Towards the understanding of Karl Marx: A revolutionary interpretation

by Sidney Hook

"Published 1933, at a time of widespread unemployment and bank failures, Towards the Understanding of Karl A Revolutionary Interpretation, by the young Sidney Hook (1902-1989), received considerable critical acclaim and reinforced his burgeoning reputation as a brilliant expositor of ideas. By "revolutionary interpretation" Hook meant quite literally that Marx's main objective was to stimulate revolutionary opposition to class society." "Hook later abandoned the rationale for many of the revolutionary views expressed in this volume, but he never abandoned his warm, positive views of Marx as a thinker and a fighter for freedom. He eventually concluded that twentieth-century history had proved both him and Marx wrong about the inevitable necessity of revolutionary means to achieve their mutual social goals." This unrevised but expanded edition makes readily available for scholars an influential work long out of print and provides critical insight into the intellectual development of one of the twentieth-century's great thinkers. It includes introductions by Ernest B. Hook and Christopher Phelps on the background and reception of the original publication, essays on aspects of Hook's work and life by Paul Berman and Lewis S. Feuer, and an unusual work by Sidney Hook himself on his eventual views of what was enduring in Marx's political outlook.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics

347 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1933

About the author

Sidney Hook was an American pragmatic philosopher known for his contributions to public debates. A student of John Dewey, Hook continued to examine the philosophy of history, of education, politics, and of ethics. He was known for his criticisms of totalitarianism (fascism and Marxism–Leninism). A pragmatic social democrat, Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing communism. After WWII, he argued that members of conspiracies, like the Communist Party USA and other Leninist conspiracies, ethically could be barred from holding offices of public trust.

Reviews

[Twilight O. ☭ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cornel West once wrote that Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx was the first masterpiece of American Marxism. I'm inclined to agree. That Sidney Hook would become a Cold Warrior is almost inexplicable, as his understanding of Marxism was both more faithful to the thought of Karl Marx himself than that of his average devotee and filled with far greater revolutionary potential. Indeed, it is this latter point that provides me with the only answer that makes sense: a Marxism that so revolves around revolutionary subjectivity becomes untenable once one loses faith in the working-class. Hook's position as an academic, living through the capitulation of the unions in America to the New Deal, and confronting the horrors of the Soviet Union... it'd be enough to drive anyone away from revolution. Those who clung to Marxism in this period, ironically, were very often those who had no faith in the working-class to begin with: if one sees the essence of socialism in managerial regimentation, of course the Soviet Union poses no problem! This is a view reinforced by Hook's own account of his life. Hook remained, to his death, a strong admirer of Marx, even through his most virulently anti-communist period. To Hook's mind, Marx's failing was no failing at all. On the level of theory, Marx had been as correct as was possible given the material presented to him by capitalist society and the class-struggle within it in his life-time. Hook simply thought that the new material provided to him by the 20th century outweighed the evidence of Marx's lifetime; the class-struggle was proven to be destructive, therefor Marxism has run its course as a political project. Like Lukacs, Hook believed Marxism to be a radically open ended philosophy; Marxist politics could be abandoned coherently on philosophically Marxist grounds.

In contrast to my theory outlined above, it has often been said that Hook's more unique philosophical leanings were his undoing, that the contradiction between scientific Marxism and experimentalist pragmatism were too great for him to overcome. This explanation, I believe, simply becomes absurd in the face of how flatly coherent Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx is. There's no discernible tension, no moment at which the reader can tell that Hook is being pulled in two mutually exclusive directions. Far from contradicting his Marxism, Hook's pragmatism allows him to deepen his understanding of revolutionary activity as an intellectual act as much as a practical one. Pragmatism, in Hook's hands, becomes deeply praxiological, overcoming the binary of empiricism and rationalism in a remarkably radical transcendence. This is a binary that far more traditional Marxists have had such a great difficulty overcoming, despite quite clear calls to do so within the writings of Marx himself, so to hear from them that Hook's Marxism was in some form impoverished by his debt to pragmatism is quite nearly funny.

It is very likely this emphasis on the working-class as subject that landed Hook in hot water with the Communist Party of the United States. The CPUSA published a number of slanderous hatchet jobs, an episode vividly recalled in Christopher Phelps' political biography of Hook's Marxist period, that did much to hinder Hook's reputation within the communist movement itself. In a very strange twist of fate, Hook was a radical communist who was too radical for the communists but managed to keep his place in academia. If there was a tension in the thought of Sidney Hook, it arose from the tension of his lived experiences, not from any tension inherent to the ideas which which he worked. As Hook himself wrote, "the only valid criticism of the Communist Party is that it is not communist enough," and Hook was by all accounts too communist for their liking. The previously mentioned Georg Lukacs and German Marxist Karl Korsch, both of whom Hook had read and under the latter he studied, were at this time pariahs in the official Communist parties the world over; Hook's blatant similarities to their work no doubt damned him.

