A Dialogue on Historical Materialism
By Andrew Austin
Copyright 1996
 
				COLLECTION 2

[This next post asks for clarification from an individual who joined in
the debate. It is reproduced here because in my questions I present the
crux of the Marx/Engels problematic.]

Comrade,

Does the dialectical materialism you know and love naturalize the
analytical method of dialectics by placing methodology external to the
social being and the intersubjective thereby elevating it to a general
natural principle inherent in the universe? Does the external material
world, in your understanding of dialectical material, change in a
dialectical fashion, unfolding teleologically according to the logic of
dialectics, with human beings only discovering these changes through the
objective positivistic and empirical methods of science? If so, then this
is the idealization of Marxian dialectics. Which is why I reject Engels'
formulation. Engels' is the one who sets Marx on his head by turning him
back to Hegel. My rejection to dia-mat is that it loses the central tenet
of Marxian epistemology: it is human beings, through labor and thought,
that construct their worlds. And the social worlds they construct in turn
create them. In changing the world, Marx argued, man changes himself. What
is human is not natural; it is social. Homo sapiens live in nature. To be
human is to be social. Naturalizing the social being transforms a living
breathing science of liberation into a dead reified theology. I see this
as the central failing of orthodox Marxism. 

Andy 

				* * * * * 

Comrades,

I am in a rush, and the first post I wrote to Steve, a point by point
refutation, was obliterated in a lightening storm, so I will here address
the central point of Steve's post: my alleged misunderstanding of idealism
and materialism. Perhaps I will return to the balance of Steve's post
later. Steve's post reveals the popular misunderstanding of the
idealism-materialism dichotomy. We must, first and foremost, keep in mind
that the distinction can be analytical and/or metaphysical. In either case
it is arbitrary and artificial. I tend to use the concepts of subjective
and intersubjective, or the anthropological dichotomy emic-etic. But after
a brief explanation of what idealism and materialism are, these terms
should not trouble us too much. 

Idealism itself is, for the most part, subjectless either in its view of
the origins of thought and reality (the system of thought or
thought-objects), or in the process of ideological production. The later
form, however, can include the subject, and thus can become (as it does in
Marx) the ideational component of a materialist philosophy (this avoids
the Hobbesean paradox). Idealisms in practice basically comes in four
forms. 

Absolute idealism is the idealism professed by Hegel, Fichte, Schelling.
This form of idealism naturalizes Kantian critical philosophy and method,
thus transforming what was intended as an speculative epistemology into an
absolute ontology. Absolute idealism, as Marx, Nietzsche, and others
pointed out, is a veil for theology. Absolute idealism is a truly
subjectless historical theory. It is completely teleological and grounds
its own speculation in the immutable laws of nature and supernature.
Engels and Lenin approach the gates of this view with dialectical
materialism. 

Cosmic idealism, is a step removed from absolute idealism (though not by
much). Cosmic idealism avoids the supernatural implications of absolute
idealism by placing the dialectic outside society and into nature. Where
the neoKantians (in this case the Hegelian sort, not the historicists)
naturalize (rather mythologize or ontologize) Kantian critical
epistemology, the dialectical materialists naturalize (again ontologize...
even mystify) Marxian dialectics. Engels and Lenin are both found here.
Empiricism, the purist form of objectivist idealism, manifests here, as
well, and it advocated most staunchly by Lenin. Empiricism believes that
the truth of a thing resides in the thing itself, and this truth is reveal
to us through sense impressions. This is the copy theory of knowledge. It
is wrong. How empiricists get around the fact that no subject ever
approaches an object without a preconceived (socially constructed)
interpretive frame has never been answered. 

Social idealism is the third sort. Marx can be considered a social
idealists in the materialist tradition (that is, historicism and social
constructionism, in contrast to Heidegger and Nietzsche). This is the
belief that through the process of socialization we are humanized, and
that social reality (which in the end is all reality) is maintained
socially through symbolic interaction. Marx held this in common with more
pure social idealists, such as Mead, Berger, Luckmann, Schutz. In fact,
Median thought is very dialectical, derived, as was Marxian epistemology,
from Hegel. Both Mead and Marx ground their philosophies in the material,
i.e. social world. Again, Marx is squarely in this camp. Because social
idealism is the only tenable epistemology (and if I were a metaphysician I
would say ontology, as well), this is the starting point for
interpretations of Marx, precisely because he was a historicist (other,
more idealistic historicists include Dilthey, Rickert, and Windelband,
just to fix this philosophy; Popper and Hayek tried to deform the term by
transforming it into its opposite). 

