Marxism and Inevitability – The Critics Criticised (1956)

From the March 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

“There’s a destiny that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we may.”

Is Marxism the prose Rubaiyat of economic fatalism? Many pseudo-Marxists have half believed it. Quite a few critics of Marxism—Eastman, Berlin, Popper, etc., have wholly asserted it. A host of sentimental liberals and political do-gooders have also chosen to see Marxism as a secularised version of—”and the good must come to pass.” For such critics Marxism is either a synonym for Kismet or a variation of “The Lord will provide.”

It is true that the Communist Manifesto states, “Capitalism is its own grave-digger; its fall and the victory of the proletariat are alike inevitable.” This has been taken up by opponents of Marxism and echoed and re-echoed down the corridor of the years as evidence of the fact that Marxism spells out fatalism with a capital f. Yet anything less like religious or philosophical quietism than the Communist Manifesto it would be hard to imagine. Not only do its pages breathe political activism but it ends with a stirring call to action—”Workers of the world unit,” utterly at variance with any predestined assumptions. It is not difficult, however, to tear a sentence from its context and make the author appear to say the opposite of what he actually meant.

Now this particular type of criticism of Marxism pivots on the word “inevitability.” If we are to believe the critics of Marx the term inevitability, especially as related to human society, is synonymous with fatalism or predestination—”The moving finger writes and having writ moves on.” Thus in the Marxist scheme of things, vide the critics, inevitability means that human wills are writ so small as to be virtually non-existent.

The word “inevitability” as used by the critics in reproaching Marx carries a stigma; the stigma being that human beings are but puppets in some vast cosmic process. But is that the only significance which can be given to the word? One of course does not deny that in a given context the word “inevitability” can be synonymous with fatalism. What one does deny is that in the Marxist context they mean the same thing.

Let us, to paraphrase Marx, consider the word “inevitability” a little more closely and see how its meaning varies with the context. Thus we say night, inevitably follows day. Do we imply by such a statement that fatalism or predestination of some kind is involved in the rotation of the earth on its axis? It can, we think, be agreed that the regular sequence of events connected with the solar system has nothing to do with fatalism or any other kind of supernaturalism. Some one might, of course, say “but is it not true that men are nevertheless powerless to control solar events?” Here it would seem that inevitability implies the powerlessness of men. But surely the answer is that such events being non-human have nothing to do with the powers possessed by socially organised men. Therefore the question of powerlessness on the part of humans in non-human processes does not arise. The power of human beings lies in the fact of their ability to understand and utilise natural phenomena to their social advantage.

Again the inevitable sequences of events which occur in the solar system are of inestimable advantage to humans during the course of their lives. It enables one to go to bed supremely confident that after a night’s sleep one will wake up and it is morning. And to feel assured that in making an appointment a week hence the solar sequence of things will not have been reversed. If solar events were so arbitrary that in the words of the song “when it’s night time in Italy it’s Wednesday over here” then life on this planet would be a matter of conjecture. If inevitability, then, entails some aspect of a regularised and sequential eternity one can only add—long live inevitability.

One can further expand the advantage which inevitability has for us humans. Thus if we know that “A” will always bring about “B” then the certainty of this knowledge gives us an assured basis for utilising it. Such knowledge not only gives us power to understand the world but the power to change it.

On the other hand, if events were so capricious that water raised to a certain temperature did not always produce steam, or in switching on an electric kettle the water got colder instead of hotter, then the organisation of knowledge consequent upon an inevitable sequence of things would be impossible.

It does not follow then that inevitability pre-supposes the powerlessness of humans. It can, in fact, imply the contrary. Thus, for example, if the Moscow Dynamos were to meet a scratch village eleven we could say the result would be inevitable. This would not be because of the inability of the scratch side to kick a ball but of the highly trained athletic power of the Dynamos.

Now the working class in Capitalist society constitute not only the bulk of the population but are a highly trained productive class. Potentially they are the most powerful social group and the only section capable of basically transforming existing social conditions. When Marx spoke of social inevitability he was not as vulgar critics such as Eastman and Isaiah Berlin contend, postulating mysterious agencies beyond the control of humans, but had in mind the latent powers resident in the working class.

Marxists recognise, however, that inevitability has a twofold character; one of denial as well as one of affirmation. From one aspect it can be considered as a restraint on human power. From another, a source of possibilities and opportunities. Thus Capitalism through its social productive agencies constitutes a fetter on the free and fullest use of human skills and productive resources; just as the ownership of these productive resources by a class gives them power over the lives of others and inhibits their free development. Only in a classless society can human activity be equal, creative and shared.

If then extant society gives rise to certain social consequences inseparable from its existence, i.e. if “A” always affects “B” then, in order to eliminate “B” we must get rid of “A.” It is this recognition of the “must” which makes possible our decision to achieve the “ought.” Because the pressures and conflicts of Capitalism are permanent, powerful and pervasive, it becomes not a matter of preoccupation for the few but the concern of the many. If “A” is then a necessary condition for “B” this itself promotes the idea and need of getting rid of the cause. To say that in a system such as Capitalism which generates the consequences of its existence as a continuous and cumulative process men will never, never be able to correctly diagnose their social ills is to condemn them to a moronic level utterly out of keeping with their own history.

The Marxist concept of inevitability links the negative and positive aspect of the social situation and reveals the driving force of social change.

