chapter 1). The usual argument resorted to, if this point is admitted, has been advanced by friend and foe alike: this is that Marx’s reticence on the subject of science was in some ways made good, or made up for, by Engels – an Engels who was only too eager to take up the slack and augment Marx’s arguments in the desired direction. This is not an argument adopted here (see Chapter 2). Engels’s contributions to the idea of scientific socialism, contributions which were, in their manner, substantial and indeed formative, stem, I shall argue, from a sincere interest in the natural sciences. This is an interest that Marx did not share to anything like the same extent; and it is an interest – I shall not say obsession – that on any measure outpaced Engels’s knowledge about and understanding of natural science, its protocols and procedures. I shall duly argue (see Chapter 5) that this very mismatch helped stymie and misdirect a great deal of future work, not all of it theoretical.
In a nutshell: Engels declaimed at Marx’s graveside in Highgate Cemetery that “just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so
Marx discovered the law of development of human history”.2 This famous, indeed pregnant, comparison passed unchallenged for a remarkably long time (specifically, from 17 March 1883, when Engels made it in the presence of eleven other people, right down to the present day). It will not pass unchallenged here. The terms of Engels’s comparison (“just as … so”) are deeply suspect, for reasons to be entered into more fully below (Chapter 2). Nonetheless, scholars and stalwarts, academics and apparatchiks – all laboured, sometimes prodigiously, to bring together what they understood to be “Marxism” and what they understood to be “Darwinism”. They did so in the belief, in the conviction, that Engels’s comparison amounted to or suggested as a serious, world-historical intellectual and political agenda. I suggest below that a real comparison between Marx and Darwin would point in a very different direction.
I argue below, not that the outcome of this misplaced agenda, scientific socialism, never took off – that it took off all right, but with disastrous effects – and not just that when it took off its launch codes were set wrongly (though they were). My more substantive point is that there is and can be no “correct” way of setting such launch codes, and that successive refusals to accept this point, all of which presume too much, have bedevilled intellectual enquiry (to say nothing of political reality) for long enough.
As a political theorist, I am almost by definition fascinated by the power of ideas. The ideas that occupy this book are for the most part bad ideas – bad because attempts to put them into practice were disastrous, and because they were fatefully misconceived in the first place. Obviously, the sell-by date of scientific socialism is by now long surpassed; my presumption here is that we can learn from our mistakes, and that one of the mistakes we can learn from is the mistake involved in letting misconceived ideas turn into misconceived political agendas. The idea of Marxism as a, or the, science of society and history was, after all, anything but a non-starter in the course of the sad century that was our twentieth. From a desideratum or an ideal this turned with frightening ease into an agenda. When true believers, stalwarts and others operated on the assumption that there had to be a way of formulating the precepts of scientific socialism or of putting them into practice, they were assuming or presuming what needed to be established. The idea that there has to be a way of mapping the protocols and promise of natural science on to human society – and this is an idea that neither begins nor ends with the concept of scientific socialism – is an assumption that fails to hold up to sustained examination.
Let us return briefly to Engels, who supposed otherwise. His formulation at Marx’s graveside suggests that events in society and history should in principle conform to law in much the same way as do events in nature, in which case we are in the presence of a category mistake. Nor does Engels even leave it at this. The “law of development of human history”, he suggests, can and should be regarded as being not just cognate with “the law of development of external
nature” but as a branch, expression or outpost of this latter. This is confusion worse confounded, confounded in the event not just by Engels but by all those – their number is legion – who followed suit. They always had Engels’s authority to fall back on, along with Engels’s assurance that he was merely giving voice to what Marx himself had believed. But there is no warrant in any of Marx’s writings for Engels’s central conviction that laws of nature, laws of social development, and laws of thought all follow the same, “dialectical” logic.
