Sidney Hook’s polemic against Max Eastman over the meaning of Marxism in the late 1920s offered such remarkably rich essays as the one below.

‘Marxism, Metaphysics, and Modern Science’ by Sidney Hook from Modern Quarterly. Vol. 4 No. 4. May-August, 1928.  

MAX EASTMAN has bungled a great theme.¹ The revolutionary upheavals of the last decade have brought home a realization that Marxism is not so much a petrified set of bloodless abstractions as a fighting philosophy of the underdog–a flexible method of organizational struggle in the bitter class warfare of industrial society. We have learned that its slogans are battle-cries, its formulae predictions, and its wide-sweeping generalizations prescriptions for action. It has made its converts on the firing-line and not in the class room and, Antæus-like, its strength grows fresher after each defeat and period of reaction. Max Eastman has felt the force of the practical program of Marxism and has gone on a crusade to make it more scientific. Repelled by the incrusted dogmatism of its theory as opposed to the experimental attitude of its practice, he has dived deep into Marxian literature in order to discover why a militant social philosophy should obscure its message in ponderous volumes of scholastic subtleties. He has come up gasping with the conclusion that “Marxism is a seventy-five years’ struggle between metaphysics and an instinctive practical scientific realism in which metaphysics has carried the day” (p. 54). Instead of seeing in the doctrines of Marx an implicit judgment of direction or activity (which would at least have the merit of explaining both its wide acceptance among the working classes and its instrumental efficacy), Eastman interprets Marx’s views as the confused, personal expression of a queer German–at once hard-headed (scientific) and quasi-religious–trying to liberate himself from the metaphysical superstition of a still queerer German–Hegel.

Eastman’s intense animus against metaphysics is very child-like. It reminds one of a bull which Lord Haldane pulled some years ago when he said: “We do not need to be metaphysicians at all except to the modest extent of knowing how to guard against falling into bad metaphysics.” This is forgetting that to know what is bad metaphysics demands considerable knowledge of what is good or would-be good metaphysics. Eastman is unaware that in rejecting the metaphysics of Marxism he is thereby committing himself to a definite metaphysical position, although that position may be confused in his own mind. His mistake comes from taking the word “metaphysics” etymologically instead of regarding it as implying an analysis of fundamental scientific categories; in unconsciously following Kant instead of Aristotle. For example, Eastman strenuously protests against the notion of a “block” universe and defends a fantastic variety of a metaphysical doctrine known as indeterminism. And yet despite the professed rigid deterministic creed of the scientist, Eastman is ready to approve the following: “…inscribe the word science on your banner, and beware of every man who speaks to you in the name of philosophy” (p. 221). Amusingly enough, when he speaks of poetry and art–about which we expect him to know something he says that they are concerned “with being and not becoming” (p. 183). This is metaphysics and bad metaphysics at that. Eastman calls himself an instrumentalist. But it is a rather emasculated brand of instrumentalism which he preaches. He repeats after Dewey that all thinking–including philosophic thinking—is purposive, but widely diverges from him in believing that these purposes are purely immediate and personal and that the action which is the life of thought is undertaken for narrowly practical ends. Dewey is taken to task for implying that philosophy is a critical consideration of methods of criticism instead of urging that philosophers should “devote themselves to the more fruitful and needed task of clearing up the defects in Ford motors” (p. 221). The only revolutionary feature about the correction is the audacious attempt to palm off this Philistinism in the name of Marxism. For Dewey the judgment is a factor in completing a situation which is indeterminate only in respect to its outcome, whereas Eastman in some passages at least implies that the structural features of the situation itself and the causal laws of its operation are affected if not created by judgment. For example, he chides Marx for forgetting that “true science consists of defining a purpose and compelling the external world in its service” (p. 39). This is certainly a much more adequate definition of magic than of science. But science is not Eastman’s forte.

