How many care to seek only for precedents? How many fiery innovators are mere copycats of bygone revolutionaries? 1
Peter KropotkinI cleave to no system, I am a true seeker. 2
Mikhail Bakunin
Classical Marxism is built upon the theory of dialectics, the theory of knowledge, the Classical Marxist description of human nature, the theory of classes, and the Classical Historical Materialist theory of history. It is for use by revolutionaries who are attempting to understand and change the world. Based upon the last two chapters' criticisms and upon our own experiences with more recent Classical Marxist Leninist practice, there are a number of weaknesses we perceive whose roots we hope to now uncover:
1- Classical Marxism doesn't generate an organic enough understanding of racism, sexism, or even classism. These oppressive forms do not get a high enough analytic priority. At motivation and human interaction levels they are simply not well enough understood. As a result Classical Marxism doesn't help practitioners sufficiently with related strategic problems. It doesn't adequately predict or even explain sex, race, or even class related behavioral events.Of course we haven't yet given any evidence that these weaknesses really are endemic to Classical Marxist theory. However, on the basis of our study of Bolshevik practice and Classical Leninist strategy we've posited 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 above. And on the basis of our own experiences with modern Classical Marxist Leninists we've posited 1, 6, and 8. Keeping all these areas of potential weakness in mind as a guide, we will now look at the historical context of Classical Marxism, its basic tenets, and its usability in search of the roots of whatever weaknesses it does in fact turn out to have.2- Classical Marxism's level of abstraction is too high to deal well with a whole variety of important historical and day to day situations. While its largely implied methodology is well suited to studying historical contours, it is not so well suited to studying the dynamics of separate institutions, groups of people, or even of revolutionary tactical plans or revolutionary acts themselves. Classical Marxism relegates too much that is critical to the category 'accident of history' or to the non-theoretically supported common sense of its users. While giving brilliant broad outline understandings of macro trends it leaves out or even misleads about too much that is relevant to day-to-day local practice. It is not applicable in constructive enough ways to small scale but still critically important situations. Its methods are better suited to understanding decades than days; and when applied to the latter lead to error or confusion just as often as to success.
3- In line with point two, Classical Marxism says very little about revolutionary organizational dynamics, bureaucracy, violence, and the adverse effects of severe discipline. It says very little about how revolutionary efforts affect their own initiators. Indeed it says very little about how any relations of production, be they those of the revolutionary party or those of the bourgeois factory, affect workers 'functioning within them. Further, in paying little attention to the effects of relations of production on producers, Classical Marxism also says very little about contradictions between varying relations of production and even within a given set of relations in a given mode. It focuses instead almost entirely on the more economic contradictions between growing forces and fettering relations.
4- In fact, though Classical Marxism says people of any one class will either share a consciousness or gravitate towards sharing one, it says little about precisely how such processes occur, and even less about how they might be propelled or why they are frequently hindered. In what it does say it sticks pretty much to issues of material well being, minimizing the obviously also important issues of authority, race, sex, and even age. With reference to the Proletariat, for example, Classical Marxism says very little about how their consciousnesses change on the road to socialist awareness, or when they reach it, and it doesn't go very far in explaining the actual tendencies in concrete initial proletarian consciousnesses that foster or that hinder revolutionary possibilities.
5- Classical Marxism focuses so much on classes that it tends to forget individuals, both as components of classes and other groups, and as separate people unto themselves. For Classical Marxists the statistically expected (but often not forthcoming) average over the whole large group becomes the reality, while the real underlying basis, the social individual person both alone and in concert with other individuals, somehow largely disappears. Statistical expectations become dogma and the individual realities that could set them right become lost to sight. The focus of attention never swerves from the mass; it becomes dehumanizingly large, abstract, and often even alienated from real people's real personal needs and desires.
6- Thus Classical Marxism is generally narrow in its understandings of the forces lying behind class struggles; it says little about the many forces entering into the formation of class consciousness and class interests. It does not deal at all adequately with the dynamics between relations of production and the consciousnesses of producers. It doesn't really explain how or why ruling class ideologies are at least in part adopted and defended by non-rulers, it doesn't even really explain how they are adopted by rulers. It doesn't explain how or why they are so deeply rooted, and it doesn't explain why workers often become oppressors and often even support their own enemies. It gives a solid explanation of why workers should revolt but it doesn't say why, in concrete situations, they will or they won't. In general Classical Marxism simply doesn't translate awarenesses at the material level to awarenesses at the consciousness and behavioral levels well enough for proficient strategizing.
7- Classical Marxism doesn't adequately explain third world revolution, or even the history of Russia since 1905.
8- Classical Marxism gives an inadequate view of the dynamics of advanced capitalist societies. It is weighted too heavily to the economic, not comprehensive enough, and not convincing enough. It does not predict well enough. It does not understand the actual variety of day-to-day life or even of the more subtle aspects of long term living. It does not provide guidance for local work or tools well suited to fully analyzing a local situation's dynamics. It does not allow for an understanding of people's thoughts and emotions and so it does not sufficiently help one evaluate potential effects of alternative tactical approaches. It does not understand the factory well enough in its day-to-day functioning, and hardly understands many of society's other institutions and dynamics at all -- thus the family, the athletic institutions, the media, the state, and so on.
9- And finally, when used by real normal active people, Classical Marxism becomes dogmatic, exclusionary, and self-defeatingly blinding. It has nothing within itself to offset modern day tendencies towards polarizing and over-abstracting, and dogmatizing -- and indeed we might even expect to find some aspects within it that foster these tendencies. Thus Classical Marxism in action suffers from all the theory's problems and then some, due to harmful dynamics between practitioner and theory.
Classical Marxism developed in the context of scarcity, the need to overcome metaphysics, the need to have a revolutionary transfer of power, and the need to counter bourgeois liberalism. The backward political, psychological, and technical awarenesses of its times are responsible for many of its weaknesses. For example, as we already saw in the 'presentation' chapter, the more varied Marxist understandings of human behavior, need, and thought never made it into the pragmatically oriented Classical theory precisely because there were no psychological awarenesses sufficient to give them any practical concrete implications for strategy or even for analysis.
Marx was thus highly aware of all kinds of human needs while Classical Marxism as an ideology of practical revolution is not. For in practice as opposed to rhetoric, it recognizes only material needs backed up by scarce conditions, competition, or forceful exploitation. It almost completely ignores human potentialities related to fulfillments more than to survival, precisely because it contains no meaningful ways to incorporate the former, no ways to understand how they affect behavior and consciousness, and thus no ways to understand how they affect revolutionary potentials. These weaknesses, rooted in some sense in the scientific lacks of Marx's age, have still to this time been hardly at all rectified, at least insofar as practical application of theory is concerned, and will thus certainly demand considerable amounts of our attention.
Similarly Marx understood the inevitability of imperialism but he did not fully understand, nor could he have, the depths of capitalism's abilities to reorganize itself in the face of its own weaknesses. He couldn't foresee the ways contradictions could alter over time, nor the ways in which they could be continually re-resolved through displacement into new spheres with new defining characteristics. Working in a time of relative scarcity when it seemed quite clear that the driving motivations for revolution would be survival needs, Marx laid his main emphasis on the revolutionary potentials of the continually more and more impoverished working classes. He did not and could not fully foresee the effects of economic growth on diminishing the previous overriding importance of material needs, while increasing the influence of power, sexual, racial, community, identity, ecological, and other such 'higher' needs. In Marx's context there was no obvious impetus to fully understand the inner dynamics of racism or sexism (at least none for a white male to do so); there were no on-going forces pushing him to such understanding or to an understanding of the revolutionary potentials of women or minorities. Classical Marxism reflected and still reflects these biases.
