Definition of fatalism; The doctrine that all events are predetermined by fate and are therefore unalterable. A particular outcome will occur regardless of what agents do.
Definition of determinism; The idea that all events, including human actions and choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes combined with the laws of nature. Given the complete state of a system and its operative laws, only one subsequent state is possible.
Definition of teleology; The determination of a process by an end (telos) given or posited in advance, such that the process is organized towards the realization of that end, the purpose toward which it is directed.
There are three important questions to be asked with regard to how these philosophical concepts and outlooks relate to and diverge from one another. These are:
- Is Marxism compatible with fatalism?
- Is Marxism compatible with historical determinism?
- Is Marxism’s theory of history, historical materialism, possessing of teleology?
The first two are quite easy to answer; Marx himself rejects any such simple summary of history. “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real living man, that does all that, that possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not a person apart, using man as a means for its own particular aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims” (German Ideology, I). The critical distinctions to be made then, are twofold; one between human purposiveness and historical teleology, and then those necessary to distinguish objective necessity with subjective thought, and their respective roles in revolutionary practice. To elaborate on the Marxist definition of historical materialism: Human beings enter relations of production corresponding to the development of their productive forces… When developing productive forces come into conflict with existing relations of production, the relations can be said to become constraints on actual development. This process manifests itself in the class struggle, where contradiction between the conflicting rational interests of private property become increasingly clear. It is only through intimate knowledge of this historical process that truly revolutionary changes can be realized, and the world can move from one social formation to another. A line must be drawn between determination vs. determinism, and telos as applied to history vs. the purposive human behavior that necessarily makes up the body of history. Fatalism and determinism in their stated forms are completely and utterly incompatible with the thought of Marx and Engels. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism resolutely considers historical determinism to be completely and utterly incompatible with Marxist dialectics as it is a form of idealistic agnosticism. Engel’s critique of Neo-Kantianism and the agnosticism of Hume is also particularly relevant.
“Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends,” writes Engels. “This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history… thereby history receives its own special aims and becomes ‘a person rating with other persons’.” (German Ideology). “Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever… They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history.” A later historical outcome must never be turned into the predetermined purpose of the processes that preceded it. Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring of the dangers of applying philosophical apriorism and world schematism upon history. “The principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them… Speculative philosophy imagines that it can produce out of its head, in the first place, the basic forms of being, the simple elements of all knowledge, the axioms of philosophy, and then deduce the whole of philosophy or world schematism from them. The laws, which were abstracted from the real world… are set up against it as something independent, as laws coming from outside, to which the world has to conform.”
Engels emphatically rejects the procedure of establishing a universal schema in advance and then interpreting actual history as an illustration of that schema. Materialism as a doctrine states that, once one accepts the materialist conception of history, “the demand for final solutions and eternal truths ceases once and for all.” And therein lies the answer to the question, “is Marxism compatible with fatalism?” Fatalism dictates that history is ultimately unchanging and set in stone. There is no room in such a formulation for praxis, for class-consciousness, for revolutionary change of any kind.
However, the question of teleology remains unanswered. And with it, an improvisational form of historical determinism. Traditional determinism is, to repeat, the philosophical idea that all events, including human actions and choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes combined with the laws of nature. Historical determinism, therefore, would dictate that each successive epoch in history is brought about by apriori positngs of necessity mediated through the material conditions of the preceding epoch, such that the course of historical development is ultimately determined by the objective laws governing the course of history; as applied to Marxist materialism, these laws can be said to determine the development of the productive forces and relations of production.
A pause. Where exactly this materialist formulation diverges from dialectical thought is its usage of the word “determine/determination”, and the implications for determinism in general. Does this causal determination entail the inevitability of their outcomes? To conflate these propositions is to mistake the existence of objective material constraints on development for a guarantee that history must unfold along one predetermined trajectory. Marx and Engels certainly maintain that social relations develop through determinate material conditions, and that the contradictions arising within those formations dictate the objective processes of social transformation. But the existence of such contradictions can not in itself establish any such schema dictating the inevitability of their resolution. That dialectical development is irreconcilable with philosophical inevitability can be demonstrated by the mere arisal of such contradictions in history, showing without a doubt that subjectivity in independent human possessiveness necessarily leads to conflict according to their position in relation to the means of production, dictating their means of acquiring sustenance. That contradiction exists at all owes itself to the dialectical nature of life itself, that it can be taken away at any moment, that to continue with itself it must engage with, eliminate, and appropriate other life. Engels writes, quite simply, that “life is the mode of existence between protein bodies.” This mode of existence consists, essentially, in the continuous renewal of material processes through the exchange of matter with the surrounding environment. This is a process whose continued existence depends on its active reproduction under definite material circumstances. Applied to the history of society it becomes clear that while organisms of all kinds must continuously engage with their environments to sustain themselves, the specifically human organization of this activity is historically variable, and arises through the development of productive forces.
The third question on teleology remains unanswered. Is it possible for Marxism, as a worldview, to possess a telos? Generally speaking this is up for debate. However, the subjectivity of human action meant a great deal to Lenin, culminating in his dialectical enrichment of reflection theory in his later Philosophical Notebooks; and of course, the goal of Marx’s philosophy is nothing but to change history! Many have their takes, Lukacs’ ontology of praxis, Hall’s ‘Marxism without guarantees’, Althusser’s aleatory materialism, etc. etc. Full Communism essentially is a process that Communists organize towards the realization of that end, and is purpose toward which it is directed - but this means nothing transcendentally separated from the reality of praxis, and the immanent philosophy of dialectical materialism needs no teloi outside of the necessary human purposiveness of action that makes up revolutionary movements. “A movement from the lower to the higher, a transition from the old qualitative state to a new qualitative state" does NOT necessarily mean history has a predetermined destination. The outcome is generated through the dialectical development of the process rather than being imposed upon it by a predetermined final purpose.
It is precisely the dialectical aspect of development that here comes into play, and puts to rest any determinate view of what dictates historically distinct forms of social organization; the material necessity and engagement with material reality (labor) at the core of this process can not dictate by itself the conditions of private ownership, rather it only dictates the specific material basis from which societies emerge. Contradictions arise not inevitably, but as a dialectical consequence of the fact that, history, in essence, is merely “the activity of man pursuing his aims.” The Manifesto itself calls the bourgeoisie’s fall and proletarian victory “equally inevitable,” and it should be noted that while these thinkers wrote respectively in Russian and German, the translation evidence does not support assigning four fundamentally different meanings to “inevitable.” “Possibility and actuality must not be confused” - Stalin. Possibility itself, that of proletarian revolution and socialist construction alike, must be transformed into actuality through material processes and can do nothing on its own. Objective possibility is therefore not a self-realizing or guaranteed outcome – and Lenin profusely worked against this kind of spontaneous conception of working class action, purporting that the most conscious elements of the working class, the vanguard, should seek to direct that struggle toward this previously conceived political end. That is the teleological character of the international Communist movement, and requires no fatalism, nor determinism; while dialectical monism may welcome some forms of Spinozan or some such immanent atheism or pantheism, one must come prepared entering Marxist spaces with these beliefs as they will call you a vulgar materialist and lowkirkuenly beat you to death with rocks. Materialism is not particularly unique in its flexibility amongst philosophies; dialectical materialism on the other hand often becomes confusing and muddled with apriorism. Maoist dialectics appear as its highest form, through the dialectical enrichment of negation of the negation.
The next logical inquiry would be into the teleological character of the universality of PPW. ___