In his much discussed and sometimes reviled Preface to The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx wrote:
“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.”
The passage brims with the confidence of a humanism infused with the spirit of scientific advance, but it also raises a number of difficult philosophical questions with important political implications.
The most fundamental question that it raises is: What are its truth conditions?
This question breaks down into three more particular questions:
What are the sorts of ‘tasks’ that Marx has in mind?
Does he believe that human beings inevitably solve those tasks for which they provide themselves with the materials for solution?
Must a solution be permanent in order for it to be declared a success?
I will try to answer the main question about truth conditions by way of answering these three secondary questions.
To begin, one must keep in mind that work is a preface and that Marx is attempting to sum up in a few paragraphs the basic principles of historical materialism. The main argument of the preface is that periods of social revolution arise when the tensions exerted by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production cannot be contained by the existing institutional structure of society. Marx’s confidence that human beings do not set impossible tasks for themselves is a function of his understanding of this contradiction as the underlying driver (beneath the consciousness of human beings taken as abstract individuals) of historical development.
“No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”
The qualifier “superior” indicates that Marx believes that there is a direction to historical change. Productive forces (the technical capacity and intellectual know how as well as the concrete labour required to convert raw materials into goods useful for some purpose) grow, Marx believes, until the way in which labour is organized (as well as the justified customary, legal, and ethical justifications for the relations of production), restricts further growth. The constriction of productive capacity generates social crises which are– eventually–resolved through the revolutionary transformation of the relations of production.
However, the growth of productive forces is not simply a matter of more, it is equally a matter of better. The development of productive forces is the material condition, Marx thinks, for richer and more comprehensive forms of human individual development. Human problems are ultimately problems of how to organize societies so that people can lead meaningful, satisfying, and enjoyable lives. However, without resources (which must be produced through collective labour) those values are just words. Marx is not indifferent to the philosophical evaluation of different forms of life but only insists that unrealizable ideals are not real values. Values make a difference when they are expressed in forms of life that are actually enjoyable by real people.
Therefore, I think that the tasks that Marx has in mind are not simply technical tasks, but political, social, and existential tasks as well. If Marx were referring to technical tasks only, then the paragraph would simply assert a truism, since it is true by definition that scientific-technical problems cannot be understood as problems unless the concepts in which they are expressed exist. Before one can remove bugs from a computer program, the mathematical logic which underlies programming language must exist and the engineering problems involved in building computational machines must be understood.
The argument is only interesting if Marx means that human beings not only set themselves technical tasks for which they have the means of solution, but also political, social, and existential tasks. But what are the tools that human beings create that can serve as the means to solve those value-laden tasks? Here the problem becomes more complex, since Marx also believes that the solution of social, political, and existential problems requires revolution. Societies break down because, under the pressure of stagnating economies, the old justifications for the existing structure of rule break down. The old gods fall along with the collapse in the production of life-necessities, and new gods must be created to justify new relationships.
That does not mean that the solution to social problems is a function of ideas alone: we solve social problems by transforming our societies. Radical transformation involves ideas and arguments but also the practical means of embodying them in new institutions. Marx thus believes that the tasks that history poses to human beings are on the one hand technical (how to improve the forces through which we produce our means of life), and on the other social (how to organize our societies so that improvements in productive capacity are translated into improved lives). Feudalism’s task was to solve the problems left in the wake of the collapse of Rome, and capitalism’s problem was to overcome the stagnation that ultimately beset feudalism. Socialism, likewise, faces the problem of solving the problems caused by capitalism.
The second question concerns whether Marx believes that human beings inevitably solve the problems that history sets for them, or only inevitably create the conditions that a solution presupposes. The starting point for charitable interpretation is the words the author uses, so let us be charitable and note that Marx says that human beings inevitably give themselves the means of solving problems. He does not add that they will inevitably use those means.
If that is what Marx intends, then the claim seems difficult to falsify. Failure in any particular instance would not disprove the claim because it could always be explained by a failure to use the means at our disposal to solve the problem at hand.
The cost of choosing the more modest interpretation of the claim is that it undermines the obvious belief in historical progress that colors the Preface as a whole. As Marx said in the final Thesis on Feuerbach, the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. And not only to change it (making things worse is as much a change as making things better). The point is to solve the problems (injustice, inequality, exploitation, meaninglessness, violence) that philosophers have argued about for millennia. Once people stop thinking about these problems as timeless abstractions and tie them down to concrete social contexts, definite institutions, and human relationships we will see- just as we saw in the case of technical-scientific problems– that the solution has been prepared by past historical development. The solution to the problem of justice– getting what one deserves– is to distribute the collectively produced social product according to need, to give but one example.
Our answer to the third question thus affects our answer to the second. If Marx counts as solutions only practical changes that improve people’s lives, then he must believe not only that we give ourselves the tools to solve problems in the historically concrete forms in which they confront us, but also that, eventually, we will figure out how to use those tools properly. Failure of one attempt does not prove that subsequent attempts will succeed, assuming that people learn ‘the lessons of history.’
But here is where things become difficult for Marx’s position. While there is abundant evidence that science learns from its mistakes because it operates according to a self-correcting method that can be applied by different scientists working anywhere on the same problem, the only way to correct social problems is to build or change existing societies. Is historical change recursively self-correcting like repeated experiments in science, or does the solution of one set of problems improve the lives of some in some dimensions, but create other, unforeseen problems for others in other dimensions? And if the latter answer is the one best supported by historical evidence, does that have political implications for how we set about solving the tasks which history sets for us?
The problem with determining the truth conditions for Marx’s statement is now clear. Since the implications of historical change can only be determined in the future, one can never be certain that we have correctly applied the tools that past historical development has furnished us with to solve the problem, because new problems can always arise. Thus, if Marx believes that socialism is the solution to all the fundamental problems of human life, there would be no way of determining the truth of that claim until the moment just before the end of human history. Only at the end of a process can one say definitively what its results have been.
