Roy Bhaskar and Alex Callinicos

MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM

A Debate1

ALEX CALLINICOS

I’m very grateful to the Centre for Critical Realism and to Historical
Materialism for inviting me to speak, and it’s very nice to see Roy again and
to be engaging in dialogue with another advocate of critical realism. There’s
a sense in which the subject of our discussion, namely the relationship
between critical realism and Marxism, is an established fact. I think the
relationship between the two is very deep. For example, there’s an entry on
Roy and critical realism in the Dictionary of Contemporary Marxism
published in Paris last year.2 (I wrote it myself, and will be going over a
number of the points it makes, both positive and negative.) When a major
dictionary identifies the originator of critical realism as a significant
contributor to contemporary Marxist thought, broadly understood, it seems to
me that—while one shouldn’t believe everything that encyclopedias and
dictionaries say—we’re talking about an established fact. The contribution of
critical realism to the more general development of radical and critical
thought has been an extremely beneficial and positive one. However, it’s
precisely because of this that one can’t—certainly I can’t—help but be
dismayed by Roy’s more recent development as indicated in the last of his
books I’ve read, From East to West. I honestly don’t see that there’d be much
point discussing whether or not one can make a transcendental argument for
the existence of angels or the transmigration of souls, so what I want to do in

1
This is an edited transcript of the first part of a debate between Roy Bhaskar and
Alex Callinicos, sponsored by the Centre for Critical Realism and Historical
Materialism, at SOAS, London, December 11th 2002. Although it had been billed as a
debate on critical realism, Marxism and materialism, most of the discussion was about
critical realism and its relationship to Marxism; and although various issues to do with
materialism came up in the discussion and in the main speakers’ subsequent
contributions, following the focus of Callinicos’s initial remarks, turning on what
Bhaskar has called epistemological (as distinct from ontological and practical)
materialism, we are presenting here the debate under the title of ‘Marxism and Critical
Realism’.
2
J. Bidet and E. Kouvelakis, ed., Dictionnaire Marx Critique (Paris, 2001).

JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 1:2 MAY 2003

© The International Association for Critical Realism 2003
90 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

part is to consider what kind of flaws, weaknesses, and tensions in the earlier
development of critical realism—particularly in its dialectical phase—could
have helped to make possible this kind of development. But first I want to
talk about my overall appreciation, as someone very much engaged in the
classical Marxist tradition, not just as a body of ideas but as a transformative
practice engaged in the social world, and from that perspective offer some
kind of assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Critical Realism with a
big ‘C’ and a big ‘R’: critical realism against Critical Realism.

I’ve thought of myself for a long time as a critical realist with a small ‘c’ and
‘r’. In other words, I find myself very much in agreement with, and
influenced by, the broad conception of the sciences that Roy advanced,
particularly in his writings of the seventies. It may be helpful to highlight
what seem to me the three most important aspects of those texts. First, reality
is conceived as complex, structured, and multi-levelled, with its apparent
workings—the workings that are visible to observation, for example—the
outcome of interaction between the powerful particulars that underlie them.
That’s one strand in critical realism, as it took shape particularly in Roy’s
first book, A Realist Theory of Science. Second, this broad conception of
reality is claimed to be applicable in modified form to the social world, where
the operation of the underlying powers is dependent on the activity of human
subjects. Third, science itself is conceived as a relatively autonomous social
activity whose ability to capture the structure of the real is dependent upon its
capacity to intervene in nature to create closed systems to allow the testing of
theories. The distinction between open and closed systems, too, is critical in
the argument, and it’s something I’ll come back to. Let me just say that the
difference is roughly speaking between, on the one hand, the world as it is,
where what occurs is a consequence of the interaction between a number of
different powerful particulars, and the operation of any individual particular
is modified and restricted in various ways because it’s operating in relation to
all sorts of other powers. That’s what critical realism calls an open system,
whereas, on the other hand, we have the world as it is when science
intervenes: critical to scientific practice is the creation of a closed system in
which as far as possible the operation of one particular power is isolated from
the operation of all the others; this is something achieved approximately in
order to test scientific hypotheses. So there’s a real sense in which science is
conceived as a material practice: to know the world is dependent upon the
ability of science to intervene in the world to create, or try to create,
sequences that correspond to how its theory suggests the world ought to
behave once the interference of other particulars from the one whose nature is
under investigation is held in abeyance.

That, then, is basically what I mean by critical realism, and I’ve always
thought that this conception of science is one that articulates and develops the
conception of science that’s implicit in Marx’s Capital. Marx makes a
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 91
number of obiter dicta about science in Capital, stressing in particular the
way it distinguishes between the essence of things—the underlying essence
or inner framework—and the surface appearances of things, and this is
crucial to his critique of non-Marxist versions of economics, particularly
what he called vulgar economics, which bears a close resemblance to what is
orthodox economics in virtually every academic department of economics in
the world today—except by some fortunate conjunction of events the
Department of Economics here at SOAS. This much is explicit, but I think a
conception of science consistent with Roy’s scientific realism of the seventies
implicitly informs the whole of Capital. And there are even closer
connections between some of Roy’s ideas and the work of more recent
Marxist philosophers; for instance, Roy’s distinction between the transitive
and intransitive dimensions of science bears quite a close resemblance—a
family resemblance shall we say—to the distinction between a thought object
and a real object in science that we found developed by Althusser and Balibar
in Reading ‘Capital’. The history of Marxism and its conceptualization of
science is of course a complicated one—in the anti-scientistic wing of
Marxist philosophy, particularly the Frankfurt School, you even have
incomprehension in relation to the natural world and natural science—but I
think that what critical realism does, among many other things, is to capture
important features of Marxist conceptions—or what should be part of the
Marxist conceptions—of science.

And certainly I welcome the growing influence of critical realism. I teach in a

politics department and have been both pleased and slightly amused to note
the way in which some of my younger colleagues, particularly those doing
empirical research—and in Britain political science has been not just
empirical but ultra-empiricist—have recently started using the ideas of
critical realism, and indeed dialectical critical realism, to inform their
research. That’s a really good development and a really good example and
indication of the enormous influence that critical realism has had.

But why wouldn’t I describe myself as a Critical Realist? There are a number
of reasons, but I want to emphasize two in particular. I’ve always been
skeptical about what has seemed to me to be the exaggerated claims that are
sometimes made by Critical Realism as a new approach to the social
sciences. I’ve taken part in conferences which sought to pursue a Critical
Realist approach in one or another social scientific discipline. This seemed to
me to be inflating what one could legitimately claim of critical realism as an
essentially philosophical theory. I think there are very strict limits to what
philosophy can achieve with respect to actual scientific research, let alone
political practice and that sort of thing. It seemed to me that what critical
realism did was to articulate best practice in critical social theory rather than
offer a philosopher’s stone that would allow us to resolve a whole series of
anomalies, tensions and crises in particular disciplines. I also never liked the
92 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

idea of a Critical Realist movement—a movement around a set of general

philosophical ideas seemed to me to have a certain sectarian quality, so I was
uncomfortable about that. Secondly, and more importantly, my worries about
the inflation of claims about what philosophy can achieve took a quite
specific form—and here I want to get slightly more technical philosophically.
In A Realist Theory of Science Roy pioneered an extension of the method of
transcendental argument that was developed by Kant, especially in The
Critique of Pure Reason, and in particular Roy sought to develop a
transcendental argument for realism itself. It seems to me that there is an
enormous disanalogy between what Kant does and the kind of argument that
Roy put forward.

