Heart of a Heartless Theory

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Marxism is a collection of intricately inter-related notions, and so can't be carved up neatly into discrete sections. That said, there are I suggest five broad aspects which can be identified, provided we remember they have many overlaps and connecting threads.

1) Philosophy. Hegelianism - the transformation of quantity into quality, negation and sublation, negation of the negation, the interpenetration of opposites and eternal change. Dialectical materialism.

2) Economics. The three types of value, including the labour theory. Surplus value and its declining rate. Exploitation and immiseration. Crises of over- and under-production.

3) Sociology (including psychology and culture). Labour as man's self-creation, ideology and hegemony, false and contradictory consciousness.

4) History. Classes, economic stages and teleology. The workers' revolutionary potential. Historical materialism.

5) Project. Organisation, party and activism, the need for revolution, the overthrow of capitalism and class, the establishment of communism.

These aspects could be diagrammed as overlapping in various ways. They could also be drawn as containing each other in various combinations. In particular, the economics could be regarded as a part of the history, or equally validly, vice versa.

But there are two elements which are curiously unconnected to the others. One is the political project itself, which isn't actually surprising even though the project is the point of all the theory, because the project is imperative and moral, while theory is declarative and morally neutral.

It is of course possible to accept the theory without accepting the project, or to regard the project's aims as desirable but unachievable, or indeed set the project on a substantially different theory.

The other unconnected element is dialectics. The 'materialism' part of dialectical materialism is near omnipresent, though not consistently defined. But the 'dialectics' part doesn't seem to relate at all. Or rather, it can always be made to relate, but only with constant redefinition and special pleading.

Is there a way in which the working and ruling classes 'interpenetrate'? Yes, in that there is a nebulous intermediate band between the two, composed of proxies for the rulers - workers indoctrinated and bribed with higher wages and small amounts of power, to keep the workers in line. We call this band the 'middle' class.

Or if you don't like that reasoning, you could say the two classes define each other reciprocally, much as a slave and slave owner define each other - a slave can't be a slave if someone doesn't own them, and it works the other way around too. This is of course a completely different notion of 'interpenetration', and you can chose which ever one you like, or switch between the two as convenient.

Ideology means one of two things. Either the rulers foist their own self-justifying rationalisations on the workers, who patchily internalise them into a kind of self-loathing. Or the rulers decide on a course of action, and set the middle class to invent and disseminate whatever lies they can come up with to justify it to the workers. Hegemony and propaganda, respectively.

Does ideology involve some kind of transformation of quantity into quality, or quality into quantity? It could - if you decide that hegemony has been reached when (say) >78.3% of the workers have been convinced by >23.1% of the arguments the mass media feeds them. Or you decide that there is a precise threshold beyond which a biased reporting of a true event becomes a lie.

Does it involve negation? Lies certainly 'negate' truth in one sense, by not being the same. And they 'negate' understanding in another sense, by creating misunderstanding.

Ideologies usually involve multiple, incompatible lies, which could be said to 'negate' or 'contradict' each other - which then negates the negation of the truth when the public realises the government's been telling them two things which can't both be true. Except that they can, dialectically, but let's pretend we've forgotten that for now.

How is the labour theory of value dialectical? That's easy - the labour contradicts the raw material (because one's 'living' and one's 'dead') but also penetrates and fuses with it, sublating both into a product (congealed labour). But it's got a limited shelf life because everything's constantly changing into its opposite and decayed merchandise is the opposite of new...and old things become new things when they've decayed into raw material for new labour.

Did Marx say any of this explicitly? Not to my knowledge - I just made it up. It's an easy game to play, because that's all it is. An intellectual game, of stretching and bending words until they fit - sort of, more or less - something already described.

It's no more profound or true than describing a violin as a kind of elephant. Both have a tough outer shell, both make a noise, and both need a lot of maintenance. I'm not sure whether you can tune an elephant though.

So, if the hegelian aspect of marxism is the basis of marxism, then marxism is founded on a vacuum. If it can't find another basis - game theory, its own economics etc. - then it falls right into that void and disappears.

If on the other hand the hegelianism is just a vestigal appendage of marxism, then we have both a hope and a problem. The hope is that marxist theory may be correct, and the marxist project may be possible - the evil of capitalism can indeed be overthrown, and maybe we can create a world worth living in.

The problem is that almost no marxists see it like that - and none of its major theorists. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg - they were all hegelians. Not just passively or vaguely - passionately and definitely. The very people who seemingly understood and practiced marxism best, most deeply, with the most insight and sweep...were wedded to a piece of 18th century mystical gibberish, and to the belief that it underpinned all their other beliefs, and their struggle.

Thus the great dilemma for the marxist who knows philosophy: One precondition of marxism being true is that it's not predicated on hegelianism. Therefore if all the giants of marxism are right, marxism is false. And if marxism is true, all the great marxists are wrong about marxism.

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Anything You Can Do...

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Let's invent a philosophy. Apoplectical Hyperrealism.

It's origins are in a German mystic called...Bagel. Unfortunately no one's sure what Porge Bagel said because he always spoke with his mouth full, so our ideas about him mainly come from a philosopher and revolutionary called Narks.

Writing with his friend Angels, Narks put it this way:

I turned the Bagel upside down, and scooped out the gastronomical filling, discarding the stale outer crust.

- The Gnomic and Orthodontic Manuscripts (1944)

Narks wrote many books using the tasty nuggets squeezed from Bagel, but somehow never got around to explaining what they were. Fortunately though, Angels wrote one and a half books explaining it, and their followers have been able to piece it all together. The three principles are as follows:

1) The principle of Fragmentation and Reconstitution: All things are constantly falling apart and coming back together, but in a different order.

