In the next four chapters, the author covers how 4 different Marxists tried to resolve difficulties they saw in Marx’s reasons. I’ll cover these two at a time
Chapter 3- The Heterodox Marxism of Ludwig Woltmann
Marx’s contention that morality arose from merely material conditions was unconvincing. With Engels death in 1895, the two founders of Marxism were no longer around to declare what was orthodox. One of Marxism’s followers, Eduard Bernstein, had argued that if Marxism were as scientific a hypothesis as Marx claimed, it would be incumbent to continually test it’s predictions for reliability.
Given that certain issues, such as the basis for morality, had not been satisfactorily answered, there were a series of attempts to make better sense of Marx’s simplistic assertions, without directly repudiating them.
One of those attempting to answer the difficulties in Marx’s assessment of morality was Ludwig Woltmann. Woltmann recognized that human thought and morality could not be reduced to reflections of contemporary modes of production. He knew that thought was not purely mechanistic/deterministic, and that it operated independently. Conditions influenced, but did not determine human will. Marx was convinced that such things as creativity and intelligence arose as a reflection of economic modes of production. But both Marx and Engels had made reference to racial components of social selection. Woltmann understood that technology didn’t invent itself, it was invented by creativity and intelligence. So using Marx’s reference to races, he sought to find which race was most creative and intelligent. From there, applying the Marxist theory of material productive forces being determinant in social development, thought the most intelligent and creative races would most productive.
Then he tied Josef Dietzgen’s Darwinist idea of the importance of preserving the group over the individual with the concept of a superior race, and that provided a justification for a race based socialism.
There are unmistakably Marxist roots here, and Woltmann considered himself a Marxist. He simply tried to apply some rigor to holes inherent in Marx’s thinking, and arrived at a variant of Marxism.
Clearly, Marx envisioned a class revolution. Woltmann’s variation gave the basis for a moving from a call for workers to unite, to a call for the superior race to unite. Marx’s vision was that the collective was more important than the individual. Marx took support for his ideas from Darwin’s survival of the fittest in a lineage sense, so that individuals must suffer if the greater good is at stake. Woltmann incorporated that idea into his assessment of society, and understood it to mean that inferior races needed to bow to the superior races.
Chapter 4- The Heterodox Marxism of Georges Sorel
In France, socialists were dividing over the labor movement. These French socialists became known as syndicalists. Some sought any improvement that could be found in the conditions of the workers, while others wanted complete overhaul. The general strike was seen as the way to bring about political activism and stimulate workers to revolution. Georges Sorel, like Woltmann, did not accept Marx’s materialist explanation of morality. Ethics and thought required autonomy, and Sorel believed the end goal was virtue. He rejected liberal individualism as the great disorder of the time. He also accepted Marx’s view that our environment wasn’t really the natural world anymore, but the humanly constructed world of machines. History was a human product- the result of human creativity taken in concert. Sorel thought humans could only attain virtue in association, and he saw individualism as toxic to moral purpose.
Marx saw history as an inevitable march towards socialism. Sorel, on the other hand, conceived of history as being won in conflict through collective effort. Virtue is the result of moral challenge. Revolution would not come inevitably, it would have to be enacted by mobilizing the masses. Sorel clearly saw that the uneducated proletariat would not come to socialism on his own. Socialism would have to come through an educated, elite, small group of revolutionaries who would mentor the people. Sorel believed the workers would not be mobilized to action by class consciousness, as Marx insisted, but myth. Myth should be understood as a body of images that would inspire the people to action. Myths are meant to be motivating forces, not necessarily scientific truths.
It’s not hard to see that Woltmann’s variant of Marxism would transform into the National Socialists party in Germany, and Sorel’s version would become the basis for Mussolini’s Fascism. Both Woltmann and Sorel saw the deficiencies in Marx’s assertions about determinism and what it meant for morality. They also saw that workers were not going to unite around class consciousness. Economic class was not sufficient, and the Italian workers, for example, had much more in common with the Italian bourgeois, than with Russian workers.
As both these Marxists tried to grapple with how to mobilize the workers to overturn an unjust system, they needed a mobilizing element. Woltmann in Germany thought workers would identify more with others of their race. Sorel, for his part, believing in Marx’s collectivism, but recognizing that determinism could not explain history, thought more about the mechanics of instilling revolutionary consciousness in the workers, settling on myth as the motivator.