From my vantage point, Marxism should be construed as making arguments that are, in part (and in vary degrees of significance and strength), social scientific (in the widest sense, wherein political economy is paramount), historical, moral (even if only implicit), philosophical (as in having to do with philosophical anthropology, Liberal political philosophy, including democratic theory and praxis, and utopian thought), and of course political (hence the relevance of the state, reforms, and revolution). These strands are sometimes brilliantly or more often obscurely intertwined, confused, or conflated among Marxists; and they cannot be combined so as to achieve clarity within something christened “materialism” in an ontological or metaphysical sense. Thus I find it deeply misleading because profoundly mistaken to characterize Marx and Marxist thought as merely “scientific,” a reductionist and simple-minded description (if only because it is frequently positivistic in the worse sense) that has done much theoretical and practical harm over time. This is but one reason the self-defined “analytical Marxists” (G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer, Erik Olin Wright, Philippe Van Parijs, and Adam Przeworski; there are others, like Robert Brenner, Michael Luntley, David Schweickart and R.G. Peffer, who might be included under this term even if they did not participate in discussions with group members over the years), and thus analytical Marxism as such is, I adamantly believe, a necessary (hence not sufficient) condition of any intellectually respectable Marxism. This Marxism need not hold to any particular model or theory heretofore popular among these Marxists, be it “rational choice” or game theory, but should avail itself of the best in social science methods and the norms of philosophical (especially conceptual) clarity and argument. Finally, it should be leavened by the global experiences of political praxis which draw upon not only the relevant history, but is framed, with regard to probabilities and possibilities, in the short, medium, and long-term, all the while not forswearing or ignoring what might be viewed as a time-transcendent utopian dimension (at least insofar as that involves our most cherished hopes and dreams as incarnate in our highest ideals and fundamental values; this is distinguishable from blueprint utopias on the one hand, and the ‘real utopias’ of the late Erik Olin Wright on the other).
Personally, I hope this Marxism understands the moral, legal, and political significance (which includes ‘constitutional goods’) of Liberal political philosophy as much or even more than Liberal political philosophers themselves, and is firmly committed to the values, principles, and practices embodied in democratic theory and practice, be it in participatory, deliberative, or representative form. Finally, I trust that a Marxism construed in this manner does not rule out lifeworlds and worldviews working in conjunction or collaboration with other worldviews and lifeworlds, such that one might be, for example, and at the same time, say, a Marxist and a Buddhist, a Marxist and a Catholic, (or forging solidarity or alliances with those who, while not Marxist, are sympathetic to socialist and communist ideas and ideals) what have you, for this Marxism need not crowd out other beliefs, values, and ideals that give meaning and purpose to one’s life. After all, Marxism is but one worldview among others, and unless we are irrationally dogmatic or fatally blinkered, like contemporary fundamentalist evangelical Christians or militant jihadists (e.g. Al-Qaeda or ISIS/Daesh) who fail to appreciate and respect the notion of human dignity or the values of intellectual or worldview pluralism, including the unavoidable degree of relativism intrinsic to our views (as both the pragmatists and Jains, for different reasons, would remind us), we can concede the fact that identification with a Marxist worldview is perfectly compatible with coming to learn whatever truth(s) might be incarnate in other worldviews.
A rough analogy with the propagation of a crude and reductionist Marxism might be taken from what has occurred in the natural sciences insofar as it demonstrates how far astray philosophers and scientists often find themselves from the arguments of those to whom they are theoretically beholden, while more or less claiming intellectual fidelity (and often some measure of emotional identification or devotion) to this or that intellectual forebear. Consider, for instance, what has happened to the Darwinian theory of evolution, which has been variously translated (and ‘updated’) as (i) the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer; (ii) the Malthusian Social Darwinism of the ecologist Garrett Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics;” (iii) the sociobiology and “population genetics” of E.O. Wilson; (iv) the right-wing ideology of what Mary Midgley memorably termed “biological Thatcherism” (which is ‘romantic and egotistic, celebrating evolution as a ceaseless crescendo of competition between essentially “selfish” individual organisms, each making “investments” for its own separate advantage, organisms whose attempts to “manipulate” one another provide[ ] the whole dynamic of development’); (v) the “selfish genes” of Richard Dawkins; (vi) and much of the nonsense that has dominated the field of evolutionary psychology. The collaboration between disciplines or fields of inquiry does not necessarily avoid any of the myriad problems that plague the above theories, indeed, it may just exacerbate them, as I suspect will be—if it is not already— the case with the marriage of convenience between the neurosciences (or ‘evolutionary neuroscience’ in particular) and evolutionary psychology. As Darwin himself wrote about the intellectual and ideological nature of such phenomena, “Great is the power of misrepresentation.” We cannot hold either Darwin or Marx wholly responsible for the folly of those who later developed ideological isms and systems in their name (even if their theories were to some extent unavoidably vulnerable to same). Of course neither intellectual giant is immune from criticism, as the analytical Marxists demonstrate in the case of Marx and Stephen Jay Gould or Evelyn Fox Keller illustrate in the case of Darwin: this is what it means to follow in the footsteps of others while also carefully constructing new trails through methodological and theoretical thickets. Therefore, and to adapt the words of one of my undergraduate teachers—the late Raghavan Iyer—Darwin and Marx remain “ill-served benefactors of humanity.”
Here is a short list of titles germane to the critique of the various Darwinian motivated or inspired theories above (which should not detract from the core integrity and coherence of Darwin’s theory). (I have not included titles, save one, related to the neurosciences, which are prone to similar kinds of untenable reduction, extravagant and hyperbolic theoretical claims, as well as ideological manipulation):
- Buller, David J. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (MIT Press, 2005).
- Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford University Press, 2001).
- Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (Blackwell, 2007).
- Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science (Oxford University Press, 2007).
- Lewontin, R.C. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (HarperCollins, 1991).
- Lewontin, Richard. It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New York Review Books, 2000).
- Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Routledge, revised ed., 1995).
- Rose, Hilary and Steven Rose. Genes, Cells and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology (Verso, 2012).
- Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development (Zed Books, 1998).
- Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.).
- Tallis, Raymond. I Am: An Inquiry into First-Person Being (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
- Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Acumen, 2011).
Relevant Bibliographies
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