Some Points on Methodology and Theory Relating to Marxism

The Applicability of Historical Materialism

Regarding Marxist theory, it is quite clear to Marxists of all stripes that one of the two absolute fundaments of the Marxist conception of the world is the philosophy of history known as historical materialism.¹ The nature of this theory I will not now explain, since I have done so in the article I posted on this blog last month, which should be clear enough for anyone to grasp the basics tenets of this philosophy and the meaning of its various terms (or if not, then I can do no better). But one question regarding the theory has been left unanswered: what is the coverage of the theory? Or, in other words, what exactly can it explain, and what can it not explain? This is an important question. Discussing the subject with my father, a cultural historian of some reknown, I became aware of a discrepancy in what the theory is presumed to explain and what it in fact gives answers to. I felt that it had not often enough been stressed exactly what kind of matters the theory is meant to cover; which in turn can prevent the application, or abuse, of the philosophy to subjects it is not suited to cover, which serve only to discredit its standing among serious historians.

Historical materialism is a philosophy of history, that is, it gives answers to questions relating the nature of history and the way it develops. History itself, here, is meant to be the history of man, and in particular the history of civilization, though that term should be used as broadly as possible. The crucial point here is that it is not history itself. The difference lies in that the philosophy of history can ultimately answer questions whose main subject is why things happened as they did, whereas history ponders the matters whose main subject is what happened in the first place. Certainly neither can do without the other: applying a philosophy of history to a subject of which no serious knowledge exists is groping in the dark, and doing historical research without a philosophy of history leads to incoherent jumbles of facts. But they are not the same, and do not fully overlap.

Why does this observation matter? Take the issue of art, the matter my father raised in the discussion I mentioned above. There are various questions one can raise, as someone thinking in historical terms, with regard to art. But necessarily only a section of those can be actually answered by historical materialism. Because that theory engages in the question of how historical developments came to be as they were, it is very much suited to answering a question like "how, historically, did the social structure develop in such a way as to allow painters like Jacques-Louis David to become prominent in the cultural life of the time"? It could, presumably, also answer with some authority a question phrased similar to "why was neoclassicist painting popular in the late 18th/early 19th century, and not in the Middle Ages?". But take the question of "what explains the difference in aesthetic or 'technical' approach between J.L. David, J.A.D. Ingres and C.W. Eckersberg?" or even worse, "what is the most pleasing aspect of the painting The Lictors bringing to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons"?
The point here is that the latter questions belong rather in the field of what particular aspects are of some political, legal or cultural 'fragment of history'², whereas historical materialism by definition deals with the development of such fragments, and even then only in the form of explaining those developments in terms of their structural cause. Such explanations are accepted by many, Marxist and non-Marxist, in the field of social, economic and political history to be crucial to understanding, but that by no means should be conceived as to be the only questions that can be asked in history. The questions historical materialism and its competing theories deal with are, as I started out by saying above, essentially philosophical questions, aimed at structure and abstraction, and they leave all matters of specific content largely open, and are unqualified to deal with aesthetic, moral or legal comparisons when those are immanent to the 'fragment of history' involved. It follows, then, that historical materialism is not disproven by its inability to answer such questions, but that followers of historical materialism should find in that theory no reason to reject the importance or relevance of such questions either. Matters of art, law and ethics can be quite important to discuss, more so perhaps to many than the philosophical matters of structure and form, but the Marxists should find in this neither an attack on veracity of Marxism nor should they deride those as mere pretenses for ideological posturing (as some modern Western Marxists have tended to do), but they should simply consider that historical materialism is neither meant nor fit to answer such issues.


