Marxism

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MARXISM

An intellectual tradition and political movement initiated by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), Marxism has devoted much attention and debate on matters of science, technology, and ethics. Marx and Engels themselves were particularly influenced by Darwinism and saw themselves as extending an understanding of organic evolution into human history. They believed that developments in the natural sciences of their times required elaboration of the philosophical and sociological consequences in the direction of a dialectical and historicist form of materialism. But they were critical of existing materialist currents as undialectical and existing dialectical positions as idealist. In the intellectual division of labor between Marx and Engels, Marx devoted his efforts to economics, while Engels wrote on philosophy, science, culture, morality, and gender, and entered into polemics with critics. His Dialectics of Nature, published posthumously in 1927, explores the philosophical implications of the natural sciences.

Marxism held that capitalism has played a crucial part in developing science and technology, but that only socialism could fulfill their potential and organize an equitable distribution of their benefits. For Marxism, capitalism was an inherently contradictory mode of production. It was a system based on the primacy of market forces and private ownership of the means of social production, generating a basic class division between those who own the means of production and those who own only their labor power. Although capitalism led to an unprecedented development of productive forces, rising standards of living, and advances in science and technology, it also created massive inequality, parasitism, and alienation. Capitalism was a historically necessary stage in human development, but socialism was a necessary next step. A socialist system based on the social ownership of the means of social production would create a social order based on the principle "from each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs."

Marxism pioneered the field of sociology of knowledge, including the sociology of science and technology. It has insisted that science and technology are not isolated, self-contained activities, but develop in complex interaction with a whole range of other processes: philosophical, cultural, political, and economic forces. Within this interaction, the mode of production is decisive. All existing scientific theories, technological developments, economic structures, political institutions, philosophical positions, legal codes, moral norms, sexual roles, cultural trends, aesthetic tastes, and even common sense are inextricably interrelated and determinately shaped by the dominant mode of production. Marxism thus made extraordinarily strong claims regarding the philosophical assumptions and sociohistorical basis of scientific knowledge. At the same time it put considerable emphasis on ideology, arguing against the view that science itself is neutral and that only the use or abuse of science is ideological. Yet Marxism perceived recognition of these aspects as enhancing science and not being in conflict with the rationality and credibility of science.

Developments in the USSR

There have been many twists and turns in the history of Marxism due to the impact of new scientific discoveries, technological developments, philosophical trends, and political formations. Marxists of subsequent generations got caught up in many controversies. Along with political conflicts over evolutionary versus revolutionary paths to socialism, those of the second generation took various positions on the epistemological implications of the natural sciences. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's (1870–1924) Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) is a product of the philosophical debates of that period.

After the October revolution of 1917 that gave rise to the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Marxism came to power as the official ideology of the new Soviet state, meaning that its visionary ideas could be tested in social practice. There were fiery debates about how to do so in virtually every sphere: from strategies for industrialization and agriculture to nationalities policy about the fate of different nationalities/national cultures within the USSR, socialist morality, science policy, free love, and the future of the family.

In the early years of the revolution, the movement for proletarian culture, proletkult, led by Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov (1873–1928), a doctor who advocated a collectivist subjectivism in the philosophy of science, argued that the culture of the bourgeoisie—from art and literature and morality to science and technology—was saturated with class ideology and could not serve the needs of the proletariat. Proletkult required a specifically proletarian culture, including proletarian science, because science had been shaped by the capitalist mode of production and needed to be collectivized and revolutionalized, putting an end to the fragmentation of scientific knowledge and the competitive drive of capitalist production. For Proletkult socialism was impossible without science, but it was also impossible with bourgeois science. Lenin and others took issue with this argument, contending that it was premature and sectarian to sweep aside the existing intelligentsia and existing knowledge. Lenin insisted that it was necessary to embrace bourgeois science and knowledge while critically reconstructing it. Bogdanov's movement dissipated within a few years, especially after he, as director of the Institute for Research in Blood Transfusion, died in an experiment on himself.

Nevertheless the USSR put much emphasis on working out a distinctive approach to science and technology under the banner of Marxism. Many political and philosophical debates flourished through the 1920s. The relationship of philosophy to the empirical sciences was very much in play through the prolonged debate between those who were grounded in the empirical sciences and emphasized the materialist aspect of dialectical materialism and those who were more grounded in the history of philosophy, particularly Hegel, and emphasized the dialectical dimension of dialectical materialism. It has been an ongoing tension in the history of Marxism, playing itself out in the intellectual ferment and institutional transformation of a socialist revolution. Philosophy was considered to be integral to the social order. Political leaders, particularly Lenin and Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888–1938), participated in philosophical debates as if these issues were matters of life and death, of light and darkness. Even while preoccupied with urgent affairs of state, they polemicized passionately on questions of epistemology, ontology, ethics, and aesthetics.

