James and Marxism
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Introduction: A Marxist in America
“It is obvious that these are large conceptions. But the death of a world civilisation is not a small thing.”
This essay is intended to serve as an examination of CLR James’s thinking on Marxism in the mid-late 1940s. James was constantly revising and tinkering with his understanding of Marxist thought, but the work we will focus on here, his masterful "Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity" of 1947, represents the culmination of much of his work with the Johnson Forest Tendency and gives us a window into several critical questions that appear throughout his writings. The following is intended to function as a piece of public pedagogy—to lay out James’s approach to these critical questions and to serve as an introduction to those who wish to explore James’s Marxism in more detail.
1940’s was a tough time to be a Marxist in America. Stalin had signed a pact with Nazi Germany, and horror stories had been leaking out from Russia for over a decade about the utter repressiveness of his government. In addition, the fact that the celebrated February 1917 revolution in Russia had led to brutal totalitarianism rather than the liberation of the people cast a huge amount of doubt on the scientific nature of Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism. With Marxism increasingly under attack in America as merely a trendy religion, James fought to defend its logic from pragmatists like John Dewey who attempted to supplant it with a more flexible conception of truth and human history. In this essay, James takes us back to Hegel to defend the science of Marxism, delineate its differences from the “bourgeois” pragmatism, and, through a brilliant re-envisioning of recent Russian history, demonstrate why the “real history of humanity” is still “being prepared by the revolutionary masses.”
(Ed. Note: Throughout this essay, all quotes unless otherwise attributed are from the 1947 "Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity")
William James, Meet C.L.R. James
“Any Deweyite pragmatist who is rubbing his hands with joy at this ‘reasonable’ Marxism is in for rude disillusionment.”
Marxism at its root relies on a specific theory of knowledge. With the scientism of this theory under attack by American pragmatists, CLR James asks us to return to the origins of Marx’s thinking on this issue, the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).
At the center of Hegel’s thinking is the idea of the dialectic—-the idea that most phenomena in our existence are actually the result of a dynamic balance between two polls. Life consists of struggle between forces on either side of this dialectic which over the course of history can shift towards one poll or towards the other. In Hegel’s words, “Contradiction is the root of all movement and life, and it is only in so far as it contains a contradiction that anything moves and has impulse and activity.” (Hegel, Science of Logic, Vol 2) As James explains, Hegel conceived of such an analysis of phenomena as a “strictly scientific method” which he used to construct a set of laws that formed the foundations for Marxism. Yet the proof of these laws ultimately for Hegel and Marx, as James points out, was their “correspondence with reality.” James cites as an example a letter by Marx where he ridicules the notion of having to equivocally “prove” the labor theory of value like it is some geometrical theorem. But as James elucidates, “If the labour theory of value proved to be the means whereby the real relations of bourgeois society could be demonstrated in their movement, where they came from, what they were, and where they were going, that was the proof of the theory.” In other words, if this or any other theory was true, it would prove itself as such through its its capacity to interpret history, its ability to predict future phenomena.
Now, here is where James runs into trouble, for, if any mainstream American scholars were listening to him at this point, they would immediately interject that such an argument for scientific truth is merely the American theory of pragmatism. Pragmatism, an American philosophical tradition, goes back to the late 19th century, but it exercised a tremendous influence on American thought up through the first half of the 20th century (and still does today, though in slightly transformed ways). Simply put, as its most famous spokesperson William James wrote in his 1907 Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, “ideas…become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.” Such a school of thought was developed later on in the Progressive Era most famously by John Dewey, whose theory of instrumentalism elaborated upon how ideas could be tested and developed through public policy experiments aimed at improving the quality of societal life. Thus, when people like CLR James explained that a central tenet of Marxism, Hegel’s “law of contradiction” was merely a “hypothesis,” a “grouping of empirical facts,” many American pragmatists were eager to jump on and say that Marxism was merely an outdated form of their philosophy.
But here James (and we are referring only to CLR, not William, from this point forward) fights back to reassert Marxism’s independence from American pragmatism. The hypotheses of Hegel and Marx, James argues, aren’t just any old hypotheses. They aren’t just random speculations thought up so they could justify a revolution to take down the capitalist system. There aren’t, as James puts it, simply “empirically arrived at, tentatively used, discarded if not satisfactory, experimental or instrumentalist.” They are systemic deductions that both thinkers derived from detailed analysis of how humanity has developed over time.
Specifically, Marx’s thinking finds its roots in Hegel’s analysis of human beings as historical agents in a perpetual process of self-development or self-becoming. From Hegel’s viewpoint, ever since the beginnings of Christianity, humanity has pursued the dual objectives of happiness and freedom, what he refers to as “abstract universals.” As humankind fulfills its ontological vocation to become more human, it strives to make the concrete aspect of such abstractions in reality into universal phenomena.
As a result, humanity through its self-development is actually transforming the nature of society through its evolution. Thus, truth in this Hegelian sense is impermanent like pragmatism. Nevertheless, this notion of knowledge differs greatly from the American model in that it is tied to a specific anchor in history—-the constantly-developing human spirit. It is not merely a relative or tentative relationship with our existence, a set of inferences that have yet to be disproved. Nor can there simultaneously exist multiple truths such as with pragmatic theory. As James writes, “Man is not only what he does but what he thinks and what he aims at. But this can only be judged by the concrete, what actually takes place. The truth is always concrete. But it is the concrete viewed in the light of the whole.” The relationship between the concrete partiality and the abstract whole is always shifting, so truth is as well. Nevertheless, this is hardly in an arbitrary manner! It is fixed to the specific development of humanity in its desire to be more human. As humans inch closer to their dreams, or develop broader conceptions of these dreams, truth shifts proportionately, yet it is never constructed to the extent Dewey would have us believe.
