Marxism and Modern Culture
Marxism has been a potent force in modern culture and, to a certain extent, has determined and fertilised a number of currents of thought within it. The study of this most significant fact has been either neglected or ignored outright by the so-called orthodox (Marxists), and for the following reasons: the most significant philosophical combination that occurred was that in which Marxism was blended with various idealist tendencies, and was regarded by the orthodox, who were necessarily bound to the cultural currents of the last century (positivism, scientism), as an absurdity if not sheer charlatanism. (In his essay on fundamental problems, Plekhanov hints at this but it is only touched upon and no attempt is made at a critical explanation.) Therefore, it seems necessary to evaluate the posing of the problem just as Antonio Labriola attempted to do.
This is what happened: Marxism in fact suffered a double revision, was submitted to a double philosophical combination. On the one hand, some of its elements were absorbed and incorporated, explicitly and implicitly, into various idealist currents (it is enough to cite as examples Croce, Gentile, Sorel, Bergson and the pragmatists); on the other hand, the so-called orthodox, preoccupied with finding a philosophy which, from their very narrow point of view, was more comprehensive than a "simple" interpretation of history, believed they were being orthodox in identifying Marxism with traditional materialism. Still another current turned back to Kant (for example, the Viennese Professor Adler, and the two Italian professors, Alfredo Poggi and Adelchi Baratono). In general one can say that the attempts to combine Marxism with idealist trends stemmed mainly from the "pure" intellectuals, while the orthodox trends were created by intellectual personalities more obviously devoted to practical activity who were, therefore, bound (by more or less close ties) to the masses (something which did not prevent the majority from turning somersaults of some historico-political significance.).
The distinction is very important. The "pure" intellectuals, as elaborators of the most developed ruling-class ideology, were forced to take over at least some Marxist elements to revitalize their own ideas and to check the tendency towards excessively speculative philosophising with the historical realism of the new theory, in order to provide new weapons for the social group to which they were allied.
The orthodox, on the other hand, found themselves battling against religious transcendentalism, the philosophy most widely spread among the masses, and believed they could defeat it with the crudest, most banal materialism, itself a not unimportant layer of common sense, kept alive more than was or is thought by that same religion which finds, among the people, its trivial, base superstitious, sorcery-ridden expression, in which materialism plays no small part.
Why did Marxism suffer the fate of having its principal elements absorbed by both idealism and philosophical materialism? Investigation into this question is sure to be complex and delicate, requiring much subtlety of analysis and intellectual caution. It is very easy to be taken in by outward appearances and to miss the hidden similarities and the necessary but disguised links. The identification of the concepts which Marxism "ceded" to traditional philosophies, and for which they temporarily provided a new lease of life, must be made with careful criticism and means nothing more nor less than rewriting the history of modern thought from the time when Marxism was founded.
Obviously, it is not difficult to trace the clearly defined absorption of ideas, although this, too, must be submitted to a critical analysis. A classic example is Croce's reduction of Marxism to empirical rules for the study of history, a concept which has penetrated even among Catholics ... and has contributed to the creation of the Italian school of economic-juridical historiography whose influence has spread beyond the confines of Italy. But most needed is the difficult and painstaking search into the "implicit", unconfessed, elements that have been absorbed and which occurred precisely because Marxism existed as a force in modern thought, as a widely diffused atmosphere which modified old ways of thinking through hidden and delayed actions and reactions. In this connection the study of Sorel is especially interesting, because through Sorel and his fate many relevant hints are to be found; the same applies to Croce. But the most important investigation would appear to be of Bergsonian philosophy and of pragmatism, in order to see in full how certain of their positions would have been inconceivable without the historical link of Marxism.
Another aspect of the question is the practical teachings on political science inherited from Marxism by those same adversaries who bitterly combated it on principle in much the same way that the Jesuits, while opposing Machiavelli theoretically, were in practice his best disciples. In an "opinion" published by Mario Missiroli in La Stampa when he was its Rome correspondent (about 1925), the writer says something like this: that it remains to be seen whether the more intelligent industrialists are not persuaded in their own minds that Capital saw deeply into their affairs and whether they do not make use of the lessons so learned. This would not be surprising in the least, since if Marx made a precise analysis of reality he did no more than systematisation rationally and coherently what the historical agents of this reality felt and feel, confusedly and instinctively, and of which they had the greater awareness after his critical analysis.