Individual idealism argues that human beings are rational creatures
innately, that is to say that systems of knowledge are apriori. Kant
resides here. As well as Cartesian philosophers of all sorts. Whereas
empiricism is the working form of objectivist idealism, Rationalism is the
working form of subjectivist idealism. These two combine to form the basis
of positivism. Although Marx rejected positivism in the main, he did use
the methods in his historiography. Engels and Lenin, however, are
positivist to the core. On a basic level, this philosophy is often called
"apriorism." Individual idealism is often connected to cosmic idealism. In
fact, Engels connected the two levels in both Anti-Duhring and Dialectics
of Nature. In the former he attacks Herr Duhring for his apriorism, but is
apparently unaware--this has been the excuse made for Engels--of his own
apriorism throughout the work. However, excluded passages from the
Anti-Duhring reveal Engels was in fact well aware of the contradiction in
his thought. He went through the manuscript and carefully purged the more
obvious appeals to individual and cosmic idealism. But these passages are
very revealing. For example, in one excluded passage Engels writes: 

	The fact that our subjective thought and the objective world are
	subject to the same laws, and hence, too, that in the final
	analysis they cannot contradict each other in their result, but
	must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought.
	It is the unconscious and unconditional premise for our
	theoretical thought.

Here Engels admits his idealism. If subjective thought is subject to the
same laws as those laws that govern the objective world then human beings
are mere objects of universal laws of history and nature. We are, in every
event determined not by other humans in social interaction, but by
objective imperatives that lie external to our social beings, and hence
external to our knowledge. Engels makes this last point clear throughout
both works under discussion. But this is absurd, and approaches absolute
idealism! To posit the existence of something outside of knowledge is to
produce imaginaries (speculations on unknown things), and to bring these
imaginaries into contemplation objectivates them. God came into being
precisely because he fill the gap between what was known and what was
BELIEVED to be unknown. Absolute idealism performs the same function as
theology here, and in contradition to the cosmic idealism Engels (and
Lenin) try to fuse with individual idealism. Before them this amalgamation
produced positivism. They arrive hers but with absolute idealism in their
minds as well through Hegel. And so the end product -- dialectical
materialism -- is this bizarre, hopelessly contradicted philosophy. On top
of all this (and I wouldn't care if it were not for this) they have the
language of praxis, which demands they put this model into practice. 

Engels continues to display his apriorism:

	Modern science has extended the principle of the origin of all
	thought content from experience in a way that breaks down its
	old metaphysical limitation and formulation. By recognizing the
	inheritance of acquired characters, it extends the subject of
	experience from the individual to genus; the single individual
	that must have experience is no longer necessary, its individual
	experience can be replaced to a certain extent by the results of
	the experiences of a number of its ancestors. If, for instance,
	among us the mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every
	eight-year-old child, and in no need of proof from experience,
	this is solely the result of "accumulated inheritance." It would
	be difficult to teach by a proof to a bushman or Australian
	Negro.

So here Engels wants to say that conceptual systems, which are an exact
reflection of natural systems, both driven by the immutable laws of
nature, are innate, but he wants to avoid sounding like he is presenting a
rationalist argument, and thus avoid overt idealism. How silly. So he
appeals to a false theory, that of the genetic transmission of acquired
characteristics (which was Lamarkean evolutionary theory, rejected by
Engels' other hero Darwin). And he even argued in this passage that blacks
could not learn these thing because they did not have the genes for it.
Absurd! These mathematical axioms are human constructions. The child
learns them from his culture. And the blacks could learn them too if they
were in the same culture. Marx argued this point. The ideological
superstructure is the result of the productive mode, emerging from the
force of production, the combined amalgamation of technological
contradictions and the dialectical interplay of social interactions
manifest in social class. Have we forgot our Marxism?? Marx would never
have naturalized these process in nature by claiming that they appeared in
our consciousness as the product of biological evolution! Surely you
cannot defend Engels here! 

