‘Karl Marx Anticipated Sigmund Freud’ by Max Eastman from New Masses. Vol. 3 No. 3. July, 1927.

I want to take up Floyd Dell’s challenge to expound the correct revolutionary attitude toward Freudian psychology. It is a problem that agitates every alert Marxian theorist in the world, and I think I have given the only possible solution of it in my book about Marxism. I cannot fully explain my thesis in a short article, but I can give enough to serve as an advance notice to those who are interested.

Not only Freudian -science “should be made use of by revolutionists like any other kind of knowledge” — as Floyd Dell suggests — but it has been made use of by Marxian revolutionists, unknowingly, all along. Marx’s theory of history and the whole attitude to human thought and culture involved in his use of the word “ideology”, was a direct anticipation of the Freudian psychology. It was by far the most direct and the most startling anticipation of it in all scientific literature.

Marx himself never defined the word ideology, but he used it so frequently and so forcibly that it is very easy to see what it meant to him. It was with him a term of scientific abuse — a name for all those kinds of thinking which ignore the economic facts which constitute the real explanation of historic events. If Marx had been a psychologist, instead of a semi-Hegelian philosopher, he might have expressed his doctrine of ideologies somewhat as follows:

In human society life’s strongest and most universal impulses are suppressed by a standard of ideality and respectable virtue, that is an automatic product of social intercourse and self-consciousness. These strong universal impulses disappear out of men’s thoughts, but they do not die. They continue to function unconsciously, and the result is a falsification of the conscious thoughts, where ever they touch a matter in which these suppressed impulses are concerned. Men think they are defending and pursuing such goals as Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, when in reality their concern is, as Marx put it, with Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery. Their concern is to defend their own privileged position in a class which, in its unconscious but ultimately reliable motivation, knows nothing and cares nothing about liberty, or equality, or fraternity. That is what an ideology is. It is a thinking process which is unaware of the economic motive which instigated it, and toward the satisfaction of which it is directed. That the great part of written history, and of political and sociological theorizing, up to the time of Marx, was distorted with such ideological thinking, indulged in by people controlled by their own unconscious class interests, is fairly obvious. It is also obvious that this process has not ceased merely because it has been discovered. But it is certainly the ideal and the essence of scientific thinking to escape from it.

Practical scientific thinking defines its real motives, because it seeks a clear knowledge of the means to their satisfaction. And “pure” scientific thinking defines its motives, because it wishes to abstract from them, and get a picture of the facts which will be as objective and general as the nature of the human brain permits. Both these kinds of thinking are sharply and unmistakably distinguished, exactly as Marx originally said they are, from economically-determined ideologies.

That shows how close Marx was to the psychology of Sigmund Freud. The psychoanalyst, because he is trying to cure individual disorders, emphasizes those distortions of consciousness which arise from suppressed motives of sex. The Marxist, who wishes to cure the disorders of society, emphasizes those which arise from economic motives — the motives of hunger and fighting egoism. It is such motives which unconsciously dominate the majority of men in those broad social and political relations which constitute so large a part of their lives. It is such motives which align them in antagonistic classes, with the result that loyalty to class takes the place of that loyalty to society as a whole, upon which it might be possible to establish the framework of a reasonable world. Marx’s word ideology is simply a name for the distortions of social and political thinking which are created by these suppressed motives. It is a general term for all that Freudians mean when they say rationalization, substitution, transference, displacement, sublimation. The economic interpretation of history is nothing but a generalized psychoanalysis of the social and political mind. One might infer this from the spasmodic and unreasonable resistance it meets on the part of its patient. The Marxian diagnosis is regarded as an outrage rather than a science. It is met, not with comprehension and critical analysis, but with rationalizations and “defence-reactions” of the most wild and infantile kind.

One of the most notable of these defence-reactions has been contributed by the Freudians themselves. They have invented the device of explaining away all revolutionary intelligence as a manifestation of the “Oedipus complex.” Freud seems to have remained wisely silent upon this theme, but it is quite a fashion among his followers to dismiss any man who wants to cut under the plausibilities of existing law and government, as a neurotic driven on by an unconscious fixation of infantile emotion against his father. It is a case, they say, of substitution or transference of the libido. The answer from the Marxian point of view is obvious: Doctors are in the economic nature of things bourgeois, or petit-bourgeois, and these Freudian doctors are driven on, in their attempt to explain away revolution, by unconscious motives of class loyalty and pecuniary self defence. It is a case of ideological thinking. In this exchange of amenities, the Marxian may have the satisfaction of remembering that Marx got there first. And he has this satisfaction also, that his position does not involve a snap diagnosis of some of the healthiest and most stable personalities in the world as neurotic, and it does not pretend to an expert opinion on the intimate family history of several millions of people who have never been examined. It attributes to these Freudian doctors no condition more peculiar than the most general underlying motives of all humanity and all organic life.

When I say that the doctrine of ideologies is an anticipation of the Freudian psychology, I mean it literally and exactly. It can be nothing else, once you have put in the place of the Hegelian metaphysics, a science of human thought and behavior. This can be seen clearly in any of Engels’ attempts to state what an ideology is. “An ideology,” he says in one place, “is a process which is carried out, to be sure, with the consciousness of the so-called thinker, but with a false consciousness. The real motive-powers which move him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process.” You need only recognize that the motive-powers which move people to think are organic impulses, or “desires,” and you have here all the essentials of a Freudian definition. And there are passages, indeed, where both Marx and Engels do seem to recognize this fact. In his book about the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where Marx applies his theory to a piece of concrete historic action, he continually talks of the “interests” of the classes and parties concerned. He interprets their political ideas, not as an unconscious reflection of their economic position, but as an unconscious scheme for getting their economic wishes satisfied.

“As in private life we distinguish between what a man thinks and says about himself, and what he really is and does, still more in historical struggles we must distinguish the phrases and imaginations of parties from their real organism and their real interests…Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were raving about the Kingdom, the Church, and the Beauty of the Old English dispensation, until the day of danger snatched from them the confession that they were only raving about Ground Rent.”

That this is Freudian psychology at its most brilliant, needs no demonstration. Engels in his speech at the grave of Marx described the whole Marxian theory of history as a discovery of “the simple fact, heretofore concealed under ideological overgrowths, that men have first of all to eat and drink and live and clothe themselves, and only after that can they occupy themselves with politics and science and art and religion…” Here again it is simply the underlying animal motivation that explains history and ideologies play exactly the part that is played by rationalizations in a Freudian psychology. They serve in concealments in consciousness, for those crude unconscious motives which on the broad average and in the long run determine the conduct of men.

That will indicate how I think the problem of the relation between Marxism and the Freudian psychology ought to be solved. I must hasten to add, however, that this solution cannot be accepted by orthodox Marxians. The reason is that orthodox Marxism is not scientific in the modern sense, but Hegelian — metaphysical. Until the relics of Hegel are abandoned and Marxism restated as a scientific hypothesis, no solution of its conflict with Freudian psychology, or any other psychology, or any other modern science, can be arrived at.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1927/v03n03-jul-1927-New-Masses.pdf