Marxism and the New Physics
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Author : Paul Mattick

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Source: Anti-Bolshevik Communism by Paul Mattick, published by Merlin Press, 1978;Transcribed: by Andy Blunden, for marxists.org 2003.
The conflict between the East and the West, although it involves
different ideologies, has little to do with different concepts of physical
reality. Ideologies differ because material and social interests differ;
‘physical reality’, on the other hand, is quite the same for all
the combatants. Nevertheless, in both camps, the ideological struggle is
carried into the natural sciences — in the East, in the form of a
rearguard defense of dialectical materialism; in the West, in the assertion
that dialectical materialism is “the real root of the conflict between
East and West, because it is the basis of the fanatic belief of Marxists that
the world is bound to fall to them spontaneously and inevitably”.[1]

Both sides insist, of course, that their scientific interpretations of the
external world are free of all ideological encumbrances. While for the Eastern
scientists and philosophers the whole of modern physics seems to verify
dialectical materialism, for those of the West Marxism appears completely
outdated because the idea of determinism has disappeared. The very term
‘materialism’ is rejected as belonging to the last century. During
Marx’s lifetime, it is pointed out, “nothing was known of
today’s relativistic and atomistic physics; matter was at that time what
our senses conveyed it to be; physical measurement dealt with sensually
perceivable properties of things,[2] which is no longer
true.

Marx, of course, had only the natural science of his period to rely on; but
the changes in science since then do not affect his theories. Marx did not coin
the term dialectical materialism but used the word material
to designate the basic and primary conditions of all human existence.
Hegel’s dialectic merely formed the point of departure for Marx’s
critique of capitalist society. It was important to Marx because of “the
enormous historical sense upon which it was founded,” and because
“it dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth, and of a final,
absolute state of humanity corresponding to it."[3]

The materialism which Marx encountered was not historical, and the dialectic
then in vogue was not materialistic. By pitting Feuerbach against Hegel and
Hegel against Feuerbach, Marx developed his own concept of social development,
for which Friedrich Engels coined the term historical materialism. This
materialistic conception of history did not stem from the “physical
determinism derived from Newtonian mechanics”.[4] on
the contrary, it developed, by way of dialectics, in direct opposition to the
materialism based on Newtonian mechanics. It excluded the idea of human history
being determined by over-riding ‘natural laws’, whether mechanical
or dialectical. Although recognizing the inter-relations between men, society
and nature, it was, first of all, a theory of men and society.

Unfortunately, however, the persuasive power of historical or dialectical
materialism — as it came to be known — was great enough to carry
away even Engels, who spoke of its universal validity. While some tolerant
critics found this merely amusing,[5] the less well-disposed
used this over-zealousness as an excuse to reject the whole of Marxism as just
an oddity of German mysticism. But while the notion of the
‘universality’ of the dialectic process is not defensible, neither
is it essential to Marxism, which loses none of its force by omitting it. Marx,
at any rate, did not concern himself with the ‘dialectics of
nature’. However, it is not the ideas of Marx but ‘Marxism’,
as the ideology of the rising European labor movement and of the self-declared
‘socialist’ states of the Eastern power bloc, that nourishes
Western anti-Marxism. And it is for this reason that the struggle between the
‘Marxist’ East and the anti-Marxist West, however real, tells us
nothing about the validity or invalidity of Marxism for our time.

Marxism as Ideology

The pre-capitalist world was agitated by the question of the primacy of
spirit or nature. “Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature
comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary,
belonged to the various schools of materialism.[6] In
opposing both the conditions and the religious ideologies of the feudal past,
the revolutionary middle class was materialistic. It considered nature as
objectively-given reality and man as determined by natural laws. The natural
sciences were to explain his life and actions and, with the function of his
brain, his sensations and consciousness. Freed from religious superstitions,
science devoted itself to the discovery of natural laws, and Newtonian
mechanics served as the basis for a growing conviction that all natural
phenomena follow definite causal rules.

Radical middle class materialism lost its ideological urgency with the
establishment of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. The emancipation of
natural science from theology could not be extended to the emancipation of
society from religion. As Napoleon expressed it: “As far as I am
concerned, religion is not the mystery of creation but the mystery of society.
Religion connects the idea of equality with heaven and thus prevents the
butchery of the rich by the poor. Society depends on the inequality of incomes,
and the inequality of incomes, on the existence of religion.[7] The co-existence of science and religion in the uneasy
bourgeois world found ideological support in idealistic interpretations of the
further results of scientific development.