For instance, when you breathe out, you are losing a part of yourself - Fragmenting the carbon dioxide from your lifeblood into the universe. But man cannot breathe out without thereafter breathing in, for without breath there is no life.

Man reconstitutes himself by drawing in breath, which is inevitably followed in an iron law of nature by exhalation.

When you eventually die your atoms are Fragmented into the soil, to Reconstitute as a tree or another person. So reality itself is breathing in and out, unable to ever stop. This is the Apoplexy of Apoplectic Hyperrealism.

2) The Principle of Comparison: Everything looks a bit like something else.

A man with a full head of hair resembles one with a small bald patch, who resembles one with a larger bald patch, who resembles a skinhead. Thus there is a chain of keratin from the hairiest hippy to the most shaven of punks, proving that if you change enough details, anything is a bit like its opposite.

3) Resemblance of the Resemblance: Sometimes, something looks so much like something else, it outshines the thing it looks like.

So, Lady Gaga is like Madonna, but with even worse clothes, a gayer fanbase and even more formulaic songs. Lady Gaga, the Resemblance of Madonna, has Reconstituted the Fragmentation of Madonna's attributes into a new, lower form.

I Can't Believe It's Not Butter is a butter-substitute so buttery, it replaces butter in the fridges of people who don't like margarine. The imitation has replaced the original by taking the main points, and exaggerating them. This is the Hyperrealism.

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This wonderful philosophy which perfectly explains absolutely bloody everything is not popular with those who control the world. The superrich are the only people with enough money to spend all day in bed - hence their name, the boudoirsie.

They are threatened by its profound implications, and have all the scientists in the world brainwashed into accepting a false idea of reality. This is ironic, because all the discoveries of every single scientist confirm Apoplectic Hyperrealism.

When you boil water, the molecules of H₂O are Fragmented from the body of the liquid, eventually Reconstituting back into liquid in a different place. Small droplets of water floating in air Compare to particles of smoke, and as the Comparison increases, eventually the water (as steam) Compares to smoke more than the Smoke does, rising higher and being hotter.

Smoke that doesn't float is ash, and as steam turns back into water, it compares itself more and more to ash and therefore falls to the ground in a light sprinkle.

This view of the universe is both simple and obvious from a thousand daily phenomena and a million scientific facts, yet almost no one can see it. Such is the power of ideology.

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The philosophy isn't just an unquestionable scientific truth, but also the only hope of humanity.

The great revolutionary Lemming used its principles to lead a people's coup, and even though the regime he set up turned into a barbaric dictatorship, that's only because his successor (Stealing) wasn't sufficiently Apoplectic.

There have been other glorious failures in many countries, and one day one of them will last more than a few years and spread through the whole world.

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Finally, we should make clear that there is another philosophy called Dialectical Materialism, which may look superficially similar but is completely different.

Dialectical Materialism is a collection of incredibly vague, quasi-theological principles which can be interpreted to mean anything so as to 'explain' any and every phenomenon.

All refutations are simply condemned with circular logic as 'undialectical'. The evidence is cherry-picked and distorted to make it fit. The followers of this sad delusion form small warring factions, yet have spent the last 150 years believing they can use its mantras to lead humanity to salvation.

Once they can be convinced of Apoplectical Hyperrealism, they can join our cause - and then, comrades, the whole world will be Apoplectic.

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Blessed be the Holy Method

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Marxism is not a religion, but Hegelianism is.

Assuming for the moment that Plekhanov's version of Hegel is more-or-less the same as Marx's version of Hegel, this quote from Plekhanov shows why:

"We know that Hegel called his method dialectical; why did he do so?

In his Phänomenologie des Geistes he compares human life with dialogue, in the sense that under the pressure of experience our views gradually change, as happens to the opinions of disputants participating in a discussion of a profound intellectual nature. Comparing the course of development of consciousness with the progress of such a discussion, Hegel designated it by the word dialectics, or dialectical motion. This word had already been used by Plato, but it was Hegel who gave it its especially profound and important meaning. To Hegel, dialectics is the soul of all scientific knowledge. It is of extraordinary importance to comprehend its nature. It is the principle of all motion, of all life, of all that occurs in reality."
- Georg Plekhanov, From Idealism to Materialism, 1917

Read that last sentence again. Hegel describes a model of progress in human understanding of the world, one of stages somewhat akin to Khunian paradigms, with each stage incorporating the insights of the earlier ones but improving on them, in a successive approximation to an as-yet unknown truth.

It's a simplistic but defensible model, both of the way individuals learn from their lives and the way science progresses.

Then in the last sentence he suddenly asserts that the universe progresses in the same way. As below so above. That the universe is moving through stages of successive approximation to...what? Some kind of self-actualisation, presumably.

There's no reasoning given behind this leap - we're just supposed to be carried along from an epistemological hypothesis to a cosmological one as though there were no difference between changing your mind and changing your molecules.

Hegel has taken a reasonable partial description of one aspect of human behavior, and projected it onto the entire universe, which becomes thereby shrunken to a human scale, and personalised. We have a word for this: Religion.

In a religion, the impersonal enormous universe gets scaled down and invested with human traits. Thunderstorms are the gods fighting because lightning looks violent. Crops are the earth mother giving birth because you can only harvest from fertile ground. Life hurts you because a magnified version of your father is punishing you, or because an invisible trickster enjoys your pain.

And in the modern, industrialised and educated world, the method by which human knowledge advances is, according to Hegel, the method by which the world does the same thing.

Religions involve this linguistic slight of hand: Two very different things become the same thing because they can be described with the same word.

This leaves open the question of why such insightful thinkers as Luxemburg and Trotsky thought such shallow writing as Plekhanov's was correct, nevermind great.

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Sci-curious

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Marxists have a very distinctive attitude to science, and also a very puzzling one.