Bukharin was an advocate of the new economic policy aimed at achieving agricultural productivity and steady industrialization, but was outmaneuvered and defeated by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (1879–1953). Although he had fallen from the heights of political power, he continued to work as constructively as possible and devoted himself particularly to the application of science to economic planning during the first five-year plan. Bukharin believed that Marxists should study the most advanced work in the natural and social sciences and cleanse their thinking of the lingering idealism inherent in quasimystical Hegelian formulations. In Historical Materialism (1921), used as a basic text in educational institutions, he interpreted dialectics in terms of conflict and equilibrium. Other Marxists, such as the Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) and the Hungarian Georg Lukacs (1885–1971), saw Bukharin as the personification of a positivist tendency in Marxism. Lukacs's book History and Class Consciousness, rejecting Engels's concept of the dialectics of nature, drew a storm of controversy.

In 1931 Bukharin led a Soviet delegation to the Second International Congress of History of Science in London, projecting enormous enthusiasm for the role of science in a socialist society. Boris Mikhailovich Hessen (1883–c. 1937) delivered one of the most influential papers ever in the historiography of science, giving an ideological analysis of Newton's Principia, setting it firmly within the social, political, and economic struggles of the seventeenth century.

Both Hessen and Bukharin perished in the purges. Bukharin was the most prominent defendant in the spectacular Moscow trials and was executed. Even during his imprisonment he continued to write of how Marxism forged the most progressive path for science and technology, as affirmed in his posthumous work Philosophical Arabesques (2005), which was discovered decades after his death.

Another Marxist intellectual who espoused ideas relevant to science and technology was Leon Trotsky (1879–1940). He was inclined to the mechanist position in the debates of the 1920s and saw the role of philosophy as systematizing the conclusions of all the positive sciences. After Lenin's death in 1924 Stalin also outmaneuvered Trotsky, rejecting his pursuit of a worldwide socialist revolution in favor of developing socialism in the Soviet Union. Dismissing him from the government and expelling him from the party, in 1929 Stalin forced Trotsky into exile where he was assassinated.

Beyond and Within the USSR

The intellectual energy and social purpose of the Soviet philosophers and scientists had great impact on their international audience, especially in Britain, where influential scientists, such as J. D. Bernal (1901–1971), J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), and Joseph Needham (1900–1995) took up the challenge of a sociohistorical analysis of science and put their energies into a movement for social responsibility in science.

Marxism captured the imagination of many intellectuals in the west in the 1930s. Some of the most brilliant, such as David Guest (1911–1938) and Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937), died in the Spanish Civil War. In The Crisis in Physics (1939), Caudwell extended his ideological analysis of all spheres of thought into physics, seemingly the area most remote from ideological involvement. Caudwell saw a causal connection between the crisis in physics and those in biology, psychology, economics, morality, politics, art, and, indeed, life as a whole. The cause of the crisis in physics was not only the discrepancy between macroscopic or relativity physics and quantum or subatomic physics, but the deeper problem was the metaphysics of physics. What it came down to was the lack of an integrated worldview that could encompass all the sciences with their dramatically expanding experimental results. Science was decomposing into a chaos of highly specialized, mutually repellent sciences, whose growing separation increasingly impoverished each of them and contributed to the overall fragmentation of human thought. Ironically the very development of each of the sciences in this situation accentuated the general disorientation and resulted in scientists falling back on eclecticism, reductionism, positivism, and even mysticism.

Back in the USSR, a number of those who were fervent advocates of the new social order being created there were accused of undermining it and perished. All the debates of the 1920s took a sharp turn from 1929 on with the frenzy of the first five-year plan and the intensified pressure to bolshevize every institution and discipline. The intelligentsia was told that the time for ideological neutrality was over. They had to declare themselves for Marxism and for the dialectical materialist reconstruction of their disciplines or evacuate the territory. All controversies, whether between Marxism and other intellectual trends or between different trends within Marxism, were sharply closed down through the 1930s. There was to be one correct line on every question. Any deviation was considered to be not only mistaken but treacherous.

