A Rational Critique of Marxism and
Communism - XIV
(Selected from the book:
“Reason, Romanticism and
Revolution”
By M. N. Roy-2)
1.
“To attach class labels to ideas is evidently a false
practice. Ideas are created by men, and as such belong to the entire race, and
not to any particular class. They are, of course, not static; from the dawn of
civilization they have been in a continuous process of evolution, having been
influenced by the natural and social conditions under which various human
communities and classes lived in different parts of the world, in different epochs
of history. But ideas have their autonomy and a logic which is not dialectical,
but dynamic. Therefore, political doctrines of the bourgeois revolution,
theories of the classical capitalist economics and the principles of the
Hegelian philosophy could all go into the making of Marxism which called itself
the ideology of the proletariat, but the positive elements of which will
survive the proletarian revolution. Marxism was not a negation, nor a negation
of a negation, of the older ideas that it took over. Without those ideas there
could be no Marxism. Therefore, the laws of the dynamics of ideas cannot be
called dialectical.” (Pages:399, 400)
2.
“As against the “utopia” of the forerunners of Socialism,
Marx offered his “scientific Socialism. He criticized his predecessors because
they had no knowledge of the proletariat; that they built out of their
imagination fantastic pictures of a new social order that they appealed to
morality; that, in short, they did not have a philosophy of history. An
unbiased study of the pre-Marxian history of socialist thought shows that some
of the charges against the Utopians were simply unfounded. As regards the
charge of appealing to morality, they were guilty, but only from the Marxist
point of view. For rejecting that appeal, Marxism was doomed to betray its
professed ideas and ideals. The contention that “from the scientific point of
view, this appeal to morality and justice does not help us an inch farther”,
was based upon a false notion of science.” (Page: 405)
3.
“Marx distinguished himself from his predecessors by
declaring that he wanted to proceed scientifically; nothing was to be taken for
granted or deduced from preconceived notions. He would make inferences only
from the empirical laws of social evolution and forces of modern society. He
proposed to prove that Socialism was bound to come, as a “necessary product of
historical development”. The “evolutionary laws of history”, which enabled him
to found scientific Socialism and predict the inevitable advent of Communism,
was the Hegelian notion of progress through conflict. It was certainly not an
empirical law; it was a preconceived notion; and Scientific Socialism was
derived from it. As a notion, it belonged to idealist philosophy, even when
Marx’s imagination put it on its feet. The result was that “the picture given
at the end of Capital, Vol.1, answers
to a conception arrived at by speculative Socialism in the forties.” The
picture conjured up in the Communist
Manifesto is much more so. Marx had not yet hit upon his master-key of
economic determinism. Later on, to elaborate the philosophical presuppositions
of Marxism, Engels wrote that a particular economic phenomenon had already
ceased to exist “when the moral consciousness of the masses declares it to be
wrong.” The idealism of the dialectic method cannot be suppressed. Moral
consciousness is not an economic force. And Marxism, in so far as it was true
to the tradition of man’s age long struggle for freedom, could not get away
from the appeal to morality. Its historical significance lies in that fact. But
the much vaunted historical sense failed Marx when he ridiculed his
predecessors, and believed himself to be a prophet of immaculate conception,
possessed of the light of revelation.” (Page: 406)
4.
“The error, if not insincerity, of Marx’s rejection of the
earlier socialist thought is proved by the fact that his whole fight against
the German philosophical Radicals, who called themselves “true Socialists”, was
a defence of the utopianism of the French Socialists. The German Socialists,
whom the founder of scientific Socialism vehemently combated, characterized
pre-Marxian Communism as utopian and maintained that, as against the empiricism
of the French and English social reformers or revolutionaries, they reached
Socialism scientifically.” (Page:407)
5.
“In the same article, in which for the first time Marx
advanced the theory of the inevitability of the collapse of the capitalist
order and the advent of Socialism, he also for the first time advocated armed
revolution for the overthrow of the established State and the social system.
So, at its very conception, Marxism was self contradictory. If the decay and
disappearance of any social system was inevitable, a violent revolution for its
overthrow was palpably unwarranted. Conversely, if the change had to be brought
about by force, it was not inevitable. Because it could be prevented by the use
of superior force.”(Page:409)
6.
“Trying to combine rationalism, the view that history is a
determined process, with the romantic view of life which declares the freedom
of will, Marxist historiology contradicts itself. Not that the two cannot be
combined; they are combined in Hegel’s dialectics. The notion of progress is a
product of reason and romanticism. Nature is a rational system; so is society,
because it is a part of nature, social evolution being a continuation of
biological evolution. If the mechanistic view is not to be tampered with, then
neither a dues ex machina should be
allowed to wind up the clock of the evolution of the physical Universe, nor any
conscious effort of man is to influence the unfolding of social forces. And the
mechanistic view of the physical, biological and social evolutions is the very
essence of Materialism.” (Pages:409, 410)
7.
