Julius Kovesi
It was over thirty years ago that Karl Popper in an ingenious article ‘What is Dialectics?’ argued that the theory of dialectics is not scientific because it is irrefutable. A theory is scientific, in his view – and many shared and still share his view on this – if, although it is not refuted, it is highly refutable. Or in other words a theory is scientific if one could state what experiments, events or occurrences could refute it. Since no experiments or events could refute dialectics, or since any state of affairs is compatible with it, it is not a scientific theory. This argument was impressive when it was impressive to be scientific in the Popperian sense, and indeed it had a special point at the time when communists and most other Marxists were priding themselves on being scientific.
I left Hungary not long before Popper’s article was published in Mind, and I think it was one of the first articles I read on Marxism in the English speaking world. I do not wish to dwell on my puzzlement at the time on first encountering the positivist approach to history. To me the fact that the Party which claimed to represent the true consciousness of the proletariat came to power not by revolution but, in Russia, by a putsch carried out by a group of sailors, and in Hungary by dishonest cunning backed by military conquest, were relevant facts towards the refutation of Marxism. And who am I to say that the Party which came to power by these unmarxian means was not that real historical movement revealed by Marx, but a betrayal of the revolution? Just a year earlier I had been listening to Lukács’ lectures, and his brilliant mind demonstrated that ‘totality’ and the true consciousness is present in the Leninist Party to such an extent that even his own brilliant mind had to be submitted to it.
This is just a brief indication of the state of mind in which I encountered Popper’s view that any state of affairs is compatible with Marxist dialectics. My bewilderment with the positivists turned sour on me when I gradually realised that none of my arguments nor any factual claims made any impression on people who believed that the future ideal society was being built in the countries I was talking about.
Since then I have learnt two things. One is that it is not the theory itself which is irrefutable. It is refutable and has been refuted. Some people however live within certain conceptual frameworks which have ingenious conceptual devices that act like buffers against arguments and on occasions can even turn a potential refutation into a confirmation of their theory.1
The other, related, thing I learnt is that human beings become most creative when they are cornered. Some of the best examples of this are to be found in the history of theology. But Lenin’s theory of imperialism and ‘the weakest link’ as well as Stalin’s theory of ‘socialism in one country’ were ‘creative developments’ of Marxism in response to the non-appearance of revolutions where they should have been expected to appear. The most ‘creative’ outburst of Marxist theory occurred in response to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, in response to an event which should have been a refutation of Marxism even for Marxists and fellow-travellers. Indeed the ‘creative’ elaboration of Marxism – what used to be called the ‘new left’ – came into being because those events penetrated even the conceptual self-protective devices of their systems. Then the shocking events of Czechoslovakia in 1968 created the idea of ‘socialism with a human face’, and contributed to the flourishing of the idea of ‘eurocommunism’.2
These are two of the many sad facts I learnt in these years while talking to people who admired socialism and despised me as a reactionary: that there are certain ideas that act like cotton wool to stifle arguments, and that the origins of the most grandiose ‘creative developments’ of certain theories are the periodic bankruptcies of those theories. Of course I learnt other things as well, like the difference between being moral and moralising, and the difference between being rational and rationalising; but throughout I kept to my original view that the Marxist theory itself is refutable and that it has often been refuted.
It is one of the latest crucial experiments that I would like to turn to, which might or might not refute the theory. And I am not thinking of Poland, where out of tragedy the most likely people to emerge triumphantly with a ‘creative development’ of Marxism will be our University Trotskyites. No, I am not thinking of Poland, but of our Aboriginals’ struggle to preserve their sacred sites.
The theory which is on trial is at the heart of Marxists’ belief in the inevitable march of history towards their version of socialism. It is a variant of the Hegelian view that in the process of history there are certain configurations which contain within them certain contradictions. The march of history is the travail of the eliminations of these contradictions by the configurations turning themselves into more rational arrangements. While for Hegel this is a complex and subtle process, and the configurations contain all the ideas that make up our society – indeed if one wants to talk about contradictions one has to talk about the sorts of things that ideas are – in Marx all this is transposed into a lower key.
