marx and determinism

Marx and DeterminismAuthor(s): Howard ShermanSource: Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Mar., 1981), pp. 61-71Published by: Association for Evolutionary EconomicsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4224996 .

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Jj JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ISSUES 'J Vol. XV No. 1 March 1981

Marx and Determinism

Howard Sherman

Even the best modern social scientists sometimes seem confused about the age-old issue of determinism and free will in social processes. Many economists incorrectly conclude that there are only two logically possible positions. One view is rigid determinism: Everything is predetermined, people are puppets, and the political result is fatalism. The second view is free teleological causation or free will, which says that humans are at liberty to do whatever they will, and the political result is voluntarism. My own opinion (which happens to be my interpretation of Marx) is that both of these views are inaccurate and one-sided. It is possible to combine the best elements of both in a truly scientific determinism, which includes human behavior based on human choice.

Predeterminism and Fatalism

Many religions of the world have considered that the path of history is predetermined by God or Fate. On this basis, many believe that what will happen will happen, and they accept their destiny with fatalism. This attitude is obviously deadly to any political action, and for centuries religious fatalism has stood as a barrier to any attempts to improve the world in which we live.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several philosophies developed which were not always explicitly religious, but which came to the

The author is Professor of Economics, University of California, Riverside. He wishes to thank Jon Wisman and several anonymous referees for very helpful and constructive comments.

61



62 Howard Sherman

same conclusions. For example, Hegel spoke of the "world spirit" requir- ing (or predetermining) a particular development, such as the rise of Napoleon. Similarly, some historians explained the rise of American imperialism by the notion of "manifest destiny." Typical of this view is a statement by a well-known historian as late as 1927: "These great changes seem to have come about with a certain inevitableness, there seems to have been an independent trend of events, some inexorable necessity controlling the progress of human affairs.... History ... has not been the result of voluntary efforts on the part of individuals or groups of individuals, much less chance; but has been subject to law."' The fatalism expressed here must be distinguished from a scientific view of determinism. The law to which the writer refers may be quite com- patible with scientific determinism, but if he means inexorable necessi- ties-or forces beyond human control-then he lapses into fatalism.

This distinction has been clarified as follows:

Fatalism is the view that everything is predetermined, that what happens is not affected by what we do.... Everything... just happens to us, for nothing is the result of our own decisions. Determinism is the view that everything occurs lawfully. That is, for any event there is a set of laws or regularities connecting it with other events. With respect to human con- duct, this implies, first, that there are circumstances-in our constitutions, background, environment, and character-that are jointly sufficient conditions for our behavior, including the choices we make. It implies, second, that these choices have causal consequences. . .. In contrast to fatalism, it follows that our choices sometimes make a difference.2

This quotation defines the essential difference between predeterminism or fatalism and scientific determinism. Determinism means explaining events in the matrix of relationships and regularities of human behavior. But, unlike the fatalists, a social scientist includes human beings and their decisions among the factors causing any social event, even though our behavior is conditioned by our social and biological inheritances and environments.

John Stuart Mill points out that it is one thing to say that social change is determined by "laws" or regularities, and quite another to say that "therefore, human actions have no effect on history." The "therefore" simply does not follow. Similarly, Mill argues that there is a great difference between the belief in causation, the existence of "laws" or regularities of human social behavior, and fatalism, the belief that individuals or even governments are helpless to influence history.



Marx and Determinism 63

If any one in a storm at sea, because about the same number of persons in every year perish by shipwreck, should conclude that it was useless for him to attempt to save his own life, we should call him a Fatalist; and should remind him that the efforts of shipwrecked persons to save their lives are so far from being immaterial, that the average amount of those efforts is one of the causes on which the ascertained annual number of deaths by shipwreck depend.3

Mill also attacks one of the most persistent variations of the fatalist argument, the notion that human nature cannot be changed. This argument has been used against every proposal to improve society, and even to deny that major social changes ever could have taken place or ever will (except for those somehow predetermined by "human nature"). Mill argued that "human nature can no longer be regarded as the final and most general cause of historical progress; if it is constant, then it cannot explain the extremely changeable course of history; if it is changeable, then obviously its changes are themselves determined by historical progress."4