There’s a famous bit of the Critique, a relatively early part of the

transcendental analytic, where Kant undertakes what he calls the
transcendental deduction of the categories. What this is designed to show is
that, even though we can’t know the structure of reality independently of our
experience, we can nevertheless have knowledge of those appearances
themselves in the sense of applying a set of categories inherent in human
understanding that organize them as a causally governed world of objects
existing independently of human perception of them; even if we can’t know
their ‘real’ structure, we’re entitled to regard the things we experience as
objective in the sense of being organized on the basis of universal categories
of the empirical understanding. Kant claims that this conclusion is necessary
and unquestionable, or apodeictic. The reason why he believes he can
accomplish this is that he starts with something indubitable: with the kind of
sense experience that every human being has; there’s a sense, therefore, in
which we start where Descartes pursues the argument of the cogito—with the
sense certainty of the individual subject. But Kant does something different
from Descartes. He asks, what are the conditions of possibility of such sense
experience? What would have to be the case for us to have the sense
experiences that any human subject does? The answer he gives is that there
must be an enduring self that we can refer to as the subject of our sense
perceptions, and he offers a series of detailed arguments which seek to show
that the operation of coherence of such an enduring self—what he calls the
synthetic unity of apperception—requires the application of a set of
categories common to human understanding; categories that constitute our
very experience as that of an objective causally governed world. So we start
from something of which we can’t doubt—the fact that we have sense
experiences as human beings—and we end up confident, certain, that what
we’re experiencing is a causally governed, objective world. That’s the
argument of the transcendental deduction of the categories, and critical to the
success of that argument is that we start with something indubitable, our
sense experience.
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 93
Don’t ask whether the argument really succeeds or not—it’s not relevant to
the position I’m putting here; the point is that it is the model of
transcendental argument Roy has employed, and critical to it is this
indubitable starting point. It’s the indubitability of the starting point that
transfers certainty, from the premisses to the conclusion. But if we look at
Roy’s version of the argument in A Realist Theory of Science, we don’t start
from anything indubitable. We start from a particular interpretation of
science, which critically involves the distinction between open and closed
systems, an interpretation which characterizes scientific practice as human
intervention in the world to create closed systems—systems in which one
particular power or set of powers is as far as possible left to operate without
the interference of the other powers constitutive of the world; the world itself
being an open system in which all sorts of different powers interact, creating
and regenerating the experiences that we actually have. The starting point is
science characterized in terms of the distinction between open and closed
systems. Once you’ve got that distinction it’s not hard to move to the rest of
Roy’s characterization of science, in particular the distinction between the
transitive and intransitive dimensions of science—in other words, science on
the one hand as a human social activity involving conceptualization and
experimentation and, on the other, the world of powers and activities and so
on that science seeks to know. Some have sought to show that Roy’s
argument is a circular one. That’s not really important from my point of
view; the critical point I want to make is that the starting point is not an
indubitable one. It doesn’t do the job that Kant’s argument is supposed to do
of moving from a certain starting point to a certain conclusion. First of all,
science is not a universal feature of human existence, it’s a highly culturally
and historically specific set of practices. Secondly, what Roy offers is an
interpretation of what is central to scientific practice—it’s a very good
interpretation, and one that I find persuasive, but it’s an interpretation: it’s a
contestable, conjectural account of what scientific activity involves and
there’s no reason in principle why it’s any better than all the other ones on
offer—Popper’s, Kuhn’s, and so on. Why is Roy’s characterization of the
starting point any better than any others in principle? I think it’s a better
starting point, but it’s not an indubitable one and therefore the analogy fails.

I apologize for going into this in such detail, but it’s important because in
Roy’s later writings we get transcendental argument after transcendental
argument. Having, as he sees it, successfully pioneered a transcendental
argument for his philosophical conclusions in A Realist Theory of Science,
quite understandably Roy seeks to redeploy this method for other more specific
cases or complications and developments of that initial paradigm case—and
this is notable, for example, in his book Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom. It’s a
very striking feature of Dialectic that there are transcendental arguments all
over the place, and sometimes they are really quick and short. I’m going to
quote one in a minute that is three sentences long. I can’t remember exactly
94 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

how long Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories is, but something
like fifty pages. Now I’m not arguing for prolixity as a philosophical practice,
but the length and tortuous character of Kant’s deduction (in two versions)
suggest that transcendental arguments, to have any claim to definitiveness, are
difficult and painful things to pull off. Yet in Roy’s later writings they pop up
everywhere, and I think that’s really problematic.

For example, in Dialectic Roy has a really interesting argument—which is part

of the general development of Critical Realism into Dialectical Critical
Realism—that, central to dialectics and to a proper ontology of the world, is the
priority of absence over presence, or of the negative over the positive. It’s a
really interesting idea, and he puts it forward in what is often a very exciting
way—in particular there are some discussions with implications for our
understanding of the physical world; they are very interesting, and one wishes
there were a lot more of them. I’m not knocking the idea that absence in some
fundamental sense has priority over presence, but this is a philosophical work
which is attempting to establish the contours of what we must hold to be a
necessary feature of the world independently of any particular scientific theory
of the structure of the world—that’s what I understand ontology to be about. So
one is entitled to ask, what kind of philosophical argument does one get for the
ontological priority of absence over presence? Well this is the closest that there
is to an argument, unless I’ve missed something: on p. 44 of Dialectic he says
‘the identification of a positive existent is a human act. So it involves the
absenting of a pre-existing state of affairs, be it only a state of existential doubt.
This may be taken as a transcendental deduction of the category of absence and
a transcendental refutation and immanent critique of ontological monovalence.’
That’s three sentences.

Now that’s an example of the very quick transcendental arguments that one
gets in Dialectic, and as such it raises concerns about the inflation of
transcendental argument in Roy’s later works. But what’s really interesting
about that deduction is that it’s made on the basis of a human act that consists
in the absenting of a pre-existing state of affairs. And this highlights a theme
which I think runs through the whole of the book, namely that Roy tends to
characterize human freedom in terms of the absenting, negating, or removing
of some existing positive state of affairs. There are two issues here. One is
whether the theme of freedom—the political theme of freedom—can be
integrated with a key category of dialectical thought: absence or negativity or
whatever. That’s a quite attractive notion that we don’t need to go into. The
other issue is whether absence can be characterized as fundamental, as Roy
tends to do, because it connects with the concept of freedom. This is
problematic, because—as I’ve tried to indicate—what Roy is supposed to be
constructing in his book is a dialectical ontology; in other words, some
general account of the constituents of being, physical as well as social—and
indeed, as I said, some of the more interesting passages about absence are all
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 95
to do with physics, cosmology and so forth. There’s something problematic
about making an essential ontological category depend upon freedom,
because freedom is a property of agents, and as far as I know the only agents
capable of freedom are human.

This relates to one of the main things I set out to do in this talk, which is to
try and identify where—from my perspective, which is highly fallible—Roy
went off the rails: what started him off on his current spiritualist phase? Once
we define absence, conceived of as a fundamental ontological category, in
terms of freedom, we’re making human agency in some sense paradigmatic
of reality itself. That’s a fantastic way for someone who calls himself a
Critical Realist to proceed, but leaving aside whether or not Roy’s
membership card should be revoked, the critical point is that it opens the door
to a spiritualization of reality—a conceptualization of reality as constituted in
some way in terms of subjectivity or subjects.