The engine room of history is below the level of ideas, in what Marx called the economic base of society. Here are the real contradictions, and their appearance in the world of ideas is only a reflection or the result of where the real action is, of the economic base. This economic base consists of two elements, the forces of production and the relationships of production. The nature of these is again never properly specified by Marx, which enables the proponents of this theory to make various evasive moves, but none of these variations and embroideries affects my present argument.
On the Marxist account we come into social relationships, we create the relationships of production, in order to produce. But after certain developments these relationships instead of helping the productive process, hinder it. As Marx puts it, they become fetters of production. At times like this a revolutionary situation develops; indeed these are the objective conditions of a genuine Marxist revolution. Certain productive forces are suitable for certain relationships of production. As the famous Marxian adage has it: handmills create a feudal society but steam engines create a capitalist society. Once your forces of production are like steam engines then the feudal social relationships become fetters to the development of the new productive processes, and this ‘contradiction’ creates the revolutionary situation. The feudal relationships of production must give way to the new capitalist relationships of production in order to give scope to the full development of the new forces of production. This is the scenario according to which with equal necessity capitalism will have to give way to socialism.
I mentioned earlier that talking of contradictions makes sense only where we talk of the sorts of things that ideas are, and I must add that it makes sense only if we have the idea of what is rational as a backdrop to it. Why would it be a contradiction to have certain relationships of our social life acting as fetters to the development of productive forces? It is only a contradiction on the assumption that only that arrangement of society is rational which does not hinder but rather helps to develop all its productive powers. This is the assumed concept of rationality which makes those states of affairs where the social relationships are preventing the development of the productive powers ‘irrational’.
Marx took this notion of what it is to be rational so much for granted that it never occurred to him that the recurring conflicts between these two elements that he conjured up as the driving force of history might be resolved by the curtailment of the productive powers and not by the drastic revolutionary transformation of the social relationships.3* But after all, on a Marxian analysis, what else could one expect of an ideologist writing in mid-nineteenth century England with the collaboration of a Manchester businessman?
Now this is the theory which is on trial to the north of Western Australia. The outcome is not certain and Marx might not be refuted. If Sir Charles Court4 wins then Marx will be vindicated. If the new powers of production of which Sir Charles is the ideological expression, but which work with historical necessity even without their ideological expression in him, if these forces of production really win, then Marx’s theory, though it would not be proved, would gain very strong experimental support. If however the Aboriginal religious beliefs which on Marxian grounds are the ideological expressions of what Marx would regard as one of the most primitive relationships of production would prevent the spread of what Marx would regard as the most advanced forces of production, then Marx’s theory would suffer a serious experimental setback.
Perhaps I have overemphasised the deterministic nature of the Marxian historical development. Perhaps those who want to prove Marx’s theory to be correct could interfere in history and help shape events so that they conform to Marx’s theory. In that case people with such desires should support the industrial development of the north of Western Australia and hasten the revolutionary transformation of social relationships, and with it the withering away of a religion, which was suitable for earlier forces and modes of production.
- Cf. my ‘Marxist Ecclesiology and Biblical Criticism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Jan.-March 1976, Vol.37, No.1. ↩︎
- To see the absurdity of this new outburst of ‘creative Marxism’ as a result of what happened in Czechoslovakia what we have to imagine is that, say, in Holland, one political party after ruling by force for twenty years had allowed – without giving up its monopoly of power – some television stations to show more varied programmes, and, as a result we would proclaim to the world that here is real capitalism, capitalism with a human face. Part of the reason why such absurdities do not happen in what socialists call the capitalist world is that capitalism, unlike socialism, is not a belief system which periodically inflicts existential crises of self-identity on its believers. ↩︎
- As one should expect, some of our bourgeois Marxists are working on the ‘creative development’ of Marx according to which Marx was an environmentalist. ↩︎
- The then Premier of Western Australia. He was Premier from 1974 to 1982. This essay must have been written between 1976 and 1982. [AT] ↩︎