Although rendering lip service to scientific method, Eastman has the temerity to maintain that the ideas of Freud will continue and complete the work of Darwin “in the direction of a scientific logic” (p. 17). This in the face of Dewey’s studied avoidance of Freud. This in the face of the charge made by so many scientific psychologists that Freud’s theories represent the crassest violation of fundamental principles of scientific method; that his notions of what scientific hypothesis and evidence mean enable him to explain anything and everything; that he has systematically confused stimulus with motive; that the “unconscious” (whatever that is) works more intelligently to attain its ends than does ever active intelligence, so that Freud’s “unconscious” is in line with the elan vital of Bergson, the super-empirical entelechies of Driesch, and the “soul spook” of McDougall; and that his canons of interpretation of dream experience are purely arbitrary. Eastman does not improve upon Freud’s only answer to his critics which charges them with being victims of one of his pet complexes. But, adding insult to injury, Eastman makes bold to claim that “the essence of Marx’s historical wisdom…one of the deepest and wisest intuitions in all the history of genius” (p. 79) is his anticipation of the Freudian psychology through his doctrine of ideology. Most simply put, ideology means giving “good reasons” for the “real reasons” of which we are unaware. The “real reasons” are generally economic “interests.” Eastman disavows the word “interests” (except on pp. 80 and 122), but he uses synonyms such as “pecuniary self-defence” (p. 81). He goes on to draw the conclusion that the “economic interpretation of history is nothing but a generalized psychoanalysis of the social and political mind” (p. 81). How Marx would have sworn if he had read Freud and heard that! And if one stops here, draws breath and asks Eastman for proof—why, proof is right at hand. “One might infer this (i.e., its truth) from the spasmodic and unreasonable resistance it meets with on the part of its patient” (p. 81). This is proof with a vengeance!–and in the Freudian manner indeed! If we had no other way of proving a man insane except his emphatic denial that he was insane, where would we be?

The truth of the matter is that the “unconscious” of Marx has nothing to do with the “unconscious” of Freud. Marx never used the word as a noun but only adverbially (or adjectively), in order to characterize certain social objective processes which operated in the main independently of individual knowledge or volition. Darwin used the word in the same way, in order to make clear that purposive biological arrangements are not the result of conscious effort but of variation, struggle, and survival. For Freud, on the other hand, the unconscious is not a process but an entity–a repository and yet a force–with an elaborate mechanism of repression, censor, transference, etc. Venturing into anthropology, Freud has invented a “racial unconscious” with the result that the experts in that field give him credit for nothing but his courage (Goldenweiser). The very first para graph of Marx’s recently published essay on Die Deutsche Ideologie should have convinced Eastman that to reject men’s false ideas of themselves and stop at that as the Young Hegelians did–was not enough for Marx.

But we have not yet completely stated Eastman’s central thesis. According to him, Marxism has been poisoned at its source by accepting the Hegelian dialectic and objectifying it as the dynamic principle in things, thus assuring the inevitable realization of socialism. Eastman denounces this as animistic metaphysics, as an old superstition recreated into a new religion. Hegel comes in for vitriolic abuse, while Marx, because he coquetted with Hegelian terms, is held responsible for all the inconsistencies of his disciples. This facile manner of sweeping away men he does not understand arises from Eastman’s failure to apply the methods of that very functional approach upon which he prides himself. Instead of examining Marx in his relation to the social and political environment of his day, instead of trying to make clear who the people were whom Marx was attacking and why, instead of applying the same method to Hegel–Eastman has seized upon unhappily phrased formal statements without grasping the material point and pith behind their use. If this approach were taken, the analysis in outline would read something like the following:

Marx took his point of departure from the objective existence of an economic class struggle. He noted that in the interests of this struggle, ideas and systems of thought are used as instruments in perpetuating or destroying a prevarious social equilibrium. The anticipated efficacy and adequacy of these ideas in furthering class interests explain their acceptance and use but not necessarily their genesis or origin. Marx made no attempt to explain the mechanics of individual creation in social terms. But he maintained that once certain ideas have seen the light only social influences could explain why they are accepted and disseminated through the educational institutions–school, church, and press–which are, on the whole, in the hands of the master class. They are accepted or rejected not because they are in the personal interest of any one individual, but because they are instrumentalities which are used to accelerate (or retard) the tendencies of the social environment towards or away from a social ideal. Conscious allegiance to a social ideal expresses the personal idealism of the revolutionist. This social ideal is not a mere possibility of the given; nor is it an oracular revelation of a foregone certainty. It is grounded in objective tendencies which set the limits of the type and range of instruments which may be effectively used. For Marx, effects are inevitable, not ends. His theory turns out to be self-critical, explaining its own acceptance on the basis of its own principles. The doctrine of historical materialism expresses the necessity of an economic basis of organization among the working classes instead of a religious or national or merely political program; the reading of history in terms of class struggle leads to its intensification; the theory of surplus value provided a powerful ethical motivation and rallying cry in industrial stress. Marxism therefore appears in the main as a huge judgment of practice, in Dewey’s sense of the phrase, and its truth or falsity (instrumental adequacy) is an experimental matter. Believing it and acting upon it helps make it true or false.