They can hate science one moment, then they're grateful that it tells them what they want to hear, then dismissive because it doesn't, than patronising because they knew what it says all along, or filled with horror that it might cut away their humanity.

It's confusing because it's confused. They're trying to reconcile three irreconcilable views.

The first is the view that science is a dehumanising view of the world, one that reduces people to things and treats emotions with contempt. This comes from the hermetic philosophy that Hegel was building on, and in it science is the enemy of both happiness and 'true knowledge'. Science is evil.

The second is the view that marxism is confirmed by the natural sciences - even though scientists don't recognise it themselves. Discoveries are cherrypicked and reinterpreted to make them both agree with and support marxism. Indeed, marxism itself is sometimes called a science. This could be called the enlightenment view. Science is good.

The third is the view that marxism is like the natural sciences...but better. That marxists are waiting for the plodding positivists to catch up with them. This is the opposite of the enlightenment view, in that instead of science confirming marxism, marxism confirms science. Science is redundant.

Hegel held to the first and second views, both being inherent in his hermeticism. Engels vacillated between the second and third.

Bogdanov held to the second, even suggesting (quelle horreur) that science had something to teach marxists. Lenin slapped him down, citing the third view - but sometimes shifted towards the second.

Lenin studied Hegel extensively, claiming it was necessary to digest all of Hegel to understand Marx. But Hegel was a science-hating hermetic mystic, not a philosopher as such, which accounts for Lenin's hostile view of science as something which attacks marxism.

The three 'poles' give a vast number of permutations and attitudes to adopt and slide between, but there is no way they can be integrated or simultaneously dominant. This is why their attitude is so mercurial within individuals, and so perplexing even when it's constant.

There is of course one constant in nearly all marxists. They know nothing about science.

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Theolectics

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Comrades in branches don't talk about dialectics much when organising leaflet design or strike support. The unity of opposites doesn't play a major role in chanting at protests.

In fact, most members of most socialist groups don't care about philosophy, cosmology, or the nature of ultimate reality. Dialectics is a closed book to them, and they show no inclination to open it.

Marxism has a strong anti-intellectual current, as shown by the scarcity and poor quality of its major philosophical works, endlessly quoted without critique in the minor works.

But dialectics is used by the leadership, and the layers of party hacks who address meetings, organise demos and transmit policy to the branches. It gives an air of educated authority to presentations, it gives the appearance of impressive theoretical justification to policy flip-flops, and it papers over the cracks of inconsistant positions.

It serves an authoritarian purpose. A bit of Hegel is great for bullshitting the members.

But do the hacks, leaders and party intellectuals belive it? Most of them probably believe it when it's convenient for them to do so. When they want to discipline an errant member who's written an article questioning the party line, they passionately believe the inconvenient article is 'undialectical'. It's probably 'idealist', 'petit-bourgeois', 'mechanical', 'ahistorical' and 'reactionary' too.

The rest of the time, dialectics is like the god of the anglican - not so much disbelieved in as forgotten about when not needed.

If this were the whole story, the ghost of Hegel haunting Marx would be an annoyance, but not a major issue.

If it were the whole story, Engels would not have set aside real work for a year to produce the Anti-Duhring, and later the Dialecics of Nature. Lenin would not have turned away from intensive political activity in 1908 to attack Bogdanov.

Marxists want to make you free. But they also want to make you to believe their supersitions.

In the ideal future world of evangelical christians, everyone will submit to christ of their own free will. In the hypothetical post-capitalist socialism after the revolution, everyone will take dialectics as an unquestioned axiom. And they'll do it because they've seen the light.

After the revolution, everyone will be a marxist.

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The Spectre Still Haunting

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What did Marx take from Hegel?

In answer, marxists generally trot out the line that Marx took the "rational kernel", and/or that he "turned Hegel on his head, or rather his feet".

Both are more slogans than answers, and when you press for more detail, the former gets expanded into something like "Hegel was an idealist but he had some central insights which were materialist, and Marx took these", or sometimes "Hegel's method was materialist but mystified by his ideological idealism, and Marx extracted the method". As to what these insights were or this method was, that remains vague - as does the exact nature of this "materialism".

As for the latter line, incompatible with the first, it suggests that Hegelianism is simply a coded form of Marxism, and Marx found the cypher book.

Marx was not a philosopher, and neither was Hegel. Hegel was a follower of Hermes Trismegistus - he was a hermetic mystic. Numerology and kabalism, freemasons and the illuminati, ancient symbols and word magic, animism, mystery-as-revelation and universe-as-god-approaching-self-awareness - these are the furniture of Hegel's world.

To try to read Hegel as a philosophy is like trying to read Hobbes as a romantic comedy. The result can only be gibberish and incomprehension - which is of course precisely the result of most readings of Hegel.

On the questions of what Marx took from Hegel, I suggest there are three broad kinds of things one writer can take from another:

1) Form - style, a way of writing, a choice of words and preferred grammatical forms, aphorism or prolixity, the mode of expression.

2) Content - the ideas expressed, irrespective of the words used to express them. Of course, the habit of using different words for the same idea and the same words for different ideas is a feature of form that Marx and Hegel share.

3) Values - attitudes, emotions, associations and connotations. Not completely distinct from content, but often useful to separate.

I think what Marx took from Hegel was mostly his values - with some of the content which was bound up with them.

Their attitude towards science, for instance. On the one hand, the hermetic, proto-scientific view that the universe runs on rules that can with difficulty be discovered, and through knowledge of these rules controlled. And on the other hand the equally hermetic, anti-scientific view that treating animate matter as not qualitively different from inanimate matter, is dehumanising - even evil.

