The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Max Eastman and Sidney Hook were the best-known exemplars of this phenomenon. Rather than arguing their positions within the organized left, they used their philosophical differences to distance themselves from it, creating a syndrome in which philosophical heresy became virtually synonymous with political elitism and apostasy. This resulted in an unfortunate situation that prevailed throughout the 1930s and after, during which a polarization occurred between the “orthodox” and the “heterodox.” Virtually all questioning of classical Marxist precepts became suspect as a sign of impending deradicalization, and little development of historial materialism took place. It was understandable that an attempt to bypass rather than critically assimilate new philosophical challenges had occurred within the official Communist movement, which by this time was uncritically accepting the increasingly ossified politico-cultural pronouncements emanating from Moscow. That such a crude bifurcation between orthodoxy and heterodoxy should have replicated itself, albeit in a milder form, in the anti-Stalinist left, was unnecessary. After all, it was not foreordained that the Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinist Marxists should be incapable of philosophical development, especially since this sterile polarization did not repeat itself in France and elsewhere where conditions were different.

  Hook’s Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx is something of an exception to this generalization because certain aspects of Hook’s discourse bear the influence of Georg Lukács’s early philosophical work. But these may be evidenced more in its creative spirit than in its philosophical substance. To be sure, key passages reveal a vaguely Lukácsian appreciation of reification. Certainly Hook’s interpretation of Lenin as the modern manifestation of the essence of Marxism by virtue of his activism and undogmatic approach to social revolution echoes Lukács, although perhaps more the Lukács of Lenin (1924) than of History and Class Consciousness (1923). What meager references Hook makes to the “organizational question” seem to be, like those of the young Lukács, more in the spirit of what Marcel Liebman calls “libertarian Leninism” or Luxemburgianism than in the tradition of Zinoviev’s “Bolshevization” project or Stalinist theory and practice.57

  However, the only substantial parallel between Hook and Lukács may be in Hook’s consideration of revisionism and reformism, in which he seems to repeat certain themes of Lukács’s chapter, “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” One should not be misled, however, by two odd twists in Hook’s argument. Lukács states that he is an “orthodox” Marxist, but he clarifies this to mean that orthodoxy inheres in the method of dialectics, which contrasts dramatically with the fatalism, revisionism, and reformism of the Bernstein-Kautsky school. Hook, on the other hand, declares that he is not an orthodox Marxist for essentially the same reason. He identifies orthodoxy with dogmatism, declaring Marx himself unorthodox.

  Both affirm allegiance to a praxis-oriented revolutionary communism, with Lenin as the model for a creative application of the ur-doctrine and social democratic reformism as the epitome of self-serving corruption. Where the two sharply depart is in Hook’s effort to present Marxism as being compatible with John Dewey’s pragmatist instrumentalism. Hook begins by reiterating Lukács’s claim that the method of Marxism can be detached from its conclusions. But Hook’s purpose was to formulate a complex argument that Marxism is “scientific” while not a “science” per se. For Hook, Marxism, though class-based and partisan, could be “scientific” insofar as its method approached, or presaged, Dewey’s instrumentalism, which Hook considered the epistemological formulation of the scientific method. On the other hand, Hook asserted, “science” itself was classless. This argument is compelling in that science cannot be regarded as class-bound in the same sense as political ideology; dubious, however, is the view of science as authentically classless. Certainly, the social sciences are inevitably bound up in a class viewpoint, conscious or not. In regard to the natural sciences, it is, on the one hand, untenable to talk of “proletarian biology” or “bourgeois astronomy”; on the other hand, it is questionable to view natural science as wholly apart from historical determination by the structure of the social formation in which scientists carry out their work.58 Moreover, one might even distinguish the content of scientific claims from the status of its aims or methods—rejecting the claim that science is a purely objective method, but accepting the truth of scientific theories.

  That Hook was trying to straddle two horses is crucial to understanding the nature of his book, as well as its relation to History and Class Consciousness, its reception by the Communist and other left-wing press, and, indeed, Hook’s future evolution. In History and Class Consciousness Lukács was largely attempting to create intellectual space in order to function within the confines of the Communist movement, which at the time was just beginning the process of ossification that would eventually overwhelm it. In contrast, Hook was trying to sustain his dual position as virtually the only Marxist professor in the United States and a close ally of the Communist Party, to which he had been bonded by the pro-Communist activities of his college days, his first marriage to a devout member of William Z. Foster’s faction of the party, and periods of collaboration with the party on literary, intellectual, and electoral activities.