“The recognition of the decisive role played by thinking
man, that is to say, by ideas, in historical processes, runs counter neither to
the rationalist notion of progress nor to the mechanistic view of evolution.
The harmony between the rationalist conception of progress and the romantic
idea of revolution also takes place in the materialist philosophy, which is not
a negation of Idealism, but absorbs and goes beyond by tracing the roots of
ideas in the rational scheme of nature. The thinking man acts upon the process
of social evolution not as a dues ex
machine; he is an integral part of the process. The human brain is also a
means of production – of ideas, which motivate action to create history.
These philosophical implications of Marxism were not
clearly thought out by its founders. Therefore, the Marxist view of history is
vitiated by the contradiction between rationalism and the romantic notion of
revolution. With his rationalism, which is the essence of materialist
philosophy, Marx was a Humanist, and as such a romanticist. He combined, as
Heinemann wrote, “the righteous fury of the great seers of his race, with the
cold analytical power of Spinoza.” A different personality could not be the
prophet of revolution; because, any successful revolution is conditional on a
combination of thought and action inspired by a harmony of rationalism and the
romantic view of life.
The harmony is in the thesis that “philosophers have only
interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” This basic
doctrine of the Marxist philosophy of revolution is a legacy of Renaissance
Humanism, which saw the relation between history and philosophy. Inspired by
the humanist tradition, Bacon in his Advancement
of Learning emphasized on the necessity of shifting importance from precept
to application, from theory to practice, from philosophy to history. Bacon, at
the same time, was a rationalist, the exponent of inductive logic, which made
Newtonian mechanistic natural philosophy possible. Inspired by Bacon’s humanist
approach to history, Vico’s Scienza Nuova
unfolded the romatic vista of humanity creating itself. The relation that
connects Marx and Bacon can be traced backward through earlier phases in the
history of philosophy.” (Pages : 410, 411)
8.
“Dialectics is a rationalist notion; dialectical
Materialism, therefore, is a rationalist notion and a rationalist philosophy.
On the other hand, the appeal to violence, being an echo of the last phase of
the Great Revolution, is a romantic extravagance. The two aspects of Marxism
thus stand in the relation of thesis and antithesis. The synthesis is the
statement that “by changing the world, man changes himself”. In other words,
man’s ability to change the world, to expedite evolution through revolution,
and the moral right to do so, result from the fact that man is a part of
nature, which is a ceaseless process of change, a dialectic process, in the
Hegelian language. But the world is greater than the greatest of men; and will
always be so. Therefore, man’s ability to change it is limited by the axiom
that the whole is greater than its part. By disregarding this self-evident
truth, revolutionary activism becomes irrational and runs up against the law of
nature and the nature of man. Then, revolution only mars the salutary and
uninterrupted progress instead of being truly beneficial for mankind, as Godwin
warned.” (Pages:412, 413)
9.
“Owing to the Hegelian association of his adolescence,
Marx himself was not sufficiently aware of his spiritual ancestry. Under the
influence of the Hegelian dialectics, he rejected eighteenth century
Materialism as mechanical. At the same time, he disowned the humanist tradition
of the earlier advocates of social justice, ridiculing them as Utopians. Though
he thus believed that he was beginning from scratch, as the founder of a new
philosophy and the prophet of revolution, Marx belonged to the intellectual
lineage of Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Bruno, Gassendi, Hobbes, Holbach,
Diderot and Feuerbach, to mention only the most illustrious of them. His place
in the history of philosophy, therefore, is no less significant and honourable
than any one of his forerunners. Indeed, his contribution to the cause of human
freedom was greater, because he had the advantage of living in an age when
scientific knowledge could throw light on the old problems of philosophy.
To be able to offer a rational explanation of the world of
experience, and to avoid the pitfalls of mysticism, philosophy must be
monistic; monistic metaphysics does not preclude pluralism in the process of
becoming; and only a materialist metaphysic (irrespective of the change in the
concept of matter in physics) can be strictly monistic. Marx’s proposition that
consciousness is determined by being placed materialist metaphysics on a sound
scientific foundation. His subsequent thought, particularly sociological,
however, did not move in the direction indicated by the significant point of
departure. Marxism, on the whole, is not true to its philosophical tradition.
In sociology, it vulgarizes Materialism to the extent of denying that basic
moral values transcend space and time. With the impersonal concept of the
forces of production, it introduces teleology in history, crassly contradicting
its own belief that man is the maker of his destiny. The economic determinism
of its historiology blasts the foundation of human freedom, because it
precludes the possibility of man ever becoming free as an individual. Yet,
contemporary sociological thinking has been considerably influenced by the
fallacious and erroneous doctrines of Marxism which do not logically follow
from its philosophy.
