THE WORKERS AND THE WORD: WHY MARX HAD THE RIGHT TO THINK HE WAS RIGHT
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[W]hile Marx was so much alive to the ideological character of systems of ideas with which he was not in sympathy, he was completely blind to the ideological elements present in his own. But the principle of interpretation involved in his concept of ideology is perfectly general. Obviously we cannot say: everywhere else is ideology; we alone stand on the rock of absolute truth. Laborist ideologies are neither better nor worse than any others.
—JOSEPH A. SCHUMPETER, A History of Economic Analysis, p. 33–34
Ein allbekanntes und in den Augen der bürgerlichen Wissenschaft entscheidendes Argument gegen die Wahrheit des historischen Materialismus besteht darin, daß er auf sich selbst angewendet werden muß.
—GEORG LUKÁCS, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, p. 2341
In this paper I want to defend Karl Marx against the kind of argument typified by the remarks of Schumpeter quoted above. The argument I propose to refute belongs to a class of arguments, the members of which are bound together by a shared formal structure. The arguments are pressed against many theorists, Marx being only one of them. What these theorists have in common is that they try to account for the workings of human thought by means of explanations which may be called reductive, since they end by assigning to human thinking a status lower than the one it receives from those who hold no such theory. They demote human thinking to a lower grade, because they entail that human thought is not primarily an effort to arrive at truth, in the normal acceptation of that word. The objection takes the form of a tu quoque, a complaint that the theorist cannot claim validity for his own views, since he has chosen to doubt that it is profitable or right to assess views for their validity. The objector’s argument might run as follows:
(1) According to you, human thought-processes have a status lower than what they are usually conceived to have. In particular, you maintain that it is inappropriate and/or impossible to assess them for their truth or falsity.
(2) But your theory is itself a series of human thoughts.
(3) Therefore it must have the properties you ascribe to human thinking in general.
(4) Therefore you cannot advance it in the spirit in which you advance it, as a candidate for truth.
(5) In short, the character of your theory makes it illicit for you to put it forward.
An example of a theory often dealt with in this fashion is relativism, the doctrine that what is true for one person may be false for another, that truth and falsehood are not properties of propositions, but of propositions as held by this or that person, where that p is true for X does not entail that p is true for Y, and where that p appears true to X entails that p is true for X. The objector will point out that he need not regard this theory about truth as true for anyone other than its propounders. It may be true for you, he says, but it does not appear true to me. And you cannot, on your own principles, prevent me from dismissing your theory in this way.
Another victim of the tu quoque argument is that version of pragmatism which declares that a proposition is true if and only if it is useful to believe it, or that there really is no property truth which attaches to propositions but only the property utility. The natural objection is that pragmatism shall be accepted only if its utility is demonstrated, that its utility can be demonstrated only by showing that it is useful to believe that pragmatism is useful, and the latter proposition can be supported only by showing that it is useful to believe that it is useful to believe that pragmatism is useful, and so on endlessly; so that pragmatism, while not immediately self-stultifying, like relativism, is nevertheless prevented by its own principles from being a theory which anyone can claim he knows he has a right to hold. One can advance the theory, but one cannot hope to argue successfully for it.
Relativism and pragmatism, as just sketched, are thin and uninteresting theories, and I know of no noteworthy philosopher who has put either forward in quite so spare a form. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that they seem so open to the charges put by tu quoque argument. But this form of argument has also been used against elaborate theories of distinguished pedigree. One such theory can perhaps be constructed out of a certain trend in Freud. It cannot be characterized as Freud’s settled and consistent view, but it is in the Freudian corpus, and it is certainly sponsored by some followers of Freud. It is the theory that people who purport to be seeking the truth are really only sublimating unfulfilled needs, or gratifying a voyeuristic disposition, or driven by some neurosis which has no interest in truth at all. The reply will be that the Freudian cannot regard himself as dispassionately researching into the psychology of knowledge or as revealing truth when reporting his results.
Some physiological psychologists might be indicted in this way, and also some radical behaviorists, such as B. F. Skinner. The first treat thoughts as processes in the brain, the second as behavioral responses to stimuli, and within each camp are those who claim to dispose of the notion of truth when characterizing the nature of thought. The response to them will be: Why should I take an interest in your brain-processes? And: Why should I be guided by what you have been reinforced to say? Indeed in the second case, the case of Skinner, one might reply: Why should I allow you to condition me to think as you do?
