Practical paradox of Marxism as a Philosophy
মার্কসবাদ একটি অবাস্তবায়নযোগ্য আপাতবিরোধী দর্শন।
এটি আমার মার্কসবাদের উপর ক্রিটিক্যাল এনালাইসিস। যারা মার্কসবাদের ওপর জ্ঞান রাখেন তারা হয়ত আমার সাথে একমত হবেন যে দর্শনটি কতটুকু স্ববিরোধী।
(I hv been writing from my college going periods. I love to read,understand and express. I wrote this article in February 2014.)
13 February 2014 at 15:13
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Marx bases his Dialectical Materialism upon Hegel's dialectics, but stretches it to reach a quite contradictory conclusion. However eagerly Marx may have tried to disown his debt to Hegel and to stress the difference between the Hegelian idealistic system and his own materialistic system, an impartial observer of history can hardly fail to detect his debt to Hegelian dialects. In his eagerness to explain the entire universe, including human history as cosmos, a rational and intelligible structure, Hegel tried to explain it in term of gradual self-expression of the absolute or the supreme rational principle.
Hegel’s, ‘Absolute’ is a system of ideas or concepts of categories such as quantity, quality, substance,causality essence, existence and the like which r connected dialectically i.e. the scrutiny of one of these categories will lead to the other either as a reaction to its one sidedness or as a conciliation of its contradictions. Hegel's Absolute is the totality not only of thought, but also of all experience including the temporal. The dialectic governs not only progress of thought, but also of temporal events.
A thing is real in proportion as it is seen in relation to the Absolute. This leads Hegel to conclude "Whatever is real is rational" and conversely, “Whatever is rational is real”.
This explains why Hegel regarded every historical event, however retrograde and apparently harmful, as in some way representing the Divine Will as also his approval of a retrograde social system of his own country.
Nw whatever may be the merits or demerits of Hegel’s system, Marx found his dialectics a convenient instrument of explaining human history in terms of the gradual self-expression, as it were, of matter or material economic forces through the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
He found the dialects a handy stick to beat Hegel with and to reach a conclusion which purports to be the undoing of Hegel. As opposed to Hegel, who regarded all social phenomena as the unfoldment of the Absolute Idea or the Divine Will,Marx regarded human history as the gradual unfoldment for economic forces which form the basic infrastructure of human society upon which the world of thoughts of ideas and aspirations including the moral and spiritual yearning of man, is built a superstructure.
Spiritual phenomena, is thus dismissed by Marx with a single stroke ofhis Dialectical Materialism.
Ok now let’s see wot Mr. Karl Marx did.
Marxism is based on the following so-called laws of dialectic:
(1) The law of the unity of opposites which asserts that reality is essentially contradictory in nature and that this contradiction exists in unity.
(2) The law of the transformation of into quantity into quantity and vice versa. According to this law changes take place by imperceptible quantitative mutations, by sudden jumps as revolutions leading to the emergence of new qualities.
(3) The law of the Negation of Negation which asserts that all developments proceed through thesis, antithesis and synthesis, each reconciliation issuing in a higher reformulation.
As an illustration of Negation of Negation and also of emergence of new qualities, the case of growth of crops is cited. One seed of barley dies or negates itself to give birth to the barley plant, which in its turn, dies or negates itself to give birth to, say,ten grains of barley.
Marx attacks formal logic for its devotion to static or fixed concepts and terms nd acting thereby as a handmaiden of conservatism or reaction. As distinguished from the allegedly unscientific character of formal logic, dialectics is scientific and gives "an exact representation of the universe."
As regards the law of Unity of opposites, it may be said that unity becomes meaningless if it is irreducibly contradictory. The term "Unity of opposites" cn convey any sense only if such contradiction is supposed to be only apparent and not real. The term Unity stands above all duality, above all plurality.
Either there cn be unmitigated plurality or duality, or there can be unity. One is to apply for one or the other, but not for both at the same time. Moreover, the existence of positive and negative particles of electricity may at most testify to co-inherent of such dual factors, but not to their ‘triadic’ dialectical movement.
Even science hs advanced to a point when the apparent duality of electrons and protons or positive and negative of electricity is not ruled final. Science has shown tat the different forms of energy are mutually convertible and has resolved everything into one ocean of energy upon which the appearance of atoms itself is a mystery.
Again,the apparent plurality or duality is a characteristic of process and not reality. These cn be final only if reality is all process, in which case it makes absolute nonsense of itself.
But Marx has at least been so much charitable as to grant reality a sense, and therefore a right of existence. And it cn exist meaningfully if it is a unity, not an unmitigated plurality.
Thirdly,by calling it a law, Marx rather indirectly concedes its claim to absoluteness. If everything be a process, merely an aimless battlefield of irreducibly contradictory forces, then there cn be no permanent immutable laws. Curiously enough,while Marx reduces everything into the spiral process of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, he quite unwarrantably grants the dialectics the status of a permanent immutable law and thereby pays an indirect tribute to Hegel's Absolute.
In the words of K.R. Popper "It almost looks as if historicists were trying to compensate themselves for the loss of an unchanging world by clinging to the faith that change can be foreseen because it is ruled by an unchanging law." (The Poverty of Historicism).
As regards the law of transformation of quantity into quality emergence of new qualities, it cn be said tat like all theories of emergent evolution, it leaves the mystery unsolved. No theory of emergence has answered why or even hw a new quality should emerge and has only shelved the problem instead of solving them.
