Criticisms of Marxism

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This article is on criticisms of Marxism, a branch of socialism. See criticisms of socialism for a discussion of objections to socialism in general. These concepts are not identical; many socialist supporters also criticize Marxism.

Various aspects of Marxist theory have been criticized. These criticisms concern both the theory itself, and its later interpretations and implementations.

Criticisms of Marxism have come from the political Left as well as the political Right. Democratic socialists and social democrats reject the idea that socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and a violent proletarian revolution. Anarchists reject the need for a transitory state phase. Some thinkers have rejected the fundamentals of Marxist theory, such as historical materialism and the labor theory of value, and gone on to criticize capitalism - and advocate socialism - using other arguments.

Some contemporary supporters of Marxism argue that many aspects of Marxist thought are viable, but that the corpus also fails to deal effectively with certain aspects of economic, political or social theory. They may therefore combine some Marxist concepts with the ideas of other theorists such as Max Weber: the Frankfurt school is one example.

Contents

[edit] General criticisms

Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer sees communism as one of the chief examples of a mass movement which offers The True Believer a glorious, yet imaginary, future to compensate for the frustrations of his present. Such movements need people to be willing to sacrifice all for that future, including themselves and others. To achieve this aim such movements need to devalue the past and present. This is not only a criticism of communist tenets specifically; Hoffer's other chief examples are Fascists, Nationalists, and the founding stages of religions.

Arthur Koestler describes Marxism as a closed system, like Catholicism or orthodox Freudianism. Such systems have three peculiarities: they claim to represent a universal truth which explains everything and can cure every ill; they can automatically process and reinterpret all potentially damaging data by methods of casuistry which are emotionally appealing and beyond common logic; and they can invalidate criticisms by deducing what the subjective motivation of the critic must be, and by presenting this motivation as a counterargument. An example of the third feature might be the disregarding of such concepts as the free market or self determination as instances of false consciousness engendered by bourgeois ideology.

Defenders of Marxist theory might respond to such criticisms by arguing that they are deliberate misrepresentations of Marxism, or ad hominem attacks. For example, it might be argued that Marxism does not, in fact, claim to "explain everything and cure every ill" - it merely recommends certain political and social policies, just as all other ideologies do. On the issue of the True Believer, defenders of Marxist theory may agree that some "True Believers" exist, but they would also argue that a Marxist is not a "True Believers" by necessity: and that, in any case, the behaviour of individual Marxists does not necessarily reflect the validity of Marxism itself.

[edit] Human nature completely determined by the environment

Certain, pre-Althusserian interpretations of Marxism have held that human nature is completely determined by the socio-economic base. The anti-communist historian Richard Pipes describes how this interpretation led to a belief in a coming new man without vices, in essence a new superior species: albeit one caused by socio-economic changes, not genetics. Trotsky thought that this new man would be able to control all unconscious processes, including those controlling bodily functions like digestion, and have the intellect of Aristotle. In order to reach this stage, Pipes argues, it was seen as necessary and right to completely destroy the existing institutions that had formed the current wretched humans; this would in turn make it possible to dispense with the state. Pipes argues that such thinking inevitably leads to a devaluation of the importance placed on the lives and rights of current human beings.[1] For Pipes, self-interest could not be destroyed by Communism and the new ruling class, the nomenklatura, quickly replaced the old aristocracy; periodic attempts to destroy it, such as the Cultural Revolution during Mao's regime, failed.[2]

Althusserian Marxism asserts, however, that reductive interpretations of the Marxist thesis that "the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life processes in general"[3], such as that held by Trotsky and criticised by Pipes, are misreadings. Engels seems to say as much himself:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More that this neither Marx nor I 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[4]

It should be noted that Althusserian Marxism has in turn been subjected to an epistemological critique by the British sociologists Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, who view it as Privileging certain discourses over others and using these "privileged discourses" as a base on which to build further arguments. For Hindess and Hirst, such privileging is unjustified.[5]

[edit] Human rights

Bryan Caplan has criticized Marx's rejection of human rights. Marx:

"None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice"
"Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not harm others... It is a question of the liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself."
"The right of property, is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard for other men and independently of society... It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty."
"[B]ourgeois 'freedom of conscience' is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part [socialism] endeavors rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion."
"political emancipation itself is not human emancipation."