  Hook, it seems, was ready to make considerable compromises to maintain a modus vivendi with the Communists, but he would not entirely abandon his intellectual independence. In the preface to Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, he deftly balances an acknowledgment of his debt to Karl Korsch and Lukács with a comparable amount of criticism, thereby providing some degree of protective distance between himself and the two heretics. After his philosophical ideas came under attack by V. J. Jerome in the official party publication, the Communist, Hook fought vigorously to maintain his legitimacy as a loyal intellectual ally of the Communist movement. He even agreed to private meetings with party officials to examine his ideas.59

  Only when the Communist Party definitely rejected Hook—because of a combination of political suspicion (Hook, along with Eastman and journalist Quincy Howe, had defended Leon Trotsky’s right to asylum in 1932), a longing for philosophical uniformity, and a probable jealousy on the part of the Communist theoretician Jerome, who felt overshadowed by Hook’s relative brilliance, and fear on the part of party leader Earl Browder, who was threatened by Hook’s independence—did Hook emerge with a new political orientation that roughly parallelled Trotsky’s International Left Opposition. Shortly thereafter he helped organize A. J. Muste’s American Workers Party and steered it toward fusion with the Communist League of America.

  Hook’s decision not to join the new party came as a surprise. In the negotiations for the fusion that began in early 1934, Hook was adamant in insisting that the only differences he had with the official Trotskyists were over tactical matters, such as the most effective choice of language to convince people to become communists; he was even in favor of working to build the Fourth International (which had as yet to be founded). It is possible that tensions between his roles as a revolutionary politician and a bourgeois academic were a factor in his decision to pull back from organizational commitment. Earlier Hook had been the object of a fierce red-baiting campaign by the Hearst newspapers. He was being considered for promotion to associate professor and was even offered the chairmanship of the Philosophy Department at New York University in 1934.60 Of course, he may have already had some political doubts, but, if so, his other actions suggested that any disagreements that he had with the new party were minimal. Just a year later Hook closely collaborated with the Trotskyist leaders Cannon and Shachtman against his former friends and comrades Herbert Solow and A. J. Muste to facilitate a fusion of the Workers Party of the United States with the Socialist Party. In 1936 he signed a joint statement with members of the Trotskyist faction in the Socialist Party endorsing Norman Thomas for president on a revolutionary socialist basis.61

  In order to understand Sidney Hook’s contribution to Marxist philosophy, it is crucial to understand the precise terrain of the
debates about Marxism and its relation to epistemology and science that raged within the anti-Stalinist left during the 1930s. A historic struggle was fought on this terrain over the legacy of Marx and Engels, a struggle for the appropriation of their legacy by different methodologies representing divergent currents within the broad socialist movement. If the original writings of Marx and Engels were as one—devoid of inconsistencies, contradictions, and ambiguities—perhaps there would have been a lesser need for the kind of debates that occurred. But even if fully consistent, the theories of Marx and Engels would still require continuous refinement or correction precisely because they seem so plausible to many; the greater the relevance, the more richly and subtly elaborated must be the doctrine. And since Marxism also demands further development in light of new experience, it embodies tensions of the sort that often sparked provocative and relevant debates.

  For the anti-Stalinist left in the 1930s, as well as for some of its predecessors and successors, a central tension was felt between what might be called Marxism’s “scientific” and its “activist” (sometimes referred to as “praxis”) component. The tension— which is more complex than simply dichotomous—might be suggested in a passage from Marx’s 1859 “Preface to a Critique of Political Economy”:

  In considering such [social] transformations, a distinction should be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and in the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. (Emphasis added)62

  The first group of underscored words could be interpreted as emphasizing the “scientific” element in Marx; he borrowed and developed techniques from existing scientific method in applying his social analysis, and he viewed history and nature as proceeding according to certain laws. The second group of underlined words could be understood as emphasizing the “activist” element in Marx; the view that the human agency, that is, human will or human actions, are critical to the consummation of historical change. No doubt there are other tensions present in Marx’s work as well, but this apparent one constitutes perhaps the most crucial one for the 1930s dispute. It was in light of their training with John Dewey that Hook and Eastman aspired to resolve what they saw as a tension.

  The work of the classical Marxists—Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg—held the two elements in dialectically interconnected balance, the subjective will, itself objectively conditioned, having a variety of options within the limitations of an objectively conditioned reality. In contrast, the so-called official Marxism of the established Socialist and Communist movements —the Second International under Bernstein and Kautsky, and the Third International under Stalin—often presented Marxism in a highly reductionist manner. It is not so much that the Social Democrats and the Communists developed the “scientific” side while quashing the activist side. Rather, in their own ways each truncated Marxism: the Second International, under the influence of Kautsky’s reformism, reduced politics to economic determinism, predicting an inevitable overthrow of capitalism as the next historic stage. The Third International alternately emphasized human will or scientific fatalism, depending on the political exigencies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in different periods. The truncated version of Marxism of the Second and Third International is usually referred to as “economism” or “vulgar Marxism.”