In addition to the accumulated achievements of the agelong
struggle of metaphysics against dualism, philosophically, Marxism inherited
also the liberating tradition of Humanism. The two apparently conflicting
trends of thought – mechanistic naturalism and romantic Humanism – harmonized
in Feuerbach, who therefore could throw off the Hegelian influence more
completely than Marx. Nevertheless, in Feuerbach’s materialist Humanism, man
remains an abstraction, veiled in mystery, an elementary, indefinable category,
as simply given, to be taken for granted. The fiery prophet of social justice
in Marx was more a Humanist than a Hegelian. But his critical mind did not miss
the weakness of Feuerbach’s Humanism and realized the necessity of explaining
the being and becoming of man, if his sovereignty as the maker of his destiny
was to be empirically established. It was in search of a rational foundation of
the humanist view of life that Marx under took his analytical study of history.
At the same time, anthropology had discovered that the struggle for physical
existence was the basic human urge – a biological heritage. Marx identified the
primitive man’s intelligent effort to earn a livelihood with the biological
struggle for existence, and came to the conclusion that the origin of society
and subsequent human development were economically motivated. The point of
departure of the Marxist historiology was the mistake of confounding physical
urge with economic motive.” (Pages:418, 419)
10.
“For a considerable time after the origin of the species, homo sapiens were not moved by any economic
motive, but by the biological urge of self-preservation. He earned the means of
subsistence, and for the purpose devised primitive tools out of sheer physical
necessity. Anthropological research does not show any economic motive in the
human struggle for existence in the earlier stages of social evolution. What it
does show is that the struggle for physical existence provides stimuli for
mental development. Consciousness and other rudiments of mind are a biological
heritage antecedent to the appearance of homo
sapiens. Thus, further evolution is determined by the physical conditions
of the being and becoming of man. But economic determinism of history from the
origin of society cannot be logically deduced from that fact. In other words,
economic determinism is not a corollary to Materialism. Moreover, it is
antagonistic to Humanism, because it subordinates man to the inexorable
operation of the impersonal forces of production. In an economically determined
society, man is not a producer, but a means of production.” (Pages:419, 420)
11.
“Marx’s effort to place Feuerbach’s materialist Humanism
on a rational foundation led to the exactly contrary consequence. Feuerbach’s
mystic abstraction was replaced by an economic automation; and the abstract
conception was transferred from the debased man to society, which was endowed
with a collective ego.” (Page:420)
12.
“Marx’s failure to work out a sociology consistent with
materialist philosophy was due to his passion for social justice, inherited
from his humanist predecessors, though he disdained them as Utopians. Marx,
however, was not the dry-hearted mathematical prophet of history, as he has
been celebrated by his followers, and as he might have believed himself to be.
With a burning faith in revolution, he was a romanticist and as such a
Humanist. The idea of revolution is a romantic idea, because it presupposes
man’s power to remake the world in which he lives. If purposeful human effort
is left out of account, social development becomes a mechanistic evolutionary
process, making no room for sudden great changes and occasionally accelerated
tempo. As the prophet of revolution, Marx was a romanticist. He proclaimed his
faith in the creativeness of man which, accelerating the process of evolution,
brought about revolutions. Marx being a Humanist, the force of his theory of
revolution was its moral appeal. Even his critics, who do not depart from
objectivity, honour Marx for a passionate search for truth and intellectual
honesty. Without a moral fervor of the highest degree, without an intense
dislike for injustice, he could not undertake the lone fight to improve the lot
of the oppressed and exploited.” (Page:420)
13.
“In the absence of an adequate knowledge about the origin
of life, in the past, Humanism could not be placed on a rational foundation.
The advance of scientific knowledge since the middle of the nineteenth century,
while compelling certain revisions of mechanistic cosmology and materialist
metaphysics, contributed to the triumph of rationalist Humanism. The fact that
life is found to be associated with dead matter in a particular state of
organization connects man, through the long process of biological evolution,
with the background of the physical Universe. The supreme importance of man
results from the fact that in him the physical process of becoming has reached
the highest pitch so far. Humanism thus ceases to be a mystic and poetic view
of life. Based on scientific knowledge, it can be integrated in the materialist
general philosophy, and the latter, then, can be the foundation of a sociology
which makes room for human creativeness and individual liberty without denying
determinism; which reconciles reason with will; which shows that cooperation
and organization need not stifle the urge for freedom. Harmonised with
Humanism, materialist philosophy can have an ethics whose values require no
other sanction than man’s innate rationality.”(Page:421)
Reason,
Romanticism And Revolution
M.N.Roy
Ajanta
Publications India,
Jawahar
Nagar,
Delhi-110
007