I shall point to no fallacy in the tu quoque argument. My quarrel is not with the argument but with those who use it with such undiscriminating eagerness that they often misapply it. For what frequently prompts its employment is a desire not to consider the detail of the theory being attacked. And what just as frequently makes the attack irrelevant is that the theorist is willing to claim an exceptional status for his theory. Once he does this the crucial premise used by the critic has vanished, for that premise is “All human thought-processes have the character indicated by the theory.” The theorist can evade the critic’s argument simply by asserting that his theory is not among the ideas to be treated in the manner in which his theory treats ideas. The critic can then justly demand from the theorist a defense of his assertion that his theory enjoys a special immunity. The tu quoque refutation is thereby transformed into a challenge, and instead of closing discussion of the theory, the critic succeeds in opening it, in a potentially fruitful way. Instead of giving the wrong sort of argument he puts the right sort of question. We shall now see how this question arises for a theory held by Karl Marx, and how we may imagine him answering it.
The tu quoque charge against Marx depends on the way he sought to explain the social theories of thinkers who preceded him. When Marx considered such theories, when he asked why Plato said what he did in the Republic, why Thomas Aquinas thought as he did about society and government, why Hobbes held the views he held, and why they differed as they did from Locke’s, he began his answer to such questions by identifying each thinker as the intellectual representative of a certain class, and he called his theory the ideology of that class. For a thinker to be the intellectual representative of a class two conditions are necessary: (1) His theory must serve the interests of the class, in the sense that if it is generally accepted, the class will flourish, will be able to seize power, or to protect the power it has. (2) The members of the class must feel drawn to the theory; they must find it natural to believe in it. Not that they must recognize it for what it really is, a weapon fashioned for their use. On the contrary, it is demanded by Marx’s theory that they do not deem their ideology particularly appropriate to their needs and aspirations. They must find their representative’s ideas plausible whenever they are disposed to reflect on man and society, even when their class interests are far from their minds. For Marx all interesting and significant social theories have this secret class character. They are not therefore what they purport to be, for they are not the result of unbiased efforts to arrive at the truth. They are rather to be understood as expressing and supporting the interests of classes, and for this reason Marx calls them “ideologies,” a term he uses to suggest error and illusion.
The critic now claims to have found an incoherence in Marx’s view. We may imagine him addressing Marx as follows: your theory, the very theory with which you explain social theory, is itself a social theory. Therefore it represents the interests of a certain class, in fact those of the working class. It follows that your theory has the properties you have assigned to all class-bound theories. It is the ideological reflex of the working class. It embodies the particular kind of false consciousness to which laboring men are prone. It is your role to articulate this consciousness. You are therefore forbidden to regard your work as genuinely scientific.
There is no doubt that Marx would feel moved to resist this indictment. He would begin by granting that his doctrine was expressive of proletarian interests. But he would argue that the situation of the proletariat has unique features which ensure that its intellectual representative is developing a theory which is not an ideology, that he is possessed of a correct rather than an illuded consciousness of reality. The position of the workers is such that they have a privileged access to the facts about reality in general and society in particular. The circumstances of their life and struggle bring them into contact with the Word, with truth itself. This licenses their intellectual representative’s scientific posture. The workers and the Word are destined for each other, and the scientific status of Marxism is a result of that destiny.2
I want to explain and defend the response I have attributed to Marx. But let me make clear what I shall be defending. The critic’s argument does not purport to show that Marx’s theory is false. It aims at showing only that he lacks the right to regard it as true. I believe that Marx’s theory is to an important degree true, but in this paper I shall sponsor only his right to think it true.
It is important to separate the position of Marx on the issue which concerns us from an attitude to which it might loosely be assimilated, and which once can associate, at least loosely, with the name of Stalin. For Stalinists also thought that theories devised and presented on behalf of the proletariat were true. Why? Because the proletariat is fated to be the dominant class, and the final victor in the battle of history. And that is the beginning and the end of the Stalinist argument for this thesis. For them truth is identified with whatever theories help the workers to prevail. They really revise the concept of truth, since for them there is no objective standpoint from which the claims of Marxism might be judged true.
This is not the way in which Marx thought that theories which expressed the interests of the proletariat were true. He does not deny that there can be an objective standpoint. On the contrary he asserts that the proletariat occupies that standpoint. Marx is not departing from the standard idea of truth, according to which true statements correspond to what is the case in the world, independent of any person’s interests, or any class’s interests. For him the situation of the proletariat brings it about that its worldview, unlike that of any other class, is correct. But this is not the beginning and the end of the argument, as it seems to have been for Stalin. The workers do not automatically have the Word just because they are workers. But because they are workers they have certain features which make it immensely likely that they will have it. It is a matter of fact that only the proletarians have such features: it is therefore a matter of fact that they possess the truth. It is not a matter of definition as it is for Stalin.