Further there was no obvious impetus for Marx or Engels to carefully analyze their own motivations -- they were right and that was that. The times did not fully recognize the absolute corruptibility of all people's thoughts, and so the times did not make Marx adequately self-critically cautious. Moreover, the times did nothing to suggest that the theory itself should have self-critically cautious dynamics of its own.
Since Marx opposed the decentralization of his time, since he felt that scarcity was the main factor of revolutionary motivations, and since he opposed the power of the bourgeoisie, he constantly emphasized the need for centralization and discipline among workers. He didn't foresee that motion in exactly the opposite direction would eventually be far more important. He developed a theory that revolved around the working class potentials of his own time (or at least his perceptions of those potentials); he ignored the need to analyze the intellectual dynamics of revolutionaries themselves -- people who in a manner of speaking lived outside of class constraints. He didn't understand, or at least could in no way pragmatically deal with needs for theories of 'micro' rather than just aggregate motivations. His theory, at least as it was taken by the Classicists, was thus understandably narrow. It took off from a desire to explain only what was necessary for a revolutionary transfer of power. It didn't address needs to overcome all authoritarianism, and it didn't address itself very deeply or clearly to the nature of the society that revolution was going to create. While talking about power at the top it didn't talk enough about power throughout societies and especially in their productive and other institutional relations. It didn't talk enough about revolutionaries' given weaknesses resulting from their various backgrounds and it didn't talk sufficiently or convincingly enough about a newly revolutionized society's potential strengths.
Classical Marxism understandably but incorrectly thinks that revolution is motivated by material needs and consciousness of material oppression alone -- not by other needs and by political consciousnesses of new alternatives as well -- and so it is quite content in leaving descriptions of future social forms to the future.
In the seventies and perhaps for a long time past this has been a serious error. People are not suffering so much that they are motivated to move from pain alone (have they ever been?) or even from pain and an awareness of that pain's unjustness. They want to know precisely what radicals are suggesting and precisely how new programs will affect their lives. They will not be motivated to risk by need alone, but only by combinations of need and desire both resting on deep political insights about present conditions and about future possibilities. Modern citizens won't trade their present positions for new ones that are substantially the same (or unknown) save for the costs of transition. The whole context in which Marx thought about revolution is very different from our own. The analysis of revolution from feudal class society to bourgeois class society in times of scarcity is certainly not a good jumping off point for developing a theory which can help modern activists understand their present realities fully, engage in revolutionary activities based on their own needs and expectations, and aimed at meeting all and not just a few of those needs and expectations.
But what is most striking and what we must come to understand most clearly is how the dictates of Marx's historical context manifested themselves in the roots of his theory and thus pervaded its later interpretations; and how they manage to persist in those interpretations (for use) throughout the years rather than being altered as new insights grew. This means we must turn to Classical Marxism's dialectics, theory of people and knowledge, and theory of history, in search of the manifestations already suggested, as well as of possible explanations for why such weaknesses were never rooted out. (We should be very clear here lest the reader rebel in justified anger. We are not implying that Marx's original efforts had all the weaknesses we attribute to Classical Marxism, but rather, as we have already said often before, that it had many wider, better insights, which were left behind by those who were looking only for a core theory with immediate use value, and that even Marx's own practical suggestions were tinged by his inability to translate implications from many of his more important, more flexible awarenesses. Further, when we say 'never rooted out', we mean out of the body of thought that still exists called Classical Marxism Leninism. We are perfectly aware that many scholars, and a few activists have gone beyond such weaknesses in their own more flexible and better interpretations of Marx's work -- and that those people who are trying to create a new consciousness for the seventies are frequently Marxists who have gone well beyond the kind of weaknesses this book finds in Classical Marxism, and who indeed share the bulk of our criticisms of it and are even implicitly employing such a set of criticisms in their present efforts.)
As we've seen, the Classical theory of dialectics is essentially implicit. It is confined to understanding historical motion; it looks solely at contradictions insofar as their resolutions intimate or in fact demand the dissolutions of their constraining historical systems. Our criticism is directed not so much at any outright error in this approach, as at its narrow inadequacy and at its tendency to mislead further analysis.
The method focuses practitioners on broad aspects of history's propensities towards major change and on epochally critical struggles enmeshed within those propensities. It overthrows the 'progressivisms' and 'metaphysicalisms' that continually thwart revolutionary analyses but there is considerable 'side cost.'
The practitioner, insofar as he or she uses the methodology, focuses on broad tendencies to historical change. He or she looks for contradictions that throw up the conditions of dissolution of whole societies. He or she looks for imminent change. The methodology orients his or her attention and strategic thought away from considerations of smaller scale relations, away from considerations of changes that are not dissolving of past totalities, and away from considerations of tendencies toward prolonged continuities.
The dialectician, as Classical Dialectician, indeed focuses admirably on historical revolution but at a great cost. Attention swerves from and methodology is insufficient for other issues of smaller scale changes and tendencies towards absences of change. Thus the Classical dialectician hardly ever moves to analyze questions of party change or party tendencies not to change, questions of class changes or class tendencies not to change, and so on. The question "Why will one society eventually transform its nature?" is at least seemingly comprehensively asked and analyzed. The question "Why doesn't it happen more quickly?" or "Why hasn't it happened at all in near the proportions we expect?" are not so well asked, discussed, or answered. And similarly, the posing and answering of questions about day-to-day tendencies toward change or stability at local levels, in workers, in party members, and so on are also not so well asked or dealt with -- and in any case to the extent that they are, the methodology used lies outside the Classical theory itself.
Thus the classical dialectical method is weak due to narrow applicability and one sided (change as opposed to stability) orientation. We might now suggest, in anticipation of the rest of our analysis, that those biases will show up in varying forms throughout the theory, and thus help explain many of the weaknesses outlined, one to eight, above. However, consider its theory of human nature. For certainly it is reasonable to guess that some of its narrowness in tactical analysis and in understanding racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and its so-called accidents of history, likely stem from basic weaknesses in its understandings of human nature.
But here again we should include our oft repeated proviso: we will not critique the most general Marxist understandings of people and their potentials. Rather, we will examine that understanding that was most easily translatable to pragmatic results, and thus that understanding that was taken from Marx's wider body of thoughts precisely for its pragmatic usability, and not that understanding that was deeper and more subtle but unable to be immediately translated into concrete theoretic and strategic results.
Classical Marxism emphasizes that human nature is not innate but transitional -- that it is determined by environment and individual history, and that it changes and develops as productive modes change and as man's interrelations with nature change. We could agree easily enough if these views were applied only to human personality or character structure. When one goes further, however, as the Classical Marxists do, the picture becomes sorely lacking for its excess simplicity.
Classical Marxism doesn't describe human nature fully enough. It, abstracts out too much that is critically important. That this occurs because of needs to counter metaphysics and because of lacks of psychological ideas for dealing with more complete views is at least a viable justification for the weakness occurring in Marx's time, but not a full critique of that weakness and its effects, and with reference to our own present efforts, certainly not a justification at all.