Socialists do not deny human will and choice. What they say is that if men are to raise themselves to a truly human stature this exploitative set-up where magic and myth, charlatanism and violence are agencies through which social problems are mediated, must go and the choice can only be a social arrangement of free and equal access to social wealth. Given the means the choice is inevitable.

Among the critics of Marx, and they are numerous, are those who fail to grasp the aspects of affirmation and denial in the concept of inevitability. For them social laws are another name for pre-determinism or an animistic notion of causality. They regard society, if they can commit themselves to such an organised notion, as a laissez-faire arrangement which can be altered and re-altered like a meccano set. Having no social charts or compass they remain as “free” as a cockle boat in mid-ocean.

There is also irony in the criticism of Marxism which asserts that not only is Marx’s inevitability, fatalism, but Socialism is utterly impossible. To the Marxist “aye” they can only counter with an everlasting “nay.” Their inevitability is shot through and through with fatalism, a sublime belief that inscrutable agencies control men and make it impossible for them to master a world.

Such critics can be shown on analysis to be supporters of the “eternal status quo.” For that reason their misunderstanding of Marxism is perhaps—inevitable.

Ted Wilmott

The Critics Criticised – Professor Popper Looks at History pt.4 (1956)

Book Review from the September 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from the August issue)

Mr. Popper is what may be styled a militant Christian. His social doctrine is the familiar secularised interpretation of the New Testament. We must cast out false idols—lust for power; seek humility, do things for their own sake, be guided by our conscience, etc., and all this in a world where profit is the ruling motive, power politics a normal social mechanism, and where the vast majority are excluded from control and genuine participation in the wealth producing agencies. The social ethics of Mr. Popper are the age long belief of all social reformists: the belief that humanity will triumph over lust for profit, and power, while leaving the basis of the present system intact. Mr. Popper, like so many other social reformers, seems to regret the fact that under capitalism, Capitalists continue to behave like Capitalists and not as ardent humanitarians and social philanthropists.

Again selfishness or unselfishness are not attributes intrinsically good or bad as the abstract morality of Christ, Kant, and perhaps Mr. Popper, maintains. They can only be given real content in the social environment in which they arise and the purpose and ends which give effect to these attributes. Thus a section of the community, fighting to resist encroachments on its standards of living, may impose hardships on others, to call upon them to cease their struggles would be to ask them to sacrifice their own human interests. Mr. Popper talks about morality but fails to see that the watershed of any genuinely human morality must be the concrete needs of men. The Marxists maintain that only the abolition of social privilege based on ownership can best serve the concrete needs of the vast majority and hence constitute the truly human morality.

Mr. Popper, while he soft peddles on the present system, finds it easy to take the organ stops out when dealing with the past. For him power politics loom most large in the story of men. It is the story of the powerful and wicked against the weak and virtuous. How it came about we are never really informed or why it took the social forms it did. As such it does not explain the past, it merely explains it away.

While Marx never ceased to roundly condemn the cruelties and stupidities of the past and present, he never attributed social evils to be basically the outcome of wickedness on one hand or the ineptitude of virtue on the other. Instead of passing empty categorical judgment on those who have gone before, Marx insisted that men’s actions should be studied in the light of the social situation which initiated and gave meaning to them. Marx held that all systems based on a class structures tended to perpetuate a set of beliefs, theories, and social rationalisations in keeping with the needs of the ruling section, and because the privileged minority are by virtue of their social position, connected with the agencies which disseminate social ideologies they are not only able to exert a major emphasis on those ideas favourable to their interests but to set the tone of the extant cultural pattern which produces the social pressures which make for uniformity of outlook among all members of a given society. What is known as the general outlook will prevail until it is challenged effectively by counter beliefs set up in the interests of a new social group. It is from the warp and the woof of the generally accepted ideas that social ideals and doctrines are formed. That is why although the pages of history tell of man’s inhumanity to man and reek with blood of the innocent, there has never been a lack of social doctrines to justify men’s deeds.

Marx calls this incongruence between the ideals which men set up and the real nature of the social relations on whose behalf these ideals function—” false consciousness.” This is not due to some grave moral defect in human nature, or to a lack of logical consistency in their theories and beliefs but to a set of social beliefs which, under the guise of acting on behalf of what is known as "the general interests,” are projections of certain group wills and interests and thus act as polarising and refractory agents on the social vision of men. It is because of this process of social deception that men become victims of their own ideologies. And abstractions like justice, freedom, the rights of man, etc., not only become battle cries but take on the character of real things. While men then have been guilty of all manner of cruelties in the name of ideologies they have to a great extent been innocent of the real sources from which they sprang. No amount of cruelty or slaughter, Marx thought, would correct this deception, nor, we might add, moralising platitudes. Only when men grasp the real content of the relations between themselves and nature can a socialised humanity emerge. The verdict of Marx on history reveals a more profound and more tolerant attitude than the crude denunciations of Mr. Popper.

Marx was also opposed to judging human beings by some absolute scale of ethical values. He believed that men must be appraised by the standards of their time. No doubt members of the Capitalist class would be horrified at the idea of keeping slaves. Yet are we to believe that the slave owners of the 18th and 19th centuries were wicked men? They certainly did not think so. Judged in accordance with their own lights they were not exempt from humane feeling and consideration. They did not, however, oppose slavery or demand its abolition, no more than the employing class demand the abolition of capitalism based on wage slavery. Socialists demand the abolition of capitalism not because Capitalists as such are inhuman or lack consideration, but because the form and content of their humanity and ethical values are circumscribed by the type of social organisation of which they are the social representatives. Our claim is that ethical values do not function independently of the social context in which they are expressed and which Mr. Popper should have sought to prove but he never did. Only when class division has ceased to count in human affairs will the meanness, hatred, cruelty and antagonism which are so much features of contemporary culture disappear and the values and motives of Capitalist society be replaced by more humane values and more humane motives.