Institutionalists and Marxists have written extensively on how human ideas ("human nature") arise from given structures and conflicts of socioeconomic institutions. At the same time, nondogmatic institutionalists and Marxists avoid economic or technological determinism by em- phasizing that human beings, guided by their own ideas, are the makers of institutions and events at a given time. There is a reciprocal interac- tion.5 As Marx wrote: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."0

Many dogmatic "Marxists," particularly Joseph Stalin and his followers, have interpreted Marx in terms of an inevitable march of history. This type of fatalism or predeterminism "insists that there are compre- hensive laws of the social process that are wholly independent of actions of individuals. Men's choices do not and cannot affect these large-scale, collective historical developments. . . . Predeterminism is not only dif- ferent from scientific determinism, it is inconsistent with it."7 Whereas the predeterminism of theologians and Hegelians refers to the inevitable movements of general ideas, the predeterminism of dogmatic (or mecha- nistic or vulgar) Marxists refers to general historical or economic forces. Somehow, these forces are considered to operate regardless of human psychologies or actions.

From the German Social Democrats of the 1890s to the Stalinists of



64 Howard Sherman

the 1930s, some Marxists declared that "history" had in some fashion determined-independently of human decisions-that socialism is inevitable because of the march of economic forces. This view makes very nice propaganda because everyone likes to be on the side of the inevitable winning cause. The major drawback, however, is that fatalism leads to neglect of political struggle. If the revolution is "inevitable," why do we have to work for it?

Yet, the Stalinists and the communist parties of the world profess to be strongly in favor of organization, political struggle, and revolution. Therefore, they also strongly attack the views of fatalism found in some earlier socialist movements. Since "inevitability" leads to fatalism, however, their position is an inconsistent merger of two contradictory views. One cannot assert, on the one hand, that all of history is determined by nonpersonal forces in an inevitable progression, while asserting, on the other hand, the need for human political action. These two views contra- dict each other in a formal, logical sense, and their eclectic joining cannot be defined as a "higher synthesis."

These confusions of vulgar Marxism have been exploited with great glee by every critic of Marxism. For example, Lewis Feuer says that if Marx sees a necessary progression of history, he cannot also believe in any human intervention in history.8 Similarly, Murray Wolfson bases virtually his entire book on a predeterminist view of Marx. He claims that for Marx to be correct, it is not enough to show that socialism is a desirable alternative to capitalism, but that "capitalism has to decline."9 He thus sets up a straw man who argues that the inevitable laws of history (known a priori) must make capitalism come to a final and automatic doom, regardless of human action. He then, naturally, demolishes his own straw man and believes that he has thereby demolished Marx.

Finally, the most often quoted critic of Marxism is Karl Popper, whose works form the basis for that of most other critics. Popper calls the dogmatic Marxist view "historicism" and attacks this stereotype. His attack on "historicism"-and its distinction from ordinary scientific prediction- is worth quoting at length. So long as one does not confuse so-called historicism with Marxist or scientific determinism, his remarks are partially correct and constitute an excellent attack on "hard determinism" or predeterminism.

The historicist doctrine which teaches that it is the task of the social sciences to predict historical developments is, I believe, untenable.... Ordi- nary predictions in science are conditional. They assert that certain changes (say, of the temperature of water in a kettle) will be accompanied by other changes (say, the boiling of the water) ... so we can learn from




the economist that under certain conditions, such as shortage of com- modities, controlled prices, and say, the absence of an effective punitive system, a black market will develop.

Unconditional scientific predictions can sometimes be derived from these conditional scientific predictions, together with historical statements which assert that the conditions in question are fulfilled.... If a physician has diagnosed scarlet fever, then he may, with the help of the conditional predictions of his science, make the unconditional prediction that his patient will develop a rash of a certain kind.10

But, Popper adds, "the historicist does not, as a matter of fact, derive his historical prophecies from conditional scientific predictions." Popper's attack on historicism or predeterminism is basically correct, but one should note that this position is held only by some vulgar Marxists, but not by most Marxists or radicals.

