JOHN DEWEY
examination of history-just as an assertion that the Newtonian laws
are the final laws of physics would preclude further search for physical
laws-it would not follow, even if it were
the
scientific law of history,
that it is the means to the moral goal of the liberation of mankind.
That it is such a means has to be shown not by "deduction" from a
law but by examination of the actual relations of means and con–
sequences; an examination in which given the liberation of mankind as
end, there is free and unprejudiced search for the means by which it
can be attained.
One more consideration may be added about class struggle as a
means. There are presumably several, perhaps many, different ways by
means of which the class struggle may be carried on. How can a choice
be made among these different ways except by examining their con–
sequences in relation to the goal of liberation of mankind? The belief
that a law of history determines the particular way in which the struggle
is to be carried on certainly seems to tend toward a fanatical and even
mystical devotion to use of certain ways of conducting the class struggle
to the exclusion of all other ways of conducting it. I have no wish to go
outside the theoretical question of the interdependence of means and
ends but it is conceivable that the course actually taken by the revolution
in the U.S.S.R. becomes more explicable when
it
is noted that means
were deduced from a supposed scientific law instead of being searched
for and adopted on the ground of their relation to the moral end of the
liberation of mankind.
The only conclusion I am able to reach is that in avoiding one kind
of absolutism Mr. Trotsky has plunged into another kind of absolutism.
There appears to be a curious transfer among orthodox Marxists of
allegiance from the ideals of socialism and scientific
methods
of attaining
them (scientific in the sense of being based on the objective relations of
means and consequences) to the class struggle as the law of historical
change. Deduction of ends set up, of means and attitudes, from this law
as the primary thing makes all moral questions, that is, all questions of
the end to be finally attained, meaningless. To be scientific about ends
does not mean to read them out of laws, whether the laws are natural
or social. Orthodox Marxism shares with orthodox religionism and with
traditional idealism the belief that human ends are interwoven into the
very texture and structure of existence--a conception inherited presum–
ably from its Hegelian origin.
John Dewey
