Marx's Errors

 

 

 

Marx's most serious theoretical error - his moment of real utopianism - was when he said that "Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."  (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)  This bizarre claim, which reminds me of Wittgenstein's idiotic notion that "When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.  The riddle does not exist.  If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6:5), is more of a religious belief than it is a scientific observation.  But it is simply false, which is easy to see.  Humanity has all kinds of problems, both theoretical and practical, that it is unable to solve, and has been unable to solve for a vast amount of time.  There are also other problems, which humanity has managed to solve, or at least partially solve, but the solution came long, long after the posing of the problem.  Take, for instance, the development of calculus.  Although there are important precursors, such as Hasan Ibn al-Haytham and Bhaskara II, it was Newton and Leibniz who independently really brought this calculation by way of infinitesimals into its full fruition - thousands of years later, and more importantly for Marx's argument, under a different economic mode of production than the original problem of infinitesimals was posed, by the likes of Zeno of Elea.  The history of math and science is full of such examples, such as "Fermat's Last Theorem," which took more than 300 years to solve, the four color map took more than a century, and squaring the circle, trisecting the angle, and doubling the cube were all proven impossible in the 19th century after people had been working on them since the era of ancient Greece.  The three-body problem remains unsolved, though the solution always seems tantalizingly and frustratingly near.  Indeed, there may be "tasks" that humanity will never be able to solve - questions about the nature of the universe that we will never be able to answer, because we do not have brains that were designed or optimized for understanding the profoundest mysteries of the cosmos, but merely brains that evolved to be best adapted to surviving and finding food in the Savannah.

A related error, which I'm not completely convinced that Marx himself actually committed, is often nonetheless imputed to him, and can be found among writers like Gyorgy Lukacs.  I consider this error the mystification of the critique of political economy, and it can be divided into two parts, (1) an epistemological, that is to say analytic or descriptive error, and (2) a practical, that is to say, strategic error.  

Let's start with the epistemological or descriptive error.  The transition from the feudal mode of production to the bourgeois mode was obviously a complex, centuries-long transition, involving both formal and real subsumption, and motivated by vast and impersonal economic forces such that the establishment of the capitalist order was not primarily any individual's intentional policy decision.  The descriptive error is the baseless assertion that, in contrast, the transition from the bourgeois mode of production will be and must be the self-conscious and deliberate action of the proletariat, and indeed that the proletariat is already in the process of achieving self-consciousness - whatever this "self-consciousness" might mean, and whatever it might mean for the entire global proletariat to achieve it simultaneously.  This epistemological error renders what could be an economic transformation at the level of the relations of production into a metaphysical, theological, spiritual transformation, a simultaneously global and personal transformation of consciousness.

The practical and strategic error, which follows directly from the epistemological error, is to reject any and all real movements, transformation, and sublation of the present state of things, if those who enact these changes fail to "achieve self-consciousness" and attain some kind of theoretical purity - for which they are castigated as having "false consciousness." 

Of course, we can wish that the global proletariat would suddenly self-consciously act to transform the relations of production - and I do.  But a wish is not the same as a scientific theory.

This fundamental irrational optimism of Marx - this unfounded conviction that tasks are always just about to be solved and indeed are always already in the process of being solved as soon as we begin to pose them - is perhaps what led him to make certain erroneous historical predictions.  Marx denied that communism and its theory was in any way based on principles invented or discovered by any one thinker, including himself.  Instead, he thought that the theory emerged out of the ongoing political struggles that were everywhere visible to everyone.  He thought that class conflict was already happening in his lifetime, and that he was merely reporting on it, showing the world what it was already fighting for.  More specifically, he saw it as fully "inevitable" that the proletariat - the dispossessed working class, those with "nothing to lose but their chains" - would rise up, win the "conquest of democracy" and become the ruling class, especially in European nations.  For that reason, Marx and Engels preached that communists should support "the union and agreement of all the democratic parties of all countries."  They turned their "attention chiefly to Germany," because they saw an upcoming "bourgeois revolution in Germany [which] will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution." (Communist Manifesto, Chapter 4)

But, sadly, the workers didn't rise up.  A proletarian revolution in Germany did not follow the bourgeois revolutions "immediately."  In fact, even considered as bourgeois revolutions, the wave of struggles throughout 1848-1849 were mostly failures - some gains were made, but the movement suffered huge reversals as well.  From then until Marx's death in 1883, there were numerous false starts, in which it seemed, again and again, that the proletariat was finally forming into a class, achieving self-consciousness, and in its crucial position at the juncture of the means of production, realizing its already existing power - most famously, the Paris Commune of 1871.  Marx thought that "This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier."  But again and again these hopes were dashed.  And this cycle of raised expectations followed by colossal disappointments continued into and throughout the 20th century.

Instead, two things happened: (1) in countries of advanced industrial capitalism, a set of usually professional, salaried workers emerged that did not own the means of production, but nonetheless were not entirely dispossessed and thus had more to lose than their chains.  A very small subset, mostly within this set, embraced communism, but as an affection and even a kind of cultural distinction, using superior vocabulary, allusions to classical literature, and complex metaphysical mode of analysis to display their separation from other workers via greater education.  This process began even within Marx's own life, and, truth be told, he himself and many of his allies - Liebnecht, Bebel, etc., were a part of it.  (Engels, too, in a cultural sense, though economically speaking, he was a capitalist.)

(2) In other countries, a group of movements appeared, largely at first composed of peasants, usually aiming at land reform, and in many cases also as an adjunct of a peace movement, or at least a movement toward withdrawal from certain wars in which the peasants had no rational interest.  Some section of these movements, too, identified as "communist," and occasionally formed alliances with some of the educated intellectuals I identified as the first movement.

Neither of these movements, (1) or (2), was primarily composed of, or led by, factory-working proletarians - particularly those in the most advanced industrial nations, where Marx predicted the movement would inevitably become unstoppable, because "the increasing improvement of machinery" and the "development of industry" would mean that "the proletariat grows.  The proletarian movement, as such, scarcely existed - and though rare flashes of a proletarian movement did occasionally flare up - the largest example in Spain in 1936. 

1. I am a huge fan of Guy Debord, but this mystification of the critique of political economy took perhaps its purest and most radical form in his work, when he defined the proletariat as "the class of consciousness" (Society of the Spectacle, chapter 4, section 88)