People often doubt the legitimacy of the question "what is man?" in its general form. This question, they say, is sometimes posed by certain philosophies, but it is a false question and it cannot be asked by Marxism. Different special sciences explore different aspects of man's activity; no aspect remains unexplored; and all "special" sciences together give a complete picture of man. On the other hand, man in general, man as such, does not exist; there is only a concrete man of a concrete society; slave owner or slave, landlord or serf, bourgeois or worker.If people can be greedy, that must be an internal potential; if they can be bourgeois, then that must be a potential; and if they can be socialist, that too must de a potential. Human character structure is as much a 'product' of the interactions of human nature as it is innately at birth and in the genes, with its environment. To what extent there are innate traits or drives or tendencies is still an open question but that there is in a person something given which then interacts is known, and that that given is something more than just an empty slate is also known. And finally, that such assertions in no way contradict materialism is a direct and obvious result of the fact that 'people at birth' are not ideas or products of ideas, but material entities caused in the first place by material rather than idealistic interactions. Saying that people have as part of their reality a given-at-birth nature, including two arm-and legness, bilateral symmetry, a powerful but not too powerful brain, and other more psychological features is by no means the same as saying that autonomous ideas create realities.Man is not, however, the sum total of his parts or aspects, but an integral being; and no special science does or can answer the question of what he is as an integral being, that is, what makes him man and each of his activities or aspects human. Although man is not always and everywhere the same, although he historically changes, there is something that allows us to call a proletarian as well as a capitalist, a landlord as well as a slaveowner, a man. 3
Human character structure changes over small time spans precisely because human nature is complex and contains many potentialities. Human beings are like all other systems, not simply slates upon which external causes can have any and all effects. They have on-going internal natures at the basis of their changing personalities. And those natures include biological constitutions, given needs, tendencies, and creative potentials, and perceptual and cognitive apparatuses. Social, political, and economic interactions in the real world from birth on are the cause of any moment's personality, but human nature is the basis for it. And further, human nature evolves over long time periods -- it too is 'material' and not somehow outside the processes of reality. Over the long haul human nature and human interaction with environments each cause and are affected by the specific character structures endemic to changing time periods.
Although it is unnecessary for our critique, perhaps we can go a bit further in trying to say something about what the knowledge of human nature is needed for, and about what it might be like. Wilhelm Reich worked hard on precisely these questions and decided that the main purpose of the psychological model was to explain the mediations between the economy and its people, and to explain precisely how it is that "ideas form themselves in people's heads." 4 Further, he felt that the psychological model was the only way to explain the "irrational ways of behavior (such as every kind of religion and mysticism)... because psychoanalysis alone is capable of investigating the instinctual reactions of the unconscious. But it can do this in the right way only if it does not merely 'take account of the economic factors', but is clearly aware that the unconscious structures which are reacting irrationally are themselves the product of historical socio-economic processes, and that, therefore, they cannot be ascribed to unconscious mechanisms as opposed to economic causes, but only viewed as forces mediating between social being and human modes of reaction." 5
It seems reasonable to agree with Reich that a knowledge of human nature, or what he calls the psychology of human behavior, is essential to an understanding of how people form their consciousnesses, how they, react in changing circumstances, why they have the personalities they do, and how those personalities might change with time, or be affected by varying revolutionary policies. It is thus critical knowledge for understanding how events affect people's behaviors and their personalities, and of course that is the critical calculation of the revolutionary policy maker.
In trying to augment Classical Marxism with a psychological insight Reich postulates a model in which human nature has two essential attributes, the instinct for self preservation and the instinct for sex, and in which these two needs interact with the environment by way of man's mental and bodily facilities, to co-motivate all of his behavior. And even this 'simple' model was enough different from Marx's total 'relativism' to lead to results that were significantly new enough for Reich to be thrown out of the party for espousing them. Nowadays it seems a little more reasonable to go somewhat further than Reich and say that people have innate tendencies to need food, shelter, safety, sex, self-esteem, companionship, knowledge of their environment, and the fulfillment of these innate capacities for expression, and that all these 'needs' interact with one another and with external causes to create the multiplicity of human personalities that exist throughout history and throughout any given society.
But far short of the above statement, even just admitting the existence of something called human nature which changes over evolutionary time spans, and admitting that it's important to understand because such understanding would help us explain personality, consciousness, and motivation, is a big step from the Classical Marxist approach. It leads to a more balanced, broader theory and it opens up a difficult problem that we only barely began dealing with in the above paragraphs: what is human nature, how much of a factor is it in personality, and how do its various aspects struggle and interpenetrate with one another and with external causes?
Classical Marxism's extreme abstractness about psychology and its ignorances about human nature are at the base of its greatest weakness: its inability to cope with psychological aspects of either oppression or liberation and its resulting tendency to overemphasize the 'material' side of things, thus incorrectly understanding dynamics of human interactions, human consciousness, and human motivation, and thus even of human political struggle.
As we've seen, Classical Marxism, as a theory used by pragmatists who require concrete analyses, regards people almost totally in context of their needs for material sustenance -- in the prevalent formulations there is little mention of other needs or desires or of the paramount importance of sex and race or for that matter ego and self-image. The theory of alienation, again as we've mentioned earlier, arises only with the description of capitalism and on a basis of the more varied Marxist humanist insights into human behavior. It plays only a small role in Classically oriented theory, strategy, or practice. That Marx was more aware than Classical Marxism is clear enough. The critical point, as we've suggested elsewhere as well, is that while the whole body of any Marxist's thoughts contain much about racism, general human behavior, et al, the practical core of it that actually guides activity does not: there is an absence of a useable theory of behavior and consciousness that can translate observations at the psychological, personality, need levels into concrete prescriptions at the practical level. Regrettably over time the reason has been pushed to the background and the effect has gained independent life -- the Classical Marxist view of human nature, as narrow as it is, and as obviously a product of intellectual lacks as it is, is nonetheless held up as truth and even defended against critical improvement: thus the extensive length of this part of our discussion.
Perhaps a new view of people and history would take the position that instead of being passive recipients of their character structures, people are active engagers in a process that creates character structure from a combination of internal human nature and external social cause. Perhaps it would assert that innate human needs, desires, potentials, and weaknesses are just as instrumental in unfolding history as are material and productive dynamics. It might find that the former provide the basis for change and the latter the cause, and that that was true not because of some metaphysical postulation but because of the real interrelations between people and their environments. The new view would still be materialist precisely because people's innate natures are part of the real material world just as much as anything else is, but at the same time it would be altered from an old approach stressing the dominance of material production, to a new approach stressing the interrelated causal and effectual framework formed by the interactions between human nature and the fulfilling/oppressing characters of productive and social organizations.
In any case it is fair to make the minimal assertion that if the rest of * our study shows that Classical Marxism's psychological narrowness is a severe debit, then attempts to build a new ideology with a broader psychological model would be a good thing, to the extent that it could show up such weaknesses, at no new costs.
We should now consider the Classical Marxist theory of knowledge in the light of our overall intuitions about Classical Marxism as a whole, and in the light of our analysis of the Classical Marxist view of human nature, and finally also in the light of our own modern insights into the problems of consciousness formation. For given our earlier analyses of Classical Leninist strategy and practice and our recognition of Classical Marxism's inability to understand and prevent sectarianism, or to say much about the formation of oppressor and oppressed consciousnesses, it is reasonable to think we'll find some weaknesses in its root conceptions concerning consciousness formation.
To review: Classical Marxism says knowledge derives from practice, guides it, and is either verified or transformed by it. It says production is at the root of people's consciousnesses but it doesn't say much about precisely how. It doesn't go into details of how productive influences manifest themselves in consciousness and thus overlooks the extents to which they often do not. It doesn't tell how emotional needs, creative potentials, previously arrived at knowledge, and previously adopted thought habits all subjectively affect new perceptions and analyses. It doesn't deal sufficiently with the ways people's subjective weaknesses affect their consciousness formation processes.
