Re: Exchanges on Marxism and ecology

[James Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 21 Oct 1999 23:47:08 +0100 bernie wool <bernard.wool@xxxxxxxxx>
writes:
>This discussion might benefit from the following article from
>International Socialist Forum Issue 4, 1999.  Basing himself on
>articles by Farr and Ball (see
>refs), Hooke follows through the logic of identifying a break between
>the philosophy and method of Marx and those of Engels, and likewise
>those of Lenin and
>Trotsky who followed Engels' essential line on dialectical
>materialism.  I am not sure that I agree with Hookes, but equally find
>it difficult no to agree!
>
>BW
>
>Marx and Positivism
>
>by David Hookes
>
>This is the summary of a talk given at the International Socialist
>Forum
>
>Background
>
>It is important locate any philosophical discussion within a concrete
>historical context. This is in keeping with Marx?s own dictum in the
>Theses on
>Feuerbach that
>"Previously philosophers have only interpreted the world, the task
>however is to change it". In this spirit, I list some of the relevant
>issues that confront
>all those who
>wish to build an effective movement for socialism:
>
>


>
>
>Positivism
>
>I believe a central issue is the concept of the "revolutionary
>vanguard party" and its malign influence on the development of the
>socialist movement,
>particularly the
>disastrous consequences for the Russian revolution. I also believe
>that the origin of this tragic mistake lies in the French revolution,
>which ascribed
>excessive
>importance to the role of a revolutionary intellectual elite, those
>who can apply reason to society as a whole. This was given
>philosophical form in the
>philosophy of
>positivism.
>
>According to The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and
>Philosophers [2] "positivism" is the name given (a) to a doctrine and
>movement founded by the
>
>French Philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and (b) to the general
>philosophical view of which Comte?s Positivism is one instance. In
>this latter sense
>positivism is
>the view that all genuine knowledge is based on sense experience and
>can only be advanced by means of observation and experiment.
>
>Metaphysical or speculative attempts to gain knowledge by reason
>alone, unchecked by experience should be abandoned ("meaningless"
>according to Vienna circle
>
>Logical positivists) in favour of the special sciences. All
>positivists hold that the task of philosophy is to understand the
>methods by which the sciences
>are advanced
>but not to seek for any independent knowledge of the world. In short
>they are empiricists.
>
>Francis Bacon in many ways can be considered the founder of empiricism
>and therefore positivism, and a key figure (or "organic intellectual")
>in the rise of
>the English
>mercantile bourgeoisie. He held that it was impossible to "deduce" the
>ultimate facts of nature, philosophers should not wander beyond "the
>limits of
>nature". He thinks
>that there are ultimate facts that should be approached " without any
>previous conception" ? that they should be accepted "on the faith of
>experience" and
>uses the
>word "positive" to denote these "inexplicable" facts. Bacon was much
>admired by the 18th century empiricist philosophers in England and
>France and hence his
>usage
>of the word "positive" came to be applied to the methods of the
>natural sciences in their reliance on observation and experiment.
>
>Saint-Simon in his Essay on the Sciences of Man (1813) applies the
>word "positive" to the sciences which are based on "the facts which
>have been observed and
>
>analyzed"; sciences not so based are called "conjectural". Comte
>(sometime secretary to Saint-Simon) uses the word in this sense in
>article entitled Plan of
>the Scientific
>Works Necessary for the Reorganisation of Society (1822) and later in
>his Course of Positive philosophy (1830-42). In the latter he says
>that the function of
>theories is to
>co-ordinate observed facts rather than explain them in terms of
>causes. Comte is usually credited with being the originator of the
>famous Law of Three Stages
>(in fact
>this is due to Saint-Simon) in which the human mind passes from a
>theological through a metaphysical to a final positive stage. In the
>first two stages,
>attempts are
>made to penetrate to the inner nature of things by explaining
>behaviour in terms of supernatural or metaphysical entities. In the
>final, positive, stage this
>attempt is
>abandoned and the positive thinker seeks only to establish by
>reasoning based on observations the invariable sequences and
>co-existences of phenomena.
>
>Comte held that the time would come when human society itself would be
>studied by such positive methods. Such a positive science he called
>"sociology" or
>sometimes
>"social physics". He argues that the development of society
>corresponds to the three stages. First, a theological social outlook
>upheld by priestly learning
>and
>authority. This is followed by the era of metaphysical criticism of
>traditional doctrines, when they are replaced by such unverifiable
>doctrines as belief in
>natural rights
>and the sovereignty of the people. In Europe this is the era of the
>Reformation, Enlightenment, and the French revolution. This era would
>be replaced by a
>stable society
>where agreement is established on the basis of incontrovertible
>positive social knowledge. A new form of authority would then reside
>in a new spiritual power
>
>consisting of men of science whose knowledge would enable humanity to
>achieve a peaceful unity of thought and action. In later years Comte
>developed this
>authoritarian doctrine into a Religion of Humanity. His prominent
>English supporters, JS Mill and the novelist George Eliot refused to
>follow him in this
>direction.
>Positivist Societies flourished for many years and one group of
>Positivist Proletarians was allowed to join the First International.

