Marxist Philosophy - Bryan Magee & Charles Taylor (1977)

[Music] foreign [Music] practical terms Marxism must be Far and Away the most influential New Philosophy to have appeared in the last 150 years or so and I suppose most of us have a rough idea anyway of what its basic tenets are one could put them I think like this everything that really matters about a society is determined by how it maintains itself in existence because it's what people have to do to keep alive that really decides their relationship to Nature and to each other and therefore ultimately to everything that grows up on those bases so the decisive thing in any society at any given time is what the means of production are when they change people's ways of life have to change and the way individuals relate to each other has to change and thus the organization of classes changes so long as the means of production are in the hands of a section of society rather than the whole of it a deep-seated conflict of class interests is inevitable for this reason the whole of History up to now is really a history of class struggles this is bound to continue until the means of production are taken over by society as a whole thereby abolishing classes in Marx's sense altogether and held in common ownership and run in the common interest the establishment of this new kind of society I.E communism will inaugurate a whole new era of human history which will be different in kind from the past however since no ruling class can be expected voluntarily to give up its ownership of the means of production with not only the wealth but also the power privilege and Prestige which that confers the forceful overthrow of the existing system is likely to be the only way in which Communism can be established and it's therefore if only for that reason Justified well something like that sketch map of Marxist theory is probably as much as most of us possess and indeed as far as it goes it's accurate but there's so much more to it than that Marxism is a rich and Powerful explanatory system whose intellectual history is colorful and interesting in its own right as well as having an obvious practical influence on the world we live in but in this program we're going to consider Marxism as a philosophy to do so we have someone with us who has a lifelong interest in the subject the Canadian Charles Taylor more than 20 years ago as Chuck Taylor a young fellow of all cells College Oxford he was one of the founders of the new Left movement in Britain since then he's been professor of philosophy and political science at McGill University in Canada has run as a candidate several times for the Canadian Federal Parliament and has published a major book on Marx's philosophical progenitor Hegel now after all these years he's back at all cells as professor of social and political theory in the University of Oxford well Professor Taylor I've started this program by giving a very rough but perhaps overbuild outline of Marx's political and economic theory and what we want to do now is to go into the philosophy that throws these things up to the surface as it were now where would you like to begin in discussing that well I'd like to begin pick up a point you made about how it's what you said was right but it's much richer I mean you gave a thumbnail sketch very good thumbnail sketch of Marx's an explanatory Theory but there's also another dimension a theory of Liberation which I think accounts for the immense importance and excitement that this theory has has generated for the last century you can start really from the same point it's that human beings are what they are because of the way they make their lives the way they produce the means to live and they produce the means that live as a society as a as a group not individually so in a way we could look at them just as another gregarious animal like ants or bees but what differentiates them from answer bees Marx holds is that human beings have this capacity to reflect on and change the way that they work on nature to produce the means to life in other words labor in the human sense in Marx's view incorporates this idea of reflection and that means that they can change the way that they interact with nature over time and that is the dimension it's property human that means that over time they can get greater and greater control greater greater capacity to take from nature what they need and to produce the means to human life now this just doesn't just mean that they aren't monotonously stocked like a certain animal species in the same way of doing things all the time but over history they actually get better they actually realize this capacity to control nature to a greater and greater degree in that sense already we can see they become Freer that is with the increase of Technology with their understanding of nature with their capacity to reorganize their their lives human beings become more and more capable of controlling the way in which they interact with nature and is part of the point here that a man in his most primitive State when he's literally emerging from the animal state is virtually enslaved by Nature he's subject to all the natural forces the realm of Realm of Necessities the way that Marx uses for this very much and that the historical process can be seen as the process of of self-liberation from this enslavement to nature which is conversely if you like the process of the conquest of nature that we are more and more mastering our material environment is that that is the now what makes Marxism a very interesting and Rich theory is that there's another as they were Wing to this that as we as man progresses in history and nature something else happens between human beings because Marx believe that the necessity it was absolute necessity in order to progress that human beings break up the original highly unified Human Society there had to be a division of labor there to be the generation of a surplus which required very rigid discipline and all this meant necessarily inevitably that some men would dominate others in other words they would be class division and the tragedy of this if you like is that this great capacity to control our our labor and our interaction with nature and our way of being in the world is something that we never