To quote Marx (1842):

	But philosophers do not grow like mushrooms, out of the earth;
	they are the outgrowth of their period, their nation, whose most
	subtle, delicate and invisible juices abound in the
	philosophical ideas. The same spirit that constructs the
	philosophical system in the mind of the philosopher build the
	railways with the hands of the trade. 

The only tenable position epistemologically is one of social idealism
grounded in the social world, that is, those realities found in the
intersubjective of particular sociohistorical frames. This is the
historical materialist project. Remember, Marx's philosophy was historical
materialism NOT dialectical materialism. Marx used the phrase the
"materialist conception of history" not the "materialist conception of
dialectics." And the title of Engels' work, the Nature of Dialectics,
shows the break in thought quite clearly. Marx recognized, as did the
historicists of his day, that the thought systems of any epoch are the
products of the social relations, NOT biology or theology. Indeed,
theology and biology themselves are social constructions. We are the
subjects of history precisely because we construct history through social
interaction; real men in the real world, to borrow Marx's phrase. The laws
which govern historical development are human- made laws, they are found
in the ideological products of various social institutions. "In every ages
the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class." Remember this? What
was Marx saying? Marx was saying that philosophy itself was the product of
sociocultural and sociohistorical processes. And this is where we are
given the revolutionary impetus; it is because reality is constructed by
humans that humans can change reality. Under Engels' ideas we are
determined by natural forces, even the thought in our heads. Then a Lenin
comes along and, like a messiah, claims the unique ability to see the
world ahistorically, to hold social reality (as if this were possible)
transepochally (a contradiction), uses the natural law of historical
development produced by Engels, and guide us to the inevitable utopia of
state socialism. This is all so twisted. Marx was teleological and
positivistic enough without the reification of thought into such
ridiculous dogma. But this intellectual thread is not the core of Marxian
thought. It is only the thread that Engels found most useful to justify
his own philosophical leanings. Marx must be extricated from Leninism, and
those parts of Marx which give rise to the dialectical materialist
tendency in Marxist philosophies should be reconstructed, so that Marx is
consistent with himself, at the same time avoiding the mistake of
Althusser in attempting an epistemological break in Marx's work to justify
an identification with Engels. 

Again, I highly recommend the article by Neill in the 1974 Insurgent
Sociologist I have previously cited. I also recommend Danny Goldstick's
"Out of Engel's Wastebasket, etc." in Nature, Society, and Thought, Vol.
7, No. 4 1994. These specifically address the Marx-Engels controversy. As
for the philosophical foundation I have presented, however helpful to
understand the thought of Marx in context, is not so easy to come by. 

Andy 

				* * * * * 
Comrade, 

The discussion was on the foundational aspects of Marxian thought and its 
corruption in Leninism. I am pleased to hear you do not take Marxism as 
gospel. However many people do, and the particular doctrine used is 
Leninism. It is my goal here to extract from Marxism-Leninism the core of 
Marxian theory. I am doing so because I want to return Marx to his 
emancipatory beginnings so that we might shed the stigma (and the stigma 
stems from a correct criticism) of actually existing socialism.
 
Andy

				* * * * *

[An individual, in a lighthearted gesture, drew up a glossary entitled, 
"How to Understand Austin." It was really very good.]

Comrade,

This is excellent! However one correction to Webster is in order. 
Historicism in the sense that I am using it is the noncorrupted 
philosophy of Dilthey et al. This is the view that consciousness is a 
product of the social relations and the historical context of a 
particular epoch. Marx used this argument to describe the way in which 
the ideological superstructure, and even culture and language, arise on a 
foundations of social and material processes. He called this the base, or 
mode of production, and grounded it in the material world. This IS Marx's 
materialist philosophy. He goes no further than to place the driving 
force of history and consciousness here at the productive level. 