Marx wasn't an animist, but he did view human life a special and valuable - for ethical, not doctrinal reasons. Plus of course, Marx was an atheist - at least to the extent of not believing in a personal creator god who answered prayers.

Their attitude towards technology and industrialisation, as on the one hand oppressive and brutalising, and on the other indicative that humanity (and for Hegel the universe) had reached an advanced stage. The next stage would incorporate and "tame" technology, putting it to work for man, instead of the other way around.

This notion that humanity moves in discrete stages towards a great predefined goal is very Hegelian, though for Marx what's inevitable is the movement in stages and the attainment of the goal, not the nature of the stages, nor their number or any necessary timetable.

Hegel of course thought that the progress of human society, human knowledge and the universe itself had already reached its end point in justice and self-awareness - embodied in his very own modest writings. For Marx, the endpoint of society at least is yet to come - but not far away.

Engels was much more a Hegelian than Marx, taking more of the content and writing style. Unline Hegel, Engels wasn't horrified by science and technology - rather, he tried to incorporate scientific discoveries into his hegelianism. A different way of taming the technical side of capitalism.

Lenin studied Hegel intensively and extensively, though largely in secret - a secrecy which may suggest a hermetic attitude to study. Lenin's notebooks and Emperiocriticism offer mutually incompatible but decidedly backward looking views of epistemology and ontology. Indeed, his ideas about science, when not simply wrong, are anachronistic precisely to the lifetime of Hegel.

Trotsky was much less hegelian. He still believed in the dialectic, and thought it was almost impossible to be a thinker or activist at all if one didn't. But the occult signs, terror of science, inevitibilism, confusion about referential language and sense experience - these are gone.

As for modern marxists, they range from sages pouring over revered texts seeking the perfect wisdom of the authors, to streetwise activists concerned with human rights and sticking it to The Man, caring nothing for theory.

It's an open question as to how much hermetic mysticism has been purged from marxism by time, and a separate question as to how much however much of it remains is a serious problem for marxism today.

We can hope that Marx is now almost free of the ghost of Hegel. I think there's a lot more still inside the hermetic box.

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A Bedtime Story

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Once upon a time, a long time ago, there wasn't a giant robot. Back then, no one needed one.

Everyone was miserable, but at least everyone was equally miserable. Then people found ways to make things that made them less miserable - like more food, better clothes, painting and music.

Soon, there were enough good things for a few people to not do much work - provided everyone else still worked hard. These people decided they liked not doing much work, so they built a little robot to organise everyone else's work.

Some people didn't want to do what the robot said, so it was given teeth to encourage them. Over time, the teeth got quite large. Soon, the people forgot there had ever been a time without the robot. They forgot that people had made it, so they forgot people could take it apart again. Sometimes it didn't work very well, but most of the people had also forgotten it could be repaired.

Under the robot, people made more and more things, and so there was more for the robot to do. It got bigger and bigger, until it got so big no one could see all of it at once.

The roboteers realised too late that it controlled them too, but it provided them with the nicest things made by the ordinary people, so they didn't mind too much.

The ordinary people though, were not happy. They had some nice things, but they were more and more miserable. The robot was having them made pointless things just for the sake of making things.

Often it bit people for no reason, and told them they deserved it. When two roboteers fought over a mountain of shiny things, the robot made the ordinary people fight in their place.

Many of the people dreamed of becoming roboteers themselves, because then they thought they could get into the robot's brain and reprogram it.

Some tried to persuade them to make a few tweaks - to make the robot nicer. But even the few roboteers who wanted a nicer robot found it had made ways to protect itself from tampering.

Lots of people decided there was an old, bigger, friendlier robot out there. One which loved the people and would do some reprogramming if everyone obeyed its hundreds of lifestyle rules. But the bigger robot was just the big robot in disguise.

Others dreamed of going back to a time before the robot, but they didn't know how. Many tried to set up their own, littler and friendlier robots, but the big one stamped on them.

A lot of the younger people thought that, if people were sensible, they could organise themselves much better than the robot could. But while the robot was there, it made people silly. If only there were a way to make people sensible enough to destroy the robot, then they'd become sensible enough to organise themselves - and destroy the robot.

Then one day one of the youngsters realised that if all the people got together, they could smash up the robot, and then...what?

Everyone could be a roboteer! And everyone could build a better robot together! Smaller, easily reprogrammable, and set up to do what the people as a whole decided they wanted - not a small lazy group.

Life was now too complicated to do without an organising robot of some kind, and the people wanted the nice things that came from the organising. In fact, there could be a lot more nice things! (If that's what people really wanted).

But some of them decided the robot would rust on its own in time, so they didn't need to do anything. And most of them didn't trust any of the others to build a better robot properly.

Most of the time they argued over who was in charge, and who had the correct schematics of the robot. They found they liked arguing about things better than doing things.

And so the robot continued to stand, barely noticing them, for a very long time.

THE END.

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Star Quality

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There's an idea under capitalist ideology that leaders are specially gifted. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be leaders, right?

There's also the corollary that when someone gets thrown out from their leadership position, their special giftedness always turns out to have been an illusion - and suddenly everyone knew it all along.

It's related to the idea that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor - with the same corollary that when a poor person becomes rich, their poorness is rewritten as a temporary aberration - a brief failure of the universe to recognise that they deserved to be rich.

There's another idea that intellectual work is superior to manual work - and thus intellectual workers are superior to manual workers, and thus if a person is superior, it must be because they're a skilled intellectual worker. In other words, if someone is admirable, they must also be smart, because how did they get to be admirable if they weren't smart already, right?

When these two ideas collide, they produce an offspring: the idea that leaders are intellectuals. Thus Lenin was a great thinker, and although Plekanov was his mentor in theoretical matters, Plekanov was somehow less brilliant because, well, Lenin was the man in charge.

