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glorify existing conditions has been overshadowed, in some cases, by the apparent counteraction of a directly opposite tendency. The vehement protests raised from time to time by otherwise well-disposed critics against some particularly disgraceful aspects of the existing social order, the occasional lapses of an exceptionally impressionable literatus into an entire negation of present society, and the equivalent pessimistic, ironic, or sceptical currents in contemporary bourgeois philosophy do not initiate a new phase in the development of modern social thought. All apparent expressions of an enhanced bourgeois "self-criticism," varying from the Freudian scientific analysis of the Civilization and its Discontents, to the inflation of such minor “discontents" into a Decline of the West, or a final Breakdown of Modern Civilization,1 rather serve the purpose of opening an illusory outlet to the feelings aroused in the lower strata of the bourgeoisie by their increasingly oppressed condition, or to the temporary hangovers befalling the entire class under the impact of a defeat in war or of a major economic depression. Such ideological phenomena, while purporting to express an increasing critical self-consciousness of bourgeois society, indicate only an increasing unwillingness on the part of the hitherto ruling class to understand its own social mode of existence as a specific entity. The essential futility of every attempt of contemporary bourgeois self-criticism appears most strikingly in the ideological repercussions, resulting from the periodic cycle through which modern industry runs. The alternate occurrence1 of an absolute denial and an equally absolute acceptance of the universal crisis, periodically repeating itself in the theory of bourgeois economists, along with the periodical recurrence of prosperity and depression, can best be regarded as being itself a secondary phenomenon of a given phase of the industrial cycle. The fact 1 Titles of recent books by Freud, Spengler, Briffault. 71 KARL MARX that bourgeois economists have not yet arrived at a "theory of the crisis," independent of the momentary fluctuations of the industrial process, only emphasizes once more a definite incapacity of present-day bourgeois society to grasp "specifically" the process of its own destruction. A critical investigation of the existing conditions of mankind which conceives of the imminent break-down of existing bourgeois conditions not as an absolute disintegration but as a transition from the present historical phase to a higher form of society can only be attempted and carried through in an unbiassed and consistent manner by the new social class produced by the bourgeoisie itself. 72 CHAPTER VI A NEW TYPE OF GENERALIZATION BEFORE we deal with the practical implications of Marx's critical investigation of existing bourgeois society, we shall discuss a strictly theoretical problem arising from the statements made in the preceding chapters with regard to the main methodological principles of Marxian science. How does that emphasis on "specification," which we have shown to be the very foundation of Marx's materialistic criticism and research, conform to the equally fundamental demand for some degree of generalization which is necessarily bound up with every attempt at a truly scientific statement, and is certainly recognized by Marx. As shown in the second and third chapters, Marx scornfully dismissed the superficial and arbitrary procedure of the bourgeois social scientists who described the various conditions of different historical stages in the terms of the same general concepts and thus "by a sleight of hand represented bourgeois conditions as unchangeable natural laws pertaining to society in abstracto."1 He was equally critical of that complete abstention from all theoretical generalization which is the idea vaguely aimed at by the Historical School and other irrationalists. As against both, he worked out a new type of generalization. Here again, Marx took his departure from the work of the idealistic philosopher Hegel. This latter too had rejected the abstractual procedure commonly applied by the social theorists as well as what he called the "conceptlessness" underlying the historical trends of the early 19th century. In opposition to both, he had posed another principle: That of the "truly general."2 The "general" as it appears in the most developed forms of
2 See Hegel, Encyclopedia, I, § 163, and Philosophy of Law § 24. 73 KARL MARX philosophical thought is, according to Hegel's terminology, dialectically identical with the "particular" and, indeed, with "individual existence." Or, as this Hegelian principle has been most succinctly recapitulated in a single sentence : "Truth is concrete." Of course, this highly paradoxical formula had not yet acquired with the idealistic philosopher that unequivocally realistic connotation which it was to assume later with Marx and such other dialectic materialists as Engels, Antonio Labriola, Plechanov, and Lenin. The new emphasis laid by Hegel on the subject matter of human thought as against its mere form was not meant as a materialistic adherence to the given external facts, but rather served as a starting point for a new and more refined form of the most daring philosophical abstraction. Philosophical thought, according to