In common with other votaries of emergent evolution, Marx at least uses terms like “sudden jumps" or “revolution" and thereby unwittingly walks into the enemy's parlour as these remain unexplained phenomena which the religious man might well credit to God.
Moreover by appealing to "sudden jumps" or "revolutions" Marx has unconsciously admitted a break in the chain of his dialectics leaving himself at the merry or wotever gods there be.
Moreover,the change from one grain of barley to ten grains which, according to Marxists,illustrate the law of ‘Negation of Negation’ and also of qualitative change cannot be represented as contradiction or emergence of new qualities or higher reformulations. As Sidney Hook hs observed in “The law of the Dialectics" the seed-flower-fruit cycle simply brings us back where we started.''
Marx's contention tat the dialectics is scientific, as opposed to formal logic which is unscientific, fails to hold water.
It is not scientific at all. Had it been so the greatest scientific discoveries of the world cud not hv been possible without any reference to this great law. Again,contrary to wot Marxists may think, the scientist's world is not a world of perpetual becoming without any being, any principle of permanence. Had it been so, then all the scientific investigations wud hv to be abandoned as scientific study is possible only if the scientist cn isolate the phenomena of his study into a closed system.
Moreover, the idea tat a particular group of phenomena cn be comprehended only as part of the whole refers to a metaphysical belief and as such belongs to Metaphysics rather than to science.
Here therefore the ghost of Hegel is found to be very much in possession of Marx. And Finally, as Ropke has pointed out, "There is a profound gulf between the attempt to comprehend the world through the critical intelligence, as the scientist seeks to do within his own field and the attempt to identity tat intelligence with the world. For the of becoming and our idea of tat process r different things and science lends no warrant to the notion that it is possible to establish a mystical union between the two”.
Again,while it is intelligible tat ideas develop through conflicts, it is wholly arbitrary to attribute analogous contradictions and conflicts to the natural world. It is unintelligible why matter sud behave as ideas.
As Max Eastman has rightly observed. "Marx was by no means as successful in getting rid of Hegel as he had supposed and that having declared the world to be made up of unconscious matter, he then found himself obliged to read into matter the very essence of Hegel's Absolute, so that his system is in fact a return to the animism of primitive which attributes human values to trees and other material objects”(Marxism: Is it a Science?).
Thus it is clear tat Marxist theory cn hardly be regarded as science, however much Marxists may try to flaunt it as a scientific theory. The materialistic character of Marxism is based on no more stabler ground than its so-called scientific character. Materialism in order to remain materialism sudbe mechanistic on the operational side.
But Marx radically altered the mechanistic theory of materialism in order to leave room for development. He was forced to propound the activist of knowledge, generally know as Instrumentalism, according to which knowledge is nothing but action or Praxis. As a marked departure from traditional materialism, which regards sensations as faithful copies of reality, Marx held tat our sensations do not give us immediate knowledge of reality but merely stimuli to action which is true knowledge. Marx declared in his thesis on Feuerbach "All philosophies hv sought to explain the world; the point however is to change it'.
Knowledge and action r almost identical and theory and practice r inseparably linked. A theory which is not confirmed by action is sterile while action based on no theory is purposeless.
This puts Marx almost in the rank of a religious preacher with his emphasis on the close relation between faith and action or Iman and Amal. Hahahaha.
Again, by his emphasis on action in Preference to speculative theorizing Marx makes meaningless his theory of Dialectical Materialism which is sought to be presented as a law. Moreover, there has been a great vagueness and ambiguity about the apportionment of emphasis of Marxist dialectics between material economic forces and the human phenomenon of class struggle.
In his eagerness to stress the materialistic character of his theory he used a language which puts the greater emphasis on the material forces rather than on the human frame work within which they operate, thus throwing him open to the charge that "he endowed matter with qualities tat transcend its physical character and belong to the realm of metaphysics."
Here Marx finds himself in the unenviable position of having to sacrifice his materialism at the altar of his dialecticism. Bertrand Russell has rightly pointed out in ‘Freedom and Organization’, "I agree with Lenin that no substantially new argument against Materialism has emerged since the time of Berkley with one exception. This one exception, oddly enough,is the argument set forth by Marx in his Thesis on Feuerbach and completely ignored by Lenin. If matter something which we passively apprehend is a delusion,and if, ‘Truth’ is practical rather than a theoretical conception, then old-fashioned materialism such as Lenin's becomes untenable.”
Likewise in ‘History of Western Philosophy’ Russell observes"Marx professed himself an atheist, but retained a cosmic optimism which only Theism could justify.”
The same contradiction plagues Marx's theory of social development. He regards all social development as a natural concomitant of development of productive forces.
According to him, the productive forces form the substructure upon which laws and institutions, religion and morals grow as superstructure. Marx, however, ws later forced to admit some inter-action between the two but did not precisely define the exact nature of that inter-relation.
Howbeit, once the inter-relation is conceded,the material basis of his theory is considerably weakened by the influence of mind and its manifestations. Though in his eagerness to maintain the primacy of the material economic forces, he had to endow these forces with the capacity develop somehow automatically, he ws forced elsewhere to concede some role,however secondary, to the human agency, as without it the productive forces wud themselves remain an illusion.
The productive forces are, in fact, developed by the human agency through the operation of ideas and intellect leading to new discoveries. Marxism itself is a product of the mind of the prince of bourgeois intellectuals, viz. Karl Mart and not viceversa.