It has long been my conviction that Engels in delivering such assurances was in fact not augmenting Marx at all, but extending what Marx had said into precincts Marx had never seen fit to enter. I propose to demonstrate this point in its proper place (see Chapter 2). This is not a book about Marx, but about claims made in Marx’s name by Marxists who were moving away from Marx. For this very reason, it is necessary at this juncture to distinguish the Marxian from the Marxist. A Marxian belief or tenet is one that can safely be attributed to Marx himself on the basis of textual evidence. There is a limited number of these. A Marxist belief or tenet, by contrast, is one that claims to be in keeping with Marx’s own beliefs and convictions. Not all Marxist beliefs are Marxian: the category “Marxist” is simply more capacious than the category “Marxian”, particularly now. By now, it is safe to say, conversely and paradoxically, that “it is … not the case that all Marxian beliefs are Marxist, for the good and simple reason that when Marxism developed, knowledge of what Marx wrote was inadequate”. It may be, as I have suggested elsewhere, that we are today faced with “a galaxy of different Marxisms, within which the place of Marx’s own thought is ambiguous”.3 This point needs to be positioned with some care. That “Marxism” as a composite term has long been characterized by tensions between “scientific” and “critical” tendencies is not at issue here. Alvin Gouldner’s The Two Marxisms4 has ably and creditably traced out some of these tensions. But Gouldner vitiates his own argument to the extent that instead of convincingly connecting the doctrine of “scientificity” with the broadly Leninist concept of orthodox Party “vanguardism”, he projects these tensions back into Marx’s writings, which is where they need not – indeed cannot – apply in the same way. Gouldner’s assumption is that since Marx’s writings must by definition be “Marxist” ones, what characterizes the “Marxist” must characterize the “Marxian” too. It is this very assumption I wish to call into question, in the belief that Marxism, whatever form it may have taken, and what Marx wrote are no more than tangentially related. This tangential relationship follows from the fact that Marxism, whatever contours any of its manifestations may have assumed, developed on the basis of an astounding ignorance of what Marx had written. It would perhaps have seemed preposterous to Gouldner to suppose that what Marx wrote is analytically separate from, and at cross-purposes with
whatever Marxism became. It does not seem preposterous to me. Nor indeed is this a conclusion, laboriously arrived at. It is a starting point, and one that overlaps with a more central, pointed contention: that the central components of what has come down to us as scientific socialism depart from, and are at variance with Marx and the Marxian in significant ways. The term “scientific socialism” assumed a variety of different meanings as its history ran its course, but none of them had much to do with what Marx wrote. This may still appear to be a large and surprising claim, but it is not a very difficult claim to support.
The concept of scientific socialism is commonly thought to have been left to posterity either by Marx or by the composite Marx-and-Engels, but is in reality much more the province of Engels – not of Engels alone, but of Engels along with those who never took it upon themselves to disagree with him, or with his understanding of what Marxism comported. It was Engels, not Marx, who bequeathed to Marxism the concept of scientific socialism, though he took care to advance it in Marx’s name. It was Engels, not Marx, who wrote about natural science in the belief that it had some application to human history – though again, he gave expression to this belief in Marx’s name. In so doing, Engels was influential indeed. Scientific socialism in short order became an article of faith among political stalwarts and academicians. The concept became regnant. It stayed where Engels put it – in a position of prominence – from the era of evolutionary socialism in the late nineteenth century right up through the period of the Cold War. Engels’s understanding of scientific socialism, and with it Engels’s understanding of Marxism itself, was seized upon with some alacrity by both sides during the Cold War. In this way, the concept of scientific socialism, which had never made much sense in Engels’s formulation of it, and which, if judged by its intellectual merits, should have died a natural death long before the irruption of the Cold War, was instead given an artificial lease of life during the Cold War, by both sides, albeit for different reasons. In Terrell Carver’s welljudged words,
“commentators, adherents and critics were not slow to seize the enormous advantages offered by this view … The style and content of Marx’s works were more difficult, particularly in the critical works on political economy, than Engels’s more readable efforts; indeed Engels’s subjects – philosophy and history – were less remote than political economy. There were some aspects of Engels’s work that were easier to demolish than Marx’s more intricate arguments, so hostile critics have clung to the view that Marx and Engels may be read interchangeably. Political and academic life in the official institutions of the Soviet Union, by contrast, involve(d) a positive commitment to dialectical and historical materialism that derives from Engels’s work but require(d) the posthumous imprimatur of Marx, the senior partner. The Marx-Engels relationship is therefore sacrosanct5–
as sacrosanct, we might add, as a view of Marxism as scientific socialism that was (at first) Engels’s and Engels’s alone. It is not enough here merely to indicate that neither side in the Cold War monopolized the title of true believer. My erstwhile colleague, the late Michael Rogin, gave memorable expression to a more substantive paradox: that the Cold War was the kind of conflict in which each side, as it combats its (often demonized) antagonist, mirrors that antagonist’s worst features. I freely admit, indeed celebrate, the influence of Michael Rogin’s insights in and on what follows.