This means that between the premise that the workers will prove triumphant in the class struggle, and the conclusion that their views, and therefore Marx’s theories, are correct—between this premise and this conclusion there are in Marx’s thought a number of links which warrant the inference from the one to the other. It is my object to explore these links. I shall do this by presenting a series of arguments, all taken from Marx, though not all designed by him for the purpose to which I shall put them. The arguments offer the missing steps which Stalinism dogmatically neglects to provide. Their aim is to demonstrate both that the way the proletariat perceives the world is specially immune from illusion, that information reaches them without passing through a distorting medium, and that where information is not something which presents itself but something which has to be sought, the proletariat is specially well equipped to find out what is true.
The critic’s challenge is that one important part of Marx’s social theory, namely his account of the nature of social thought, subverts his own doctrine. The only way to meet the challenge is to refer the critic to statements in the doctrine that should silence him. But the critic may say that since such statements are part of the doctrine, they are part of what he is putting into question. Now if he insists on this, he is demanding too easy a victory for himself. We have already seen, when discussing the tu quoque argument more generally, that he is not entitled to say that there couldn’t be anything in Marx’s theory which makes it exempt. And that there are legitimate exempting clauses is what I shall be concerned to show.
For the inquiry to be fruitful, one Marxian thesis must be accepted: the claim that the workers will make a successful revolution. Now it scarcely follows immediately from this that the workers have the Word. What I want to display is the complex route through which Marx would hope to reach this conclusion, once a fair-minded critic has granted that premise.3
The missing-link arguments are four in number. The first is the most powerful of them. In fact, it will emerge that the other three are either highly inconclusive or dependent for what strength they have on the first argument.
After giving the four arguments, I shall describe and examine a view held by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. For he believes that if the workers are to make a successful revolution they must suffer illusions. I have said on this hypothesis one can show that the workers possess the truth. Niebuhr claims that on the same premise one can show they are blind to it. I shall end my defense of Marx by disposing of Niebuhr’s thesis.
I now pass to the first argument:
(1) For Marx every class which makes a revolution does so in order to advance its own material interests. But its revolution cannot be successful unless it is certified and supported by allies in other classes, who will not benefit from it. For this reason a class will not achieve victory unless its intellectual exponents manage to propagate the idea that the aims of revolution have comprehensive validity, that they promote the interests not only of the class initiating the revolution, but of most men in the society. And so, to take an example which strongly conditioned Marx’s thinking, the bourgeoisie made the French Revolution in order to liberate itself as a class, to emancipate capitalism from feudal restrictions. But it had to adopt the slogan “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for all men” in order to obtain—what it needed to succeed in its undertaking—the support of other classes. The French bourgeoisie succeeded because, to quote Marx,
[there was] … a moment of enthusiasm in which it associated and mingled with society at large, identified itself with it, and was felt and recognized as the general representative of … society … [For] … it is only in the name of general interests that a particular class can claim general supremacy.4
Yet it is not the case that a French bourgeoisie—or even its intellectual representatives—played a cunning trick on the rest of society. They were not being devious when they disseminated false doctrine about what their revolution was intended to achieve. To convince others of the cogency of their ideas they had to propound them with passion and vigor, and they could do this only because they themselves believed that they were aiming at general prosperity. A gap exists between the interests of the revolutionary class and those of society as a whole, but the class must deny even to itself the existence of the gap, for only then can it prosecute its aims with enough resolve to succeed. And so, to fulfill its revolutionary project a class must fall into illusion.
We encounter here Marx’s belief that human beings will be stirred to action of world-historical importance only if they are inspired by the proclamation of universal ideals.5 Thus sectional interests must believe themselves to be sponsors of humanity as such in order to act in a revolutionary way. But this pretense is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy on so grand a scale is beyond the capacity of men, but self-deception of equal measure is not. And so, to quote again, the men of the bourgeoisie
found … the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their enthusiasm on the high plane of the great historical tragedy.6
Marx used these essentially psychological principles to explain not only why the French bourgeoisie succeeded in making a revolution, but also why the German bourgeoisie failed to make one. The Germans, he thought, were too petty in spirit, too engrossed in very private and limited concerns to extricate themselves from them except in fantasy. They were grand in their theories, but they were too modestly self-centered, and too easily satisfied to make ambitious claims about their own historical roles. They lacked romantic ardor. And so they were unable to live their illusions.7 And so they were unable to act on the sort of doctrine which obscures from view the gaps between the interests of different classes. And unless those gaps are through appropriate action made to seem to disappear, a successful revolution is impossible.8
In short, for all classes except, as we shall see, the working class, the fact that a gap exists between them and other classes means that they must lose contact with the truth if they are to develop a theory which will further their interests.