can fully exercise because it's something we only could exercise as a whole Human Society together whereas the the the necessary requirement for progress in the beginning is that we break into class division and the result is that instead of we're controlling freely our way of of interacting with nature and getting the means to life from nature we find that it escapes human control that it follows a set of impersonal laws which no one no individual person no individual group can dictate and of course the the Apex of this at the highest point of human development in history before we recover control is is capitalism and that Marx devoted his major work to Capital and we see in capital important one way of putting a pencil sketch of capital is that it's an it's a picture of a society of an organization of society which is governed by inexorable laws out of human control in control of no individual in which the laws of capital accumulation drive on and on and on to the destruction immense suffering of human beings which no one can can control so the Paradox is is what Marx use the word alienation for that this immense potential human beings develop to write their own ticket as it were as as animals in nature which no other animal has is it we're arrenched from their hands by their own internal divisions now comes the final combination in which by a revolution Human Society can recover control something that can only happen at the Apex of history when the Surplus has been generated and the means have been as they were gathered why does I mean why is this so to speak almost magical Act of Revolution going to make everything right that's been wrong throughout history what how does the theory explain the theory really is that there is a bent in human nature if you'd like to put it this way towards ultimately free and therefore Collective control together over their Destiny and this this bent you can see is being frustrated by the fact that in previous history it just wasn't possible to take the first steps without paying the terrible cost of class divided Society I mean in very poor Indigent societies under primitive communism it was necessary to break into dominators and dominated Masters and servants in order to make the next step I see and that's when it no longer is necessary the Marxist theory is that a class will arise which is willing to take that step towards a revolution which will for the first time not simply produce another dominant class but do away with domination altogether yeah if I remember rightly and absolutely in a way the key to this whole process though in Marx's view is the division of labor isn't it because I believe he says that that uh in order for human societies to develop beyond the very primitive stage you have to have specialization but once you have specialization the individual is no longer producing everything that is responsible for his own maintenance and he becomes dependent on others he he gets hived off into particular groupings with others but he also becomes so to speak an instrument of production he is somebody who is now being used for the purposes of others as well as himself to produce the means of livelihood for society as a whole and this starts the process that you just mentioned of alienation he becomes someone who is as it were cut off or partially cut off from the means that sustain him yes we are all at that point fragments of the social process and none of us can really understand or control it totally and it follows from that of course that when we have a revolution in which we recuperate this control that once again the division of labor has overcome it's very important theme in Marx that the division at least between workers by hand and workers by brain will be overcome but now I think the really exciting element in this which has not always been brought out very clearly but I think it's always there but I call The Liberation theory is really this that what human beings are about in history comes to be something very surprising it the motivation for all these earlier stages of History moving from one system to another is of course just acquiring the means to life I mean the very dire necessity of keeping alive but Marx had the view that it was part like a human fulfillment to exercise this capacity to control their lives for its own sake is it where that there was a expressive Dimension not simply an instrumental Dimension to this it becomes a form of self-realization of realizations yes and it's this dimension of self-realization which is utterly frustrated by class Society in other words what marks you see Marx constantly saying his works both early and late is that in class Society capitalism for instance we have a society which at best simply produces in order to keep men alive it's just the bear means production simply a means to keep alive whereas man is a laboring animal ought to be capable of expressing himself in his labor as a human being is almost the vision of man as a collective man social man is kind of artist expressing himself which is where what awaits human beings once they can overcome this alienation and I suppose the vision of the society to be achieved communism is a vision of a society without internal divisions without classes without master and man and without alienation exactly it's an overcoming of alienation and which means that all the capacity that human beings have to control their lives are put to the service of their expressive uh drive and aspirations that's I think in a nutshell what overcoming alienation means no uh it's very clear that this philosophy has had an enormous influence on the modern world and on all of this and it's also pretty clear to me anyway that it contains very important elements of Truth what would you say uh uh so to speak the the good things about the philosophy or the things that we all have learned from or at least ought to have learned from even if we haven't well I would say of the two sides that we've looked at the expansion Theory and then the Richer Liberation Theory the expanded theory in a way we're all in some degree Marxist now in the sense that it gave us a reading of history in terms of of the precisely the way in which human beings make the means to life and it gave us insights into history which