For Workers' Power by Brinton Maurice; Goodway David;

Author:Brinton, Maurice; Goodway, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2020-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

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150. L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942), pp. 14–15.

151. F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian or Scientific (Moscow, 1955), p. 108.

152. A. Pannekoek, Anthropogenesis (North Holland, 1953).

153. That Marx wanted to dedicate Capital to Darwin was no accident. Darwin refused, feeling he had a ‘bad’ enough reputation already.

33: Introduction to Cornelius Castoriadis, History as Creation

‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, and all that is holy is profaned…’ (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848)

These words are even truer today than when they were written 130 years ago. In the 19th century the idea of progress was self-evident: the body of scientific knowledge grew and grew and rapidly became incorporated into the fabric of expanding capitalism. In the 1890s some physicists even predicted that all there was to know about the universe would soon be within their grasp. The figure of twenty years was bandied about. Great ‘unifying’ theories were being thrown up: Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, the Universal Theory of Gravitation, Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table of Elements, Darwin’s theory of the Origin of Species through Natural Selection. The great intellectual edifice of 19th century science was an imposing counterpoint to the remorseless surge of the industrial revolution, which during this period was changing the face of Europe. Technology seemed omnipotent. The bourgeoisie had dethroned God and instituted the realm of Reason. It believed that everything was inherently rational, determinable, quantifiable. (It had to be, in order to bought and sold.)

This was the science that the founders of ‘scientific socialism’ had sucked into their bones: the science of elegant universalism, of cosmological laws to which there were no exceptions, of systems that would encompass the whole of reality in their net. The very structure of this kind of thinking reflected the confident ambitions of a capitalism in full development. In the air was the promise that life itself would soon be amenable to the same mathematical manipulations that had successfully predicted the motions of the stars, the combination of atoms and the propagation of light.

It is scarcely surprising that, as an offshoot or extension of bourgeois objectivist rationalism, a grand theory of history and social change (namely Marxism) was also to emerge, based on the methodological premises and impregnated with the scientific euphoria of the 19th century. This particular setting ‘provided both the bricks and mortar for such a theory…largely predetermining even what were to be its dominant categories’. The economy seemed the obvious basis of all social relations, and was solemnly theorized as such. The techniques of capitalist production were consecrated as scientifically inevitable although criticism was levied at how the product was distributed. Capitalist models of organization and efficiency were imported into the radical movement. Under the guise of revolutionary theory, an ideology was born and was to develop, the ideology of a bureaucracy whose ascendancy was still in the future.

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