That would suggest that positivism is not innately authoritarian
in its implications.  Some people contend that positivsm is
necessarily conservative but Saint-Simon who was certainly a
positivist had some pretty radical ideas and he was a source
of inspiration to the young Marx.  And it should be noted that
it was the Saint-Simonians or at least their leftwing that
first made the effort to introduce socialist ideas to the
proletariat.


>
>In positivism there only two types of knowledge: knowledge of matters
>of fact, how things are through observation and experiment, and then
>there is knowledge
>of logic
>and mathematics which is not about the world at all. All other books
>that do not fit into these two categories are "sophistry and
>illusion". This view was
>widely held in
>the 19th century by men of science but not in faculties of philosophy
>where various forms of Idealist metaphysics prevailed.
>
>Positivism in the form of Logical Positivism revived in the 1920s
>particularly in the Vienna Circle, and also in Berlin, based on the
>work of the early
>Wittgenstein and the
>developments in Physics (quantum theory and, especially, relativity).
>This group of thinkers asserted that Kant?s category of the Synthetic
>a Priori must be
>rejected, and
>that only verifiable matters of fact or truth of mathematics or logic
>were meaningful. Everything else was strictly meaningless.
>Unfortunately, "when it came
>to explaining
>what exactly the facts are, which observation and experiment can
>reveal, positivists give as widely different answers as the
>metaphysicians" [2, page 256].
>Bacon?s
>"simple nature", Humes?s "impressions" or the "atomic facts" of the
>20th century positivists raise theoretical problems every bit as
>difficult and elusive as
>those of the
>metaphysicians. Two members of the Vienna Circle, Kurt Goedel and Karl
>Popper, effectively dismantled the whole program of Logical
>Positivism. The former
>showed
>that mathematics itself was incomplete and could not be reduced to
>"pure" logic, and the latter that the method of science was based on
>conjectures and
>refutations not
>verifications.
>

It is interesting to note that one of the leading members of the Vienna
Circle, the economist and sociologist Otto Neurath was a Marxist.
Neurath was not simply an armchair Marxist either, he was a
a participant in Germany's 1919 revolution, serving as the minister
of economic planning for the shortlived Soviet Republic of Bavaria.
He nearly suffered the same fate as the revolutionary leaders,
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht.  Afterwards, Germany's
Weimar government put him on trial for treason.  Eventually the
charges against him were dropped due to the intervention of
friends such as his old teacher, Max Weber, and to the intercession
of the Austrian government.  In such works as *Empiricism and
Sociology* he exponded a version of Marxism that was compatible
with the tenets of logical positivism.  Having already been
heavily influenced by the Austro-Marxian school, Neurath argued
that Marx's materialist conception of history provided the basis
for a positive science of society.  He conceived of socialism
as a form of social engineering, and he wrote voluminously on
the problems of economic planning.  In the logical positivst
manifesto, "The Scientific Conception of the World:  The Vienna
Circle" which he co-authored with Rudolf Carnap, in tracing out
the heritage of positivist thought, he specifically included Marx
and Engels in his list of positivist and materialist thinkers who
had given birth to the "scientific conception of the world."
Neurath also insisted that the scientific conception of the
world constituted the philosophy of the proletariat and
that the proletariat was the chief bearer of the scientific
worldview.