no one can go back on however much there may be arguments about how far to take it when you get to the Liberation Theory it's a much more checkered and controversial question it is it's undoubtedly given as I think one of the one of the Richer and more interesting insights into the development of modern man the the immense importance that freedom has for people in modern civilization the way that uh people Pine after it and struggle for it and so on at the same time it's been the source of one of the biggest problems within Marxism itself because these two sides of the theory explanatory Theory and The Liberation Theory don't always fit too well together I mean can can you show how they I think we can see that together by example I mean if you want to look at Marxism simply as you know almost newtonians and scientific theory explaining human history doing for development history what Newton did for the planets then you get a view of inexorable law which governs human beings at any period of time isn't this Newton's Laws of the planets govern the planet's motions in a period of time then what disappears is something in The Liberation theory of Marxism which is something of this kind that as we make the revolution from capitalism to Communism we recover control over certain facets of Our Lives which previously under capitalism or as it were under the control of inexorable law the idea that some at one point in history some things are controlled by laws which then are recuperated if you like for for freedom this is an idea that doesn't fit neatly into a model of Newtonian science in other words I mean what Mark what Marx is suggesting is is that up to a certain point in history namely the Communist Revolution all historical events are covered by laws which have the character of scientific laws and suddenly there's going to be some kind of break so that man will after that become free and therefore not government except the Liberation Theory it wouldn't be that that uh crude I mean it would be of this kind really that as the different societies succeed each other in history I mean feudalism capitalism and so on you get very different kinds of laws governing people and things that are under control and control at one period cease to be at other periods and vice versa and it's only with the arrival of Communism that we get um another such change but at this point of change which has an unprecedented degree incorporates an impressive unprecedented degree of control but the idea would be that there would be quite a great qualitative differences between the kind of laws applying under ancient Society feudal society and communist Society against this however you have the kind of the way that Marxism came to be considered quite understandably in late Victorian period the period of Darwin the period of you might say scientism is a kind of ideology when it's seen as an inexorable set of of of laws now within Marxism itself these two sides have gone on struggling you know as a political movement it can't abandon either one because it's I think it's political punch precisely depends on holding on to both of them I mean it has to hold on to the Liberation Theory because that is the if you like the whole Messianic future that it can open to man and it has to hold on to the claim to being a science because that stamps it is something quintessentially modern just overcome Superstition and which can have a really solid foundation but any that's level of politics any Marxist theoretician has been in one way or another deeply embarrassed with this and they've taken difference different roads there is a very popular school today which has decided to jettison The Liberation Theory almost all together I think many people listening to this discussion between us will be surprised at your emphasis on half of Marxism being a theory of Liberation because in many people's minds I think Marxism is bound to be associated with a form of totalitarianism there are very very few people left anywhere in the world now I think who actually regards say the Soviet Union as in any serious sense a free country the communist countries are dictatorships of one sort or another and how them people will be asking themselves how can a theory of Liberation be the ideology of this kind of society yes I think it's a very cruel Paradox but I think it's one that explains a great deal of it explains just why the Soviet Union is such a totalitarian country it is if it were content merely to be an autocracy as its predecessor regime its Artisan was it wouldn't need to interfere with control shape people's lives as much as it is it tries to do but it's because it's a regime which is based on ideology of Liberation it has to be the case that everybody not only obeys but likes it but believes in it and any evidence serious evidence that people don't they find it spiritually empty has to be crushed I mean people have to be at the limit even put in insane asiders partly because one has to believe that such people must be insane to see a system of this kind as spiritually empty because it has these tremendous claims again you mentioning earlier that The Liberation Theory and Marxism in a way looks on man as an artist and therefore four Marxist movements again what artists say hold believe Express becomes supremely important according to the theory they ought to be in that Society expressing and celebrating what that Society is about and when they turn out not to be it's something absolutely intolerable and therefore they have to be suppressed this brings us to a consideration I think of what the main shortcomings in the theory are I don't I don't want to get hived off into a discussion of the Soviet Union which would be very fascinating I wanted to try and keep to talking about Marxist philosophy but it does seem to me that one of the mistakes in the theory is that the theory posits with the achievement of communism a society within which there are no conflicts now it seems to me that this is even theoretically unattainable um for example wherever you get two people together you are bound to have conflicting interests and conflicting opinions and so on and almost the central problem of politics could be described as being how do you solve such conflicts if not by Brute Force