The early materialists, or natural philosophers (Francis Bacon and Thomas
Hobbes) were convinced that through sense experience and through intellectual
activities derived therefrom, it would be possible to gain absolutely valid
knowledge of the external world. This optimism vanished with John Locke, who
saw this knowledge limited by the very intervention of ideas. He thought it
valid only to the extent to which ideas were actually in conformity with
things. Although sensations and ideas related to the external world, this world
itself could not be really known. Immanuel Kant accepted the proposition that
ultimates (the thing in itself) are not knowable and that empirical knowledge
restricts itself to the subjective forms in which man becomes aware of the
objective world. It was for this reason that he saw the need for a priori
concepts which brought order into experience and made it intelligible. Concepts
of time, space and causality were inventions of the human mind and, though not
empirically verifiable, were nevertheless necessary to science, philosophy and
effective human activity. In its essential structure, the world was, then, a
product of the idea. And just as the materialist theory of knowledge became for
many materialists the materialist theory of reality, so for many idealists the
idealist theory of knowledge became an idealist theory of reality.

In an attempt to carry the materialist representation of the objective world
into the process of knowledge itself, Ernst Mach opposed both the new idealism
and the old materialism. He insisted “that we cannot make up properties
of nature with the help of self-evident suppositions, but that these
suppositions must be taken from experience”.[8] But,
since all knowledge derives from sensations and cannot go beyond sensations, it
cannot make statements about objective reality; it can merely fill out the gaps
in experience by the ideas that experience suggests. Although he opposed the
Kantian point of view, he also rejected mechanical materialism and regarded its
objective world of matter, space, time and causality as artificial conceptions.
Mach’s critical empiricism supported, although unintentionally, a rising
idealistic trend in the philosophy of science.

Marxist ‘revisionism’, i.e. the successful development of labor
organizations within the confines of capitalism and the hope, connected
therewith, of a purely evolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism,
led to the loss of an earlier militant atheism and to an ambiguous acceptance
of the rising idealist trend in the form of neo-Kantianism. Radical socialists
began to defend the old materialism of the revolutionary bourgeoisie against
the new idealism of the established capitalist class and its adherents in the
labor movement. For Russian socialists this seemed of particular importance
since the Russian revolutionary movement, still on the verge of the bourgeois
revolution, waged its ideological struggles to a large extent with the
arguments of the Western revolutionary bourgeoisie. The intelligentsia, largely
from the middle class, formed the spearhead of the movement and was quite
naturally inclined to adopt Western middle class materialism for their own
purposes, that is, for the task of opposing the religious ideology that
supported Czarist feudalism.

Because, for Ernst Mach, science had its origin in the needs of life, his
ideas had a certain appeal to socialists. Some Russian revolutionaries,
Bogdanov in particular, tried to combine them with Marxism. They gained some
influence in Russia’s Socialist Party and Lenin set out to destroy this
influence with his book, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. The
subjective element in Mach’s theory of knowledge became, in Lenin’s
mind, an idealist aberration and a deliberate attempt to revive religious
obscurantism. It was Mach’s insistence upon the derived, abstract
character of the concept of matter which disturbed Lenin particularly, because
for him, as for the early materialists, knowledge was only what reflects
objective truth; truth, that is, about matter. He thought that reducing
objective reality to matter was necessary for the unconditional recognition of
nature’s material existence outside the mind.

The independent existence of the external world was not denied by Mach. He
merely pointed out that our knowledge in this respect’ is limited because
it is limited to sense experience. But Lenin found it “unconditionally
true that to every scientific theory there corresponds an objective truth,
something absolutely so in nature”.[9] For him
dialectical materialism had already discovered what nature is and does, if not
as yet completely, at any rate approximately. “From the standpoint of
modern materialism, or Marxism,” he wrote, “the relative limits of
our approximation to the cognition of the objective absolute truth are
historically conditioned; but the existence of this truth is

unconditioned, as well as the fact that we are continually approaching
it."[10] With the discovery of the substance and motion of
the universe, all that was left to do was to proceed in every separate field of
knowledge in accordance with the principles established for nature as a whole.
One could then not fail to have scientific practice conform with objective
reality, just as the latter was bound to show up in every true scientific
endeavor. The difficulty with this is, of course, that it is impossible to
apply the criterion of practice to a theory of the universe, not to speak of
the fact that nobody knows what nature as a whole is.

It was in this way that Lenin extended historical materialism into
dialectical materialism. Nature has had a history and its dialectical pattern
of development has been progressive in the sense that it has developed from the
inorganic through the organic mind and consciousness. “Matter is not a
product of mind,” Lenin wrote, “but mind itself is only the highest
product of matter.”[11] The world was an
“eternally moving and developing material mass which reflects a
progressive human consciousness”.[12] Human history is
a product of universal history. In a certain sense, this is true and follows
from the admission of the existence of the external world independent of human
existence. And it is clear that consciousness presupposes the existence of the
brain.