Like the classical dialectical methodology, the classical understanding of consciousness formation sees the forest, or at least one aspect of it, but directs attention away from the trees, thus often completely misunderstanding the interrelation. It overcomes many idealist errors but in doing so pays only lip service to the fact that thinking is a process involving on-going interactions between various aspects of people's natures, of their personalities, and of the contexts or things they're thinking about. It overlooks the fact that each contributes to the resultant knowledge and that each is somewhat changed by the contributory process. It correctly recognizes that people's consciousnesses are largely determined by interactions with their environments, but it overemphasizes the import of purely production related environments, and underestimates the import of human nature and personality in both affecting and impeding final results.
Human nature and previously developed personality provide the basis for human changes and external effects provide the causes. Perception, the process of thought, and the development of theory are human changes that are based on people's natures and personalities and are bounded by their interactions with their environments.
Beyond its 'narrowness' problem there is a very simple fact that Classical Marxism doesn't seem to adequately understand. "Practice, knowledge, practice" is a far from fool proof approach to consciousness development. Sometimes it leads to good results, sometimes and perhaps even more often than not, it leads to a kind of perversely correct result which is in fact unrelated to the whole truth or to human welfare. For example, capitalist practice usually achieves its ends but in no way leads to a full understanding of reality -- it simply functions in a peculiar constricted environment where its inadequacies go 'unnoticed'. Classical Marxists probably understand this phenomenon on some level but they have never developed that understanding to its fullest or incorporated the results into their theory. For if they did they would understand Classical Leninism's authoritarian drawbacks much more than they do. The explanation for the lack lies in the coupling of vested interests, authoritarian personalities, and narrow constraining methodology.
Therefore we have two criticisms, each of which suggest that the Classical theory of knowledge is not aptly suited to understanding the pitfalls of human perception and thought. First, it does not understand the ways people subjectively alter perceptions and thoughts to fit needs, and second, it does not understand that oftentimes wrong or at least narrow knowledge can lead to successful practice and therefore go uncorrected over time. These root weaknesses explain at least something about why Classical Marxism in use is almost always sectarian.
Further it seems not unreasonable to say that in certain circumstances useful ideas might even be 'latent' in people due to the material basis all people have in reality. In such cases ideas might be released from inside us rather than adopted or constructed. In any case ideas are not products of human thought alone; various aspects of human nature and character structure always enter into the process. A person's world view depends a good deal more on his or her upbringing and social situation than on just job, class, or even past work experience, though of course these are all critically important too. In any repressive country men have different consciousnesses than women and Blacks have different consciousnesses than whites. Even in a class or caste there can be vast divergences in the ways people view things. One cannot just abstract out as relatively unimportant the non-class related factors, as Marxists tend to do. In Classical Marxism there is, despite all protestations, an excessive and unhealthy overemphasis on the productive realm.
Further, consciousness actually changes in a variety of ways. Sometimes an individual acquires new views through introspection, or even spontaneously when all his or her old ones are severely undermined and conditions favor free human development and the strengthening of what were previously only latent ones at other times education or changing conditions, or new experiences weaken old ways or enforce new ones, and so on.
In any case a good understanding of knowledge would have to include an awareness of all the ways that subjectivism affects consciousness, all the ways that ideas are held and why, all the ways that they can be changed and why, all the ways that they affect behavior and vice versa, and all the ways that all these things occur both in groups as well as in an individual. Classical Marxism accomplishes very few of these tasks and as a result doesn't understand the dynamics of subjectivism or of consciousness change. Thus it is very weak with regard to adapting over time, seeing its own subjective inadequacies, and understanding how events affect people's views and behavior.
Marx said that it is not men's consciousnesses that determine their existences but, on the contrary, their existences that determine their consciousness. What we've been suggesting is that it is not the consciousness of people that determines their being or vice versa, but on the contrary, it is both which, through their interaction, determine each other and only then in the contexts of their whole on-going histories.
People and their beliefs are not abstractly outside the economic and social systems that are torn by contradictions, but in fact, are an integral part of those systems, a part whose own potential is one of the determining factors in the nature of the whole. And thus we tend to agree with Paul Cardan's remarks in the Solidarity pamphlet History and Revolution:
The famous phrase about "consciousness lagging behind reality" is no more than a phrase. It represents an empirical assertion, valid so to speak for the right half of any phenomenon and false for the left half. 6In our view, effects of consciousness on history are not so clearly secondary to history's effects on consciousness. Further, influences of production in consciousness formation are not so obviously always in accord with or dominant over other socialization influences, family influences, race or sex influences, and so on. For us the awareness that might logically arise out of any one set of relations can be easily forestalled or at least altered by the effects of the other sets even when the first set is productive and the latter only familial or otherwise superstructural. Finally we expect that to understand such dynamics one must understand the totality of people's active needs and their relations to perception and behavior rather than simply their material needs and their effects. Thus we can say that because the Classical Marxist theory skimps in its understanding of human need and behavior, and because it focuses dogmatically on mode-of-production dynamics, it overlooks many sides of the process of human consciousness formation and subsequent use.
Finally, we can also point out that the Marxist theory of knowledge underestimates the importance of secondary information gained by the analysis of the experiences of others. People in 'backward' countries often learn from the experiences of people in more 'advanced' countries. People can and often do transcend the intellectual content of their personal environments by reading about other people's environments. The interaction of ideas found in books and in intrinsic dynamics of human nature and need can lead people to world views that go far beyond those they might be expected to have, both in richness and in depth of knowledge. Further, it is even possible for people to make very educated guesses about conditions that no one has actually experienced.
People have latent intellectual and other potentials due to their material make-ups and their evolutionary development, and these can be uncovered or thwarted by any of many different processes. We agree with Cardan when he recognizes the importance of living ideas: "The Sermon on the Mount and The Communist Manifesto belong just as much to historical practice as any technological invention. And their real effects on history have been infinitely weightier." 7
Having looked at least briefly at the roots of Classical Marxism, we are now prepared to examine its view of history as a whole, and to thereby better understand just what its weaknesses really are, and just how they are manifested.
To review: Classical Marxists say that societies undergo constant processes of change centering around development of their productive forces, and the conflicts between those forces, and the relations within which those conflicts are constrained to operate. Classical Marxism is centrally based in the belief that at any time in history the overall nature of any society is determined by the nature of the primary aspect of the principal contradiction of the society's main historical process -- that is, it is determined by the society's mode of production.
Classical Marxism goes on to say that modes of production change during revolutions which are brought on by the aggravation of a society's primary contradiction to its most extreme antagonism. This all rests on the belief that in any society forces of production are expanded to their limits within old relations of production while at the same time new relations of production are foreshadowed at many levels until finally the growing forces of production compel a change in the relations and then in society's whole superstructure.
Classical Marxism says that the contradiction at work in all revolution comes into existence precisely because people must work to survive and because they invariably seek the best possible material conditions for themselves. Human labor is necessary to produce and reproduce the conditions of human existence. But at the same time it also produces and reproduces large groups of people who share the same relationship to the productive mode of their society, and who therefore also share roughly the same consciousnesses. According to Classical Marxism these groups, called classes, inevitably have different interests from one another -- in times of rupture the landed and then the capitalist classes try to maintain the old modes of production, while the working and other disenfranchised classes try to promote new ones.
