What is the proper relationship between science and textual exegesis in Marxism? What does it mean to uphold one at the expense of the other? Comrade Magsalin’s piece, “The Question of a Stagnant Marxism: Is Marxism Exegetical or Scientific?” poses the relationship as a zero-sum, mutually exclusive one. Exegesis of “alchemical tomes” is equated with stagnation and opposed to “theoretical *development* of Marxism as a scientific tradition.”
While it is uncontroversial to say of Marxism that it should develop and grow, it is much harder (and rightfully so!) to demonstrate that any particular “innovation” in the tradition really constitutes an innovation and not a backslide. Comrade Magsalin, in lieu of this hard work, treats the problem of “science” vs. “exegesis” in the abstract, leaning on the tacit assumption of the excluded middle to carry the weight of his argument.
When the piece does briefly mention specific innovators, it doesn’t seem to appreciate that, in order to be persuasive, it must demonstrate that their contributions are novel and valuable. “The Marxist theory of imperialism as popularized by Lenin has a contemporary equivalent in the World Systems Theory elaborated by Immanuel Wallerstein.” But equivalence is not innovation! If they’re equivalents, why should anyone put down their Lenin to pick up Wallerstein?
Comrade Magsalin, like myself, is fond of rhetorical questions. He asks the same rhetorical question several times:
“Why is it that these [newer] theories have not displaced older texts like Lenin’s Imperialism in Marxist ideological pedagogy?”
“[W]hy is that Marxists are called to return to the classics again and again, something that other scientists do not necessarily do?”
“Why is it that this unchanging tendency persists[?]”
These (very similar) questions can and should be answered. The answer provided (that Marxism has a “normative dimension, which has a certain timelessness that cannot be subjected to scientific positivism”) makes Marx out to be a spiritual teacher who still has true things to say about what we should want. While this isn’t the worst way to view Marx, more needs to be said about how the normative and the positive interpenetrate in Marxism, and the implications of this. Marx upends and revolutionizes normative thinking just as much as he does positive thinking.
One way that Marxism differs from other sciences is that our experiments are not perfectly replicable, since they take place in history. Because we aim for proletarian power, revolutionary historical experiences, i.e. those where proletarian power seems greatest or closest at hand, take pride of place. Thus it makes sense to privilege those theorists who have had the most to do with the shaping of successful revolutions or revolutionary organizations.
Something else that distinguishes Marxism from other sciences is that it has class enemies who seek constantly to blunt or distort it. It is prudent, then, to treat claims of innovation from non-revolutionaries with skepticism. There are only a couple of throwaway references to opportunism in Comrade Magsalin’s piece, plus a decidedly dismissive one to revisionism, but these related errors are infamous in Marxism for a reason. I won’t quote Lenin here because it should be uncontroversial to observe that many people try to pass off a watered-down, defanged and declawed version of Marxism as either the long-awaited Correct Interpretation or as a totally new and brilliant socioeconomic theory.
If we decide in favor of “science” and against “exegesis” in the abstract, then we will be more easily taken in by flashy novelty and scientistic modes of presentation, and less sensitive to subtle changes that may not be for the better. In the “hard sciences,” a new scientific paradigm supplants an older one only by *doing a better job* at explaining things. Prospective innovations in Marxism should be held to at least this standard, but in fact, Marxism adds an additional wrinkle: not only do we care about explaining things, but also, or even principally, about *changing* them. Since this is a question of a theory’s efficacy in history, it is by nature more contentious and open-ended than those faced by the “hard sciences”. In Marxism, as in the social sciences more generally, questions aren’t closed with the same finality as in other sciences. Whoever wants to write a Marxist “textbook” is welcome to try their hand at it, but it will inevitably elicit fierce criticism from opposing tendencies, and is unlikely to join the canon, let alone win universal assent or supplant the classics. Innovations in our field are always tentative and provisional until they receive the imprimatur of a world-historical revolution (and sometimes not even then, because it is so tricky to establish a causal link between some idea and some event, or the correctness of some value-judgment).
As the most politically engaged social science, Marxism is also the most *reflexive*. To see why this is so, consider that the main reason people find Marxism implausible today is the growth, since Marx’s time, of a large middle class in the developed world. But this phenomenon can’t be understood except as a historical byproduct of Marxism itself! Marxism lives within its object of study and has to take responsibility for its consequences—another reason it has a different relation to its classics and would-be textbooks than other sciences do. Texts that helped bring about revolutions or mass movements deserve closer, more sustained attention than unproven attempts to “update” them, which are just as likely to neglect important aspects of the problem as they are to shed light on new ones.
Comrade Magsalin’s ire is particularly focused on Engels’ “On Authority,” which he claims has “stunted the intellectual development of thousands—if not millions—of Marxists the world over.” He claims that Engels makes a straw man out of the concepts “the *principle of authority* and *authoritarianism*”. He writes: “If one fails to engage with the ideas one is critiquing, then the critique itself fails.” I agree. I would follow Domenico Losurdo even further: “We believe that the reading of a text can be accurate to the extent that it is able to account for the history of interpretations; to the extent that it does not dismiss it as a sequel of misunderstandings and mistakes; and in the final analysis, to the extent that it takes into account the reception of a text and the historical importance of the philosopher who compiled it.”[26-27]
So it is disappointing to see that Comrade Magsalin does not endeavor to understand why “terminally online ‘Marxists’ constantly cite [“On Authority”] again and again and appeal to its authority”. He sees the piece as so stupid that it can be dispatched in a few lines, so he must chalk up its popularity to sheer error and idol-worship. Is this “critically engaging and charitably constructing the arguments” Engels puts forward in “On Authority”? No one could possibly attribute to Engels the belief that “the violence used by the slave to liberate themselves is equal to the violence of slavery.” If that is the position implied by your interpretation of what Engels wrote, your interpretation is wrong. He is making precisely the point that those who condemn “authoritarianism” conflate these two types of violence. Comrade Magsalin abuses the words “equal” and “equate” to distort Engels’ argument beyond recognition.
It may be that Comrade Magsalin’s polemic is obliquely addressing disputes within the CPP that I’m unaware of. I would have much preferred to read a piece that addressed the “disturbing strategic and tactical blunders” of the CPP directly. Instead, what we have is an article that defends the new against the old, the dynamic against the stagnant, the novel against the traditional, the heterodox against the orthodox, the scientific against the exegetical, and so on. This is a cheap, easy, and *empty* position to take. The devil is always in the details: which *specific* ideas count as progress, and which count as regression? Which ideas *ought* to belong to Marxist dogma, and which are extraneous? People return to the classics and do exegesis of them to identify precisely their unsurpassed contributions to the science of Marxism, to critique newer ideas that present themselves as novel and innovative but in fact are anything but. A truly reflexive science cannot take any other approach. Marxism’s adherents are quite accustomed to being called stagnant, outdated, obsolete. Lucky for us that history never quite seems to agree.
Comradely,
Nia Frome