Against this it might be urged that Marx believed socialism to be inevitable in the nature of things and that it would realize itself by some sort of dialectic necessity. But the point is that Marx–following Hegel–never separated man from his environment. All the social psychological presuppositions concerning the revolutionary energies of men transforming their environment are implicit in Marx and for a good reason. The people whom he was at that time fighting tooth and nail paid no attention to the kind of activity which the situation demanded. Some tried to solve the social problem by a new religion, others by appealing to organized philanthropy, others–notably the Young Hegelians–by invoking in pre-Freudian fashion man’s real consciousness, Carlyle by mediævalism and hero worship and Comte by a separation of state power and a new morality. In order to show that the sentimentality of the Utopians and the mere criticism of the left-Hegelians, no matter how well intentioned, were instrumentally useless, Marx pointed to the economic structure of society which controlled and set the limits of effective action. Marx is much truer to the spirit of the instrumentalist logic than is Eastman when he affirms that prior natural structures and processes condition functional activity and that, specifically, the existing economic structure conditioned the use of the very means to be employed in changing it. Nor does Eastman take Marx’s startling anticipation of the pragmatic theory of knowledge and truth with sufficient seriousness. And in order to save his own caricature of Marxism, he dismisses as contradictory Marx’s statement that to a certain extent men make their own history.

Eastman savagely assaults certain of Marx’s disciples for taking the notion of inevitable social development too literally. It is quite true that among Marx’s followers those who take pride in calling themselves orthodox have sweepingly subscribed to the doctrine of complete determinism. So have many others who are bitterly opposed to Marx. But to read this doctrine back into Marx is a disastrous error. It is due to the failure to understand the logic of abstraction used in Capital. When Marx speaks of the natural laws of capitalist production he is speaking of tendencies (he uses both words interchangeably) which “work with iron necessity towards inevitable results.” But anyone who has read carefully sees that his is qualified by an if or unless: if left to themselves; unless acted upon by other forces. And where on the basis of a projected interaction between certain psychological forces which are taken for granted and the external environment, Marx does predict revolutionary political activity, he refers to the whole situation as tending towards a result. To cite an important example. In the very passage from which Eastman gleefully quotes the phrase “iron necessity” and stops short, Marx continues: “…where capitalist production is fully naturalized among the Germans…the condition of things is much worse than in England because the counterpoise of the Factory Act is wanting” (Introd. to Capital, 1st ed.). Surely not even Eastman will maintain that Marx attributed the Factory Act to economic processes and not to men! Eastman’s interpretation of Marx makes it impossible to understand why Marx stressed so heavily trade union activity and all forms of social legislation, why he believed in the objective existence and importance of accidents, why his followers the world over cry out that the imminence of a universal suicidal war sharpens the issue between “Communism or Barbarism” (the disjunction if not exhaustive is at least exclusive) and, to bring matters home, why the Workers Party–despite the Verlendungsteorie–recently adopted a reso lution pledging itself to fight against the “bourgeoisification” of the working class. If Marx did not underscore the importance of human activity at all times it was because he was opposing most of the time those who believed that, mathematically speaking, the future possessed all degrees of freedom. Any intelligent man (follower of Marx or not) would admit that where thought is a vital influence it is quite true that we may speak of possibilities being indeterminate. But to go on from this to assume that the past has no influence upon the limits of this indetermination is to go counter not only to Marxism but to every established principle of scientific method.

We may digress here for a moment to point out that a knowledge of Marx’s early writings would have deterred Eastman from accusing him of teleological fatalism. The absurdity of this indictment against Marx has been acknowledged by the most revisionist of Marxian critics, e.g. Leone in Italy, Andler in France, Bernstein in Germany, Struve in Russia, and in England even by the staid Master of Balliol himself, A.J. Lindsay.

I quote two passages from the early writings of Marx, ignorance of which damns Eastman’s scholarship even if it casts no reflection on his intellectual integrity. Arguing against B. Bauer, he writes in Die Heilige Familie (1844):

“History does nothing, it possesses no colossal riches,’ it ‘fights no fight’! It is rather man—real, living man—who acts, possesses, and fights in everything; it is by no means ‘History’ which uses man as a means to carry out its ends as if it were a person apart, rather History is nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends.” (Mehring’s Literarischen Nachlass, vol. 2, p. 195.)

Arguing against the Wahre Sozialisten in 1847, Marx writes:

“But need (Noth) gives man strength; he who must help himself will do so. Hence, the real environment of this world, the sharp opposition between Capital and Labor…serves as the other powerful generating source of the socialist outlook, of the desire for social reform. circumstances cry out: “Things can not remain that way, they must become different and we ourselves, we human beings, must make them different.’” (Ibid. p. 416.)

Many more passages can be cited. But these suffice to show that fatalism was far removed from Marx’s thought, and that he lashed his early opponents for their belief in it.