Now why is the proletariat an exception to this rule? Marx thinks they are exempt because there is no serious difference between their interests and those of mankind.9 And he gives two sorts of justification for this claim. The first sort occurs in his earlier writings, where the proletariat is pictured as a reflection of the essence of man: all other classes represent man in a warped shape. This is because what distinguishes men from other animals is their capacity to produce, and it is the workers who play the role of producers in society. This makes them essentially human,10 and therefore their interests cannot contradict those of man as such. Furthermore, their insurgency is only superficially the mutiny of a class, for they have no class interests to defend, no status or acquisitions to protect or increase. They act in response to needs which any human being, regardless of his social situation, must want fulfilled. And their intense suffering is so comprehensive that it is a summation of the suffering of all men throughout history: in revolting against it they are therefore revolting on behalf of all mankind.
I shall not assess this argument, not because I think it is below scholarly consideration, but because I am proposing to deal with Marx as a social theorist, rather than as a philosopher. That is, I am in this paper concerned with those among his claims which are empirically testable, and his characterization of the proletariat as the universal class raises philosophical questions which I do not wish to deal with here. I therefore pass to the second sort of justification Marx gives for denying a significant difference between the workers’ interests and those of others, a justification which is less grandiose, and which emerges in his later writings. The second justification is very simple. It is that the workers form the overwhelming majority of the members of society, and that for this reason there is no gulf which they must bridge by making and believing false theories.
But is there in fact no gulf? Certainly it can be argued that since the society to be introduced by the proletarian revolution will be classless, there will be no groups with discrepant interests in it. But this contention is inadmissible here, since we are concerned with the proletariat while it is making its revolution, not with the state of affairs it hopes to realize. We have allowed Marx to presuppose that the workers’ revolution will be successful, but only in the sense that they will defeat their opponents. We did not include in this success the realization of their conception of the future society. Had we done so we should have begged entirely the question whether their thoughts about themselves and society are true, since the belief that their efforts will bring about a socialist society is central to those thoughts.
The question, is there a gap between proletariat interests and those of other classes? therefore reasserts itself, and the obvious answer is that there is a gap, since the proletarian ascendancy frustrates the interests of the bourgeoisie, on any plain interpretation of “interests.”11 But this does not mean that Marx was wrong, for he said that there was no gulf which had to be bridged, and there is indeed no gulf of this sort. Because of its numerical strength, the proletariat is not constrained to summon other classes to its aid. So the gap exists, but it is quite consistent to argue that in the case of the workers, and only in their case, the gap does not matter. I would therefore claim for the first argument considerable power. It is a good argument for the thesis that the workers are in a position which makes it unnecessary for them to embrace false theories.
Thus the intellectual representative of the proletariat need not advocate any ideology. This does not, of course, entail that he will not. But I think Marx would accept a principle which would enjoin the entailment, the principle that it is not only the office but also the natural aim of intellectuals to discover truth, so that social theorists will arrive at it if nothing impedes them.
(2) The second argument is that the suffering of the proletariat in capitalist society is so great that their true situation cannot but be painfully evident to them, and they are consequently unable to entertain illusions about it.12 The workers’ suffering is total: they undergo everything that happens in capitalist society, they are the raw material in the process of that society, they are what it uses, so that whatever happens in it has such a strong impact on them that they cannot divert their minds from it. Every rhythm in the dynamic of capitalism comes home to them as a keenly felt deprivation.13
There are several ideas clustering here. One is the notion that when something hurts you, you come to know it very well. Another is the supposition that men who are made miserable by a state of affairs cannot accept theories which would distort the character of that state of affairs. And finally there is a metaphysical thought, arrived at by a kind of conceptual compression, which argues that suffering does not merely give rise to knowledge but is itself a mode of knowing. This is achieved by relating suffering from something to suffering or undergoing that thing, that is to say, experiencing it, which in turn is related to perceiving it, and indeed to perceiving it veridically, that is, gaining knowledge about it. It seems that the English word “suffer” has nuances which stimulate an elaboration of this kind, and the German word leiden, which is the one Marx uses in this connection, is similarly shaded.14
I do not think we can draw much from this second argument, in any of its forms. For reasons already stated, I shall decline to consider its most philosophical version. And the idea that what hurts you presents itself to you clearly is obviously exposed to a rich array of counterexamples, which only the most sophisticated could hope to surmount. The other idea, that one does not develop illusions about a situation in which one is mishandled, that he who knows the Woe knows the Vale—this might, at a pinch, show that the workers know the nature of capitalism. But the same suffering makes them prone to enormous illusions about what conditions they may hope to enjoy in the future. The Marxian analysis of capitalism might therefore be defended by these anyhow dubious means, but the very same considerations jeopardize the Marxian projection of a communal future for all.