What’s the moral of this? I think it is that those who want to be critical
realists, whether with a lower or upper case C and R—those who want to
draw on the very rich body of work that Roy and his collaborators have
developed, for which, notwithstanding my criticisms, I have the greatest
admiration—should be much more modest about how they conceive the role
of philosophy. In A Realist Theory of Science Roy says that his model of
what philosophy should do is provided by John Locke’s notion of philosophy
as an underlabourer with respect to the sciences, spelt out in Locke’s Essay
concerning Human Understanding. Now I think that’s a good conception of
the role of philosophy—as something that develops in an intimate
relationship with the general developments of the sciences. If one takes that
conception seriously, it’s very hard to see much scope for the conceptual
deductions about the nature of the world such as Roy seeks to effect with his
transcendental arguments; on the underlabourer conception philosophy is
much more likely to be clarifying what’s happening in the sciences, and
perhaps coming up with new concepts that can be used to further the
development of the sciences. Let me emphasize that I’m using ‘science’ very
broadly to include, not just the physical sciences, but also what I broadly call
critical social theory, engaged in understanding the social world. On the
underlabourer conception, it seems to me there is little division in principle
between philosophical innovations and the formulations of critical scientific
theorists. In a way what I’m arguing is a more straightforwardly naturalistic
conception in which philosophy isn’t something external to the sciences—
transcendental philosophy—but part of a broader process of trying to
understand the world, central to which are the sciences.

My final point relates to the new slogan Roy puts forward in From East to
West, that we should re-enchant reality. When I read that I was really angry, I
have to say, because I thought the world is so ugly, so unjust, so full of
96 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

suffering, that what we need to do is, not to prettify it, but rather to look it
lucidly in the face in order to denounce and seek to remove its evils. That’s a
political response, but then critical realism has—as the adjective included in
its name indicates—always had something to do with radical transformative
politics; that’s very clear in a text like Dialectic. So initially, politically I was
very angry. Then I was very lucky because I went to the World Social Forum
in Brazil in February this year and it was a fantastic event of political
mobilization, radical debate, and so on, infused by a marvellous sense of the
enjoyment of life; you had all these wonderful demonstrations involving
particular groups of social actors where the style was not necessarily as
important as the political issues motivating them, but nonetheless very
important. In one demonstration by Brazilian artists the main slogan was ‘re-
enchant the world’, and that made me think again. I came to think that we
should indeed talk about re-enchanting the world, if by that we mean
breaking down the horrible, cramped, commodified prison that capitalism has
erected, both on human beings and on nature. If the slogan of re-enchanting
reality means that we want to create a world full of beauty in which human
beings can freely express themselves, then I’m all for it. But you can’t
separate such an aspiration from an attempt in the full and best sense
realistically to understand the mechanisms of exploitation and oppression that
make the world currently such an ugly and horrible and unjust place, and you
also can’t separate the aspiration for a beautiful and liberated world from the
struggle to remove those mechanisms through a project of collective social
transformation or, as we used to put it in the old days, revolution.

ROY BHASKAR

Thank you, Alex. Firstly, just on that last point, I can understand Alex’s
anger, but it stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of enchantment,
disenchantment and re-enchantment. Disenchantment is in fact a very
familiar theme in the development of the philosophical discourse of
modernity. It’s intrinsic to it, but was developed particular clearly by
Nietzsche and Weber and just means denuding the world of meaning. So this
is part of the ideology of positivism, of the discourse of modernity; it said the
world is meaningless, the world has no value in it. The point is Alex is angry
because, he says, the world is horrible. Of course, I agree with him, that the
surface structure of the world is horrible but that’s intrinsic to the world and
in saying the world is horrible you are immediately re-enchanting it; it’s a
technical philosophical term. Of course, what we have to do is produce a
world which is not horrible, but which is beautiful. Now, if you believe in the
thesis of disenchantment, you believe there’s no meaning in reality, so you
can’t learn from reality. This is a very counterfactual and intuitively absurd
thesis, because we learn immediately from reality. I learn immediately—
there’s no gap—from the frown on your face that you’re concerned. I think
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 97
it’s very difficult to conceive of the social world and the natural world except
as being understood immediately as meaningful. We look at the clouds and
we see their meaning is that it’s going to rain.

This is a very significant point to lead in to what I want to say. I would like to
thank Alex for the nice things he said about critical realism, both in the upper
and lower case. I remember that he came to several of the conferences that
preceded the actual establishment of the Centre for Critical Realism and the
International Association for Critical Realism, and I think that in the fullest
sense he is a lower case critical realist—and actually critical realism is a very
broad church, if that’s not to be misunderstood as something implying
religious commitments. So let’s however see essentially what Alex’s nice
point was that A Realist Theory of Science actually turns on the distinction
between open and closed systems. That’s not the case. The Kantian
transcendental argument stems from the existence of sense experience. Kant
of course goes on over the next ten or fifteen years to produce just as many
transcendental arguments as I do, but he takes the argument in the first
Critique to be a kind of premise that no one can dispute. What I do in the
case of A Realist Theory of Science is start from two premises, experimental
activity and applied activity. Why? It’s not that no one can dispute them, it’s
because these are premises which positivism, empiricism and the theories of
Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend and others which infused the philosophical
thought of the time all in fact explicitly or implicitly presupposed; that is, did
not dispute (or even sometimes theorize). In fact, there’s nothing you can
take for granted in philosophy except your opponents’ premises. For me
transcendental argument is always immanent critique, and in a nice
coincidence Alex towards the end of his talk comes very close to wanting to
loosen the distinctions between different kinds of argument. I now think that
transcendental argument, dialectical argument, immanent critique and
retroductive analogical explanation in science are all roughly the same in
form: they say we have a certain phenomenon or a position which someone is
holding, let’s see what must be the case for that phenomenon or position to
be possible.

Actually I was never very concerned with experimental activity as such. I

started off doing my postgraduate work trying to write a thesis on the
relevance of economic theory for underdeveloped countries, and what I
discovered was that, according to the standard methodology at the time, you
couldn’t make a single statement about the world. This is an extraordinary
state of affairs. In fact, even today you can’t pose the question of the
relevance or irrelevance of economic theory to the world. As it was clear to
me as a postgraduate student that economic theory was not only pretty
irrelevant but actually causally efficacious and so pernicious, and because I
wanted to be able to say something about the world, I went back to
philosophy and lo and behold discovered that it’s actually a dictum in
98 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

philosophy that thou shalt not commit ontology, that you can’t say anything
about the world. Hume and Kant had ‘established’ this. Wittgenstein and the
logical positivists reasserted that you can’t talk about what the network
describes—that’s the world—you can only talk about the network, that is, the
way you talk about the world. Ontology was denied. Let’s think about this for
a moment because it’s very important. You find this in postmodernism.
Someone will say to you well, actually, you can’t talk about something that’s
real, because, actually, that’s just talk. Can I just engage this little fantasy
here? Pauline, can you say something to me? [Pauline: Hello Roy.] There’s a
question—she said something—is that talk real or not? The postmodernists
get stuck here because, if they admit that talk is real, then at least one object
is real, then you’ve started the subject matter of ontology. If on the other
hand they say no, that’s not real, then the next time Pauline says something I
just turn my head the other way, because what possible point could there be
in my carrying on a dialogue with something that doesn’t exist? Of course the
moral here is that ontology is absolutely unavoidable. Whenever we speak
something about the world, whenever we have a set of beliefs, embodied in
that speech or those beliefs are presuppositions about the nature of the world.
Now the really shocking thing is this: that empiricism has a view of the world
as being flat, undifferentiated and unchanging. Actually one of the things I
try and show in Dialectic is that the same view of the world is there in an
extraordinary way in Hegel and many of the great idealists. We could go
further back to Descartes, or even further back to Aristotle, and it’s very
interesting to see how enshrined within Western philosophy that view of the
world as flat, undifferentiated, and unchanging is.