>
>
>At this point I would like to refer the reader to two papers by two
>American academics: Marxism and Positivism by James Farr, and Marxian
>Science and
>Positivist
>Politics by Terence Ball (see reference [3]). They demonstrate clearly
>, and with much greater erudition than I could claim, that the ideas
>of the
>Positivists were an
>anathema to Marx himself but NOT to Engels.

Concerning Engels, his *Anti-Duhring* is often taken to be a primary
Marxist attack on positivism as represented by the  philosophy
of Professor Duhring but on the other hand Engels often
seems to have been partial to certain positivist ideas.  Certainly,
his young disciple, Karl Kautsky, who became one of the leading
Marxist theorists of the Second International, was himself
a rather ardent positivist.

> To give a flavour of these
>articles I will like to quote the following :
>
>Never one to mince words, he (Marx) condemned the "shit positivism"
>(Scheisspositivismus) of Comte and vehemently denied ever "writing
>Comtist recipes for
>the
>kitchens of the future"(4). More tellingly, Marx insisted that the
>much vaunted value neutrality and expertise of Comtean social
>engineers was a sham,
>inasmuch as they
>purport to stand above society, manipulating social variables and
>changing circumstances of everyone except themselves. "The materialist
>doctrine concerning
>the
>changing of circumstances and education," wrote Marx, "forgets that
>the circumstances are changed by men and that the educator himself
>must be educated. This
>
>doctrine has therefore to divide society into two parts, one of which
>is superior to society"( Marx and Engels [5]). This is, of course,
>impossible. For the
>social technician
>is also human, and is therefore " no abstract being squatting outside
>the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society"(Marx [6]).
>Contra Comte, there
>can be no
>objective asocial Archimedean point from which expert engineers may
>move people and manage societies. (Ball, reference [3] page 241).
>
>And also:
>
>Physical reductionists marching under the banner of unified science [a
>key positivist notion-DH] fail to understand this elementary but quite
>crucial point.
>They mistake
>the "language of commodities" for the language of physical things
>[Marx(7)]. In so doing they are not only bad scientists but fetishists
>as well. Physicalism
>[the
>reduction of all reality to physics-DH] is in short a version of
>fetishism. Physical thing terms cannot provide the bedrock of a
>unified scientific
>vocabulary because they
>misdescribe the very reality a social science attempts to capture ?

Otto Neurath was a great proponent of the unity of science
but his thinking on the subject shifted away from a reductionist
approach as his thought matured.  On the one hand he always
remained a stauch physicalist and insisted that all real phenomena
are describable in physical terms.  On the other hand he came to
believe that not all human knowledge is reducible to physics.
Instead he came to hold that all true propositions about the world
must form a "universal history"  which would encompass physics,
chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, etc. without insisting
on reductionism.

>Even Darwin was guilty of this(biological reductionism). After an
>initial fascination
>with Darwin, Marx
>viewed his achievements in a more sceptical light. Indeed, he finally
>found Darwin?s theory downright "amusing" because it smuggled a social
>interpretation
>of capitalist
>society into biological law: "It is remarkable how Darwin recognises
>among the beasts and plants his English society with its division of
>labour,
>competition, opening up
>of new markets, inventions, and the Malthusian ?struggle for
>existence?. His is Hobbes? ?bellum omnium contra omnes?, and one is
>reminded of Hegel?s
>Phenomenology
>where civil society is described as a ?spiritual animal kingdom?,
>while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society."(Marx
>Engels [8]). From James
>Farr [3], pp.
>223-4.

As I see it Marx was commenting on the ideological genesis of
Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection.  As Marx
correctly noted it relied upon notions derived from classical
liberal ideology, yet this did not necessarily mean that Darwin's
theory was false despite its origins, and Marx never made
any such claim that I am aware of.

>
>[Both these two articles should be read by comrades. I will try to get
>them made available on the internet-DH]
>
>I would also argue that these ideas were not abhorrent to Lenin and
>Trotsky, despite the former?s celebrated attack on the Russian Machist
>Positivists [9].

It would be surprising if they had been since Russian radicals
from the mid-19th century on were strongly influenced by positivist
and materialist thinkers on the West including Comte, Feuerbach,
Darwin, J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Marx & Engels, and later on
Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius.  The influence of this Western
positivism and materialism first became palpable among the
so-called "nihilists" of the 1850s and 1860s who were celebrated
in fiction by Turgenev (see his *Fathers and Sons* with its
nihilist hero, Bazarov) as well as Dostoyevsky's novels.
BTW most of Bazarov's speeches in *Fathers and Sons*
in which he gives positive statements of his ideas were
pretty much lifted, almost word-for-word from the editorials
that Turgenev's nihilist friend, Chernychevsky wrote
for his magazine, The Contemporary.