But it is also true, as Marx pointed out, “that the question whether
objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory
but is a practical question. In practice men must prove the truth, i.e. the
reality and power, the ‘this-sidedness’ of their thinking. The
dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from
practice is a purely scholastic question."[13] The atomic
theories of the ancient Greeks, for instance, were based not on experimental
facts but were part of a speculative cosmic philosophy and were opposed and
defeated by other philosophical schools on purely philosophical grounds. This
can no longer be repeated, for today’s atomic theory is based on
experiment and mathematical treatment, on a scientific practice in brief, able
to verify the theory’s validity. Not mere speculation but the work of
chemists and physicists led from the atomic to the nuclear theory, to the new
physics and the new philosophy associated with it. All real knowledge of the
external world is the product of men’s theoretical and practical activity
in the actual world. But this knowledge produced by men can never be more than
knowledge produced by men; it is not absolute truth. It is only truth about
that part of the universe currently accessible to men, on which they can work
and verify their theories. And as their knowledge accumulates with historical
development, it leads to the continuous modification of knowledge by way of
additional knowledge and sometimes to the discarding of theories made
superfluous by theories referring to new discoveries.

The decline of the radical Western labor movement and the success of
Russian bolshevism brought with it an almost complete identification of a
specific Leninist version of Marxism with Marxism proper. Because the Russian
Revolution was simultaneously a ‘bourgeois’ and a
‘proletarian’ revolution — in the sense that the
preconditions for socialism were non-existent while laissez faire
capitalism was no longer possible — it led to a form of state-capitalism
which could be designated as ‘socialism’ only because it was
something other than private-property capitalism. But the functions assigned to
private enterprise and competition were now the functions of the bolshevik
state. By appropriating part of the social product and allocating productive
resources for the construction of a larger productive apparatus and a higher
productivity, the bolshevik rulers turned into controllers of labor and
capital.

While the capitalist’s ‘peace of mind’ and the necessary
acquiescence of the workers require some form of general agreement on the
indispensability of capital and private initiative, the new Russian situation
needed a different ideology that could make the interests of the controllers
and the controlled appear identical. Marxism could somehow satisfy this need
because it was formulated during capitalism’s laissez faire
stage. For there were no longer in Russia any capitalists in the traditional
sense; and as to the government, it characterized itself as the executive of
the ruling working class.

But since only the miserable are inclined to believe in an equal sharing of
a miserable situation, the bolshevik ‘elite’ soon found that income
differentiations, by serving as incentives for greater individual effort, could
turn into a blessing for all. In order to improve the life of all in the long
run, it was necessary to improve that of some immediately. Thus a new class
came into being based on control of the state apparatus and nationalized means
of production. To hasten productive developments, both the
‘positive’ incentives of power and income, as well as the
‘negative’ incentives of forced labor and terrorism were
repeatedly advanced. Yet, the more the interests of the controllers and the
controlled diverged, the more insistently did ideology proclaim their
identity.

Under relatively stable social conditions ideological control may suffice to
secure the social status quo. Under such conditions, designated as a
‘free’ or ‘democratic’ society, a struggle for ideas
accompanies the social conflicts, and its class structure is simultaneously
denied and admitted. Both the existence and nonexistence of class relations,
for instance, are incorporated in such concepts as ‘social
mobility’ and ‘equal opportunities’. Socialism would
eliminate these ambiguities, for if there are no classes there is no way of
moving from one class to another, and if there are no privileges there are no
equal opportunities to partake of. Russian society, while supporting a
privileged minority, necessarily adheres to the concept of ‘equal
opportunities’, but it cannot admit the existence of class relations
without destroying its socialist label.

Even if, out of fear of utopianism, Marxian socialism never became explicit,
one thing was clear nevertheless: socialism implies a classless,
non-exploitative society, and not merely a modified class relationship in a
modified capitalism. In Russia, ideology only can claim the absence of class
relations. Yet, the ruled cannot help being aware of existing conditions and of
their unrelatedness to the state-prescribed ideology. This ideology cannot
serve as a substitute for, but is an aspect of, direct physical control —
an instrument of police power. The enforced absence of social conflicts finds
not support, but merely expression, in the apparent unanimity of ideas.