Mr. Popper follows the traditions of the Fabians, Bertrand Russell, G. D. H. Cole, and others, in seeing the value of Marxism as a moral appeal. Marx, however, sharply disassociated himself from the utopians. As Marx pointed out “the utopians have a bent to interpret surplus value in moral terms and then appeal to society for correction of its glaring injustices.” For Marx, morality had to rest upon a theory of objective conditions to ensure its success.

Some of Mr. Popper’s inadequate ideas of Marxism can be seen from his assertion that Marx held that the rate of profit must fall (p. 184), when Marx held no such view. Another idea he puts forward, that Marx also held that the fall in the rate of profit was an automatic process for the increasing misery of the workers (p.p. 183-185). What Marx said was that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was an incentive for Capitalists to attempt to increase productivity. He never said that all increases in productivity go to the Capitalist in the shape of profits. Some go to workers in higher wages but he maintained never proportionately to the productive power of labour. Again we are told that Marx held that wages oscillate round starvation level (p. 173). Marx again did not say it but emphatically denied it. How Marx vide Mr. Popper came to believe that workers’ conditions would continue to worsen from starvation levels, he Mr. Popper does not explain. Finally he repeats the hoary myth that Marx held that capitalism would crash (p. 179).

If we seem -to have spent much time on Mr. Popper it is not in deference to his criticism on Marxism, but because he has in his book summarised most of the criticism of Marx in the last 50 years. The views on Marxism and history held by Mr. Popper can themselves be summarised as mostly Poppercock.

Ted Wilmott

(Concluded)

The Critics Criticised – Professor Popper Looks at History pt.3 (1956)

Book Review from the August 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from the July Issue)

Mr. Popper’s own remedy is that men must change their hearts. He takes little note of the fact that hearts themselves are environmental products. Or to put it another way the beliefs, ideals, theories, for which we seek to gain acceptance are themselves products of social development, i.e. they have a growth and history. Indeed it is only by seeing them as patterns of response in an historical process that they become intelligible. Nor are these responses merely subjective as Mr. Popper seems to think but are brought forth by the needs of men and these needs are part of an objective class conditioned situation.

Ideas, theories, doctrines, are always related to the needs of men in some way or other. Social aims and purposes are for that reason never mere abstractions. Never attempts to realise eternal truth but projections of group needs. That is why the demands for justice, equality, progress, have at bottom been the demands of social groups. It is for that reason “the what is” has ever in practise been directly related to “the what ought to be.” The function of “the what ought to be,” has been to mask the “this worldliness” of social ends, as an aspect of “the other worldliness.”

From this it follows that a ruling social section will always define the good in relation to its own needs. But because we live in a changing world the character and content of its needs undergo historical modification. Sometimes a ruling social group will demand more freedom, more equality. At other times they will proclaim against what they term excesses carried out in the name of these. Sometimes they have called for democracy and toleration, at other times for less democracy and less tolerance. In a world in which they are in social control hut cannot control there can be no eternal truths, no fixed values to serve as precepts for final social judgments.

Again it is not true to say that because we cannot know all the ideas which have ever passed through the heads of men or their emotional experiences we cannot know history in any valid or concrete sense. To say that because we do not know everything on a subject we cannot know anything worthwhile, has no more validity in history than any other subject. The ideas Marxism seeks to investigate are the ideas which have brought about significant changes in the social pattern. Not all ideas do this. The various ideas men form in the world in which they live have a greatly varying weight and importance. Many have a purely personal aspect. Some are the outcome of prejudice and attachment. Other ideas are merely cranky. There are ideas which are held one day and discarded the next. And even if we could trace these ideas down to their finest nuances we should find them irrelevant for purposes of historical investigation, for they do not reflect those social forces which are necessary for any major social change.

The point Marxists are interested in, is what gives momentum and power to those ideas which are crucial for social development. The answer is that it is those ideas which are expressions of group interests which are historically effective, for it is these ideas which have been most instrumental in bringing about social change.

Marxism does not, however, view ideas as powers in themselves, capable of conjuring things into existence by pure mental activity. Men can only think within a socially organised continuum. That is why their theories, aims and ends, are moulded by the particular configuration of the society in which they live. It is then a particular historic phase which sets the questions to which men must find the answers. It is because men enter into certain determinate relations with each other that sets the stamp on their interests and activities, and provides the conditions which make their thinking effective.

Mr. Popper, and he is one of legions, accuses Marxism of social determinism. If Marxism insists that a knowledge of the social forces and those impersonal elements which form part of the social structure of society are essential for forming valid judgments, then we plead guilty. Not to know the relevant facts of a situation is not to know effectively and when there is no effective knowledge, there can be no effective action. Where little or nothing can be proved, everything can be believed. That is why any competent diagnosis, whether it concern our social ills or bodily ills, must be brought under the control of the objective data at our disposal. To recognise that there are determinate limits to a situation is to come to grips with that situation. To chose the alternative, necessary, for the best solution of the problems set, is the first step to freedom. Mr. Popper’s contention that Marxism seeks to nullify political action and makes everything dependent on something called inner reality, is non sense.

