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MARX AND THE MARXISTS
THE AMBIGUOUS LEGACY
BY
SIDNEY HOOK
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER
THE AUTHOR
SIDNEY HOOK, Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at New York University, brings to this Anvil Book a well-deserved reputation for incisive analysis of philosophical issues. Among other intellectual interests, he is a profound student of socialism and Marxism, about which he has published many original and influential works. His books include From Hegel to Marx; Reason, Social Myths and Democracy; The Metaphysics of Pragmatism; The Hero in History; John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait; Education for Modern Man; Heresy, YesConspiracy, No; Common Sense and the Fifth Amendment ; and other noteworthy volumes.
A graduate of the City College of New York, Dr. Hook received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. For over thirty years he has taught philosophy in New York schools. He has done research abroad on fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ford Foundations. He is a member of the American Philosophical Association, the John Dewey Society, the International Committee for Academic Freedom, the League for Industrial Democracy, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
DEDICATION
To the memory of
BENJAMIN ZINKIN
whose predictions came true
PREFACE
This volume of exposition, comment, and readings is offered as an introduction to the study of the theory and practice of Marxism. Obviously it cannot be comprehensive in scope or exhaustive in its analysis. Some currents of thought, for example, syndicalism and guild socialism, which have had only peripheral relations with the main streams of Marxist tradition, have not been considered because of the short compass of the work. I have sought only to lay before the reader the chief issues which have divided Marxists from non-Marxists and Marxists from each other.
The development of Marxism as a movement has resulted in some peculiar paradoxes which make it difficult to retain traditional conceptual formulations. Where Marxism as a movement has triumphed, as in the Soviet Union, its socialist ideals have failed or have been betrayed; where it has failed as a movement, as in the West, its ideals have made considerable headway. It seems as if history itself has been guilty of lse-Marxism.
Events of the last twenty-five years or so have shown how important a knowledge of the ideas and movements discussed in this book is to an intelligent appreciation of political affairs. It is safe to say that had Roosevelt and Churchill and their advisors been better informed of them they would have been better prepared for the Soviet strategy of the cold war. The wages of ignorance may very well be the loss of freedom.
The most a book of this kind can do is to arouse the interest of the reader to a point where he is curious to find out more about the subject it treats. Whether it is successful in this respect each reader, of course, will judge for himself.
New York,
April, 1955
SIDNEY HOOK
Part IMARX AND THE MARXISTS
1THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF KARL MARX
1. On Understanding Marx. Karl Marx is one of the most influential figures in human history. Judged by the number of those who have regarded themselves his followers, and of the organizations set up by them, he has inspired the greatest mass movement of all times. This movement transcends national, racial, and continental boundaries. Only in Anglo-Saxon communities has he had a comparatively small following, to some extent because of the use made of his ideas elsewhere. The result is that in England and particularly the United States, he is often condemned without even being read. On the other hand, in some regions of the rest of the world, a new religion has arisen which proclaims that History is God and Karl Marx its chief prophet.
The increasing complexity and interrelations of modern civilization make it practically certain that the fashion in which Marxs ideas are interpreted will have a very great bearing upon the future of the Anglo-Saxon world, especially the United States. That is one sufficient reason why every reflective person should have some familiarity with his doctrines, their evolution, and their current impact upon the stormy political life of our era.
In many situations it is not so much the actual past which determines the present as what people imagine the past to have been. Similarly with the ideas propounded by a great thinker of the past. Save as a rule in the natural sciences, it is not what a man actually has said or meant so much as what he is interpreted to have said or meant which influences the present. Of few figures is this truer than of Marx. These varying interpretations are affected by current needs and interests, and explain why from the fact that a man calls himself a Marxist one can hardly be more confident about his actual beliefs than about the actual beliefs of one who calls himself a Christian. Nonetheless, although it is difficult it is not impossible to determine with some fidelity what Marx really taught and believed. Any hypothesis about the actual meaning of his doctrines is an hypothesis about a matter of historical fact and must be tested by the same fundamental canons of evidence as we bring to bear upon other historical questions.
In Marxs case this is rendered difficult by the circumstances of his life and the occasion of his writing. He was not an academician interested in ideas for their own sake but a revolutionary activist who developed his ideas in an effort to influence the course of events. He was a fierce controversialist and polemicized against individuals who held contrary positions, so that sometimes he stresses one point and, at other times, when this point seems overshadowed by events or eclipsed in argument, he emphasizes its opposite. Nowhere is there a systematic exposition of all his leading ideas and of their relation to each other. He wrote at a time when precision was not regarded as a great virtue, when statistical and probabilistic conceptions of scientific law were in their infancy, and when the social sciences pretentiously modeled themselves on the physics of the day. Marxs terminology often reflects his Hegelian heritage. Almost all of his basic formulations seem ambiguous. Honest critics have charged him with flagrant inconsistencies and a fundamental incoherence, while uncritical admirers have accepted every word even when his conclusions appear contradictory. All these difficulties are aggravated by the fact that Marx has become a political symbol evoking emotive reactions rather than intellectually discriminating ones.