It was in the name of Marxism and socialism that the bolsheviks came into
power, and in their name they destroyed all their enemies. Even their internal
struggles for positions and influence within the controlling hierarchy must be
expressed in Marxian terms — either as adherence to, or as an alleged
deviation from, a once-established ‘orthodoxy’. The total
unrelatedness of Marxian socialism to Russian conditions makes impossible any
questioning or serious discussion of Marxian theory. Lenin’s dogmatized
‘Marxism’ must be accepted as an article of faith. Only in this way
can it be fitted into Russian conditions. And it is not only Lenin’s use
of middle class materialism in defense of ‘Marxism’ which indicates
the half-bourgeois, half-proletarian character of bolshevism and of the Russian
Revolution itself. There is also the bolshevik state-capitalist concept of
‘socialism’, the authoritarian attitude toward organization and
spontaneity, the outdated and unrealizable principle of national
self-determination and, finally, Lenin’s conviction that only the middle
class intelligentsia is able to develop a revolutionary consciousness and is
thus destined to lead the masses. The combination of bourgeois materialism and
revolutionary Marxism which characterized early bolshevik philosophy reappears
with victorious bolshevism as a combination of neo-capitalist practice and
socialist ideology.[14]

Science and Society

“In social production,” Marx wrote, summing up his materialism,
“men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent
of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of
development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society —
the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production
in material life determines the general character of the social, political and
spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines
their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their
consciousness."[15]

Marx did not concern himself with the dialectic or any other absolute law of
nature because for him “nature fixed in isolation from men — is
nothing for men”.[16] He dealt with society
as an “aggregate of the relations in which the producers live with regard
to nature and to themselves”.[17] Although nature
exists independently of men, it exists actually for men only in so far as it
can be sensed and comprehended. The laboring process in its various forms,
including scientific labor, is the interaction and metabolism between men and
nature; it dominates, exploits and alters nature, including the nature of man
and society. ‘Laws of nature’ relate not to ‘ultimate
reality’ but are descriptions of the behavior and regularities of nature
as perceived by men. Perceptions change with the change of knowledge and with
social development which affects the state of knowledge. Concepts of
physical reality relate then not only to nature and men but also indirectly to
the structure of society and to social change and are therefore historical
Although specific social relationships, bound to specific forms of social
production, may find ideological reflection in science and affect its
activities in some measure; science, like the production process itself, is the
result of all previous social development and in this respect is independent of
any particular social structure. Concepts of physical reality may be shared by
structurally different societies. And just as different technologies may evolve
within a particular social structure as, for instance, the current so-called
Second Industrial Revolution, so one concept of physical reality may be
replaced by another without affecting existing social relationships. Yet, these
new concepts are still historical in comparison with earlier concepts of
physical reality associated with previous and different modes of production and
previous and different social relationships.

Science in the modern sense developed simultaneously with modern industry
and capitalism. The rapidity of scientific development parallels the relentless
revolutionizing of the production process by way of competitive capital
accumulation. There is an obvious connection between science, its technological
application and the prevailing social relationships. Although modern science is
not only quantitatively but also qualitatively different from the rudimentary
science of the past, it is a continuation of it nonetheless. Likewise, the
science and technology of the hypothetical socialist future — no matter
how altered — can only be based on all previous scientific and social
development. There is no ‘bourgeois science’ to be replaced by
‘proletarian science’. What a Marxist critique of science is
directed against is the class-determined ideological interpretation and
class-determined practical utilization of science wherever and whenever it
violates the needs and well-being of humanity.

Although science strives toward some hypothetical ideal objectivity, the
application of science is guided by other considerations. Like the utilization
of other productive and human resources, it is subordinated to the requirements
of class relations which turn the social production process into capital
formation. The utilization of science for prevailing profit and power
principles may not affect internal scientific objectivity, but it affects the
direction of scientific exploration. Because there is no ‘end’ to
science and because its fields of exploration are unlimited, science can choose
to concentrate upon one or another. The emphasis upon a specific field and a
particular direction depends upon the needs, structure and superstructure of a
particular society. There was, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an
obvious connection between the concentration on astronomy and the development
of world trade. There is an obvious connection between the present emphasis on
atomic physics and the current imperialist military struggles.

In Marxist values, man is the measure of all things and science should be
science for men. As socialism implies the further growth of the social forces
of production, it also implies that of science. It intends to add to the
principle of scientific objectivity that of social responsibility. And just as
it rejects fetishistic capital accumulation, so it rejects ‘science for
the sake of science’. This fetishistic attitude towards science,
supposedly based on an innate human need to search for ultimate reality, is
actually only another expression of the lack of sociality in class society and
the fierce competition among scientists themselves. The irresponsible,
irrational and self-defeating disregard for humanity on the part of many
scientists today, who defend their work in the name of science even though it
has often no other but destructive purposes, is possible only in a society that
is able to subordinate science to the specific needs of a ruling class. The
humanization of science presupposes, however, the humanization of society.
Science and its development is thus a social problem.