Yet (on p. 268) he says that we want to know how our troubles are related to the past, in order to progress towards the solution of what we feel and chose to be our main tasks. Thus it seems that vide Mr. Popper “the what is,” definitely links up with “the what was.” This would suggest that even Mr. Popper believes that the connection between the past and present is influenced by causal factors; that there has been development and continuity in human affairs. In that case our interpretation of this development process must be guided by an objective assessment of the available material and not by a subjective judgment based on our particular feelings and thinking. It is the latter which Mr. Popper generally adopts as his criterion for judging history.

When Mr. Popper says we cannot know the past that is true in the sense that the past as the past is physically dead. Yet it is also true that in another sense the past lives on, in so far that elements of the past are always incorporated in some way into the present and just as aspects of the past exist in a reconstituted form in the present, so features of the present will be reconstituted into the fabric of the future. It is because that which has been most significant in the past is linked with the present in a continuous chain of historic events that the structural evolution of human society becomes possible,. To seek to reconstruct this evolution into an intelligible pattern is| the task of historical investigation. In this way it serves as a present guide to our actions. To suggest that Marxism seeks to make men into marionettes moved by a mysterious force called history is merely a pleasantry of Mr. Popper.

Ted Wilmott

(To be continued)

The Critics Criticised – Professor Popper Looks at History pt.2 (1956)

Book Review from the July 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from the June Issue)

Mr. Popper’s own evaluation of history can hardly claim any scientific pretentions. In the main he largely garbles the anti-Christian Nietzsche’s “power drive theory of history.” With Mr. Popper this power drive reveals itself in the history of political power which, he says, “has been elevated into world history.” This political power drive theory is explained by Mr. Popper as the impulse to worship or be worshipped. He repeats Schopenhauer that man’s besetting sin is making power synonymous with success. This worship of power it seems is due to fear (p. 272) although (same page) he appears to have changed his mind and made the power drive one of instinct which in that case makes him a Bertrand Russell adherent. This, then, is Mr. Popper’s theoretical contribution to the understanding of our times. One might add in passing that to grasp the significance of political power or any aspect of social power lies not in assumptions about some neurotic impulse or instinct but in an analysis of the historical conditions and social formations which explain not only the nature of political power but why different societies have thrown up different forms of political organisations. When this is done the power drive theory of history becomes supernumerary.

Mr. Popper has quite mistaken notions as to what constitutes history. For him, technocracy, political power, historical records, etc., are history. In fact they are not history, but the outcome of history. History itself is the story of man—not this man or that man but socially organised man in pursuit of his ends under given and determinate conditions. Since the passing of primitive society the pursuit of these ends has taken place via the agency of social groups whose aims and interests have been conflicting ones. It is by an examination of these social productive relations—the economic factor—that we reveal the rise and fall of institutions, traditions, politics, ideologies and other cultural phenomena and thus allow a theory of historical causation to become possible.

Marxism is an attempt then to show the prime causal factors in the evolution of human society. In spite of Mr Popper’s efforts to show that Marxism believes there are mysterious impersonal forces in history which shape man’s destiny, it is no more mysterious than other evolutionary concepts which seek to account for development in other fields.

Men make history Marxists contend and what some men have made, other men can understand. In this way history becomes an intelligible process and the past capable of being reconstructed by the same pattern of enquiry which marks other fields of scientific investigation. In the light of this, Mr. Popper’s remarks that men have only faked history seems more than a little foolish.

Mr. Popper is unoriginal enough to seek to be original and daring and too often succeeds in being merely dull and pretentious. He plays to the gallery by announcing that all the history which exists, i.e., our history of the great and powerful, is a shallow comedy. He brings in the usual gods whose function it is apparently to mock at human affairs and they indulge in the conventional guffaws at our expense. At other times he converts the comedy into crude melodrama by assuring us that the history which is advertised as the history of mankind is but the history of international crime and mass murder (p. 270).

Mr. Popper’s views on history seem to waver between a cloak and dagger conspiracy and another version of the fall of man. Neither of them can validly explain the actual evolution of human society: Why it has pointed in a determinate direction, viz., primitive society, slavery, feudalism, capitalism. And why in that order.

In spite of the nonsense talked about by Mr. Popper, Isaiah Berlin and others, that “historic inevitability” is another name for an automatic impersonal force which supposedly operates in history, Marx’s views on history were sharp and clear. Human effort and struggle he held were the means which brought about the historically determined. He never sought to make history a mystery. Indeed he claimed that history had no greater reality than that which could be discovered by the analysis of actual historical events. While unlike Hegel he never believed that history was the outcome of logic and reason, he nevertheless believed that it could be rationally explained.

Marx had then a view point on history. He did not believe it could be explained by abstractions like power drives or impulses. Nor it might be added by spirit, nature or some economic first cause. For Marx history had no purpose which was not the purpose of man. No goals which are not human goals. It is men who will to do things. But what men will is always contramenious with elements in the social situation which are unwilled. Because society is a continuous process, men always find themselves in a set of conditions which is given. It is these conditions which give the scope and set the stamp on particular social aims and goals. When and whether they will be effectively realised will depend upon the objective possibilities within the social situation. It is true for instance that Socialism must be willed by men but it is not until a particular set of social relations namely capitalism, appear, can there arise the objective means for Socialism to be realised. Marx’s theory of historic causation explains then why men in different historic phases seek to achieve certain ends and what have been the nature of the circumstances which have allowed them to succeed —or fail. Critics of Marx have seized upon the term “objective” conditions, isolated it from its context and then accused Marx of propounding a prime mover on economic first cause which propel men along some predetermined path. Mr. Popper is an incorrigible exponent of this type of distortion.

