Abstract
A distinctive feature of Marxist method is that analysis of ideas and theories go hand in hand with social relations that produce them. The encounter between Critical Realism and Historical Materialism needs to be located in the transformations of capitalism into transnational monopoly finance capitalism in the beginning of the 20th century, a change that Lenin referred to as a new ‘epoch’. The trajectory of Marxism is also subject to historical materialist methods of analysis. Not taking a historical materialist approach to developments within Marxism renders Marxism into an ideology rather than a living guide to emancipatory political action.
Keywords
What kind of ‘encounter’?
The metaphor of an ‘encounter’ is central to the arguments in the article. An encounter invariably involves coming upon the other(s) in a specific time–place context. At a specific moment in Human Geography Marxist geographers came across, rather accidentally, Critical Realist (CR) geographers and were drawn towards them; however, that moment in retrospect turned out to be a passing encounter.
The discussion in the article is less about developments in Human Geography in the 1970s and 1980s and more about metonymical engagement with social theory as such. The encounter between Marxist geographers, exemplified by David Harvey, and CR geographers, exemplified by Andrew Sayer and Doreen Massey, is interesting to recall a quarter century later when geographies are once again being transformed, maps of states redrawn, in ways that would have been unimaginable at the time of the encounter. Having set up the problematic as an ‘encounter,’ the article confuses the turf, the two parties, omits the trajectories that brought them there or the rules of the academic game. What we are left with is glimpses of sparring without knowing who was sparring, where and why.
Harvey’s critique of Sayer was that his method was not dialectical. Sayer responded that it was not enough to merely counterpoise CR and Marxism and reiterate the importance of the latter but that the underlying epistemological, ontological and methodological questions in theory required answers. Indeed CR’s claim is that it develops the philosophical presuppositions of Marxism. Clearly, there are two distinct questions to be answered here: does CR render theoretical categories ‘inert’ and lifeless as Harvey claimed; and what are the epistemological, ontological and methodological premises of Historical Materialism? Cox (2013) does not address the wider theoretical issues thrown up by the encounter. Four themes are identified and counter posed between Marxism and CR: (i) methods of abstraction; (ii) internal and external relations; (iii) totalising versus pluralising understanding of the world and (iv) contradiction and change. The ‘compare and contrast’ treatment of the themes set up in adversarial terms do not prompt answers to the questions raised by the encounter. A quarter of a century later, we are no wiser about the theoretical questions that the encounter threw up.
Unhistorical defence of Historical Materialism
The article defends Historical Materialism (using the term interchangeably with Marxism) but does it in a historical ways using non-materialist and non-dialectical methods. Cox (2013) treats Harvey’s Marxism as representative of all schools of Marxism and Sayer’s as representative of Critical Realism. This conflation does disservice to the development of both Marxism and Critical Realism. Without doubt the contributions of Harvey and Sayer to Human Geography and to social theory are important. However, individuals respond to questions presented to them within a specific context. A distinctive feature of Marxist method is that analysis of ideas and theories go hand in hand with social relations that produce them. To speak of theoretical debates between two schools of thought without locating them within the wider social and historical processes to which the geographers were responding adds little to our understanding of the theories, the issues or the debates. Developments in capitalism are left out of the theoretical encounter altogether, yet the sparring is all about capitalism.
The metamorphosis of capitalism during and after the World War II (WWII) presented certain types of questions for social theory that Marxists and CRists responded to in particular ways. It is that context, the trajectory of intellectual developments and its materiality in post-WWII capitalism that make the encounter and its passing interesting and useful to recall.
There are three contextual factors that make the encounter relevant in retrospect: (i) the development and transformation of capitalism during and after WWII from National Competitive Industrial capitalism to Transnational Monopoly Finance (TMF) capitalism, a transformation that Lenin characterised as a distinct epoch; (ii) the challenges that those developments presented for early 20th century philosophy and social theory, in particular, for Marxism and Philosophy of Science, and how intellectuals responded to them and (iii).the re-emergence and expansion of Human Geography in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of ‘globalisation’ which began with the restructuring of labour–capital relations on a global scale.
