Reply to Young

Abstract

I am pleased to be able to respond to the comment by T. R. Young. I believe that his intervention in the discussion between Marc Wardell and myself is useful, and I find myself in agreement with much of the general tone of his comments. There are specific points in his paper, however, with which I strongly disagree. I will respond to these points with a few brief comments. Young tells us that starts with a Now I am aware of no place where Marx makes such a statement, and I must confess that I really have no idea what a ontology is. There are many places within the corpus of his writings, however, where Marx tells us is a materialist, which implies a naturalist ontology. Marx's particular problem was to undertake a scientific study of the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production. This appears, in one form or another, as the major theme of all of Marx's theoretical writings from the 1845 German Ideology on. The modest purpose of my original paper in The Sociological Quarterly was to discuss one aspect of the methodological approach adopted by Marx in those studies. Both Wardell and Young seem to fear that such an obsession with scientific method betrays a lack of revolutionary ardor. Certainly, the theoretical scientism of the European Social Democratic parties at the turn of the century, which posited an inevitable breakdown of capitalism and socialist victory, was a contributing element to these parties' political quietism. It seems to me, however, that many Marxists today risk an even greater danger in abandoning the scientific element in Marx's own work for an historicist (mis)reading of Marx and a voluntaristic politics of will. Although I that Young is sensitive to these dangers, I believe that his note exhibits both of these flaws. Young, throughout his comment, consistently interprets Marxism as a form of historicism. This is especially clear in his opening remarks where Young states that the best element of Wardell's critique is that he says that Marx is not talking about theory coming closer to reality but rather reality coming closer to theory. Of course, although neither Young nor Wardell make precisely clear what is meant by this usage, we are meant to know in a more general way what they have in mind. The historical unfolding of capitalism creates the conditions of its demise and socialist supersession-capitalism arranges its own funeral as well as creating its own gravediggers-and Marxist theory is fulfilled. History (or, as Young would have it, prehistory) is thus a kind of play whose script is already written and the final act is never in doubt. This undoubtedly is the historicist notion of what prediction in the social sciences ought to be and, however far it may be from Marx's own work, the affinities of this sort of reading of Marx to Hegelian philosophy are obvious and do not require comment. But notice what has happened here. If reality truly has no choice but to fulfill revolutionary theory, then what happens to the role of active revolutionary struggle or practice? Young now seemingly contradicts himself. He affirms that revolutionary praxis is the active capture of history in which the determinism of