The other aspect of the question is even more interesting. Why did even the so-called orthodox also "combine" Marxism with other philosophies, and why with one rather than another of those prevalent? Actually the only combination which counts is that made with traditional materialism; the blend with Kantian currents had only a limited success among a few intellectual groups. In this connection, a piece by Rosa Luxemberg on Advances and Delays in the Development of Marxism should be looked into; she notes how the constituent parts of this philosophy were developed at different levels but always in accordance with the needs of practical activity. In other words, the founders of the new philosophy, according to her, should have anticipated not only the needs of their own times but also of the times to come, and should have created an arsenal of weapons which could not be used because they were ahead of their times, and which could only be polished up again some time in the future. The explanation is somewhat captious since, in the main, she takes the fact to be explained, restates it in an abstract way, and uses that as an explanation. Nevertheless it contains something of the truth and should be looked into more deeply. One of the historical explanations ought to be looked for in the fact that it was necessary for Marxism to ally itself to alien tendencies in order to combat capitalist hangovers, especially in the field of religion, among the masses of the people.
Marxism was confronted with two tasks: to combat modern ideologies in their most refined form in order to create its own core of independent intellectuals; and to educate the masses of the people whose level of culture was mediaeval. Given the nature of the new philosophy the second and basic task absorbed all its strength, both quantitatively and qualitatively. For "didactic" reasons the new philosophy developed in a cultural form only slightly higher than the popular average (which was very low), and as such was absolutely inadequate for overcoming the ideology of the educated classes, despite the fact that the new philosophy had been expressly created to supersede the highest cultural manifestation of the period, classical German philosophy, and in order to recruit into the new social class whose world view it was a group of intellectuals of its own. On the other hand modern culture, particularly the idealist, has been unable to elaborate a popular culture and has failed to provide a moral and scientific content to its own educational programmes, which still remain abstract and theoretical schemes. It is still the culture of a narrow intellectual aristocracy which is able to attract the youth only when it becomes immediately and topically political.
It remains to be seen whether this manner of cultural "deployment" is an historical necessity and whether, always taking into account the circumstances of time and place, it has always been so in the past. The classic example, previous to the modern era, is undoubtedly the Renaissance in Italy and the Reformation in the Protestant countries. In History of the Baroque Age in Italy (p.II) Croce writes: "In Italy, its mother and nurse, the Renaissance movement remained aristocratic, confined to select circles; it never broke out of court circles, never penetrated to the people, never became custom and 'prejudice', that is, collective acceptance and faith." The Reformation, on the other hand, "had this virtue of popular penetration but paid for it with the delay in its inner development, by a slow and often interrupted maturing of its vital seed". And on page 8: "And Luther, like the humanists, deprecates sadness and celebrates joy, condemns idleness and commands work but, on the other hand, is led to indifference and hostility to letters and scholarship, so that Erasmus was able to say: 'Ubicumque regnat Lutheranismus, ibi litterarum est interitus'; and it is true, though not solely as a result of its founder's aversion, that German protestantism was almost sterile in scholarship, criticism and philosophy for a couple of centuries. Italian reformers, especially the circle of Giovanni des Valdes and its friends, fused humanism and mysticism, combining the cult of scholarship with moral austerity without effort. Nor did Calvinism, with its hard concept of grace and its strict discipline, encourage free investigation and the cult of beauty; but, through interpreting and explaining and adapting the concept of grace to that of vocation, arrived at an energetic advocacy of the thrifty life, of the production and accumulation of wealth."
Lutheranism and Calvinism inspired a broad popular national movement over successive periods during which a higher culture was diffused. Italian reformers inspired no great historical events. It is true that the Reformation in its highest stage of development necessarily assumed Renaissance ways and, like it, spread also to non-Protestant countries where there had been no popular incubation; but the period of popular development made it possible for the protestant countries tenaciously and successfully to resist the crusades by Catholic regiments, and it was in this way that the German nation was born as one of the most vigorous of modern Europe. France, which was torn by religious wars in which Catholicism apparently emerged victorious, experienced in the 70's a great popular reform through the Enlightenment, Voltaireism and the Encyclopaedists, which preceded and accompanied the 1789 revolution. Because it embraced the great mass of peasants as well, because it had a clearly defined lay base and tried to substitute for religion an absolutely lay ideology founded on national and patriotic ties, it was in fact a great intellectual and moral reform movement of the French people, more complete than German Lutheranism. But even it had no immediate flowering on a high cultural level, except in political science in the form of a positive science of law.
