Re: [Marxism] The Duality of Marxism: is capitalism totalizing or

[brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Haines Brown)]

Although I appreciate the honesty and thoughtfulness of Michael
Friedman's comment on the "totalizing" aspect of Marxism, the thrust
of his explanation of the a presumed "crisis" in Marxist thought ends
up, I fear, in its rejection. Either out of ignorance or
dim-witedness, I don't see that there is a crisis at all, at least not
in Marxism as a science. And so let me re-thread Michael's needle to
evaluate the steps he took to arrive at his conclusion.

> > I proceed from one fundamental fact: Marx clearly underestimated
> > the flexibility and lifespan of the capitalist system. Of course,
> > it requires no keen intellect to note this, but it is a starting
> > point for a critique which I think should flow from this fact.

Did Marx underestimate the flexibility and lifespan of capitalism? In
a sense this would appear to be so, but from another angle it is
not. After all, in his time there were powerful working-class
movements that did in fact have a great impact on history. The reason
why Marx's outlook may strike us as ambivalent seems to depend on
whether Marx was in the business of making historical
predictions. While there are instances in Marx where prediction serves
a rhetorical purpose (the movement needs to feel that victory is
within its grasp), the whole of the Marxist corpus, I believe,
suggests he was not trying to predict the future in the sense of
defining the final outcome of the historical process. On the contrary,
he appears to have pursued an analysis of his present situation in
terms of its limits and possibilities to arrive at a sense of its
likely direction of change rather than its outcome.

A mathematical analogy would be the difference between a scalar and a
vector. A scalar is a particular value that exists in a field
representing the range of possible values. If applied to history it
implies that the course of development is known - past, present and
future - the field is known in advance. The object, then, would be to
draw a line from the present point to a known future point and to
adopt policies that would carry you along that line. In contrast, a
vector is a value (magnitude) in the present, such as a force, that is
associated with merely the direction of change implied by the starting
point. It seems to me that Marx was analyzing the forces at work in
capitalism that define a certain direction direction of its change
rather than striving for some known alternative in the future. While
one might hazard a guess as to the possible outcome of such a process,
and our representation of that outcome might be politically useful,
his work seems primarily directed at understanding the forces at work
in late 19th-century capitalism rather than the construction of a
future goal toward which one might strive.

I'm only conveying a rough impression that certainly is open to
challenge, but I'm not sure many would be is inclined to do so. I
would like to think the distinction is clear and that one's position
on the issue has obvious and profound implications for just what Marx
was up to.

> > Marx's very apparent hope that socialist revolution was on the
> > agenda in Europe so early in the development of capitalism was
> > reflected in a dialectical analysis: contradictions in capitalism
> > would mount, the backward states would be assimilated into the
> > modern dynamic, classes would polarize, the proletariat would be
> > in a desperate but pivotal position, and revolution would
> > inevitably follow. Again, it would be beyond obvious to point out
> > that the relation of capital to the colonies was not one of
> > uplifting, that the living conditions of the proletariat in the
> > West did not sink but rise, and so on. The real issue is: what
> > implications does this have for the kernel in the Marxist method?

I don't disagree with his description as long as the "would be" were
replaced by "can be". The former seems to imply prediction; the latter
describes the actual potentials existing in a given state of affairs.

The "kernel in the Marxist method" depends very much on our resolution
of this methodological ambiguity. In positivism the successful
prediction of the outcome of a laboratory experiment validates a
general law which then serves to explain what is going on. Contrary to
what is often assumed, this is not _the_ scientific method, but only
one method employed by scientists. Many instead use an abductive
method that that offers a range of hypotheses concerning the
probability distribution of the possible outcomes of a situation. If
the outcome happens to be known (as is the case for the "retrodictive"
method employed by historians), the outcome might seem to offer a test
of the truth value of the historian's explanatory hypotheses. However,
that would be misleading, for the probability distribution of the
initial state of the process does not consist of one valid hypothesis,
making all others are false, but a set of real possibilities, all of
which are true, although having different probabilities. These
probabilities are not an effect of our ignorance, but are an
objectively real feature of an open process. The test of the truth of
these hypotheses does not depend on some specific future outcome, but
in the adequacy of our understanding of the situation itself.