Rightly has Koester observed in “The Yogi And The commisser’, “Marxist society has a basement production and an attic intellectual production, only the stairs and lifts are missing"
Again, in advanced human society the elemental human needs like the economic needs r not necessarily decisive factors in development. Other instincts like the love of ego or love of power even at the cost of economic needs have been found to influence the course of history in very big way.
To identify all human activity with the economic factor wud be to confuse the condition of such activity with its cuz. Economic condition may at best stand in the same relation to human civilization which is the manifestation of the ideas and aspirations of the human spirit as the soil stands to the plants growing in it.
Just as the soil-plant relation leaves a significant and more original and productive role to the seed, similarly human civilization is due more to the aspirations and endeavors of the human mind than to the prevailing production forces which may form the soil for its growth.
Human intellect and ideas themselves cn change the productive forces and productive relations trou scientific invention and formulation of new philosophies, as Marxism produced a new train of socio-economic relation.
K. R.Popper has with remarkable penetration observed,
"Historicists overlook the dependence of trends on initial conditions. They operate with trends as they were unconditional, like laws. Their confusion of law with trends makes them believe in which are trends which r unconditional (and therefore, general); or as we may say, in absolute trends-for example, in a general tendency towards progress-‘a tendency towards a better and happier state’. And if they at all consider a "reduction “of their tendencies to laws, they believe that these tendencies cn be immediately derived from universal laws alone, such as the laws of psychology (or perhaps of dialectical materialism etc.).
"This is the central mistake of historicism. Its 'law of development turns out to be absolute trends; trends which like laws, do not depend on initial conditions and which carry as irresistibly in a certain direction into the future. They are the basis of unconditional prophecies, opposed to conditional scientific predictions.
But wot about those who see tat trends depend on conditions and who try to find these conditions and to formulate them explicitly? My answer is tat I have no quarrel with them.
On the contrary, tat trends occur cannot be doubted.
Miss Shelly from Harvard can it? Prove me. Lol
We hv the difficult task of explaining themas well as we can i.e. of determining as precisely as possible the conditions under which they persist.
This point is tat these conditions r so easily over looked by Marxism. There is, for example, a trend towards an "accumulation of means of production (as Marx put it), but we sud hardly expect it to persist in a population which is rapidly decreasing, and such a decrease may in turn depend on extra-economic conditions, for example on chance inventions or conceivably on the direct physiological (perhaps biochemical) impact of an environment.
There are indeed countless possible conditions; and in order to be able to examine these possibilities in the search for the true conditions of a trend; we hv all the time to try to imagine conditions under which the trend in question wud disappear.
But this is wot the historicist cannot do. He firmly believes in his favorite trend and conditions under which it would disappear r to him unthinkable. The poverty of historicism we might say is a poverty of imagination.
The historicist continuously upbraids those who cannot imagine a change in their little worlds; yet it seems tat the historist is himself deficient in imagination, for he cannot imagine a change in the conditions of change" (The Poverty of Historicism).
The inherent contradictions of Marxism between the determinist and voluntarist elements of it hv put Marx himself and his followers in considerable difficulty forcing them to swing from one pole to another.
If Marxism is to maintain its materialistic character, then it must maintain its determinist stance. But in order to retain the dialectical character of his theory Marx was forced to propound the activist theory of knowledge, Marxists generally believe tat this instrumentalist theory of knowledge has finally resolved the controversy of determinism and voluntarism.
But is it tat easy Side by side with his instrumentalist theory of knowledge? Marx preached in his Kapital that “Society is governed by inexorable laws operating independently of the will of man and tat "Where a society has discovered the natural law that determines its own movement--it can neither overlaps the natural phases of its evolution or shuffle out of them by a stroke of the pen"
This is in flagrant inconsistency with his activist theory of knowledge according to which the sole business of philosophy is "to change the world" and which led both Marx and Engels to declare tat history does nothing… man makes his own history even though he does not do so on conditions chosen by himself”
Marx cudnot easily get away with this self contradiction and his moment of truth came when following the banning of the communist League in France and the defection of the bourgeoisie in 1841, Marx had to oppose the proposal for immediate revolutionary action put forward by Karl Schapper, the president of the League and to plead for patient waiting for another fifteen, twenty or fifty years.
In a meeting held on 15thSeptember the same year Marx accused the activists of being idealists rather than materialists in representing "will by itself as the motive force of revolution" Finding himself in a similar situation, Stalin issued the blunt reminder in his ‘Economic Problems of Socialism, in the USSR issued just before the19th Congress meeting of October 5th 1952, tat economic laws operate ‘independently of the will of man" to which even Soviet planners must conform, conveying warning to the general public that although the "Construction of Communism" would be achieved in the not too distant future, too much was not to be expected in the immediate present.
Wowo our so called Marxists lamer.hahahaha
Here, again Marx and his follower finally opted for their materialism at the cost of their activist theory of knowledge. Lol
Is Marxist historicism strictly maintainable?Like Marxist science itself upon which his historicism is based, theory of historic development fails to stand a strict scrutiny. Consistent with their historical materialism, Marxists try to explain away unique and contingent events in history and even the role of great men by objective economic laws.
They even go so far as to say tat Homer hd sung. Plato hd philosophized, Jesus and Paul had transformed moral consciousness quite unaware tat they were simply the instruments of an economic forces to which all their work was ultimately reducible", as Croce has put it.
