One of the foremost social critics in U.S. history, Thorstein Veblen was author of such influential works as ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class,’ ‘The Place of Science in Modern Civilization,’ and ‘The Theory of Business Enterprise.’ His critiques of modernizing capitalism, the middle class, and its society added as much as any non-Marxist to our understanding of capitalist psychology and practice in this country. If any comrade was capable of holistic and critical analysis of Veblen’s political and social conceptions, it was Lewis Corey (Louis C. Fraina), who here offers a Marxists critique in what is an essential essay on Veblen’s impact and contributions

‘Veblen and Marxism’ by Lewis Corey (Louis C. Fraina) from Marxist Quarterly. Vol. 1. No. 1. January-March 1937.

WHAT VEBLEN TAUGHT, Selected Writings of Thorstein Veblen, Edited With an Introduction by Wesley C. Mitchell. New York, Viking Press, 1936; 503 pages; $3.00.

THE fourteen selections in this book offer a compact and stimulating introduction to the writings of Thorstein Veblen, incomparably the greatest American thinker in the social sciences. They cover most of his books and some of his essays, including the devastating essay on “The Limitations of Marginal Utility.”¹ It appears clearly, if incompletely, from the selections how destructive a critic of capitalism Veblen was. The criticism inexorably unmasks the apologetics of capitalist economics by undermining their preconceptions, recurs again and again to the disastrous antagonism between industry and business, damningly analyzes the social relations that degrade the sense of workmanship, and makes the prophecy that the system of business enterprise, or capitalism, must inevitably decay. Nor is it all destructive criticism, for the emphasis on workmanship offers elements of a new cultural synthesis. One misses, however, selections from The Higher Learning in America and The Vested Interests and the Common Man; one misses especially the two sympathetic essays, written in 1919 and 1921, on the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism, which reveal in Veblen the beginnings of a practical revolutionary approach to the problem of social reconstruction. Nevertheless the Mitchell selections, together with Dorfman’s excellent biography,_² offer a good preliminary introduction.

There is need, however, for a Marxist selection and editing of the writings of Veblen, who more than any other American thinker offers material and ideas of the utmost significance to Marxism. Yet Veblen was not an “American Marx,” His ideas are not, as a pre-war socialist (now of the most reactionary persuasion) tried to prove, the basis of an “American socialism,” nor is it true, as one liberal claims, that “Veblenism may be to intellectuals of the future what Marxism has been to the humanitarians of the past.” But neither are Veblen’s ideas, as one communist argues, “garbled Marxism” and “premonitions of fascist strategy.” The confusion makes a Marxist selection and evaluation all the more necessary.

Veblen is not, of course, directly responsible for vulgarizations of his ideas by those who claim him, but there are elements in them that lend themselves to vulgarization. The Technocrats distorted his conception of social change and forgot his observation that the “technicians must be backed by the aggressive support of the trained working force engaged in transportation and the great primary industries,” yet Veblen did speculate, wrongly, on the technicians being a peculiarly revolutionary force. Others speak in mystic fashion of the “technological imperative” and have faith in “consumers” and “the public,” not in the “classes employed in the industrial occupations,” yet Veblen overemphasized the technological factor and never clearly analyzed the class-economic elements of social change. Nor is Veblen responsible for the shortcomings of institutional economics, which claims him and is influenced by him, but which, despite its constructive aspects, is an incomplete application of his ideas. Veblen himself in 1925 stigmatized institutional economics as “a science of business traffic, monographic, detailed, exacting, and imbued with a spirit of devotion to things as they are shaping themselves under the paramount exigencies of absentee ownership as a working system; and the personnel of this science should be partisans of this system.” The final proof of this sardonic appraisal appears in the persons of the institutional economists who rallied to the New Deal to make more workable the system of business enterprise that Veblen condemned: to plan the systematic limitation of economic output—a formerly relative necessity of capitalism now become absolute—that Veblen denounced as “business sabotage” and the “conscientious withdrawal of efficiency.” Yet Veblen, while destroying the preconceptions of accepted economic theory, developed no theory of his own; his analysis of institutional changes and mutations lends itself to the belief that one may tinker with institutions pragmatically, for there is no theory to guide action.

Veblen claimed that Marxism was “unscientific,” “romantic” and an expression of “natural rights.” But his one proof of the latter charge was wrong, for Marx never urged the “natural right” of labor to its “full product.” And Marx was “unscientific” to Veblen because the American scholar limited science to the “objective” study of cause and effect. But science is not interested simply in why natural forces act in a particular fashion, but in utilizing and organizing those forces to serve man: the technological application of science. If the aims of the natural sciences are practical and purposive, how much truer that is (or should be) of the social sciences! Veblen’s approach limited him to a study of the cause and effect of institutional changes. Marx was interested in something more practical and purposive, hence more scientific: an understanding of changes to organize and direct them toward conscious and definite ends: a social expression of the technological application of science, or social engineering. Marx had a truer conception of science than Veblen.