How that understanding is achieved is a difficult
question. Neopositivists have long struggled with it and offer a
variety of useful insights, but in terms of Marxism I believe an
important, perhaps primary, consideration is the degree to which our
description of a situation is universal. That is, how much of reality
do we take into consideration? The greater the scope of our
investigation, the greater will be the potential truth value of our
explanatory hypotheses. I won't belabor this point, but merely suggest
that Marx habitually strove to bring as much as possible into
consideration as he could. He was not satisfied with the narrowly
economic scope of classical political economy, but felt it necessary
to tie it in with social dynamics (class) to arrive at a larger and
more complex system, and, as can be clearly seen in his historical
works, include politics as well.

It is interesting (but, again, I'll not explore this point) that, when
Marx studied the past, he gave greater weight to politics than when
studying the present. In his _The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte_, politics looms as central, but it is a politics that is
betrayed by circumstance. This suggests that when the outcome of a
process is known, it supports the development of conscious policies,
but political outcomes are always "structurally determined" by the
material circumstances in which they take place.

In short, "totality" in this context would not be an ideal whole (as
in Hegel and Meszaros), but a naturalistic whole, the real environment
in which a process takes place. In contrast with the old positivist
laboratory model, you do not look at the system as being isolated and
therefore as having an unequivocal outcome, but as being open and
therefore as having a real range of possible outcomes with various
real probabilities of their realization. The future is not
unequivocally determined by the present, but the present consists of a
virtually unlimited set of objectively real possibilities that have
various objectively real probabilities. For more on this, I refer you
to the subject of "scientific realism", which holds that unobservables
(such as probability distributions) are real (google for "Scientific
realism"+wikipedia).

> > What I refer to here specifically is what I would call 'maximalist
> > dialectics'. That is, the idea that a polarization of social
> > forces would be so total, and the resulting synthesis so clean and
> > absolute; the very neat notion that the motor of capitalism at
> > once sweeps away obstacles in its path and prepares the conditions
> > for its collapse in the same step.

This paragraph might serve to illustrate my point. To the extent we
isolate a system under study, the more a particular outcome becomes
predictable. Unfortunately, the word "total" here seems to imply that,
just within the scope of our study all the relevant factors are taken
into consideration, while everything outside that definition of scope
is assumed to be irrelevant, trivial or marginal. However, if we
instead view the system under study as being open and therefore
necessarily subject to significant outside influences, we cannot offer
a static definition of the system in order to predict its
outcome. What we confront instead is an equivocal (probabilistically
determinant) process. So, our aim is not closure, but the embrace of
an ever wider range of these outside influences in our understanding
of a situation to arrive at a better estimate of the probability
distribution of its possible outcomes. The resulting synthesis is not
"clean and absolute", but ever dirtier and more ambivalent.

> I cannot quite put my finger on it, but there is something about
> this idea which I think is at the root of the crisis in Marxist
> thought.

I would very much like to know just what this "crisis" is. In terms of
the distinction I tried to raise above, if Marxists are experiencing
difficulty comprehending the dynamics of our present world, that does
not invalidate Marx's approach, but is a result of either our not
taking a sufficient number of forces into consideration or the
incoherence of these forces. We are not applying the method well
enough or what we are studying is inherently ambivalent.

It is not the method that is proving inadequate, but the conclusions
we perforce derive from applying it to an ambivalent and changing
world. Globalization suggests that capitalism's environment is rapidly
expanding, and so we cannot represent it in thought as a static whole
in order to arrive at an unequivocal prediction of its outcome. But
this is no reason to despair, for we know that to the extent
globalization reaches completion (embraces the entire planet), the
capitalist system becomes largely closed, and the enormous range of
outcomes with more or less equal probability is thereby reduced so
that the line of class struggle will indeed become more "clear and
absolute" in the sense that class struggle can become coherent and the
working class a significant determinant of the future. Put in simpler
terms, as long as the capitalist system is acquiring new potentials,
class struggle can only serve to deepen its contradictions, not
displace it.

The incoherence and weakness of class struggle today I would not
attribute to any weakness of theory, but to the complexity,
ambivalence and evanescent nature of the world in which we now
live. To attribute the shortcomings of class struggle to the
inadequacy of theory seems uncomfortably close to an objective
idealism. I have no doubt that as this globalizing process reaches
completion, as it seems to be doing right now, we will see a rebirth
of a class struggle that contests the system rather than make the best
of it, although of course not quite in the form it took in the late
19th century.

Sorry for this long and difficult diatribe. I hope folks are willing
to shoot arrows at it so that I can develop my understanding of
things.

Haines Brown


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