Is Marxism determinist?

Marxism is accused with tedious regularity of thinking that everything can be reduced to the mode of production, of being highly deterministic, etc. These accusations come partly from people who do not properly understand Marxism, and partly from outright enemies who distort it so it may more easily be discredited. They also, it must be said, come from some who consider themselves Marxists (so-called ‘vulgar Marxism’) — Stalinism has in particular been responsible for crudely mechanical interpretations of theory. Marxism is a determinist philosophy, but not in the strong sense where A determines B when B depends entirely upon A.

Ambiguities in some of Marx’s writings are partly to blame for the confusion, as examined for example by Macdonald Daly in his introduction to the anthology Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art. In the passage from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy cited before, Daly writes, Marx “reiterates a central idea in varied phrasing in a manner typical of someone intent on persuading a reader of a novel notion (for Hegelians a heretical notion).”[1] He points out that the passage offers three alternative verbs to describe the relationship between base and superstructure — ‘give rise to’, ‘conditions’ and ‘determines’, depending upon the translation — each of which implies a different sort of relationship. He concludes:

Depending on the chosen inflections, then, the passage can be used to imply either: (1) a strongly deterministic theory in which art is seen as being wholly preordained by the economic context within which is it produced or consumed — in fact is virtually reducible to it — and thus plays a negligible role in ‘real’ historical processes; or (2) a theory in which, although ultimately dependent on and influenced by economic forces, art has a variable freedom (or ‘relative autonomy’) from the economic system within which it arises...[2]

From what we know about Marx’s method and other writings, interpretation (1) seems highly uncharacteristic, and indeed, as Daly also concludes, Marx’s position was not that material conditions determine everything in an ‘inevitable’ way.

An example is the supposed inevitable victory of the proletariat over capitalism. Contrary to the claims of his enemies, Marx did not believe that social change was literally ‘inevitable’. The section of the Communist Manifesto that uses the word [3] does so in a rhetorical gesture which must be understood in the context of his weightier works. Although society can advance to the point where productive forces make huge social advances possible, success or failure depends upon the class struggle — that is, it is politics that is decisive. Nothing is inevitable; only praxis makes change. It could even happen that an asteroid destroys the world before the proletariat can be victorious — where is your ‘inevitability’ then? Such catastrophic changes have happened before in the Earth’s history, as in the Permian extinction or ‘Great Dying’ that wiped out 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of land species about 250 million years ago, or the more famous extinction 65 million years ago that obliterated the dinosaurs. We are hardly immune from such developments.

The correct position with respect to base and superstructure was made explicit by Engels, who made it his duty to try and clarify such questions after Marx’s death. Engels expressed regret, in an 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch, that

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-á-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction.[4]

In the same letter he explained:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.[5]

This could not be clearer. Art cannot be reduced to a superstructural ‘reflection’ of the economic system, any more than it can be reduced to the personal ‘vision’ of individual artists. If such a crudely determinist perspective were correct, then every culture existing under the same general conditions would produce identical art. In reality, we see enormous variations between cultures even when their economies are very similar, because there are many other influences at work. Each society builds up its own set of beliefs, its own history, its own precedents of style, influenced by its particular environment; it throws up too its own aesthetic ideas, which will sometimes resemble those of other societies, or borrow from them, or be imposed upon by them, and will sometimes contradict them.

Marxism may appear rigidly deterministic if we reify history into separate components — economics, law, politics, etc — and take economics as the main factor. But the breakup of history into rigid ‘subject areas’ was a bourgeois creation, and is contrary to the method of Marxism because it is non-dialectical. The Marxist approach is far more rich and flexible.

Free will

The idea that our consciousness is heavily conditioned by our environment raises the question of to what extent we enjoy free will. Are our actions determined for us?

It is only possible to rob us of free will if we adopt a mechanical version of Marxism. Marx answered the question thus:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past [6].

Marx believed that human beings created themselves by producing to meet their needs, through their active engagement with the material world — to borrow from Childe, ‘man makes himself’. Important as the mode of production is, history is ultimately made by human beings, but acting within conditions shaped by that mode of production. The issue was summed up by Paul Blackledge:

Given that the distinguishing characteristic of human production, according to Marx, was that it was a form of ‘purposeful activity’, it makes little sense to contrast productive-force determinism with free action. Rather, because we exercise free will within determinate material contexts, it is much better to follow Hegel in conceiving determination and freedom as two sides of the same coin: ‘freedom is the appreciation of necessity’, as Engels put it.[7]

What productive forces do is define the parameters of what is possible for human will within a particular historical context that is constantly being redefined by human action — within that context there is a dialectical relationship between freedom and necessity. The task of historians is to seek to understand that relationship.