But perhaps those conditions are too stringent and we have to adopt more modest criteria for the evaluation of claims about historical developments. I would be inclined towards relaxing the criteria and conclude that since Marx’s claim refers to a dynamic historical landscape and not to timeless realities, we can only assess its truth in definite historical contexts. That is, what Marx is saying is that social changes solve the problems that older societies could not solve, but that does not mean that new and unforeseen problems may not arise. The history of capitalism and revolutionary socialism both contain examples of very serious unforeseen problems.
Industrialization resolved the problem of absolutely scarcity of life-goods, but it reconfigured an older problem of unequal distribution of those same goods while also creating the entirely unforeseen problem of human-caused climate change. No one in the nineteenth century understood the changes to atmospheric chemistry that burning fossil fuels would have leaving those of us alive now, in the twenty-first century, to solve the problem. The technical means exist– or are being rapidly developed– but whether the political, economic, and social changes required to fully realize the promise of renewable energy sources remains an open question.
The example of climate change thus supports Marx’s argument. Even though it was an unforeseen problem of industrialization, we have the scientific and engineering capacity to solve the problem. The social and economic changes required to fully realize the technical potential of green energy lag behind scientific progress, but there is a growing understanding of the need to make those changes. We therefore have the political tools that we need to solve the problem, now we just have to use them.
On the other hand, the history of revolutionary socialism perhaps challenges the optimism that underlies Marx’s claim. Neither the Soviet Union nor China were able to solve the economic problem of replacing the use of market forces to allocate resources, direct investment, and distribute income with a planned economy. The Soviet Command economy proved adept at rapid industrialization and made impressive technological and scientific strides, but at monstrous human cost and on the basis of a central planning system that ultimately could not compete with Western capitalism. China, facing the same sorts of problems, addressed them not by moving towards a more decentralized, democratically planned economy but backwards, towards the use of capitalist market forces. While it is true that the state retains significant power to direct investment (a power which it has used to raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty) it might be better to call the model that has developed since the late 1970’s “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” rather than “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Since the Chinese experiment is on-going, perhaps the safest approach is to wait and see what unfolds, and especially how the Communist party responds to what appear to be building structural tensions in their model, but however the future plays out, China, like the Soviet Union, encountered severe difficulties building a non-market based economy.
A charitable reading of Marx must allow that he claims only that we can solve the problems that confront us with the tools that past development makes available, but can his optimism survive apparently backward historical turns? Or is it just the case that Marxists have not yet discovered the right economic model of socialism? While one must not foreclose on the future or ignore the deep structural crises that capitalism generates, at some point one must call “time” on the evaluative frame of reference. How many revolutionary socialist experiments will be sufficient to declare the project a definitive failure? Or is the lesson of the twentieth century that the mistake lay in believing that socialism could only be constructed through the armed, revolutionary overthrow of the old society and the new one created through conscious planning by a relatively small cadre of disciplined experts?
The problems with the later appear immediately, for it is obvious that there cannot be ‘experts” in the creation of the future. How to tear things down is easy enough, but how to build a completely new set of economic institutions cannot be clarified by studying the past, because the past will only contain examples of the system that one is trying to replace. If one group walls itself off from the masses as a set of vanguard experts, the results seem to be that very ancient human problems will quite quickly emerge that spell doom for socialism as a democratic and progressive alternative to capitalism.
Marxists tend not to focus on the dark side of the human personality, chalking up malign psychological dispositions and misanthropic philosophies to alterable social conditions. But if it is true, as Marx says in the Second Thesis on Feuerbach, that the doctrine that maintains that human beings are functions of circumstances forgets that it is human beings that make circumstances, it is also true that the human beings that make those circumstances are not society-building machines. They are, as Nietzsche would say, human, all too human, and can be motivated by ambition, bloodlust, and a zeal to destroy that overawes their desire to create. One can say that the chaos that followed the Russian Civil War created the conditions for a strongman like Stalin to arise, but one also needs to ask themselves how a Stalin is possible. Not everyone is capable of murdering tens of millions of people. Those who are cannot simply be functions of circumstances because if they were, everyone would be able to step into the breech. There are darker drives in us that are more pronounced in some than others. There is little reason to think that those drives will ever be entirely eliminated.
Does that claim imply anything of political importance? I think so. I think that it cautions us to be wary of human beings: we are ambivalent creatures who (as Spinoza, at the beginning of Part Four of the Ethics) says “see the better and choose the worse.” Selfishness, dogmatism, and violence are transhistorical phenomena. Are we driven by a death instinct, as Freud believed, or a desire to wreck things just to avoid boredom, as Schopenhauer mused? Perhaps those are over generalizations, but it would be naive for thinkers who claim to form their ideas by studying history to ignore the abundant evidence of the existence of antipathetic and malignant sides of human desire and behaviour.
People who claim to study and learn from history cannot be selective in the conclusions that they draw from it. I think that Marx is correct: we do only set ourselves problems for which the solution (in principle) exists. But history also teaches, I think, that theory should be translated into practice via modest experiments whose social implications ramify overtime. Perhaps in that way the ambitious and over-zealous can be exposed before they accrue the power necessary to sacrifice the movement (and millions of other people’s lives) to their own ambitions.
In science, there is no experiment of experiments that will prove everything once for all. Most scientists, therefore, prefer incremental progress to a betting it all on a giant leap that might blow up the lab and prevent further research. Stalinism blew up the revolutionary socialist lab, but democratic mobilization and open ended struggles against the structural problems that capitalism generates remain tools bequeathed by past generations to present and future generations who should put them to work intelligently today and tomorrow.