So it was obvious to me that the world is in some way stratified—it’s

structured and differentiated—and it’s changing. So how do I show my
friends the economists—and the philosophers of science who think I’m
talking rubbish—that the world must exist and that actually I can establish
some better propositions about the world than them? Well I say, tell me, give
me something you think is really important, that you think is epistemically
valid or significant, and they say to me well, experimental activity is, because
that’s what scientists mean when they talk about experience: they don’t just
mean Kantian generic sense experience, they mean experimental activity.
That’s where I take my starting point: from something that they affirm. So I
take my opponents’ premise and then I say, well, what must be the case, then,
if that’s your starting point; I’m not starting from something that can’t be
denied (at least without further argument), but from something that you don’t
in fact deny. This afternoon we’re talking and starting with Alex’s remarks.
We might be talking about Marxism, critical realism or materialism, it
doesn’t matter, we’re starting from something specific. You then have to ask
them if they can give a rough characterization of experimental activity, and
the extraordinary thing is that, although there were not many obvious
characterizations, there is one thing that practically everyone would agree on,
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 99
which was that it would involve something close to active intervention in the
world. Now why is that necessary? Why do scientists have to intervene in the
world? Because the objects of scientific knowledge—the real structures,
generative mechanisms, the fields that they want to study—are not
immediately obvious to them. To use Marx’s terminology, there’d be no
point to science if the essential relations of the world were already always
manifest in phenomenal forms; so what you have to do—and can do in the
natural sciences sometimes—is intervene in that world to gain epistemic
access to it. And that’s where the closed/open system distinction comes in. In
a way it comes alongside another distinction which Alex didn’t mention, the
distinction between the real and the actual. And actually what you’re trying to
do in the natural sciences is identify the enduring real structure at work in
open and closed systems alike. What you do with that argument is two things.
First of all you establish that some kind of ontology is legitimate; in fact you
can argue further that an ontology must be presupposed, and you show
straight away that the ontology that empiricists and practically all orthodox
philosophy of science around the late sixties and early seventies, when I was
writing, is false. But the world is not how they classically presuppose, so you
have some kind of argument for ontology and at the same time an argument
for a different ontology.

Now of course the really interesting thing is that, if you’re interested in how
some substantive science like economics might cast light on the problems of
poverty, you want to see whether that general ontology—to start with turning
on the distinctions between the real and the actual and between open and closed
systems—can be applied in the social world. You want to ask whether the
structures of the world in social life are in some way analogous to those in
nature and, if so, how do we access them. Is there an analogue in the social
world for experimental activity? Well the short answer is that now you come to
a problem because there’s no way in which social science can obtain a closure
of its subject matter. This means that criteria for confirmation and falsification
cannot be predictive and so must be explanatory. So you only have the
possibility of a social science if you pitch it at the level of the non-actual real.
Failure to conceptualize this level of ontology had resulted in the social
sciences at the time I wrote The Possibility of Naturalism in a whole plethora of
dichotomies and dualisms. Everywhere in social science there were splits,
reflecting no doubt splits and alienations in the wider society. And in debates in
the philosophy of the social sciences these were reflected as splits too—splits
between naturalism and anti-naturalism, between positivism and hermeneutics,
between those who thought the object of social sciences was the individual and
those who thought it was the whole or the collective. There were splits between
the proponents of structure and those of agency; there were splits between mind
and body, reason and cause, fact and value, theory and practice. The whole of
social science was dichotomous, so you couldn’t adopt exactly the same
procedure or technique of argumentation.
100 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

Instead, what you have to do is try and see if there’s a ground that unites
those antagonists. Perhaps their argument is misconceived, and that’s what I
try to show, for example in my resolution of the dualism between the
proponents of structure and agency. I said hang on a moment, we can say
with those who support the claims of structure that we don’t create the social
structures which constitute the social world—they pre-exist us, we’re born
into them if you like. Rather what we do is to reproduce or transform them;
so social structures are things which don’t exist independently of our activity
but persist only in virtue of it. That’s quite a nice resolution, because actually
you’ve already got a double layered ontology in the social sciences—you’ve
got something which is autonomous, if you like, of the surface form of the
social world. This is not to say that human agency is not an interesting thing
to study in its own right. We can go into that later. But if you’re talking about
things like the capitalist mode of production, then you have something like an
analogue between the capitalist mode of production and the way in which
agents reproduce or transform such structures. I did the same sort of thing
with the mind/body problem. I said, we can’t just conceive mind as
something apart from body, and we can’t reduce it to body, but what we can
do is to look at mind as an emergent power of matter. Or in the case of
reasons and causes, I introduced the notion of intentional causality. Above all
I did this kind of thing in the resolution of the problem of naturalism, which
is what I claimed to accomplish in my second book: I argued that what you
could have in the social world was a qualified critical naturalism. You were
denied decisive test situations but because of this you had to rely purely on
the explanatory power of a theory. You could still say that one theory was
more powerful in an explanatory way than another theory. And I think it’s
quite obvious that you can say that Marxism is a tremendously powerful
explanatory theory. It explains things like the genesis of the First World War
in a much better way than the rival theories around, and there are lots of other
phenomena that Marxism can explain: above all the fundamental structures, I
do believe, of our economic form of life.

So that was the form of the argument. Now notice again it’s a kind of
transcendental argument. And I would say that Marx—I want to get on to
Marx a little bit—actually uses transcendental arguments in Capital Volume I
and elsewhere. He asks what must be the case for the world of wealth to
manifest itself as an accumulation of commodities. He does a transcendental
deduction. And interestingly enough there are two central distinctions at
work in Capital Volume I: the distinction between labour and labour-power
and the distinction between exchange-value and use-value. Using those two
distinctions in rather the same way as I used the distinctions between the real
and the actual and open and closed systems, he generates the basic anatomy
or deep structure of the capitalist mode of production, and I still think that
deduction is valid. So I think that actually we have to loosen up about
argument: we have to realize that there’s nothing that’s indubitable, there’s
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 101
no sharp distinction between philosophy and social science, and that what
we’re always trying to do is engage in something that is pretty useless unless
we’re addressing or talking to real human beings. So often what you want to
do if you’re trying to show them that their social practice or theory is wrong,
or could be improved, is take something they accept as given and try to show
how it necessitates a contrary conclusion, something that they don’t already
believe. That’s a very expanding kind of process, which can also be said to be
dialectical—one of the forms of what I called, in Dialectic: the Pulse of
Freedom, the diffraction of the concept of dialectic. I tried to show that this
did not have a simple meaning or a simple answer; it was a complex concept
itself. It’s true that I argued for the centrality of absence. However, the
absence that I argued was central was determinate absence. We can not now
go further into absence.

Having tried to respond to Alex’s critical remarks, we can go into the subject
matter of the relationships between critical realism, Marxism and materialism
a bit more. Let’s start with Marxism. I think the first thing you’ve got to say
is that Marx will be remembered not primarily as a philosopher but as the
founder of a research programme. Unfortunately, the sad thing is that there
are very few Marxists who’ve carried on or done work of comparable
measure to that of his own. So it is still a largely unfinished programme. We
can say that Marxism does involve philosophical commitments; let’s just
look at Marx himself for a moment, understanding that he was primarily a
theorist of human emancipation, a theorist of the social conditions of his
time—of the capitalist mode of production above all—but also the founder of
a research programme which we call historical materialism. There are three
moments in his life when he got really charged up about philosophy—I’m
talking now about the mature Marx—and they can be registered by the dates
1844, 1857 and 1867. In 1844 he was really gripped by Hegel’s notion of the
alienation of the idea—the alienation of the absolute subject as the moving
force in history—and what he did, if you like, involved a transposition of that
figure. Instead of the absolute spirit, or the absolute idea, he looked at labour,
and that became his central category from then on; so that he conceived,
talked, and thought in terms of the alienation of labour as the foundational
moment in human history. He was inspired by the analogy with the alienation
of the idea.

