EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES - SPRING 2000 (continued)

In the afterglow of the sesquicentennial celebrations of the Communist Manifesto, we find this passage still ringing in our ears: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

Now gravedigging -- at least the political variety envisioned here -- is most definitely a willful act! With a characteristic ethos of paradox, then, Marx and Engels posit free will leading to a determined -- inevitable -- result. In its Marxist form, the issue is clearly joined. The inevitabilism of the currently dominant neoliberal ideology, by contrast, seems to drown genuine human will and intentionality in the icy waters (apologies for the obvious plagiarism) of the "free market" and narrow utilitarian rationality.

The problem of freedom of will vs. determinism, of course, is ever the stuff of Philosophy 101, and a review of some recent philosophy texts suggests that the academic professionals in this field have not made much headway over its classical statements. All manner of "compatibilist" positions and sophistications in the definition of causality do not appear ultimately to transcend the core problem: freedom of will seems necessarily to imply a rupture in the chain of causes and effects, with dire consequences for the unity and knowability of the material world. There is undeniable wisdom in the compatibilist view, and particularly in its Marxist variant urging a dialectical sensibility in preserving and developing both causality, on the one hand; and human vision and ac- tion, on the other. But this is a programmatic call, not a finished product; dialectics is not a substitute for clarity.

In the meantime, we still face the challenges to the Marxist notion of inevitability, perhaps most forcefully stated in the 20th century by Sir Karl Popper in his charge that Marxism is guilty of "moral futurism": the proposition that what is inevitable must therefore be good. Without trying to unravel the centuries-old free will vs. determinism knot -- otherwise, what would our future philosophers do for a living? -- we may begin a process of re-examining the venerable question of socialism and inevitability.

The simplicity of the response to Popper -- he has attributed to Marxism the reverse of its true position, which is that what is good will therefore in time become inevitable -- can be brought out using a simple analogical parable. Imagine a person placed inside a rectangular room, blindfolded; imagine further, to give the parable space to work, that the blindfold cannot be removed. The room has no windows; there is one door, on one of the four walls, and the door is closed but not locked. The room is otherwise plain in construction: the floor is smooth, and there are no obstacles -- no pits, no pendulums. The question, of course, is: can any sense be made of the statement that our subject will inevitably leave the room through the door?

The problem has two confronted aspects: the will of the person to survive -- which can only be realized by escaping from the room and finding food, other people, etc. outside -- and the objective conditions in which she is placed, and about which she initially has no knowledge. What emerges immediately is that there is no guarantee of success and survival: no absolute inevitability attached to any prediction concerning the act of opening and passing through the door. Our subject might fall, hit her head, and die. We could lengthen the odds against survival by introducing Poe-like elements into the environment: pits, pendulums, poisonous snakes. This, however, does not change the fundamental nature of the problem.

Our subject's behavior is a matter of speculation. She will undoubtedly start to move, cautiously, and will eventually find a wall; we have no way of knowing which one. Finding a wall, she will move along it, in one of two directions (again, the choice is indeterminate, even if we go along with the determinist philosophers in attributing this indeterminacy to our lack of knowledge of the full set of causal elements shaping the choice). Her path of discovery will be either long or short, depending on the good or bad luck of her various choices of direction of movement. Timing, therefore, clearly cannot be predicted. If, however, no serious mishaps occur, it is reasonable to posit that she will sooner or later find the door, and try it. We therefore conclude: it is conditionally inevitable that she will leave the room through the only door that exists.

We have arrived at a "determinism" that relies on the assumption of free will and choice, but where the latter are not exercised in a vacuum but rather in a definite set of conditions "not of [the subject's] own choosing" (plagiarizing, this time, from The German Ideology). The directionality of our claim rests on the analytical and empirical-practical enterprise that gave us knowledge of the characteristics of the room, and we had better have gotten all that right. The motive force is provided by the subject's will to act, to survive, to progress; without that will, nothing happens. The contingency results from the possibility that error or accident will result in her death, ending the game (so to speak).