So emerges the Classical Marxist view of history: class conflict, built upon contradictions between forces and relations of production, 'creates' history -- men themselves have been impotent to prevent class struggle and thereby create their own long term and material fulfillment. Over and over, men's long term desires fall prey to the 'demands' of on-going class struggle -- the dynamics of history are, at least up to now, essentially the dynamics of material scarcity and class struggle. Though this view far surpasses those of the liberals and the metaphysicians and others, it is still far too abstract and far too steeped in economic biases to be really useful for revolutionaries. It doesn't really engender an understanding of the dynamics of individual or caste oppression, not recognizing the non-material, psychological effects of many social roles. It doesn't concern itself significantly with the dynamics of upbringing. It doesn't recognize that people are most often both oppressors and oppressed and that their character structures are therefore full of complexities that go well beyond simple class governed expectations.
Classical Marxism doesn't explain the preponderance of economically irrational behavior that various individuals and social groups exhibit. It doesn't even explain why classes don't always pursue their own best material interests. Though it uses the phrase "false consciousness," it doesn't define it adequately or give any significant insights into how the condition it is applied to arises and persists. It recognizes that certain traits created by one's relations to work can be repeated over and over from person to person and thus achieve a societal importance. It doesn't, however, recognize that the same can be true for traits acquired through upbringing, experiences due to race, sex, or religion, the dynamics of interpersonal relations, or the dynamics of various forms of oppression. Certainly it is true that people must work to survive, but it is also true that they must have safety, and intermingle with other people, and that in most cases they must have families that relate to people of other sexes and races etc. Certainly there is no a priori reason to postulate that these other influences will necessarily have only secondary effects upon consciousness formation. In fact, what will determine the relative importance of various kinds of experiences upon people's consciousnesses are people's past experiences and their human natures. And it seems at least reasonable to suggest that human nature and people's collective experiences are generally such that under many conditions things relating to sex, race, self-image, self-management, and creative fulfillment are at least as important, if not much more important to consciousness change than things concerned with only material fulfillment.
By and large in its real-world application, Classical Marxism simply ignores the likelihood that many times individuals in one class will form different consciousnesses from one another in understandable patterns. It underestimates the importance of internal class conflicts and so it doesn't deal with them effectively. It doesn't adequately understand the dynamics of class collaboration based on fear, insecurity, racism, and other psychological motives, and so it does not provide adequate directions for overcoming it.
Classical Marxism doesn't perceive that classes are not necessarily always a given society's best defined groups -- it denies that contradictions between other sorts of groups could be more important than class struggle and eventually overwhelm it as causal agents in history. It denies this possibility because of its fetish for one principal contradiction in history and for the idea that only classes are in a position to mediate the dynamics of that contradiction. Classes over all: for all its protestations to the contrary, Classical Marxism does give more weight to the importance of the productive mode than is justified. This stems directly from the biased nature of Classical Marxist dialectics, the absence of an understanding of psychology, and the narrowness of the Classical Marxist theory of knowledge.
Classical Marxism doesn't understand the dynamics of revolutionary collectivities. It finds the problem unimportant, in fact it doesn't even seem to recognize its existence. Each revolutionary is left to do what he or she will about understanding his or her own motivations, weaknesses, and strengths. It doesn't incorporate an understanding of its practitioners into its 'dogma'; it doesn't provide any real tools for the development of such an understanding, or even for realizing the importance of such understanding. Here is a fairly strong analogy to the way capitalist ideology allows its practitioners to overlook the existence of classes, exploitation, oppression, etc. Classical Marxism has categories which allow its practitioners to ignore their own weaknesses and to overlook their own oppressive tendencies and authoritarian interests.
At its roots Classical Marxism's categories are self-sustaining of certain oppressive tendencies. This problem becomes most apparent in the modern age, when we're trying to create a revolution that really will lead to a classless society -- we are forced to consider how to change from class consciousnesses that are oppressive to revolutionary consciousnesses that are liberating, and therefore we must understand what exactly a revolutionary consciousness is, how it evolves, and how it can be reached. It no longer suffices for Classical Marxist leaders to say that working-class consciousness becomes objectively revolutionary when capitalist contradictions become antagonistic; this is obviously untrue. People's consciousnesses are very complex; it is true that under pressures they change, but it is not necessarily true that they always change to the left. If nothing else is sufficient to prove this, the lesson of post-World War One Germany certainly is. A useful theory must take into account the multiple realities of consciousness. It must understand what is necessary for consciousness to move left and stay there, and in understanding that, it's not unreasonable to believe that such a theory would reverse many of the weaknesses we uncovered in Leninist strategy. If nothing else such a theory would likely explain why it is that authoritarian approaches, though they may create motion, in the end do not create truly revolutionary consciousnesses in their practitioners or in the affected masses. It is probable that it would also explain the role sexism and racism play in maintaining reactionary consciousnesses and the roles struggles against such oppressions could play in developing revolutionary consciousnesses.
No social systems are closed. Frequently external pressures, knowledge, models of previous experiences, and/or coercion can outweigh any social system's purely internally expected dynamics. Thus what seems like a backward country's primary productive contradiction can be made relatively unimportant by interactions with an intervening external environment.
Classical Marxism does not adequately explain the emergence of bureaucratic social forms in third world countries. The new class in these countries is not created by new modes of production and it does not develop in the 'womb of the old society'. On the contrary, the Chinese bureaucracy creates the new mode of production rather than vice versa. The bureaucracy emerges from the incapacity, rather than the growth of the productive forces. Its roots lie in the 'future' rather than in the past. These are all facts that the actual logic of the Classical model precludes at least insofar as that model is applied consistently. Indeed the reality is that there has never been a revolution corresponding to the simplistic model of growing forces bursting fettering relations.
Certainly, for example, one can say that consciousness and practice in China, Cuba, and other parts of the world, have outstripped mode-of-production developments there and perhaps anywhere, and further, this has occurred not because of any mystical metaphysical miracle, but because of the dialectical interaction of the human (material) base and the productive and social boundary.
Our criticism's essence is that Classical Marxism's unbalanced dialectics forces its practitioners into dogmatic incorrect understandings of the roles of social classes and the nature of social change. Classical Marxism excludes from consideration the potentials and peculiarities of human nature, which prove crucial to understanding day to day work, and to understanding something more about the finer details of history's flow.
It isn't sufficient when the Classical Marxist rejoins that over the long haul historical 'deviations' due to chance occurrences, and the dynamics of revolutionary thought, race, sex, etc., will all even out in the welter of events so that the overall flow becomes consistent with Classical Marxist expectations. For even if the assertion were true, and it would certainly be a hard one to prove, it would still say very little with regard to offsetting our actual criticisms of Classical Marxism.
When we make strategic determinations we are not so much interested in eventual success as we are in hastening success by exploiting every available opportunity for skillful activity. We must be able to understand as many situations and so called accidents as possible, we must know more about history's main contours, and we must be able to apply all our awarenesses effectively in local contexts. Finally any theory that could accomplish such ends should also and, to be fully worth while, constantly grow in light of new experiences so that it can continually do its tasks better even as circumstances significantly alter.