The second moment came in 1857. You must remember that he was someone
who’d read Hegel quite a lot, together with many other philosophers of his
generation, when he was young, so sometimes he would go back to Hegel;
and suddenly when you go to Hegel—when you go to a great philosopher—
you have re-inspirations that shake your conceptual kaleidoscope around a
bit. So in 1857 Marx went back, and out of that came the Grundrisse. And
what was it that he got from Hegel then? Looking at the doctrine of the
notion—that’s the third book of the Science of Logic—he came to a view of
102 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

capitalism as a process in motion. And that was terrific—the Grundrisse must

be one of the greatest books ever written. But it didn’t provide an adequate
methodological basis for the work that eventually became Capital, for the full
understanding of the capitalist mode of production.

For that he needed to go back to Hegel again and there he got it—although of
course other things are going on, I’m being a little bit artificial in picking on
these three years—but it came to fruit in 1867. And it is easy to see that
Capital Volume I is written under the dominance of motifs drawn from
Hegel’s doctrine of essence, the second book of the Logic, because there you
have all these paired oppositions with standing contrasts. One of the great
paired oppositions was that between essential relations and phenomenal
forms. This opposition, this contrast, is rather similar to my own contrast—
which as Alex correctly points out was also familiar from structuralists and
poststructuralists of the sixties and seventies—between structures and events.
Basically Capital Volume I is written under the dominance of motifs of
scientific realism. But Marx never theorized his critique of empiricism, he
never theorized his ontology, so when you look at Marx as a realist he says
things like the real object exists outside the human being before and after the
process of production, exists outside the scientist’s head. Well, that’s a
critique of the Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself, but it’s not very specific
about what kind of things those real objects, those structures are, and that’s
where you can say that critical realism, not just in my hands but in those of
all our collaborators, developed a firmer grounding for the sort of ontology
that Capital actually presupposes.

Let’s focus more specifically then on materialism, on Marx as a materialist.

What I’ve argued in a number of encyclopedia and dictionary entries of my
own—and I thank Alex for writing his piece—is that you can elucidate
Marx’s philosophical materialism, simplifying a little, by dividing it into
three main tenets: epistemological, ontological, and practical materialism;
and, following the main thrust of Alex’s remarks, I want to focus mainly on
the first of these. Marx’s epistemological materialism, I would argue to begin
with, is essentially a transcendental realism of the kind I described in A
Realist Theory of Science, refined in works like Scientific Realism and
Human Emancipation and Reclaiming Reality, and then dialecticized in
Dialectic and Plato Etc. This epistemological materialism, then, is a thesis
about knowledge. Actually I would now go a little bit further—this is where
I’m trying to break new ground within critical realism, because I think that
critical realism is a process in motion, its own development. This
development, at least in my hands and my thought, was first as philosophy of
science, through to philosophy of social science, then through to a theory of
value which I called the theory of explanatory critique, on to a theory of
dialectic and then on to a theory of what I called the spiritual presuppositions
of emancipatory projects. Then more recently, in the three books which I’ve
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 103
published this year on meta-Reality, I’ve talked about a sixth and seventh
level of ontology or development. In the sixth we see the world as sui generis
meaningful, that’s the level of re-enchantment. Then the seventh, the most
exciting for me, is the level on which we understand the world in terms of
categories of non-duality. Orthodox philosophy and philosophy of science is
structured around the notion of subject-object duality. It privileges non-
identity over identity, so what I’ve been trying to argue now—what I’m
trying to do, really, is open up conceptual spaces—is that non-identity is
actually parasitic and dependent upon relations of identity. And I’m arguing
in these works that subject-object duality breaks down at vital moments in
science and in ordinary life.

Let’s just take science for a moment. Consider what happens when Newton is
painfully working away and is getting very close to the concept of gravity but
hasn’t quite got it, takes a walk in the afternoon, isn’t thinking, sees an apple
fall to the ground, and wow! gravity: it’s not the apple falling to the ground,
the earth is pulling the apple. Things are constituted by fields of force in
virtue of which heavy bodies are pulled to them. So you have that huge shift
from the Aristotelian world view there. This comes out of the blue. Do you
think I’m teasing you when I say that this is absolutely necessary for science?
I certainly believe that science does follow a pattern which is roughly that in
the transitive dimension as described by Kuhn. You have an absence—I’m
dialectizing it—an incompleteness, it generates a contradictory problem field,
and these contradictions mount to the point where they become intolerable.
Whenever a period of revolutionary science begins, a sublating concept—this
is the co-existence of positive contraries and negative sub-contraries—which
couldn’t be induced or deduced from the existing problem-field comes out of
the blue, in a flash. This is the really important thing. There’s no algorithm
for this magical logic, this transcendental moment in which something comes
out of the blue. All creativity is like that. It wouldn’t be creativity if it could
be induced or deduced from what was there before! That’s just why you need
a revolution, why you need a transformation, why you need the production of
something new, something that wasn’t there before. But does this epistemic
transcendence, this moment of transcendence within the epistemological
process, mean that it’s ontologically transcendent? No, because if it was
ontologically transcendent it would not belong to our cosmos. Newton and
gravity would be members of non-intersecting cosmic fields. What I
conjecture happens when a moment of scientific breakthrough like that
occurs is that the scientist, who has worked very hard, gone as far and as
close as he can to the point of breakthrough, comes into alethic union—
comes into contact with the alethic truth of the phenomenal field. He actually
comes into a relationship of identity with the truth which is going to
revolutionize and transform the conceptual field. Of course, that’s only the
beginning; he then has to recast the whole of the knowledge structure in the
104 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

light of this new concept. But, at that moment of breakthrough, there’s a

point of identity or union between the scientist and what he has discovered.

You might say this is all very well, but surely if relations of identity and non-
duality only held in a moment of great scientific creativity, it wouldn’t be
very much worth talking about. But, you see, they don’t. You’re listening to
me now; I’m going to ask Pauline again, are you hearing me Pauline?
[Pauline: I am Roy.] In that moment in which she hears me, she immediately
understands me, there’s not a relationship of duality. Supposing she doesn’t
understand what I’m saying, she at least immediately identifies my voice.
Supposing she can’t identify my voice, something happened, immediately
there’s a moment of non-duality; so any understanding, any perception,
depends on a relationship of identity or non-duality between the perceiver,
the understander and what is understood. This is interesting. Actually we
couldn’t communicate unless we were in relationships of non-duality, but
then equally could you do anything at all unless you just did it at some point
spontaneously, unless at some point you just did it? Supposing I want to
decide how best to speak into this microphone, I’m not quite sure whether to
go further away or nearer it. At some point the thinking has to stop, you just
have to do it. You can be planning how to cook a meal, you can think, well,
what ingredients am I going to use, but at some point you just have to cook it.
You can get into a car, and at some point you just have to start it. You can
rehearse your lines as often as you like, but at some point you just have to
speak them. So what I’m arguing is that not only communication but action
would be impossible unless you had acts which were non–dual. Another form
of non-duality is holistic non-duality, which is exemplified in the
synchronicity that occurs within an orchestra, or by the way in which we
successfully avoid bumping into each other on pavements. There’s also that
kind of non-duality in which you become at one with yourself, which people
sometimes have found in prayer and meditation and similar states. I don’t
want to focus on that now because it seems to involve other ontological
commitments, although I’ll just add that in these latest books on meta-reality
there’s no commitment to the existence of god. The basic concepts are
susceptible of a purely secular interpretation—concepts of the cosmic
envelope and the ground state which we can go into later. If these concepts of
non-duality are essential for our ordinary social life, this means there’s a level
which traditional critical realist philosophy of science had not theorized and
it’s that level, the level of the non-dual underpinning the level of the dual,
which I’m concerned to point to in these latest works.