Marxism was necessarily unscientific and romantic to Veblen because he transferred to the field of history and society the naturalistic determinism of Darwinism, “a scheme of blindly cumulative causation,” to use his own words, “essentially mechanical.” This was social Darwinism of the most rigorous kind. (It is suggestive of Veblen’s profoundly rebel nature that social Darwinism, which others erected into a repulsive system of capitalist apologetics, became in his hands the means for the most destructive social criticism by any American scholar.) But the mechanical materialism of Darwinism was transformed by later scientific progress, while the dialectical materialism of Marx, who transcended the limitations of Darwinism, acquires constantly new scope and significance, for it is an expression of reality and a means for the mastery of reality. Unlike Marx, Veblen neglected the factors of consciousness and purposive struggle in human history, despite his emphasis on the psychological approach to the study of culture. In the light of the mechanics of the naturalistic determinism of Darwinism, Veblen criticised the dynamics of the social determinism of Marxism because they “make the movement of social progress move on the spiritual plane of human desire and passion and not on the (literally) material plane of mechanical and physiological stress…It is a sublimated materialism, sublimated by the dominating presence of the conscious human spirit.” That criticism ignores the dynamics of history, which involve the reciprocal action of structure and superstructure, of consciousness and its underlying material elements, of practice and theory. Veblen’s mechanical materialism, applying to history the limited Darwinian evolutionary concepts of variation, selection and survival, makes social change a mere “drift of habituation” to new conditions; but this, despite its element of truth, cannot explain how man, habituated to the old order, may avoid habituation to a declining civilization and revolt to create the new. Veblen was partly entangled in the conception of an “immutably given human nature” with a measurably fixed determining biological endowment, while Marx recognized that as labor changes the outer world man changes his own nature.

Veblen’s final proof that Marxism was unscientific was the triumphant argument that the revisionist socialists were “amending” Marxism “to bring it into consonance with the current scientific point of view.” But the amending was unscientific, for it meant smuggling into Marxism the elements of social Darwinism. The revisionists, and most of their “orthodox” opponents, replaced dialectical materialism with a mechanical “scientific” conception of social progress, resembling naturalistic determinism, that rejected the purposive revolutionary aspects of Marxism. This expressed and justified, particularly in Germany, a reformist “habituation” to institutional changes in capitalism which was considered a “growing into” socialism, but actually represented a “growing into” imperialist state capitalism. Abandonment of the dynamics of Marxism, of the purposive revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism, led to catastrophe. Veblen himself pointed out in 1921 that the reformist socialists, who depended upon the “obsolescence” of capitalist ownership “by force of natural law [good mechanical materialism, that!] have now come to an exasperated realization that Bolshevism is putting that orthodox preconception out of joint.”³

The limitations of Veblen’s approach prevented consistent and predictive analysis of the underlying forces of social development. He foresaw “the natural decay of business enterprise,” but the prophecy does not necessarily arise out of his fundamental postulates nor is it accompanied by the projection of a new social order—as in the case of Marx. Technology is only one factor and it is conditioned by more decisive social relations. Veblen is brilliant in his exploration of the conflict between the pecuniary and the technical, business and industry; but the conflict has always characterized capitalist enterprise, and the exploration does not explain why the conflict was formerly compatible with the upswing of capitalism and is now accompanied by decline; both stages are logically explained by the Marxist theory of capital accumulation. The penetrating study of absentee ownership does not implement its significance as a new stage of capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and an objective transition to socialism. The concept of vested interests has real value, but Veblen does not recognize its limitations in terms of the more decisive class interests and class struggle.

All of which cannot adequately serve the ends of a program of action. Veblen turned from mere social criticism to practical consideration of social reconstruction under impact of disillusion with “the war to make the world safe for democracy” (which he accepted, although he indulged in none of the obscene hysterics of the academic war-mongers) and the influence of the Russian Revolution. But he had to explore ideas and movements outside the range of his own philosophy—the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), Bolshevism, a “Soviet” of technicians. Veblen sympathized with Bolshevism, which he characterized as “a menace to the vested interests, and to nothing and no one else,” foresaw a revolutionary movement of “the underlying population under something like the Red Flag,” and insisted that it is necessary to “disallow” and “cancel”—i.e. expropriate— all the rights of capitalist ownership. According to Dorfman, Veblen was bitterly disappointed by the ebb in the world revolutionary tide after 1920; six months before his death in 1929 the old rebel said: “Just now communism offers the best course that I can see.”

Yet, conceding all limitations, there is an astonishing series of analyses and ideas in Veblen’s writings that are of permanent value. The criticism of accepted economic theory and the sociological broadening of the scope of economics is in essential accord with Marxism. At least as important is Veblen’s analysis of the corporate and financial superstructure of modern capitalism, whose significance Marxism has largely neglected: that superstructure is increasingly important in the movement of cyclical crises and in the general crisis of capitalism.