Classical Marxism doesn't fill the obvious criteria for a good theory of history and revolution, and yet most revolutionaries passively accept it as a kind of revolutionary gospel. No doubt if Marx were alive, despite whatever personal weaknesses he might have had, he would frown on our fealty, toss aside the errors of old, and work toward a new updated workable ideology. The reasons many people don't try doing the same probably lies in the ease with which they attach themselves to tried ideas, the beauty of those ideas, the extent to which the ideas superficially fill present needs, and the latent fear that in trying to do better one would likely do worse or discover too many of one's own weaknesses or too many obstacles to success. It is not excessive hubris to say that ideas over a hundred years old can no longer be sufficient, but it is irrational to face the realities of the Russian revolution and of Classical Marxist dogmatism and continue claiming that an extensive overhaul is unnecessary.
Classical Marxist methodology focuses on contradictions between forces and relations of production, thus missing the fact that significant changes always involve contradictions between aggravated human desires and restraining 'external' impediments. Refocusing perceptions on oppression versus liberation might help a new theory demystify the at least highly influential position of human nature and human personality in history. We might then see that social change always derives from human struggles occurring in varying contexts, that the contexts and struggles are mutually affective, and that the crux around which to understand each is their interactions is fulfillment and oppression, and most particularly the contradiction between desires for increased fulfillments and the existence of recognized and recognizably eliminable obstacles.
Thus in contrast to Classical Marxism we might say that economic developments provide constraints, at times motivate changes, and are at times necessary if a particular thing is to actually occur, but that they are neither necessary nor sufficient alone for much of anything -- except insofar as they are viewed as an inextricable part of a totality of forces and contradictions. With such a perspective we would recognize that most events are multiply caused and overdetermined. We would understand why it is so easy to postulate many different theoretical explanations for why any single event has occurred, each of which has a certain amount of validity (because were it acting alone it could have been a sufficient cause), and none of which has a complete validity (because none was acting alone and thus when viewed as if they were sole or even primary causes are misleading). Thus arguments about what causes particular occurrences often go on interminably with no one recognizing that each pinpointed cause was in fact sufficient but that since they were all acting at the same time none was really necessary or more important than any other.
More correct approaches would probably stress the totalistic interaction of many contradictions at many different hierarchical levels. They would recognize that in complex situations most often one cause is paralleled and supported by others, where each in itself is sufficient and none really alone necessary. It becomes important to realize that in real situations causes hardly ever appear separately from one another so that dealing with only one or another but not with all is hardly ever a good strategy for affecting their common activity.
Dialectics can easily encompass this type view when formulated in more balanced manners. But when used in its old Classical forms dialectical approaches cause people to give dominance to one part of any multiple set of contradictions, and thus lead to more simplistic views than are actually required. For example a Classical Marxist analyzes a situation and determines that if he or she could resolve a certain productive contradiction it would create a newer better situation precisely because the old dominant aspect of that contradiction was defining the old situation. Sometimes the Classical Marxist will get his expectations fulfilled but more often even if his or her focused approach does resolve the favorite contradiction, others will intervene to affect the final outcome and make it different from expectations. In such cases the Classical Marxist would have been right in suspecting that the aspect was sufficient to define the old situation but wrong in thinking it was necessary, and so would have overlooked other contradictions that were also critical and continued to affect the situation adversely. So Classical Marxists often overlook the psychological for the material, or the interpersonal for the bureaucratic. They concern themselves with changes in forces and sometimes relations of production but not enough with changes in interpersonal relations, political relations, sexual relations, racial relations, etc. and as a result they often overlook crucial sides of revolutionary problems. In Bolshevik practice, for example, they missed immense problems of the total strategy of creating a new society and also shorter run problems of organization, day to day living, the employment of coercion, the effects of sexism, and the effects of interpersonal interactions. Certainly it's not enough for the Classical Marxist apologist to shrug and say that such errors occur only because practitioners are incompetent at using what is actually quite correct theory. For theories are irrelevant in isolation from their use. When their correct use requires essentially herculean efforts, their usefulness to revolutionaries becomes nearly nil. And even further no Classical Marxist would claim that Lenin himself was incompetent, but as we've amply seen, he made precisely the types of errors our above analysis pins to the inadequacies of Classical Marxist theory. It is an unhappy coincidence of error-laden possibilities: The practitioner generally starts with certain vested interests to protect (or acquires them in the course of struggle), and with certain bad habits of mind, and the theory fosters those weaknesses rather than illuminating or opposing them. Thus, most clearly with the problems of authoritarianism, the 'leader' starts with an interest in not fully understanding, and the theory serves well by fostering exactly that form of ignorance.
Classical Marxists say that though political relations influence economic movement, they are first created by it, and that while the superstructure influences the base, it is first called into existence by it. We ask the Classical Marxist whether hills are created by valleys or vice versa, and go on to say that the human emerges due to interactions of nature with itself, that the economic emerges due to interactions of the human with the natural, that the political emerges due to interactions of the human and the economic, and that as they all achieve existences of their own, they create, recreate, and change one another all. on an essentially equal basis.
A Classical Marxist says that large scale changes in human character structure are determined by changes in the mode of production. We wonder about knowledge based on observation of the experiences of others. We wonder about the innate characteristics of human nature. We wonder about the effects of movements concerned with race, sex, and authority. And we also wonder about the fact that changes in the Classical Marxist mode of production don't necessarily change human character that much. Out of these questions come many of our criticisms and many of our new intuitions.
We see that social structures do perish before all the productive forces for which they have room have developed.
We see that thought can outstrip the material base in a given society and that external factors can be crucial to the development of a society's internal contradictions.
We see that the Classical Marxist theory of classes is wrong, that it overlooks much that is important, and that it ignores forces that can effectively pervert consciousness potentials.
We see that in practice the overall Classical Marxist theory is dogmatic and that it forces its practitioners to subjectively alter their perceptions, to develop fetishes, and to dichotomize according to their preconceptions. We see roots of these maladies within the theory's methodology as well as within practitioners' personalities and role requirements.
We see accidents crucial to our understanding and practice passed off as unimportant to theory. We see the whole area of human motivation and need ignored despite the fact that knowledge of it is crucial to any rational decision-making about tactics, strategy, and program.
And finally we see that Classical Marxism does very little to develop an understanding of the dynamics of a future revolutionary society or of the kinds of people who would populate it. We see that Classical Marxism deals only inadequately with the problems of oppressing and being oppressed, with the problems of consciousness and personality change, and with the problems of knowledge, ideology, and sectarianism, and as a result we see that it creates strategies and goals that are ill-suited to the realities of the present human condition, and to the realities of where that condition might eventually go.
Classical Marxists know much more about history's dynamics than anyone who preceded them but are nonetheless quite ignorant of many of its most important aspects. Further their ignorance is of a critical kind that must interfere with their chances for successful practice. Material conditions help create possibilities for societies but contrary to Classical historical materialist injunction, they do not dictate final choices between possibilities. Objectively revolutionary conditions can often be diverted into non-revolutionary directions by people with inadequate or peculiarly self-interested ideologies. In history, people's actions make choices and people's actions are related to their needs and beliefs, which are in turn factors in history and which are therefore deserving of careful scrutiny, most especially when they claim to be something which history shows them to not be.
We've begun seeing that the Classical Marxist theory of historical materialism as we've outlined it is lacking at a number of levels, and our findings have gained considerable force from the fact that they seem to explain the weaknesses we earlier found in Classical Leninist strategy and Bolshevik practice. We haven't yet proven any of our assertions but we have given some considerable evidence. It is likely that the only real proof that Classical Marxism Leninism is a sorely deficient ideology will be the development of a new and better political consciousness at some future time. Perhaps our efforts will help give people the confidence that efforts in that direction are called for and quite likely to be successful. For now it must suffice to continue somewhat further with discussions of historical materialism and the use of Classical Marxism, in the hopes of further tracing its multiple weaknesses and of thereby developing at least a few intuitions concerning how a new formulation might improve upon the past one.