Hegel, is no more to be regarded as being a mere reflection, in the mind of the philosopher, of the concrete facts of an external world. It is, on the contrary, understood to be the most concrete existence itself, and to comprise within itself both the abstract concepts formed as a first approach to truth in ordinary practical and theoretical human thought, and the equally "abstract" forms of externally given "concrete" realities. Hegel's "concrete," then, by no means coincides with the sensually concrete of given experience and practical action. Factual knowledge was for him a means rather than an end. A faithful acceptance of the empirical data of nature and history was to prepare the ground for an idealistic reconstruction of the universe and thus to testify once more to the absolute precedence of the conceptual form over all external existence. Thus the real meaning of the Hegelian "concrete" was somewhat one-sidedly interpreted by that remarkable series of theoretical and practical leaders of the revolutionary proletarian movement beginning with Lassalle and ending with Lenin who looked at Hegel's philosophy as an essentially empirical method 74 A NEW TYPE OF GENERALIZATION of thought. The irremovable ambiguity pervading the whole of the Hegelian philosophy affects also his apparently realistic approach to "the concrete." If on the one hand he conceived of the philosophical idea as something other than an empty form and defined it as "that which is the concrete itself," he was equally ready to explain that he did not understand by the concrete "what is commonly understood by this term," but merely the speculative "concrete" resulting from idealistic philosophical thought. The theorists of abstraction proceeded to the formation of their general concepts by starting from the concrete of common experience and getting rid of its particular qualities by a method of successive elimination. The irrationalists believed that they could get hold of the concrete in an immediate manner. Hegel fancied that in his philosophy he had reached the concrete truth of the idea by starting from a first general concept and supplying the details by a successive adoption of the particular results of scientific research and historical development. Marx was the first to work out a rational type of generalization, different from the traditional conceptual procedures hitherto applied by the various schools of social, historical and philosophical thought, and more akin to the constructive procedures recently invented by the experimental scientists. With him, as shown by the examples discussed in the second and third chapters of this book, the "general" of the concept is no longer set up against concrete reality as another realm; but every "general," even in its conceptual form, necessarily remains a specific aspect of a mentally dissected part of the historical concrete of existing bourgeois society.1 Thus the unconscious and half-hearted self-criticism of bourgeois social science which had previously made its appearance in the Historical School and in Hegel, was finally transformed, by Marx, into an attack against both the ideas and the existence 1 See above, p. 29 et seq. 75 KARL MARX of the bourgeois order. The fixed abstractions of bourgeois science, which had long since ceased to serve as tools of a truly progressive thought and had degenerated into fetters upon the further advance of social knowledge, were now confronted with their present concrete existence. Hence, the previously established status of modern "civilized" society was deprived of its false halo ; and its underlying prose, the real conditions of life under capitalistic rule, could be freely contrasted with the germs of a new proletarian mode of existence. The "concrete," i.e., the real, social, economic, and class contents of existing society were confronted with their abstract conceptual form, and the as yet unformed substance of a new proletarian socialist and communist "becoming" was opposed to the fully determined forms of existing bourgeois "being." This is one of the "materialistic" tendencies of the new, revolutionary science of society. While bourgeois science defines the wealth of society as the "wealth of nations"1 or a "general property"2, and the State as a form of unity necessary for society, Marx does not deny the "abstract" truth of such statements. He simply adds that, under the prevailing "concrete" conditions, the wealth of a nation is the capital of the ruling bourgeois class and that, in the same way, the present bourgeois State is the political form of the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletarian class. In the same way, Marx does not question the "abstract" proposition that "all combined labour on a large scale, both in capitalist and socialist production, requires a directing authority, in order to secure the necessary harmony among the individual activities and to perform the general functions arising from the movement of the whole productive body as distinguished from the movements of its independent organs."3 He merely calls attention to the exploitation and despotism which the capitalistic direction of the social 1 See the title of Adam Smith's economic work: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the "Wealth of Nations." 2 See Hegel, Encyclopedia, III, § 524, and Philosophy of Law, § 199-200. 3 See Capital, I, p. 295.
