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History and Class Consciousness
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12654 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
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6 / 1987 |
6,309 Words |
| Author
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
When Marx died in 1883, he left an ambiguous theoretical legacy. During his youth he had come under the hypnotic spell of the great idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), but after emigrating to England in 1849, he paid increasing attention to the natural sciences. As a consequence, his theory of revolution moved between two poles; when it was not a philosophical summons to action, it was a scientific promise of success. For understandable reasons, he never achieved a synthesis, leaving it to his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels to interpret his true intentions. In books such as Anti-Duhring, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy and Dialectics of Nature, Engels played down the mature Marx's residual idealism and defined "orthodox Marxism" as the universal science of nature and history. That science taught, he declared, that in advanced industrial societies a large, impoverished proletariat would, in the fullness of time, rise up in victorious revolt against the ruling bourgeoisie. It could not be otherwise. The communist future was guaranteed by the operation of economic laws that were extensions of the "dialectical" laws of physical nature; they governed historical development by the continuous production and resolution of conflicts, or "contradictions."
That being the case, the Marxists of the Second International (1889-1914) attributed scant significance to human consciousness and will. There were, of course, exceptions. Georges Sorel, the quixotic French engineer who eventually joined the French far Right, insisted that Marxism derived its importance not from its ability to predict the future, but from its power to inspire revolutionary action. And Kantian Marxists always placed greater emphasis on moral imperatives than on scientific certainties. But by and large Marxism was a passive and, for all practical purposes, a reformist creed prior to the outbreak of the Great War. Ironically, it was the first "Marxist" revolution that called than creed into question. In 1917, V.I. Lenin seized power in economically backward Russia. Despite high hopes, the revolution did not spread to Western Europe, where there existed a large and growing proletariat. Orthodox Marxists were left to explain why it was that revolution succeeded in a country where peasants vastly outnumbered industrial workers but failed in lands where, according to Marx, it should have triumphed.
To make matters worse, Lenin refused to forfeit his claim to orthodoxy. True, he endorsed Engels's scientific schema and hence the axiom that Marxism was destined to prevail throughout the world. But at the same time he drew quite consciously on the voluntaristic traditions, if not the specific
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