There was resistance in many areas. Geneticists fought back against attempts by brash bolshevizers to override the process of scientific discovery. The protracted struggle over the theories of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976) took the debate over proletarian science into difficult and dangerous territory, making legitimate issues such as hereditarianism versus environmentalism into a struggle for power where all intellectual and ethical criteria were at times abandoned. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943), an internationally prominent geneticist and ardent advocate of the unity of science and socialism, defended genetics and resisted the onslaught of Lysenkoism. He was accused of sabotage of agriculture and died in a prison camp.

These developments in Soviet intellectual life were inextricably tied to the rhythms of Soviet political and economic life. The way forward with the first five-year plan was far from smooth and uncomplicated. There was violent resistance to the collectivization of agriculture and peasants were burning crops and slaughtering livestock rather than surrender. There was one disaster after another in the push to industrialization. There was a fundamental contradiction between the advanced goals that were to be achieved and the level of expertise in science, engineering, agronomy, and economics, indeed a general cultural level, needed to achieve them. There was panic and confusion and desperation. There was reckless scapegoating. Breakdowns, fires, famine, and unfulfilled targets were attributed to sabotage and espionage. There was a blurring of the lines between bungling and wrecking, between association with defeated positions and treason, between contact with foreign colleagues and conspiracy with foreign powers.

After the death of Stalin, subsequent Soviet leaders, particularly Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894–1971), in the critique of Stalinism after the Twentieth Party Congress (1956), and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (b. 1931), in the period of glasnost and perestroika (1985–1991), attempted to put Soviet life, including its science, on a new basis, but, some contend, the traumas of the period prevented such changes.

Outside the USSR: New Left Marxism

From the 1940s on, Marxism came into the ascendancy in the academies of much of Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America following the succession of communist or socialist parties to power in such countries as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, China, Mozambique, and Cuba. The academicians of the German Democratic Republic were particularly devoted to developing a philosophy of science in the sense of elucidating the philosophical implications of the natural sciences.

Marxism also played a special role in French intellectual life. Some Marxist scientists, such as the physicist Paul Langevin (1872–1946) and biologist Marcel Prenant (1893–1983) saw dialectical materialism as illuminating their sciences and looked to the Soviet Union as developing science in a way that would liberate human society. Georges Freidmann (1902–1977), however, who made original contributions to industrial sociology, came to think that Soviet science was drowning in facile formulas and sterile polemics. Later many French Marxists, such as Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) adapted their Marxism to existentialism or phenomenology. Others such as Louis Althusser (1918–1990) took Marxism in the direction of structuralism. It emphasized scientificity, but did not engage meaningfully with actual science.

In the 1960s and 1970s the influence of Marxism again became a formidable force, not only in countries defining themselves as socialist, but in the most prototypically capitalist ones as well. Although it never took state power in these milieus, Marxism did seize the intellectual and moral initiative for a time.

During this period a new left arose, posing new questions to the old left, as well as to the old right and the ever shifting center. Eurocommunism represented a merging of old and new left currents, which promised much at the time. The most vibrant debates of the day were conducted within the arena of Marxism. There were many journals such as Science and Society (1936–), Marxism Today (1953–1991), Socialist Register (1964–), and New Left Review (1960–) in which the discussion flourished.

On all matters touching on science, technology, and ethics, there was a new left challenge. The new left view of science represented a sharp break from the old left, for example the older radical science movement in Britain, exemplified by such figures as Bernal and Haldane. Science, as the older left saw it, was a progressive force. It was essential to socialism and socialism was essential to science. The Radical Science Journal (1974–1983) took the Marxist emphasis on the ideological nature of science in the direction of a radical social constructivism that sometimes tended to reject the cognitive and liberating potential of science. A long-standing leftist position, characterized by a blending of neo-Kantian, neo-Hegelian, and, more recently, postmodernist ideas with Marxist ideas, is represented by the Frankfurt School's (1923–) critical social theory, which identifies science with bourgeois ideology, counterposes scientific with humanistic values, and tends to hostility toward the whole sphere of the natural sciences. The divisions of the left on the question of science flared up in the science wars of the 1990s and were dramatized by the controversy that arose between the journal Social Text and Alan Sokal in 1996.

From the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the early twenty-first century, Marxism made major contributions to intellectual history. It may at times seem to be a discarded theory, but one would be mistaken in believing that Marxism might not surge again.

HELENA SHEEHAN