Popper correctly argues that there is no predetermined law of biological or social evolution, handed down as an eternal plan by God, Charles Darwin, or Marx. Yet, there just as certainly is a "law of evolution" for animals in the sense that the process of selection and adaptation pro- duces certain trends of change. These result in animals better adapted to the environment and involve regularities on the basis of which biologists can explain the past or predict the future (exactly in the way that Popper's physician can predict the course of scarlet fever). Similarly, the "laws of evolution" of society can be stated in the sense that selection and adaptation have produced certain trends resulting in social relations that are better adapted to the changing technological and natural environment. Just as in biology, the social process has certain regularities on the basis of which scientific explanations and predictions can be made.

Indeterminacy, Free Will, and Voluntarism

There are those who deny any determinism in history. They point out that men and women make decisions, that they have the "free will" to do what they will in many cases. One can choose to vote for candidate X or for candidate Y. They therefore conclude human actions are not determined in any way, that each of us has the free will to do as he or she pleases. The political consequence of this thinking is "voluntarism," the notion that "we" merely have to decide something, and it will be done. Tomorrow, if all Americans should consider which alternative economic system they desire and decide in favor of socialism, then the country will be socialist. If most Americans decide that all goods and services shall be free, and that people shall work simply for the good of society without



66 Howard Sherman

wages, then that shall be so. One finds this dreamy attitude in Charles Reich's Greening of America, in which he imagines that a change of "con- sciousness" will automatically bring utopia with no organization and no struggle against vested interests.

The voluntarist view, that people can make any choice regardless of their circumstances, is widespread in modern American social sciences:

Voluntarism has historically been a liberal concept to justify the status quo. When asked why there are rich and poor, liberalism argues that rich and poor exist because man chooses to attend school or not, to work hard or not ... to save or not, etc.... In bourgeois economic theory each con- sumer is treated as sovereign, as an autonomous being whose preferences are responsible for all economic behavior, and, consequently, for the entire capitalist system. In bourgeois political theory the voter (or ... interest group) is likewise treated as sovereign . .. whose political choice determines the course of the political system."1

The neoclassical economics notion that everything is a matter of individual choice and preference completely obscures the functioning of the socioeconomic institutions and environment within which we live.

The "free will" attitude was dominant in the early eighteenth century, when it was thought that there was no determined course of history. This view, developed in reaction to theological fatalism, maintained that historical events were decided by natural accidents, such as the storm which destroyed the Spanish Armada, or by the accident of birth of some great man, such as Julius Caesar, who would then change the course of history. The nineteenth-century reaction to this view was the theory of Hegel and others that everything is determined by history (or abstract ideas or the "absolute spirit"), that humans play no role, except as puppets, and must accept their destiny with fatalism.

There was also a scientific reaction against the free will position. Men such as John Stuart Mill and Marx pointed out that one can find regularities of human behavior, that on the average we do behave in certain predictable ways. This behavior also changes in systematic ways, with predictable trends, in association with changes in our technological and social environments. At a simpler level, the regularities of human behavior are obvious in the fairly constant annual numbers of suicides and divorces (although these also show systematic trends). If humans did not, gener- ally, behave in fairly predictable ways, not only social scientists but also insurance companies would have gone out of business long ago. Any particular individual may make any particular choice, but if we know the social composition of a group, we can predict, in general, what it will do. Thus, on the average, most large owners of stock will vote in




favor of preferential tax rates for capital gains; most farmers will favor laws that they believe to be in the interest of farmers.

Existentialist Marxism

The existentialist school of Marxists has revived the "free will" argument against fatalism. Immediately after World War II, people such as Jean Paul Sartre felt that more consideration must be given to ordinary human problems than to the "inevitable" sweep of history. The existentialists attacked vulgar Stalinist Marxism for neglecting problems such as human alienation and human freedom. They attacked it for seeing an "inevitable," almost fatalistic, march of history to preordained ends. The existentialists argued that people are not puppets of historical forces, but are free individuals with responsibility for their actions and the ability to make choices. A sympathetic historian wrote: "Existentialist-Marxist thought ... emphasizes ... the freedom of man to act ... many philoso- phers and historians have rebelled at the idea that men are ruled by 'laws' or 'patterns' of historical development."''2