Classical Marxism says that any society has a base and an associated superstructure, and that the superstructure's main content is determined by the will of the ruling classes and the nature of the class struggle of the time. Classical Marxism says that once there is revolution at the base, the superstructure is also "more or less quickly" revolutionized. And this flows straight from the Classical Marxist belief that human character inevitably changes with a change in the mode of production; with changes in human character classes also change and exert new pressures upon society. The new ruling class changes the superstructure of the society it comes to lead. But in fact this is all quite faulty. For as we've come to see, the economic is not only not the sole cause of changes, it is not even the sole sufficient cause of changes. Old political, interpersonal, or social forms can 'dominate' changes in the mode of production and can reverse or alter them at least as easily as the opposite can occur. Many of humankind's superstitions, myths, religions, and even warring tendencies would have been done away with ages ago if the only causes for their continuation had been material. Leaders and systems are not corrupt solely because someone is able to pocket some extra cash. History's religious, racial, and even imperial wars were all undoubtedly fought for economic reasons at least in part, but none of them can be explained solely or even largely in purely economic terms. Often ideology has held back productive change rather than vice versa, often people have fought and died in wars for 'higher glories' despite the losses they would incur, and often people have been moved to barbarism with no visible material reward available whatsoever. Classical Marxism, as opposed to today's better neo-Marxist practitioners and to Marx himself at times, is almost oblivious to the socio-political dynamics of social change despite continual lip service to its importance. Classical Marxism is just not encompassing enough, it has too narrow a framework for an understanding of interpersonal relations and personal or group psychologies -- it doesn't even give an adequate perspective for understanding the history of the Russian Revolution itself. It doesn't adequately account for the fact that even revolutionaries' consciousness can change adversely.
Marxism states that ruling class ideas always dominate but all Classical Marxists actually investigate real situations more closely to determine exactly what the interplay between various kinds of thought and culture is at any given time. The trouble isn't that they do this, but that their theory provides no good framework for doing it -- it just doesn't adequately discuss cultural development or consciousness interaction. It has no provision for understanding the different world views and ideologies associated with political versus repressive work, statespeople versus cops. There is no real attempt to provide tools for understanding day-to-day life, or movement activity, or consciousness alteration; the resulting deficiencies are profound. Classical Marxist disagreements are most severe in this area; each practitioner postulates his or her own conceptions and virtually none actually works from a theoretical framework that can answer questions like those raised here. There is no commonality and only a little success. We come full circle; good modern Marxists frequently better their theory, though often with misgivings lest their creativity be called infidelity.
Finally, the Classical Marxist analysis says that when contradictions become profound the oppressed classes line up with the revolution and the oppressor classes defend the old order. Would that it were always sol Classical Marxism doesn't explain why this should always occur and how the personal decisions of various kinds of individuals are likely made -- it doesn't include an understanding of the many ways the expected process can break down. And as a result it doesn't include an adequate understanding of how revolutionary activity can make the hoped-for process most likely occur. Classical Marxism doesn't even give us a concrete understanding of why Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Mao transcended their class backgrounds and became revolutionaries, if that is indeed even what they in fact did.
It doesn't explain why the totally immiserated classes of some countries are passive or reactionary, while the comparatively well off classes of other countries or even of the same countries are quite radically active. To say that some people see beyond their immediate situations, or that they are more sensitive or that it is an accident or whatever, totally begs a fundamentally important set of questions. Why don't the oppressed constantly rebel against their oppressors? Why do they often even support them? What can revolutionaries do to affect the involved dynamics? Why does increased oppression more often push people to the right and not the left?
Beyond these questions, the crucial issue is not what is Classical Marxism in its isolation, or what was it at some time past, but what is it in the hands of its practitioners. What is important about a social theory is not so much whether it is right or wrong in the abstract, as whether it is right or wrong in application, whether it is used correctly or incorrectly, to advantage or to disadvantage. A theory which fosters modes of thought that play into the weaknesses of its practitioners can easily become practically counter productive no matter what its 'isolated intellectual value' might be.
And indeed problems do arise due to the interactions between Classical Marxist theory and people whose characters were largely formed in class-stratified racist, sexist, authoritarian societies.
Experience shows that when people accept the overall tenets of Classical Marxist theory and no other offsetting ones, they become unable to use dialectical analysis in a way that avoids dogmatism. Their complete emphasis on major contradictions leads Classical Marxists inexorably toward putting a bias on the importance of dichotomizing and polarizing. As a result they become unwilling and even unable to realize that most dichotomies are false and arise from unnatural conditions imposed from without. Classical Marxist patterns of analysis do nothing to alter what seem to be most people's normal tendencies toward exaggeration and extremism. In fact, if anything, it is probably reasonable to say that Classical Marxism pushes people further in the direction of sectarianism than in the direction of science because its dynamics suggest that it would, and because our experience seems to suggest that it does.
Classical Marxism seems to have been adopted and to have prevailed partly for its correctness but also for the way it fills people's needs to have a clear ideological explanation for all things. In a way, then, it is an animist theory accepted like most religions for its size and shape rather than for its verifiable use value. And that is why Classical Marxists put the lid on the scientific work of geneticists in much the same way that earlier religious folk put the lid on the works of other kinds of scientists. Classical Marxists have a vested psychological interest in the unalterability of their theory precisely because of the ways they adopt it and because of the ways it serves them by giving them an unassailable identity. As a result they are more interested in preserving its form than they are in altering it for the better -- and thus the explanation for decades of sectarian resistance to any broadening of the theory as a whole.
The Classical Marxist employ of dialectics is dogmatic. The Classical Marxist emphasis on class is dogmatic. Classical Marxism perceives reality in terms of a materialistic class bias -- i.e., Classical Marxists order their perceptions in accordance with their past ideas and past experiences, unwittingly but almost inevitably. Some do it through habit, some do it because their identities depend upon it, some do it because the social pressures of their environments compel it, some do it simply because it seems quite right to them. But as a result most Classical Marxists are unable to transcend the apparent contradictions between the communal and the individual, work and play, equality and excellence, study and participation, objectivity and participation, leadership and democracy, violence and love, feeling and rationality, and culture and political economy. In practice they always go to one extreme or to the other, frequently to their own and to almost everyone else's detriments.
Classical Marxist thought occurs in essentially the same framework as bourgeois thought -- that of worship of authority, awe of scarcity and a lack of self-awareness. It has little understanding of the dynamics of elitism, sexism, and egotism. Indeed it actually precludes each of these areas of concern from any kind of independent understanding in its own right -- they either fit into a class view of history and can be so understood or they are irrelevant to revolution. No matter how sound much of what Classical Marxists suggest is, in practice all is frequently lost due to the same kind of dynamics that plague all capitalists and bureaucrats. Classical Marxists fit everything to their views lest those views be somehow upset; they see things in terms of previous beliefs, they do not grow wiser with each new experience. Classical Marxists end up by manipulating people, movements, and ideas, because their identities depend upon their doing so. It can only be a largely unsupported guess but it certainly wouldn't be very surprising to discover that Marx and Engels were egotistical, authoritarian, male supremacists in their everyday lives.