They believe that Newton was led to discover the law of gravitation not by the fall of an apple, but by the economic needs of the time and that Napoleon’s emergence was the result of similar economic needs. They argue tat Napoleon arose at a critical period of his nation’s history out of historic necessity, conveniently forgetting tat no such man emerged to save the civilizations of Greece and Rome, as Federn has pointed out.
Secondly,Marxist historicism fails to give any plausible explanation of the contingent elements in human history. To use the words of Bertrand Russell, "It was touch-and-go whether the German Government would allow Lenin to return to Russia in 1917 and if the particular minister had said, ‘No' when in fact he said "Yes", it is difficult to believe that the Russian Revolution would have taken the course it did. Again if Genoa had not ceded Corsica to France in 1768, Napoleon, born there in the year following would have had no career in France. Yet it cn seriously be maintained tat without him the history of France would have been the same" (Freedom And Organization).
Thirdly,if “historic necessity" refers to an objective law working in dependently of the will of man, it will operate without the least botheration as to whether it is good bad for man. Yet Marxists use it in the quite different sense of "desirable"when, for instance they say that England had a liberal constitution bcuz she needed strong personalities to develop her commercial empire or tat so-called great men arise in times of crisis to save a nation.
Quiet unconsciously Marxists here import a new criterion which has a metaphysical and idealistic reference.
Fourthly,history proceeds as an unending stream in which different currents and crosscurrents act and react upon one another, making it difficult to precisely determine which of its stages are thesis, anti-thesis or synthesis. Any historical stage cn be regarded as either of the three and placing them in one category or the other depends on the arbitrary choice or viewpoint of the analyst.
Thus when under compelling circumstances,Lenin had to introduce his New Economic Policy, in 1921, which marked a deviation or even a reversal of the orthodox Marxist theory, it ws denounced by many of his followers as a betrayal of Marxist theory, to be defended later by Marxists as an anti-thesis of war communism of 1919-22, which reduced Russia to a state of prostration and of which Stalin's Policy from 1924 onwards was the synthesis. Curiously enough, Stalin's Policy which was sought to be explained as synthesis between war-communism and Lenin’s NEP, is now being condemned as the anti-thesis of Leninism and of Marxism.
Wot an irresponsible treatment simply reduces history to a game for which the only qualifications are a lively imagination and much ignorance. Lol
In conclusion it cn be said tat by making every subsequent event, irrespective of is direction, the anti-thesis of every previous event, Dialectical Materialism makes mere succession and not direction the only criterion of dialecticism and thereby leaves us with no criterion at all. In tat case, we hv dialecticism, but not necessarily materialism.
We either hv materialism and no freedom or cn dialecticism with some freedom and creativity but no materialism.
This is the practical paradox of Marxism as a Philosophy.
Marx seized upon the dialectics of Hegel to reach altogether different conclusion.It must be remembered tat Hegel confined himself merely to an analysis of the past of woths happened.
He admitted that "philosophy comes too late to teach the world what it should be.... The owl of Minerva begins its flight when the shades of twilight have already fallen."
Hegel's dialectic has at least the redeeming feature of serving as a guide to the ways of human thought and human understanding. But hving found convenient instrument in Hegel's dialectics Marx applied it to the future and indulged in much pseudo-scientific sooth-saying.
Untenable as Dialectical Materialism is, both philosophically and historically, its strength and popularity lies elsewhere not in reason, but in those very levels of consciousness which Marxism seeks to repudiate.
As Carew Hunt has observed in ‘Theory And Practice of Communism’."It is in the last analysis a body of ideas which has filled the vacuum created by the breakdown of organized religion as a result of the in creasing secularization of thought during the last three centuries.
........
But for its devotees communism has the value of a religion inso far as it is felt to provide a complete explanation of reality and of man as part of reality, and at the same time to give to life, as does religion, a sense of purpose.
And much as communists resents the analogy, it must be pressed still further. If reason is to be our sole guide, the only intelligible attitude towards the riddle of existence is agnosticism, seeing tat all our knowledge is conditioned by the nature and limitations of our human faculties, and tat there is nothing outside ourselves and the products of our minds by which its final truth cn ever be tested.
As neither communism nor religion is content to rest in this position, each is ultimately driven to appeal to certain propositions which hv to be accepted by faith, but from which once accepted, whatever else it is desired to prove logically follows,only while religion frankly accepts this.
Only while religion frankly accepts this, communism maintains tat its fundamental dogmas a guaranteed by science (which they certainly are not), since one and all r very disputable …
Nor indeed wud the issue be affected if they were so guaranteed. since a belief in the hypotheses upon which science rests requires an act of faith like any other.''
Thus the appeal of communism itself is more to emotion than to intellect and it has, in fact, become the same very thing tat it seeks to repudiate viz. religion. And the same is true of all other modern movements with a strong anti-religious bias.
As Christopher Dawson has observed with remarkable insight. "Nor is this prophetic element entirely absent from modern revolutionary movements.
Rousseau himself is a remarkable example of the secularized prophetic type and the leaders of the French Revolution, above all, Robespierre and St. Just, were the Khalifas of this humanitarian Mahdi.
Even in the nineteenth century, although Lamennais and Victor Hugo and many lesser men were prophets ‘manques’, who failed to arouse any real religious enthusiasm, the movement of social revolution as a whole undoubtedly owed much of its power to non-political and non-economic forces which had their origin in the deeper levels of consciousness.
And thus it can be seen the strange paradox of the Marxian movement which has so many of the characteristics of a new prophetic religion in spite of its materialistic ideology and secularistic ethics.