if not by the law of the Jungle I mean in one sense this is what politics is primarily about and I think we now realize more than people did in the 19th century that the the physical resources of the world the material resources of the world are cruelly finite and they're always going to be disputes about how they should be used in any kind of society so in any kind of society you're going to get conflicts and Marxism doesn't give us any way of resolving these because it denies that in its form of society there are going to be any conflicts at all yes and I think can I just add a point here Chuck I don't want to go on talking too long at this point but I want just to add the point that I think that this is connected with the reason why Marxism is so to speak bad about freedom because it doesn't acknowledge the possibility of conflict in its kind of society it has no way of coping with a situation when the individual is at odds with Society or when minorities are at odds with majorities because it says that can't happen would you agree that there is yes I think that you're being a bit unfair in the sense that a Marxist would reply here that there is do foresee certain kinds of conflict but basically the basic point that they foresee that the really deep conflicts that which make people take up cudgels against each other are grounded in economic exploitation and will disappear and I agree with you but I do agree with your basic point that emerges in that that their powerless to cope with they have no resources that were intellectually otherwise to cope with with conflict and no model of how to operate a society in which conflict could arise and there's a very deep feeling that if you begin to allow for that you're going beyond the bounds of Marxism I think that's certainly true what do you think are other important shortcomings of the theory as a theory well in a way something we should have raised in connection with the Soviet Union is the opposite of of the Crimson the Soviet Union it's that it all happened in a country like the Soviet Union and not in a western Advanced country because the theory of Marx was definitely to the effect that communism would come about in the most advanced industrial societies I mean in a way just as you can say what's happening in the Soviet Union there's no test of Marxism so on the other hand you have to say that the biggest intellectual question put to Marxism is why hasn't it happened in Britain in Germany and I think that this is both a major one of the major shortcomings of the theory and one of the major sources one of the major areas of continuing discussion by Marxist would you would you agree with me also that Marxism is very limited in the following sense that that with said speak the great philosophies of the world or the major ideologies or major religions they they provide explanations of uh of the world on one can put it very crudely by by saying it this way they provide explanations on three different levels the individual level the human individual with his unique life and death and Consciousness and knowledge and soul if he has one and moral sense and so on and a whole cluster of important philosophical problems the mind-body problem the problem of the self and sound relating to the individual then there is uh the social level of political social problems historical problems and so on and then there's the level of problems concerning the natural world the cosmos the material world with fundamental questions arising about the nature of time and space and the whole material structure within which human life finds itself now it seems to me that that uh the great theories the great philosophies are richly explanatory on all three of these levels whereas Marxism isn't Marxism almost totally ignores two of them it ignores the level of the natural world and has nothing to say about the cosmos and really has almost nothing to say about the individual it's a it's a theory that functions entirely on that intermediate level of social existence I much I agree with you on that having nothing to say about the cosmos I'm afraid that in some cases they have too much to say about the cosmos they're a development out of angles which you now have in the Soviet Union of the dialectics of nature which I think is in a lot of nonsense philosophically really it would be better if Marxism had nothing to say about the natural Cosmos what modern ideology or or religion does I think that a much more powerful criticism of yours would be that it had nothing to say about the personal level and I wonder how if that's entirely true it's it's true up to now the historical record that not much has been said by marxists I don't know how much that is some kind of historical accident that Marxism has been taken out very powerfully by important political movements which have had other things to think about then indeed I wanted to suppress certain questions about the individual when you see the rich resources of Marxism as a theory of Liberation you see the kind of theory of art that could emerge from that it's possible to conceive of a another development of our culture you can imagine it happening in which that side of Marxism could really be explored could be given the kind of exploration and development that Marxist economics has been given our Marx's theory of development has been given we have just a few signs of it really in Marxist aestheticians Marx's theorist of of Art and I there could be an ultimate question arising there whether the individual as we've understood it in the past the lonely individual who very often faces the most dramatic and important aspects of his life alone whether Marxism could ever properly capture this may indeed be a question but it's a question we don't know the answer to a priori because this is a very underdeveloped side of Marxism it would be would be interesting and very exciting if there were such a turn in our cultural life that our Marxist thinkers instead of being very exclusively focused on theories of why the revolution didn't take place or why it will take place tomorrow or theories of the state and so on in which sometimes diminishing returns seem to be coming in and there could be a focus on greater development of Marx's theory of Art theory of human aesthetic