George Bush Jr was an idiot, and the left attacked him for it, saying a idiot like him should never be permitted political power. Which means, following the logic through, they were saying if he hadn't been an idiot, he would have deserved his power, and his policies been more justified. They were a lot kinder to the smart and educated Bill Clinton, whose policies weren't that different.

Now, it generally is better to have intelligent people than dumb ones in power, simply because they're more likely to understand the situation and be competent to deal with it. In fact that's almost a tautology, because that's largely what 'intelligent' means.

But to flip the correlation from "Intelligent people tend to make better leaders" to "Leaders are all intelligent" is a logical blunder a child could spot - and most do, before they grow up and lose their clarity.

Marxists ought to be able to see through this ideological trainwreck, but the reality is they can't. And that includes their leaders - who are always hailed as great intellectuals, and who always see themselves in that way.

Indeed, they tend to see themselves as great thinkers in all areas, whether they know anything about the subject or not.

Max Eastman was educated in science - Leon Trotsky was not. Karl Liebknecht and Nikolai Bukharin knew about science and philosophy - Rosa Luxomburg and Vladimir Lenin did not. Indeed, they both claimed to be uninterested in such matters - when they weren't writing about the errors of bourgeois scientists.

So of course it was Trotsky who spent hours shouting his "corrections" at Eastman, Lenin who remarked on Bukharin's ignorance of "real science", and Luxomburg who tells us Liebknecht didn't grasp Marx's philosophical insights.

While writing his aborted biography of Lenin, Trotsky found himself obliged to read Hegel. He managed thirty pages of Phenomenology of Spirit before giving up in exasperated incomprehension. This didn't stop him explaining the limitations of Hegel's genius in ABC of Dialectics - in terms lifted unattributed from Plekhanov.

It seems even the greatest marxists have trouble applying their insights to themselves, but it also goes for those who aspire to be leaders within marxist groups.

Those of us who've spent years sitting in rooms with a dozen revolutionaries know the type - the one whose ambition is to run their own branch (or party), who has a confident, decisive opinion on everything despite knowledge that's usually minimal and often just plain wrong.

I once had a comrade who liked to lecture on how higher mathematics and quantum mechanics proved marxism. Eventually I saw the one science book on his shelf - The Physics of Star Trek.

Sometimes I'm ashamed to call myself a marxist.

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The Masterplan

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Marx never got around to describing his method, though he planned to do so, but there are clues.

In the preface to the second edition of Capital, he refers to an article by an unnamed author in The European Messenger (May 1872, pp 427-436), on the subject of Marx's method, which calls his method "severely realistic" but his presentation "unfortunately, German-dialecical".

In other words, the author says Marx thinks like a hardnosed scientist, but writes like an idealist philosopher, indeed as "the most ideal of ideal philosophers".

Marx quotes the author at length:

"The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own.... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx's book has."
(pp 23-24)

He then immediately comments:

"Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?"

So Marx says that an author describing his (Marx's) method, is describing the dialectical method - the one Marx extracted and demystified from Hegel, but never explained fully.

It's a long, wordy quote, but it boils down to two things:

1) Every economic epoch has it's own laws. There are no universal economic laws - that would be ahistorical.

2) There are "special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one".

So...there are universal, ahistorical economic laws, not governing economic systems, but governing the transitions between economic systems. And they have a teleology, because systems are replaced by "higher" ones.

It seems Marx really did think history was on his side, that the revolution was inevitable, that society really does have a master plan, and that he'd unlocked it.

Marx, the idealist.

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Class and Consciousness

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Marxism has an ambiguous attitude towards the working class, and its ideas.

On the one hand, marxism is supposed to be a theory of society and economics, history and the future, life as it is and as it should be, from the point of view of the working class. It could be characterised as codified and systematised working class consciousness.

On the other hand, we're told the working class doesn't actually have working class consciousness. Instead, workers have in their heads the muck of ages - the assorted contradictory ideologies and propagandas which served the ruling class at one point or another.

Class consciousness then is a matter of authenticity - only highly authentic people have much of it, and almost no one has much authenticity. And so long as there have been classes, people have been inauthentic. Which means, supposedly, we won't know what people are 'supposed' to be like until decades after the revolution. Obviously there's some residual essentialism in our materialism.

Class consciousness is what the working class would have if it could stand outside itself, seeing itself from an ahistorical gods-eye viewpoint.

The image of the marxist party as the 'memory' or 'soul' of the working class, or as the 'vanguard' or a container for the 'best' workers involves a blend of substitutionism (where the party is conscious on behalf of the unconscious workers) and a kind of messianism, where the chosen few keep the sacred flame which would disappear forever if they didn't tend it.

In "What is to be Done", Lenin wrote quite plainly that the workers are incapable of creating the insights of marxism from their own experience - even though the insights supposedly come from this experience. Rather, they need to be educated in what they should already know by people who haven't had such experience - forward looking bourgeois intellectuals.

This is at the least a condescending attitude - portraying the workers as children who lack the maturity to understand their own circumstance, and have been led astray by bigger children. Marxists then are the grownups who have to guide them back to the right path.

It also raises the question of how the marxists came to be the few grownups. Were they born qualitatively superior? Was their indoctrination into mainstream culture faulty at some crucial point in their lives? Are they just smarter and more principled by natural variation? All these answers are given - implicitly, of course, because they are very un-marxist notions - in hagiographies of marxist great figures.

The usual explicitly given answer is that they grew into marxists as a result of participating in struggles and resistance. Which doesn't explain where these struggles came from, or why the marxists were among to few to get involved. Presumably before they were marxists they were born proto-marxists.