Is this at all evocative of the historical materialist vision of human possibility at the start of the 21st century? Without belaboring the obvious, I will simply state that the external ("objective") characteristics of the room are the nature and limitations of capitalism -- its increasing incapacity to manage the ever-more-urgent tasks of human reproduction and survival. There are any number of pits and pendulums, in the form of possible irreversible ecological damage, nuclear annihilation, inability to address the violent ruptures in the fabric of society revealed from Kosovo and Serbia to East Timor, Rwanda, Russia, Central America, etc. Historical materialism does not guarantee survival; it only ("only"?) points to the door and urges us to find it, as soon as possible. There is no way out other than to replace the elemental, destructive power of capitalist accumulation with the democratic, principled and egalitarian logic of socialism. Thus: socialism is (conditionally) inevitable, because it is possible.

Is this too sanguine? Too simple? I put the issue to a participant in the "Manifestivity" celebration of 1998 (who will re- main anonymous here, as his remarks were made in private). Perhaps, he argued, there are two doors, not one. Then you cannot predict which one will be opened. All that is left is radical contingency. The addition of a second door, however, does not alter the basic logic of the parable. If both doors open onto the same environment external to the room, this is just an elaboration of the path-contingency already present in the parable: we do not know and cannot predict the actual path of movement, the timing, etc. To this we now add that we cannot predict which of the two doors will be used. The heart of the matter remains: it is conditionally inevitable that our subject will leave the room, by whichever door. In either case, this outcome leads to survival and progress.

Suppose, however, we posit that each of the doors leads to a different outside: one that offers success, and another leading to destruction. This is like the fable from antiquity about the gladiator forced to open one of two doors, one of which conceals vast treasure, the other a hungry tiger. Once again, on reflection this turns out to be an elaborated version of an aspect we have already considered, in the form of pits and pendulums. The choice of the wrong door represents a fatal accident of history: human progress, in its most recent, capitalist, form, has led to despoliation of the natural environment and disruption of the conditions for economic development to a degree that blocks the possibility of crossing over the threshold into socialism. The advance of intelligent life into a shared intentionality and democratic control over its own conditions of existence will then have to occur -- if at all -- on some other planet, in some other galaxy, where the buildup of fossil fuel material relative to the timeframe of evolution is larger, and the material conditions for continuing social development therefore exist. My friend's "two doors" proposal in this form reduces the conditional inevitability of socialism to a 50-50 crap shoot. Is that the way it is? I personally like to believe the odds are better than that, but that is a matter for scientific investigation, not wishful thinking!

Are there, perhaps, multiple positive doors (i.e., doors other than one leading to destruction)? This may refer to different paths to socialism and different forms of socialist construction, and that is clearly in the spirit of the parable. But I would want to insist that all of the paths have in common the transcendence of exploitation, domination, elemental rivalry and greed, and the instantiation of socialist, communitarian, collective and democratic principles of public life and activity. If the "door" concept is held to this general level, then there is only one positive door available. This also, however, is a matter for extensive scientific corroboration.

A final question (for now). If our subject's leaving the room is equated to general human survival and the unfolding of human potential -- in a word, socialism -- and if the odds are arbitrary, with the probability of survival taking on any value from zero to one, then the conditional inevitability parable reduces to a simple tautology: we either will or will not survive! The force of the parable, it should be emphasized, depends on our ability to substantiate the core Marxist claims concerning capitalism's inherent realities and tendencies, and the material foundations for the opposites of these realities and tendencies in the struggle and organization of the working class (with all of that class' diverse cultures, sites and identities). This, of course, is the on-going work of Marxist theory and research, and a principal interest of this journal.

What, then, of free will vs. determinism? Can we help those philosophy students as they grapple with the riddle of Buridan's Ass (the animal, not the anatomical feature)? Suspended between two equal culinary pleasures, you will remember, the Ass starves to death, an absurd result that proves the opposite of causally determined behavior, i.e., freedom of will. All we can do, I suppose, is urge our students -- and colleagues -- to act, willfully, decisively, and militantly, in their own best interests and in those of their working-class communities, even while they ponder the innumerable threads of causation running through their lives and consciousness. Change the world, don't just interpret it (to plagiarize one last time), and the dialectics of agency and struc- ture, of freedom and causality, will increasingly become clear to everyone -- even to those who were trained in academic philosophy.

D.L.