Did Marx Believe in Teleology? (2009)

Chapter IX of Marx Without the Beard: A Critical History of Spinoza’s Role in the History of Marxism, Harrison Fluss’s Master of Arts (in Philosophy) Thesis at Stony Brook University.

Harrison Fluss contributed the introduction to the English-language edition of Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. As a philosophy professor, he writes extensively on the Enlightenment. ^[1]

The most famous statement Marx made on teleology was ostensibly against it. In addressing Lassalle on the importance of Darwin, he noted

Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. One does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument. Despite all its shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, “teleology” in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained. ^[2]

At first glance, this quote would betray Marx as being an opponent of teleological explanations. However, read a second time, the quote reveals much more complexity than most Marxists would be willing to admit. What does Marx mean that for the first time in Darwin’s system, teleology (put in scare quotes by Marx) is dealt a mortal blow and its rational meaning is “empirically explained”? We know that Marx and Engels were against the old teleology of William Paley, that posited a supernatural designer to explain the universe (a watchmaker for his watch), and it is certainly true that Darwin “dealt a mortal blow” against this type of theologizing. But what is the rational meaning of teleology that Marx is pointing to in this letter? The teleological explanations described above are empirical ones, since they are discerned through the means of observation and the investigation of nature itself. Something’s essence cannot be deduced from a dictionary but is a matter of strict scientific analysis. And it is here in Marx’s letter to Lassalle that we find a hidden rational core that has been obscured by mysticism and idealism, which Darwin was able to dissolve in his theory of evolution. ^[3]

Marx in Capital sought the laws of phenomena, treating “the social movement as a process of natural history governed by laws.” ^[4] These laws, as Meikle points out, quoting one of the reviews Marx cites approvingly in Capital, are “laws regulating the origin, existence, development and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another, higher one.” ^[5] This becomes clearer as Marx distances himself from classical political economy, which adopted an “analytical” methodology. Marx in contrast is operating with another set of categories inherited from Aristotle and Hegel. For instance he notes that political economy accounts for competition “in terms of external circumstances. Political economy teaches us nothing about the extent to which the external and apparently accidental circumstances are only an expression of a necessary development. We have seen how exchange itself appears to political economy as a accidental fact.” ^[6] Analytical methods can account for laws, as an Althusserian can, but they cannot “comprehend these laws, i.e. it does not show how they arise from the nature of private property.” ^[7]

In the course of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx critiques political economy for failing to understand economic categories in their movement and development. Because of this failure to understand things in their dialectical interconnections, we are left with a series of categories that are juxtaposed to each other as antinomies: “for competition, craft freedom, and division of landed property were developed and conceived only as accidental, deliberate, violent consequences of monopoly, of the guilds, and of feudal property, and not as their necessary, inevitable, and natural consequences.” ^[8]

As the later Althusser was eventually forced to recognize in Marx in his Limits, Marx remained “stuck” in Hegelianism even in his mature scientific phase, and proceeded in a Hegelian fashion to deduce the laws of capital in terms of capital’s telos. In Capital and the Grundrisse, we encounter a Marx who has appropriated Hegel a second time, though this appropriation relies less on the Phenomenology (as the first one did in the Paris Manuscripts) and more on the categories furnished by the Science of Logic.

Alfred Schmidt drew attention in his critique of the Althusser of For Marx and Reading Capital to this second appropriation of Hegel by Marx, in his work History and Structure. In contrast to political economy, Marx’s critique is humanistic

insofar as it rose above the conventional level of national economy. Because Marx refuses merely to register the reified, pseudo-objective structures of capitalist everyday life but seeks instead to bring the history congealed in them back to life, he comes up against the specifically human, if deformed, reality. […] even Capital is not a thing “but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things. ^[9]

Schmidt further recognizes that Capital is not a mere economic history of a mode of production, but is informed by Hegel’s Logic, and that Marx’s method demanded a logic to analyze history with. History could not be understood in its immediate concreteness. A theory of history instead had to take the necessary detour in a dialectical movement from abstract concepts to the concrete reality.

Like Hegel, Marx finds this kind of knowledge in the methodological progression from the abstract to the concrete, from the universal to the particular. Both of these dialectical thinkers [Hegel and Marx] resisted the current sensualism which yielded to the isolated facts given to naïve consciousness by viewing them as synonymous with “the concrete” in general […]. ^[10]

Thanks to Hegel, Marx was able to analyze capital’s essence and historical movement. In Capital Vol. II, Meikle points out that Marx explained the ergon ^[11] of the circuits of capital in terms of self-expansion. In Capital Vol. I, Marx devoted the first sections to the deduction, from the economic germ cell of the commodity ^[12], of the entire system of economic relationships under capitalism. ^[13] Most important in this discussion was Marx’s discussion of value as a form, and how the value-form eventually developed into its final form, i.e. capital. Within the value-form, there is a tendency to universalize itself, in the form of capital, and this explains the “riddle” of money, since money acts as a “universal equivalent” for all other commodities. Marx wanted to present the genesis of the value form in terms of a dialectical development, and he warned that such a presentation of the value form might look as if it were static and distilled a priori. But in contrast to how the mode of presentation might look, the method of enquiry was through and through historical:

Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of enquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. ^[14]

Capital develops in stages, gestating in the wombs of past relations of production. However, petty commodity production was only able to transform into capitalism proper if certain conditions were met. For instance, there always existed petty commodity production in the epochs of antiquity, feudalism, etc., but it only develops into capitalist commodity production “where the worker is the free proprietor of the conditions of his labour, and sets them in motion himself.” Below Marx outlines the dialectical development from petty commodity production to capitalist production proper:

At a certain stage of development, it [petty commodity production] brings into the world the material means of its own destruction. From that moment, new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society, forces and passions, which feel themselves to be fettered by that society. It has to be annihilated it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation […] of the dwarf-like property of the many into the giant property of the few, and the […] terribly and arduously accomplished expropriation of the mass of the people forms the pre-history of capital. ^[15] [16]

Marx throughout his life was concerned with the development of society, especially capitalist society, and how the real contradictions between labor and capital, between the forces of production and the relations of production, point to a new phase of the development of the human species under socialism. It is this movement of history towards socialism, towards humanity reappropriating its essence as social beings: “The entire movement of history is therefore the actual act of creation of this communism — the birth of its empirical existence — and, for its thinking consciousness, the comprehended and known movement of its becoming.” ^[17]

These Aristotelian categories cannot be reduced to the mere ideological problematic of the “theoretical humanism” of the pre-scientific Marx, as Althusser had done. This metaphysics is a continuous one for Marx, permeating all his major works and notebooks. In the Grundrisse we find that the process of inversion (of living labor being dominated by alienated/dead labor, i.e. of the worker being dominated by capital) is “merely an historical necessity for the development of the productive forces from a definite historical point of departure, or basis. In no way is it an absolute necessity of production; it is, rather, a transitory one, and the result and (immanent) aim of this process is to transcend this basis itself and this form of the process.” ^[18]

Without the Aristotelian/Hegelian presuppositions that Marx assumes to analyze and critique capitalism, Marx’s method becomes almost indistinguishable from positivistic sociology. It is the dialectic, understood in the categories of essence, law, and necessity that separate Marx from regular sociology and from the geometrical method of Spinoza.