Does Marx have a method?

Abstract

This previously unpublished lecture was delivered by Gillian Rose in 1987 at the University of Sussex, as part of a multi-lecturer series called Sociological Theory and Methodology. In it, Rose explores the concept of ‘method’ in Marx's work and its broader implications for philosophy and social theory. Against the tendency to interpret and employ Marx's thought instrumentally or dogmatically, Rose emphasises its dialectical character. Unlike traditional notions of method as a set of rules or procedures for inquiry, Rose defines Marx's method as a process that ‘follows the path’ (from the etymology of method: meta-hodos) from what we perceive as immediate experience to its social mediations, showing how specific concrete relations give rise to systematic subjective illusion. The lecture concludes by describing the ‘paradox’ of sociological reason: ‘The general statement of rules always presupposes the results which are to be explained. They are an essential and deadly exercise. […] Sociology must be disciplined or methodological in order to be rational. But equally, it must recognise its inherent tendency to lose its object if it becomes excessively instrumental. Hence, it must constantly radicalise its methods.’ In typical fashion, Rose challenges us to resist the allure of abstract methods, fixed positions or any other form of intellectual comfort, and offers a stark warning of the dangers of such complacency.

Does Marx have a method? Well it all depends, of course, what you mean by ‘method’. The three senses of method I’m going to develop are instrumental (number one), dogmatic (number two), dialectical (number three). The first and most familiar sense of method is the instrumental: the Weberian sense – Weber's sense of method, as a means to an end. This sense stresses that the rules of apprehension are distinct from the object to be apprehended. The second sense, the dogmatic, is the idea that the natural law of the object is the same as the natural law of its apprehension, not distinct from it. The third sense, the dialectical, is best approached by considering the etymology of the word ‘method’. There are two Greek words: meta and hodos. Meta means ‘by’, ‘through, ‘along’; and hodos means ‘path’ or ‘way’ or journey’. ‘Method’ in this third sense means ‘following the path’. Only the first of these three is properly called ‘method’. The very idea of ‘method’ arose as a criticism of the dogmatic stance that the natural law of an object is the natural law of its apprehension. A ‘method’ by contrast stresses the sui generis – that is, ‘of its own kind’ – status of its procedures. It is always critical of any tendency to obscure them.

Now, it could be and has been argued that Marx has a method in all three of these senses: the instrumental or critical sense; or the dogmatic sense; and it has also been argued that Marx's writings are dialectical. Weber's method is instrumental or critical and Durkheim's is dogmatic. So all three of these notions of method have been attributed to Marx. But, on the other hand, sometimes Marx, Weber and Durkheim are distinguished in terms of the three. In this lecture, I am going to argue both of these points. First of all, I shall argue that Marx has a method in the instrumental-critical and in the dogmatic sense of ‘method’.

What is Marx's method? Marx described it as ‘historical materialism’, thereby distinguishing it principally from three approaches on which it also drew: German idealism, French utopian socialism and British political economy. His method was materialist in distinction from the idealists Kant, Fichte and Hegel, because ‘life determines consciousness, consciousness does not determine life’ (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, Vol. 29: 263). ¹ It was historical in distinction to British political economy because it did not start from the individual and then make features of a historically specific society into the universal preconditions of economic activity as such; it considered the individual and his or her economic activity as socially and historically specific. It was scientific, Marx argued, and not utopian, because unlike the French utopian socialists, it didn’t just paint a beautiful picture of a perfect society, but demonstrated how the possibility of that society, of a just future, lies in the contradictions of the present society – so it wasn’t just a vague dream. Marx's method, it may be argued, is materialistic, historical and scientific, as opposed to the idealistic, individualistic and utopian alternatives to which he was deeply indebted.

What is precisely methodological about it? It has a specific object of its own (modes of production and the laws of their transformation); it has rules for the apprehension of that object (to discern the contradictions which determine all observables). These rules can be stated as formulae, such as M-C-M1, among others: money-commodity-money. ² That looks kind of scientific and statistical. Thus, we could argue that Marx's method is dogmatic, recalling his famous assertion in the preface to the second German edition of Capital that he had discovered the iron laws of necessity in capitalist society, ³ or by recalling Engels’ description of Marx as ‘the Darwin of society’, ‘the founder of dialectical materialism’ (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, Vol. 24: 467). ⁴ (Marx never called his work ‘dialectical materialism’, incidentally. He called it ‘historical materialism’.) Or we could say that Marx's method is instrumental or critical because it stresses the formal and provisional nature of its tenets and considers its theory to be constantly striving to realise itself under different conditions in different periods. Here's another famous statement from Marx, which is often taken as crucial in this matter: ‘It is not enough that thought strives to actualise itself, actuality must itself strive towards thought’ (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, Vol. 3: 183). So, clearly, we can find statements in Marx which are instrumental or critical, and some which seem dogmatic.

