Empiricism and Its Evolution: A Marxist View by George Novack is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for July. Novack, who was a longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party, traces the advances and contradictions of empiricism, the ideological reflection of rising capitalism. He explains how a different way of thinking and world view — dialectical and historical materialism — is required for the revolutionary era of the transition from capitalism to socialism. It is needed to arm a communist vanguard party to find the road to lead the working class and its exploited allies to take political power and build a new social order. The excerpt is from the chapter “Materialism and empiricism today.” Copyright © 1971 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
The materialist conception of the world is squarely opposed not to empiricism, but to idealism. Empiricism is a composite of ideas belonging to dissimilar and even incompatible viewpoints; it is situated between these polar types of philosophy. …
The regularities of society are primarily expressed in the productive activities and economic relations of its members. Since our species emerged from the primate stage, men have acquired and produced the means of satisfying their needs in routine ways through repetitive labor processes. The tools they made for that purpose were fashioned according to traditional techniques and previous models.
Our prime source of knowledge about preliterate times comes from archaeology, that science of society which deals with the earliest human activities incorporated in artifacts. …
Jacquetta Hawkes tells us that “in the Lower Paleolithic period the hand-axe, although it was gradually improved, remained in use as the dominant tool form for over a quarter of a million years.”
The social relations of the most primitive peoples were as simple and standardized as their instruments of production. The small bands or tribes of Stone Age food-gatherers, hunters or fishermen, had collectivist institutions and customs. The scope of variations in their social organization were held within the narrow limits prescribed by their mode of production. They might live in caves or camps but had, as a rule, no permanent settlements.
The innovation of food production which gave rise to barbarism introduced the first epoch-making changes and extensive diversifications into primitive social structures. But the barbaric communities and kingdoms were based upon agriculture. What could be more repetitive than this kind of economy rooted in the natural processes of plant growth and reproduction, regulated by the round of the seasons, and carried on by traditional techniques and rituals?
Mankind took more than a million years to go from savagery through barbarism to civilization. This crawling pace indicates how greatly recurrences outweighed novelties in daily life. Even after the most advanced sections of humanity became civilized, the fixity of social relations and the slow and intermittent rate of change in the agricultural societies, culminating in feudalism, betokened the predominance of repetition in the lives and labors of their human constituents.
Change becomes the rule rather than the exception in society and history only with the advent of capitalism — precisely because of the peculiar nature of its mode of production. Unlike previous master classes, the bourgeoisie is impelled by the dictates of its economic interests to keep modernizing and revolutionizing the conditions of production. This is imposed by competition, the necessities of capital accumulation, the drive for the maximization of profits. Incidentally, that is why the peasant is “history-less,” the proletariat is so historical-minded. …
However, bourgeois changeability has inherent limits. As much as the capitalist class may reform the economy and other parts of society, it cannot replace the mode of production and appropriation upon which its property, profits, and power rest. It must safeguard these at all costs. This conservative basis of its socioeconomic position clashes with the cumulative changes in the rest of the system. The intensification of these contradictions in its system has led to grave social and political crises. …
The main task of historical and social science, according to Marxism, is to find out the pattern of all those regularities and formulate them into laws that express the necessary connections of objective realities in their evolution. Such regularities are not confined to established social structures. They also operate within the evolutionary and revolutionary changes which bring new and higher types of social organization into existence. These processes begin with occasional variations from the customary pattern which massively recur until they acquire power enough to overthrow and replace the old order. …
Why did the Cuban Revolution follow a different path and have an outcome different from its Latin-American predecessors in Mexico, Bolivia, and Guatemala? There were numerous reasons for its unprecedented turn. Among these was the fact that [Fidel] Castro and his associates learned from the military coup in Guatemala in 1954 that, if colonialism was to be stamped out and popular power preserved, the officer corps and the old army had to be destroyed and replaced by a revolutionary armed force.
In addition, they learned how to expropriate the capitalists and start building a planned economy from Russia, Yugoslavia, and China. The whole experience of twentieth-century history since 1917, plus the international balance of forces issuing from it, were indispensable preconditions for the unanticipated course taken by the Fidelistas. …
The policies of Washington to contain and crush, and of Havana to aid and extend, the socialist revolution have a lawful character. They correspond to the logic and dynamics of current history, which is determined and directed by the necessities of the mortal combat between capitalism and socialism. …
[Only] Marxism, which stands at the apex of sociological and scientific development, can assure the finding of satisfactory answers to the most complex and compelling issues of this age of transition from capitalism to socialism.