Historicism in the sense that Webster is using it is the corruption by 
Popper and Hayek in bashing Marxism. They used this term to make fun of 
precisely the tendency in Marxism to be teleological and nomothetic, i.e. 
crude economism. This is a caricature of Marxian thought, but it not
inaccurate if applied to Engels and Lenin, which was the dominant 
interpretation of Marx used by Popper, Hayek, and other of their day. If 
Marxism was all about this form of historicism then I would be agreeing 
with Popper (on this and hardly anything else). I could never agree with 
Hayek. However, Marx is unique in his recognition of historicism in the 
neoKantian tradition and this is what is overlooked time and time again. 
It is the premise of Marx's HISTORICAL materialism.

Andy

				* * * * * 

Comrades,

I do want to make a statement on primacy, because this is central to 
the discussion at hand. When I discussed the compatibility of social 
idealism with historical materialism I did so to get at their shared 
assumption of ideas being shared by a common people in a common 
historical context. 

Social beings interact with other social beings and ideas are 
shared among them. This is what I mean by intersubjectivity, i.e. a 
shared subjectivity. Marx called a form of this class consciousness. 
The degree to which thoughts are intersubjective is the degree to which 
reality, or things in reality are said to be objectivated. 

These ideas can be transformed or maintained by institutions in the system, 
for example by the ruling class, whose ideas, Marx noted, and Gramsci 
formulated in his concept of 'ideological hegemony', are the ruling ideas of 
any particular epoch. This means that our consciousness, at least on a 
narrow ideological, perhaps better said political level, is determined by 
the promulgation of ideas by the ruling elite who control hegemonic 
institutions, that is institutions of thought control.
 
However, ideology in an expanded sense, as in a worldview (and Marx used 
both conceptions of ideology in his work--this was further formulated by 
Mannheim), is determined by not only the former component, that is 
ideology as a mystification of real social relations, but also other 
elements in the superstructure, e.g. norms, beliefs, culture, aesthetics, 
etc.. 

Ideology in the total sense can change when the social being changes, and 
transformation of the social being can result from various forces. One 
force that can account for this is environmental. A change in the 
environment can force an adaptation in the social system. The ecological 
changes are random, not governed by laws (such as dialectics). 

But a more important cause of transformation is in the productive mode, 
either along changes in the means of production (technological-
organizational) or relations of production. Both of these forces of 
production are the engine of historical transformation. So this is the 
primacy of the Marxian model. As I stated before in my post on the 
glossary, Marx begins here: with production and social reproduction.

However, it must be remembered that social beings create their worlds 
in thought and labor. Primarily this is manifest in the extraction of 
natural objects and their transformation into use values by human labor. 
Thus the primacy lies in SOCIAL RELATIONS and their CONSTRUCTIONS, hence 
social constructionism. It does not lie in nature, but in the social. 
Alienation is not estrangement from natural being, but from SOCIAL being. 
Thus the relationship is reciprocal, or hermeneutical. Social beings 
change society and in changing society change social being. The primacy is 
not an ultimate beginning or structure, but it is a PROCESS. Marx's 
theory is a system's theory only analytically. The fundamental reality of 
the system is the processes of social relations.

Andy

				* * * * *
[The author of the glossary pointed out that Webster's did in fact present 
this other conceptualization of historicism.]

Comrade,

I do like the alternative Webster gave. A key element of historicism is 
trying to understand a particular epoch or culture according to its own 
logic. Weber called this "verstehen" or interpretive understanding. 

Social constructionism is the philosophy that humans are at the center of 
the social world and that, through social interaction, humans construct 
and maintain social reality. It does not locate truth outside society, 
either in disembodied ideas, like absolute idealism, or in 
transhistorical laws, like cosmic idealism (dialectical materialism 
is a form of cosmic idealism). Niether did Marx, and this is the central 
point in all my contributions.

Social constructionism in its fully developed form is a synthesis of 
historicism, phenomenology, historical materialism, and symbolic 
interactionism, all on a more micro level.
 
The type of phenomenology used in this synthesis is not of the individualist 
idealism of Husserl or Heidegger, rather it draws on the sociological 
reconstruction of their work by Alfred Schutz. Schutz was, along with 
Heidegger, Husserl's star pupil. Schutz's students Peter Berger and 
Thomas Luckmann wrote an even more sociological reformulation in a very 
important book called The Social Construction of Reality. It would not be 
an exaggeration to say that this book is among the top 5 most 
influential books in sociology. 