Why do we want Marx to have a method? For the same reason Engels did: to distinguish Marx and in this case Marxist sociology from its rivals, Weber's action approach and Durkheim's structuralism or sociological positivism. After all, if Marxism is a sociology, it must provide a logic of the social, a socio-logos. It must define its object, and formulate rules of apprehension and generalisations which must be taught, learnt and applied. In short, we must design, build and demonstrate our tools, before we use them. This is method in the instrumental-critical not the dogmatic sense. But in the case of sociology, Marxist or non-Marxist, there is something very odd about this programme. With instruments in general, we can demonstrate their use without setting about using them. My watch, for example, I could take it apart and show you how it works. (I couldn’t actually, but people could in principle.) But designing, building and examining sociological tools can only be done by the very same rationality which is the object of sociology. Rationality means rules, and sociology is the study of the various rules and conventions of social life. So we’re in a vicious circle. We are assuming the validity of the operation whose validity is to be questioned. This approach is claiming that it is neutral and that it is seeking to dispel all assumptions, but it has made and overlooked an enormous assumption: that logic, here socio-logic, is distinct from the rest of reality and that it can be used to grasp that reality or at least part of it. The very metaphor of the tool in sociology is suspect. The very power of sociology, especially Marxist sociology, but what's true of all sociology, is that scientific rationality and subjective consciousness are themselves part of the whole to be apprehended. Critical method seeks to know before it starts knowing. This is what Hegel says about Kant but it's true of what I’m saying here: this is as absurd, he says, as the wise resolution of Scholasticus not to venture into the water until she had learnt to swim (Hegel, 2010 [1830]: 38). Clearly Marx could not have a method in this sense.

But what about the third, the dialectical sense: meta-hodos, following the path? Now you probably know that dialectic is often used casually and loosely when the precise nature of a relationship is unclear. My students are always saying in their essays, ‘this is dialectical’, when they don’t really know precisely what it is at all. It does have precise meanings, ‘dialectical’. Let's try and find out what they are. At least two clear meanings may be discerned in Marx. The Greek word dialektike originally simply meant ‘speech’. In the Socratic dialogue, the dialogue of the philosopher Socrates written down by Plato, it means attaining truth simply by question and answer, what Socrates called ‘intellectual midwifery’, maieutics, without any distinction between ends and means (Plato, 2015: 11–12). (Socrates’ mother was a midwife. I don’t know if you know that (Plato, 2015: 10).) So Socrates said that all he was, all that a philosopher is, is a midwife. Philosophers never actually tell anyone anything, they just make them realise that they already know the truth themselves. But in Aristotle and in later hands, ‘dialectic’ itself came to mean the rules of argument, distinct from the rest of intellectual and social life. It didn’t mean that in Socrates. It meant that everyone equally possessed the truth, and it wasn’t a rule distinct from the totality of social life. In Aristotle's hands it comes to mean ‘method’ in the instrumental sense.

Dialectic in the earlier Socratic sense is said to have been possible because Socrates lived in a community in which social relations were transparent, in which social relations were immediately political relations, by contrast with the complex separations and mediations between spheres of social life – economic, political, religious, didactic – which characterise modern societies. Marx revived ‘dialectic’ in this original Socratic sense in his presumption that theory is itself a practical activity. It is part of the society it is cognising, not an abstract tool imposed on a recalcitrant object. But how to do this? How to be dialectical in a modern society which is complex and fragmented? Marx adds to the Socratic sense of dialectic a meaning which no longer means ‘dialogue’, which comes from the philosopher Kant. ‘Dialectic’ in this second sense means ‘necessary illusion’. Lots of people use the phrase ‘false consciousness’ as if it comes from Marx, but Marx never uses the phrase. Again, that's Engels making Marx into a much cruder position. Marx never said that any consciousness was ‘false’, but that there were systematic reasons why it occurred, even if it might not fully understand the whole – and he called this ‘necessary illusion’. According to Kant, the structure of the human mind gives rise to illusions which cannot be simply attributed to any subjective errancy. These illusions are systematic and unavoidable even after we’ve found out about them. That's the crucial point. You can’t just stop the mistake by knowing about it, you’ve got to alter the conditions that give rise to it. Similarly for Marx, capitalist social reality is dialectical. It produces and reproduces illusions systematically. That's a definition of ‘ideology’, if you like – not a simple one, but an important one. Immediate experience in capitalist society is illusory and abstract but not false. It's illusory and abstract – it doesn’t understand the totality – but it's not false. That's a very important point. I shall explain this more in a minute.