There's another implication in Lenin's statement. If the workers can't create marxism, and people can only become marxists by reading Marx (plus maybe a handful of other towering figures) and engaging in struggles...then where did Marx come from? He seems to be at the start of one of Hegel's bad infinities, much as Freud supposedly was.

Just as Freud alone was special enough to psychoanalyse himself, so Marx alone was special enough to take Feuerbach, Ricardo, Hegel etc. and spin them around onto their feet.

Regarding the founder as unique, and justifying your beliefs by reading them into his words - these are traits of a cult, not the sole hope of humanity. But then, cults often do believe themselves to be the sole hope of humanity.

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What You Fail to Understand Comrade....

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A common idea among proselytisers is: "If you disagree, it's because you don't understand", with the corollary that "If we can make you understand, you will believe".

This is obviously rubbish. The church which persecuted Galileo understood heliocentrism perfectly well - they were just committed to not accepting it. Indeed, as the Marquis de Sade pointed out, the same church could easily believe its own doctrines without understanding them.

The opposite idea, however, can be true. If you believe in crystal healing, acupuncture, or transcendental meditation, it may be because you don't know enough about them to know why they're junk. If you study enough of them to see the vacuum at the center and still believe, it's because your faith means more to you than your reason.

But it's still a commonly asserted notion that statement of a truth necessarily entails persuasion, even among those who ought to know better. Marx himself in a letter to Engels wrote that Pierre Tremaux's sort-of-Darwinism only had to be explained to be persuasive. The irony is that Engels trashed Tremaux's incorrect thesis based on a misreading, and Marx supported it due to a different misreading.

Bertoll Ollman writes: "A correct understanding of Marxism (as indeed of any body of scientific truths) leads automatically to its acceptance". He of course inserts the weasel get-out clause that one needs a "correct" understanding - an incorrect understanding doesn't guarantee belief, so if there's no belief, the understanding must be incorrect. Which means each individual student must adjust their understanding until they believe - and that's how we determine when they have the 'correct' understanding.

Lenin noted that Bukharin didn't understand the dialectic. Rosa Luxembourg said the same about Karl Liebknecht. The truth was that Liebknect and Bukharin understood the idea perfectly well, and wrote clearly about why they rejected it. Lenin and Luxembourg also wrote about the dialectic, but never clearly stated why they believed it.

Modern marxists have a habit of patiently explaining to doubters the very thesis the doubters doubt. It might be more helpful if they respected the doubter's intellect, and presented some evidence instead.

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The Secret

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One of the defining characteristics of cults is their insistence that they - and only they - have access to some Great Truth.

Sometimes they differentiate themselves from the outside world by making the Truth a secret - forbidding their members to tell outsiders about it. The cult of Pythagoras supposedly did this with the irrational value of Pi, though in their case it was a Truth they feared as well as revered. In this case the Truth was also true, though that isn't the important thing historically.

The Great Truth is of course usually a falsehood, and not actually the secret the cult tell themselves is it. The notions from scientology of Xenu and thetans are obviously not factual, and are common knowledge. Only members have to pay to be told.

There's another possibility: that the Great Truth is indeed true, but a commonplace triviality, dressed up in obscuring new words and the constantly repeated insistence that outsiders can't see it, or refuse to see it. Indeed, they claim the political structure of the world outside the cult is designed to obscure it.

Alfred Lawson dressed up the easier notions of relativity - the relation between motion and frame of reference - as "zig-zag and swirl". He also wrote impenetrable books on how "scientists" were too stupid to understand "his" insight into how things move.

Marxists have the same attitude.

In an article called On Teaching Marxism, Bertell Ollman writes:

"The dialectic is the only adequate means of thinking (and therefore, too, of examining and presenting) the changes and interactions that make up so large a part of the real world."

A few paragraphs later:

"Unlike bourgeois social scientists, who try to relate and put into motion what they conceive of as logically independent and essentially static factors, Marx assumes movement and interconnectedness and sets out to examine why some social forms appear to be fixed and independent."

The same tired old strawman - "we have the special knowledge, no one else does, and it consists in recognising something screamingly obvious, which no one else can see". Ollman paints mainstream academia as incapable of comprehending that different disciplines overlap because the distinctions between them are matters of convenience, not eternally fixed and inevitable.

Everyone knows that chemistry and biology blur into each other, with organic chemistry, molecular biology, enzymology and other subfields differentiating the overlap - and obviously overlapping with each other also. No one would deny that some philosophical works tend to be read as works of literature (eg. Hobbs' Leviathan, Rousseau's Confessions), and vice versa (eg. Alice in Wonderland, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence).

Leviathan is also part of political science, and Alice in Wonderland is used by linguists - who would be very surprised to be informed otherwise by a marxist colleague.

If marxist academics can't combat the mainstream without caricaturing it, then the problem is either in academia, or marxism.

Darwinism, for instance, is the only theory of its kind to have any credibility, not just because of the mountain of evidence, but because almost every single attack on Darwinism is a strawman - failing to get to grips with the real theory. If marxists can produce nothing but strawmen, then they should join the creationists and inventors of perpetual motion machines.

Note that I say "marxists", not "marxism". I'm sure marxists can produce rigorous, engaged critiques of every aspect of bourgeois society. Occasionally they do so, but too few, and too rarely.

When a cult has a secret Great Truth, the content of the secret is irrelevant. It doesn't affect the running of the cult - though it's probably used to justify the way the cult is run. It doesn't serve to enlighten members, though it does make them feel enlightened.

It's there to be the thing which marks the boundary between insiders and outsiders - cult members and the enemies outside the group. Marxism has long become too much like a cult.

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Patchwork Retrotheorisation

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Karl Marx didn't have a theory of art. That didn't stop Mikhail Lifshitz writing a book on it.