The relative autonomy of art

The various parts of the superstructure — art, religion, law, politics and so on — are not only conditioned by the economic base, but by each other, and from this they draw a relative autonomy. This is especially true of art.

Failure to recognise this has led vulgar Marxists into some seriously flawed assertions. For example, the important Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, praised by Trotsky as a “convinced, passionate and brilliant crusader” for dialectical materialism [8], went into a theoretical decline after 1905, and this decline was very visible in his 1912 pamphlet Art and Society. Plekhanov drew a ‘vulgar’ parallel between the waning capitalism of the period and a supposed waning of art, leading him into absurd attacks on modern art. Art and Society was highly influential, not least in the Soviet Union where it was held up by Stalinists as theoretical justification for their doctrine of ‘decadence’. Today it serves merely as a warning against mechanical interpretations of Marxism.

There is no work of art that does not have an ideological content, but art is less purely ideological than economics or politics. It exists in a highly complex dialectical relationship with other aspects of ideology, influencing them and being influenced in turn. Marxist critics are interested in these relationships and — because the point of Marxism is to change the world — what role art plays in helping to change the capitalist economic base to a socialist one.[9] (This, after all, is the whole point of a revolution.) Society provides art with its raw material, with its range of possibilities. But art is not dictated to by economic conditions. If it was, it could in our society only reflect capitalist ideology. In fact, because it has strong relations with many different strands of the superstructure — such as philosophy, religion and psychology, not to mention the artist’s own idiosyncratic experience — and because many of these strands will be in contradiction, art is able to assert a degree of independence. As Marx wrote in the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

As regards art, it is well known that some of its peaks by no means correspond to the general development of society; nor do they therefore to the material substructure.[10]

If this were not so, it is unlikely that classics from times profoundly different to our own, such as The Odyssey or the prints of feudal Japan, would be able to enthrall us. Once it was removed from the society that determined it, art would retain very little meaning.

Brecht believed that art was able to reproduce what life was like in certain conditions, thereby recreating experience instead of analysing it or being enslaved by it. This confrontational quality has caused art a lot of trouble. St Petersburg audiences booed the Rite of Spring, Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were banned, and Hitler burned books, because art is able to remind us that there are different ways to live. Art is both infused with ideology and able, through its relative autonomy, to distance itself from it and expose it.

The superstructure changes the base

There is another important dialectic working against crude determinism: as the base influences the superstructure, so too the superstructure influences the base. It is through the ideological forms thrown up within the superstructure that humans realise the possibility of changing the mode of production, and build the revolutions which transform the base into a new form. For this reason, art, although it cannot by itself cause revolutionary change, can be part of a process towards change. Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting of 1784, The Oath of the Horatii, may be taken as an example: a starkly original piece of republican and revolutionary propaganda. The French Revolution was not, and could not be, caused by a painting, but works like this contributed to some small degree — impossible to measure precisely — to creating the atmosphere of revolutionary commitment that prepared the way for the overthrow of Louis XVI.

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii. Larger image here.

A revolution takes place when the productive forces of a society outgrow the existing political structures. After a series of quantitative changes, new social forces bring about a new quality — a new mode of production. Only the conscious intervention of human beings can change the base — it is politics, a part of the superstructure, that is decisive — and this change is not inevitable. The superstructure, rather than being a passive reflection of the base, is in fact the battleground upon which different classes and ideologies compete.

Crude determinism is not, then, supported by the writings of Marx and Engels. Our task is rather to try and comprehend the totality of relationships in all their dialectical richness. This is a tremendous task, and one that even the best Marxist will struggle to be equal to, but we cannot escape the actual conditions of life.