It has already been noted that Mr. Popper’s conception of history, i.e., the story of power politics, technocracy, historical records, etc., is not history, even though each of them has a history, and even when he presents them as history he converts them into a masquerade of power drives and neurotic impulses. Because Mr. Popper denies there is any valid continuity, any causal connection in social development, he asserts it is only we who live in the present, who can change things not something called history. Almost a century before Marx had said: “Things cannot remain that way, they must become different and we human beings must make them different.” Indeed the whole purpose of Marx’s teaching was that only by understanding capitalism and acting upon that understanding would we be effective in changing it to something better.

Mr. Popper wants something better. He refers vaguely to the need of justice, democracy, equality, without any real reference to the social context. His own assertion that something called historicism alias Marxism sees men as pawns in some inevitable cosmic evolution which ignores their personal aims and attitudes, renders politics null and void, and allows “the social scientists to say what shall or shall not be done,” is a sheer invention on his part. He refers innocuously to the brotherhood of man but he has no serious quarrel with the present set up. He fails to recognise that the removal of class privilege based on productive ownership must be the indispensable and elementary step for achieving that “brotherhood.”

Ted Wilmott

(To be continued)

The Critics Criticised – Professor Popper Looks at History pt.1 (1956)

Book Review from the June 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many critics see Marxism as a theory of iron determinism which regards men as puppets pulled by the strings of historical necessity. Mr. K. R. Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies, believes that too. One could say why bother about such palpable errors? The pity of it is not that Mr. Popper has written it but many who read him might come to believe it.

Mr. Popper holds that Marxist historicism is fatalism. He also holds that it helps to generate beliefs that men are mere instruments of impersonal forces. Such views, he thinks, tend towards men coming to accept a collective tyranny called by him, “the closed society” as against the “open society” where democracy and toleration prevail.

Mr. Popper is a christian toreador who seizes the Marxist bull by the historic horns by declaring there can be no concrete history of mankind. “Such a concrete history would have to be the history of all men; of all human hope, struggle and suffering” (p. 270). We are also told “it would have to be the life of the unknown individual man . . . this is the real content of human experience down the ages” (p. 272). Thus does Mr. Popper consign history to the unknown and unknowable. There are, he tells us, separate histories, viz., the histories of politics, technocracy, art, economics, poetry, etc. Such histories, he thinks, should be studied and interpreted from our own standpoint. We can, for example, interpret the history of political power in the light of “our struggle for the open society.” While history vide Mr. Popper “has no meaning, in this way we can give meaning to it.”

Just as one did not know where to have Dame Quickley, one does not know where to have Mr. Popper. Thus we are told (page 268) “The merits of interpretation must rest on its ability to elucidate historical facts.” Yet he informs us (p. 265), that “the facts of history have been collected in accordance with a preconceived point of view.” In that case they are not historical facts but highly dubious material incapable of providing any valid knowledge of historic causation. Indeed, Mr. Popper contends historical reasoning is circular, because, starting as it does from preconceived theories it can only in turn reduce preconceived theories.

But if, according to Mr. Popper, concrete history does not exist, then only what he terms the various histories can provide historical sources. But these sources he assures us are tainted sources. Any interpretation based on them must be suspect—including the interpretations of Mr. Popper.

Yet we are told (p. 266) that some interpretations have more merit than others. That is some are at any rate more in accordance with the accepted records. But if these records do not constitute genuine knowledge one wonders what real significance can be attached to the word “merit.” Curiously enough in the same paragraph we are told “that if only one authority which gives information on certain events that fit in with his own specific interpretation, can be radically interpreted in a different way, then this deviation may take on something of the semblance of a scientific hypothesis.” On the one hand we are told that the merit of an historical interpretation lies in its accord with the records and on the other hand an interpretation can only achieve some semblance to a scientific hypothesis by radically departing from it. But Mr. Popper’s statement that an historical interpretation can achieve some semblance to a scientific hypothesis is inconsistent with his contention that there can be no factual evidence and hence no valid historical knowledge. For it is obvious that unless such knowledge is available an hypothesis having any semblance of being scientific, becomes impossible.

Mr. Popper also tells us that although there is no such thing as universal history there are, nevertheless, universal laws of the separate histories. They are, he says, trivial and provide no selective and unifying principle. He gives as an example of what he means by a universal law of history by telling us that if two equally well armed and well led forces meet, then the one with a tremendous superiority in man power will win. This merely tells us that a good big ‘un will always beat a good little ‘un. While this may have some relevance in pugilistic circles what relevance it has to the character and content of history and the nature of historical investigation only Mr. Popper knows, but alas he refuses to tell us.

Mr. Popper repeats the stock objection to history by making invidious comparisons between it and what he calls the generalising sciences (such as physics, biology, sociology, etc.) This objection, however, tells most heavily against Mr. Popper, because if physics is taken as a model, invidious comparisons can be drawn between it and large parts of biology. While if we compare physics with the ad hoc assumptions and vast amount of unrelated detail which goes to make up the alleged science of sociology, then the comparison between physics and sociology becomes positively odious. While an evaluation of psychology on such terms would forever exclude it from any pretensions to be called scientific. Indeed, on the logic of Mr. Popper’s “comparison,” many subjects regarded as scientific would have to yield their claims in this respect.