It's not a difficult trick. If you want to find "the islamic theory of childhood", you trawl through the Q'uran and your favoured hadiths, picking out any passages that refer to children, put them in a list and treat them as notes for a book which the author(s) planned but never got around to writing.

If you want "the marxist theory of aesthetics", you assume as a matter of faith that
(1) there is such a theory,
(2) it's contained implicitly in available works on other subjects,
(3) it can be extracted from them, and
(4) it's well worked-out and coherent.

Four highly questionable assumptions. In effect, you assume the great marxists did unwittingly collaborate on a worthwhile theory of aesthetics...but they wrote it out of sequence, scattering it in fragments across works covering tangentially related topics.

If you're a scrupulous researcher, you'll remember the context the fragments came from and take that into account when interpreting them - and if you're not, well, that makes it easier to write the book.

None of this is to say such a work must be worthless, or that Marx, Lenin etc. had nothing interesting to say about art. But any project like "Buddha on family", "Hume on linguistics" or indeed "Lenin on music" should be regarded with great skepticism.

If I want to know something about geology, I ask a geologist. I don't ask a dozen haematologists, or read a dozen books by one astronomer.

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Engeldust

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Marx thought he had a theory of economics and politics - casting sidelights on history, society and psychology.

It's an impressively wide ranging theory - indeed, if only half of it turns out to be true, it would still be one of the great theories humanity has ever produced.

But that kind of reach wasn't enough for Engels - he thought he had a theory of everything. Atoms, societies, galaxies, emotions, reason and everything in between.

Lenin followed Engels instead of Marx. Trotsky and Mao followed Lenin. Luxembourg followed Trotsky, and now whenever we read Marx, we read him through the lens of Engels.

Seeing as Engels was wrong - both about the need for a totalising theory and about the theory itself - this is a problem.

So the questions are:

* Is this problem fatal to the marxist project of political change if it's unresolved? And,

* If there's a solution - a way to get marxism back on track - what is it?

I haven't found answers to these questions yet - these little essays are partly an ongoing attempt to find them - but here's an oblique stab at them.

Believing in a false (or meaningless) theory - if you act on it - is obviously not a recipe for success. If, like any major church, you kind of believe in it, and justify your actions in terms of it, but don't actually act on it, then adherence becomes an empty ritual.

A lot of people like their rituals empty, but are there any positive effects of the influence of engelsism (to coin a term) on marxism?

I'd say there is at least one positive effect, namely that marxism as a theory of everything is much more attractive to potential recruits than marxism as a theory of economics and politics - or even as a theory of world revolution.

The percentage of revolutionaries who want to make a revolution, as opposed to struggle for one, must be quite small.

But there's a flipside to this. Many are attracted to marxism because it provides a social support network for them - and depending on the stripe, this may extend to it being a closed cult, which of course is exactly what many disaffected people want.

Others are attracted to the liberal progressive campaigning that some groups do - as a way to hold the party together until a revolutionary situation presents itself.

Some like bloodcurdling rhetoric of violent overthrow, or the opportunity to walk in the road with a banner shouting abuse at the police.

These desires are obviously not mutually exclusive or fully conscious, but another one would be the desire to have a totalising theory of absolutely everything. They're attracted, not really to the theory itself, but to the fact that there is one.

Most marxists don't understand dialectics, and aren't sufficiently troubled by their lack of understanding to read the standard works about it - which is of course one reason why they don't realise how vacuous it is.

Indeed, most marxists haven't read Marx, or any of his followers. Some books are for reading, some are for quoting, and some are for owning. But it doesn't seem to impair (or improve) their effectiveness as marxists, so long as the cell, branch or party has a resident intellectual or two to set the line for others to follow.

So, the mysticism of Engels may - or may not - be a factor in the failure of marxism as a political project. But it's also probably a reason why there are so many marxists.

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Au Contraire

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"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
- George Orwell, 1984

How is it possible to believe two mutually contradictory things? Actually it's quite easy - people do it all the time. Voluntarism and fatalism exist side by side as psychological tropes, as do sympathy for suffering and blaming the victim, knowing that winning streaks don't go on forever, and organising your life around the assumption that this one will.

The trick of course is to believe different things at different times, about different things, in different circumstances - while always maintaining that whatever belief you have at any given moment is the complete and unalterable truth.

You lost your job? There was nothing you could have done about it. You're applying for a new one? If you're confident, you'll get it. You didn't get it after all? There was nothing more you could have done. Or you weren't trying hard enough, take your pick.

The 'clever' part of doublethink is not the hypocrisy. Although there's a perverse admirability in the ability to flip nimbly between blatantly incompatible positions in an eyeblink - even between complex metaphysical and moral structures.

The clever part is in marshaling all the ancillary lies and evasions required to prevent the incompatible beliefs bumping into each other - and in the further lies and evasions involved in restoring cognitive consonance when they do collide.

As Orwell says, to be convinced by your own lies you need to lie to yourself about lying, and evade the fact that you're evading. If the generals fighting a losing war could plan operations with the skill and speed needed to justify the war inside their own heads, they'd probably win in a week.

Of course, sometimes the buzz of sophism in a person's head leads only to vacillation, paralysing indecision, or a steady state of being conflicted. People have been known to spend their lives working towards a goal, but to constantly invent delays in reaching it.

---

Marxists have elevated doublethink from a psychological coping strategy to a grand overarching narrative of the universe - with the astonishingly flexible and convenient notion of 'contradiction', in which it's not people who are hypocrites, it's the universe!

'Contradiction' means whatever you want it to mean, whenever you need it, and never when you don't.

The union has sold out strikers? Not to worry comrade, because every time the workers are betrayed, their consciousness increases, so their (eventual) political activity level increases, hastening the revolution. Every defeat is contradictory, because it creates success.