এটি আমার মার্কসবাদের উপর ক্রিটিক্যাল এনালাইসিস। যারা মার্কসবাদের ওপর জ্ঞান রাখেন তারা হয়ত আমার সাথে একমত হবেন যে দর্শনটি কতটুকু স্ববিরোধী।
(I hv been writing from my college going periods. I love to read,understand and express. I wrote this article in February 2014.)
13 February 2014 at 15:13
=============
Marx bases his Dialectical Materialism upon Hegel's dialectics, but stretches it to reach a quite contradictory conclusion. However eagerly Marx may have tried to disown his debt to Hegel and to stress the difference between the Hegelian idealistic system and his own materialistic system, an impartial observer of history can hardly fail to detect his debt to Hegelian dialects. In his eagerness to explain the entire universe, including human history as cosmos, a rational and intelligible structure, Hegel tried to explain it in term of gradual self-expression of the absolute or the supreme rational principle.
Hegel’s, ‘Absolute’ is a system of ideas or concepts of categories such as quantity, quality, substance,causality essence, existence and the like which r connected dialectically i.e. the scrutiny of one of these categories will lead to the other either as a reaction to its one sidedness or as a conciliation of its contradictions. Hegel's Absolute is the totality not only of thought, but also of all experience including the temporal. The dialectic governs not only progress of thought, but also of temporal events.
A thing is real in proportion as it is seen in relation to the Absolute. This leads Hegel to conclude "Whatever is real is rational" and conversely, “Whatever is rational is real”.
This explains why Hegel regarded every historical event, however retrograde and apparently harmful, as in some way representing the Divine Will as also his approval of a retrograde social system of his own country.
Nw whatever may be the merits or demerits of Hegel’s system, Marx found his dialectics a convenient instrument of explaining human history in terms of the gradual self-expression, as it were, of matter or material economic forces through the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
He found the dialects a handy stick to beat Hegel with and to reach a conclusion which purports to be the undoing of Hegel. As opposed to Hegel, who regarded all social phenomena as the unfoldment of the Absolute Idea or the Divine Will,Marx regarded human history as the gradual unfoldment for economic forces which form the basic infrastructure of human society upon which the world of thoughts of ideas and aspirations including the moral and spiritual yearning of man, is built a superstructure.
Spiritual phenomena, is thus dismissed by Marx with a single stroke ofhis Dialectical Materialism.
Ok now let’s see wot Mr. Karl Marx did.
Marxism is based on the following so-called laws of dialectic:
(1) The law of the unity of opposites which asserts that reality is essentially contradictory in nature and that this contradiction exists in unity.
(2) The law of the transformation of into quantity into quantity and vice versa. According to this law changes take place by imperceptible quantitative mutations, by sudden jumps as revolutions leading to the emergence of new qualities.
(3) The law of the Negation of Negation which asserts that all developments proceed through thesis, antithesis and synthesis, each reconciliation issuing in a higher reformulation.
As an illustration of Negation of Negation and also of emergence of new qualities, the case of growth of crops is cited. One seed of barley dies or negates itself to give birth to the barley plant, which in its turn, dies or negates itself to give birth to, say,ten grains of barley.
Marx attacks formal logic for its devotion to static or fixed concepts and terms nd acting thereby as a handmaiden of conservatism or reaction. As distinguished from the allegedly unscientific character of formal logic, dialectics is scientific and gives "an exact representation of the universe."
As regards the law of Unity of opposites, it may be said that unity becomes meaningless if it is irreducibly contradictory. The term "Unity of opposites" cn convey any sense only if such contradiction is supposed to be only apparent and not real. The term Unity stands above all duality, above all plurality.
Either there cn be unmitigated plurality or duality, or there can be unity. One is to apply for one or the other, but not for both at the same time. Moreover, the existence of positive and negative particles of electricity may at most testify to co-inherent of such dual factors, but not to their ‘triadic’ dialectical movement.
Even science hs advanced to a point when the apparent duality of electrons and protons or positive and negative of electricity is not ruled final. Science has shown tat the different forms of energy are mutually convertible and has resolved everything into one ocean of energy upon which the appearance of atoms itself is a mystery.
Again,the apparent plurality or duality is a characteristic of process and not reality. These cn be final only if reality is all process, in which case it makes absolute nonsense of itself.
But Marx has at least been so much charitable as to grant reality a sense, and therefore a right of existence. And it cn exist meaningfully if it is a unity, not an unmitigated plurality.
Thirdly,by calling it a law, Marx rather indirectly concedes its claim to absoluteness. If everything be a process, merely an aimless battlefield of irreducibly contradictory forces, then there cn be no permanent immutable laws. Curiously enough,while Marx reduces everything into the spiral process of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, he quite unwarrantably grants the dialectics the status of a permanent immutable law and thereby pays an indirect tribute to Hegel's Absolute.
In the words of K.R. Popper "It almost looks as if historicists were trying to compensate themselves for the loss of an unchanging world by clinging to the faith that change can be foreseen because it is ruled by an unchanging law." (The Poverty of Historicism).
As regards the law of transformation of quantity into quality emergence of new qualities, it cn be said tat like all theories of emergent evolution, it leaves the mystery unsolved. No theory of emergence has answered why or even hw a new quality should emerge and has only shelved the problem instead of solving them.