It is true that historical investigation in common with many other fields of scientific knowledge cannot employ “the controlled experiment” of physics. It is not true to say that it cannot acquire valid knowledge. To paraphrase Marx, “In physics and chemistry the microscope and the reagent are used, in historical investigation the force of abstraction must replace both.” The force of abstraction is itself an integral part of scientific procedure. So far then as the possibility of obtaining valid knowledge is concerned it holds good for all fields of systematic inquiry. Thus history differs from physics in the same way that biology or geology differ from physics that is in subject matter and not because physics has a logic and procedure of a different order.

That there is no intrinsic barrier in the nature of things to prevent their scientific investigation is hardly questionable. If, of course, history was able to apply the same procedures and tests as physics then it would not be history. Mr. Popper apparently is not prepared because history is not physics to grant it any scientific validity.

Marxism does not hold that there is some impersonal prime mover called historic inevitability. It simply asserts that the complex phenomena we term history are capable of being coherently organised in a manner which gives knowledge and understanding to the affairs of men and the ability to predict within limits the broad trend of human development.

Ted Wilmott

(To be continued.)

A Capitalist Criticises Capitalism (1999)

Book Review from the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The global capitalist system . . . is coming apart at the seams”. So declared arch-speculator George Soros before a US congressional enquiry on 19 September last year. He has since expanded on this in a book entitled The Crisis of Global Capitalism. What has he in mind?

By “global capitalist system” Soros doesn’t mean what we would understand by the term, i.e. capitalism as a world-wide system of production for profit, but the more restricted sense of present world financial arrangements which allow the more or less free movement of capital throughout the world:

“The global economy is characterized not only by free trade in goods and services but even more by the free movement of capital. Interest rates, exchange rates, and stock prices in various countries are intimately interrelated, and global financial markets exert tremendous influence on economic conditions. Given the decisive role that international financial capital plays in the fortunes of individual countries, it is not inappropriate to speak of a global capitalist system” (Introduction).

It is these arrangements—this single world financial market—that he is saying is in danger of disintegrating; which of course would not at all be the same thing as the collapse of capitalism that has sometimes been mistakenly predicted by some writers in the Marxist tradition.

Unstable system 

Soros, following, consciously or not, a distinction made by one school of anti-imperialist thinkers in the 1970s and 80s, divides the “global capitalist system” into a centre (US, Western Europe, Japan) and a periphery (Asia, Latin America, Russia, East Europe, Africa). Under this system capital flows from the centre to the periphery and back, supposedly to the mutual benefit of both. He sees the danger of disintegration coming from countries on the periphery taking steps to stop the free flow of capital in a bid to avoid the negative effects of the system’s instability on their economies and populations:

“To put it bluntly, the choice confronting us is whether we will regulate global financial markets internationally or leave it to each individual state to protect its own interests as best it can. The latter course will surely lead to the breakdown of the gigantic circulatory system, which goes under the name of global capitalism” (p. 176).

So what Soros means by the “breakdown” or “disintegration” of global capitalism is not the collapse of the world-wide system of production for profit based on the exploitation of wage labour, but only states coming to adopt measures that impede the free movement of finance capital.

Soros does not believe this to be an inevitable process. As the quote above makes clear, he thinks it can be stopped if appropriate measures are taken at international level; global institutions must be created to lay down some basic ground rules for the operation of global capitalism.

For Soros is no free marketeer. In fact part of his book is a devastating attack on those he calls the “market fundamentalists”, the followers of Von Mises, Von Hayek and others, who advocate that market forces be given complete free rein and who came into intellectual prominence in the time of Reagan and Thatcher. Soros levels two charges at them. First, that they think that markets have an in-built tendency towards creating a stable situation through supply and demand being in balance, while this is not the case. Second, that they preach that the market is the best way to regulate all human activities.

Writing from his own experience, admittedly not of the real economy but only of financial markets, Soros challenges the equilibrium theory:

“Market fundamentalists have a fundamentally flawed conception of how financial markets operate. They believe that financial markets tend towards equilibrium . . . Financial markets are characterized by booms and busts and it is quite amazing that economic theory continues to rely on the concept of equilibrium, which denies the possibility of these phenomena, in face of the evidence. The potential for disequilibrium is inherent in the financial system; it is not just the result of external shocks” (Introduction).

The external shocks which the market fundamentalists invoke are usually, of course, government interventions of one sort or another. According to them, if governments just stood aside and let the magic of the market operate, there would be no slumps just continuous, smooth growth. But there is no evidence for this. Throughout the 19th century British governments pursued a policy of laissez-faire yet slumps still occurred on a regular basis.

The fact is that the market system does have a built-in tendency towards creating booms and busts rather than stability and smooth growth. As Marx pointed out, this applies to the real world of market-oriented production and not just to financial markets. Soros is even prepared to give Marx some credit here:

" . . . the capitalist system by itself shows no tendency toward equilibrium. The owners of capital seek to maximise their profits. Left to their own devices, they would continue to accumulate capital until the situation became unbalanced. Marx and Engels gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways, I must say, than the equilibrium theory of classical economics” (Introduction).

He claims, however, that thanks to “countervailing political interventions in democratic countries” Marx’s “dire predictions did not come true”. This is based on a misunderstanding of Marx’s view. The “dire predictions” that Soros mentions were not, as he seems to assume, that the unregulated profit-seeking of capitalists would lead to the collapse of the capitalist system but simply that their competitive struggle for profits meant that steady, smooth growth was impossible and that growth proceeded by means of booms and slumps.