This aspect of my argument is taken up and developed in Chapter 5. But what is at stake in advancing it can be illustrated more immediately. Some years ago, in conversation, Sir Isaiah Berlin said to me: “This contrast” – if memory serves, “this fashionable contrast” – “between Marx, the warm humanist, and Engels, the dreary positivist, won’t work at all.” He was in a sense quite right. Engels was the least dreary of writers – unless, that is, he turned his attention to science. Nor is there anything necessarily “dreary” about positivism as such. Maurice Mandelbaum convincingly amended Lezsek Kolakowski’s characterization of positivism on the grounds that, even though the latter appears capacious enough – no real positivist, not even Auguste Comte himself, would meet all Kolakowski’s requirements – it makes no allowance for the possibility of a critical positivism.6 Yet Engels’s positivistic statements about natural science are both dreary and uncritical, and there is no shortage of alternatives to such dreariness, alternatives which do not collapse or coalesce into the category of “warm humanism”, Marx’s or anyone else’s.
While Berlin’s contrast does not work – few overdrawn contrasts do – another contrast was made to work by being put to work historically: the contrast between what Marx wrote and what can be made of what Marx wrote. This is why, some time ago, I advanced the view that “rescuing Marx from the legacy of the high Cold War is going to take a lot of hard work”.7 This book, to reiterate, is not an attempt to rescue Marx but an account of one of the dogmas advanced in his name, the concept of scientific socialism. This concept was advanced by different figures with different ends in mind. It meant different things at different times, and disputes about its meaning were frequent and sometimes bitter. One example, a central example, must suffice here. Scientific socialism during the heyday of the German SPD and the Second International (1885–1914) was a mainstay of “evolutionary socialism”, of a Marxism that had publicly dissociated itself from the perceived insurrectionary excesses of the Paris Commune (1871), and by extension from insurrectionary violence at large. Parliamentarism and gradualism were henceforward to be its watchwords. In Russia, by contrast, after the unexpected success of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) scientific socialism was again invoked and resorted to for its supposed explanatory power. But it now meant something very different from the scientific
socialism that had been a component of SPD and Second International orthodoxy. The victory of the Bolsheviks had nothing of the ballot box about it, had been forseen by few and planned by fewer. It now needed theoretical support of the kind that would explain why what had happened had to have happened, that it was in some way inscribed in the logic of history.
That a heady dose of intellectual and political chicanery was involved in the Bolsheviks’ invocation of scientific socialism is not at issue here. As successful revolutionaries they were, however, faced with a real dilemma. As Marxists they had succeeded against all the odds. (A successful seizure of power in Russia, and in Russia alone, is the last thing Marx would have expected.) Their revolutionary seizure of power was no longer a distant prospect but a fait accompli. How then could they not have invoked Marx, but for whose inspiration none of this would have come to pass? It is the manner of Marx’s invocation, not the fact that his name was invoked, that is at issue here. The scientific socialism that was now newly brought to the fore as a legitimating device, and brought to the fore, again, in Marx’s name, had little (if anything at all) in common with that of the German SPD. The co-ordinates of the concept of scientific socialism had shifted – and not for the last time.
The shift was nevertheless decisive. Despite Marx’s hopes, the success of Marxism as a revolutionary movement owed much to the efforts of leaders like Lenin, whose philosophical background was not deep. This weakened the intellectual stature of Marxism for some time to come. Marx’s thought, interpreted in the light of events he had no way of foreseeing, was henceforward all too frequently forced to fit the contours of these later events. Arguments made by Marx were at times to become mightily inconvenient to Marxist regimes, and so were ignored, downplayed or suppressed, along with those intellectual mavericks who were importunate enough to reveal what Marx had said.
That it was within this context that the concept of scientific socialism was now, newly brought into play is a point of considerable importance. Hobsbawm notes that
the increasing tendency to back political argument by textual authority, which had long marked some parts of the Marxist tradition – notably in Russia – encouraged diffusion of classic texts … In the course of time the textual appeals to Lenin and Stalin were considerably more frequent than those to Marx and Engels.8
Indeed they were; but what needs to be added is that Marx came off far worse than Engels. The latter’s views proved much more assimilable than Marx’s within the Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy, for reasons entered into more fully below (Chapter 5).
