By Ben Campbell, The North Star, December 15, 2012
While today’s left has frayed into many strands, there
was a time when the left presented, or at least aspired to present, a coherent Weltanschauung.
This was Marxism, founded on Karl Marx’s brilliant synthesis of materialism and
the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, which led him and his collaborator Friedrich
Engels to an unprecedented coalescence of existing human knowledge.
Today’s crisis of capitalism has, unsurprisingly, led to
a renewed interest in Marxism. Yet any “return to Marx” will not be found in an
exegesis of ancient texts but in grounding Marx’s materialist dialectic in the
present. Just as Marx critiqued 19th-century advances by incorporating them
into his thought, so too must the most promising developments of the last
century be synthesized into a radical understanding for the
present. Unfortunately, today’s left has for too long been relegated to
social and cultural studies, ceding the “hard” discourse in economics and science
to a new generation of vulgar scientistic “quants”. The resulting left has too
often neglected a dialectical critique, in favor of a dichotomous relation to
science.
It was not always so. In an attempt to recover some of
the lost spirit of the scientific left, I will be interviewing subjects at the
interface of science and the left. I begin today with Helena Sheehan, Professor
Emerita at Dublin City University. Her research interests include science
studies and the history of Marxism, and she is the author of Marxism and the
Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (available on her website).
Ben Campbell: The advances of 19th-century science were
inseparable from the rise of “materialist” philosophy. While Marx certainly
belongs to this tradition, he was also strongly influenced by German idealism,
specifically the dialectical system of G.W.F. Hegel. What did a “dialectical”
materialism mean for Marx, and how did he see it as an advance over the materialism
of his day?
Helena Sheehan: The materialist philosophy of the 19th
century was tending in a positivist direction. It was inclined to stress
induction and to get stuck in a play of particulars. Marxism pulled this in the
direction of a more historicist and more holistic materialism. It was an
approach that overcame myopia, one that looked to the whole and didn’t get lost
in the parts.
BC: You’ve written, “It is no accident that Marxism made
its entry onto the historical stage at the same historical moment as
Darwinism.” What do you mean by this, and what do you see as the connection
between these two monumental figures?
HS: The idea of evolution was an idea whose time had
come. It was in the air. Historical conditions ripen and set the intellectual
agenda. Great thinkers are those who are awake to the historical process, those
who gather up what is struggling for expression. Marx and Darwin were both
great thinkers in this sense, although others were also coming to the same
conclusions. Marx and Engels were far bolder than Darwin, carrying forward the
realization of a naturalistic and developmental process beyond the origin of
biological species into the realm of socio-historical institutions and human
thought.
BC: Engels also wrote extensively on science,
particularly in his manuscript Dialectics of
Nature, unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime. What is it
about this document, and Engels more generally, that has been so controversial
in the history of Marxism’s relation to science?
HS: There is a tension in Marxist philosophy between its
roots in the history of philosophy and its commitment to empirical knowledge.
For the best Marxist thinkers, certainly for Marx and Engels themselves, it has
been a creative interaction. However, some of those pulling toward German
idealist philosophy, particularly that of Kant and Hegel, have brought into
Marxism a hostility to the natural sciences, influenced by the Methodenstreit, an
antagonistic conceptualization of the humanities versus the sciences, which has
played out in various forms over the decades.
The critique of positivism has been bloated to an
anti-science stance. The tendency of some to counterpose a humanistic Marx to a
positivist Engels is not supported by historical evidence, as I have
demonstrated at some length in my book.
BC: It seems to me that this synthesis of dialectical
philosophy with materialism has always been contentious. On one hand, as you
say, there is the danger of reducing an anti-positivist stance to an
anti-scientific stance. On the other hand, there is the threat of “the
dialectic” being reduced to a mere rhetorical flourish for an otherwise bare scientism.
Other writers, like John Bellamy Foster, have argued that Marxism after Marx
and Engels split along these lines. Do you agree with this assessment? After
Marx and Engels, what or who best demonstrated the potential of a “dialectical”
science to transcend this divide?
HS: No, I don’t agree with it. There have always been
those who synthesized these two streams. Most familiar to me is the 1930s
British Marxism of Bernal, Haldane,
Caudwell, and others, and post-war Eastern
European Marxism. Regarding the latter, it suffered from the orthodoxy of
parties in power, but it wasn’t all catechetical dogmatism. In the United
States, Richard Levins and Richard
Lewontin. This would still characterize my own position today.
BC: Yet despite the ability of some to transcend it,
there does seem to have historically been much ambiguity concerning what a
“materialist dialectic” would really entail. Some, like philosopher David
Bakhurst, have traced some of this ambiguity back to the
philosophical writings of Lenin. Bakhurst argues that while Lenin appeared
at times to advocate a “radical Hegelian realism”, at other times his
philosophy failed to transcend a rather vulgar materialism. How did any such
ambiguities in Lenin’s own writings contribute to subsequent debates in Soviet
science?