(3) The third argument is this: in the course of and because of their revolutionary struggle, the workers develop their critical powers, their ability to discern the nature of the society they are attempting to change, and their insight into the future which is gestating in the womb of the present. Marx says:
[P]roletarian revolutions … criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts.15
To make a socialist revolution, Marx seems to think, it is vital to have a clear view of things. Truth is so necessary that the proletariat is forced to discover it.16
This argument is of questionable value. For plainly a commitment to revolution does not automatically sharpen anyone’s wits. In fact participants in socialist movements have always been plagued by fantasies of power or of impotence. But there is a more decisive objection. The workers are not the first to make a revolution. The bourgeoisie made one too. Why, then, were its eyes not opened in the process? To answer this Marx would have to appeal to the first argument, about the bourgeoisie’s need to close a gap the workers need not close, and therefore what strength the third argument has depends upon the cogency of the first argument.
(4) The final argument involves a trend in Marx’s thought which cannot, perhaps, be considered dominant, and for this reason the argument has limited value even if it is valid. The premise is that when a class is secure in its position it needs no illusions. It needs them only when it is weak and firmly subjected, or when, although it is in power, its rule is threatened. Thus Marx declares that the economic theories of the bourgeoisie remain genuinely scientific as long as working-class opposition to capitalism is very feeble. But after 1830, when the capitalist order begins to be seriously challenged, “the death-knell of scientific bourgeois economy is sounded,” and economists become the “hired prize-fighters” of the ruling class.17
The opposite holds for the place of truth and falsehood in the career of the proletariat. This emerges in Marx’s assessment of the historical role of the Utopian Socialists who preceded him. He says that these men theorized when the proletariat was weak, and that they were for the most part visionaries who improvised fantastic schemes which an immature working class was willing to accept. But once the proletariat begins to feel and show its strength, it becomes possible for it to enlist a genuine social science as its ally.18
I have said that this trend is not dominant. Indeed, to speak strictly and candidly, it contradicts the Marxian thesis we have been investigating: that the doctrines of and for the workers are true. For on the view just expounded, the social thought of the bourgeoisie begins by being true and ends by being false, while the social thought of the proletariat undergoes the reverse development. But why, anyway, should the workers’ doctrine remain true? Presumably because there will be no section of society capable of challenging them once they begin to exercise hegemony. Therefore, as we probe the fourth argument, it reveals itself as yet another dependent of the first argument.
This ends the exposition of four arguments intended to show that if Marx’s theory serves and represents the working class, then it is reasonable to think it is correct. I now turn to Niebuhr’s accusation, which occurs in the introduction to his book Moral Man and Immoral Society:
No class of industrial workers will ever win freedom from the dominant classes [unless] … they … believe rather more firmly in the justice and in the probable triumph of their cause than any impartial science would give them the right to believe … [Only if they have these unwarranted beliefs] … will they have enough energy to contest the power of the strong.19
Niebuhr thinks that, in order to effect its revolution, the proletariat must be under two illusions. They must think their cause more just than the evidence suggests it is, and they must think themselves more likely to succeed than any objective observer would.
The second allegation is very strange. It says that in order to be victorious they must be more confident of victory than they have a right to be. But what is the proper verdict on their belief if it turns out that they are victorious? It must then be clear that their confidence was not excessively great. The criticism is paradoxical, for it says that the proletariat will prevail only if it has an unwarranted belief that it will prevail. The belief may be partly self-warranting, but this does not make it unwarranted: even a person who issues a self-fulfilling prophecy cannot be reproached with confusion about what is going to happen.