Employers want to reduce wages, but with low wages the workers can't buy commodities to make the market work? That's not irony, and it's not a flaw in the design of capitalism, it's a contradiction - in a completely different sense of the word.

Workers interests (revolution) aren't the same as those of employers (the status quo)? Yes, they're in contradiction - in a different completely different sense.

1+1=2? According to Engels, the two 1s are in contradiction. Something's moving? Engels says its position is contradictory.

Light is a particle and a wave? Magnets have two poles? Entropy increases but biological life gets more complex? That shows how physical reality itself is contradictory - which with great circular convenience (and scientific illiteracy) proves marxism as a whole.

---

The one place where we conspicuously don't find contradiction is our own movements, which is odd, because they're so full of ironies, conflicts and paradoxes.

Your party talks about democracy, but doesn't have any of its own. Your tendency believes in human freedom, but demands obedience. Your group hates all the other groups, because apparently they're all sectarians.

It seems the world is constantly contradicting itself, so in describing it, it makes sense for us to contradict ourselves. But we don't see contradictions in ourselves - instead, we see 'subtleties' and 'nuances' of theory and practice.

So it seems we don't see ourselves as part of the world we want to change.

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Make Light of Reason

Marxism is Romantic. It therefore has an ambivalent attitude towards the Enlightenment.

On the one hand, it proudly claims to be based in reason and materialism, also acknowledging that these are enlightenment values - and thus preconditions for science and technology, themselves preconditions for industrial capitalism.

On the other hand, it looks forward to a postcapitalist world, where industry serves the necessary needs of all humanity, as opposed to the unnecessary greeds of a very few.

In such a world, reason and materialism are the philosophical norm, and while advanced science and technology won't be seen as good or inevitable in their own right, they would most likely be ubiquitous. Everyone would have all the technological comforts they could want - provided the production of this technology weren't harmful to other people, or the environment.

In the marxist image of capitalism, the people are servants of reason, itself a servant of the ruling class of industrialists. In the marxist image of postcapitalism, the relation between people and reason is inverted, which raises the question of which image came first to Marx, and which was the derived inversion.

Under marxist postcapitalism - aka communism - reason is the servant of the people. This is significant because it's seen as a re-inversion - a restoration of the corrupted original order - of the role of reason in classless primitive communism. It's not an accident that the original (pre-fall, edenic) state of humanity shares a name with the projected (post-apocalypse, idyllic) final state.

Under communism, we are returned to a classless, oppressionless state - but higher than the original. Indeed, the negation of classless society by classes is negated by the industrial and social products of class society.

Given the severe problems in dialectical theory, this alone should set off alarm bells.

Far Out Man

There are recreational drugs which make the banal seem profound. There are also ideologies which do the same.

For instance: The more I write, the more my biro runs out of ink - it's on a journey from 'full' to 'empty', where the quantitative lessening of the ink supply ends in a qualitative shift from 'useful' to 'useless'. Indeed, a full pen is an aid to communication, whereas an empty pen is actually an impediment, proof that an object can have opposite properties at different times.

Or: No two cups of tea are ever exactly the same temperature. Given that there are an infinite number of possible temperatures - and an infinity between each of these points and the next - it follows that every brew is unique. Although empirical proof is impossible because we don't have an infinitely graded thermometer to check.

Or: The song I heard on the radio today isn't the same as the same song I heard yesterday. The radio, DJ, transmitter, CD and ears may all be the same, but they've all changed minutely in 24 hours. So although the lyrics are identical, they mean something slightly different now - because the universe has changed, and I've changed, so my interpretation is different, so the meaning of the song to me is different, every time I hear it.

If you think these insights are deep, with great political consequences if only everyone else would realise them, you're either stoned...or a marxist.

One Size Fits All

A lot of philosophy - especially bad philosophy - consists in applying a single principle to everything in the universe. For Empedocles it was the war of Love and Strife, for Schopenhaur it was the universal Will, and for Engels it was the dialectic of nature.

In arguing against Dühring's all-embracing system - and indeed against the notion of all-embracing systems - Engels wants to show that his system is superior to that of Dühring...but doesn't want to admit that he's playing the same universe-explaining game as Dühring. So, he fudges the issue.

"...this work cannot in any way aim at presenting another system as an alternative to Herr Dühring's “system”, yet it is to be hoped that the reader will not fail to observe the connection inherent in the various views which I have advanced."
Frederich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1877)

The rest of the book is more honest, piling up examples of how the dialectic accounts for everything which happens or exists, from simple arithmetic to the motion of planets and the nature of revolutionary struggle. Years later, the convert JBS Haldane comes right out and says it.

"...dalectical materialism, the philosophy which, along with Marx, he founded, is not merely a philosophy of history, but a philosophy which illuminates all events whatever, from the falling of a stone to a poet's imaginings."
JBS Haldane, Preface to Dialectics of Nature, by Frederich Engels (1833)

In Lieu of an Introduction

I don't have a manifesto - nothing so grand. I don't have a list of specific reforms or personal grievances, nor a sweeping new theory or program of strategic proposals.

What I have is a web of unanswered questions after a decade of calling myself a marxist. You could call it a crisis of faith, a kind of burnout, or just another personal journey by blog.

I'd call it frustration. I've run out of patience - with the baseless assertions, inconsistency, evasions, pseudotheory and bullying of marxist leaders and intellectuals. That, and the general failure of marxism itself.

For a theory which promises so much, it seems to deliver so much in peripheral areas - psychology, art, linguistics, history, sociology - and so little in its own target area - effective political action.

Marxism looks like it should be great, but it's a joke. I want to know what went wrong, and what elements in marxism itself contribute to its sorry state. I want to know if its successes are real or just so much hot air - and whichever it is, why.