Materialism and Determinism

Marxism, not being a theory of physical materialism and not bound to
Newtonian determinism, is not affected by the new physics and microphysics. To
be sure, Marx had no way of rejecting and no desire to reject the physics of
the nineteenth century. What distinguished his historical materialism from
middle class materialism was his rejection of the latter’s direct
confrontation of individual man and external reality and its inability to see
society and social labor as an indivisible aspect of the whole of reality.
What united Marxism with middle class materialism was the conviction that there
is an external world independent of men and that science contributes to the
knowledge of this objective reality.

While Marxists accept the positivist emphasis on experience, they reject the
notion that sensations are the sole source of experience — a notion which
led some people into the self-contradictory sterility of solipsism and others
to idealism and the indirect justification of religious beliefs. Although sense
perceptions are individuals’ perceptions, men extended the range and
amplified the powers of their senses in quality as well as quantity. Moreover
the “knowledge of an orderly external world on which we can act
rationally is derived almost entirely from society. The scraps disclosed in
sense perceptions by themselves would make no pattern but fit into the pattern
whose outlines society has taught us. Indeed what we perceive with our sense
organs is conditioned very largely by our education — by what our elders
and fellows have taught us to notice.[18]

The concept of matter now implies something different from what it did a
hundred years ago. While for Lenin, and middle class materialism before him,
matter, composed of atoms, was the very stuff of nature, and for Mach atoms
were a mental artifice not susceptible to sense experience, matter is now
regarded as something ‘in-between’ because matter as given by our
senses appears as a secondary phenomenon, created by the interaction of our
sense organs with processes whose nature can be discovered only indirectly,
through theoretical interpretations of experimentally observed relationships;
in other words, through a mental effort.”[19] Matter
was once conceived as consisting of indivisible atoms. This concept lost its
validity by newly discovered properties of matter such as radio-activity. It
was found that “material particles are capable of disappearing while
giving rise to radiation, whilst radiation is capable of condensing into matter
and of creating particles”.[20] Einstein formulated
the transformation of mass into energy and now the term, matter, when
it is used, includes all the physical phenomena of which men are aware.
Experimental methods were devised which recorded the effects of atoms and of
the elemental particles of which they are composed. These elemental particles
may be considered the ultimate units of matter — “precisely those
units into which matter decomposes under the impact of external forces. This
state of affairs can be summed up thus: all elemental particles are made of the
same stuff — namely, energy ... Matter exists because energy assumes the
form of the elemental particles.[21]

These discoveries do not deny the objective existence of physical reality,
nor its manifestation in things considered to constitute matter. Whatever
science may reveal as properties of nature, and whether or not matter is
considered ‘real’ or ‘unreal’, as a
‘primary’ or as ‘secondary’ phenomena, it exists in its
own right and without it no immaterialist would be there to deny its existence.
The material world is the world of men, quite independent of the fact —
scientifically or philosophically speaking — that the old
concept of matter is insufficient to account for physical reality.

The equivalence of mass and energy, of light and matter, extended the
wave-corpuscle duality — at first discovered for light — to all
matter. Like light, material particles can be pictured as either corpuscles or
waves, and both pictures are necessary to explain their properties. According
to Max Planck’s quantum theory radiation is not continuous but, like
matter, can be dealt with only in individual units. Emission and absorption of
these units involves the principle of probability. The application of quantum
mechanics to the problems of atomic structure by Niels Bohr and Werner
Heisenberg led to the principle of uncertainty, of indeterminism, and to the
concept of complementarity. According to the latter the description of
micro-objects, such as electrons, requires both wave and corpuscle models;
although mutually exclusive, they also complement one another. The uncertainty
principle relates to the impossibility of ascertaining with accuracy both the
position and the momentum of a particle simultaneously.

Because in their totality the elementary processes constitute physical
reality, the indeterminist, statistical, probabilistic character of quantum
physics led to a denial of causality. Not all scientists, however, are willing
to recognize acausality as a fundamental aspect of nature. For Einstein,
quantum theory in all its implications seemed only a temporary makeshift
— an expression of our ignorance. Max Planck held that the quantum
hypothesis will eventually find its exact expression in certain equations which
will be a more exact formula of the law of causality. And Heisenberg speculates
whether acausality is only a consequence of the separation of observer and
observed and is not applicable to the universe as a whole.