The trajectory of post war Marxism
What is striking about Marxism until the late 19th century is that the theory developed outside the academia. While Marx and Marxists engaged academic writings, the questions for theory were posed by the political praxis of their times and tied closely to struggles for emancipation. In the first half of the 20th century, Marxist theory developed almost entirely within the crucible of the political upheavals in response to the crises and breakdown of capitalism. In contrast, the end of the world wars saw the rise of academic Marxism for the first time. Broadly, three strands emerge from then on within Marxism. The first strand, following the theory and practices of the Second Internationalists during the world wars, became integrated into the capitalist nation–states and mechanisms of governance in the post-WWII reconstruction. The social democratic governments throughout Western Europe and similar governments in North America legitimised Marxism within institutions of power in a way it was never done before. Marxism became an influential method in academic disciplines in social sciences which produced the knowledge base for post-WWII governance.
The second strand in Marxism follows from the trajectory of the Third International. The Third International played an important part in developing theories and practices that contributed to the successes of the socialist revolutions and national liberation struggles during the world wars. The Third International was wound up in 1943. 1 The emergence of nation states as a subject of capitalism in the TMF capitalism stage and the distinct institutional legal technological scientific ideological and political infrastructures presupposed by the new epoch, presented Marxist theory with too many complications and contradictions that made a common theoretical position that suited all states difficult to sustain. 2 Much before the rise of postmodernist pluralism and difference Marxism became, de facto, pluralist and culturalist, as Chinese, Indian, Russian, Kenyan, Ghanaian and other ideologies of new post-WWII states.
The third strand, sometimes referred to as revolutionary Marxism (as opposed to academic Marxism) continued to struggle on the ground but overshadowed by the influence of academic Marxism which was incorporated into institutional echelons of nation–states in the three Worlds that emerged after WWII. National independence notwithstanding, struggles against ‘neocolonialism’ and the new institutions of post-WWII TMF capitalism: the Bretton Woods organisations, bi-/multilateral aid, Third World debt, development and dispossession continued in the Third World, where Marxism inspired insurrections, insurgencies and protest movements survived but without corresponding theoretical developments. These developments introduced the most important spatial split in Marxism: that between theories and practices of social transformation. Increasingly, the Global North became de facto centres for theoretical developments in Marxism and the Global South provided the data and the empirical material for the geographies of knowledge production (Raju, 2006). It is important to signpost these geographies of knowledge to appreciate the commonalities and differences in the encounter.
These developments influenced the way academic Marxists formulated research questions and answered them. One important effect of the hiatus with political practice is that it introduced into academic Marxism the main features of ‘bourgeois’ social sciences. The hiatus hemmed Marxism within disciplinary boundaries of the academia and its methodological and institutional norms (D’Souza, 2009); it introduced empirical methods into social sciences (Lovering, 1987; Porter, 1995), where the ‘subject’ of capital, the academic, stood outside of production relations of imperialism and its forms of governance in post-WWII TMF capitalism. The hiatus produced a way of theorising that sundered ideas from their materiality in social relations.
Post-WWII academic Marxism produced an ideological/ethical discourse of capitalism that relied on empiricism in support of its claims. When Cox (2013) writes about ‘the Practices of Geography,’ we understand it as academic practices within the discipline of Human Geography largely in the institutional context of Euro-American universities. It is significant that this context is taken as given for the encounter. The discipline of geography becomes naturalised in the encounter at a time when the politics of disciplinary boundaries are increasingly called into question (Fuller, 1985; Giri, 1998).
Geography, which emerged as a modern discipline in the wake of colonial discoveries and conquests returned to academia with renewed importance during globalisation (Quaini, 1982). The main questions for geography were tied to the New International Divisions of Labour and transnationalisation of production chains, in other words the spatial dialectics of capitalist restructuring. Marxists and CRists alike, searched for appropriate methods within social science research practices and academic disciplines. The debates between Marxist and CR geographers within academia were located within the research contexts of the changes in TMF capitalism. Clearly their accounts were better than their postmodern counterparts. Equally, their location within institutions of knowledge production for post-WWII governance reduced the transformative potential of their critique of capitalism (D’Souza, 2010a). The geographies of labour and firms did little to challenge the geographies of knowledge production or the political practices for emancipation. Marxist theory developed informed by bourgeois practices of firms, just in time technologies and capital flows delinked from the politics of decolonisation and freedom.
