File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-27.123, message 17


Date: Sat, 25 Jan 1997 15:54:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: M-I: The Marxian Dialectic Part 1 of 4


[I was unaware of length constraints, and thus have been informed that I
must break this post into four parts. I regret that this will necessitate
four posts in one day, but I have been told that this will be okay in this
one instance. I also apologize for the delay, for this post, written
around noon on the 25th, will be read in the morning of the 26th. Due to
the nature of posts contributed by my detractors I had desired a quick
turn around. Note that the enumeration of parts designated in the message
heading do not correspond with the parts enumerated in this post.
Finally, the original post was addressed to Siddharth and Adolfo. I
apologize to them in advance; they will receive this post twice.]

Comrades,

In this post I intend to address some outstanding issues remaining in this
debate, and to address some issues that have developed over the course of
the debate. This post contain little of the irritation present in my past
couple of posts (although Siddharth recent post, dripping with
psuedoscientific and positivist themes, makes this difficult); I have
decided to leave the shouting to others. I herein honor a request that I
provide excerpts from a postface by Marx that I earlier refered to. I also
present excepts from an interpretation (Avineri) that is consonant with
mine, as was also requested. I hope that this post clears up
misconceptions surrounding my position. I do regard most of these
misunderstandings not attributable to me, but I will nevertheless try to
be more clear. I will not discuss Kant in this post, as I feel that Kant
is tangential to this discussion. Further, I will not discuss issues of
mathematics, physics and so forth because these are not relevant to the
conversation. This was why I have not engaged Siddharth in a point by
point debate over his positivism. In my view this constitutes a red
herring. The debate is about this: did Marx advocate a position of
dialectical materialism. The answer I gave was no. I intend to defend that
position in this post. What Siddharth has missed about this debate is its
sociology of knowledge character. He wishes to continuing presenting smart
little examples in the physical sciences that demonstrate supposed
objectivity (he is apparently a hardline empiricist--knowledge of the
thing resides in itself!) while the discussion is about what Marx
believed. Finally, and the underlying purpose of my argument (I should be
honest about my motives), it must be reckoned that idealism often
masquerades as materialism by attaching to itself the trappings of
science. That is precisely what is happening here on my opponents' side. 
It is often the case that novices, with an insufficent understanding of
philosophy of science, see idealism as materialism and materialism as
idealism. This is clearly a failure to interrogate the deeper foundation
upon which our worldviews are erected. But even more than this, it is a
failure to purge from their own minds the bourgeois indoctrination that
was so profound in their early school days. This empiricist, rationalist,
and positivist view of the world structures their understanding of the
dialectic, deforms it, and then they unreflexively map this monster back
onto of their interpretations of the physical, material, and social
worlds. It is a simple case of reifying analytical methods and heuristics
as eternal transcendental subjects and then being ruled by human (and
bourgeois) ideational creations. This is what I call the "naturalistic
fallacy," and it is so subtle that it must be made brutally frank for the
purposes of dislodging what amounts to brain-lock. Feuerbach's critique of
religion is applicable to a critique of this sort of scientism, but I am
getting ahead of myself. 

I. The Materialist Conception of History (Marxian General Theory)

The following extract presents in very concise form Marx's general theory
of social structure and social development, or what is often called "the
materialist conception of history," or, more simply, "historical
materialism." The passage is from the "Preface" (1959) to *A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy* from his economic manuscripts of
1957-1958) and is regarded, I think without reservation, as the definitive
formulation of historical materialism. 