Capitalism has not collapsed because it was never going to, not because of government intervention Marx didn’t foresee. And government intervention has not been able to eliminate the boom/slump cycle which Marx saw was an unavoidable feature of capitalism.

Creeping marketisation

Soros sees himself as continuing the political philosophy of Karl Popper. As expounded in books such as The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper argued against the idea of trying to establish a “perfect” society in favour of accepting an “open” society as one subject to permanent improvement by piecemeal social engineering, by which he understood capitalism with a political structure involving elected institutions, the rule of law and pluralism, i.e. more or less what the West has had for years.

For Popper the main enemies of his “open society” were the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and “Marxism” (which, for him, was not just Marx’s own views but those mixed up with Lenin’s and Stalin’s). Soros adds a third which he says has come into prominence since the collapse of “communism”: uncontrolled capitalism. Hence the subtitle of his book “Open Society Endangered”, though he had already expressed this view in a famous article “The Capitalist Threat” that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1997 and which was widely reproduced.

Soros sees the danger coming from the penetration of market values into all aspects of life, leading to social disintegration. “Monetary values”, he writes, “have usurped the role of intrinsic values and markets have come to dominate areas of society where they do not properly belong” (p. 206). He is in fact quite forceful in his criticism of this aspect of global capitalism:

  “The functions that cannot and should not be governed purely by market forces include many of the most important things in human life, ranging from moral values to family relationships to aesthetic and intellectual achievements. Yet market fundamentalism is constantly attempting to extend its sway into these regions, in a form of ideological imperialism. According to market fundamentalism, all social activities and human interactions should be looked at as transactional, contract-based relationships and valued in terms of a single common denominator, money. Activities should be regulated, as far as possible, by nothing more intrusive than the invisible hand of profit-maximising competition. The incursions of market ideology into fields far outside business and economics are having destructive and demoralizing social effects” (Introduction).
   “A transactional society undermines social values and loosens moral constraints. Social values express a concern for others. They imply that the individual belongs to a community, be it a family, a tribe, a nation, or humankind, whose interests must take precedence over the individual’s self-interests. But a transactional market economy is anything but a community. Everybody must look out for his or her own interests and moral scruples can become an encumbrance in a dog-eat-dog world. In a purely transactional society, people who are not weighed down by any considerations for others can move around more easily and are likely to come out ahead” (p.75).

Soros does not realise just how fundamental a criticism of capitalism this is. Although he rightly says that “a purely transactional society”, in which the only links between people would be monetary, “could never exist”, the market fundamentalists are equally right to insist that the logic of capitalism is to work towards this—they are just crazy in thinking that this nightmare situation is the ideal form of society.

Soros’s mistake is to think that you can have capitalism and somehow keep its money-commodity relations from spreading everywhere. The history of capitalism is the history of the continuous spread of such transactional relationships—i.e., the market—into more and more fields of human activity. It is a process that cannot be stopped within capitalism as growing marketisation is just as much a feature of capitalism as capital accumulation; indeed the two go together.

Soros, however, is a supporter of capitalism:

  “I want to make it clear that I do not want to abolish capitalism. In spite of its shortcomings, it is better than the alternatives. Instead, I want to prevent the global capitalist system from destroying itself” (Introduction).

We doubt whether he has given serious consideration to the alternative of a global society based on the common ownership of the world’s resources and production directly to satisfy human needs. Not that we would really expect him to. Some of his fellow-capitalists already think he has gone too far in his criticism of their system.

Adam Buick

Farewell, Free Marketeers (1989)

From the December 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

To defend Marx against criticism is not to be taken as implying endorsement of everything he said and wrote. The man himself continually updated and corrected his theories. Who are we to foist omniscience upon him? But there are those who behave as if his was the final word upon capitalism, and past history, and the future. One can imagine his scathing reaction to any such flattery. His ruthless abandonment of the beginning and the end of the Communist Manifesto, of the reformism in his earlier proposals in favour of the abolition of the wages system, and of his tidy schema of social evolution so as to accommodate the Asiatic mode of production, these and other changes of direction demonstrate that humility which is the beginning of wisdom.

Feeble Grip on Logic

Marx may well have been the pathologically quarrelsome old sponger that Arthur Koestier claimed. He may have loved his mother and been kind to little dogs. We can leave those concerns to the propagandists of the status quo: the Von Mises and Hayeks and Friedmans and Poppers and Nozicks of this world, who all share a feeble grip on the Logic of Aristotle.

Von Mises charges the critics of capitalism with being merely intellectuals who are jealous of the businessmen's wealth. This used to be called the fallacy of argumentum ad hominen. It was illustrated by the case of a Counsel who returned a hopeless brief to his junior with the advice: No case. Abuse the plaintiffs attorney! And this is the final word of a man who pleads for his economics to be regarded as a science.

His pupil Hayek is an equal master of logic:

It is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man.

and

Some voluntary (sic) labour service on military lines might well be the best form for the state to provide the certainty of an opportunity for work and a minimum income for all.

He later repeats the argument in favour of forced labour, where unions resist wage cuts after a war, and all this in a polemic against an unbelievably muddled notion of socialism, called The Road to Serfdom.

Metaphysical Predictions

Hayek's colleague Karl Popper provides the explanation of how the system will benefit us all. It is because of the unintended consequences of all our individual actions which in some mysterious way combine to do good. Popper insists that all theories which cannot be falsified by experience are metaphysical. A. J. Ayer pointed out that this would make a statement “there are white swans” a metaphysical proposition as what experience could show it to be false?

