Fight the Fascist Philosophy of Pragmatism – Robin Yeamans

Capitalism gave rise to the philosophy of pragmatism

Although Harry K. Wells wrote “Pragmatism—Philosophy of Imperialism” back in 1954, it is burningly relevant today. Pragmatism has silently taken over as the dominant philosophy of people who live in the US, and it is harming the struggle for progressive change.

The book intertwines discussion of political economy with the adoption of the harmful philosophy, pragmatism. By the late 19^th century the frontier was closed, and the white working class was becoming aroused, and evolution as part of science threatened the dominance of old ideas.

Marx published Capital in 1867. In the last chapter, he described how difficult for capitalism were conditions in the US: “where land is very cheap and all men are free where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself,¹ not only is labour very dear [expensive], as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.” The U. S. worker was not yet deprived of everything except the ability to work and therefore was not yet truly exploitable as a proletarian.

Harry Wells states, “the period between 1860 and 1878, when pragmatism was being formulated, was one of rapid economic development and of sharp political struggle. In the economic base it was marked on the one side by a vastly heightened concentration of capital with the beginnings of monopolies, and on the other side by a large growth in the numbers of the proletariat.”

The Paris Commune of 1871 terrified the capitalist class and electrified the working class. In the preface to the second edition of Capital Marx stated that the class struggle “sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested enquirers, there were hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetics.” Wells states, “Expedient apologetics takes the place of scientific inquiry; usefulness to the class takes the place of truth.”

From 1871 to 1874, a Metaphysical Club met, which was to be the incubator of the philosophy of pragmatism. The main initial proponents of pragmatism were in the group.

Henry Wells states, “[W]ith one great leap forward of capitalist industrial development following the victory of 1865, and the concomitant development of the proletariat with its forms of organized struggle, religion could no longer” control the masses. Further, “the challenge of evolution to theology speeded up the process of the formulation of a strictly bourgeois philosophy…. [There was a] double threat to established religion: from an aroused working-class and from science, especially the theory of evolution.” The bourgeoisie had used old-fashioned, rigid, religion with its doctrine of the Protestant ethic telling people it was good to be a worker, to control the working class. This was no longer adequate, something new was needed, and it appeared as the philosophy of pragmatism.

In 1878, the belief system of pragmatism first appeared in print, authored by Charles S. Peirce. He set forth the basic premise of pragmatism that the production of belief is the sole function of thought; what is believed is called “the truth.” The opposite of truth is not falsity but doubt. Peirce contended that the settlement of opinion is the sole end of inquiry.

Peirce set forth three methods of pragmatism (1) tenacity and voluntarism–if you believe what you want with sufficient tenacity it will come to exist for you; further the problem is not just how to fix belief for the individual but for the community. (2) authority–force and violence. This was to be the method applied to the people. Wells explains, “From its inception, pragmatism has within its character the potentiality of becoming the philosophy of fascism. (3) science–which is reserved for the intellectual minority. Peirce says the world is not my creation but our creation.

Whatever is believed, or is fixed as belief, is reality for Peirce; for him belief and reality are the same thing. For him a thing is real because we believe it; we do not believe it because it is real; it is important to ensure fixation of public rather than merely private beliefs. This brings in “the market place of ideas.” “What is believed by the majority of the people in the intellectual market place is considered as true. The criterion of truth is majority belief,” Wells explains. He further states that Peirce’s “denial of reality lays the basis for his denial of truth.”

It might be noted that Mussolini hailed James as his teacher. In 1954 Wells pointed out that pragmatism was the main line philosophy of US imperialism. The great bulk of Dewey’s works appeared in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Pierce and James had earlier written against the specter of socialism. Dewey wrote against its reality. He was and indeed it is the leading philosopher of US imperialism.

When Peirce first voiced the philosophy of pragmatism in 1878, it went unnoticed until it was rediscovered by William James in 1898 and took off like a shot. These 20 years, Wells reports, “saw the closing of the frontier, . . the conquest of the internal market, and the Indian peoples mostly destroyed or confined to ‘reservations.’ The era of ‘free land and the trek west’ was over. But most important, . . . Competitive capitalism . . . by the turn of the century. . . was already a different kind of capitalism . . . ; it was monopoly capitalism.” The inaugural international imperialist war of aggression by the US occurred in 1898 with the annexation of Spanish colonial territories. The proletariat by 1898 was restless and throwing off old ideological constraints.

Interestingly, today the proletariat is also in a changing situation— with many becoming homeless and or jobless due to computers and robots. This is a time comparable to 1898 when the bourgeoisie had found it needed new ideas to control the proletariat. At the present old ideas are wearing off. Charlottesville shocked many, and in the 2017 Houston flood, Pastor Joel Osteen did a lot to discredit his own religion of prosperity, which said that if you had faith you would prosper. The open violence of Nazis in Charlottesville supported by Trump, the flood and the disaster in addition to long-standing US economic problems are bringing people to question old ideas. Our job is to prevent the bourgeoisie from replacing the bad old ideas with new worse ideas. Our job is to convey a proletarian, Marxist philosophy.