Now the reason for this is that somewhere between Plato Etc and From East To
West it occurred to me that we have to expand ontology in a very radical way
because we have to allow that illusions are in one sense real and in another
sense unreal. An illusion such as belief in witchcraft, if it’s unreal—which I’m
sure it is—is not true of an object, but it’s real in the sense that it’s causally
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 105
efficacious and so part of the world. So ontology actually includes
everything—it includes contradictions and mistakes—there’s nothing that’s not
included within ontology. Of course, now we need to differentiate within
ontology the realm of the demi-real: the realm of the illusory and the
oppressive. The biggest demi-real structure we know of is the capitalist mode
of production. It’s a tyrannical structure of oppression. The extraordinary thing
is, though, that we know that the capitalist mode of production is not, as its
apologists hold, a self-regulating system but actually presupposes a social
network, which it cannot think, outside that system it describes. It presupposes
a state; it presupposes lots of things which it cannot think. But what we have is
an ideology in which the capitalist mode of production, or the market system, is
taken as being effectively self-regulating. This involves its being disembedded
from its social context. So what we have today is the dominance of market
fundamentalism. They say: leave it all to the market. What is the meaning of
that? The meaning of that is that something else is going on behind the back of
the market, which is what they are interested in. And we haven’t just got today
the disembedding of markets from the social context. We’ve got the
disembedding of money, of finance capital, from product markets. So we’ve
got the disembedding of money from the markets and markets from the social
fabric—what I theorize as four-planar social being. The extraordinary thing is
that this disembedding of the market from social being is actually a
disembedding from a dual social context in which apparatuses such as
language, the police, the state, the military etc are all there—the international
world order enforcing, if you like, the market mechanism.

But actually the really extraordinary thing is that, behind this level of the dual
social, is the non-dual; this is really beautiful. The Marxists should never
have forgotten this, for if we take the sphere of domestic labour, it’s very
obvious that typically the female is reproducing labour-power—the
fundamental commodity of the capitalist mode of production—but she isn’t
being paid for it, her own labour is not commodified. For the most part what
she does is unconditional, spontaneous, creative, intuitive and holistic;
typically she has to be deliberately aware of many things going on at once.
But it’s not just the women in the home who are doing this, it’s the women in
the factories, in the offices; and it’s the men—men have to be women to be
men, they have to do things unconditionally, creatively, spontaneously.
Working to rule is the best way to slow the system down. If I’m sitting here
working, and I have a telephone, and the rule book says this is my telephone,
then what happens if Nick’s telephone goes off? If I pick it up when he’s
there, he’d be very cross with me; if he’s not there, however, and I observe
the same rule and never pick up Nick’s telephone, he’d be equally cross with
me because I may have missed an important business call. So I have to use
intuitively and spontaneously my judgment about whether to pick up that
telephone or not. Any production-line only keeps going because of the
spontaneous, unpaid creativity of the workers, below the level theorized as
106 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

the extraction of surplus-value. Every mode of production or reproduction

only keeps going because of the spontaneous, unconditional creative loving
acts that human beings perform. We’re, if you like, extraordinary beings,
because our innate intelligence, energy, consciousness, creativity, and
compassion—which you can call love—manifests itself as solidarity. Just
think for a moment, if you don’t believe this. Think of the most horrendous
thing you can think of. Think of war—how is that war sustained? Let’s define
the war first, let’s take it in the classical mode as being the combat of soldiers
at the front. That war, that combat, can only be sustained by the selfless
solidarity of the soldiers for each other; they are fighting for a cause—
mistakenly in all probability—but they’re still unconditionally and selflessly
doing it through the support of their wives, sisters, daughters and girlfriends,
and boyfriends, back home. There’s not a social phenomenon—I’d like to
challenge you to find one—that isn’t sustained by love. There’s not an
addiction that isn’t kept going creatively. Does anyone want to smoke now?
Then you know what I mean: you’re going to use your creative ingenuity;
smoking is allowed out there, you’ll brave the cold. Think of the amount of
ingenuity, if we were in a dry town, we would put into finding some alcohol.

What I’m arguing in these latest works is that non-duality is primary to

duality, in three ways. First as the mode of constituting ordinary life, and
therefore of reproducing or transforming all the horrendous structures we
know. Secondly, as forming the ground-state qualities on which everything
else depends, which include such qualities as creativity and love. Thirdly, as
transcendental identification in consciousness: if you go deeply enough into
any phenomenon, in the end you will find that it is characterized by very
extraordinary qualities, which are similar to those that the mystics have
found; if you go deeply enough you will find peace, bliss, joy. You might say
this is extraordinary for someone who thinks highly of Marx, who thinks that
Marx analysed the fundamental structure of our society. No, Marx himself
believed that there’s a mystical transcendental identification in that act of
exchange of commodities. Marx is very conscious of the analogy with the
mystical experience. What I’m arguing is that, behind that transcendental
identification that two use-values find in virtue of their equation as an
exchange-value in an act of exchange, there is also social solidarity in trust.
Every exchange transaction reposes on a trust. Imagine a high financier
moving a million shares. How does that happen? The instruction has to be
obeyed on the telephone; without that finance capital couldn’t survive. I’ve
argued that finance capital dominates the world we live in, but it actually
depends on very simple things like acting trustfully; this blight of capitalism
is horrendous, of course, in its causally efficacious impact throughout the
world, but its basic form is sustained by non-dual actions wherever you look.

This is very empowering and liberating, because it says there’s an asymmetry

between those horrendous structures and our innate goodness. It’s not that
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 107
we’re only good, but that we have a level of goodness that sustains the rest.
This holds open the possibility of an emancipation which turns on the
asymmetry between those structures of oppression and our ground-state
qualities, our non-dual moments. Because, very simply, capitalism couldn’t
exist without our creativity and love, but we could do fine without it.
Capitalism can take us with it, but we can do without capitalism. So there are
three alternatives. We swim or sink together; we survive without capitalism;
or capitalism pulls us down with it. Because capitalism and those structures
can’t survive for a moment without us. Now this is not an argument for
voluntarism, because—although it seems to assign primacy to the self-
referential, to my act—whenever I act, I of course act at all four planes of
social being, I act collectively; in fact, logically speaking, whenever I act, I
affect the whole cosmos. So it’s not an argument for individualism, it’s not
an argument for voluntarism. It’s an argument for understanding our true
power, which of course will be manifest in the collective way, in the way of
solidarity, though again we should not presume the form: most revolutions
take place by processes of generalized synchronicity. It’s not an accident that
in 1917 everyone, all the soldiers, suddenly thought, aha! we can do it! 1789
the aristocracy, ah bloody hell! And then in 1989 everyone walked out of the
Soviet Bloc together. These sorts of generalized processes of synchronicity
we can go into in another context. But it’s on this asymmetry of axiology,
this asymmetry of emancipation, that our hope—and that informing the
project that Marx formulated in Capital—ultimately depends.

