Polemics in Marxist Philosophy

by George Edward Novack

Novack defends scientific socialism—the generalization of the historic line of march of the working class. In articles from “In Defense of Engels” to “Is Nature Dialectical?” Novack answers those who throughout the twentieth century sought to provide a “philosophical” veneer for the anti-working-class course of Stalinist and social democratic misleaderships around the world.

“The book itself is lucidly written….Useful for those uninitiated in philosophy or Marxism.” —Choice

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

Paperback

First published August 1, 1978

Reviews

[Jay Rothermel]

Marxism and Existentialism
Novack explores the fundamental incompatibility between these two schools of thought. He argues that while Existentialism starts with the "isolated individual" and subjective experience, Marxism begins with social relations and the material conditions of existence. From the perspective of the Glossary, Existentialism is viewed as a form of Subjectivism, where the subject’s consciousness is prioritized over objective reality. Novack contends that Existentialism’s focus on "absolute freedom" is a middle-class illusion that ignores the Historical Materialism necessary to understand how social structures actually limit or enable human agency.

In Defense of Engels
This chapter refutes modern attempts to separate Engels from Marx, specifically the claim that Engels introduced a "vulgar" or "positivist" distortion into Marxism. Novack defends Engels’s application of dialectics to the natural world. He emphasizes that Engels correctly identified the Laws of Dialectics (such as the transformation of quantity into quality) as objective laws of movement in both nature and history. To reject Engels is, for Novack, to reject the Materialist foundation of Marxism in favor of a narrow, human-centered "praxis" that lacks a scientific basis.

Georg Lukács as a Marxist Philosopher
Novack evaluates Lukács as a brilliant but flawed thinker. He acknowledges Lukács’s contributions to understanding Alienation and Reification (the process where human relations take on the appearance of relations between things). However, Novack criticizes Lukács’s early work, History and Class Consciousness, for its Hegelian tendencies and its initial rejection of the "dialectics of nature". He argues that Lukács’s later political accommodations to Stalinism represented a retreat from the revolutionary essence of Marxism.

The Jesting Philosopher: The Case of Leszek Kolakowski
Novack analyzes Kolakowski’s journey from orthodox Marxism to a complete rejection of it. He characterizes Kolakowski as an "apostate" who moved toward Skepticism and Idealism. Novack argues that Kolakowski’s disillusionment with Stalinism led him to mistakenly blame the Marxist method itself, eventually adopting a "philosophy of the jester" that mocks the possibility of objective social truth or revolutionary progress.

Sebastiano Timpanaro’s Defense of Materialism
Novack expresses qualified support for Timpanaro, who defended "vulgar" materialism against the "Western Marxism" of thinkers like Frankfurt School members. Timpanaro emphasized the biological and physical constraints on humanity—what the Glossary refers to as the Objectivity of the external world. Novack agrees with Timpanaro's insistence that nature exists independently of human consciousness, but cautions that Timpanaro sometimes leans too far into a "pessimistic" materialism that underestimates the power of revolutionary Praxis to transform conditions.

Back to Kant? The Retreat of Lucio Colletti
In this critique, Novack examines Colletti’s attempt to excise Hegel from Marxism. Colletti argued that Marx’s scientific method was closer to Kantian distinctions than Hegelian contradictions. Novack asserts that this is a "retreat" into Dualism (the separation of mind and matter). By discarding the Unity and Struggle of Opposites, Colletti loses the ability to explain the internal motor of social change, effectively stripping Marxism of its revolutionary dialectic.

Is Nature Dialectical?
This chapter serves as a pillar for Novack's Materialism. He argues against the "humanist" Marxists who claim dialectics only apply to human history. Using the Glossary’s definition of Dialectics as the "science of the universal laws of motion," Novack argues that if nature were not dialectical, human society (which emerged from nature) could not be dialectical either. He points to modern science—evolution, physics, and chemistry—as evidence of the Negation of the Negation and other dialectical processes occurring in the non-human world.

Leon Trotsky on Dialectical Materialism
Novack concludes by presenting Trotsky as the premier practitioner of dialectical materialism in the 20th century. He highlights Trotsky’s use of the Law of Uneven and Combined Development to explain the Russian Revolution. According to Novack, Trotsky maintained the essential link between scientific Theory and revolutionary Practice, demonstrating that a correct philosophical method is not an academic luxury but a vital tool for the working class to understand and change the world.

