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.

Base and superstructure

The Marxist theory of history explains the fundamental relationship between material conditions and ideas through the concept of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. The most important passage on this can be found in Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.[1]

We could cite a number of passages from other works that reinforce the point. For example, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx writes:

[People] 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. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.[2]

For Marx, the most important conditioning elements in a society are the relationships through which it produces and distributes its wealth. The emphasis upon relationships is important. You cannot tell from a person’s DNA whether he or she is a serf, a vagrant, a capitalist, a proletarian — such status is not innate to them, but depends upon their position within the social relations of their time. These fundamental relationships include the prevailing mode of production and the class basis of a society.

During the Middle Ages, the dominant social relationship was that of a peasant to a lord. After several centuries, a new mode of production arose within feudal society based upon the relationship between a wage labourer and a capitalist. This relationship was based upon a different mode of production and therefore had a different character. Where the feudal serf was the vassal of his or her lord, and owed them service and a share of the products of their labour, the wage labourer has no means of sustaining themselves other than the sale of their labour to a capitalist.

Upon this economic ‘base’ arises a complex ‘superstructure’. This is composed of state structures of law, institutions and political organisation which reflect the dominant social relationships; it also comprises an immense range of conventions and ideas, such as politics, philosophy, morality, and (most importantly for this blog) art. In class society, these are largely, though not exclusively, defined by the ruling class, to justify and maintain the unequal social relationships upon which their privileges depend. The ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ of the superstructure are known to Marxism as ideology.

The forms this takes in actual societies is always concrete, always precise:

The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production.[3]

Through history, modes of production and their corresponding social structures change, and therefore art too, as part of the superstructure, changes its forms and meaning.

As an example we may take the Puritan Christianity that arose in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This new religious form was an expression of the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, which required a church institution that was under its own control. Puritanism conformed more closely to bourgeois individualism, with its emphasis upon a personal relationship with God, and its severity and simplicity represented in part the bourgeoisie’s need to accumulate starting capital. Puritan policy towards the arts was to ban theatrical performances, the use of music in church, and ‘idolatrous’ imagery. All of these characteristics of Puritanism, indeed its very existence as an ideology, are ultimately based upon its relationship to the bourgeois mode of production in the particular conditions of pre-Revolutionary England.

Totality

Art then is part of the superstructure of society, influenced by the mode of production. But no work of art exists in glorious isolation — it is also influenced by other things, such as other parts of the superstructure. Trying to trace every causal thread that links a work of art through the law, philosophy, religion, aesthetics and so on would be impossible, but criticism must try to see art as a totality — causality in art, as in everything, is not a straightforward linear process but a sum of processes, some of which are in contradiction. As Marx put it, “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”[4]

Our own history as a species illustrates this very well. Humans evolved because of the rise of the mammals made possible by the great extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic era 65 million years ago; this extinction followed the crashing of a huge asteroid into the earth at what is now the Yucatán peninsula; this asteroid was probably influenced by the tremendous gravitational pull of Jupiter, half a billion miles from Earth, which nudges cosmic objects towards us. Thus the very existence of human beings is part of an immense, complex system of interlinked cosmic processes — like the Earth itself, the ‘Goldilocks’ planet where everything is ‘just right’ for life to prosper, we are one tiny, fortunate accident.

So art too is complex. It is partly a product of the psychology of its creators, but it is also a product of a dominant ‘way of seeing’, in John Berger’s phrase, which is conditioned by the most profound structures of society.

Students of art may wonder why they are being asked to understand politics and economics, and what all this has to do with art. Terry Eagleton provides a succinct answer:

To understand King Lear, The Dunciad or Ulysses is therefore to do more than interpret their symbolism, study their literary history and add footnotes about sociological facts which enter into them. It is first of all to understand the complex indirect relations between those works and the ideological worlds they inhabit — relations which emerge not just in ‘themes’ and ‘preoccupations’, but in style, rhythm, image, quality and... form. But we do not understand ideology either unless we grasp the part it plays in the society as a whole — how it consists of a definite, historically relative structure of perception which underpins the power of a particular social class. This is not an easy task, since an ideology is never a simple reflection of a ruling class’s ideas; on the contrary, it is always a complex phenomenon, which may incorporate conflicting, even contradictory, views of the world. To understand an ideology, we must analyse the precise relations between different classes in a society; and to do that means grasping where those classes stand in relation to the mode of production.[5]

Many basic questions of art history simply cannot be answered any other way. For example, the reason there has been such a rapid succession of art movements from the nineteenth century onwards, when art in societies like ancient Egypt could persist unchanged for 3000 years, is the dynamic rate of change introduced by capitalist forces of production. This quantity and quality of change has produced a historically unprecedented degree of alienation amongst artists, who need to constantly reinvent what art ‘is’ in order to escape recuperation of their work (a topic we shall examine in detail at a later stage).

This is why we need to understand base and superstructure — politics and economics are, inescapably, an essential part of understanding any work of art.

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[1] Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1856).
[2] Marx, Chapter 1 of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). This pamphlet was Marx’s brilliant analysis of the rise to power of Napoleon III in France.
[3] Marx and Engels, from Vol 1, Part I of The German Ideology (1845–6).
[4] Marx, ‘The Method of Political Economy’ from Grundrisse.
[5] Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976). Eagleton is Britain’s most important Marxist critic.