Hook, perhaps in part due to the time in which he wrote, does not blame Lenin or Engels, today's most common scapegoats, for the development of Marxism into a rigid doctrine of deterministic nonsense. In fact, Hook at numerous points draws attention to the times at which Engels contradicted such a view, for example his second preface to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific which quotes approvingly and at length from the Holy Family, and credits Lenin (along with Luxemburg) for having been responsible for restoring the revolutionary soul to Marxism. Instead, Hook blames the weakness of the Second International/SPD's grasp of philosophy and their capitulation to the bourgeois state for this development. Funnily enough, Hook at numerous points praises Bernstein for being among the only Marxists to be conscious of what they were doing; what Kautsky called revisionism, Hook calls honesty. An abandonment of working-class subjectivity in political practice necessarily led to the development of a 'Marxist' philosophy that could accommodate and justify such an abandonment. If the working-class will necessarily be compelled towards socialism simply by virtue of the laws of capitalist development, what can Marxists do but seize control of the state on behalf of the working-class and help guide them to socialism when the time comes? The power of the Marxists in the state became synonymous with working-class power, and thus the contradiction was 'resolved'. Hook shows quite conclusively that none of this nonsense had its roots in the writings of Marx & Engels as well as detailing how Lenin (and Luxemburg) broke free of it all. The CPUSA, in their war against Hook, accused him of being an apologist for Bernstein on the grounds that Hook had credited him for his honesty. This I can only explain by suggesting that the CPUSA were keenly aware of how close Hook's critiques of the SPD were relevant to them; perhaps the only way to counter his critique was to attempt to silence it!

Hook's book is ultimately a very philosophical one. It's split, half and half, into a discussion of how Marxism was bastardized and then an attempt to explain Marx's real philosophy in light of what we now understand Marx to not have thought. To be blunt, Hook manages to make sense of what has long made no sense to me; that, of course, being dialectics. After having read Hook, I can approach the works of Bertell Ollman, for example, with far greater confidence that I have some inkling of what's being talked about. For all his merits, Ollman's writing is far from lucid, while Hook's certainly is. He does much to clarify what the dialectic is, its unique qualities in Marxist hands, its actual practical utility, and so on. Even when given a focus on clarity, it's simply easy to get lost in the maze of dialectics. Truthfully, I think this is the great value of Hook's pragmatic contributions. Pragmatism, unlike Hegelianism, is understandable while containing many of the same insights. What is a seemingly inescapable vortex in the hands of Hegel becomes quite navigable in Hook's. One day I'll tackle Hegel more fully, but for now, I feel quite satisfied with what I've learned from Hook.

"...the apparently mysterious character of the Marxian dialectic is due to nothing more than the Hegelian terminology with which Marx, out of piety to Hegel’s memory, invested it, and to the refusal of Marx’s critics to translate its meaning from the technical idiom of philosophy into the ever fresh experience of change, growth, and novelty." - Sidney Hook

Of course, not everyone shares my high opinion of Hook's Marxism. Cornel West, while crediting Hook's brilliance, nevertheless has provided a critique of pragmatist Marxism that I think is worth considering. His argument hinges on pointing out that Hook's arguments in the 1930s for the necessity of revolution are, philosophically, the same arguments he made in the 1960s for why American imperialism ought to be tolerated. In short, the fact that the world is imperfect and we must operate within such a world requires us to make choices that, too, are imperfect; violence that is directed towards useful ends is ultimately justifiable. West, I believe, effectively shows how pragmatism can capitulate to imperialism and remain coherent, and of course, it is true that Marxism could not do this. Why? The answer is subjectivity, the very matter on which Hook is so strong in this book! If one loses faith in the working-class as revolutionary subject, one cannot possibly believe the working-class revolution is a tenable political project. A pragmatist would never consider options he did not consider live. Marxism argues for the subjectivity of the working-class. A pragmatist Marxism, therefore, would consider working-class subjectivity a live option at all points and therefore has no reason to abandon working-class revolt as a political project. If, as it would seem, Hook was under the impression that the failures of the working-class movement in the 1930s proved that Marx was wrong about their revolutionary subjectivity, it's quite easier here in 2021 to suggest that it was Hook who was wrong. Since the 1998 Seattle protests, class-struggle has remained a part of American life, even if the weakness of working-class organizations undermines the power the class has in its struggle. By reaffirming that the class-struggle is internal to the logic of capitalist production, we can show on the level of theory that there is no need ever to abandon such a position. That pragmatism can capitulate to capitalism in no way implies that it is necessarily conciliatory in nature. Pragmatism, furnished with the class perspective provided by Marxism, has no reason to capitulate! That Hook lost faith in working-class subjectivity speaks more to the pessimism of the era through which he lived. It's this same pessimism that led Orwell to go from fighting the fascists and writing Homage to Catalonia in 1937 to writing 1984 a mere decade later. That pragmatism, in and of itself, is not a revolutionary doctrine does not imply that it has nothing to tell revolutionaries or that it is incomparable with a revolutionary perspective.