In advancing this objection, Niebuhr was missing an important fact about the relation of human thought to human action, a fact which Marx sought to accommodate in his idea of the unity of theory and practice. One aspect of this idea has been stressed in our time by Stuart Hampshire:20 that men can find a basis for their beliefs about the future not only by reviewing the evidence external to their intentions, but also in their own resolutions and decisions about what they are going to do. Marx would agree that part of what makes it certain that the workers will win is the fact that they intend to and therefore believe that they will. But if the belief that they will win helps them to win, in fact, it is difficult to stigmatize it as unwarranted.21
Still, Niebuhr was speaking about “impartial science.” And the question may be raised whether a belief that grows out of a resolution is based on impartial science. Answer: it is not based on impartial science, but it cannot be forbidden by impartial science either, and it is the latter consideration which is relevant, since Niebuhr spoke of what impartial science gives one the right to believe, that is, what it allows one to believe. And if Hampshire’s claims about thought and action are correct, no science can subvert them, however much it fails to confirm them. But Niebuhr’s submission is open to a more telling refutation still. For the impartial scientist observing social movement when the proletariat is making its revolutionary bid would himself have to treat as a datum its belief that it will succeed, and we have seen that Niebuhr grants critical efficacy to this belief, although he wrongly thinks it unreasonable. So the impartial scientist who takes account of the proletariat’s convictions will, on Niebuhr’s own authority, be able to predict reasonably that workers will succeed.
Niebuhr’s other claim is in no way paradoxical. In fact I think it is correct, but that it does not weaken the case which I have presented in this paper. The workers believe excessively in the justice of their own cause, if, for example, they imagine themselves utterly pure and the capitalists utterly wicked, but it is difficult to conceive how men engaged in a revolution against them can always avoid believing that they are. They can hardly shout across the barricades, “We have nothing against you personally.” Or feel great compassion for them while confiscating their property. The nature of revolution demands that those who make one experience strong feelings against those who resist them, and such feelings are bound to embody irrational beliefs about the villainy of their opponents.
So I grant Niebuhr his claim. But I think it fails to affect the thesis for which I have argued, because of a distinction which I now wish to draw. We have to separate the doctrine of a class, the theory which its advocates put forward, and with which its members associate themselves when they are disposed to theorize—we have to separate this from the passions and observations of the members of the class, which weigh with them in their nontheoretical moments. Even if the doctrine is to be regarded as expressive of the passions, it need not reproduce the errors embedded in them: it is one of the functions of expression to refine what it expresses.22
The distinction is not constructed simply to save the workers and Marx from Niebuhr’s criticism, since it holds for the thinking and feeling of all classes. Thus the ideology of the English bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century is contained in writings like those of Hobbes and Locke and Calvin, because the ideas of these men gave shape to the political behavior of that class. But the English bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century also had its narrowly emotional attachments and resentments, which would not normally be regarded as part of its ideology.23 Like the proletarians’, their emotions involved illusions, such as an ungrounded pride in their own spiritual worth. But in addition to such personal illusions of the heart, they had theoretical illusions, illusions of the head, and such, it has been argued, the proletariat lacks.
Now one might accept this distinction but complain that I have attributed too little significance to what I wish to call the personal factor. After all, does it not play a larger role in the worker’s daily life than his articulate theoretical consciousness does? Niebuhr is entitled to press this point, and indeed to maintain that the proletarian’s theoretical life is not only less vital than his personal life, but so marginal as to deserve no attention at all. But the same line of attack is not open to Marx’s tu quoque critic, since he must accept, for the purposes of his argument and his challenge, the Marxian view that classes have substantial theoretical lives, and that Marxism is the substance of the proletariat’s theoretical existence: only thus can he hope by his simple means to show that Marx’s theories are unscientific. We can acknowledge the force of Niebuhr’s point and still use the argument of this paper in support of the hypothetical proposition that if the workers have a theoretical life, there is reason to think it is a lucid one, And this is enough to silence the tu quoque critic.24
1 “A common argument against the validity of historical materialism and one regarded by bourgeois thought as decisive, is that the methods of historical materialism must be applied to itself.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 228.
2 In his essay “Der Funktionswechsel des historischen Materialismus” (“The Changing Function of Historical Materialism”) Georg Lukács replies to the critic in a manner which differs importantly from the one sketched here, and he too thinks he is speaking for Marx. He believes that Marx would be prepared to judge his own doctrine in the way he judged the best work of political economy, which he regarded as true for its time, but false insofar as it extended its claims to all human history instead of restricting them to men as they behaved on nascent capitalism (see Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, pp. 234–35). Lukács’s essay opposes vulgar Marxism, which in his view extends historical materialism in an analogously illegitimate way. Lukács counterclaims that the principles of historical materialism are very difficult to apply to precapitalist epochs (Geschichte, p. 238).