A NEW TYPE OF GENERALIZATION labour process inflicts upon the wage-labourers subordinated to it, under the prevailing social conditions. While the bourgeois apologists compare the function of modern capitalistic management with that of the conductor of an orchestra, Marx compares the concrete forms in which, under fully developed capitalistic conditions, the command over the mass of workmen collaborating in a workshop is exercised in the name of the absentee owner through a whole hierarchy of managers, foremen, overlookers, etc., with the command of an army through its commissioned and non-commissioned officers. In spite of the apparent "freedom" of the labour contract there is, from a social point of view, no voluntary self-subordination of the army of workers to a supreme leadership necessary for the common good. "The capitalist is not a capitalist because he is a leader of industry. He becomes a commander of industry because he is a capitalist. Supreme command in industry is an attribute of capital, just as, in feudal times, supreme command in war and in the courts of justice was an attribute of the landed proprietor."1 Moreover, such uniformity of command exists in bourgeois society only for the single workshop within a system of social prod which as a whole, is neither planned nor directed, and barely balanced subsequently only by the competitive struggle of individual commodity producers. As a general rule, there is even an inverse relation between the authority exercised within the single workshop and the existence of a planned co-operation within the whole of a given capitalistic society. It is precisely the people most loudly extolling the wholesome results of an unconditional subordination of individual workers to the capitalistic "organization of labour," who denounce equally loudly every kind of deliberate control and regulation of the social process of production as an invasion of the inviolable property rights, liberty, and self-determining "genius" of the individual capitalist. "It is characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of 1 See Capital, I, p. 297. 77 KARL MARX the factory system can find nothing worse to say against every general organization of co-operative work, than that it would transform the whole of society into a factory."1 This whole process of confronting the abstract bourgeois concepts of State and Authority with the actual facts of the master and servant relationship growing directly out of the present-day form of capitalistic production, ultimately resolves itself into a transition to the new form of socialist production just struggling into being. While in bourgeois society the dead accumulated labour of the past rules as "capital" over present living labour, in communist society conversely, the accumulated labour of past generations will be but a means to widen, to enrich, and to further the existence of the workers.2 While the bourgeois social theorists, with so-called "general" concepts framed according to their usual abstractual procedure, ended by not grasping any real historical stage of social development at all, Marx, by his rational use of a new theoretical procedure conceived on the model of the dialectical principle of Hegelian philosophy, arrived at the unique form of generalization, which is in keeping with the most fully developed methods of modern experimental science. Bourgeois "sociologists," who apparently are concerned with society in general, remain entwined in the particular categories of bourgeois society. Marx, by analyzing the specific historical form of bourgeois society, attains a general knowledge of a social development far transcending that particular form. While the bourgeois theorists endeavour to proceed to an abstract general concept of "society" by a successive elimination of more and more empirically (i.e., 1 See Capital, I, p. 321. 2 See Communist Manifesto (MEGA, I, vi, p. 540). On the whole question of authority see Marx: Misère de la Philosophie (MEGA, I, vi, pp. 198 et seq.); Capital, I, pp. 294 et seq., 321 et seq.; Capital, III, ii, pp. 324-25,418; Engels: Eugen Dühring's Revolution of Science, and his article Dell' autoritá in Publicazione della Plebe, Lodi, 1873. See further Lenin: State and Revolution August-September, 1917), and Next Tasks of the Soviet Power, Report delivered at the session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Workmen's, Soldiers', Peasants' and Cossacks' Delegates, 29.4.1918. 78 A NEW TYPE OF GENERALIZATION historically) given data of bourgeois society, and thus often unconsciously retain just those features which happen to be the most singular ones, Marx is aware of the fact that the only possible way of comprehending the general concept, or the "law," of a particular historical form of society is through its actual historical change. Modern natural science no longer employs the old scholastic Aristotelian method. It no longer bases its generalizations upon an arbitrarily chosen common feature of a given number of objects which is thus constituted as a class of such objects. For instance, it does not proceed from the observation of falling stones to a general law of the fall of stones. It proceeds from the analysis of a single case observed in all its particularity, or rather from a single experiment carried out under exactly determined conditions, to formulate the general law of gravity which now, under varying conditions with correspondingly varying results, applies alike to falling stones, to stones at rest, and also to such other things as balloons, planets and comets. In the same manner an exact social science cannot form its general concepts by the simple abstraction of certain more or less arbitrarily chosen traits of the given historical form of bourgeois society. It must secure the knowledge of the general contained in that particular form of society by the exact investigation of all the historical conditions underlying its emergence from another