In common with other votaries of emergent evolution, Marx at least uses terms like “sudden jumps" or “revolution" and thereby unwittingly walks into the enemy's parlour as these remain unexplained phenomena which the religious man might well credit to God.
Moreover by appealing to "sudden jumps" or "revolutions" Marx has unconsciously admitted a break in the chain of his dialectics leaving himself at the merry or wotever gods there be.
Moreover,the change from one grain of barley to ten grains which, according to Marxists,illustrate the law of ‘Negation of Negation’ and also of qualitative change cannot be represented as contradiction or emergence of new qualities or higher reformulations. As Sidney Hook hs observed in “The law of the Dialectics" the seed-flower-fruit cycle simply brings us back where we started.''
Marx's contention tat the dialectics is scientific, as opposed to formal logic which is unscientific, fails to hold water.
It is not scientific at all. Had it been so the greatest scientific discoveries of the world cud not hv been possible without any reference to this great law. Again,contrary to wot Marxists may think, the scientist's world is not a world of perpetual becoming without any being, any principle of permanence. Had it been so, then all the scientific investigations wud hv to be abandoned as scientific study is possible only if the scientist cn isolate the phenomena of his study into a closed system.
Moreover, the idea tat a particular group of phenomena cn be comprehended only as part of the whole refers to a metaphysical belief and as such belongs to Metaphysics rather than to science.
Here therefore the ghost of Hegel is found to be very much in possession of Marx. And Finally, as Ropke has pointed out, "There is a profound gulf between the attempt to comprehend the world through the critical intelligence, as the scientist seeks to do within his own field and the attempt to identity tat intelligence with the world. For the of becoming and our idea of tat process r different things and science lends no warrant to the notion that it is possible to establish a mystical union between the two”.
Again,while it is intelligible tat ideas develop through conflicts, it is wholly arbitrary to attribute analogous contradictions and conflicts to the natural world. It is unintelligible why matter sud behave as ideas.
As Max Eastman has rightly observed. "Marx was by no means as successful in getting rid of Hegel as he had supposed and that having declared the world to be made up of unconscious matter, he then found himself obliged to read into matter the very essence of Hegel's Absolute, so that his system is in fact a return to the animism of primitive which attributes human values to trees and other material objects”(Marxism: Is it a Science?).
Thus it is clear tat Marxist theory cn hardly be regarded as science, however much Marxists may try to flaunt it as a scientific theory. The materialistic character of Marxism is based on no more stabler ground than its so-called scientific character. Materialism in order to remain materialism sudbe mechanistic on the operational side.
But Marx radically altered the mechanistic theory of materialism in order to leave room for development. He was forced to propound the activist of knowledge, generally know as Instrumentalism, according to which knowledge is nothing but action or Praxis. As a marked departure from traditional materialism, which regards sensations as faithful copies of reality, Marx held tat our sensations do not give us immediate knowledge of reality but merely stimuli to action which is true knowledge. Marx declared in his thesis on Feuerbach "All philosophies hv sought to explain the world; the point however is to change it'.
Knowledge and action r almost identical and theory and practice r inseparably linked. A theory which is not confirmed by action is sterile while action based on no theory is purposeless.
This puts Marx almost in the rank of a religious preacher with his emphasis on the close relation between faith and action or Iman and Amal. Hahahaha.
Again, by his emphasis on action in Preference to speculative theorizing Marx makes meaningless his theory of Dialectical Materialism which is sought to be presented as a law. Moreover, there has been a great vagueness and ambiguity about the apportionment of emphasis of Marxist dialectics between material economic forces and the human phenomenon of class struggle.
In his eagerness to stress the materialistic character of his theory he used a language which puts the greater emphasis on the material forces rather than on the human frame work within which they operate, thus throwing him open to the charge that "he endowed matter with qualities tat transcend its physical character and belong to the realm of metaphysics."
Here Marx finds himself in the unenviable position of having to sacrifice his materialism at the altar of his dialecticism. Bertrand Russell has rightly pointed out in ‘Freedom and Organization’, "I agree with Lenin that no substantially new argument against Materialism has emerged since the time of Berkley with one exception. This one exception, oddly enough,is the argument set forth by Marx in his Thesis on Feuerbach and completely ignored by Lenin. If matter something which we passively apprehend is a delusion,and if, ‘Truth’ is practical rather than a theoretical conception, then old-fashioned materialism such as Lenin's becomes untenable.”
Likewise in ‘History of Western Philosophy’ Russell observes"Marx professed himself an atheist, but retained a cosmic optimism which only Theism could justify.”
The same contradiction plagues Marx's theory of social development. He regards all social development as a natural concomitant of development of productive forces.
According to him, the productive forces form the substructure upon which laws and institutions, religion and morals grow as superstructure. Marx, however, ws later forced to admit some inter-action between the two but did not precisely define the exact nature of that inter-relation.
Howbeit, once the inter-relation is conceded,the material basis of his theory is considerably weakened by the influence of mind and its manifestations. Though in his eagerness to maintain the primacy of the material economic forces, he had to endow these forces with the capacity develop somehow automatically, he ws forced elsewhere to concede some role,however secondary, to the human agency, as without it the productive forces wud themselves remain an illusion.
The productive forces are, in fact, developed by the human agency through the operation of ideas and intellect leading to new discoveries. Marxism itself is a product of the mind of the prince of bourgeois intellectuals, viz. Karl Mart and not viceversa.