experience moral experience it could be something there have been certain Beginnings which have never been really taken up which could be something quite interesting do you regard the acceptance or indeed advocacy of violence as being a strike against the philosophy or the theory well you can't say that an advocacy of violence is such because there's very few theories except outright pacifist ones I mean a great theoration like lock of the of liberalism Advocates revolution in certain circumstances but I do think I think there is a point in what you're saying there that the very belief that one can achieve a kind of conflictless society beyond the revolution gives you a kind of license to destroy and undercut what exists now and to do so even violently as long as you think that what's going to come out of it is going to be a conflictless realm of of Harmony and it's not about it that the certainty with which marxists uh political figures and people believe in this the um very often the facilities which they accept the idea that one should destroy system violence or violently upset it I think is a is a feature of you might say they're Messianic hope because and also in individuals and in groups it only too easily becomes an assumption that it's all right for them to use violence in pursuit of whatever their aims are doesn't it but that does of course fall off the theory because if the theory is right they are on the right side there's also yes it's perpetual Marxism is a Perpetual theory of the just War applied to politics in in his slide to history or yes yes any theory is just War says that we're right and they're wrong I mean that's but that's not peculiar too but now what exactly is the status of this Theory I mean it claims to be scientific and it marks his own writings this is reiterated over and over again that he is putting forward a scientific View and I suppose what he really meant was that whereas other socialists have been uh either seeing lovely visions of an ideal Society or issuing uh moral demands he wasn't doing that what he was doing or trying to do was to look at the actual sociological processes at work in society and seeing where they would lead him uh he was claiming all the time that he was taking a scientific approach but one is struck in fact by by the amount of profits prophecies Theory isn't one by all the claims and discussions about the future which actually don't look very scientific when you examine them closely well actually he marks us quite careful about claims in the future in any detail he hedged a lot about the future nature of commune society and what would happen I mean the big claim is the breakdown of capitalism the big claim of the future which is yet to be Redeemed by by the facts yeah but I the word the word in German meaning science as you know distance shaft has a much broader sense and people talk very happily in German about historical science and as well as about the science of physics activities but I think it's undoubtedly true that anyways Marx developed he came to see the firmness and rigorousness of his science of capitals being absolutely on all fours with that of of physics and do you think that just can't be sustainable but I don't think it can be sustained in principle for any Theory which purports deal with human beings their motivation their history their society how they develop that kind of rigor that kind of exactitude that kind of verification just can't be of course I think why not to add In fairness to Marx that the notion of of what constitutes science has changed radically in the hundred years since he wrote that that all well-informed men in the middle of the 19th century thought that scientific knowledge was especially secure and certain and infallible they were an encourageable kind of knowledge whereas now that view has been virtually universally abandoned and we've realized that science is valuable science is currently and uh and therefore I mean we Marx himself would take a different view now if he were writing it because he would have different models yes yes yes yes and that's too wouldn't fit very well with as you say the Messianic side it really was a 19th century belief you know Darwinism cleaned up this area and he had all that all clear and and physics had cleaned up this area and now Marx was we're cleaning up finally the area of Human Social history one parallel that's been drawn by a lot of other people is the is is between Marxism and the religion and I'd like to invite your comments on this uh what the people who make the parallel point out is that it has uh says sacred books and it has its profits and its sects and its schisms and its persecutions and its Heretics and and the whole kind of setup the the whole way in which Marxism and communism has developed is strikingly like a religion even the spread is like a religion I mean I do think that uh an absolutely astounding fact about Marx is that uh 100 years ago he was an almost unknown uh Refugee intellectual living in this country on the charity of friends and living in lodgings and working all day in the British museum reading room studying and writing and so on and within less than 70 years of his death the death of this intellectual Scribbler uh within less than 70 years of his death a third of the human race is living under governments under region teams that actually call themselves by his name that call themselves marxists I mean the whole of China the whole of Russia in its 19th century Empire the whole of Eastern Europe This is an astounding thing and the only similarity to it it seems to be in the whole of history is the spread of Islam and the spread of Christianity now what how would you comment on those parallels with a religion well I think undoubtedly Orthodox established Marxism in Soviet Union or China resembles in the respects you've mentioned religious movements in the past imposed Orthodoxy and indeed the the the worst dimension of an imposed Orthodoxy when you go back to Marx himself Marx is writing himself what is the religious element there I think this something there which is the kernel to all that along with the scientific Outlook and that is that Marxism is so obviously related to the Messianic tradition of the milanist tradition of European uh