Economic Determinism - Criticism of The Concept

Criticism of The Concept

Other Marxists and Marx-scholars - including György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Maurice Godelier, Franz Jakubowski, Edward P. Thompson and Michael Lowy - completely reject the interpretation of Marx and Engels as "economic determinists". They claim this idea is based on a poor and selective reading of Marx and Engels' work.

They argue that this interpretation originated in the early years of the Second International and was popularised by Karl Kautsky and Nikolai Bukharin, among many others. They refer to the disclaimers by Friedrich Engels (see historical materialism) to the effect that while Marx and himself had focused a lot on the economic aspects, they were very aware that this did not in fact constitute the totality of society or of social life. However, some have viewed such comments as Engels's attempt to extricate himself from an untenable position: Max Weber and other influential sociological and economic thinker agreed that Marx's views were really unidimensional in regard to economic determinism. They did not agree that economic determinism was a vulgar interpretation of Marx. They regarded this to be the explicitly stated and true interpretation of Marx (See own admission in Friedrich Engels, Socialism—Utopian and Scientific, pg 54). They criticized the simplicity in Marx's arguments and held that ideas and cultural beliefs and values to determine societal progress and the evolution of society. (See The Protestant Work Ethic (1905).

Non-Marxist scholars have also objected that economic determinism is overly generalized, insofar as any serious historical explanation of economic realities must always refer to non-economic realities. This became obvious when one had to specify exactly what the economic determinism precisely consisted of. In addition, a lot of confusion about "economic determinism" is due to the conflation of the "commercial" with the "economic". For Marx at least, these were very different concepts.

The dynamic of history according to Marx was shaped precisely by the clash of those interests (class struggle), and that clash could not be understood simply in terms of economic self-interest, because it also involved human needs, customs, traditions, morals and values encompassing a whole way of life. On the other hand, Lenin wrote that "an idea that captures the minds of the masses becomes a material force," meaning that the said needs, customs, traditions, morals and values can be equated to economic forces.

The end result of economic determinism in this view is both economism (a narrow focus on how people earn their livelihood) and economic reductionism (the attempt to reduce a complex social reality to one factor such that this one factor causes all other aspects of society). This, according to some plays directly into the hands of the business class, and ultimately ends in an anti-working class position, whereby the allegiance of the working class is just a "tool" to be used by the political class to modernise an economy, with the aid of forced labour, if need be.