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[1] Ed. Baxandall and Morawski, Karl Marx and Frederick [sic] Engels on Literature and Art. Originally published in 1973, this essential anthology of Marx and Engels’ writings on art was reissued and re-edited with Daly’s introduction in 2006.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Marx and Engels, Chapter 1, ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’ from Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848).
[4] Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch (written 1890). Engels expresses the same regret in a letter to Franz Mehring of 1893, in which he makes his important remark that “all action is mediated by thought”.
[5] Ibid. An attempt is sometimes made to separate the views of Marx and Engels on this and other questions, but Engels’ point derives from a dialectical perspective fundamental to Marx’s philosophy.
[6] Marx, chapter one of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
[7] Paul Blackledge, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (2006).
[8] Trotsky, A Note on Plekhanov (1922).
[9] This does not mean that Marxists insist upon art having a tendentious or propaganda content. Where such content exists, it has to emerge as an organic part of the outlook of the artists themselves.
[10] Marx, from the closing section of the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1857). This work was part of Marx’s Grundrisse, to which the quote is therefore sometimes attributed.

Ideology

How does the economic system influence something as subjective and seemingly autonomous as a person’s creativity? The answer lies in the concept of ideology.

Marx and Engels did not invent this, but it plays an essential part in their theory. They taught that the ideas of a given epoch were the product of its ‘dominant material relationships, grasped as ideas’ [1]. Ideology is part of the superstructure and therefore flows from the mode of production.

Works of art are not mysterious things snatched from the ether, nor are they the unique offspring of individual psychology. Artists are, like all humans, social beings, and they draw upon the most prominent ways of seeing in the culture or cultures of which they are a part. These ways of seeing in turn are dependent upon the particular social relations of that time and place. By ‘ideology’ we do not mean a formal set of doctrines, but the whole complex of ideas, ethics, and imaginings which we live and breathe, often unawares, as we go about our lives.

Even such a seeming constant as love is expressed in different forms depending upon the social conditions of the time. The way in which we understand and express our feelings of love is determined by many aspects: the family structure, the relative equality (or inequality) of the sexes, our social expectations, and so on. Many of the forms in which love is expressed in the West today, such as the ‘candlelit dinner for two’ and the sending of Valentine’s cards, are of very recent and culturally specific provenance.

The illusion that consciousness is primary

We do not choose the ways of seeing that surround us — that is an accident of our birth. In practice, although ideology is the product of material relationships, we often have the impression that the reverse is true — that our consciousness is primary. Engels provided an explanation for this, rooted in the development of human society. As we increased our productivity, we achieved a more sophisticated division of labour, and began to build complex structures of law, religion and politics.

In the face of all these images, which appeared in the first place to be products of the mind and seemed to dominate human societies, the more modest productions of the working hand retreated into the background, the more so since the mind that planned the labour was able, at a very early stage in the development of society (for example, already in the primitive family), to have the labour that had been planned carried out by other hands than its own. All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain. Men became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds.[2]

Marx saw the origins of this in the division of labour:

The division of labour becomes a real division only when a distinction between material and mental labour arises. From this moment on, consciousness can be effectively persuaded that something else exists besides the consciousness of existing praxis.[3]

Our awareness of the power of our consciousness, and its visible effect upon the material world, creates the impression that life is determined by it. In fact the ideas through which people define themselves and make assumptions about what is true are ultimately conditioned by the mode of production.

Dominance of the ruling class

The relationship between the structures of society and the works of art created within that society is hardly controversial. “One cannot live in society,” wrote Lenin, “and be free from society.”[4] It is a small step from recognising that, to recognising that the power relationships within human society will exert their own influence. We have quoted elsewhere part of Marx and Engels’ famous declaration from the Communist Manifesto:

What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.[5]

A couple of years earlier they had already formulated the theory:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.[6]

This is well known in the adage that ‘the victors write the history books.’ And it is not difficult to see how this dominance is achieved. The ruling class controls the great majority of the wealth; the publication houses and television stations; the curriculum of schools and universities; bodies of armed men who can arrest or even execute people who propose alternative views, and so on. It uses these powerful means to influence what ideas are disseminated in society, and make sure that those ideas are agreeable to its interests.

The bourgeoisie, currently the ruling class in three quarters of the world, requires a system of commodity exchange and waged labour. In order for this mode of production to function smoothly, the bourgeoisie requires not only capital, a class of wage labourers, markets to sell products to, and so on, but ideological institutions, assumptions and ideas that encourage everyone involved to co-operate with it as uncomplainingly as possible. These ideas include the belief in the moral right to private property, the importance of obeying bourgeois laws, the capitalist’s right to extract profit from his or her workforce, nationalism as a means of mobilising workers behind military adventures, cynicism about or outright hostility towards alternative forms of society, and so on.