HS: Yes, I would agree with that. Lenin could be very
philosophically and politically sophisticated, but I never thought his
philosophical position quite gelled. Some of his texts on reflection theory
were epistemologically crude. As to the effect on Soviet debates, these were
beset by the tendency to deal with writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as
sacred texts. This rigidified further after the Bolshevization of all academic
discipline, when there had to be one and only one legitimate Marxist position
on every question. A quote from Lenin stopped any further debate.
BC: Such talk about the rigidity of Soviet science
inevitably leads to the specter of T.D. Lysenko. For readers who may not be
familiar, could you briefly describe Lysenko’s work? How would you respond to
those who use Lysenko as a cautionary tale about the danger posed by Marxism or
dialectical thinking to biology?
HS: T.D. Lysenko (1898–1976) was a Ukrainian agronomist
who came to prominence in the U.S.S.R. in 1927 when his experiments in winter
planting of peas were sensationalized by Pravda. He became lionized as a
scientist close to his peasant roots who could serve the needs of Soviet
agriculture in the spirit of the first Five-Year Plan. He then advanced the
technique of vernalization to a theory of the phasic development of plants and
then to a whole alternative approach to biology. This was in the context of
wider debates in international science about genetics and evolution, about
heredity and environment, about inheritance of acquired characteristics. It was
also in the context of the Bolshevization of academic disciplines and the
search for a proletarian biology and the purges of academic institutions.
The issues were many and complex. There has been a
tendency to flatten them all out into Lysenkoism as a cautionary tale against
philosophical or political “interference” in science. However, I believe that
philosophy and politics are relevant to the theory and practice of science.
Lysenkoism is a cautionary tale in the perils and pitfalls of certain
approaches to that.
BC: If we turn from the Soviet philosophy of science to
that of the non-Marxist West, you see a greater reluctance to mix philosophy
with the content of science. Instead, a lot of canonical “philosophy of
science” (e.g., Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend) has more to do with
scientific method. What does Marxism, with its emphasis on contradiction, have
to say about the scientific method? I wonder specifically about Lakatos’ background
in Hegelian Marxism and whether there are affinities there.
HS: One big difference between these two traditions in
philosophy of science is that Marxism pursued questions of worldview, exploring
the philosophical implications of the empirical sciences, setting it apart from
the narrow methodologism of the other tradition.
However, Marxism also addressed questions of scientific
method. There is an elaborate literature dealing with epistemological questions
from a Marxist point of view. There have been many debates, but the mainstream
position would be critical realism. What is distinctive about Marxism in this
sphere is how it cuts through the dualism of realism versus social
constructivism. Marxism has made the strongest claims of any intellectual
tradition before or since about the socio-historical character of science, yet
always affirmed its cognitive achievements.
The fact that Lakatos had a background in Marxism made
him inclined to take a wider view than his later colleagues, but I find that he
left a lot to be desired in that respect. Nevertheless, contra Feyerabend, I
think that the project of specifying demarcation criteria, so central to the
neo-positivist project, is a crucially important task.
BC: Karl Popper famously invoked a “falsifiability”
criterion as a means of solving the demarcation problem, which refers to the
question of how to distinguish science from non-science (or if that is even
possible). Popper’s solution has influenced many scientists but has been
strongly critiqued in philosophical circles. How does a Marxist approach inform
this demarcation problem?
HS: There is a need for criteria to distinguish between
legitimate and illegitimate claims to knowledge. The positivist and
neo-positivist traditions contributed much to the formulation of such criteria.
They did so, however, from a base that was too narrow, employing criteria that
were too restricted, leaving out of the picture too much that was all too real,
excluding historical, psychological, sociological, metaphysical dimensions as
irrelevant. Marxism agrees with the emphasis on empirical evidence and logical
coherence, but brings the broader context to bear. It synthesizes the best of
other epistemological positions: logical empiricism, rationalism, social
constructivism.
BC: Today, Marxism stands at its weakest historically,
right as the global economic crash seems to have most vindicated it. Similarly,
Marxism has almost no direct influence on 21st-century science, yet discoveries
and perspectives seem increasingly “dialectical” (e.g., biological emphases on
complex systems, emergence, and circular causality). What do you make of the
situation at present? Would it be possible to develop a “dialectical” or even
“Marxist” science without Marxism as a political force? Or will science always
be fragmented and one-sided so long as there remains no significant political
challenge to capital?
HS: Yes, Marxism is at a low ebb as far as overt
influence is concerned, precisely at a time when its analysis is most relevant
and even most vindicated.
I think that people can come to many of the same
realizations and conclusions as Marxists without calling themselves Marxists.
However, I don’t think there can be any fully meaningful analysis of science
that does not analyze it in relation to the dominant mode of production. Such
an analysis shows how the capitalist mode of production brings about
intellectual fragmentation as well as economic exploitation and social
disintegration.
I don’t think that left parties having any chance of
taking power in the future will be Marxist parties in the old sense, although
Marxism will likely be a force within them. I am thinking particularly of
SYRIZA, with whom I’ve been intensively engaged lately. One of the leading
thinkers in SYRIZA is Aristides Baltas, a Marxist and a philosopher of science.
Thank you, Helena.
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