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Communism: The Philosophical Foundations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Antony Flew
Antony Flew
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Extract

‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ It is with this seminal sentence that Leszek Kolakowski begins his great work on The Main Currents of Marxism: its Rise, Growth and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). Both the two terms in the predicate expression are crucial. It is most illuminating to think of Marx as originally a philosopher, even though nothing in his vastly voluminous works makes any significant contribution to philosophy in any academic understanding of that term. It is also essential to recognize that for both Marx and Engels philosophy was always primarily, indeed almost exclusively, what they and their successors called classical German philosophy. This was a tradition seen as achieving its climactic fulfilment in the work of Hegel, and one which they themselves identified as a main stimulus to their own thinking. Thus Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, claimed that ‘The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy’.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 66 , Issue 257 , July 1991 , pp. 269 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1991

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References

1 The fact that a joint composition by Marx and Engels first published only decades after their deaths—The German Ideology—was adopted a few years ago as a set-book for certain British school examinations in Philosophy has to be seen realistically: not as a belated admission of the authors' stature as philosophers comparable with the authors of the other works prescribed—Descartes, Hume and Mill; but instead as one more example of that servile fawning upon power to which George Orwell saw intellectuals as occupationally inclined.

2 Selected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951), Vol. II, p. 361Google Scholar. In ‘Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’ Lenin wrote similarly: ‘the doctrine of Marx … is the legitimate successor of the best that was created by humanity in the nineteenth century ….German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.’

3 Compare my ‘Prophecy or Philosophy? Historicism or History?’, in Duncan, R. and Wilson, C. (eds.) Marx Refuted (Bath: Ashgrove, 1987), pp. 68–88.Google Scholar

4 The final paragraph begins: ‘When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make?’ Then, referring to the sort of work to which the embargo applies, it concludes: ‘Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.’

5 Political Studies Vol. XXIX No. 1 (1981): p. 117.Google Scholar

6 New Society (London) for 3 11 1983.Google Scholar

7 Schwartzschild, LeopoldThe Red Prussian (London: Pickwick, Second Edition, 1986).Google Scholar

8 The outstanding critical study, unlikely ever to be superseded as a treatment of the period which it covers, is the Wetter, Jesuit Father Gustav's Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1958).Google Scholar

9 Compare McLellan, DavidMarx before Marxism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, Revised Edition 1972), p. 67Google Scholar: ‘It was precisely this gap between what is and what ought to be that Marx considered to have been bridged by the Hegelian philosophy.’ Those wishing to learn the truth about this controverted topic should study Hudson, W. D. (ed.) The Is/Ought Question London: Macmillan, 1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Engels, FriedrichHerr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (AntiDühring), translated by Burns, Emile (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1934).Google Scholar

11 Engels, FriedrichThe Dialectics of Nature, translated by Dutt, Clemens (New York: International, 1940), pp. 26–7Google Scholar. This Edition contains a Preface and Notes by J. B. S. Haldane, who was at the time both Britain's leading geneticist and a member of the National Executive of the local Communist Party. He suggested that Einstein's low opinion of the work should be disregarded on the ground that Einstein probably saw only the admittedly worthless essay on electricity. So compare the Appendix to Hook, Sidney, Dialectical Materialism and Scientific Method (Manchester: Committee on Science and Freedom, 1955)Google Scholar, which prints a letter from Einstein saying that Edward Bernstein showed him the entire manuscript.

12 See, for instace, Popper, K. R., Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), especially Chapter 1.Google Scholar

13 See Popper, K. R.The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957)Google Scholar; and compare my ‘Popper and Historicist Necessities’, in Philosophy for 1990, pp. 53–64.Google Scholar

14 Can we, should we, refrain from repeating the concluding sentence of the obituary tribute paid to Marx: ‘So war dieser Mann der Wissenschaft’?

15 In my Darwinian Evolution (London: Granada Paladin, 1984), III 3Google Scholar, I argued at some length that it was because Engels was so right in the first claim made in that tribute—that Marx was always, before all else, the revolutionary—that he was so wrong in the second—that the achievement of Marx as a social scientist was on all fours with that of Darwin in biology. For, as I show there, Marx repeatedly, shamefully, and shamelessly preferred revolutionary rhetoric to scientific truth.

16 On the appeal of this promise to the first Russian disciples see, for instance, Wesson, R. G.Why Marxism? (London: Temple Smith, 1976), p. 46.Google Scholar

17 In Early Writings, translated by Livingstone, R. and Berton, G., introduced by Colletti, L. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 323.Google Scholar

18 See, for instance, McClellan op. cit., passim. In his Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London: Granada Paladin, 1976)Google Scholar McClellan cites a remark supposedly made by Philippe, Louis in 1845: ‘We must purge Paris of German philosophers’ (p. 135).Google Scholar

19 Early Writings, p. 256: original emphasis.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., p. 348: original emphasis.

21 Anyone insisting upon such explorations will find the best guide in Hook, S., From Hegel to Marx (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan UP:, New Edition, 1962).Google Scholar

22 See, for instance, Voslensky, M., Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class (London: The Bodley Head, 1984).Google Scholar