Marx, in fact, never called his work ‘dialectical’, as I said earlier, he called it ‘historical materialism’. It was Engels and later Marxists that needed a methodological label. (Sometimes the word ‘dialectical materialism’ is shortened to this horrifying little word ‘diamat’. You may come across that. It took me ages to work out what on earth it meant.) When Marx said his work was ‘scientific’ in the famous – you must read it if you haven’t – preface to the second German edition of Capital he was not being dogmatic. It sounds terribly dogmatic, but it wasn’t dogmatic. He was parodying those critics who had pointed out how heavily he drew upon British political economy and British experience by claiming that his discoveries were nevertheless generalisable, that whatever had happened in Britain was going to happen in all the other capitalist countries. Much more important for understanding Marx's scientific claims is his equally famous aphorism (which is a pithy sentence or proposition): ‘there is only one science: the science of history’ (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, Vol. 5: 28). Now the problem is that the German word which we translate here as ‘science’, Wissenschaft, does not immediately connote natural sciences to the German ear. It means no more than any ordered scholarly activity, that we in English call a ‘discipline’. (I remember when I was a graduate student, I had a German friend at Oxford who always said after lunch, when we were feeling very low like you’re probably feeling now, ‘I’m going off to my scientific activities.’ I thought that was tremendously impressive. But it meant no more than ‘I’m just going to the library’. Probably to sleep … .) In the English translation they use this word ‘science’ but it doesn’t really mean what we understand by science necessarily. In the proposition here quoted, all it means is this: that something, an activity, is systematic and comprehensible. Not that science is a mechanical device for cognising a natural object.

Did Marx ever defend his method as plainly materialistic and not idealist? Reconsider the first thesis on Feuerbach, which I’ve translated afresh since, I shall say quite immodestly, all existing translations I know are quite inaccurate and misleading. You might like to take this down actually – it's just a couple of sentences – because it's terribly crucial. I hope you’ve come across the famous 11 ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. Everybody knows the last one: ‘Philosophers have just interpreted the world. The point is to change it’ (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, Vol. 5: 5). You’ve probably heard that one. It's on Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetery. But anyway, the first thesis on Feuerbach is really important for understanding Marx's method. Here's my translation of it. I’ve got a lot of German words in, which I won’t read out. I really think it's better than the ones published:

The chief defect of all previous materialism … is that the object, actuality, sensibility, is grasped only in the form of the object of intuition but not as human sense-activity, not as praxis, not subjectively. Hence, in opposition to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism which of course does not know actual sense-activity as such. (cf. Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, Vol. 5: 3; Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. IV.3: 19)

Now, whenever you think you’re slipping back into calling Marx a materialist or a voluntarist, read this through. You see, it cannot be said that Marx is here or anywhere else defending materialism in opposition to idealism, for he is indicting the very opposition between objects, senses and passivity in materialism; and the will, subjectivity and activity in idealism. Marx is actually saying that both materialism and idealism are wrong. They only get half the picture. When you go away and you’re able to read that through again you’ll see that that's what he's saying.

Materialism cannot be reduced to the chiasmus – the famous one – ‘being determines consciousness, consciousness does not determine being’ (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, Vol. 29: 263). Now, what's wrong with that proposition? Of course, I mean, Marx did say it – all right – but the reason it's not very helpful is that this reversal fails to tell us what the mechanism of determinism is. It's just as opaque whichever way round you put being and consciousness. Nor can the opposition materialism-idealism be bridged by emphasis on the priority of praxis for then you’ve merely reduced Marx to voluntarism.