By the early 1960s, Sartre and others began to form the existentialist Marxist movement which achieved some popularity later in the decade. While the earlier Sartre was anti-Marxist, he now made a major contribu- tion to Marxist social science. In Search for a Method,13 he violently attacks the economic determinism of vulgar Marxism but upholds the historical materialism of Marx. For example, in explaining the views of a politician or a poet, he shows that it is quite insufficient to cite his or her class background: Frederick Engles was the son of a factory owner and later supported Marx from the factory's profits. Sartre correctly points out that to understand an individual it is necessary to dig deeper than the vulgar Marxist class analysis, to examine specific historical complexities, and to investigate in detail the individual's biography, beginning with his or her family and childhood. There is certainly nothing un-Marxist about going beyond a simplistic two-class view or examining personal psychological motivation; this is obvious in many of Marx's works, exemplified by the very rich historical complexity in his analysis of Napoleon III.14

Some of Sartre's followers have remained more existentialist than Marx- ist. One, Richard Pozzuto, writes: "Given a scientific interpretation of the world . . . the potential for human liberation is stifled since man has given up responsibility and control of his life to an external force.... If we were to follow the argument that Marx is a determinist, we would find no political task for human actors.""5 Any institutionalist or Marxist can sympathize with Pozzuto's desire for human freedom and his opposition



68 Howard Sherman

to treating humans as puppets. It is a false dichotomy, however, to set political freedom against a "scientific interpretation" or "determinist" view of history. As noted earlier, Marx argued that people freely make their own history-it is not predetermined by God, Marx, or economic trends-but they do make historical choices under given conditions.

Scientific Determinism

Neither the dogmatic views of predeterminism (or fatalism) nor the equally dogmatic views of free will (or voluntarism) are defensible. A scientific determinism must oppose both, while using the grain of truth in each. Predeterminism claims that man is a puppet of Fate, God, economic forces, or whatever, which leads to the position of fatalism, which cannot be defended. The free will position claims that history is acci- dental, there are no laws, humans can do anything, which leads to voluntarism in politics, religious mysticism, or opium dreams, and it also cannot be defended. A scientific determinist position simply asserts that everything-not only natural but also social events-is explainable on the basis of observed relationships, including the existing psychology and behavior of humans. In this view, humans make their own history; that is, humans can make their own decisions on the basis of their own ideas and psychologies, but under given natural and social constraints. "Scientific determinism is the view that every event occurs in some system of laws . . . if we knew [all] these laws and the state of the universe at any time, then we could explain the past and predict the future. This frame of re- ference includes, as it consistently must, human actions which, therefore, can be the object of scientific study."'16

Of course, we can never know all of the laws of the universe, nor the complete state of the universe at a particular time, so our explanations and predictions must always be partial, although we may hope that they will improve as we learn more laws. Furthermore, "laws" are not absolutes given forever by God or Darwin, but merely our best description of certain regularities as presently known. The future will take place in some particular way, but our knowledge of social "laws" and our predictions based upon them are always limited. We are constrained at any given time by (1) the extent of known facts; (2) the analytic theories available (including restricted mathematical knowledge); (3) our imperfect reasoning power; (4) the time available to research a problem; and (5) the fact that we are part of the social process and, therefore, have "limited" or biased views of it."7 Economists know something about social laws at any given time, but not everything.




Some skeptics have argued that economics cannot be scientific (or determinist) because social situations are not exactly repeated or recur- rent. They conclude that economists can draw no precise unconditional predictions. This is simply another limitation of our predictive ability; it is not a telling argument against a reasonable or scientific determinism. In fact, even in the natural sciences, none but the very simplest situations can be exactly repeated in the laboratory. Outside the laboratory, natural situations also do not exactly repeat themselves. Scientists base "laws" on what is common to many situations or individuals. The fact that each situation or individual is unique only means they are not identical; unique- ness does not mean they have nothing in common. We can formulate laws, but they are limited by the degree to which each new individual or situation includes the common aspect on which the law is based. This variability limits predictive power for both the natural and social sciences, and the difference is only one of degree.

