From International, January-April 1983, Vol.8 No.1 & 2, pp.14-18.
Downloaded with thanks from the Ernest Mandel Internet Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for
From International, January-April 1983, Vol.8 No.1 & 2, pp.14-18.
Downloaded with thanks from the Ernest Mandel Internet Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Marx carried out a revolutionary transformation of all social sciences. He revolutionized conventional approaches to philosophy, society, history, political economy, politics and the prospects of human emancipation. These transformations can be subsumed under the general formula of ‘the theory of historical materialism’. Key to this theory, argues Ernest Mandel, is the centrality of the revolutionary potential of the working class.
Marx viewed history as determined by objective laws which science could uncover. These laws derive from the specific structure and dynamics of each particular mode of production. These objective laws have to be discovered for each particular society. Marx simultaneously stressed the social determination of history as a science and the historical determination of sociology (and economics) as a science. There are no ‘eternal’ economic laws. There are only particular economic laws for particular forms of social organization of the economy.
But while endeavouring to discover the laws of motion of each particular mode of production, concentrating on the laws of motion of bourgeois society dominated by the capitalist mode of production, Marx rejected the mechanically deterministic view of history, characteristic for the French materialists of the 18th century (later to be largely recuperated by the vulgar evolutionism which influenced socialist thinkers like Kautsky).
Marx stressed the active aspect in history, so typical for human versus purely animal behaviour (this stress can be found not only in the Theses on Feuerbach, but also in Vol. I of Capital, not to speak about the Grundrisse and various philosophical and historical comments by Marx and Engels). Marx’s philosophy of history – like his philosophy in general – is a philosophy of praxis. Historical materialism does not deny that humanity makes its own history, which is not imposed upon it through mysterious outside forces. To be sure, men and women don’t make it independently from the circumstances they encounter, in the first place the material possibilities given by the existing and potential level of development of the productive forces, and the resulting possibilities for the extension of enjoyment, and the self-realisation of the producers.
But they do make their history themselves. Their level of consciousness and awareness of their own conditions and future, their degree of objective (scientific) approach to reality, the degree of self-delusion they still suffer, all strongly react upon the way in which they will shape their own destiny. Marx believed in the possibility of humankind to do just that to shape its own destiny, not only through understanding the objective laws of motion of society, but also through its capacity to actively attain emancipatory goals. Through Marx’s writing, there remains the emancipatory purpose: to abolish all social conditions which make men and women into oppressed, exploited, mutilated, miserable beings; to realize a society in which the free development of each becomes a precondition for the free development of every individual.
Thus, Marx was not only a social scientist. He did not limit himself to revolutionizing the sciences of society, history, economics, and philosophy. He also revolutionized politics and the drive towards human emancipation (‘socialism’), which are much older than bourgeois society, in fact, as old as class society itself. While it is necessary to separate methodologically his revolutions in science (which have to be judged from a purely scientific and not a ‘class’ criterion), from his revolutions in politics and emancipatory endeavours, these revolutions in thought and action constantly interact upon each other. Only if we synthesise them can we understand and represent Marxism in its totality, in its majestic richness, as a totality in movement, which has nothing to do with dogma or religion.
For the epoch starting with the industrial revolution, the totality of the theory and practice involved in Marxism can best be summarized through the revolutionary potential of the working class as the only social force objectively and subjectively capable of replacing bourgeois society (the capitalist mode of production) with a higher form of civilization and of socio-economic organization: classless society, communism, of which socialism is the first or ‘lower’ stage. This does not mean that for Marx and Engels the victory of socialism was an inevitable product of the inner contradictions of capitalism. Quite the contrary: they often stressed that human societies can, throughout history, either progress or regress; they can even disappear.
There is nothing fatalistic in Marx’s view of history, which asserts as a result of a scientific understanding of bourgeois society, and in light of the lessons of 3,000 years of class struggle, that no other class than the contemporary working class, ie, wage labour, has the potential to replace capitalism by a socialist society. The fate of humankind is for that reason tied to the victory of the world working cla