Rightly has Koester observed in “The Yogi And The commisser’, “Marxist society has a basement production and an attic intellectual production, only the stairs and lifts are missing"
Again, in advanced human society the elemental human needs like the economic needs r not necessarily decisive factors in development. Other instincts like the love of ego or love of power even at the cost of economic needs have been found to influence the course of history in very big way.
To identify all human activity with the economic factor wud be to confuse the condition of such activity with its cuz. Economic condition may at best stand in the same relation to human civilization which is the manifestation of the ideas and aspirations of the human spirit as the soil stands to the plants growing in it.
Just as the soil-plant relation leaves a significant and more original and productive role to the seed, similarly human civilization is due more to the aspirations and endeavors of the human mind than to the prevailing production forces which may form the soil for its growth.
Human intellect and ideas themselves cn change the productive forces and productive relations trou scientific invention and formulation of new philosophies, as Marxism produced a new train of socio-economic relation.
K. R.Popper has with remarkable penetration observed,
"Historicists overlook the dependence of trends on initial conditions. They operate with trends as they were unconditional, like laws. Their confusion of law with trends makes them believe in which are trends which r unconditional (and therefore, general); or as we may say, in absolute trends-for example, in a general tendency towards progress-‘a tendency towards a better and happier state’. And if they at all consider a "reduction “of their tendencies to laws, they believe that these tendencies cn be immediately derived from universal laws alone, such as the laws of psychology (or perhaps of dialectical materialism etc.).
"This is the central mistake of historicism. Its 'law of development turns out to be absolute trends; trends which like laws, do not depend on initial conditions and which carry as irresistibly in a certain direction into the future. They are the basis of unconditional prophecies, opposed to conditional scientific predictions.
But wot about those who see tat trends depend on conditions and who try to find these conditions and to formulate them explicitly? My answer is tat I have no quarrel with them.
On the contrary, tat trends occur cannot be doubted.
Miss Shelly from Harvard can it? Prove me. Lol
We hv the difficult task of explaining themas well as we can i.e. of determining as precisely as possible the conditions under which they persist.
This point is tat these conditions r so easily over looked by Marxism. There is, for example, a trend towards an "accumulation of means of production (as Marx put it), but we sud hardly expect it to persist in a population which is rapidly decreasing, and such a decrease may in turn depend on extra-economic conditions, for example on chance inventions or conceivably on the direct physiological (perhaps biochemical) impact of an environment.
There are indeed countless possible conditions; and in order to be able to examine these possibilities in the search for the true conditions of a trend; we hv all the time to try to imagine conditions under which the trend in question wud disappear.
But this is wot the historicist cannot do. He firmly believes in his favorite trend and conditions under which it would disappear r to him unthinkable. The poverty of historicism we might say is a poverty of imagination.
The historicist continuously upbraids those who cannot imagine a change in their little worlds; yet it seems tat the historist is himself deficient in imagination, for he cannot imagine a change in the conditions of change" (The Poverty of Historicism).
The inherent contradictions of Marxism between the determinist and voluntarist elements of it hv put Marx himself and his followers in considerable difficulty forcing them to swing from one pole to another.
If Marxism is to maintain its materialistic character, then it must maintain its determinist stance. But in order to retain the dialectical character of his theory Marx was forced to propound the activist theory of knowledge, Marxists generally believe tat this instrumentalist theory of knowledge has finally resolved the controversy of determinism and voluntarism.
But is it tat easy Side by side with his instrumentalist theory of knowledge? Marx preached in his Kapital that “Society is governed by inexorable laws operating independently of the will of man and tat "Where a society has discovered the natural law that determines its own movement--it can neither overlaps the natural phases of its evolution or shuffle out of them by a stroke of the pen"
This is in flagrant inconsistency with his activist theory of knowledge according to which the sole business of philosophy is "to change the world" and which led both Marx and Engels to declare tat history does nothing… man makes his own history even though he does not do so on conditions chosen by himself”
Marx cudnot easily get away with this self contradiction and his moment of truth came when following the banning of the communist League in France and the defection of the bourgeoisie in 1841, Marx had to oppose the proposal for immediate revolutionary action put forward by Karl Schapper, the president of the League and to plead for patient waiting for another fifteen, twenty or fifty years.
In a meeting held on 15thSeptember the same year Marx accused the activists of being idealists rather than materialists in representing "will by itself as the motive force of revolution" Finding himself in a similar situation, Stalin issued the blunt reminder in his ‘Economic Problems of Socialism, in the USSR issued just before the19th Congress meeting of October 5th 1952, tat economic laws operate ‘independently of the will of man" to which even Soviet planners must conform, conveying warning to the general public that although the "Construction of Communism" would be achieved in the not too distant future, too much was not to be expected in the immediate present.
Wowo our so called Marxists lamer.hahahaha
Here, again Marx and his follower finally opted for their materialism at the cost of their activist theory of knowledge. Lol
Is Marxist historicism strictly maintainable?Like Marxist science itself upon which his historicism is based, theory of historic development fails to stand a strict scrutiny. Consistent with their historical materialism, Marxists try to explain away unique and contingent events in history and even the role of great men by objective economic laws.
They even go so far as to say tat Homer hd sung. Plato hd philosophized, Jesus and Paul had transformed moral consciousness quite unaware tat they were simply the instruments of an economic forces to which all their work was ultimately reducible", as Croce has put it.
