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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]
"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes
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Since you asked for what Marxist philosophers think on the subject, I have a few samples for you. This is a very quick introduction to a few Marxist perspectives on determinism. I’ll talk about a few Marxists who’ve touched on the subject and their thoughts.
Let’s start with Charles Gagnon (Quebecois Marxist-Leninist with the FLQ). Charles Gagnon says that “The question of the extent to which men are masters of their existence, the extent to which they can make real choices as individuals or social communities. . . is much the same problem as the question of the relationship between the objective and subjective factors in the evolution of societies. The subjective factors are the expression of society’s freedom to change its situation; the objective factors are the things that society cannot directly change, the things it must accept as factors independent of its will.”
“On all these questions, be it the question of individual liberty or the role of subjective factors in the evolution of societies, philosophers have always wavered between two poles: pure determinism on the one hand, and absolute free will on the other.”
For Gagnon, Marxism is the first rigorously scientific analysis of the social systems of mankind. However, the question remains if society’s conditions are determined. If so, asserts Gagnon, then there is no point in agitating for revolution: “for in the final analysis it would be the determinism of the productive forces that counts.”
Instead, let us look at the myriad ways in which mankind has made choices in the furthering of society. Gagnon points to the mastering of the laws of nature, the understanding of the universe, and the scientific leaps mankind has made as a result. “In other words, men’s freedom to transform nature depends on how well they understand it.”
“[Marx and Engels] concluded that human life in society was historically determined by the level of development of productive forces. . . This means that the first law of human society is that a society is determined by the need to ensure its own subsistence. Everything it does is ultimately oriented towards satisfying this “fundamental determinism”.”
This leads Gagnon then, to the question: “Should we not just view socialism as the necessary and inevitable result of the development of the productive forces?”
“Marx said that there is a “necessary correspondance” between the relations of production. . . and the level of development of the productive forces. From this, it is sometimes rather easy to slip into saying something else: that a given level of development of productive forces will necessarily coincide with an equally advanced set of relations of production.”
Gagnon asserts that this is not true. That capitalism developed in Europe because of its level of production is not to say that it was inevitable that capitalism should develop in Europe because of its level of production.
“In other words, historical materialism enables us to understand to a certain extent – for we still have much to learn about this – some stages in the evolution of human societies; but it does not tell us that these stages were inevitable. Nor does it enable us to foretell the future.”
Thus, Gagnon concludes: “The development of societies does not follow a predestined, predetermined course. Societies can act on and influence their development. But – and this is the fundamental lesson of Marxism – societies cannot act in ways that contradict the laws currently governing the evolution of societies.” (1/4)
Now let’s look at Max Beer (an Austrian Marxist).
In, On the Problem of Free Will, Beer reminds us “there exists no concurrence of opinion as to the essence of will” and that there may never be concrete answers to such questions. Nevertheless, it is an essential part of human curiosity to continue such questioning.
Beer starts us off with a definition of the problem at hand. “The will may be defined as the capacity of human beings to arrive, after some deliberation, at a decision to do or not to do, to allow or to resist something. It is an emphatic message, a resolution, sent to our motor nerves and muscles to perform or to resist a certain action, to allow or to suppress a certain emotion or thought. It is, however, uncertain whether the will is an independent mental capacity like memory, imagination or reasoning, or merely the result of other mental factors.”
Beer also presents us with the essence of the argument between determinism (those who say the will is not sovereign) and the indeterminists (those who say the will is sovereign).
“The Determinists argue: In the whole range of nature we see that every event, every phenomenon must have a cause. Nothing happens without being caused by something. All phenomena are closely linked in an endless and irrefragable chain of causation. The universe is a unity. Man as a natural being can therefore not act without a cause, and seeing that a cause is but an effect of another cause, and thus of an infinite chain of causation, man’s will is manifestly determined, and therefore not free.”
“To that the Indeterminists reply: We admit that in nature nothing happens without a cause. But the laws of nature do not apply to the soul. The soul is a part of that sovereign power which rules nature. Were the will not free, the sense of responsibility, the moral sense that dwells within us, could have no existence. Why should man feel responsible for deeds which he could not prevent? Finally, it is a matter of everyday experience that we change our decisions and that we feel we can decide either way. Our moral and psychological experience proves thus the freedom of will.”
Citing Hobbes, Hume and Huxley, Beer shows us that despite the existence of a predeterministic Creator, Christianity itself is an indeterministic philosophy, whereby mankind is responsible for all the fruits of its actions, and natural science is deterministic, whereby all actions are the results of man’s participation within the greater systems of the universe which determine the potential choices that may be presented as “free will.”
