Quick Notes on Marx's Determinism
A criticism often levied against Marx is due to his economic determinism. I'm of the view that this is typically overblown by his critics (and sometimes his supporters too!) and based on a caricatured view of Marx, heavily influenced by Stalin's Marxism-Leninism.
Marxism is often framed in terms of a linear societal development, a marche generale, driven by inexorable economic forces through primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and finally global, stateless communism. However, many of Marx's fundamental concepts contradict this view, and this is reflected even in some of his most famous quips!
For example, one of the most famous of all Marx quotes, from 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte opens explicitly with human agency. This is actually oft quoted to show Marx's determinism, as if the first clause does not exist!
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
Another incredibly famous quote, from Marx's Theses on Feuerbach echoes the exact same sentiment:
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.
Marx outlined his intent and limits of his magnum opus Capital in a letter to a critic. He is explicit that he is not suggesting a universal path of development:
But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) ...Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.
This touches similar themes to some of his earlier works, such as in The Holy Family wherein he is directly criticising pan-historic grand narratives of a deterministic or teleological nature:
History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles”. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.
Engels, too, spent some time criticising the "tommyrot" of overly economic deterministic thought:
History is so made that the end-result always arises out of the conflict of many individual wills, in which every will is itself the product of a host of special conditions of life. Consequently there exist innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant product – the historical event. This again may itself be viewed as the product of a force acting as a whole without consciousness or volition. For what every individual wills separately is frustrated by what every one else wills and the general upshot is something which no one willed. And so the course of history has run along like a natural process; it also is subject essentially to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals – who desire what the constitution of their body as well as external circumstances, in the last instance economic (either personal or social) impel them to desire – do not get what they wish, but fuse into an average or common resultant, from all that one has no right to conclude that they equal zero. On the contrary, every will contributes to the resultant and is in so far included within it.
It would be very hard to attempt to explain by economic causes, without making ourselves ridiculous, the existence of every petty German state of the past or present, or the origin of the shifting of consonants in High-German, which reinforced the differences that existed already in virtue of the geographical separating wall formed by the mountains from Sudeten to Taunus.
If Barth imagines that we deny all and every retroaction of the political, etc., reflexes of the economic movement upon that movement itself, he is simply contending against windmills. He ought at least take a glance at Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, which almost restricts itself to the treatment of the special role that political struggles and events play, naturally within the sphere of their general dependence upon economic conditions; or in Capital, e.g., the section on the working day, where legislation, which certainly is a political act, operates so decisively; or the section on the history of the bourgeoisie (Chap. 24). Or else, why are we struggling for the political dictatorship of the proletariat, if political power has no economic effects? Force (i.e., the state power) is also an economic power!
Of itself economics produces no effects here directly; but it determines the kind of change and development the already existing intellectual material receives, and even that, for the most part, indirectly, since it is the political, jural and moral reflexes which exercise the greatest direct influence upon philosophy.
Etc etc
A bit of quote spam, but I think its useful to look directly at the source. When one does encounter aspects of determinism in Marx and Engel's writing (Socialism Utopian and Scientific being a good prime offender), I think it is always good to take the above quotes as a starting interpreting point, rather than later works from the Stalinist period.