"A MIGHTY PROPHET"

(There are many references to Marx and a few whole entries devoted to him throughout this book, and a lot of what I wanted to say about him I have said already. There are just a few leftover bits and pieces for this section, and at least for now, until I have reorganized my Karl Marx material in the next stage of my work, this is how it will have to be.)

"Karl Marx was a mighty prophet." These words were uttered by the great George Bernard Shaw in a 1933 New York speech. Whether he was excessively exuberant or right on the mark is unimportant. What must be concluded from an objective review of Marx’s role in history is that he was among the most influential thinkers of all time, if not the most influential one.

Perhaps, the most practical way for me to reintroduce our old friend Karl Marx (1818-1883) to the reader is by quoting from Bertrand Russell’s Marx chapter of his History of Western Philosophy. I have already said so much of my own about Marx that at least my resort to Russell will offer something new. Here is Russell’s opening paragraph quoted in full:

"Karl Marx is usually thought of as the man who claimed to have made Socialism scientific, and who did more than anyone else to create the powerful movement, which, by attraction and repulsion, has dominated the recent history of Europe. (This was, of course, written in the 1940’s!) It does not come within the scope of the present work to consider his economics or his politics, except in certain general aspects; it is only as a philosopher and an influence on the philosophy of others, that I propose to deal with him. In this respect, he is difficult to classify. In one aspect, he is an outcome, like Hodgskin (Thomas Hodgskin {1787-1869} was an English Socialist already mentioned in a previous entry), of the Philosophical Radicals, continuing their rationalism and their opposition to the romantics. In another aspect, he is a re-vivifier of materialism, giving it a new interpretation and a new connection with human history. In yet another aspect, he is last of the great system-builders, successor of Hegel, a believer, like him, in one rational formula, summing up the evolution of mankind. Emphasis on any one of these aspects, at the expense of others, would give a false and distorted view of his philosophy."

Russell continues his overview of Karl Marx throughout the rest of this chapter, and because of its conciseness and critical merit I shall continue quoting excerpts from him:

"The stimulus to his work was always the hope of the social revolution,--- if not in his lifetime, then in some not very distant future… Marx like Bentham and James Mill, will have nothing to do with romanticism; it is always his intention to be scientific. His economics, admittedly, has been an outcome of British classical economics, changing only the motive force. Classical economists-- consciously or unconsciously-- aimed at the welfare of the capitalist, as opposed both to the landowner and to the wage-earner, while Marx, on the contrary, set to work to represent the interest of the wage-earner… he called himself a materialist, but not of the eighteenth-century sort. His sort, which, under Hegelian influence, he called dialectical, differed in an important way from traditional materialism, and was more akin to what is now called instrumentalism." (In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are useful instruments, whose worth is measured not by whether these concepts and theories are true or false, but by how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena. This explication is extremely close to the definition of a workable hypothesis, to which I myself subscribe, but only within the limited context of a hypothesis.) "The older materialism, he said, mistakenly regarded sensation as passive, and thus attributed activity primarily to the object. In Marx’s view, all sensation, or perception, is an interaction between subject and object; the bare object, apart from the activity of the percipient, is a mere raw material, transformed in the process of becoming known. Knowledge in the old sense of passive contemplation is an unreal abstraction, whereas the process that really takes place is one of handling things. “The question whether objective truth belongs to human thinking is not a question of theory, but a practical question,” he says. “The Truth, namely, the reality and power of thought must be demonstrated in practice. The contest as to the reality or non-reality of a thought which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.” And now here comes Marx’s well known, and much celebrated dictum: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the real task is to alter it.”

I think we may interpret Marx as meaning that the process which philosophers have called the pursuit of knowledge is not as has been thought one in which the object is constant, while all the adaptation is on the part of the knower. On the contrary, both subject and object, both the knower and the thing known are in a continual process of mutual adaptation. He calls the process dialectical because it is never fully completed (except at the highest stage, just as in Hegel!)."
Marx’s philosophy of history is a blend of Hegel and British economics. Like Hegel, Marx thinks that the world develops according to a dialectical formula, but he totally disagrees with Hegel as to the motive force of this development. Hegel believed in a mystical entity called Geist, which causes human history to follow the stages of the dialectic set forth in Hegel’s Logic. For Marx, matter, not spirit, is the driving force. But it is matter in a peculiar sense. For Marx, the driving force is really man’s relation to matter of which the most important part is his mode of production. In this way his materialism becomes economics.
Marx fitted his philosophy of history into a mould suggested by Hegelian dialectic, but there was only one triad that concerned him: feudalism, capitalism, and Socialism. Hegel thought of nations as the vehicles of dialectic movement; Marx substituted classes. He disclaimed always all ethical or humanitarian reasons for preferring Socialism or taking the side of the wage-earner; maintaining not that this side was ethically better but that it was the side taken by the dialectic in its wholly deterministic movement. He might have said that he did not advocate Socialism, but only prophesied it." (…Karl Marx was a mighty prophet!…)

Having said that, Russell immediately admits that this is not quite true. As far as I am concerned, Marx’s stance was rather disingenuous and manipulative. Infusing ethics into the equation would have reduced it to an expression of Marx’s opinion, whereas masking his actual opinion in the clout of scientific inevitability elevated his opinion to the level of an objective truth. Needless to say, once we have studied Marx’s ethics, it becomes quite obvious that he is ethically on the side of Socialism against capitalism, but in his scientific pronouncements he wishes to produce the strongest impression of objectivity, whereas there is nothing to be ashamed of, if his personal ethics just happens to be on the side of objective history…

There is another paragraph in Russell’s Marx chapter, which can be read unequivocally tongue-in-cheek:

"Considered purely as a philosopher, Marx has grave shortcomings. He is too practical, too much wrapped up in the problems of his time. His purview is confined to this planet, and within this planet to Man. Since Copernicus, it has been evident that Man has not the cosmic importance which he had formerly arrogated to himself. No man who has failed to assimilate this fact has a right to call his philosophy scientific."

What would Protagoras, that selfsame Man-is-the-measure-of-all-things-Protagoras say to that? I hope, he would appreciate Russell’s sense of humor and would not object to the joke, just as we are not going to say anything that might get us accused of not being able to see a joke where it stares you in the face. If we are to examine Russell’s linguistic skill here (“Considered purely as a philosopher…”), we shall see exactly the same riddle as Kierkegaard had posed in a previous entry: “Once you label me, you negate me!”

The key is thus not to label Karl Marx as purely a philosopher, that is, in the technical sense, as he is, like Kierkegaard before him or Nietzsche after him, a far more complex figure, standing on the intersection of several disciplines, and only from this combined perspective can he be viewed and judged. We can love or hate him as we please, but there is one thing that we cannot do, which is to deny him his greatness.