Key Glossary Terms Influencing These Synopses:

dialectical materialism—the philosophical world view of Marx and Engels, encompassing both nature and society. Materialist in that it postulates the existence of nature prior to humanity and views material conditions as the underlying cause and determinant of society and mind; dialectical in that it postulates the study of matter in motion and transformation by way of contradiction from one form or state to another.

dialectics of nature—the position, held by classical Marxism, that evolutionary change through the process of internal contradiction is universal in inanimate and organic nature as well as in society and the human thought process. Hegel also believed in a dialectics of nature, but rooted it in a supposed teleological process in which nature was striving for self-consciousness through higher and higher levels of organization, leading to the realization of the Absolute Idea (see entry) in an omniscient and all-powerful subject. Hegelianizers of Marxism retain Hegel’s belief that consciousness is required for the existence of contradiction and generally deny that nature apart from human activity is dialectical. Positivistic versions of Marxism reject the dialectics of nature for opposite reasons, maintaining that universal laws of change are incompatible with the findings of the specialized and compartmentalized sciences.

materialism—philosophically, the view that all of reality is composed of matter in motion, including mind, which is the product of the physical brain in social life. Materialism rejects all supernatural explanations of phenomena. In contrast to vulgar materialism, Marxism does not reduce phenomena to mechanical motion, but postulates distinct sets of laws for nature, society, and thought. It holds, nevertheless, that nature and material conditions in general have causal priority in explaining the development of society and thought.

praxis—in general the activity of people in pursuit of their aims. It is popularized by Hegelianizing Marxists to designate social action based on and integrated with theoretical understanding. As they use it, the term implies the ability of revolutionary will to substitute for a lack of propitious objective opportunities.

alienation—literally, separation from, as in the selling of property or the loss of someone's affection. By extension, the loss of one’s creations with a consequent sense of aloneness and powerlessness. This concept is central in twentieth-century existentialism, certain schools of socialist humanism, and various psychological interpretations of Marxism. At the same time, Althusser and the Maoists have tried to extirpate this concept from Marxism, leaving it only in the specific form of the alienation of the product of labor under capitalism. Alienation in the Marxist sense has a double origin, in the powerlessness of human beings to control nature, and, secondly, in class society, in the alienation of labor as well as its product. Marx distinguished here not only the physical appropriation of the products made by the exploited but also the feeling among workers that their laboring activity itself was alien to them and did not satisfy their needs. Additionally there is the sense of separation from humanity as a group, inevitable under class society, and the lack of solidarity with other’ specific individuals one comes in contact with. Above all, alienation expresses the fact that the objective creations of labor come to dominate their creators so that the market in commodity production stands over them as an alien power.

[Michael Zimmerman]

𝙋𝙤𝙡𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙘𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙭𝙞𝙨𝙩 𝙋𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙤𝙨𝙤𝙥𝙝𝙮 is George Novack's final publication. It represents the most developed expression of his philosophical thought. Familiarity with Novack’s earlier works is by no means required, but it is incredibly helpful for understanding the topics covered in this work. 𝘼𝙣 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙙𝙪𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙇𝙤𝙜𝙞𝙘 𝙤𝙛 𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙭𝙞𝙨𝙢, his first work, and 𝙐𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙃𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙮, which lays out the law of uneven and combined development, should be considered essential reading for anyone new to dialectics.

For someone like myself, who has had the unfortunate experience of having their cognitive habits damaged by exposure to academic philosophy in bourgeois “educational” institutions, this work is indispensable for clarifying the confusion reproduced on college campuses. It is not possible to understand Marxism without juxtaposing it with contending and opposing schools of thought. This is why all of Novack’s philosophical works are polemics against bourgeois philosophy. I came to this text having read all of Novack’s earlier philosophical works available from Pathfinder Press and am glad to have ordered my reading this way. I would not have gotten as much out of this text without first reading his other polemics.

Here is an incomplete list of topics covered by the text:
Chance in a dialectically determinist worldview, the development of contradiction, the dialectical laws, the subject-object distinction, epistemology broadly, 𝘢 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘮 specifically, philosophy of science, a non-metaphysical ontology, Hegelianism, vulgar and mechanical materialism, dialectics of nature, Frankfurt School distortions of Marx, dialectical categories, determinants versus causes, and much, much more.

