Marxism is a History without a Subject
Yes, Marx was wrong in his predictions. But, I think this was a minor mistake. Let me explain: making mistakes about the future is common to liberals, socialists or whatever ideological orientations may be. “Near future specialists”, how do market agents not make mistakes in their bets on the stock exchanges?
Nor is the problem that his error was proportional to his (enormous) claim, but that (here’s the thing) there is no firm distinction, as the heterodox want, in seeing a “methodological Marx” (who would save himself) from the “Prophet Marx” (completely discarded). I think that the error that led to the pretentious predictions lies in the Marxian method itself.
The objective teleology of history on which Marx relied had a foreseen, objective end. How many times do we hear about “class interests”? Where do we think this comes from? Well, the interests are not structural, they can be several.
Not infrequently, the interests of the working class can be well in tune with the business elite, when the latter’s gains result in benefits at first. What makes this unfeasible in Marxian reasoning? The alluded end, which will be reached via (structural) contradiction between the classes. For this reason, the adversities in the historical course are nothing more than occasions in which the “dominant tendency” of the “evolution of history”, read class struggle, will be imposed.
It didn’t impose itself. This was what we saw, as the metamorphoses undergone by the labor movement demonstrate.
Another characteristic that is allied to this historical finalism (teleology…) is its functionalist aspect. I know that some will say that it is something specific to an American school of sociology (Talcott Parsons) that would have nothing to do with Marxism… But, I disagree: the functionalism present in Marxian work has to do with a closed system where effects (outputs) produce feedbacks that justify the inputs, the political effects being nothing more than intermediate elements of the circuit.
A commonplace example of functionalism in Marx’s work, which many call, unknowingly, “economism” (misrepresenting this science… economics) is when an institution arises to meet the “needs of the system”. The paradigmatic case I am referring to is religion which, in a more shallow (Althusserian) reading, is categorized as a mere superstructure at “service to the system”.
(A vulgarized reading that, however, arose in Marx himself.)
Now! If there are situations in which the religious sphere justifies a given economic situation, there are those in which it is clearly opposed to changes in the same system, that is, in the economy itself. If religion were like that, so “reflexive”, there would be no reason to have so many quarrels between economic agents and oligarchies with their timeless legitimation.
There are no gross determinisms in reality, as Marx wanted to see.
Marx may have been right (from an empirical point of view) in certain analyzes for his time, but he was completely wrong in generalizing to the future and also, in what he understood as the past of capitalist society. Some of his subtheories, such as the declining rate of profit, contain poor deductive reasoning derived more from his own wishful thinking than a logical exercise in contraposition and truly dialectical testing.
Marx’s passion evidently clouded his critical eye. He also dismissed the fundamental role of the individual in history. Depending on the place it occupies in the network of social relations, its action can play a decisive role in the course of historical facts, even greater than certain collective class actions or not.
The objective teleology of history in Marx contains a paradox. It “explains everything” from front to back, but what it proposes to explain explicitly, the future has in the possibilities of chance and historical contingency, the most complete void. While science proceeds backwards, from cause to effect, Marxianism does exactly the opposite by intending to point to the past from the future. As if this future had already inscribed, beforehand, what the past will inexorably discover in a logical, accurate and irreproachable way, the so-called “historical becoming”. But, without noticing in this past, the unforeseen and historical creations as what they are: options and alternatives, full of dilemmas.
Marx’s biggest mistakes are also the same as Hegel’s, of believing in a history without a subject (individual and of individual interactions), but that disastrously assigns an objective to history, as if it were possible to detach objectives from subjects.
Anselmo Heidrich
March, 19 2023