Beer then asserts: “Marxism as a system of social science and social practice is determinist. There is no other liberty for it than that which the knowledge of necessity yields.”
If man’s actions are determined, then, is man absolved of responsibilities?
“There can be no other reply to this than that which Marx has given: Not abstract commandments, not abstract reasoning, fill our mental capacities with concrete social ideas and ideals, but material conditions and class positions of Society. The contradiction in which the determinists are involved is at once removed when we remember that a society, based on private property, is a class society with class notions, class ideals, class conflicts which must necessarily manifest themselves regardless of religion and natural science.”
However, Beer then reminds us that the propagation of the theory of determinism has no practical effect. It, in fact, favours the bourgeoisie, who will use determinism as a means of absolving themselves of their responsibilities, who, as the ones in power, will interpret it to their interests and carry out its conclusions in their favour.
The second question Beer poses: if man’s choices are determined, why convert people to the party?
Beer provides us with an example to answer this question. I will paraphrase. Say you’re invited to a lecture. You enjoy the topic, you enjoy the speaker, you’re interested in going. That is a set of motivations to attend.
However at home you are warm, comfortable, cozy. That is a set of motivations to stay. (Dialectics anyone?) The two sets of motivations war within you, and the choice is made.
For every action you take, there are motivations determining your course of action, a series of inputs, often resolved so quickly and so intricately that it gives the illusion of free will, according to Beer.
So why convert? Because as Marxists we know that the proletarian are predisposed to socialism, and we must act on them as inputs in the system of motivations to aid them in arriving at such conclusions. (2/4)
Now let’s look at Peter Stillman, a philosopher at Vassar who’s written extensively on Marx and Hegel.
In Marx Myths and Legends, Stillman contributed an essay entitled The Myth of Marx’s Economic Determinism, in which he argues that Marx’s writing was not, after all, based in economic determinism, and that such claims are founded on “weak” interpretations.
In Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx says, to paraphrase, that men enter into relations independent of their will, and moreover that it is “not the consciousness of men that determine their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” By asserting that man’s consciousness is a reflection and consequence of his social conditions, there is a pretty strong argument to be made that Marx was espousing economic determinism (in fact, this passage is one of the main arguments that economic determinism was Marx’s stance, and it’s pretty convincing).
Stillman explains four types of determinism that can be argued from this passage.
Marx’s further assertions in Capital that capitalist production has “natural laws” and in the Manifesto that the victory of the proletariat is “inevitable” are further indicators of a deterministic outlook within Marx’s writings.
Marx also states: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.”
This idea that we bear the weight of the past is an essential and foundational part of historical materialism. However, argues Stillman, this is merely a state of society in which the past contextualises and limits the choices before us, not an argument that the society constructed by our past is causally determinative to the point of robbing us of choice altogether; that is to say, we don’t merely react to the externalities of history, we make history.
Stillman also argues that when Marx rejects the Hegellian notion that “life is determined by consciousness” by asserting that “consciousness is determined by life” he is merely rejecting the idea of consciousness independent of life; that is, he is rejecting the otherworldly structure of consciousness that may superceded and thus order life. This is no surprise to any Marxist, of course: Marx consistently writes of the importance of looking to the material to order the material. Consciousness devoid of sensuousness is discounted by Marx, but that is not to the same as a claim that consciousness is directly determined and ordered by sensuousness.
“Circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances” is a phrase by Marx which would show, according to Stillman, that to Marx there is a reciprocal ordering of consciousness and sensuousness, which is a far cry from a solid claim of determinism.
While these are all refutations of economic determinism as a factor in Marx’s works, Stillman notes that these require meeting economic determinists on their level. To have arrived at these arguments they had to have picked a few select quotes from Marx devoid of context to arrive at their arguments. More importantly, though, according to Stillman, is to divorce yourself from applying your questions to Marx, and to look at what questions Marx himself sought to answer.
“Marx does not focus on – indeed, he does not even address – the issue of whether human beings have free will.”
Marx may have touched on the ways in which history and economic conditions have limited mankind’s relations and choices in society, and he may have employed rhetorical devices to rally people to the party (“the inevitability” of proletarian victory for instance), but Marx himself did not believe that philosophy was worthwhile as an independent branch of knowledge. For Marx, philosophy was merely one aspect of the broader questions of society, and as such he never sought to pontificate on or question the ungrounded philosophical inquiries that occupy so much of Western academia. Marx never sought to argue determinism nor indeterminism.