movements movements in the Middle Ages for seeing the coming of the the New Order of the new world that broke out in the time of the Reformation indeed were there in a way in the extreme sex of the French Revolution who had the same idea of a new beginning they started you know in 1791 I think it was a new calendar law and this is a very important feature via Hegel via the works of Hegel which fed into Marxism particularly the idea that there will be a period of Maximum Strife maximum suffering a great final struggle just preceding the introduction of a new age of Harmony peace fulfillment now this is not necessarily incompatible with science I mean if you did try out to be the case that Marx's view of human history was right then it would turn out that Messianic movements had been unculinity prescient just as certain myths as were our forerunners of atomic theories and so on but it's there's no doubt that right or wrong this is part has been part of the very powerful appeal of of the theory this however is still very far from what you were pointing out the established developments of established religion with heresy trials and the holy office and all the paraphernalia which is grown up where marxists societies have established themselves officially but I mean you would do agree that that parallel exists oh yes unquestionably yes yes now this really takes me naturally to the next question I wanted to put to which is this in view of all the things that we've agreed are either wrong with Marx's Theory or if that's too crude a way of putting it in view of the limitations and shortcomings of the theory how does one explain the spell binding appeal that this theory has had to so many such enormous numbers of people I mean you you've begun so to speak halfway to answer this now in in what you've been saying but I'd like you to to unpack that a little more yes I think that if we go back to these two sides of it and see that it combines them some of the most important and the most appealing theories in history have been a theory that combine two things that people want to combine and they can't easily combine in life and the claim to be a science to be something firmly established to be something very much of modern times which is cast off the Superstition of the old days and yet at the same time answering that deep hunger for a new age a new era a freedom of fulfillment that these two can be held together I think it's been very powerful playing very powerful appeal and it's gone right through tremendous gamut I mean all the way from intellectuals semi-disabused intellectuals in Western societies through Marxism is very much a private orientation to their their studying whatever they're studying because they haven't maybe a popular movement but but are as we're attracted by the same combination from their point of view all the way to third world countries third world populations where because there's been a rapid breakdown of a established set of traditions something new has to take its place some new Global picture of of life particularly one that offers a future and that can claim to be modern and the same mixture seen from a different angle we're a new Heaven and a new Earth but established by science by what is quintessentially modern has its appeal and so we have this tremendous gamut of different publics and different kinds of people which this combination can can appeal to it may be that Marxism may be eclipsed in this I mean in this in the second function by as it already in a way has been partly by nationalism or we may find and this is perhaps unlike religion a whole lot of hybrids growing up which have taken in in different Societies in the world today official ideologies which have taken some things from Marxism and mixed them up with other elements which are terribly important in that Society particularly National elements so that we will have African Socialism or a Arab socialism all of which oh something to Marxism but may try to make it part of a broader mix but in all these cases you can see an attempt to do the same kind of thing to have a global view of things perhaps also which saves the tradition from which people come and yet which can claim somehow to be radical new A New Beginning quintessentially modern and founded on the most solid establishment of modern civilization namely science and now we come to what for many people is I think the 64 question that is the relationship of all this to actual uh communist societies and the relationship and the problems exhibited by the relationship are one of the central themes of modern Marxist writers uh let me put it to you this way there seem to be two basic schools of thought about this relationship one says that the that societies like the Soviet Union are a perversion of the system of of the theory that they are the theory gone wrong and and one such school of thought blames Stalin and stalinism for what went wrong and so on but there's another school of thought that says no uh this outcome was always implicit in the theory and one interesting fact about that is that from the beginning it contained many revolutionary left-wing people for example the early some of the early anarchists always prophesied that if Marx's theories were put into effect they would issue in a despotism a a dictatorship and later on you get Rosa Luxembourg the revolutionary leader of the German socialists at the time of the first world war saying that if Lenin's views were put into effect they would be bound to issue in a pre-state now which of those two uh views roughly speaking do you sympathize with well Rosa Luxembourg I mean she was saying Lenin's views not Marx's views and I think that that is the right uh Theory I mean of course if you go back to any theorist who never had his theory put into effect in his lifetime which is theorizing you can find a great many things that's uh with this attitude and that attitude can lead to almost any result think of the academic gain people play with so is he totalitarian is he liberal and so on there's no doubt however that in Marx's view what ought to follow from a revolution would be what he indeed he discussed the French commune of 1871 in these terms would be even more radical basic democracy than we have in any Western society today with