Whoever said Marx had a method? It was Lukács. This is a book you study in your third term of ‘Theory’. The book is called History and Class Consciousness. What did Lukács mean? He says on the very first page – extraordinary really – that even if all of Marx's predictions turn out to be wrong, Marx would not be refuted because Marxism is a method (Lukács, 1971 [1923]: 1). ⁵ This sounds like a commendation of method in the instrumental-critical sense. It obviously cannot be the dogmatic sense because no dogmatist would admit that her predictions could be wrong. But if we read on past the first page of History and Class Consciousness, it becomes evident that Lukács' use of the word ‘method’ is rhetorical and strategic, for he clearly means dialectical. When he says Marxism is a method, he means that it apprehends the totality and does not take the abstract units into which that totality is divided in capitalist society as given. It traces the mediation – this notion of mediation is very important – of immediate experience and shows that experience to be abstract, by which that means that some of the things we think we are experiencing immediately turn out to be the result of a long development, and this opposition between immediate and mediated is very important for Hegelian Marxism. Critical methods are themselves forms of abstract consciousness which have failed to comprehend their own formation. They accept the abstracted items of a historically specific social reality as ultimate and impose further abstractions on them.

How does Marx show that immediate experience is abstract? He starts from commodities and money, facts or forms of immediate experience, and traces the path of their formation back to their origin in specific social relations between people. He then retraces the path from the origin of our immediate experience by showing that people treat themselves and others as commodities. This fetishism makes our familiar immediate experience unfamiliar and makes us aware of how deeply we have accepted this strange familiarity. Marx traces immediate experience of the commodity back to its origin in the distinction between use value – the edibility of the apple – and exchange value – the generalised feature of the apple that makes it exchangeable for a pen. This exchange is possible because the concrete labour which went into the commodity – picking it from the tree – is transformed into labour in the abstract, the socially necessary labour time for its production, or value as such. This value which appears in exchange seems to be a natural property of the commodity – like its taste – but is the expression of social relations between people. Marx traces material relations of things, monetary value, back to the social relations of people, concrete labour. He then retraces the process from this origin back to immediate experience and shows how social or universal relations between things are lived as the material or concrete relations of people. Concrete labour is itself bought and sold as a commodity: labour power. People, workers and capitalists, treat themselves and others as things, commodities which can be bought and sold like any other commodity. Work is therefore a means to an end, not an end in itself, and life is split for each individual into a work situation and private life. In the German Ideology, Marx says that capitalists, unlike the worker, may not be aware that his or her life is split into work and personal life until he or she goes bankrupt (Marx and Engels, 1975–2004, Vol. 5: 78). By retracing the steps, we see how the material relations between things, people treating themselves and others as commodities, is lived as the social relations of people, or rather as the private and personal life of individuals. So Marx even provides, as it were, a sociology of what we understand to be personal and private life. In this way, Marx provides an exposition of individual immediate experience. He exposes its paradoxical nature, so that we can see it as a result of a contradiction which both inhibits and leads to practical activity.

Did Marx ever say in detail what he was doing? Not surprisingly, for the most part, he didn’t, and when he did, he tended to sound dogmatic or at best instrumental, as we’ve heard from all these general propositions. But there is one famous place where Marx expatiated at greater length, in the introduction to the notebooks, now published with Penguin, known as the Grundrisse (which is the German word for an outline or sketch) – not published in Marx's lifetime, but it's worth reading. Here, he makes it quite clear that abstraction is the main feature of what he calls a most modern society, and he calls his approach – I found this actually after I’d worked all this out, I looked up the German – he calls his approach from the abstractions to the whole and back to the whole with its abstraction a ‘journey’ (the German word is die Reise), which is exactly the same as the original Greek meaning of ‘method’: a path or a journey (Marx, 1993 [1857–1858]): 100). Marx does not work with abstract propositions such as ‘life determines consciousness, consciousness does not determine life’, although teachers love to bring up propositions like that because they seem so easy, but in fact they cause a lot of problems. Marx follows the path of our experience and shows it to be the path by which specific concrete relations give rise to a formal social reality and to systematic subjective illusion. Both the mental and the social are abstract, and so is the making of the distinction between them.

Clearly, then, it can be argued that Marx's method is distinct from Weber's instrumental-critical method and equally from Durkheim's rules of sociological method which present the natural laws of a natural object. Max Weber himself seems to have been convinced that Marx's method was dogmatic. He accuses Marx of confusing his theoretical concepts with real processes, of reifying them (which means ‘thing-ifying’ them). According to Max Weber, the sociologist can only use the tools or instruments against which social reality or selective parts of it may be measured. He called these tools ‘ideal types’. These ideal types are merely regulative and provisional, distinct from the reality they apprehend, and named as ideal types to emphasise their critical modesty.

