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.

1. That a human’s will and actions are caused by their circumstances.
2. That social interactions are caused by economics.
3. That history itself is predetermined.
4. That if political economy is a science (and science is about understanding and thus predicting outcomes) then political economy, and thus society, can be predicted, ie determined.

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)