recall of delegates and so on the um the type of command Society we see developing the Soviet Union very much emerges however honorableism out of Lenin's view of the party as a a command structure and out of the situation which Lennon found himself so I think that there's a little bit of over wisdom after the fact in reading all that back into Marxism the only thing you can say is that the very idea the very belief that one is going to bring about a conflictless society ill equips one as you said earlier ill equips one to develop a model for how to work in conflict that Mark would have had great deal of trouble if his theories had actually worked out in his lifetime but from that to say that he had something like the germs of a totalitarian system in his mode of operating which I think Lenin unquestionably had I think it's a great great jump and it's not at all Justified yeah have given that the uh that all of the known uh Marxist movements would have actually come to power have Institute have resulted in fact in bureaucratic dictatorships how do you think they're going to get out of this do you think they will have to aband that the societies will have to abandon the theory of Marxism if they are to evolve into non-dictatorial Societies or do you think they can do that on the basis of some reconstruction yes Marxist I mean it's very unlike at the Soviet Union will do this in the base of a reconstructed Marxism but it is possible ever since this shock occurs a Marxism taking over and making such a horrifying regime there has been attempts by what are called revisionists other marxists many in the west but elsewhere even some in Yugoslavia to work out to ReDiscover their Marxism an extremely interesting and fruitful ideas have been developed along these these lines I think you began to see in 68 in Czechoslovakia the beginnings of a society summer food sources some of whose intellectual sources would have been revised Marxism of a free society which was nipped in the bud and a substantial amount of thought has gone on as I mentioned in Yugoslavia where again it's not really very possible to put it into practice indeed those who think these thoughts have some of them have lost their their jobs but nevertheless there is there is a possible living development of Marxism which could be the basis for this kind of society whether you have the political conditions in which this kind of thing could happen in Eastern Europe is another question I think it's very very different so far in this discussion we've confined ourselves and I think we've been right to do this to the Marxism of Marx but now that we've said to speak brought the discussion up to date and you've been talking about the ferment of ideas going on among contemporary some contemporary Marxist thinkers I'd like to just finish the discussion if I may by asking you if you'd pick out one or two of the more recent Marxist thinkers and tell us something about the particular developments of Marxism for which they're responsible yes well I think that there's two really quite different just to give an example in quite different areas one is the Praxis group in Yugoslavia that I would be referring to earlier which a set of markers who've tried to return to the basis of marxist humanism and to work out the theory of a Libertarian Society based on on Marxism this is one of the most interesting developments and they're the they're perhaps the center many other people have contributed to it uh they've drawn on a number of other other thinkers they've been perhaps the in some ways the more spectacular because the the bravest of of this group another area completely Marxism has been very fruitful in developing um economic theory of the world economy I mean that's the strength of Marxism is to see an economic system as a whole which is the word determines the roles of its parts and the development of a theory of underdevelopment of the way in which the structure of the world economy to some extent forces under development actually brings about underdevelopment certain societies and prevents them from from developing attribute certain roles in which societies are are stuck I think that's been one of the most fruitful developments of marxist economics and these two ways if you like in an attempt to come to terms with capitalism as it is today 100 years after Marx wrote Capital and very different and secondly in an attempt to ReDiscover libertarian sources in Marxism I think we have perhaps the two most interesting developments of non-official Marxism one outstanding feature of the history of communist countries is has been that the great political leaders like Lenin and Stalin and Mao tsitung have also had pretensions to be philosophers do you actually credit any of them with any outstanding philosophical capacity no philosophical no I mean Lenin uh great political a political strategist and a very clear thinker about that start on the less said the better Mao no no I mean it would be too much to expect that such men should also be philosophers so in other words you think that for the new Marxist ideas we need to look not at uh not to the political leaders but to the philosophers to the writers of other kind Scholars and the economists and so on yes and especially not to those political leaders but precisely to a number of very important things that have that have come in the Marxist tradition and have added to our understanding of it that is the that's going to be the groundwork for any new germination thank you very much thank you Professor Taylor [Music]

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 73,071

Keywords: History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Philosophy Overdose, Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Marx, Marxism, Political Theory, Marcuse, Frankfurt School, Bryan Magee, Theory, Socialism, Interview, Freud, Communism, Libertarianism, New Left, Leftism, Culture, Adorno, Capitalism, Materialism, Historical Materialism, German Philosophy, Horkheimer, Critical Theory, Philosophy, Hegel, Dialectical Materialism, Alienation, Aesthetics, Art, Charles Taylor, Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg, Individualism

Id: G5v6U1SJdtU

Length: 45min 10sec (2710 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023