Marxist refutation of fatalistic interpretations?

[A.R.Amistad]

1. Does anyone know if there are any good Marxist works that discuss the issue that socialism is not inevitable?
2. And what is the general answer on this question? I have read a lot of more recent Marxists writers who have said that they deny that socialism in "inevitable."
3. In the Manifesto, Marx talks about the ruination of the contending classes in a revolutionary upheaval. What is meant by this exactly?
4. And did Marx and Engels originally perceive socialism as "inevitable?" This is a question that has been bugging me for quite sometime.

5. My dad is a 'socialist,' but is skeptical of Marxism because he says it holds that socialism is "inevitable." I have tried to explain that this is not so, but I need some good theoretical base to do so in a better way. He also has brought up that capitalism has lasted through many crises. Again, I myself do not think capitalism will always last, but somehow it has managed (unfortunatley) to survive. How is this so, why has capitalism lasted so long and weathered so many crises? Or has it simply failed and is on "life support?" Any help on this issue would be great.

[ContrarianLemming]

I can't answer the original question (I think in an infinite unvierse, everything is inevitable) but you should not take the communist manifesto as Marx's full proper views, remember it was primarily a propaganda peice, it didnt really even talk about communism much.

I've been told Marx actually didn't believe in this type of fatalism/determinism, not sure.

Also, putting all your questions in one paragraph is confusing, structure your posts better next time, ie:

1. question A

2. question B

[mikelepore]

How could human beings NOT try economic production managed democratically at some point in time within the next five billion years?

[A.R.Amistad]

How could human beings NOT try economic production managed democratically at some point in time within the next five billion years?

five billion years!:crying:

[mikelepore]

skeptical of Marxism because he says it holds that socialism is "inevitable."

People should beware of saying that there is literally an "-ism" that must be either all-correct or all-incorrect. A writer made perhaps 10,000 assertions in a forty year writing career. Almost certainly, as with any writer, some of those assertions are true and some of them are false. Marx's general method of analyzing the development of society can't be judged by taking a particular sentence and finding it to be true or false. We know about mistakes in Einstein also.

[A.R.Amistad]

People should beware of saying that there is literally an "-ism" that must be either all-correct or all-incorrect. A writer made perhaps 10,000 assertions in a forty year writing career. Almost certainly, as with any writer, some of those assertions are true and some of them are false. Marx's general method of analyzing the development of society can't be judged by taking a particular sentence and finding it to be true or false. We know about mistakes in Einstein also.

I agree I just need some help understanding the contemporary take on the situation

[mikelepore]

five billion years!:crying:

The word "inevitable" doesn't have any end point, so I used the estimated time until the planet will be destroyed.

If you had said something like "by the time our great-great-grandchildren are grown up", that would change the answer.

[mikelepore]

I think Marx and Engels believed in the inevitable in the same sense as Abraham Lincoln quoting the ancient proverb "this too shall pass", and Martin Luther King saying "I have a dream." In other words, let's all work toward a more rational result, and given that human beings are a somewhat rational species, although we are not perfectly rational, we may operate on the assumption that the more rational result is going to be reached someday.

There are several factors combined here. To some extent, Marx and Engels were sucked into a general 19th century trend to believe that history was becoming an exact science, not particular to Marxists but affecting scholars generally. This causes us to find such occasional phrases as "tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results" [Marx, 1867 preface to 'Capital'] But it's easy to be too one-sided here. It's also a writing habit, of no more importance than a politician or a football coach saying "we are going to win!" when they are not actually claiming to possess the power of precognition. It's the way some people talk in certain situations, and it can be ignored as idiosyncratic style without the loss of anything important.

[BAM]

Marx and Engels write in the Communist Manifesto, "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." But it's worth putting it into context. The Manifesto was a piece of propaganda written on the verge of a revolutionary situation. Saying communism was "inevitable" was a rhetorical flourish at the end of a very fiery chapter detailing the radical transformation that capitalist society has made.

The Manifesto, in the same chapter at the beginning, also says that class struggle ends "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

[Bubbles]

He also has brought up that capitalism has lasted through many crises. Again, I myself do not think capitalism will always last, but somehow it has managed (unfortunatley) to survive. How is this so, why has capitalism lasted so long and weathered so many crises? Or has it simply failed and is on "life support?" Any help on this issue would be great.
Capitalism as dominating mode of production is fairly new. A century or two is not a big record that other economic systems haven't reached historically.

[el_chavista]

Differently from other social revolutions in the past, the socialist revolution depends on the degree of conciousness of the proletariat. So it will not be a mere byproduct of social-economic evolution as the slaves' uprisings, the peasant wars or the bourgeois revolution.
The "inevitability of socialism" is the core of the "deterministic Marxism" deviation which perverted social democracy and soviet bureaucratic ideology.

[Zanthorus]

These quotes might interest you:


We are now in a position, to understand what Marx really means when he speaks of the historic inevitability of communism. Communism is not something fated to be realized in the nature of things; but if society is to survive, communism offers the only way out of the impasse created by the inability of capitalism, despite its superabundance of wealth, to provide a decent social existence for its own wage-earners. What Marx is really saying is: either this (communism) or nothing (barbarism). That is why communists feel, justified in claiming that their doctrines express both the subjective class interests of the proletariat and the objective interests of civilization. The objectivity of Marxism is derived from the truth of the disjunction; the subjectivity from the fact that this is chosen rather than nothing. Normally a recognition of the truth of the disjunction carries with it a commitment to communism. But the connection is not a necessary one any more than the knowledge that milk is a wholesome drink makes one a milk drinker ... It is only when one accepts the first term of the disjunction – which is a psychological, and, if you please, an ethical act – that he has a right to the name [of Marxist].


... all the efforts of the bourgeoisie, all the energies expended by it in maintaining class equilibrium, manifest themselves invariably at the expense of the economic soil on which the bourgeoisie rests, at the expense of its economic base. The bourgeoisie and the working class are thus located on a soil which renders our victory inescapable – not in the astronomical sense, of course, not inescapable like the setting and rising of the sun, but inescapable in the historic sense, in the sense that unless we gam victory all society and all human culture is doomed.

Taken from Hal Draper's discussion on the subject (http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1947/12/inevitsoc.htm) which I nonetheless consider to be flawed.

[A.R.Amistad]

Differently from other social revolutions in the past, the socialist revolution depends on the degree of conciousness of the proletariat. So it will not be a mere byproduct of social-economic evolution as the slaves' uprisings, the peasant wars or the bourgeois revolution.
The "inevitability of socialism" is the core of the "deterministic Marxism" deviation which perverted social democracy and soviet bureaucratic ideology.

but didn't consciousness also play a role in pre-proletarian revolutions as well?