Instead the utopian communist society will lead to "the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man... the complete return of man to himself as a social being..." Caplan argues that this rejection of human rights leads to tyranny and oppression of dissidents. [6] Some proponents of Marxism, however, regard this as simply a rejection of a concept of human rights derived from a Capitalist viewpoint.

[edit] The dictatorship of the proletariat

Marxist theory includes a transitory state phase known as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Later, the state will "wither away" and the dictatorship of the proletariat will be replaced by the communist society. Marx and Engels gave only a few hints regarding how these societies should be organised. Different schools of Marxism have quoted different statements as support for their vision. Many current Marxists state that Marx and Engels supported a form of direct democracy.

Engels: Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Marx: The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally workers, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.[7]

Vladimir Lenin, however, insisted that Marx and Engels would have supported the authoritarian state he created in order to break down the resistance of those considered "bourgeoisie". All of the often criticized Communist states (see Criticisms of communist regimes) followed Lenin's interpretation and claimed to be Marxist.

Marx: ...When the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary dictatorship ... to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie ... the workers invest the state with a revolutionary and transitional form ...
Engels: ...And the victorious party” (in a revolution) “must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?...
Engels: As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist .... [8]

[edit] Historical materialism

Historical materialism is normally considered the intellectual basis of Marxism. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human history in economic, technological, and more broadly, material factors, as well as the clashes of material interests among tribes, social classes and nations. However, it ignores other causes of historical and social change, like biology, genetics, philosophy, art, religion, or other causes that are not "materialist" according to Marxists. Max Weber criticized this in his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, arguing that the Protestant work ethic contributed to the development of Capitalism.

In turn, the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel can be considered the basis of Historical materialism. Max Stirner has argued that this philosophy leads to nihilism and not to historical materialism. Marx himself wrote a lengthy response in The German Ideology, although it was not published until well after Marx's death.

[edit] Marxian labor theory of value

Fundamental to Marxist theory is Marx's version of the labor theory of value. The theory, including Marx's version, is rejected for various reasons by the vast majority of economists today.[citation needed] Marginalism is seen as more correct.[citation needed] This is an important explanation for why Marxism has relatively little influence among economists today. Marxists have made various responses to the objections.[citation needed]

[edit] The concept of class and historical analysis

Some argue that class is not the most fundamental inequality in history and call attention to patriarchy or race. However, Marxists argue that these inequalities are linked to class and therefore will largely cease to exist after the formation of a classless society.

The Marxist stages of history, class analysis, and theory of social evolution have been criticized. The historian Robert Conquest argues that detailed analyses of many historical periods fails to find support for "class" or social evolution as used by Marxists. Marx himself admitted that his theory could not explain the internal development of the "Asiatic" social system, where most of the world's population lived for thousands of years.[9] Many observe that capitalism has changed much since Marx's time, and that class differences and relationships are much more complex — citing as one example the fact that much corporate stock in the United States is owned by workers through pension funds. However, income and especially accumulated wealth still remain concentrated in a small elite of the population.

[edit] Marx's predictions

Marx made numerous predictions. He thought that the workers would become poorer and poorer as the capitalists exploited them more and more; that differences between the members within each class would become smaller and smaller and the classes would thus become more homogeneous; that the skilled workers would be replaced by unskilled workers doing assembly line work; that relations between the working class and the capitalists would get worse and worse; that the capitalists would become fewer and fewer due to an increasing number of monopolies; and that the proletarian revolution would occur first in the most industrialized nations. From The Communist Manifesto (1848): "The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution... ...the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.[10]

Some of these are debatable, while others have been clearly proven wrong. This has been cited by critics as evidence that historical materialism is a flawed theory.[11] Communists reply with several arguments: The first is that there were a number of major events and trends over the past century and a half which Marx could not have predicted: imperialism, World War I, the rise of social democracy and Keynesian economics in the West (that introduced the concept of redistribution of wealth, thereby narrowing the gap between rich and poor), World War II and finally the Cold War. In response, critics maintain that if so many unpredictable events have happened in the past, then an equal number could happen in the future, and therefore Marxist theory is not a reliable method of making predictions.