"In the social production of their existence, men enter into definite,
necessary relations, which are [indispensable and] independent of their
will, namely relations of production corresponding to a determinate stage
of development of their material forces of production. The totality of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation on which there arises legal and political
superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary it
is their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain
stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or--what is merely
a legal expression of the same thing--with the property relations within
the framework in which they have hitherto operated. From forms of
development of productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
At that point an era of social revolution begins. With the change in
economic foundation the whole immense superstructure is more slowly or
more rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations it is always
necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the
economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the
precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious,
artistic or philosophic, in short, ideological, forms in which men become
conscious of this conflict and fight it out.  Just as one does not judge
an individual by what he thinks of himself, so one cannot judge such an
epoch of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this
consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life,
>from the existing conflicts between the social forms of production and the
relations of production. A social order never perishes before all the
productive forces for which it is broadly sufficient have been developed
[*alternative translation*: No social order ever perishes before all the
productive forces for which there is room in it have developed], and new
superior relations of production never replace older ones before the
material conditions for their existence have matured within the womb of
the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it
can solve, since closer examination will always show that the task itself
arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already
present or at least in the process of formation. In broad outline, the
Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be
designated as progressive epochs of the socioeconomic order. The bourgeois
relations of production are the last antagonism growing out of the social
conditions of existence of individuals; but the productive forces
developing in the womb of bourgeois society simultaneously create the
material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of
human society therefore closes with this social formation." 

Note: One theme in this passage, because of the variations in translation,
can be translated thus: "It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their *existence*, but their *social existence* that determines
their consciousness" [my emphasis].

Thus, according to Marx, it is not physical existence that determines
consciousness, but "social existence," and this existence is socially
produced. This is the social production of the material life-processes. It
is "the mode of production of material life," that is, human activity in
thought and labor in transforming the natural world into a human world,
that "conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual
life." So the ideas of our intellectual life are directly tied to, and
subordinated to, "the social production of our existence" and "the
production of material life." Ideas like truth and law, like all other
ideas, are not independent of human beings; they are productions of humans
in real human activity, i.e. in their social relations, relations to the
productive means, and the transformation of nature (the production of
material life) in reproducing human social existence. (This addresses an
issue raised by Viraj Fernando.) 

I would argue that if the materialist conception of history was but
dialectical materialism applied to the study of history, that Marx, even
if not feeling the need to present a detailed exposition of his even more
general theory (dialectical materialism), would have at least indicated
that historical materialism was derivative and constituted a specific
application of dialectical materialism. This is not the case in this
passage. And, more importantly, you can find no such indication anywhere
in Marx's work.

A few quotations pulled from this passage make it clear how dialectical
materialism is not possible in Marx's system: 

(1) "The mode of production of material life conditions the social,
political, and intellectual life process in general." Here we see that
Marx regards the labor process (the production of material life) as
conditioning intellectual life process in general. This statement is key
to my argument stating that knowledge produced about reality is a social
product. Dialectical materialism holds that the logic of the dialectic is
external to social production, in fact that the dialectic is in nature. 
According to Marx, this is not possible if knowledge is produced by human
being. Indeed, for Marx, the more general and abstract a law becomes the
less valid it is. For Marx, dialectical materialism represents an idealist
philosophy, for it posits the *a priori* and external existence of a
logic. 

(2) "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but
on the contrary it is their social being that determines their
consciousness." Being is prior to essence. But not just being--"*social*
being" (or "social existence"). Marx argues that our social being, clearly
bestowed by society in his theory, determines our consciousness. Part of
our consciousness is intellectual production, of which scientific
understanding of reality and logic are domains. If consciousness is
determined by the social being, and produced in social interaction, then
logics, rational or otherwise, cannot be prior to society nor external to
it. 

(3) "Consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material
life, from the existing conflicts between the social forms of production
and the relations of production." Further demonstration of the above
point. Marx sees consciousness as arising out of the contradictions in
material life. But what is material life? What constitutes these
contradictions? "The existing conflicts between the social forms of
production and the relations of production," Marx answers. One of the key
mistakes that people make in interpreting Marx is to mistake "material
life" with "physical life." For Marx, human beings produce material life,
they do so in the labor process, they work up nature for human needs and
in so doing humanize the world and objectify it. For Marx human activity
is objective (material) activity. Corresponding with this process are the
social relations. It is upon this objective foundation that there arises
forms of consciousness, and other superstructural elements. 

One note here: the base-superstructure model implied in this passage
(although an oversimplification) is only an analytical model. Marx
stressed that one cannot ontologically separate the social totality. 

[Part I is continued...]




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