3
ALEX CALLINICOS

Let me start with a point Wendy made. It’s absolutely true that all sorts of
people, including some scientists, are attracted to forms of Eastern thought as
a way of escaping modernity. But I don’t think they succeed. I think it’s a
move within what Roy called the discourse of modernity, a move
contaminated by Orientalism and colonialist discourses in all sorts of ways.
Sure, you do get card-carrying scientists who seek to give what I characterize
a spiritualist interpretation of major conceptual breakthroughs. Take, for
example, At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe
Institute. This has fantastic discussions of complexity theory, but the bottom
line is that we’re in harmony with the universe, and that everything is
fundamentally OK. This is a profoundly ideological operation, which is
brought out by the fact that he seeks to establish analogies between how
financial markets work and how other sorts of complex systems work, and
the implication is, don’t worry too much if the fortune of your pension and
your job depends upon the fluctuations of the financial market, because it’s
inscribed in the structure of the universe that everything is going to be OK in

3
Responding also to comments from the floor.
108 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

the long run! This shows that people do indeed try to spiritualize things like
complexity, but in the process they enchant it in a way that’s ideologically
complicit with what both Roy and I agree to be the structures of an
oppressive capitalist system.

Secondly, on the question of Marx and the dialectic, Roy is quite right to say
that Hegelian forms of thinking are present in the Grundrisse and Capital
(though in fact it’s the doctrine of being—the first book of The Science of
Logic with its categories of quantity, quality, and measure—that arguably
plays the most important role in chapter 1 of Capital, Volume 1, ‘The
Commodity’). But he’s dead wrong when he says that Marx in Capital
deduces or generates his main categories from some basic distinctions. It’s
true that in the Grundrisse capital functions almost like the Hegelian
Absolute, generating its own conditions of existence, and Marx does try to
deduce the concept of capital from that of money. Here Capital is
significantly different. The relationship between the different levels of
analysis in Capital is not a deductive one. Rather Marx proceeds through
what Althusser called the ‘position’ of concepts. In other words, he
successively introduces new concepts specifying determinations not
previously considered that allow the analysis to become more concrete. But
he does not think of these concepts as somehow contained or implicit in the
preceding ones. When, in order to explain why capital is able to expand itself,
he introduces the concept of labour-power in Part 2 of Capital, Volume 1,
Marx doesn’t deduce this concept from that of the commodity or money, but
rather adds a determination that, in this context, gives us a clearer grasp of
the nature of capitalism as an articulated totality. And so on through all three
volumes of the book. It is very important that we see what’s distinctive to
Marx’s approach in Capital if we are to grasp how his method differs
radically from a merely conceptual dialectic that proceeds through
deductions—or, quite often, by sophistries concealed as deductions.

Alan asked whether a concept of philosophy as an underlabourer can be

sustained when one gets to the kind of stage Roy reaches in Dialectic. I’ve
got two answers to that. First, I agree that, once we start identifying and
criticizing the implication of philosophy in power relations, we can’t simply
conceive of philosophy as strictly an underlabourer. But all that does is
implicate philosophy in the struggle of ideologies and the effort to identify
the extent to which different theoretical discourses are limited in particular
relations of power. That in itself doesn’t tell us anything about the status of
any particular critique, and in particular whether philosophy can be regarded
as delivering knowledge independently of what’s going on in the sciences. I
take the underlabourer metaphor to imply that philosophy doesn’t deliver
knowledge independently of what is going on in the sciences. This has
nothing to do, incidentally, with whether one is for or against ontology. Of
course ontological commitments are inescapable, but it’s the notion that
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 109
there’s a separate philosophically constituted and validating domain of
ontology that I find problematic. Secondly, I do think Dialectic is where the
whole enterprise of Critical Realism goes off the rails. This is among other
things because of the way absence is treated, and it’s interesting that Roy
started to answer me about absence and then veered off to talk about love.
Fair enough, but it seems to me that how he characterizes absence is deeply
problematic because ultimately it depends on a particular interpretation of
human agency.

We can discuss whether that’s a good or bad account of human agency. But if
you make the essential ontological category of absence too central, then you’re
characterizing reality as such in terms of subjectivity, and that amounts to the
spiritualization of reality—and then we come to the kind of account that we got
in the second half of Roy’s presentation. Sure, capitalism depends on free
creativity, and I think that Roy is absolutely right that every human act has a
creative dimension, that it goes beyond the established routines. Enterprises
couldn’t function for a moment without the creative intervention of the workers
they exploit. But there’s a huge leap from saying that to saying that every social
phenomenon involves an act of love. Take the case of the Einsatzgruppen, the
SS death-squads who machine-gunned to death 1,500,000 Soviet Jews during
the summer and autumn of 1941. Sure there’s solidarity between the soldiers
involved in these obscenities—but love? To suggest that all the acts of violence
in the world are in some sense acts of love is to enchant reality in an
ideologically mystifying way.

And that brings me to the question of duality. When Alan brought up

Adorno, it’s important to see that the whole point of his philosophy is to
insist on the priority of non-identity over identity. He is warning us against
seeing the world in terms of identity. Once you say there’s no distance, no
gap, no duality, no difference between you and the other, we get caught in the
avalanche of—I’m trying to think of a polite word—mystification in which
Roy caught us all up towards the end of his presentation.

ROY BHASKAR

I’ll start in reverse order. So, determinate absence. The thing is, absence
doesn’t involve any essential reference to human beings. It doesn’t at all. You
say that the absence of rain accounts for the non-appearance of the crops—why
on earth should we think that there’s something special about presence, in
virtue of which we could possibly privilege it over absence? What I say is that
no possible being could exist without absence. You couldn’t understand the
flow of my words unless there were gaps, pauses, breaks between them. Those
are all negating concepts. That’s ontologically constitutive. Supposing we
wanted to say this whole room is full. What would that mean? The really
110 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

problematic thing is the ideological notion, which I call ontological

monovalence, of a purely positive or present conception of being. I don’t know
an atom that’s full, a person or a room that’s full, I don’t know anything in the
world that’s full. It seems such an obvious point. Absence is ontologically
constitutive. And it doesn’t depend on human beings in any way. If you take
process—any process of change involves absenting, which is of something
that’s already there and is not necessarily a human act at all. Because, of
course, there are natural processes, these are also processes of absenting and
presenting. Presenting something new. It only sounds a bit anthropomorphic
because, when we think of the world—when we think of an event or a
person—we tend to think in terms of a person. But that’s wrong. If I asked you
how many things are in this room, or how many events are going on, what
would you say? It doesn’t make any sense. We have to thoroughly reform our
basic conceptual architectonic—how we think—the fundamental categories in
terms of which we think about the world.

Alex talked about identity. The important point which I’d like to make is that
we have a completely false conception of identity. What is our conception of
identity? Our conception of identity is as punctiform and undifferentiated.
But why? I’m both one and the same, and differentiated and developing. Why
do we have a conception of identity which is atomistic and empiricist? It’s
completely wrong. I can be in a relationship of identity or non-duality with
Alan or Pauline, and we can still be differentiated human beings. They can
understand entirely what I’m saying, and I can understand what they are
saying, and we can agree to differ. That’s the natural form of argument, and I
think it’s a beautiful form. I don’t want to get into Adorno, but these
modalities of non-duality are very important. One thing that mustn’t be
confused is where love comes into the argument. Let me contextualize this a
bit. I didn’t have enough time to give a systematic exposition of non-duality.
But basically I argued that there are three important forms of it in social life.
The first is as a mode of constitution, of reproduction and of transformation.
This non-duality is the sort of non-duality I refer to when I talk about you
immediately understanding me. That doesn’t necessarily involve love. You
can say that transcendental identification in consciousness in your immediate
understanding is possibly in some way connected up with love, you might
say that the transcendental identification of two commodities in an act of
exchange is connected up with love in some way. But then you have to make
a separate argument.