Nothing reveals more clearly the absence of sympathetic intelligence in Eastman than his treatment of Hegel. He makes him the scapegoat of every socialist vagary of the last hundred years. Poking fun at a terminology he has not taken any trouble to understand, Eastman plays at being a wit and succeeds, as the Irishman said, in only being “half a one.” The “dialectic method” acts like a red rag upon him and the least abusive thing he has to say about it is that “dialectic…is related to real thinking just as a rotten spot is related to an apple” (p. 111). Now, no one, of course, swallows Hegel whole these days or Aristotle or Kant, for that matter. But there is a difference between trying to do justice to a man’s insight and ridiculing the cumbrous language in which that insight has been put. The fluidity of thing and fact and the changing context of judgment represent the heart of the dialectic, and not the antiquated terms in which Hegel dressed up the idea. Mr. Eastman may be surprised to learn that the dialectic–modified to be sure–appears in the instrumentalist logic. In any moving, developing situation the relation between “need” and “fulfillment” has been taken by Prof. Dewey to be an instance of “intrinsic opposites” whose resolution appears as a factor in other concrete situations which grow out of the first. But an existential bipolarity is the condition precedent to genuine thinking. To what extent objective natural processes taken in the large reflect the dialectic movement is an idle question. Certain instances of cumulative development and growth fall readily into the dialectic pattern, but it certainly cannot be universally applied. If Eastman is right in his report that the dialectic has become a new holy trinity in Russia in terms of which everything must be restated, then Russian students of philosophy will probably lengthen their ears rather than improve their understanding. Perhaps it was this abuse of the dialectic method which turned Eastman’s stomach and soured his sense of humor; otherwise he would admit that unless there were a dialectic movement in the particular situation in which thinking goes on, the oppositions or possible eventuations which give judgments of direction their bearing and cue would be purely arbitrary and the specific efficacies of thinking only a succession of miracles.

Journalistic over-emphasis mars some of the valid criticisms that are made. Eastman is right in implying that the theory of historical materialism is vitiated by a failure to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions; by oscillating between the anthropomorphic and functional conceptions of cause. He should have made more of this. He is right in maintaining that most Marxists have forgotten that as far as their doctrines are concerned, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” (Engels), i.e., in concrete historical investigation. He lost an opportunity to show that the so-called socialist anthropology is so much superfluous baggage and has been exploded sky high by Boas and his school. He should have flayed the scandalous misuse of such terms as law, evolution, etc., in Marxian literature and completed the criticism by uncovering some of the psychological presuppositions which Marx took for granted.

The soundest and most formidable aspect of Eastman’s indictment is his criticism of the “orthodox” Marxians for not whole-heartedly accepting the functional theory of knowledge sketched in the rough by Marx himself. If thought merely reflects antecedent existence, then thinking is useless as an instrument in effecting change. Lenin, who feels that he must defend the “copy theory” of knowledge in the interests of Materialism,² falls heir to all the evils and pseudo-problems of epistemology. His philippic against Empirico-Criticism, strong in its critical polemic, breaks down on the constructive side because of his belief that sensation (!) literally reflects the external world and gives us immediate knowledge (!) of it. Strange to say, Eastman does not seem to know that the philosopher who most strongly attacked the “copy theory” of truth–was Hegel. If all the contradictions in Marxism are due to its mistaken theory of knowledge, as Eastman intimates, then Hegel cannot be held accountable for any of them. Hegel’s denial of immediate knowledge, his use of the concept of continuity and the consequent refusal to separate the energies and ideals of men from their social and natural environment, show up very prominently in modern instrumentalist theory. As punishment, Eastman ought to read Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes.

We must end on the same note as we began. Max Eastman has been dwarfed by his subject matter. He has not come to his work with the proper spirit. He has also been handicapped by the kind of wisdom he has thought relevant to apply to this study, for he believes that “ignorance of philosophy is a kind of wisdom” (p. 132).

Notes

1. Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution. By Max Eastman. New York: Albert & Charles Boni. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. 263 pages.

2. Lenin: Empirico-Criticism. International Publishers.

Modern Quarterly began in 1923 by V. F. Calverton. Calverton, born George Goetz (1900–1940), a radical writer, literary critic and publisher. Based in Baltimore, Modern Quarterly was an unaligned socialist discussion magazine, and dominated by its editor. Calverton’s interest in and support for Black liberation opened the pages of MQ to a host of the most important Black writers and debates of the 1920s and 30s, enough to make it an important historic US left journal. In addition, MQ covered sexual topics rarely openly discussed as well as the arts and literature, and had considerable attention from left intellectuals in the 1920s and early 1930s. From 1933 until Calverton’s early death from alcoholism in 1940 Modern Quarterly continued as The Modern Monthly. Increasingly involved in bitter polemics with the Communist Party-aligned writers, Modern Monthly became more overtly ‘Anti-Stalinist’ in the mid-1930s Calverton, very much an iconoclast and often accused of dilettantism, also opposed entry into World War Two which put him and his journal at odds with much of left and progressive thinking of the later 1930s, further leading to the journal’s isolation.

PDF of full issue: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/iau.31858045478306?urlappend=%3Bseq=740%3Bownerid=117563945-788