However this may be, the problem can only be resolved, if at all, by further
scientific work. While some scientists hold that behind the statistical laws of
quantum physics there are hidden, but discernible, parameters obeying the laws
of classical physics, others think that causality in macroscopic phenomena is
itself based on probability laws. While for some, causality once ruled
absolutely, now chance rules absolutely for others. Marxism, which does not
think in absolutes, accepts the state of physics for what it is, convinced that
like any other state previously it, too, is transitory and is not the final end
of physical knowledge.

Newtonian mechanics worked well on the macroscopic and human scale of
phenomena. The knowledge gained about objective reality through our sense
organs and scientific instruments did not perceptibly affect external reality
itself. In microphysics, however, the interaction between the observed and the
observer affects the observed phenomenon. Sense impressions and instruments
imply the transfer of energy (photons) which forms an integral part of the
behavior of the atomic objects under observation. This inescapable situation,
deplored by some as the definite borderline to all understanding of objective
reality, induced others to state “that science stands between man and
nature”, and though events in the world of nature do not depend on our
observations of them, nevertheless, “in science we are not dealing with
nature itself but with the science of nature — that is, with nature which
has been thought through and described by man”.[22]

While this aspect of quantum physics is used, more often than not, as an
argument against philosophical materialism and as evidence in favor of
idealism, in a way, and differently expressed, it rather suits Marxism quite
well. What stands between men and nature also connects men
and nature. Marxism, for which knowledge of objective reality implies the
indivisible inter-relationship between man, society and nature, does not bother
with an ‘objective reality’ apart from that recognizable by men. If
there should be no way towards ‘absolute’ objectivity, that degree
of objectivity attainable is the objective reality for men. The recognition
that nature and the nature revealed through science may not be the same merely
compels us to the largest possible degree of objectivity, quite apart from the
question as to whether or not it will lead to an understanding of
‘ultimate reality’.

Microphysics is one of many human endeavors and though it led to new
concepts of physical reality, it did not alter the human situation in the
macroscopic world. The duality “between statistical and dynamic laws is
ultimately associated with the duality between macrocosm and microcosm, and
this we must regard as a fact substantiated by experiment. Whether satisfactory
or not, facts cannot be created by theories, and there is no alternative but to
concede their appointed places to dynamical as well as to statistical laws in
the whole system of physical theories."[23] Space, time,
causality, derived from experience, remain dependable guides to most human
activities, quite independently of the over-riding or under-lying relativistic
and atomistic theories of reality. It is quite certain that classical mechanics
will “remain the instrument best fitted to solve certain questions,
questions which for us are of the highest importance, since they relate to our
scale of magnitude”.[24]

Nothing is altered in this situation if the deterministic interpretation of
classical mechanics is also regarded as a fallacy.[25] For
causality and determinism do not refer to nature in its totality but to our
interrelationship with nature through which we discover rules and regularities
that allow us to expect — and thus to predict — natural events with
a degree of probability close to certainty. Although the early ideal of
absolutely certain knowledge of the external world vanished in the very quest
for scientific objectivity, ‘natural laws’ which allow for
predictability retain their ‘absolute’ validity on the human scale
of experience. And while the understanding of atomic processes implies
probability and statistics, the utilization of this knowledge leads to
predictable activities as if based on cause-and-effect relationships. Likewise,
“the notions of classical physics provide an a priori foundation for the
investigations of quantum physics, since we can carry out experiments in the
atomic field only with the aid of concepts from classical physics.”[26]

Because indeterminism rules in quantum physics, and determination is out of
the question “even in the simplest classical science, that of
mechanics”, Max Born finds it “simply fantastic to apply the idea
of determinism to historical events”.[27] However,
historical materialism, in so far as it claims predictive powers, does not
claim that these powers are derived from, or are analogous to, natural
processes but that they are based on ‘social laws’ of development
fortified by the evidence of history. To reject ‘social
determinism’ it is necessary to demonstrate its impossibility in society
and history, not by analogy with physical processes. By doing the latter, Born
does exactly — only the other way around — what pseudo-Marxists
were doing when they read ‘social laws’ of development into nature.
If one analogy is bad, so is the other.

Society does not develop and function by chance but through human responses
to definite necessities. Man must eat in order to live, and if he must work in
order to eat, the work itself leads to a regulated behavior on his own part
and in connection with his obeying of, and his struggle against, natural
phenomena and their regularities. When men work in groups and societies, new
necessities and new regulations arise out of the social labor process. With
the increase of productivity there develops social class relations and social
regulations based on them. With the further growth of the productive powers of
society the determination of human behavior by external necessity diminishes
while the determination by social arrangements increases. Determination is
largely a social product; it is the social development itself which leads
— with the recognition of the material and social requirements of
production and reproduction — to predictability.