The essay on Colletti should be published as a standalone pamphlet, in my view, because of its wide-ranging critique. It addresses distortions of dialectical materialism that are fashionable even today among intellectuals who claim Marx as their own, but confine his philosophy to the domain of human societies. Novack performs a post-mortem on Colletti’s epistemology, which “smacks more of positivism and pragmatism than Marxism.” This is because Colletti goes even further in limiting the scope of Marxism. He picks and chooses aspects of bourgeois philosophy to fill the holes left by his misinterpretation of Marx. For example, he adopts the cynical Kantian epistemology which posits that only appearances can become known to us, while essences lie forever outside the domain of knowledge. Hence Novack’s association of Colletti with pragmatism—which is at least agnostic in its approach to objectivity—and positivism, which squarely rejects that first causes can be known.

A recurrent theme in the essays selected for this publication is the attempt by revisionists to divorce the dialectics elucidated by Engels in 𝘿𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙉𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 from Marx’s earlier works. As Novack demonstrates, this view ignores the division of labor that existed between Marx and Engels early in their collaboration. Because this attempted revision of Marxism remains popular among reactionary middle-class academics, Novack’s exposition is invaluable as a ward against such distortions.

Novack’s presentation of a non-metaphysical, dialectical ontology was particularly useful. He discusses in greater detail his understanding of levels of existence and domains of being. These domains are categorized as natural, social, and thought. Novack explores the continuity and discontinuity in the operation of dialectical laws across these different domains, which is incredibly helpful in formulating the Marxist view of phenomena such as morality, imagination, intuition, etc. For the careful reader—especially those accustomed to formal analytic categories—Novack’s use of the phrase “exclusively social” refers to phenomena in relation to these domains of being. This is important for cashing out Novack’s ontology with regard to things like morality.

The book pairs well with Novack’s earlier work 𝙀𝙢𝙥𝙞𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙞𝙨𝙢 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙄𝙩𝙨 𝙀𝙫𝙤𝙡𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣, which delves deeper into the positivism that Novack critiques in his essays on Colletti and others. Novack's article 𝙋𝙤𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙢 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙭𝙞𝙨𝙢 𝙞𝙣 𝙎𝙤𝙘𝙞𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙜𝙮, the last section of that text, is an exposition on positivism that explains its use of Popperian falsification, and other misconceived “explanatory virtues,” as a philosophical razor against Marxism. This form of positivism has become the most common.

𝙋𝙤𝙡𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙘𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙭𝙞𝙨𝙩 𝙋𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙤𝙨𝙤𝙥𝙝𝙮 has me reordering my reading list and rereading authors like Lefebvre with new insight.

George Novack was a working class leader of the Socialist Workers Party which carries on the revolutionary continuity going all the way back to Karl Marx. You can read about the activities of the SWP (US) in the socialist newsweekly, The Militant: https://themilitant.com/

[Marc Lichtman]

This is one of my favorites of Novack's books. He begins with an autobiographical note written in 1976. Some of that reads,

"As the only son of immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe, I escaped the lot of a rabbinical student thanks to the voyages of my father and mother to the New World late in the nineteenth century. This fortuitous circumstance has buttressed my belief in the determinative effect of their social situation on people's destinies. Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I was directed at high school toward Harvard, where an older cousin living in the same house had enrolled before me. To my family this upward step in the educational ladder was to provide a passport to success and wealth in one of the professions or as a business executive. Alas for the dreams of parents for their children! My university training was to be put to quite different uses."

Novack stayed at Harvard for five years without earning a degree. Then he found work in the publishing industry. He was around a group based on a magazine "the Menorah Journal." Most of those people gravitated to the Communist Party, but Novack found the real thing, called "Trotskyism" in those days. This book is essays Novack wrote between 1960 and 1977. They take up challenges to Marxism, like "is nature dialectical?" and did Engels distort Marx or continue his work? Novack calls his essay, "in defense of Engels." He discusses the differences between Marxism and Existentialism, and has essays on Georg Lukács, Leszek Kolakowski, Sebastiano Timpanaro, and Lucio Colletti.

I have to admit being ignorant of almost all of these when I first read it, but that didn't affect my enjoyment or what I learned. Today all these essays can be found in the original magazines they were published in on the 'Militant' website, but I recommend the book for much easier reading.

Other Novack, which may be easier to start with: Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History, An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism, Understanding History: Marxist Essays.

[Rhesa]

Substantial essays of the many facets of Marxism by the renown American Marxist.