Edwin A. Roberts has elsewhere argued that the lack of a vibrant pragmatist Marxist tradition today is evidence that unity between them is impossible. If an absurdity of the magnitude of analytic Marxism can sustain itself to this day, then does that not suggest that the contradictions between pragmatism and Marxism are even greater? Far from it, I believe it suggests precisely the opposite. Ebbs in the revolutionary wave are always accompanied by ebbs in revolutionary philosophy; where are the praxiological Marxisms now in general? Save for a handful of empty references to Lukacs from the Trotskyist parties and sincere appreciation for him voiced by a minority of their members, praxiological Marxism as a broad brush project is kaput. It can't possibly help that the SWP, like the CPUSA before them, declared pragmatism philosophical enemy number one (see George Novak's Pragmatism vs. Marxism) and waged war on it in much of the 20th century. I'm far more suspicious of Marxism that can insulate itself from the defeats of the working-class and keep soldiering on as though nothing has changed. Those parties who are not so immersed in class-struggle that its retreat means simply a change in the conditions outside party hall doors, not a change in activity. As I believe Cyril Smith showed quite conclusively in his book Marx at the Millennium, although he was far from alone in reaching these conclusions, these Marxist organizations are little more than zombie parties, who ought to be counted among the causalities of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their project is an obvious dead-end, but they refuse to take it off of life support. That they've carried on in the face of history where pragmatist Marxists have given up speaks volumes to how more in touch the latter are to the working-class than the former.

Pragmatist Marxism, in Hook's hands, suffers from one flaw, I believe, and I feel after having defended him for so long, I have a right to voice it. Namely, Hook's version of praxis is, I believe, overly party-centric. While he's fully appreciative of the need for the party to be within the class, to be a part of the class-struggle, he sees the development of Marxism as something ultimately insular to the party itself. No question, those in the party are the most conscious members of the working-class and therefore ought to be together responsible for the development of philosophy, but Hook makes no references to theory generated by the working-class or how working-class self-activity itself is a philosophical act upon which we can draw, as did Marx on the Paris Commune when he reformulated the section of Das Kapital on commodity fetishism in light of their experiences. This is all, I believe, immanently pragmatic, it's simply that Hook lacked an understanding of the dialectic of class and party. This is an inherited failure, of course. In his studies of Hegel, Lenin never once related his studies to the matter of organization. In spite of all the great strides Lenin made in recovering the praxiological core of Marxism, he, as I believe Lars Lih proved, remained within what was, ultimately, a Kautskyian organizational form. To a large extent, this was in accordance with specifically Russian conditions, but it's a legacy that we cannot simply draw from wholesale. That Hook himself failed to break with this legacy is unimportant in the scheme of things; he wrote nearly 30 years before anyone would even think to question Lenin's legacy in this way, speaking here, of course, of Raya Dunayevskaya. That this questioning never produced satisfactory answers in her hands or the hands of her followers speaks volumes about the difficulty of the matter. That what Hook wrote remains far in advance of most Marxism today is impressive enough, and I'd like to think that a pragmatic Marxism informed by Hook will eventually play a role in finding those answers we search for.

When I think of Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, I think of alternative histories. Fantasies, perhaps. It's indulgent, but I can't help but wonder how different the world would be if Marxists hadn't simply dropped the ball so consistently. When I look around, and I see the popularity of Harvey and Wolff, Heinrich, or Postone, I can't help but just feel disheartened. Coming back to Hook reminds me that, as the socialist slogan goes, another world is, in fact, possible. A better Marxism is possible. An alternative history is obviously out of the question, but an alternative future is always on the table. This book unquestionably is and will remain important in my fight to work for that future.

[David Niose · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an old classic that I never got around to reading until now. Though Sidney Hook was a committed Marxist when he wrote it in 1933 (he would swing to the right later in life), the book can be appreciated regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum. If you want to understand Marxism, this is an informative volume that provides the perspective of a major intellectual who was a true believer. I gave the book four stars not because I think Hook was right (he clearly wasn't) but because the book has much value, as history and philosophy, despite it flawed opinions.

Hook provides a fairly thorough overview of Marx’s philosophical views, covering all the major points — the influence of Hegal, historical materialism, Marx's economic analyses, the theories of class struggle, state and revolution, etc. — while also discussing the views of important early twentieth century Marxists, such as Kautsky, Luxemburg, Bernstein, Lenin, and others. Well written and readable, the book would be very informative to those who have not already studied the subject deeply (and still interesting even to those who have.)

With all that said, what really stood out for me while reading this was how history has proven so much of Marx’s thinking wrong and made his theories outdated. While of course there are still aspects of his thinking that still have important relevance, it becomes clear while reading this old classic that the world has moved far beyond the socio-economic realities of Marx’s days (and even Hook’s days). Technology, systemic changes, the general improvement of living standards, and other factors have made it hard to take the Marxian call for proletariat revolution seriously. If more people would read books like this, the contemporary glamorization of Marx would quickly subside and more relevant political and economic solutions might make their way to the forefront.