  In retrospect, it can also be seen that such efforts of the American modernizers of Marxism as Hook and Eastman were part of a phenomenon in Western Marxism that arose, first with the young Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch, in response to the ossification of the Second and Third Internationals. In their individual ways, what Eastman and Hook shared with so many others, then and now, was a vulgar “anti-Engelsism,” although it should be noted that the young Lukács’s criticisms were actually not “vulgar.” Both Eastman and Hook attributed to Engels a mechanical materialism, a reductive determinism, a crude epistemology, and an aspiration to transform Marxism into a naturalistic metaphysical system by positing a dialectic of nature. The difference between Eastman and Hook was that the former insisted that Marx and Engels were as one in this pseudo-scientific approach, while the latter, in contrast, drew a sharp line between the two and claimed to find the seeds of a pragmatic approach in Marx’s activism. Hook’s solution was to improve Marxism by infusing it with experimental pragmatism, while Eastman sought to replace it with “social engineering.”63

  Sebastiano Timpanaro describes this phenomenon well: “The downgrading of Engels implies a particular mode of understanding Marxism today. During the twentieth century, each time that a particular intellectual current has taken the upper hand in bourgeois culture—be it empirio-criticism, Bergsonism, Croceanism, phenomenology, neo-positivism, or structuralism—certain Marxists have attempted to ‘interpret’ Marx’s thought in such a way as to make it as homogeneous as possible with the predominant philosophy.”64 Thus Eastman gutted Marxism of its philosophical apparatus entirely, saving only the strategy of class struggle which he justified on empirical-scientific grounds. Hook discovered that, liberated from the naive and simplistic Engels, Marxism had the capacity to assimilate without distorting the essence of even the most recent development in modern bourgeois philosophy: John Dewey’s instrumentalism. Hook also disputed Eastman’s claim that Marx had anticipated Freud’s theories of repression, the unconscious, and rationalization, while both Hook and Eastman affirmed in the name of a pragmatist conception of experimental science that Lenin was free of the major vices of past Marxist theory and practice. Thus they declared themselves to be true revolutionary Leninists whose mission was to save the existing Marxist parties that were certain to succumb to reformism if they embraced the fatalistic (positivist) interpretation of Marx over its voluntaristic (activist or pragmatic) variant. Hook especially held this view even though the ties between these philosophical and political stances are more probably familiar associations than genuine conceptual links.

  Fifty years later, much more is known about the Marx and Engels relationship in light of subsequent scholarship and the publication of hitherto unknown manuscripts. This body of knowledge challenges the tenability of the view, voiced by Eastman and popular among theoreticians of the Second and Third Internationals, that completely subsumes Engels in Marx and thereby, regardless of intentions, diminishes Engels’s creative individuality as a thinker. Among other unique contributions, Engels’s work on the origins of women’s oppression opened up the whole field of socialist feminism within the context of historical materialism, and Engels wrote explicitly on the semiautonomy and historical efficacy of ideologies.

  While Engels is also noteworthy for having paid greater attention than Marx to the natural setting in which humanity creates its history, he was certainly erroneous if he held that physics and biology offer paradigms for explaining social behavior, a view that Hook attributed to Engels and one that Eastman assigned to both pioneers of scientific socialism. To do so is nothing less than constructing a very crude “physicalism” blind to humanity’s ability to act upon and transform its natural and cultural environment in an extraordinary number of ways. A more convincing materialist approach that seems more consistent with the general method of Marx and Engels would be for socialists to present laws about social processes presupposing that they might resemble those at work in the physical world but which are not reducible to such laws of nature. Moreover, at this stage in the development of humanity’s powers, and also due to the dialectical essence of the subject/object relationship in history and society, it would be unjustified to claim that the propositions of Marxism carry the same relative certainty as do those of the physical and biological sciences.

  Despite its questionable manner in which it divides the natural and the social world, Hook’s Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx should be recognized as a breakthrough in the development of Marxism in the United St
ates. The centerpiece of the book, Hook’s trenchant criticism of the theory and practice of social democracy, remains powerful and convincing, as do his criticisms of reductive materialism and his exposition of the Marxist theory of the state. But, ironically, both the strengths and weaknesses of the book stem from Hook’s emphasis on the dynamic, activist Marx. This approach liberates the reader from the concept of automatic fatalism, but it simultaneously opens a gateway to pragmatism—an interpretation different from Marxism’s emphasis on becoming familiar with patterns or laws of class struggle as the foremost task for those who want to change the world.

  In the end it is important to recognize not only the ambiguities of the “praxis” approach to Marxism (the term “praxis” can have quite different meanings; often it means saying very little about science and materialism), but of the particular approach Hook took to criticizing the Marxism of the Second International. Hook aimed to underscore the link between vulgar materialism and social democratic reformism, and his book provided an implicit warning that the Third International might follow a similar course.

  In conclusion, the self-proclaimed orthodox defenders of Marxism in the United States in the 1930s were not really able to come to grips with the current of thought represented by Hook and other pragmatist and praxis-oriented philosophers. Unable to assimilate its positive features and counterpose a richer doctrine, the orthodox defenders simply sought to restate classical Marxist philosophical principles and bypass Hook’s critique, or, in the case of the Communists, to refute only vulgar caricatures of his argument. Yet Hook’s discussion of the problems existing between “science” and “praxis” enlarged the terrain of American Marxism. Hook may not have resolved these problems, but, with the possible exception of some earlier passages in works by Louis Boudin and Louis Fraina, he was the first to offer a full exegesis of them. The dialectical transcendence or sublation (in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung) of this debate is the sine qua non for the revival of Marxist theory and practice in the United States.