But these neat distinctions between Marx (dialectical), Weber (instrumental-critical) and Durkheim (dogmatic) are not satisfactory. Marx's methodological discourse is not consistently instrumental. He also tells us that ideal types are values, that capitalism is a set of cultural values, that science itself is a value. Weber's sociology is circular, but it is a virtuous not a vicious circle, a journey (a hodos), which ends where it began – after, of course, a lot has happened on the way. Even Durkheim who, for the purposes of this lecture, is in the dog-house of dogmatism can be given a non-dogmatic, even a non-critical reading. It is well known that in Suicide (Durkheim, 2002 [1897]), the thesis that suicide rate varies inversely with the degree of integration with the community is not proved empirically (you usually make that criticism in the first tutorial on sociology that you have) in spite of all the statistics which Durkheim provides, and that furthermore, he doesn’t even formulate the proposition in a way which is empirically refutable. Yet the exposition of egoistic and anomic suicide as an exposition of a paradoxical social formation of individual consciousness is immensely powerful. It is one of the most important theses that sociology has produced, regardless of whether Durkheim's evidence proves it or not. Durkheim's egoistic Protestants and anomic businessmen, Weber's Calvinistic entrepreneurs and Marx's capitalists (who do not realise that they have a personal life until they find themselves bankrupt) have a lot in common. I don’t think that anybody's actually pointed this out in the literature. I think it's worth thinking about it, how, you know, Weber (2001 [1904]) says capitalism wouldn’t have developed unless you’d had these Protestant entrepreneurs, and then Durkheim (2002 [1897]) shows the highest rate of suicide is among egoistic Protestants and anomic businessmen. So if you stop worrying about Durkheim's statistics, you may see that there's a connection there.

This leads me to the conclusion that it is probably always possible to give an instrumental or a dogmatic reading of this kind of sociological theory, and that it is always possible to give a dialectical or a substantive one. It is always possible to follow the path or to draw the map; to follow the path which leads from and returns to the paradoxes and contradictions of immediate experience. That approach is what's sometimes called ‘dialectical’ or ‘phenomenological’. And it is always possible to state the rules of how to follow it, whether critical or dogmatic ones. This will account for why Marx is so frequently presented in dogmatic and in instrumental terms. It would also start to explain why, for example, phenomenology – and by this I mean existentialist phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Schütz), not Marxist, not dialectical phenomenology – although in its own way radically opposed to critical or instrumental formulation, is so often discussed as an alternative method, even though it was developed to avoid methods. It would also throw some light on what is at stake in recent attempts – this is in structuralism and post-structuralism – to provide Marx and Freud with a scientific discourse which they were born too early to provide for themselves. The general statement of rules always presupposes the results which are to be explained. They are an essential and deadly exercise. Sociological rationalism is this paradox, a scientism which knows itself to be historically specific, that is always both separate from and part of its object. This seems to me equally true of all of the great classic sociologists: Mannheim, Simmel, Tönnies, as well as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Lukács, and phenomenology. Sociology must be disciplined or methodological in order to be rational. But equally, it must recognise its inherent tendency to lose its object if it becomes excessively instrumental. Hence, it must constantly radicalise its methods. The particular claim of Marxism to be methodological and sociological is that it exposes the illusion that experience is immediate in a way which is more comprehensive than its rivals, more inclusive. It sees the paradoxes of other theories as contradictions which themselves have a social origin. Thus, in an important sense, the varieties of sociologies are complementary not competing. Sociology does not provide abstract schemas; it provides an exposition of the abstract experience we are already living as immediate experience. So the answer to the question ‘Does Marx have a method?’ is both no and yes, because the only notion you can understand in Marx is one that involves understanding the notion of dialectical, which a lot of academics don’t understand because they don’t know – even a lot of Marxists don’t understand – Marx's relationship to Hegel and the background in Hegel of dialectic. Instead, they have tried to impose on Marx notions of method which have been developed in positivist, Durkheimian or other forms of logical positivist, or Weber's notion of ideal types, on Marx – and they pick out statements from Marx which seem to support that. I’d just like to stress, I’m not saying you can’t find statements in Marx that sound methodological in a non-dialectical way, but the point is not to take a statement out of Marx but actually to see what kind of work he does – how Marx proceeds.