I do not think Lukács’s position is supported by Marx’s writings. I believe that in a curious way Lukács himself commits what Marx took to be the error of bourgeois economists. For he takes the notion of “economics” in a narrow, capitalist sense, and only by this means succeeds in restricting its explanatory scope. He himself seems to recognize this (see Geschichte, p. 247), but he does not appreciate the consequence of his usage: it separates him from historical materialism, within which terms like “economics” and “production” are applied not, of course, loosely, but liberally, the generality of the notions enabling Marx to theorize about all past history and not merely about capitalism, as Lukács would have it.
Lukács (Geschichte, p. 239) cites as evidence for his contention certain statements in Engels’s Origin of the Family. But the use he makes of these was refuted in advance by Plekhanov, in the course of his polemic against N. I. Kareyev and others (see The Development of the Monist View of History, pp. 167–70). Finally I must mention a passage in the first volume of Capital (Chicago edition, p. 93; fn. 2, Penguin edition, pp. 175–76), which explicitly and decisively rejects the sort of interpretation Lukács favors.
Lukács also attacks the vulgar Marxists for being aprioristic and unsubtle in their deployment of the base/superstructure category. Here, I believe, he writes in complete conformity with Marx, but he fails to distinguish this problem from the question of the scope of Marx’s theory.
In these footnotes I refer frequently to the Lukács of Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, since he was much exercised by the issues considered in the present paper, but treated them in a very different and much more exciting and interesting way. While I cannot adopt his approach, I find his work too impressive to ignore.
3 In some of the argumentation which follows, the claim that the workers will make a successful revolution functions not as a premise but on the contrary as a difficulty which Marx must surmount. The claim can sometimes be used by the critic and sometimes by Marx himself, and for this reason I impose it on the discussion: it serves to situate the debate.
4 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction, pp. 55–56 (in Early Writings, ed. Bottomore). I have made an innocent change in the tense of the first sentence, to suit the present context. This doctrine of revolution can also be found in the Eighteenth Brumaire, as is shown by the next passage quoted in the paper. See also Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 62–62, 313. See Lukács (Geschichte, pp. 209–10) for a variation of this conception.
5 This suggests a contrast with Hegel. For Hegel “nothing great has been achieved … without passion” (Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 23) and reason must cunningly employ passion in order to manifest itself. For Marx passion (interest) is historically impotent if unaided by reason, and unharnessed by some ideal. But even in Marx the economic interests which use ideals ultimately also serve to realize them.
6 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 248. Lukács also believes that the bourgeoisie requires self-deception: “Aber die Verschleierung des Wesens der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft ist auch für die Bourgeoisie selbst eine Lebensnotwendigkeit” (Geschichte, p. 78). (“But the veil drawn over the nature of bourgeois society is indispensable to the bourgeoisie itself” [History and Class Consciousness, p. 66].) But for him it is necessary not so much while the bourgeoisie is acquiring its hold over society but rather when its dominion is crumbling. The bourgeoisie must convince itself that capitalism is vigorous when manifestly it is not, for capitalism will be overthrown when and only when the bourgeoisie no longer believes in it. This correlation between class position and class consciousness is stronger, I think, than any Marx would wish to posit. See also fn. 17 below.
7 This suggests that for Marx some nonproletariat classes may not have ideologies in the full sense. See fn. 23 for an elaboration of this point.
8 For Marx’s remarks on the Germans, see Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, pp. 56–57. In his assessment of the German character, Marx follows Hegel, who charged the Germans with political idealism and a fixation on forms in his essay The German Constitution esp. pp. 147, 180, 190, 206, 238. Both saw the roots of this tendency in petty selfishness, world historical cowardice, and an inability to focus on anything except narrow privilege. German thought embodied universal principles: German practice endorsed a chaos of particular interests. But the Marxian echo is in fact a rejoinder. For although Hegel was aware of the futility of constitutional ritual, of the “philosophical illusion,” he shared with the French as Marx described them (The German Ideology, p. 51) the “political illusion.” He thought that a well-ordered state would bring salvation; a new polity, not a new society. He wanted a Theseus to bring this to Germany. Marx called for a proletarian class, with radical chains, enjoining it to unite and socialize Germany in a revolution to be heralded by the crowing of the cock of Gaul. But the bird was laryngitic, and Bismark usurped Theseus’s role.
9 But Lukács argues (Geschichte, pp. 83–85) that because there is a gap between the immediate interests and final goals of the workers, they too can suffer illusions. I shall not enter this important and essentially Leninist problematic, though some of my remarks on Niebuhr, below, are relevant to it.