Perhaps we can move toward concluding with an example. When Classical Marxists consider the problem of spontaneity and organization they are unable to conceive that the seeming dichotomy might be imposed and thus one which can be overcome. They don't bother to think about the possibility of spontaneous organization or of organized spontaneity, they don't think about the fact that organized activity in isolation from spontaneity suffers as much as spontaneity isolated from organization; and what they do do is wipe out spontaneity because it seems to be less scientific. Then they go on to the opposite extreme. They correctly realize that nihilist spontaneity is destructive but they employ extreme versions of organization to isolate themselves from value considerations and to justify the most unjust activities. In essence they simply miss some reasonably obvious truths while picking up on a few others -- they are extremist and it goes back to the nature of their whole approach to analysis and history. Their world view is constricting and narrow in a way difficult if not impossible for its own practitioners to fully perceive. In a recent Liberation article on the German movement, Michael Schnieder characterized Classical Marxist Leninist sectarian psychological problems:
Since the dialectic of many comrade's emotional universe seems locked in a neurotic syndrome, the reservoirs of libidinal energy from which they might draw strength and inspiration in their political work are constantly shrinking. And so, in them, Marxist Leninist theory, instead of being the 'intellect of the passions' becomes a 'mere passion of the intellect'. In a way these comrades are like the sinner in the second circle of Dante's Inferno, who carries his head before him as if it were a lantern: "The severed head, held by the hair, hangs from his head like a lantern... So the wretch carried his brain, cut off from the source of life in his body." The brains of our cadre, filled with quotations from Marx and Lenin, often seem likewise to be cut off from their source of life, the emotional and erotic wellsprings which they have repressed and dismissed as so much "non-political rubbish," if on the one hand, they enlighten themselves and the masses with the beacon of Marxism Leninism, on the other hand they estrange themselves from the masses insofar as they are estranged from their own needs and feelings, which they denounce as 'petty bourgeois'. Under these circumstances how can a cadre awaken liberatory needs and feelings in young workers and apprentices when for himself these feelings exist only on paper; how can you believe him when he says socialism develops not only the material production forces but also "the creative imagination of the masses" (Mao) when he himself articulated his political beliefs as if he were reciting a liturgy? 8And as Fidel Castro has said about the degeneration of Classical Marxism in practice:
These are the paradoxes of history. How, seeing sectors of clergy become revolutionary, can we resign ourselves to seeing revolutionary forces become ecclesiastical forces. 9
Classical Marxism centers people's thought processes around groups and masses. It objectifies individuals or even ignores them and sets a manipulative tone, rather than personalizing individuals and setting a liberating tone. It makes a fetish of content and largely ignores form, rather than understanding the full intricacies of both, and as a result, its understanding of capitalism is as misleading as its understandings of the rest of history's major creations.
Classical Marxism does not understand capitalism's resiliency. It formed in a time when no one knew much about advanced technics and so it couldn't be fully aware of capitalism's immense capacities for growth. It couldn't predict that contradictions between forces and relations would manifest themselves in very different spheres in capitalism's later days than in its earlier ones.
Classical Marxism emphasizes class consciousness and class struggle but has only a very shallow understanding of how consciousnesses form and change, and of what the consciousnesses of workers or bosses are really like. Classical Marxism identifies wholes but pays little attention to fine structure; it addresses the qualities of masses but not of individuals, of economies but not of economists. It doesn't understand deviations from its own expectations and it usually simply ignores them. It doesn't adequately understand inner-class divisions, it says little about capitalist bureaucracy's pervasive effects and it doesn't really understand very much about dynamics of the consciousnesses of capitalism's leaders -- especially when those dynamics are derived from desires other than simple considerations of material self-interest.
Classical Marxism doesn't provide tools for understanding sub-societal environments. It doesn't help the hospital nurse to decide what courses of action might best affect other hospital workers' consciousnesses. It doesn't allow community movement people to understand their own interactions with one another or to formulate the best possible inter-group work relations. It doesn't help activists figure out how to talk to people, how to write leaflets, how to plan demonstrations or strikes, how to run meetings, etc. All this and more simply because it doesn't give sufficient insight into how and why people act the ways they do, not decade by decade, or class by class, but day by day, and group by group, or even person by person.
Classical Marxism doesn't understand modern culture. It looks for racism's and sexism's roots in the monetary requisites of capitalism, rather than in the weaknesses of people who have lived through ages of competitive struggles, and who had innate potentials for irrationality and injustice in the first place. And with regard to elitism the situation is even worse. Classical Marxists don't only not understand modern authoritarianism and the importance of anti-authoritarian ways; they sometimes glory in the dynamics of authority and take them for a virtue, thus crippling themselves, oppressing others, and making countless irretrievable errors with regard to day to day programs and even long term strategy.
Classical Marxists as Classical Marxists don't understand human needs or motivations that arise on a basis of reasonable material fulfillment. They try to fit all drives into a framework of class explanation, they say that Black movements are generated mostly by economic factors and that wealthy students rebel mostly because they are worried about future job possibilities. Generally speaking Classical Marxists are simply poorly prepared to understand the multiplicity of forces that go into determining what modern people do and why they do it, and when they go beyond that poor preparation to good results, it is usually because they have also gone beyond the bounds of Classical Marxist dogma.
In essence the Classical Marxist view of capitalism, as might be expected, given its roots in Classical Marxist views of change, history, and human nature, is much too narrow to be very useful. When it does work it is usually at too high a level of abstraction to be relevant to day to day practice. It overemphasizes class forces and misunderstands racism and sexism. It underestimates the importance of non-material human needs and desires. It completely misjudges the importance of authoritarian and anti-authoritarian dynamics. It oversimplifies the state's role and doesn't adequately explain the mentalities of society's administrators. It understands parts of modern society but it misses the whole and the relatively fine detail; it just doesn't give us a really convincing explanation for why modern capitalism functions the ways it does, or for why its citizens act as they do. It finds what seems to be sufficient causes for most things it addresses but it doesn't find the full panoply of interacting forces that we all intuitively know to be there. It doesn't help us to understand fully the factory and other work environments and their effects on us all. Mostly it does not provide us with adequate tools for understanding the dynamic effects our activities have on ourselves and others.
Classical Marxism goes further in its explanations of history and revolution than any other widely accepted system of thought, but it overlooks a great many relatively simple truths, and in this lies its ultimate revolutionary counter productivity. It is not an accurate gospel though it is often taken as one. Its errors begin in its historical roots but they spread through the totality of its major announcements. As Marcuse said:
The petrification of Marxian theory violates the very principle which the New Left proclaims: the unity of theory and practice. A theory which has not caught up with the practice of capitalism cannot possibly guide the practice aiming at the abolition of capitalism. 10It is a relatively simple fact, that should occasion little surprise, that Classical Marxism, Classical Leninism, and the body of thought and practice called Classical Marxism Leninism, are all quite outmoded. Much can be learned from them. but it is simply undeniable that they must sooner or later be largely transcended.
FOOTNOTES
1. Kropotkin in Quotations from the Anarchists, edited by Paul Berman, Praeger Books, New York.
2. Bakunin, Bakunin, edited by Maximov, London. 34.
3. Gajo Petrovic, Marx in the Mid Twentieth Century, Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, New York.
4. Wilhelm Reich, Sex Pol, edited by Lee Baxandall, Vintage Press, New York. 66.
5. ibid. 66.
6. Cardan in the Solidarity pamphlet History and Revolution.
7. ibid.
8. Michael Schnieder in Liberation Magazine, 1973.
9. Castro, Fidel Castro Speaks, Grove Press, New York.
10. Marcuse, Counter Revolution and Revolt, Beacon Press, Boston. 34.
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