Let us briefly examine Hegel’s conception of history to understand how this theory of knowledge works itself out. As is said earlier, Hegel believed freedom was “implicit in Christianity” in its theory of “commonality of goods and absolute equality.” God for Hegel was an image of the completely-developed human, the infinity into which humanity would seek to perpetually develop. Yet over time, tensions emerged in pursuit of the abstract universal. Only certain groups of individuals, which Hegel identifies as the first socioeconomic classes, were at first able to possess aspects of the concrete universality. State governments emerged to “mediate” the varying levels with which individuals possessed these concrete universals, and revolutions emerged from time to time during “crises of civilization” when existing society could no longer “contain” the developing human and it “burst” at its seams. As examples, James cites the Renaissance in which a liberal, secular humanism began to uproot the Christian church and the French Revolution in which democratic alternatives challenged equally dominant authority, this time in the realm of politics and government.
Re-Envisioning Russian History
“Only such violence could have repressed such democracy.”
But advancing forth from the French Revolution to the Russian one, James runs into trouble because of the aforementioned damage Stalin’s government had done to the name of socialism. However, James is able to salvage socialism through a brilliant tripartite analysis of the Russian revolution and the barbaric totalitarianism that followed it.
Firstly, James calls upon us not to forget the triumphs of the Russian Revolution. As James points out, the early 1920s included extremely innovative reforms concerning education, religious rights, women’s rights, worker’s rights. Combined, such reforms, in James’s view, “constituted the greatest potential democracy and enlightenment that the world had ever seen.”
Secondly, the atrocities that followed the Russian Revolution are the ultimate proof of the rebellion’s heroicism. Citing the theory of dialectical materialism, James argues that only the greatest democratic spirit in the history of humanity could have ushered in the height of violence which epitomized Stalin’s regime. It is the great successes of the revolution that “called forth the violence, the atrocities, the state organised as Murder Incorporated. Only such violence could have repressed such democracy.” Thus, Stalinism is not revolutionary socialism, but a powerful “counter-revolution” that prevented it from reaching its final stage.
As a result, and this is James’s third main argument on this matter, Stalinism is not the tragic endpoint of socialist development but instead the final form of oppressive capitalism. James points out that, under Stalin, the Russian state became enmeshed in a cumbersome bureaucracy that prevented the will of the people from ever manifesting itself. In James’s words, the “purpose of the state becomes a private purpose, a hunt for higher posts, for careers.” The forces of capital as a result were able to take back control over the state, and therefore the USSR was not socialism at all but “the completest expression of the class state.” As James powerfully puts it, Stalinism is “not the distorted beginning of something new but the culmination, the final form of the old.”
Conclusion: Re-Imagining a Socialist Future
“The proletariat, said Marx, is revolutionary or it is nothing. The proletariat, he said, will conquer or society will destroy itself.”
Because of this perceptive analysis of Stalinism, James could maintain that the dream of socialism had not run into a tragic end but instead was still to come. Yet, it is worth noting for our conclusion that James gets himself in between a rock and a hard place by defending attacks from the pragmatists while still articulating a socialist future. The trick for James was defending the science of Marx’s dialectical materialism against the pragmatists, while at the same time not making it appear like a religion because of its belief in a telos, a final destiny—-the socialist revolution. For the pragmatists, James argues, “it is not scientific to believe in inevitability. Such a belief implies that dialectic is a religion or mysticism. For them the correct scientific attitude is to reserve judgement.”
Yet James fights this final intellectual battle with utter finesse as well. As James points out, there are really only two possible futures if one accepts the limitations of capitalisms, the ontological vocation of humanity to become more human, and the fact that barbaric totalitarianism is the only force that can stop socialism. Either we must accept that we will all have an ugly totalitarian future, or we must hold on merely to “the hope, the faith, the belief that history will offer some way out of the impasse. “ But this, as James elucidates, would amount to a “denial of a philosophy of history, that is to say, the denial of a method of thought, for which the only name is irrationalism or mysticism.”
Thus, James in the end is basically mounting a direct attack on the idealistic pragmatism of individuals like John Dewey who attacked the inevitability of the socialist utopia from a scientific perspective while maintaining hopeful faith in the realization of a similar end. While Dewey thought it irrational for Marx to argue that humankind has a destiny, James fired back that Dewey was the one being irrational in having hope in such a destiny without the science to back it up!
As a result, James places all faith in the proletariat for leading the socialist revolution. “There is no by-pass. There is no third alternative,” he writes. “Either the revolution succeeds in encompassing the whole of the world or the whole of the world collapses in counter-revolution and barbarism.” It is interesting that, while using Hegel to defend the attacks of the pragmatists, James in some ways goes farther than Hegel by ultimately articulating a humble role for the intellectual. Hegel believed that the height of knowledge was possessed by a few elites individuals who carried the spirit of each age. But for James, it was the masses who possessed all the reason, all the power. The intellectual could help make “partial demands” which could help “to better the position of the toilers and mobilize them for the final struggle,” but ultimately all hope for the future rests not on the intellectual elite but among the common masses. With the socialist future yet to arrive, we can only wait and see whether James's theory will "correspond with reality" and prove its truth once and for all.
Sources
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. "Science of Logic", 1830.
James, C.L.R. "Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity", 1947.
James, William. "Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking", 1907.