Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International - Judgements

Lucio Colletti, 

J U D G E M E N T S O F F A C T A N D J U D G E M E N T S O F V A L U E

While Plekhanov reduced Marx to Spinoza, Kautsky reduced him to Darwin. According to Kautsky, man lives in two worlds, the world of the past and the world of the future.[57] The former is the world of experience, scientific knowledge, determinism and necessity; the latter, that of freedom and action. The opposition between these two worlds is removed with the removal of the distinction between 'nature' and 'society'. Whatever its specificity, the historical human world is only a 'moment' in an evolutionary series. The world of freedom and moral law is only one fragment (Stückchen ) of the world of the senses.[58]

Kautsky wanted to guarantee the distinction between freedom and necessity, while at the same time avoiding dualism. He even understood the difficulty of enlightenment, empiricism and sensualism, which, in reducing moral life to simple instinct, failed to account for the peculiarity of the 'will'; for, unlike instinct, the latter implies choice, deliberation and hence responsibility. Nonetheless, Kautsky could not avoid the conclusion of compressing the historical-social world into the framework of cosmic-natural evolution, to such an extent that they were no longer distinguishable. Moral choice itself was reduced in the process to a mere instinct (ein tierischer Trieb ) and the 'ethical law' to a natural impulse equivalent to the instinct of procreation.[59]

The counterposing of causality and finalism reappears here in the form of an opposition between factual and value judgements, between science and ideology."[62]Science 'observes'; it has no options to suggest for human action. Between the objective and impartial factual observations of science and the finalities of the will, there is a radical distinction. From the indicative premises of science one cannot draw conclusions which are determinant of, and binding for, action.

Hilferding wrote in the preface to Finance Capital :

It has been said that politics is a normative doctrine ultimately determined by value judgements; since such value judgements do not belong within the sphere of science, the discussion of politics falls outside the limits of scientific treatment. Clearly, it is not possible here to go into the epistemological debate about the relation between the science of norms and the science of laws, between teleology and causality. . . . Suffice it to say that for Marxism the object of political investigation can only be the discovery of causal connections. . . . According to the Marxist viewpoint, the task of a scientific politics is to discover the determination of the will of classes; hence a politics is scientific when it describes causal connections. As in the case of theory, Marxist politics is exempt from 'value judgements'.

And he concluded:

It is therefore incorrect, though widely diffused both intra and extra muros, simply to identify Marxism and socialism. Considered logically, as a scientific system alone, apart, that is, from the viewpoint of its historical affectivity, Marxism is only a theory of the laws of motion of society. . . . To recognize the validity of Marxism (which implies the recognition of the necessity of socialism) is by no means a task for value judgements, let alone a pointer to a practical line of conduct. It is one thing to recognize a necessity, but quite another to place oneself at the service of that necessity.[63]

The divorce between science and revolution, between knowledge and transformation of the world could not be more complete. In this divorce, moreover, lay the subordinate nature of the Marxism of the Second International, divided between positivist scientism and neo-Kantianism, and yet internally consistent within this opposition. Deterministic objectivisms could not include the ideological moment, the revolutionary political

programme.[54] On the other hand, excluded from science, ideology was readmitted in a world of 'ethical freedom', alongside the world of 'natural necessity', thereby reproducing the Kantian dualism of Mussen and Sollen, 'is' and 'ought'.

It is true that in Hilferding, as in Max Adler and the Austro-Marxist school in general, this line of thought was developed with a subtlety of argument that one would seek in vain in the philosophical writings of Kautsky and Plekhanov. And yet the conviction that there can be a body of scientific knowledge acquired independently of any evaluation, clearly reveals the naïve positivism underlying this line of thought and its inability to recognize that the role of finalism in scientific research is, at least, in one aspect, the very role of deduction. Finalism, in Kant's definition, is the causality of a concept in relation to its object; it is the process whose a priori is an idea. Now the impossibility of eliminating this process from scientific enquiry is the impossibility for science to do away with ideal anticipation and hypothesis. Theory must be a priori, for without ideas there can be no observation; we only see what our pre-conceived ideas prepare us or predispose us to see. As Myrdal has observed: 'Theory . . . must always be a priori to the empirical observations of the facts', since, 'facts come to mean something only as ascertained and organized in the frame of a theory.'[65] 'We need to pose questions before responses can be obtained. And the questions are expressions of our own interest in the world; they are ultimately evaluations.'[66] This is equivalent to Kant's observation that 'when Galileo experimented with balls of a definite weight on the inclined plane, when Torricelli . . . [etc.] and Stahl . . . [etc.], they learned that reason only perceives that which it produces after its own design; that it must not be content to follow, as it were, in the leading-strings of nature but must

proceed in advance . . . and compel nature to reply to its questions'.[67] This implies that what at first appears to be simple observation, a statement of fact, is in effect deduction, the objectification of our ideas, i.e. a projection into the world of our evaluations and pre-conceptions.

On the other hand -- and here finalism in turn is reconverted into causality, deduction into induction -- the inevitable preconceptions of science are distinguished from the prejudgements of metaphysics (the hypotheses of the former from the hypostases of the latter) in that 'if theory is a priori it is on the other hand a first principle of science that the facts are sovereign'. This means that 'when observations of facts do not agree with a theory, i.e. when they do not make sense in the frame of the theory utilized in carrying out the research, the theory has to be discarded and replaced by a better one, which promises a better fit'. In other words, to be truthful, theory must acquire its source and origin in and from reality, it must be accompanied by 'basic empirical research' which must be 'prior to the construction of the abstract theory' and is 'needed for assuring it realism and relevance'.[68]

To summarize: value judgements are inevitably present in scientific research itself, but as judgements whose ultimate significance depends on the degree to which they stand up to historical-practical verification or experiment, and hence on their capacity to be converted ultimately into factual judgements. This is precisely the link between science and politics, between knowledge and transformation of the world, that Marx accomplished in the historical-moral field. ('Marx', it has been observed 'inextricably united in his work statements of fact and value judgements'.)[69] This in turn allows us to understand that what Bernstein and so many others saw as a defect or weakness of Capital -- the co-presence within it of science and ideology -- on the contrary represents its most profound originality and its strongest element.

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