From the ruling class point of view, ideology is most effective when it obscures oppression and the great majority of people take the social relations of their time for granted, as part of an eternal, and therefore unchangeable, condition. If the proletariat were to understand with full clarity the structure of capitalist society, it could and would overthrow it with ease. The army would refuse to fight for the ruling class, the workers would take over the means of production and control of the state, and we could build a better world. Instead, many workers align themselves behind their oppressors, and more again are politically apathetic, because of the norms set by the dominant ideology — a problem known as false consciousness. It is the tremendous obstacle posed by ideology that makes it necessary to fight intense political battles to bring about change.

We may take religion as the best proof that a proposition that cannot be proved even to exist at all may still persist and exert influence over our minds and actions.

No ruling ideology announces itself as such. Bourgeois statesmen never refer to their ‘capitalist ideology’. Instead ideology is portrayed as ‘common sense’ confirmed by historical experience. For centuries it was claimed that men were naturally superior to women, drawing support from the fact that men have dominated society since records began. Ideology’s claims become eternal facts of human society and the universe, against which it is futile to struggle. Capitalism, instead of being a historical phase of human society, is presented as the system most in tune with human nature and therefore the most practical. It is also mentioned relatively rarely: euphemisms like ‘democracy’ or ‘the free world’ are preferred [7].

Active Marxists are very familiar with the constant battle against false assertions that constitutes so much political work inside the bourgeois state. Most of us, even when apolitical, are aware on some level that the world does not match the official account of it: we are told our society is democratic, but observe the inaccessibility and secretiveness of our rulers; we are told it is broadly benign but see body-bags returning from ‘our’ aggression abroad. For a comment on political rhetoric we may turn to George Orwell, whose scathing observations from 1946 sound very contemporary:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.[8]

Thus there is widespread cynicism, at least in the West, because people are aware of being dealt with dishonestly but have no confidence in an alternative.

Although ‘false consciousness’ is a key aspect of ideology, it is important to remember that ideology can not be reduced to it. Marxism is itself an ideology, and can be studied as such self-consciously. Ideology is not entirely illusion: it arises out of actual conditions and the reality of those conditions survives within it. For this reason contradictions arise that create the space for the actual social relationships to become clear. If it were not possible to overcome false consciousness, then the Russian and other revolutions could never have happened.

Conclusion

If the economy ruled every aspect of social life, then only the economy would be worthy of study. Art, so heavily determined that it had no capacity to influence society, would lose its value as art and became merely an over-imaginative and subjective copy of external facts. In these circumstances, a novel such as Heart of Darkness could offer no insight into imperialism that couldn’t be divined by reading the figures on Congolese rubber exports. Therefore it is important not to take a rigid or deterministic approach to Marxist theory — a question we will address in the next post.

This article cannot explore all the complexities of the concept of ideology, not least because Marx and Engels’ original theory has been subject to important further development by, for example, Gramsci, Althusser and Lucien Goldmann. This can only serve as a general introduction. We shall return to the question many times over the course of the blog to discuss controversies, flesh out the idea further, and explore its particular application to the arts.

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[1] Marx and Engels, from Part 1 section B, ‘Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas’ in The German Ideology (1845).
[2] Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876).
[3] Marx and Engels, from Chapter 1, section A, ‘History: Fundamental Conditions’ from The German Ideology (1845).
[4] Lenin, Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905).
[5] Marx and Engels, ‘Proletarians and Communists’, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848).
[6] Marx and Engels, from Part 1 section B, ‘Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas’ in The German Ideology (1845).
[7] History has shown that capitalism and democracy are not synonymous. Most of the western capitalist countries have practised universal adult suffrage for only a short time, and many — such as Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany and Greece — have spent long periods as dictatorships.
[8] From his article Politics and the English Language (1946). Orwell criticises Marxist writing too in this essay, and writers of every kind may benefit from it. I should perhaps make sure it is clear that Orwell in this quote is not actually defending dropping atom bombs, etc — he is explaining that the motivations of various governments in committing such acts are unacceptable both to many members of the political parties responsible and to the public in general.