Because of the socially-produced character of social determination, Marx is
neither a determinist nor an indeterminist in the usual sense of these terms.
“In his opinion history is the product of human action, even while men
are the products of history. Historical conditions determine the way man makes
subsequent history, but these historical conditions are themselves the result
of human actions ... The basic point of departure is never history, but man,
his situation, and his responses."[28]

In known history stages of human and social existence are recognizable
through changing tools, forms of production, and social relationships that
alter the productivity of labor. Where social production stagnates, society
stagnates; where the productivity of labor develops slowly, social change is
also tardy. But all previous development is the result of progress made in the
sphere of production and it is only reasonable to expect that the future will
also depend on it.

This indicates little with regard to the actual transformation from
capitalism to socialism anticipated by Marx. It merely predicts that socialism
is the next step in the development of the social forces of production, which
includes science and social consciousness. Every class structure, according to
Marx, both fosters and retards the general development of social production. It
fosters it in contrast to previously-existing social relations of production;
it retards it by attempting to make existing social relations permanent.
Definite social class relations are bound to definite levels of the expanding
social forces of production — all the actual over-lapping of old and new
forms of social relations and modes of production notwithstanding. In our time,
it is the capital-labor relationship, the basis of all social antagonisms,
which fetters further social development. But such development requires the
abolition of social antagonisms. And since only those able to base their
expectations on a classless society are likely to strive towards its
realization, Marx saw in the working class and its needs a force of human
emancipation.

Although Marx was convinced of capitalism’s inevitable end, he did not
commit himself as to the time of its departure. This depended on the actual
class struggle and was certain only on the assumption of a continuation of the
previous course of social development. Future events can only be based on
present knowledge and predictions are possible only on the assumption that the
known pattern of past development will also hold for the future. It may not;
yet, all knowledge justifies some expectations and allows for actions which
themselves will decide whether the expectations were justified or not. When
Marx spoke of the end of capitalism, he also thought of the elements of a new
society already present and unfolding in the ‘womb of the old’.
Capitalism had no future because its transformation was already an observable
phenomenon. As it developed, it enlarged all its contradictions so that its
expansion was at the same time its decay when regarded from a revolutionary
instead of from a conservative point of view.

The Ideological War

While there is no connection between Marxism and physical determinism or
indeterminism, there is also no real connection between the cold war and the
different concepts of physical reality in the East and the West. Indeed, what
possible connection could there be between the indeterminacy of nuclear physics
and all the social problems that beset the world and give rise to its political
movements? These social struggles were disturbing the world before the rise of
the new physics and they cannot be abated by either science or philosophy.
Political relations between East and West will not improve simply because
physicists abstain from ideological interpretations of their work. This work,
and its practical application, is the same in the East and the West. Where
there is disagreement, it does not matter, i.e. in speculations as to what the
physical knowledge of the future may reveal. Some Eastern scientists do not
bother to embroider their work with philosophical interpretations; others try
to fit it into the scheme of dialectical materialism so as not to violate the
state-prescribed ideology in which they may also actually believe, just as
Western scientists accept almost generally the ruling ideologies of their own
society.

At any rate, reality is always stronger than ideology, as is demonstrated by
the recurrent need to incorporate the new findings of science and the
advancements of technology into the prevailing ideologies. There was a time
when Russian dialectical materialists denounced Einstein’s relativity
theory as bourgeois obscurantism, only, and rather quickly, to come to
celebrate it as still another manifestation of dialectical materialism.
Space-time, wave-mechanics, the structure of matter, in short, the whole of
modern physics has been turned into so many revelations of the dialectics of
nature and of its material substance. The principle of
‘complementarity’, i.e. the abandonment of a conceptually unitary
picture of atomic phenomena, has been interpreted as yet another example of
dialectical development by way of contradiction and reconciliation, that is, as
a struggle between thesis and anti-thesis, bringing forth the synthesis.

As yet, however, the ‘synthesis’ is only philosophically
anticipated by dialectical materialists to satisfy the Leninist criterion of
absolute objective truth. Some Eastern physicists (not all) simply claim that
the phenomena observed in microphysics with regard to both wave and particle
are completely objective, whereas for some Western scientists (not all) they
are in part subjective, because of the disturbing and altering interplay
between observer and observed, and because wave has the character of a
probability wave and is not regarded as an objective entity. Of course, the
Russian physicists admit that the sheer objectivity of micro-objects is only
partly recognizable but they believe that, in principle, it will be possible to
establish their full objectivity by finding ways and means to discount the
influence of the observer and his instruments upon the observed micro-objects.
The application of atomic energy appears to them as proof of the objective
character of atomic phenomena.