Symbolic interaction is a philosophy born out of William James' 
pragmatism and most highly developed by social psychologist George
Herbert Mead. Mead used Hegelian dialectics to formulate a theory of self 
that parallel's the theory of self found Marx's philosophic and economic 
manuscripts. At the time Mead was thinking about all this these 
manuscripts were not published or available. If you want to understand 
Marx, then understanding these texts, the epistemology of which go unstated 
in future writings by Marx, is crucial. They change the more famous of 
Marx's work so dramatically when it is all put in context that this led 
Althusser to announce an "epistemological break" in Marx's work, rather 
than to reformulate his (and Engels and Lenin's) interpretation of 
Marxian writing. I recommend reading these manuscripts and then reading 
Shlomo Avineri's The Social & Political Thought of Karl Marx. You will 
not look at Marx in the same way.

In fact, Mead, Antonio Gramsci, and the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs
arrived at similar formulations of Marxian epistemology WITHOUT having 
ever read Marx's writings on his core philosophy. By understanding the 
"mature" Marx and going back to Hegel, they were able to "rediscover" 
Marx's basic ideas. And this led both Gramsci and Lukacs away from Lenin 
and Engels. Lukacs would even formulate a theory of alienation on his own 
(this idea of Marx was lost as well for decades) and lead a movement away 
from the Eastern European deformation of Marxian ideas. His efforts in 
the West founded critical theory, and brilliant (but neglected) Marxist 
scholars followed in this tradition, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Neumann, 
Benjamin, and others.

Andy

				* * * * *

[In response to the most substantial response to my writing.] 

Comrade, 

I agree with everything you said. My narrow argument was only addressing 
the problematic of locating the dialectic outside the social system. I 
was only seeking to dismiss the naturalization of dialectics, not the 
method of dialectics as an analytical tool nor the dialectical process 
embedded in the forces and relations of production. I agree with 
historical materialism; it is the deep structures of social reality which 
are the engine for historical transformation and give rise to the 
ideological superstructure and consciousness, which I completely agree 
with you are surface structures. Historical materialism keeps these 
processes and structures within the social system. Dialectical 
materialism naturalizes them, locating them in nature, thus producing a 
cosmic idealism which is wholly untenable.

My point is that Marx's theory IS an interpretative theory. While it is 
true that the subjective (and intersubjective) is a product of the deep 
structures of social forces and relations, it is just as true that these 
structures are only accessible THROUGH the subject. This is because one 
must use the symbolic systems of the culture in order to deconstruct the 
social processes that both constructs and mystifies social reality. This is 
why I object to the rendering of a subjectless history. For one thing, it 
is impossible to stand outside of knowledge. For another, it locates 
tranformational power outside the social system (which gets back to my 
initial argument). Remember, according to Marx, consciousness is either 1) 
a reflection of deep social structures manifest in thought and/or 2) an 
ideological product constructed by the ruling elite and distributed 
through the hegemonic institutions they control. The latter is a 
distortion, mystifying the true forces and relations possible in the 
former. Marx's interpretative method tears down the mystification to 
reveal the social world as it really is. 

But a caution. Marx is a subject. And the world "as it really is," is 
ultimately his interpretation. One that I agree with, of course. And one 
which jibes with both analytical philosophy and empirical reality. So on 
an epistemological level, interperative sociology avoid the ontological 
nightmare of postitivism. Marx disliked positivism as well. He borrowed 
the methods of the empirical sciences because 1) he was a pragmatist (I 
use these methods a lot, as well) and 2) because he found taking on the 
bourgeois ideologues using their own methods was an effective way of 
demolishing their mystifications. Capital is all about validating Adam 
Smith's value theory, something the bourgeois apologists had long ago 
decided they didn't want validated. By working in the logic of 
liberal economic theory he was able to prove the labor theory of value. 
Capitalist economists have been scrambling about ever since.

Thanks for your post. It was very well written. Again, I agree with your 
points. I do not think you provide a correct evaluation of my Marxism, but 
this is because your analysis drew from a narrow argument I presented on a 
specific topic and then generalized this as my overall interpretation of 
historical materialism. 

Andy