Lenin noted that the predicted increasing class polarization and communist revolution had failed to occur in the developed world. He then attempted to explain this by stating that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and that developed countries had created a labor aristocracy content with capitalism by exploiting the developing world. Theodor Adorno gives another explanation, arguing that pop culture is able to pacify and manipulate the population, thereby preventing revolution no matter how bad economic conditions become.

After the Western nations voluntarily gave up their colonies, supporters of communism have attempted to explain this with still another stage, sometimes called Neocolonialism, arguing that the Third World is exploited also without formal empires. [12] Critics of this point out that living standards are rapidly increasing in many parts of the third world.

A more general Marxist response to this criticism is that the predicted events will happen in the future.

[edit] Pseudoscience

Karl Popper, a former Marxist, has argued that historical materialism is a pseudoscience because it is not falsifiable. Marxism, Popper believed, had been initially scientific, in that Marx had postulated a theory which was genuinely predictive. However, when these predictions were not in fact borne out, the theory was saved from falsification by the addition of ad hoc hypotheses which made it compatible with the facts. By this means a theory which was initially genuinely scientific degenerated into pseudo-scientific dogma. [13]

Marxists respond that some social sciences are not falsifiable, since it is often difficult or outright impossible to test them via experiments (in the way hard science can be tested).[citation needed] This is especially true when many people and a long time are involved. Popper agreed on this, but instead used it as an argument against central planning and all ideologies that claim to know the future.[14] Some Marxists argue that not even all theories of hard science are falsifiable, at least at any given moment, citing philosophers of science such as Lakatos and Feyerabend. Others have attempted to find ways in which historical materialism might hypothetically be falsified.[citation needed]

[edit] The End of History

Francis Fukuyama argues in his book The End of History and the Last Man that liberal democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives. The growing spread of liberal democracy around the world will lead to it becoming the final form of human government. He also argues that for a variety of reasons Marxism, another End of History philosophy, is likely to be incompatible with modern liberal democracy. He sees no sign of a major revolutionary movement developing in liberal democracies, only in other societies. Therefore, in the future, democracies are overwhelmingly likely to contain markets of some sort, and most are likely to be capitalist or social democratic.

Marxists respond that there are many problems in liberal democracies and that a major revolutionary movement will develop in the future.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Pipes, Richard (1990) The Russian Revolution 1899-1919. Collins Harvill. ISBN 0-679-40074-5. p. 135-138.
  2. ^ Pipes, Richard (2001) Communism Weidenfled and Nicoloson. ISBN 0-297-64688-5. p. 150-151
  3. ^ Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. In the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. page 182.
  4. ^ Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Selected Correspondence. p 498
  5. ^ For a summary of Hindess and Hirst's arguments, see Ted Benton's book Althusser: The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism
  6. ^ Museum of Communism FAQ. Museum of Communism. Retrieved on October 7, 2005.
  7. ^ Democracy. The Encyclopedia of Marxism. Retrieved on October 2, 2005. 1891 Introduction by Frederick Engels: On the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune: Postscript. The Civil War in France. Retrieved on June 29, 2006.
  8. ^ Lenin, Vladimir (1918). "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky".
  9. ^ Conquest, Robert (2000) Reflections on a Ravaged Century. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-04818-7 p. 47-51.
  10. ^ Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels (1848). "The Communist Manifesto".Contradictions of Capitalism. Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Retrieved on October 26, 2005.
  11. ^ Popper, Karl R. (1971). Open Society & Its Enemies. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01972-X. Chapter. 15, section iii, and notes 13-14.
  12. ^ Neocolonialism. The Encyclopedia of Marxism. Retrieved on October 3, 2005.
  13. ^ Karl Popper. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved on October 24, 2005.
  14. ^ Karl Popper. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved on October 24, 2005.

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