It is equally difficult to see how Popper's own theory could be falsified. Perhaps Ayer saved Popper from the consequences of his own foolishness. He could not save him from the silly argument that all wide-ranging, long-term predictions are metaphysical. Popper should go and tell that to the insurance companies. It was, of course, the rationale for an attack on Marx's view of the future, which was not scientific prediction, he says, but metaphysical prophecy. I predict, you prophesy, he reads tea-cups.

Popper began by pleading for “piecemeal social engineering" as an alternative to wholesale social change. We can sympathise with his emotions when we consider that the book which gave him notoriety, The Open Society and Its Enemies, was written during the Second World War, with the horrors of Stalinism and Hitlerism on everybody's mind, and Popper himself a refugee. With the growing disenchantment of the establishment with any kind of social engineering after the failure of the Heath government, however, he adopted a more Panglossian view, and decided against change, piecemeal or otherwise.

Joining the Game in the Middle

Nozick in Anarchy, State and Utopia, argues for maintaining the status quo but with minimum interference by the state. He lays great store by the right of private property, but he joins the game in the middle and does not seem to be aware that the game was started by a great act of violent dispossession backed by the state. His position is therefore one of ignorance or lack of scruple.

Friedman is another who argues that we only act from selfish motives but that the unintended consequences of our actions are that everybody benefits, that Adam Smith's “invisible hand” sees that we are all alright. Many people in 19th century Britain and 20th century wherever might be puzzled by this claim. In any case, Friedman casts doubt on his fidelity to this belief when he says that it does not apply to academics. They act, apparently, just to secure the approval of their fellows. Whether this unselfishness deprives us all of benefits, he doesn't say.

Booed off the Stage

It was the collapse of credibility in the Keynesian and Fabian consensus that brought these propagandists of the Free-Market to the front of the stage in the 1970s. They had been waiting a long time, ever since the 1930s. The Great Crash had destroyed the plausibility of the argument: the US until 1929 was about as free an economy as was ever likely to arise in a real world, and it produced catastrophe, needing a long time to forget. The reaction was state-intervention everywhere. The most complete Keynesian of them all was probably Adolph Hitler.

With the intellectual trashing of these interventionists by the increasing economic crises —stop-go, stagflation— as the Second World War receded, the scene was set once more for the Free Market to be offered up as the solution to all our ills. And what better place to try it out than Britain? As Galbraith pointed out, there was no excuse if it failed. A sober, almost phlegmatic population, almost designed for the “we can take it" role.

The innings has been a short one, a mere decade. This might well turn out to be the excuse the next time round. It recalls the Irish nonagenarian keening over the death of her seventy-five year old son: "I didn't have time to raise him. I didn't have time to raise him."

Any time now the roof of the world economy could fall in, though only a fool would put a date to it. The otherwise prescient City tipster Bob Beckman sold his house in Regents Park in 1983 anticipating the crash and missed the greatest rise in property values in history. The Free-Market act is going to dance off the stage to the boos of its erstwhile supporters. But what is next on the bill? Are memories so short?

Ken Smith

The Poverty of Popper (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bryan Magee's biography of Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, described him as "the most formidable living critic of Marxism". He died last year but his reputation lingers on. He was born in Vienna and after the First World War became friendly with a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle. This school founded Logical Positivism, based on the principle that all meaningful statements must be verifiable, but Popper disagreed and went on to formulate his own demarcation between science and non-science. He argued that the test of a scientific theory is not whether it can be verified, since no amount of observations can confirm it, but that it is open to being falsified by experience; a theory is scientific if it fits the facts and is capable of being proved wrong. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) Popper claimed that Marxism is not a scientific theory since it cannot be falsified, or else when it was falsified its supporters shifted their ground to protect their theory.

Popper was a Cold War warrior. His attack on Marxism was based in the experience of the Communist Party, here and in Russia. Popper concluded that the totalitarian nature of the Communist Party in action in Russia showed that Marx's theories were totalitarian, rather than the more plausible conclusion that the Communist Party's claim to be Marxist is false. The Socialist Party has not shifted its ground and we invite inspection of our record to see the validity of Marxism. For instance, the Socialist Party claimed after the Second World War that the post-war boom couldn't be sustained, that Keynesian economics wouldn't prevent a slump and that capitalism would seek a way out of a slump by attacking the working class. At the time such a prediction could be seen as being very risky (risk was something Popper thought very important to science) but has been more than borne out by experience.

The other leg of Popper's criticism of Marxism stood on a mis-quotation in his book The Poverty of Historicism (1957). Popper attacked the notion that there are laws of human development, and that these laws enable us to predict the future course of human history, and he quoted from Marx's Capital, where the aim is "to lay bare the economic law of motion of human society". Marx, however, actually wrote that his aim was to lay bare the economic laws of motion of "modern society" - capitalism. The economic law of capitalism, Marx's law of value, is in fact quite specific to capitalism and it enables the Socialist Party to make the kind of predictions indicated above. Marx's theory of social development, the materialist conception of history, is a method for interpreting history with a view to taking informed political action  by the working class. It does not claim to predict the future course of human history: it is a guide to the present.

Whatever may have been his merits as a philosopher of science, it is clear that his grasp of Marxism was extremely poor, though par for the course in academic circles. May his criticisms of Marxism rest in peace.

Lew Higgins