>Lenin
>replaced the positivists? sensationalist relativism by an even cruder
>vulgar materialist empiricism, e.g. the idea that our brains
>"photograph" reality. Of
>course as
>everyone knows Lenin modified these philosophical views after reading
>Hegel?s Science of Logic, but by then the die was cast and the
>vanguard party was ready
>to
>assume its historical role.

As I recall didn't Lenin admit in some of his notes on Hegel,
that perhaps Bogdanov did have some legitimate points?

> Ironically the least knowledgeable of its
>central committee elite, J Stalin, was waiting in the wings ready to
>deal with the
>intellectuals. The
>appalling debacle of Stalinism and Fascism shaped the rest of the
>century.
>
>After the revolution, and long before Stalin got control of the
>bureaucratic apparatus created by Lenin and Trotsky, there were crude
>examples of positivist
>methods. For
>instance workers were put into a special apparatus to attempt to
>improve their productivity. Then there is Trotsky?s talk about
>remaking humanity "as in a
>mortar and
>pestle" ? chemical social engineering as it were ? and the enthusiasm
>for Taylorism in the early Soviet Union. There is also Lenin?s
>simplistic mechanistic
>positivism in
>his celebrated equation: "Soviets + Electricity = Socialism". Ball?s
>paper clearly shows the connection between the Soviet use of
>psychiatric methods against
>dissidents
>and a positivist philosophical outlook.

On the other hand defenders of Bogdanov maintain that his
empiriomonism provided the philosophical basis for a
more libertarian conception of socialism.

>
>It is also important that the reformist branch of social democracy was
>also heavily influenced by positivist scientific social engineering.
>The espousal of
>eugenics by
>British Fabians and Scandinavian social democrats is but one example.
>Recent revelations that the latter actually carried out the forced
>sterilization of
>biologically
>"inferior" people is both shocking and instructive.
>
>Of course it is critically important for capital to have its cadres of
>scientific and technical experts, its social engineers, and
>administrative
>bureaucratic elites. It is
>essential that these social layers are kept loyal and uncritically
>carry out their allotted tasks of creating the means of engaging in
>economic and, if
>necessary, military
>competition. Such elites are also essential for creating the means of
>repression and oppression of the vast bulk of humanity, those who earn
>their living
>through labour,
>be they workers or peasants. Such elites are the "organic
>intelligentsia" of the ruling class described by the Italian Marxist,
>Gramsci. [10]
>
>I believe a central issue facing the revolutionary socialist movement
>is the need to win over to the side of labouring humanity elements of
>the scientific
>and technical
>intelligentsia in new non-positivist relationship ? a true organic
>intelligentsia.
>
>My proposal is to fight for the setting up of "Community Development
>Parks" especially as part of the implementation of a Workers
>International Plan for
>Development
>[11] . The potential of the new technologies for implementing such a
>plan is obvious.
>
>References
>
>1. The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, ed
>J.O.Urmson and Jonathon Ree. Routledge, pbk. 1991.
>
>2. Istvan Meszaros ; Beyond Capital, Merlin 1995.
>
>3. After Marx ed. Ball and Farr, CUP 1984.
>
>4. Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol 31:234, and Capital, vol.1
>p17.
>
>5. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, New York International Publishers.
>
>6. Marx (1970) Critique of Hegel?s Philosophy of Right, trans. A
>Jolin, J O?Malley ed J.O?Malley CUP.
>
>7. Marx (1967) Capital vol.1:52.
>
>8. Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, ed. S.W. Ryazanskaya,
>trans. I Lasker Moscow: Progress Publishers.
>
>9. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Collected Works
>vol.14.
>
>10. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Hoare, Q and
>Nowell Smith, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1971.
>
>11. D E Hookes and A W Brick, New Technology and the Political Economy
>of Development Second Triennial Conference (1993) Science and
>Technology for
>Development.
>

___________________________________________________________________
Get the Internet just the way you want it.
Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month!
Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.