It is a matter of record that many of Marx’s writings were consigned to near-oblivion by their belated publication in the Soviet Union. These include not only the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and the Grundrisse but also The German Ideology, which did not see the light of day (and was not given a title) in any language before 1932 – by which time historical materialism
had its own basic books, long canonized precisely because in important respects they were at variance with Marx’s own. Those books included Franz Mehring’s On Historical Materialism (1893), G.V. Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History (1895), Antonio Labriola’s Essays on the Materialist Conception of History (1896), and Karl Kautsky’s The Materialist Conception of History (1927).9
But the important point about this Soviet-induced oblivion is its overwhelmingly selective nature. Not everything was consigned to it in anything like the same way. Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, a book he failed to complete or publish during his own lifetime, was, by contrast with some of Marx’s work, translated and published in short order in the Soviet Union and diffused widely, there and elsewhere, even though David Ryazanov had noted, quite correctly, that much (some would say most) of what Engels had had to say about natural science in the 1870s (when he put aside work on it in order to write Anti-Dühring) had become obsolete. Nevertheless, it seemed to fit into “the ‘scientific’ orientation of Marxism which, long popular in Russia,… was reinforced in the Stalin era.”10 The CPSU’s far from grudging imprimatur, its welcome of Dialectics of Nature, points up something of great importance to the argument of this book: the centrality of Engels to Marx’s reception.
Why, though, does this centrality matter? It matters at one level because Engels, as we have seen, had a genuine interest in, and largely self-taught knowledge about, natural science, and because while Marx wrote very little about natural science, Engels wrote a great deal on the subject. In considerable measure Engels invented what has come down to us as Marxism – that body of thought from which Marx’s own ideas still need to be extricated and retrieved. It was Engels’s “defining influence” that first “put Marxism on the map”, just as Terrell Carver says.11 Moreover, it was as a theoretician and not as an ageing consultant-from-afar of the fledgling German SPD that Engels set his seal on the development of Marxism, doing so in such a way that it never entered the minds of later Russian keepers of the flame, who derogated their German forerunners as “opportunists”, to derogate Engels in anything like the same way. Although we have no way of knowing with any certainty whether Engels would have welcomed or sanctioned any such development, there is at least one sense in which
the first believer in the mythical joint identity of Marx and Engels was none other than Engels himself. To the extent that he appointed himself the posthumous alter ego of Marx (Marx’s literary executor, we might say, in more senses than one), Engels created some of the conditions in which this same myth could take root and flourish, and in which there could be an ‘E’ in the MEGA and a joint place in the Marx–Engels Institute.
Engels’s influence on Marx’s legacy and reception has much to do with the weight Engels awarded natural science. Engels’s belief that nature (in Kolakowski’s words) “as we know it is an extension of man, an organ of [man’s] practical activity”12 is in one respect not an adequate rendition of Marx’s thinking, and runs up against so obvious a source as the Critique of the Gotha Program. For that matter, it runs up against the fact that Marx read Darwin’s Origin of Species, one of the points of which was to redefine “nature as we know it”. Kolakowski appears to think that Marx regarded nature as an arena of (and for) human activity and that such activity pushes back nature’s boundaries as it advances human aims. The human and the natural are here seen in zero-sum terms that Marx does not apply and whose purchase he would have denied. What makes labour human also and by the same token makes it natural to us as a species; the denial of the human character of human labour is the denial of its natural character too (see my Epilogue). This is not a trivial or incidental point. The Origin of Species has little to do with human efforts to transform nature, efforts which pale into relative insignificance in comparison with the sheer scope and scale of what Darwin was concerned to characterize. The idea that nature begins to exist for man only with the advent of active, human intervention in natural processes is an idea that owes nothing to Darwin and nothing to Marx, though it does play a part in Engels’s speculations. Try – if you dare – telling someone who lives on an earthquake fault, or in the path of a hurricane, that “nature begins to exist for man only with the advent of active human intervention” within it! No sensible argument is advanced by easy talk about rolling back nature’s barriers, or the Faustian or Promethean imposition of human purposes on natural processes, particularly in an age of ecological catastrophe and global warming.
1 Zbigniew A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism, London, St Martin’s Press, 1967, p. 203.
2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (hereinafter MESW), Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, vol. II, p. 167.
3 Paul Thomas, “Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now”, in Terrell Carver, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 26.
4 Alvin Gouldner, The Two Marxisms. Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory, New York, Seabury, 1980.
5 Terrell Carver, Engels, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 74.
6 Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Nature, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971, pp. 74–5, cf. p. 394, n. 58.
7 Paul Thomas, “Critical Reception. Marx Then and Now”, p. 52.
8 E.J. Hobsbawm, “The Fortunes of Marx’s and Engels’s Writings”, in Hobsbawm, ed., The History of Marxism, vol. 1, Marxism in Marx’s Day, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 335.
9 Paul Thomas, “Critical Reception”, p. 33.
10 Hobsbawm, “The Fortunes of Marx’s and Engels’s Writings”, p. 336.
11 Paul Thomas, “Review” of Terrell Carver, Engels,New Political Science, No. 8, Spring 1982, p. 101.
12 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978, vol. III, p. 10.