Scientific Marxist determinism has always emphasized that human be- liefs and actions must be included as a dynamic determining factor of social analysis. Certainly, humans are "free" in the sense that they may make any decision they care to make and may act upon it. Humans are "determined" in the sense that their decisions are predictable as a statistical probability for an entire group within the limits of social science knowledge, just as the weather is predictable as a statistical probability within the limits of current human knowledge of natural science (as well as our fact-gathering technology). Human decisions are predictable (within those limits) because they result from human ideas and psychological states. These ideas and states are determined for each individual by his or her experiences from birth to the present (and his or her inherited physiology). Knowing a group's history and environment, social scientists can predict its behavior (within the limits stated above), but that does not make the group or the individual member any less free or their actions any more predetermined by some outside plan. Of course, humans can carry out their decisions only within biological, physical, and political-economic conditions inherited from the past. Humans make their own history, but under given ("determining") conditions, and in predictable ways, although our predictive powers are limited in the ways stated above.

It is thus perfectly consistent to be determinist in the sense that economists may investigate and discover the laws of social history, while acknowledging free will in the sense of urging individuals to participate in political struggles to affect history. We cannot change history in the sense that there is no predetermined history to change, but we can make



70 Howard Sherman

history in the sense that history is always made by human beings acting under certain social and natural conditions. Even the former existentialist, Sartre, now agrees that humans make history on the basis of certain given conditions.18 These include our present (1) technology and capital; (2) resources and natural environment; (3) social, economic, and political institutions; and (4) ideas, including each individual's psychology.

Human beings are free to make (or not make) a revolution, but our actions are predictable by a knowledge of present and previous conditions, including our psychologies, and the laws or regularities of human behavior under these conditions. "To say that the revolution is inevitable is simply (in Marx's scheme) to say that it will occur. And it will occur . . . not in spite of any choices we might make, but because of choices we will make."19 The prediction of socialist revolution, however, must be expressed as a probability rather than a certainty because of our limited knowledge of the conditions and the laws.

Notes

1. Edward Cheney, Law in History and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1927), p. 7.

2. May Brodbeck, "Introduction to Part Eight," in Readings in the Philoso- phy of the Social Sciences, edited by May Brodbeck (New York: Mac- millan, 1968), p. 671.

3. John Stuart Mill, "Elucidations of the Science of History," in Theories of History, edited by Patrick Gardiner (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 99-100.

4. Ibid., p. 164 5. See Howard Sherman, "Technology vis-a-vis Institutions: A Marxist

Commentary," Journal of Economic Issues 13 (March 1979): 175-91. 6. Karl Marx, quoted and discussed with an interpretation opposed to mine

in E. K. Hunt, "The Importance of Veblen for Contemporary Marxism," Journal of Economic Issues 13 (March 1979): 116.

7. Brodbeck, "Introduction," p. 671. 8. Lewis Feuer, "Causality in the Social Sciences," in Cause and Effect,

edited by Daniel Lerner (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 302-41. 9. Murray Wolfson, A Reappraisal of Marxian Economics (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 6. 10. Karl Popper, "Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences," in Theo-

ries of History, edited by Gardiner, pp. 278-79. 11. Al Szymanski, "Marxism or Liberalism?" Insurgent Sociologist 3 (Sum-

mer 1973): 59. 12. Howard Zinn, Politics of History (Boston: Beacon, 1970), p. 279. 13. Jean Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Vintage, 1968),

first published in 1960 as part of Critique de la raison dialectique.




14. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963 [1852]).

15. Richard Pozzuto, "Pre-Marxian Marxism," Insurgent Sociologist 3 (Sum- mer 1973): 53 and 55.

16. Brodbeck, "Introduction," p. 669. 17. See John Kemeny, A Philosopher Looks at Science (New York: Van

Nostrand Reinhold, 1959), p. 78. 18. See Sarte, Search, passim. 19. Laird Addis, "The Individual and the Marxist Philosophy of History,"

in Reading's, edited by Brodbeck, p. 335



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