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NEWS & LETTERS, May-June 2005YouthIs Marx's view of socialism relevant?by Josh Skolnik Recently, while engaged with the News and Letters Committees class series, "Beyond Capitalism," I also read some of Hegel, Marx, and later dialecticians with students who, having read CAPITAL, now wish to know more about "Marx's method." These two very different discussions made me realize that while attention to method is important, one must consider the motivations behind such a search and take care not to substitute some other method for Marx's own. Dialectical method is not something that can be extracted from the exposition and goals of Marx's work. It requires understanding how his works fit into a body of ideas that is inseparable from his philosophy of revolution. People who look for Marx's "method" are usually seeking a magic formula for unlocking profound analyses of whatever strikes their fancy. What many, it seems, seek in Marx is a mere tool for understanding the immediate social world. This proves inadequate, if not diversionary, for answering the questions of the day. It causes one to skip over the work needed to grasp Marx’s philosophy of revolution, which is the missing ingredient in past revolutions. One need also be aware of a different conception of method that places less weight on the starting point of the investigation, and more on its result, the goal of transforming reality. To develop Marx's work in new directions requires, as with any scientific theory, paying utmost attention to it as a totality, which must include grasping its conception of a new society. Yet most students I spoke with treated the need to conceive a new society with dogmatic skepticism. In the interest of discovering his "method," they wished to put to the side, at least for now, the central question of the absolute transcendence of capitalism and what that entails, in favor of a theory of contradiction and struggle. When I pointed out that Marx's standpoint was akin to the absolute at the end of Hegel's philosophical system--the unity of theory and practice, subjectivity and objectivity, as well as a historical totality that includes past, present, and future--the idea was summarily dismissed. Few believe that something as "abstract," mystical and seemingly inconsequential as the absolute would have made it into Marx's "social theory." HOSTILITY TO HEGEL There aren't too many Marxists who do not adhere to Engels' separation of Hegel's revolutionary method from his "conservative" system. What they fail to understand is that Hegel's method and system are one. What Marxists--of both the Soviet and Western varieties--have dogmatically done to Hegel, they have, by extension, also done to Marx, thereby failing to understand his method by pushing off into the distance the very standpoint of the future society that necessarily grounds his specific critique of the present. Conceiving of a new society plays a key role in Marx's unique path toward closing the gap between theoretical and practical movements, resulting in socialism. Marx's work follows in the line of great philosophers who attempted to answer the question, "Can humanity be free?" It would be a shame to ignore him as many do Hegel, leaving the implications of his proposed solution undeveloped for our age. In order to realize the goal of human emancipation and not rest content with a mere social critique of the present that can very easily fall into utopian, reformist or even reactionary positions, we must address the question of how a new mode of production is possible. While this is not sufficient for building a full society of free individuals, it must, according to Marx, be the ground of such a society. Thus Marx spent decades grasping the nature of the capitalist mode of production and offers a good idea of what it is not, thus further intimating a new society. Marx felt it necessary to integrate this idea into a political organization. With theoretical results garnered from his decades of research, he critiqued the Gotha Program, the founding document of German Social Democracy, for falling short on this point. That this critique flows directly from his method makes it all the more striking when some people declare that his CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM, which lays out a conception of how relations of production and distribution must be altered, actually violates Marx's "method." The familiar reason is given that it is for workers to decide. Yet given the premise that people think, and need a general idea of where they are headed, before they act, we can no longer place on their backs the whole burden of solving such problems in the moment. There is no reason that workers cannot be involved in this thought process now. CHALLENGES OF A NEW SOCIETY Many still think the problems of constructing a truly new society will be solved during the ample time of a long transitional society after workers take power. But it would take a miracle for the totalizing logic of capital and its law of value to be phased out gradually or to admit of a purely political solution like taking power or building sites of counter-power. There will likely be little time to do what we must to keep capitalism from reintroducing itself. The problem is difficult enough if we lack answers, but is made impossible if we lack even the right questions. Raising the right questions and working out some probable answers now must form part of the revolutionary process. In this way ideas become a force (and impetus) for revolution. Humanity seems unlikely to make a revolution, if people expect it will fail as massively as in the past. They seem unwilling to accept the article of faith that it will be a long process that we will make up as we go along. Everywhere today people discuss the possibility of life beyond capitalism. Concretizing Marx's concept of a new society seems to me to be the most relevant way of following his method. |
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