The Problems of Methodological Individualism

Another charge laid often at the feet of Marxism has been that of 'collectivism'. What this presumably means is that Marxism takes collectives, such as a 'class' or 'society', to be the legitimate subject of analysis, as opposed to individual humans. The latter view is then considered methodological individualism, often considered a cornerstone of analytical philosophy³, and equally a cornerstone of orthodox economic theory, in particularly the Austrian school, in this context philosophically represented by Ludwig von Mises⁴. This methodological individualism states that "social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors".⁵ This foundation has often been considered so fundamental to rigorous thought, in particular appealing to materialists who tend like rejecting emergent properties and metaphysical constructs already, that it has shown up even in Marxism: a group of Western Marxist thinkers have attempted to create a theory called 'analytical Marxism', seeking to found Marxist thought on this basis.

Because of this attempt, it becomes relevant for Marxism to emphasize the necessity of the social (or collectivist if you will) methodology in historical and economic science.⁶ It boils down to the following problems. To start with, there's a mistaking of subjects. Marxism need not be opposed (in fact probably shouldn't be) to speaking of human actions in terms of intentionality, when we are talking about a specific 'fragment of history'. But the Marxist analysis as such, as we have seen above, is applicable only to the developments of history, and to those only an explanation in terms of what Marcus Roberts calls 'social types' can be given, i.e. 'revolution', 'religion', 'science' etc. One can indeed try to describe those by referring to what an individual might choose or want, leading in interaction with other such individuals to the occurence and meaning of the above phrases. But that leads to the following two critical points.

First, that to describe any such social type by referring to the role of an individual with regard to that type necessarily must make use of an abstract concept of the historically determined individual, that is an idealized individual as he would be positioned towards or within the social type at his point in history; this renders the individualist methodology no less abstract than the collectivist, thereby negating the advances claimed in precision and realism, particularly since this makes it entirely dependent on any individualist's concept of the individual. This, in turn, is a matter of philosophy, leading us back to Marxism.

The second critical point appears when one tries to avoid the trap of the first. Constituting the individual as being not historically determined (in his position and part of, if not necessarily all of, his intentionality) in the final analysis, but instead being independent rational agents whose intentionality does not derive from any other cause and is not influenced by any other cause⁷ leads to the insurmountable problem of aggregates. Since we can only describe the individualists' individual and his intentionality in terms of his choosing a particular way to achieve optimal utility (i.e., choosing means to an end), we must somehow place those utilist decisions in a quantitative priority order to discern exactly which end he is choosing at any moment. These can only be described in ordinal relations, not cardinal relations, since we do not know any exact 'value' attached to a particular end in a particular choice, but only its immanent relations. Comes the problem: it is impossible to make aggregates of individual ordinal relations to form a larger, 'societal' utility. Why does this matter? Because the axiom is that man can only be understood by virtue of his rationality, and rationality is described as consisting of fitting means to an end in a logical manner.⁸ Therefore, if we cannot reason from man's individual rationality to the 'point' or 'meaning' of social types (always an aggregate of multiple individuals after all), we cannot understand such structures as products of rationality, which means we cannot understand them at all.

As a way of explaining social types, then, the individualist methodology is either a mistaking of subjects, or a circle reasoning, or an explanatory dead end. I submit it should be rejected, and replaced by historical materialism as understood in the way I described in my prior article on the subject.



¹ The other being the discovery of the meaning of surplus value.
² What I mean here by this phrase is a definite historical occurrence of some limited size, understood in terms of its content, not of its form. So for example a particular king, a particular period in art history, a particular civil code, a particular work of philosophy.
³ Taking this on the authority of the likes of Gilbert Ryle and Max Weber.
⁴ I hope to refute the general theory of Von Mises, as defended in his major work Human Action, in detail in a later article. Suffice for the moment that the criticism of methodological individualism I describe here applies to his so-called "praxeology" as much as to any other theory.
⁵ Joseph Heath, Methodological Individualism, publ. in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005).
⁶ A good criticism of the application of the individualist methodology to Marxism can be found in Marcus Roberts' work. I take some of my points from his book: Marcus Roberts, Analytical Marxism: A Critique (London 1996).
⁷ Or we acknowledge that he may well be, but ignore this because we (apparently) do not know exactly how, like Von Mises.
⁸ Variations on this statement appear in the works of Von Mises, Von Hayek, Popper, etc.
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 03:57