For Western physicists, all that matters presently is quantum theory in its
present state and the problems to which it gives rise. This, of course, is also
true for Russian scientists. And it can at once be admitted that their search
for absolute objectivity, whether realizable or not, seems a better
working-hypothesis than the subjectivistic resignation to an assumed absolute
limit to the understanding of objective reality on the part of some Western
physicists. However, atomic energy has been applied on both sides of the
‘barricades'; the pragmatic truth of atomic theory has been revealed
quite aside from dialectical materialism and bourgeois idealism.

Because Lenin insisted on the objectivity and universal validity of
causality and because Leninism is the ruling ideology, it cannot very well be
denied by Russian physicists. There is also no real need to do so, for
according to dialectical materialism causality does not exclude but implies
chance. The indeterminacy in quantum physics, though recognized, is explained
as due to experimental techniques and not to a fundamental law of nature. The
differences between the Eastern and Western physicists may then be summed up as
differences relating not to their work but to additional expectations on the
part of Eastern physicists that their work will come to verify the assumptions
of dialectical materialism.

These assumptions, however, relate not to the victory of socialism over
capitalism, but merely to the reestablishment of causality for the whole of
nature and to the re-acceptance of the concept of matter, in its present sense,
as the sole basis of all existing phenomena including the human mind. Of
course, in a certain sense, such expectations may be regarded as an expression
of a general optimism associated with the rise, success and expected triumph of
bolshevism and its ideological concomitant, Leninism. Still, it is difficult to
see how dialectical materialism in physics could determine the political
decisions of people one way or another or could be regarded an instrument of
class struggle.

Ideologies are weapons, but in the age of the atom bomb they are no longer
decisive or even very important weapons. As little as the Western nations trust
in the ‘rationality’ and the ‘naturalness’ of their
socioeconomic relations, just as little do the Eastern ‘Marxists’
put their trust in the dialectical course of history — not to speak of
that in nature — as the means to final victory. Both sides rely, first of
all, on their material might. It can only be to the good, of course, when
material might finds ideological support, for which reason successful
ideologists in both camps find themselves in comfortable income brackets. But
their professional rating of the meaning and power of ideologies is only an
over-rating of their own importance.

1960


1 Max Born, The Concept of Reality in Physics. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Chicago, 1958. Vol. XIV, No. 8, p.320.


2 Ibid., p.319.


3 F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, New York, 1945, p.22.


4. M. Born, The Concept of Reality in Physics, p.320.


5 B. Croce, Lebendiges und Totes in Hegels Philosophie, Heidelberg, 1909.


6 F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 31.


7 Alphonse Aulard, Histoire Politique de la Révolution Française; Origines et Développement de la Démocratie et de la République (1789-1804), Paris, 1901, p.734.


8 E. Mach, The Science of Mechanics, London, 1942, p.27.


9 Materialism and Empiriocriticism, New York, 1927, p.107.


10 Ibid., p.107.


11 Ibid., p.63.


12 Ibid., p.109.


13 Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach in F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p.73.


14 A more extensive criticism of Lenin’s scientific and philosophical ideas is to be found in Marxism and Philosophy, by Karl Korsch, and Lenin as Philosopher, by Anton Pannekoek.


15 Critique of Political Economy, Chicago, 1904, p.11.


16 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow, p.169.


17 Capital, Chicago, Vol. III, p.952.


18 V.G. Childe, Society and Knowledge, New York, 1956, p.97.


19 M. Born, The Concept of Reality in Physics, p.319.


20 L. d. Broglie, Physics and Microphysics, New York, 1960, p.68.


21 W. Heisenberg, From Plato to Max Planck. Atlantic Monthly, Boston, November, 1959, p.113.


22 W. Heisenberg, From Plato to Planck, p.112.


23 M. Planck, A Survey of Physical Theory, New York, 1960, p.64.


24 E. Borel, Space & Time, New York, 1960, p.182.


25 See: M. Born, Voraussagbarkeit in der klassischen Mechanik. Physikalische Blatter, 1959, Heft 8.


26 W. Heisenberg, From Plato to Max Planck, p.112.


27 The Concept of Reality in Physics, p.320.


28 A.G. Meyer, Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice, Cambridge, 1954, p. 10.


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