The trajectory of post war philosophy of science
CR too emerged from an intellectual trajectory closely related to the world wars and their aftermath. Enlightenment science underwent unprecedented convulsions and transformations in the first half of the 20th century (D’Souza, 2010b; Edgerton, 2005; Werskey, 2007). 3 Enlightenment Science until the late 19th century developed as antithetical to theology. Philosophy of Science rather than theology was the basis for the new epistemology under the aegis of rising capitalism. As the science of all sciences, Philosophy of Science provided the methodological tools for natural and social sciences. The transformation of capitalism to a new stage of TMF capitalism intertwined the institutions of state, knowledge and economy by fusing military and defence, universities and disciplines, and corporations and capital markets in large monopolistic centralised organisations that went against the grain of Enlightenment freedoms (D’Souza, 2010b; Edgerton, 2005; Werskey, 2007). 4 Hiroshima and the Holocaust were, as Uberoi argues (2002), the visible consequences. Leading scientists including Einstein, Weiner, Oppenheimer, amongst others, who had been involved in creating the knowledge base that led to the events, became critics of the social uses of science (D’Souza, 2010b).
The credibility of bourgeois science was shattered by the world wars. Philosophy of Science had clearly failed in the assumptions it had made about democracy, liberal society and social institutions. Sociology of science emerged as an important discipline during and after the world wars. Science and Society Studies, Science Technology and Society and History and Philosophy of technology and science emerged as important disciplinary fields (Werskey, 2007). Hiroshima and Holocaust as the visual symbols challenged Marxism’s romantic idea of science and technology as an intrinsically emancipatory social force. Philosophy of Science faced a crisis in that without Realism, there is no science and without sociology of science, the emancipatory claims of science were no longer credible. Scientific method, the heartbeat of Philosophy of Science, had to confront method in social sciences.
CR emerged as a response to the debates in Philosophy of Science. Since its inception, CR engaged in philosophical and theoretical questions about method in natural and social sciences. Hence, CRs continued attachment to analytical philosophy. Nonetheless, CR attempted to save the idea of ‘scientific socialism’ by arguing for different methodologies in natural and social sciences. The basis for epistemology must be established philosophically CR argued. Therefore, ontology, epistemology and sociological theory are important in CR. Contrary to Cox’s (2013) assertions, structure–agency, space–time, history–geography and dialectics, including unity and difference, are central themes in CR.
What is interesting about the encounter is that Marxism’s disengagement from praxis and relocation within academia and CRs engagement with Realist Philosophy of Science to expand its reach to social sciences raised the same types of methodological questions in social theory. It created the real terrain for the encounter to occur. This context needs to be problematised and engaged with by Marxists and CRists alike. Science as the champion of emancipation is central to Marxist thinking yet post-WWII Marxists have hesitated to take on this challenge directly (seeWerskey, 1971 [1931]).
The missed encounter
Cox’s (2013) treatment of CR is surprisingly short shrift by standards of normal academic conventions. In support of the Marxist geographer Harvey, he marshals an array of Marx’s writings and other contemporary Marxists. Sayer in contrast stands alone, occasionally supported by Doreen Massey. Developments in CR relevant to the four themes identified in the article are not even mentioned. For example, there is no reference to Roy Bhaskar’s Dialectics: The Pulse of Freedom, which is relevant to the charge that CR does not take dialectics seriously. The philosophers and theorists of CR are not even mentioned by name and there are many of them, Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer, Andrew Collins and William Outhwaite to name a few. Attributions are made to CR without reference to particular works. This is notwithstanding the fact that there are several anthologies, including comparative studies of Marxism and CR readily available. 5 The problem with such superficial treatment of one side to the encounter is not just poor scholarship, but rather it impedes theoretical developments more generally.
Cox’s (2013) treatment of Marxism warrants attention as it is commonplace in the academia. If Cox wishes to argue for the superiority of Historical Materialism, the purpose is defeated by the fact it relies on reiterating the intrinsic superiority of Marxism. Questions about science and society raised by CR need to be answered. The decontextualised treatment of Marxism reduces it to an ideology instead of a living methodological tool to understand and change the world. It ossifies the theoretical developments of Marxism to the pre-world war era and squeezes the empirical developments since the world wars to an ossified theory that does not fit reality. Marxism is capable of much more than that.