Towards that end, Wells’ book on pragmatism scientifically dissects its bankrupt ideas. However, like the initial 1878 publication of the ideas of pragmatism, Wells’ book, published in 1954, was before its time. Today capitalist and fascist ideas that serve as fetters on the masses of people in the US are ready to be broken, and today Wells’ book is a key to understanding.

Pragmatism disarms the proletariat

Denial of science. In 1890, William James voiced what Harry Wells calls “the theory of no knowledge.” James says that mental life is the reflection, not of objective reality through social practice, but of bodily and brain experiences – – sensation. Each individual builds their own world out of their stream of consciousness. What they select to pay attention to is what is real; reality and belief are the same thing. He claims there are human nature and human instincts such as the ownership or proprietary “instinct’; worse, there is the killing instinct which according to James makes lynching, massacres and war inevitable. Wells points out that James makes “characteristics acquired during the life of individuals in the particular capitalist form of society into innate and therefore eternal instincts. In this way they can uphold ‘an unchanging human’ and deny that society can change since human nature cannot.”

Dewey puts forth that nature is identical with human experience. Nature has no independent existence at all. Things are the human reaction to them. We do not know the world independent of us. We know only our reaction to the world. The essence of this philosophy is the denial of objective reality, the denial that the world exists independently of humans. Ideas are not true or false; they are useful or useless. Wells explains, “Past experience does not give rise to laws or principles which are true reflections of reality. The latter Dewey brands as dogmas. Rather, past experiences act as tentative hypotheses to guide experience.” The hypothesis that works is the true one. Practice is left to grope from moment to moment without guidance by real theory. Action can proceed only on a trial and error basis, spontaneously and based on expediency. Thus Dewey rejects any genuine theory and raises practice to a “principle.” If intelligence finds that myths are useful, they are true; there is no longer a conflict between mysticism and knowledge.

Wells explains, “Dewey denies that Marxism is a science because ‘science’ is not a matter of laws of necessity, but is simply the working hypotheses about the way complex factors interact ….” In an argument that seems almost laughable now, Dewey’s chief argument against Marxism is that it is not rooted in analysis of conditions, but is based on the authority of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Thus his charge is that Marxism is not a science but a “theology.” Wells points out, “Without objective reality and scientific knowledge, ‘law’ and ‘truth’ are reduced to articles of faith and can be maintained only by authority.”

According to James, there is no world independent of human consciousness. Wells says, “Thus science is the tool of expediency; it organizes the chaos in useful ways, but has nothing whatever to do with truth, the correspondence of law and facts to reality.” This pure idealism denies the possibility of science, and it can be seen that a large number of people in US society have accepted this outlook.

In addition, there is no history. Wells explains that history is studied to see what means have worked in the past to accomplish ends.

As to education, Dewey joined with many decent people who wanted to undermine the old authoritarian, drillmaster type of education. They focused on the development of a child as an individual rather than as a parrot of the teacher. But Dewey placed education in the US in the service of the dominant interests. He substituted the idea of expediency for authority. He thus, according to Wells, placed “pedagogy wholly in the service of the political interests of American reactionaries.”

James explicitly recognized materialism with its affirmation of the objective world, science, theory and truth as the ideological enemy. James held that experience is not experience of anything, for there is nothing but human experience. He specifically says, “experience and reality come to the same thing.” For him neither “reality” nor “knowledge” has any genuine meaning; they are merely synonyms for experience.

Many had struggled to reconcile science and knowledge with religion. For James this was no struggle at all because there was no external reality for science or knowledge to study. There was no difference between science and religion. There was nothing to reconcile: “for if science as discovery of the nature of the real world is eliminated, then science has already been reconciled with religion.”

One of James’ key beliefs was, “an idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.” He goes so far as to say that “if … true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas [were] the only useful ones, then our duty would be to shun truth, …” Truth for pragmatism would be what is better for us to believe. Thus the theory of truth merges with the pragmatic method there are no principles, no criteria of right or wrong other than pure expediency.

Wells points out, “In affirming effects and repudiating causes, it in reality also repudiates any real effects.” There can be no concept of causality. The American people at the present time have a major problem with cause and effect, and it is pragmatism that underlies this difficulty. For James whatever works is scientific truth. Expediency becomes the only “principle.”

The pragmatic method looks forward into facts that the status quo may be preserved, while Marxism Leninism looks back to understand the laws of development so that the status quo may be transformed, according to Wells. Pragmatism supports violent anti-intellectualism and an anti-theoretical orientation.