They believe that Newton was led to discover the law of gravitation not by the fall of an apple, but by the economic needs of the time and that Napoleon’s emergence was the result of similar economic needs. They argue tat Napoleon arose at a critical period of his nation’s history out of historic necessity, conveniently forgetting tat no such man emerged to save the civilizations of Greece and Rome, as Federn has pointed out.
Secondly,Marxist historicism fails to give any plausible explanation of the contingent elements in human history. To use the words of Bertrand Russell, "It was touch-and-go whether the German Government would allow Lenin to return to Russia in 1917 and if the particular minister had said, ‘No' when in fact he said "Yes", it is difficult to believe that the Russian Revolution would have taken the course it did. Again if Genoa had not ceded Corsica to France in 1768, Napoleon, born there in the year following would have had no career in France. Yet it cn seriously be maintained tat without him the history of France would have been the same" (Freedom And Organization).
Thirdly,if “historic necessity" refers to an objective law working in dependently of the will of man, it will operate without the least botheration as to whether it is good bad for man. Yet Marxists use it in the quite different sense of "desirable"when, for instance they say that England had a liberal constitution bcuz she needed strong personalities to develop her commercial empire or tat so-called great men arise in times of crisis to save a nation.
Quiet unconsciously Marxists here import a new criterion which has a metaphysical and idealistic reference.
Fourthly,history proceeds as an unending stream in which different currents and crosscurrents act and react upon one another, making it difficult to precisely determine which of its stages are thesis, anti-thesis or synthesis. Any historical stage cn be regarded as either of the three and placing them in one category or the other depends on the arbitrary choice or viewpoint of the analyst.
Thus when under compelling circumstances,Lenin had to introduce his New Economic Policy, in 1921, which marked a deviation or even a reversal of the orthodox Marxist theory, it ws denounced by many of his followers as a betrayal of Marxist theory, to be defended later by Marxists as an anti-thesis of war communism of 1919-22, which reduced Russia to a state of prostration and of which Stalin's Policy from 1924 onwards was the synthesis. Curiously enough, Stalin's Policy which was sought to be explained as synthesis between war-communism and Lenin’s NEP, is now being condemned as the anti-thesis of Leninism and of Marxism.
Wot an irresponsible treatment simply reduces history to a game for which the only qualifications are a lively imagination and much ignorance. Lol
In conclusion it cn be said tat by making every subsequent event, irrespective of is direction, the anti-thesis of every previous event, Dialectical Materialism makes mere succession and not direction the only criterion of dialecticism and thereby leaves us with no criterion at all. In tat case, we hv dialecticism, but not necessarily materialism.
We either hv materialism and no freedom or cn dialecticism with some freedom and creativity but no materialism.
This is the practical paradox of Marxism as a Philosophy.
Marx seized upon the dialectics of Hegel to reach altogether different conclusion.It must be remembered tat Hegel confined himself merely to an analysis of the past of woths happened.
He admitted that "philosophy comes too late to teach the world what it should be.... The owl of Minerva begins its flight when the shades of twilight have already fallen."
Hegel's dialectic has at least the redeeming feature of serving as a guide to the ways of human thought and human understanding. But hving found convenient instrument in Hegel's dialectics Marx applied it to the future and indulged in much pseudo-scientific sooth-saying.
Untenable as Dialectical Materialism is, both philosophically and historically, its strength and popularity lies elsewhere not in reason, but in those very levels of consciousness which Marxism seeks to repudiate.
As Carew Hunt has observed in ‘Theory And Practice of Communism’."It is in the last analysis a body of ideas which has filled the vacuum created by the breakdown of organized religion as a result of the in creasing secularization of thought during the last three centuries.
........
But for its devotees communism has the value of a religion inso far as it is felt to provide a complete explanation of reality and of man as part of reality, and at the same time to give to life, as does religion, a sense of purpose.
And much as communists resents the analogy, it must be pressed still further. If reason is to be our sole guide, the only intelligible attitude towards the riddle of existence is agnosticism, seeing tat all our knowledge is conditioned by the nature and limitations of our human faculties, and tat there is nothing outside ourselves and the products of our minds by which its final truth cn ever be tested.
As neither communism nor religion is content to rest in this position, each is ultimately driven to appeal to certain propositions which hv to be accepted by faith, but from which once accepted, whatever else it is desired to prove logically follows,only while religion frankly accepts this.
Only while religion frankly accepts this, communism maintains tat its fundamental dogmas a guaranteed by science (which they certainly are not), since one and all r very disputable …
Nor indeed wud the issue be affected if they were so guaranteed. since a belief in the hypotheses upon which science rests requires an act of faith like any other.''
Thus the appeal of communism itself is more to emotion than to intellect and it has, in fact, become the same very thing tat it seeks to repudiate viz. religion. And the same is true of all other modern movements with a strong anti-religious bias.
As Christopher Dawson has observed with remarkable insight. "Nor is this prophetic element entirely absent from modern revolutionary movements.
Rousseau himself is a remarkable example of the secularized prophetic type and the leaders of the French Revolution, above all, Robespierre and St. Just, were the Khalifas of this humanitarian Mahdi.
Even in the nineteenth century, although Lamennais and Victor Hugo and many lesser men were prophets ‘manques’, who failed to arouse any real religious enthusiasm, the movement of social revolution as a whole undoubtedly owed much of its power to non-political and non-economic forces which had their origin in the deeper levels of consciousness.
And thus it can be seen the strange paradox of the Marxian movement which has so many of the characteristics of a new prophetic religion in spite of its materialistic ideology and secularistic ethics.
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