“Marx’s dialectic does not involve any kind of “thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis” triad: he nowhere uses that language. Nor does he use the language of cause-and-effect. Rather, what Marx’s dialectic involves is a careful analysis of the categories of bourgeois and human society.”
Marx, argues Stillman, never seeks to argue for causality or inevitability. Dialectic analysis is fluid, evolving over time. To Marx, humans are “active creators and shapers of their natural and social worlds who find their scope for free action drastically constrained by systems of private property.”
“When Marx presents capitalism as a totality using dialectics, his “science” is an interpretive science whose elements are systematically connected – “science” in the sense of Hegel’s Wissenschaft, not modern natural science.”
Marx’s writings are primarily concerned with the plethora of constraints (largely imposed by capitalism) which limit the free action of humanity and society. His revolutionary writing seeks to abolish those constraints, and to imagine a future in which humans are free to act of their own will. (3/4)
This one I think is a pretty fun essay, it’s Peter Jones refuting Noam Chomsky’s work in biological determinism.
Biological Determinism and Epistemology in Linguistics: Some Considerations on the “Chomskyan Revolution” is an essay in which Jones argues that Chomsky’s views are not only incompatible with Marxism but “to any discipline in which the social and historical are essential and irreducible categories in the understanding and explanation of human behaviour, institutions, and thought.”
Jones asserts that biological determinism in general (not just Chomsky’s views) is incoherent, self-contradictory, and an inadequate foundation for human sciences.
This paper is not about Chomsky’s political contributions (however you may feel about that), but rather about linguistics (for those who are unfamiliar with autonomous syntax, Chomsky wrote extensively about the innate biological function of language in humanity).
Chomsky argues that the mind must be examined as any other biological structure. For Chomsky, there is extant in the human brain specific capabilities of understanding; fields that are “accessible” by the mind.
“Chomsky believes that the speed and precision with which children pick up new words “leaves no real alternative to the conclusion that the child somehow has the concepts available before experience with language and is basically learning labels for concepts that are already part of his or her conceptual apparatus””
This extends to all forms of understanding, all sciences. That everything a human may think, every choice a human may make, every idea a human may have or execute are all predetermined through genetic material. This extends even to social interactions and moral and ethical considerations; that there is a set limit of social interactions available to be accessed by the human brain, which, in this understanding of consciousness, exists merely as a series of biological functions predetermined by its genetic makeup.
Chomsky asserts: “A consistent materialist would consider it as self-evident that the mind has very important innate structures, physically realized in some manner” and thus that all aspects of a human’s development are governed through biological determinism.
A Marxist view is at direct odds with Chomsky’s assertion of biological determinism: to the Marxist view, as we’ve seen above, human’s are products of social and historical conditions, their relations and interactions influenced (if not directly caused) by the economic and the political. Chomsky refutes this, claiming instead that it is all a function of the biological. (Biological determinism is the predominant form of determinism in modern scientific thought, and is the form of determinism most argued even in Marxist circles, despite its contraposition with economic determinism).
By Chomsky’s arguments, no being that is not innately connected to the human syntax (for instance an alien, or some other species that does not share the genetic disposition for human syntax) would thus never be able to learn human language.
Chomsky’s argument, says Jones, relies heavily on Hume’s rejection of empiricism. Experience is not the source of human knowledge to a biological determinist. rather, human knowledge is determined by a “mental organ,” and any deficits in knowledge are explained by an absence or lack in the available data (think of a child learning language; they have access to the same mental organ as an adult, but their syntax is not developed, as they have not been exposed to enough data–conversations with others).
Chomskyan biological determinism, thus, is an understanding that knowledge itself is innate. The brain’s very genetics, it’s physical makeup, determines what is and is not knowable.
The main conundrum in Chomskyan theory, according to Jones, is that truth then, can only be arrived at through the coincidental intersection between knowledge and reality.
Jones argues that biological determinism is vulgar materialism (influenced heavily by Cartesian mechanical philosophy). “Its materialism lies in the acceptance of the existence of a mind-independent material reality, its vulgarity in the simple reduction of the mental to the material (the biological).” (4/4)
This is just a small sampling of Marxist positions on determinism, be it economic determinism or biological determinism. This as an oft-argued point, and one that has no consensus. However, as was made clear above, Marx himself was more concerned with the destruction of the constraints that capitalism places on mankind’s ability to make choices with their lives and the shaping of history.