state of society and by the actual modification of its present form under exactly established conditions. Only thus can social research be transformed into an exact science based upon observation and experiment. Just as in modern natural science the general law has no independent existence outside the collection of the particular cases covered by its application, so the social law exists only in the historical development through which a particular form of society proceeds from its particular state in the past to its particular state in the present and from that to the social forms brought about by its further change. Thus the only genuine laws in 79 KARL MARX social science arc the laws of historical change. The Russian reviewer of Capital,1 whose statements are quoted in part and adopted by Marx in the Postscript to the second edition, has most aptly brought out this realistic principle of the new Marxian science. He shows that Marx, in spite of the outward form of his presentation which, according to the reviewer, is "idealistic" in the German, i.e., the bad, sense of the term, "is in actual fact enormously more of a realist than any of his predecessors in the realm of economic criticism." Whereas in idealistic philosophical thought as well as in the ordinary abstract way of scientific thinking, the facts of a particular social state are compared with some "idea," Marx's criticism confronts a given fact "not with the idea, but only with another fact," and so, by the most exact possible study of each fact, represents the facts themselves as "different momenta of a development" confronting one another. While the old economists set up abstract general laws of economic life which were expected to apply equally to the past, the present, and the future, no such general laws of economic life are conformable to the principle of historical change, as established by Marx. In his opinion, on the contrary, every historical period has laws peculiar to itself. . . . As soon as life has gone through a given period of development and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins also to be controlled by other laws. . . . Nay, more, one and the same phenomenon is subject to entirely different laws as a result of the difference in the general structure of the social organisms replacing each other in the historical process, of the variation of their various organs, of the difference in the conditions under which they function, etc. Marx denies, for example, that the law of population is one and the same for all periods and all places. He contends, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... As productive powers move on in their development, so do social conditions and the laws gov- 1 See I. I. Kaufmann in Petersburg European Messenger, 1872. 80 A NEW TYPE OF GENERALIZATION erning them change. While Marx sets himself the task of investigating and explaining the capitalistic economic order from this standpoint, he merely outlines in strictly scientific terms the aim that every exact investigator of economic conditions must have in view. . . . The scientific value of such research lies in the disclosure of the particular laws which control the origin, existence, development, and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. Such, indeed, is the value of Marx's book. 81 CHAPTER VII PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
The only point which distinguishes the Marxist theory is that it represents the interests of another class and that it is conscious of its class character in a rational way, and not only in the delusive manner of a fascist or national socialist "mythology." "The theoretical propositions of the Communists express merely, in general terms, actual conditions of an existing class struggle, or of an historical movement going on under our very eyes." The representatives of liberal and democratic bourgeois science who naively assumed that this statement of the Communist Manifesto1 implied a surrender, on the part of the Marxists, of the claim to the theoretical truth of their ideas, resemble the theologians who 1 See MEGA I, vi, p. 538. 82 PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS regard every religion but theirs as the invention of men and only their own as a divine revelation. Materialistic criticism, which defines all theoretical truths as mere historical "forms of social consciousness," does in no way abandon the quest for theoretical truth, but only replaces the traditional concept of an absolute truth by a less ambitious and much more practical idea. Every truth, according to the Marxists, applies only to a definite set of conditions ; it is therefore not absolute but relative, not independent and complete in itself, but contingent upon external facts. To-day's truth, then, depends upon the existing mode of material production and the class struggle arising therefrom. But this new definition of truth in no way lessens, nay, it enhances, the strictness of the formal demands which must be fulfilled by a "true" proposition from the standpoint of materialistic science. What goes on here is only a repetition of the same process by which in the beginnings of bourgeois society, at first in the struggle of lay thought against the theological and metaphysical system of the Middle Ages, then in that of empiricism against all metaphysics, present-day "bourgeois" science was created. On the very threshold of the new age, Bacon, in his Novum Organum, which was to assist the emerging bourgeois science in the assertion of its new methods of empirical research, proclaimed the historical character of every science: "Recte enim veritas temporis filia dictur non auctoritatis”1 On that authority of all authorities, Time, he based the superiority of the finally emancipated new science as against the dogmatic tenets of mediaeval authorities. Yüklə 0,99 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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