10 This claim can be substantiated despite the fact that the workers produce in an inhuman way. See my “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” chapter 8 in this volume, especially section 1. For what follows in the text, see Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p. 58.
11 It could be argued that the human interests of capitalists, taken severally, are also served by the proletarian revolution. But it is class interest which is relevant here, and a class can have no interest in its own extinction.
12 Note that here suffering is being put to a use different from the one it had in the philosophical part of argument (1). There it was considered a reason for saying that the workers are typical of human kind; here it is a reason for saying that they have knowledge.
13 Hence Lukacs says: “[F]ür diese Klasse ihre Selbsterkenntis zugleich eine richtige Erkenntnis der ganzen Gesellschaft bedeutet” (Geschichte, pp. 14–15) and “Der historische Materialismus … bedeutet die Selbsterkenntnis der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft” (ibid., p. 235, emphasis in original. P. 182 is also very interesting in the present connection). “[T]he fact that a class [sc. the proletariat] understands itself means that it understands society as a whole” (History and Class Consciousness, p. 2) and “Historical materialism … means the self-knowledge of capitalist society” (ibid., p. 229).
14 See Marx, Early Writings, p. 208. The original is available in Marx, Die Frühschriften, p. 275.
15 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 250. See also Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 86, 229–30.
16 Cf. Lukács, Geschichte, p. 34: “[E]s für das Proletariat ein Lebensbedürfnis, eine Existenzfrage ist, die vollste Klarheit über seine Klassenlage zu erlangen.” See also pp. 80, 181. “[F]for the proletariat the total knowledge of its class-situation was a vital necessity, a matter of life and death” (History and Class Consciousness, p. 20).
17 Capital, vol. 1 (Chicago edition), pp. 17–19 (Penguin edition, pp. 96–98). See also Marx, The German Ideology, pp. 316–17. Lukacs (Geschichte, pp. 231ff.) tells a somewhat different story. For him early bourgeois ideology is robust and confident, and in that measure illuded about the ultimate promise of capitalist society. When capitalism begins to fail, disillusion and a more correct consciousness emerge. This does not really conflict with Marx, since the latter is thinking within the polarities science/apologetic, while Lukács is concerned with the polarities utopian confidence/despair. Obviously despair can lead to self-deceptive apologetic, while confidence can stimulate a scientific approach to at least some questions.
18 See The Poverty of Philosophy (Progress Press edition), pp. 112–13.
19 Niebuhr, Moral Men and Immoral Society, p. xv.
20 Especially in Thought and Action.
21 Lukács touches on the idea of knowledge gained through the resolution to engage in certain praxis. He poses the question how one can be certain that the workers’ revolution will succeed, and answers thus: “Für diese Gewißheit kann es keine ‘materielle’ Gewähr geben. Sie ist uns nur methodisch—durch die dialektische Methode—garantiert. Und auch diese Garantie kann nur durch die Tat, durch die Revolution selbst, durch das Leben and Sterben für die Revolution erprobt und erworben warden” (Geschichte, p. 55). “There can be no ‘material’ guarantee of this certitude. It can be guaranteed methodologically—by the dialectical method. And even this must be tested and proved by action, by the revolution itself, by living and dying for the revolution” (History and Class Consciousness, p. 43).
22 Note that the concession that the workers may have many false notions does not violate the argument on which this paper has relied: that the proletariat needs no false theory to play its world-historical role and that therefore its intellectual representative is free to devise a true one. I appeal principally to argument (1) because it is concerned with the way a class speaks to other classes, with the message it projects into the wide social world. This is where Marxian doctrine is to be located, and in this sphere self-involved passions are transcended.
23 The way in which Marx speaks about the Germans (see above) is evidence that he would agree with this restriction on what is to count as ideology. The Germans lacked an ideology because they remained at the subjective level. But what about The German Ideology itself? To what does the title of the book refer? To a set of doctrines developed in Germany, but not for the benefit of any German class. For the Germans were “the philosophical contemporaries of the present day without being its historical contemporaries” (Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p. 49 [emphases in original]). The German ideology did have a class association, but only on the other side of the Rhine. The Germans developed not their own ideology, but that of others. Hence Hegel, The German Constitution, p. 206: “The principle which Germany has given to the world it has not developed for itself, nor has it known how to find in it a support for itself.”
24 I am indebted to Isaiah Berlin, Steven Lukes, Alan Madian, John McMurty, and Richard Wollheim, all of whom commented helpfully on an earlier version of this paper.