For Dewey experience itself is the sole ultimate authority. This eliminates the authoritative doctrines of science and leaves people up to improvised means to meet each situation as it arises. Wells characterizes this as “the central feature of pragmatism.” Wells points out, “If the working class were to follow the teachings of Dewey, it would cast aside the generalized experience of the class embodied in the science of Marxism-Leninism, and would rely in its strategy and tactics solely on the power of its day to day experience ….” In the final chapter of the book Wells lists some of the main characteristics of pragmatism, and one of them is spontaneity, which Wells says tells the American people, “Guess, don’t predict, act spontaneously, don’t plan; improvise, don’t lay out projects;….” Such advice, of course, is a roadmap for defeat in fighting an enemy like transnational capital.

In place of scientific analysis Dewey puts forth “ ‘the factor theory’ of culture, in which a plurality of factors, all on the same level and of the same importance, simply interact. No one is the determining element. It is an effective formula for the elimination of any possible way of understanding society. Dewey’s social theory is a factor theory: a factor theory of society; a factor theory of human nature; a factor theory of culture. The mass of factor interactions is so complex there is no way of bringing order out of the chaos…. Society with all its factors is really unknowable. There can be no science of society…. So many equally important interacting factors have to be taken into account that planning is impossible;….” Dewey ends up with a “mishmash of equally interacting factors;….”

Dewey then openly attacks the Marxist science of society but attempts to cover the attack by saying he is not criticizing the economic factor in itself, but only the over-emphasis on it. He draws a distinction between Marx on the one hand and Lenin and Stalin on the other. Wells explains, “The latter, according to Dewey, transformed ‘pure Marxism’ into Marxism-Leninism by changing an alleged ‘Marxist’ factor theory into economic determinism.” He pretends that real Marxists would list his conglomeration of factors, but bad Marxists supposedly engage in economic determinism. Wells points out, “Dewey nowhere cites passages from Marx, Engels, Lenin or Stalin to buttress his charge of economic determinism. For there are no such passages… . Dewey’s assertions are bald lies ….”

Dewey contends that the individual must be changed before society can be changed. Social change is a matter of individual choice, a slow day-to-day process. “With no theory to guide it, it must tackle each problem as it arises….[People] must grope blindly in a hit or miss manner.” To change society, human nature must be changed. This is pure idealism and leads to the conclusion you can’t change human nature anyway, at least not very fast–a doctrine of great use to the bourgeoisie.

In a fascinating chapter called “Religion of Submission,” Wells points out that James “ideologically justifies a return to a religion-centered theocratic society which revival at this time would be a fitting ideology for a fascist corporate state…[I]f there is no objective material world, if there is no scientific knowledge, no truth, then what remains except faith in the submission to unseen powers’ with ‘obedience and reverence?’ …. What is left but to pray and proceed on the basis of trial and error expediency.” Is that not an adequate description of how many of our people are trying to get by today? Like Lenin, Wells describes Dewey as “above all a ‘salesman of theology.’ ”

Wells goes on, “the central thesis of pragmatism is that the world is unknowable and that people are therefore buffeted by chance and hedged in by risk and uncertainty. Life is dangerous, for you never know what is going to happen next.” The only answer is to submit.

Wells’ closing chapter points out, “the first feature of the pragmatic method is empiricism.” Next comes individualism: “the worker who is laid off or evicted [will] think that his situation is particular and unique, that he, himself, is responsible, and that he should in consequence suffer a guilty conscience of shame as well is hunger and cold.” You can recognize the thinking of people in the US today. The third feature of the pragmatic method is spontaneity which has been discussed above. Finally, expedient opportunism closes the list. Any means to the end in view is the essence of the pragmatic method—whether that means is strike-breaking, lynching, atomic bombs, germ warfare–it is acceptable if it works. The fourth feature of pragmatism is subjectivism–the denial of objective reality and the belief that human consciousness creates everything. Fifth is obscurantism which renders the material world completely unknown and unknowable, that is, obscure from us. The sixth and final characteristic of pragmatism is fictionalism, that is, the invention of expedient fictions such as Manifest Destiny, “racial” superiority and inferiority, etc. Wells states, “The vicious ideology of white supremacy, fostered by the imperialist oppressors, is a prime source of the pragmatic virus,…

To break the hold of this vicious philosophy Wells advises, “the merging of ‘American efficiency’ with theoretical understanding, with imaginative grasp of long range developments, is the direction in which the US working class must move if it is to break out of the pragmatic trap.” Further, “as it affects the US working class pragmatism is the separation of practical work from revolutionary theory. It is narrow practicalism.” Wells excoriates pragmatism as “a Nietzschean superman philosophy; beyond good and evil; beyond truth and falsity; beyond humanity. It is a dead-end philosophy of the dead-end class…. Opposed to this reactionary idealist philosophy of pragmatism, the working class has its own progressive, materialist philosophy which is the backbone of the science of Marxism.”