But it is in cultural, superstructural analysis that Veblen is most suggestive and vital. Largely neglected by Marxism, such analysis, in addition to its necessity for the understanding of reciprocal social action, is indispensable to the creation of socialist culture. No one has as clearly and damningly revealed the “color” of capitalist culture, no one has contributed more to a new cultural synthesis.

Veblen’s penetrating discussion of technology broadens into an emphasis on its cultural aspects. For the impact of technology is not wholly economic, nor is its cultural influence always indirect. Consider one of Veblen’s many illuminating comments: “The cultural growth dominated by the machine industry is of a skeptical, matter-of-fact complexion, materialistic, unmoral, unpatriotic, undevout,” although “there has enough of the ancient norms of western Christendom remained intact to make a very respectable protest.” The value of Veblen’s analysis is not destroyed by the fact that he is unaware of the pressure capitalist production exerts, through the fetishism of commodities, on the recreation of irrationalism.

Again and again Veblen recurs to his analysis of the sense of workmanship, which he considers makes man the lord of creation; to the antagonism between workmanship and the social relations that limit, exploit and degrade it. This is a subject curiously neglected by Marxists. Veblen’s brilliant study of workmanship is his most enduring monument.

Two final aspects of Veblen’s significance. While class interests are dominant, there are minor interests. The concept of vested interests is a fruitful approach to many problems, among them the problem of antagonisms within the working class and the labor movement. While socialism abolishes classes, a large number of varying interests will exist for years to come; their recognition and free play are a social and cultural necessity. Still more important to socialist construction, perhaps, is Veblen’s analysis of the cultural traits of the leisure class. Lenin considered bureaucracy a major problem of socialist construction; it is more or less dominant, according to the economic and cultural heritage, in the earlier stages of socialism. The tendency is for a bureaucracy and its allies, including the socialist variety, to acquire vested interests and the general cultural traits of a “leisure” class—e.g. invidious distinctions and conspicuous consumption. Veblen may be of the utmost value in the struggle against the reversionary aspects of socialist bureaucracy, a struggle that involves the “withering away” of the state. There is no wholly direct or mechanical connection between socialization of industry and a particular new cultural expression, which may retain many objectionable reactionary features because of cultural lag and other factors. Socialist culture depends upon freely creative understanding and action.

All that is vital in Thorstein Veblen may fulfill itself in Marxism and socialism.

NOTES

1 The theory of marginal utility, now a wistful ghost in the halls of higher learning, was greeted upon its appearance as the final, crushing answer to the Marxist analysis of capitalist production. It is interesting to recall what Veblen wrote about the theory in 1909, What Veblen Taught, p. 52: Marginal utility seeks “to turn a postulate of distribution to account for a theory of production…which throws the whole excursion back into the field of distribution…Marginal utility theory is of a wholly statical character. It offers no theory of a movement of any kind, being occupied with the adjustment of values to a given situation, [and contributes nothing] at all appreciable to a theory of genesis, growth, sequence, change, process, or the like, in economic life…It is characteristic of the school that wherever an element of the cultural fabric, an institution or an institutional phenomena, is involved in the facts with which the theory is occupied, such institutional facts are taken for granted, denied or explained away…Money and the habitual resort to its use are conceived to be simply the ways and means by which consumable goods are acquired, and therefore simply a convenient method by which to procure the pleasurable sensations of consumption, other bearings of the case being disregarded…But such is not the run of facts in modern business. Valuations of capitalization, e.g., occur without its being practicable to refer them to visibly equivalent variations either in the state of the industrial arts or in the sensations of consumption. Credit extensions tend to inflation of credit, rising prices, overstocking of markets, etc., likewise without any visible or securely traceable correlation in the state of the industrial arts or in the pleasures of consumption…Hence the run of facts must be thrown out of the theoretical formulation…So that the whole ‘money economy,’ with all its machinery of credit and the rest, disappears in a tissue of metaphors to reappear theoretically expurgated, sterilized and simplified into a ‘refined system of barter,’ culminating in a net aggregate maximum of pleasurable sensations of consumption…The cultural elements so tacitly postulated as immutable conditions precedent to economic life are ownership and free contract, together with such other features of the scheme of natural rights as are implied in the exercise of these. These cultural products are, for the purpose of the theory, conceived to be given a priori in unmitigated force. They are part of the nature of things; so there is no need of accounting for them or inquiring into them, as to how they have come to be such as they are, or how and why they have changed and are changing, or what effect all this may have on the relations of men who live by or under this cultural situation…The acceptance by the economists of these or other institutional elements as given and immutable limits their inquiry in a particular and decisive way. It shuts off the inquiry at the point where the modern scientific interest sets in.”

2. Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York 1934).

3. Thorstein Veblen, “Between Bolshevism and War,” The Freeman, May 25, 1921; reprinted in his Essays in Our Changing Order (New York 1934), p. 442.

Marxist Quarterly was published by the American Marxist Association with Lewis Corey (Louis C. Fraina) as managing editor and sought to create a serious non-Communist Party discussion vehicle with long-form analytical content. Only lasting three issues during 1937.

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