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Marxism assumes this whole cultural past—the Renaissance and the Reformation, German Philosophy, the French Revolution, Calvinism and English classical political economy, lay liberalism and the historical thinking which rests at the foundation of the whole modern conception of life. Marxism crowns the whole movement for intellectual and moral reform dialecticised in the contrast between popular and higher culture. It corresponds to the nexus of Protestant Reformation plus French Revolution. It is philosophy which is also politics, and it is politics which is also philosophy. It is still passing through its popularising stage; to develop a core of independent intellectuals is no simple task but a long process with actions and reactions, agreements and dissolutions and new formations, both numerous and complex; it is the creation of a subordinate social group, without historical initiative, which is constantly growing but in a disorganised manner, never being able to pass beyond a qualitative stage which always lies this side of the possession of State power, of real hegemony over all of society which alone permits a certain organic equilibrium in the development of the intellectual group. Marxism itself has become "prejudice" and "superstition"; as it is, it is the popular aspect of modern historical thinking, but it contains within itself the principle for overcoming this. In the history of culture, which is broader by far than that of philosophy, whenever popular culture has flowered because there was a period of revolt and the metal of a new class was being selected out of the popular mass, there has always been a flowering of "materialism", while conversely the traditional classes have clung to spiritualism. Hegel, astride the French revolution and the Restoration, dialecticised the two streams in the history of thought: materialism and spiritualism, but his synthesis was "a man standing on his head". Those who followed after Hegel destroyed this unity and a return was made to materialist systems of thought on the one hand and on the other, to the spiritual. Marxism, through its founder, relived this whole experience from Hegel to Feuerbach and French materialism in order to reconstitute the synthesis of the dialectical unity—"man on his feet". The mutilation suffered by Hegelian thought was also inflicted on Marxism; on the one hand there has been a return to philosophical materialism and on the other, modern idealist thought has tried to incorporate into itself elements from Marxism which were indispensable to it in its search for a new elixir.
"Politically", the materialist concept is close to the people, to common sense; it is closely bound up with many beliefs and prejudices, with nearly all popular superstitions (sorcery, ghosts, etc.). This can be seen in popular Catholicism and especially in Greek Orthodoxy. Popular religion is crassly materialistic while the official religion of the intellectuals tries to prevent the formation of two distinct religions, two separate strata, in order not to cut itself off from the masses, not to become officially what it is in actuality—the ideology of narrow groups. In this respect, Marxist attitudes must not be confused with those of Catholicism. While the one maintains a dynamic contact with the masses and aims continually to raise new strata of the masses to a higher cultural life, the other maintains a purely mechanical contact, an outer unity based on liturgy and on the cult which most obviously appeals to the masses. Many heretical movements were popular manifestations for a reform of the Church and were efforts to bring it closer to the people, to elevate the people. The Church reacted violently and created the Jesuit Order, armed itself with the decisions of the Council of Trent and organised a marvellous "democratic apparatus for selecting its intellectuals, but only as single individuals and not as representatives of popular groups.
In the history of cultural developments it is essential to note especially the organisation of culture and also the persons through whom it takes concrete form. In G. de Ruggiero's Renaissance and Reformation the attitude of many of the intellectuals led by Erasmus is shown: in the face of the persecutions and articles, they yielded. Therefore the carriers of the Reformation were actually not the intellectuals but the German people as a whole. It is this desertion by the intellectuals when attacked by the enemy which explains the Reformation's "sterility" in the sphere of higher culture, until there gradually emerged a new group of intellectuals from among the masses of the people who remained faithful, and whose work culminated in classical philosophy.
Something similar has happened with Marxism up to the present; the great intellectuals formed in its soil were few in number, not connected with the people, did not come from the people but were the expression of the traditional middle classes to which many reverted during the great historical “turning points”. Others remained, but in order to submit the new concept to systematic revision and not to win an independent development for it. The assertion that Marxism is a new, independent original concept and a force in the development of world history is the assertion of the independence and originality of a new culture in birth which will develop with the development of social relations. What exists at each new turn is a varying combination of the old and the new, creating a momentary equilibrium of cultural relationships corresponding to the equilibrium in social relationships. Only after the creation of the State does the cultural problem pose itself in all its complexity and tend towards a concrete solution. In every case, the attitude preceding the State can only be critical-polemical; never dogmatic, it must be romantic in attitude but with a romanticism that consciously aspires towards its own classical composition.