So let’s go into the second form of non-duality: I argue that everything that’s
manifested in the social world and in the natural cosmos depends upon
ground-state qualities. Now these can be abused and appropriated—of course,
terrible things happen in the world. But they are in an important sense
parasitic. Actually I don’t think there’s any energy which is not dependent
upon the basic level of energy, which is at one with the cosmos. This feeds in
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 111
through our ground states, and in this sense my position is ultimately
materialist—although I would hope that we’ll be able to have the time to
come back to Jenneth’s point, where I would like to differentiate different
forms of materialism. Let’s focus for now on imagining a simple model of
the stratification of being. What you can say about our most basic level is that
at it we’re one with the rest of the cosmos. Let’s think about this. If we’re not
one with the rest of the cosmos, if we’re not in that cosmos, if we’re not
bound in that cosmos, then we would have to be in two separate cosmoses.
And if we’re in two separate cosmoses, then we’re not in any kind of
interaction, we’re not connected.

You might say it’s very anthropomorphic to call this connecting feature
love, although the Greeks certainly did. But we needn’t call it love. I’m
only calling it love now as a specific human ground-state quality. It is upon
these ground-state qualities such as love, creativity, energy that everything
else in the human world depends; such qualities must be exercised and are
everywhere manifest, though they are also abused and exploited. Let’s talk
now specifically about love. Actually it’s wrong to talk about an act of
love. Love is a motive, a ground-state motive, not a quality of an act. If I
say something, I may manifest my love, but at that level of that act, it’s not
an act of love or not. The act of what we call ‘making love’ may or may not
manifest love. Everything in some way depends on love, it will use love in
a certain form, but we must be very careful when we use terms like ‘love’.
If you take the case of the bank robbers, it’s not insignificant that no bank
robbery could ever occur without a degree of solidarity between the bank
robbers. You can engage the bank robbers in a conversation. They might of
course have a perfectly coherent understanding of what they are doing, they
might be Robin Hoods—they might have a social rationale, a justification
of it. In which case you might say it’s not to the point to engage them in an
understanding, but you can show them perhaps how the capitalist mode of
production depends on systematic analogues of what they are doing, the
forms of collusion it makes use of; and you can perhaps orient their
imposed anti-socialness in a more positive direction. I think it’s not fair
game at all to talk about horrendous acts because no one is going to say that
they are acts of love.

In From East to West spirituality was conceived in a religious vein, but it

turned out to be a transitional work. The position I’m now arguing for is
still compatible with a religious interpretation of the basic concepts, but it’s
equally compatible with a secular interpretation. So let me give you an
example of a secular interpretation of my spirituality: the free development
of each is the condition of the free development of all. Where have you
heard that? Of course, in Marx. What does Marx mean by that? He’s
talking about a society in which your flourishing, your well being, is as
important to me as my own, in which I have no ego. And that’s an
112 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

extraordinary thing. Mahayana Buddhism has that in the notion of a

bodhisattva. I don’t want to talk about the abuses of Eastern thought. I
think those who talk about it should read my forthcoming book, which is
actually called Beyond East and West; it goes into the structures of
comparative religion in great detail. The point is that the idea of
separateness, the idea of me privileging myself over Sean there, is
something that has to go in a communist society, otherwise communism
doesn’t make sense: we must lose our egos. On any interpretation, the loss
of an ego—the loss of a separate sense of existence—is an important part of
the project of many forms of Buddhism and Hinduism. It’s there in Islam
too, in fana: it means annihilation; annihilation means replacement—you
annihilate your self and it’s replaced by god or the divine—you don’t exist
any more; and that’s one interpretation of nirvana. So the loss of the sense
of your separate existence, which is a milder concept than loss of a sense of
self, or the absence of a privileging of myself over another, is an important
ingredient in a communist society. What I argue is that we have to be
capable of that right now. This doesn’t of course mean that I behave in
exactly the same way to everyone. Unconditional love doesn’t mean that, it
doesn’t mean that you go around kissing every one. This notion is so
underanalysed that we have to be intelligent and serious and think about
what it means. It means that in the circumstances in which I am with you
now I seek to manifest love in the appropriate degree. That is to say, I
perform an action solely out of love. So what I’m trying to do to you now is
to explain a philosophical point. It’s not a particularly loving act in itself,
because acts are not loving per se, but it will help you to love, and it will
help me to love because I’ll get feedback from your understanding or not
understanding of my point, and then we will help to create the kind of
society that Marx and (I argue) Jesus, Buddha and possibly also Socrates
and Krishna would have wanted. I don’t think, you see, that secular and
religious utopias are so far apart. Thus, think of the Christian ethic that
says: ‘Do unto others as thou would be done by’. Actually, this isn’t a very
clear statement of what I call dialectical universality. Because we shouldn’t
do unto others exactly as we’re done by—because we’re all different. So
we need a more refined ethics, and that’s why the Marxian or Mahayana
Buddhist ethic is better than that simple statement.

Novelty and creation ex nihilo—can you have something out of nothing? A

lot of people have attacked me on this. They say you can’t. I don’t see why
not. In fact, if everything that you have was there before, nothing would be
new. So what I’m arguing for is what I argued for in A Realist Theory of
Science: the irreducibility of emergence, of novelty. Now how can you make
sense of this coming into being of what wasn’t there before? This is where
you have the very nice expression ‘involution’. You can see that it was
enfolded, implicit, a potential; and this is very important for critical
realism—it’s dispositional realism. Because critical realism, in its
 DEBATE: MARXISM AND CRITICAL REALISM 113
dispositional realism, asserts the primacy of the possible over the actual. This
is very important. The analysis of tendencies—of laws as tendencies—
doesn’t hold unless you believe that the tendency can be real even when it’s
not exercised, and that its exercise can be real even when it’s not actualized.
So in the same way something can be implicit within you as a possibility, as
Chomsky argues. You have the possibility of an infinite number of
languages, and you have the possibility of great grace and goodness bursting
from you, and possibilities that you’ve never dreamt of. All that is implicit
and enfolded. You can even say (and I have arguments for this in my latest
round of books) that, in so far as we’re part of one cosmos, and supposing we
originated from the big bang, then everything must be implicit in me—and
you have what I call the generalized theory of co-presence; that is to say, I
contain within me (and you within you) everything that’s there as a
potentiality. In these acts of transcendental identification—this is one
interpretation, in a way analogous to Platonic anamnesis—I identify with
what is already there within me. So on this interpretation the explanation of
acts of creativity, like Newton’s, would be that it involves the bringing out of
something which you have implicit in you, in virtue of which you achieve
identity with what you come to know.

That’s a conjecture, of course. Why shouldn’t philosophy be conjectural—

why must it prove dogmatically everything before it asserts anything? My
basic intuition about philosophy is this: that it has done little else up to now
but reproduce the status quo. What I’m trying to do the whole time is give
people new arguments, new ideas, new thoughts, new concepts. So if I want
to talk about the cosmic envelope, first I have to make that intelligible by
talking about god. Then people come in and have a go at me. You remember
in Dialectic I talked about ultimata. So I say OK, let’s withdraw god—but at
least you now know the sort of thing I’m talking about—let’s talk about the
cosmic envelope. Then for Marxists or any other secular person or atheist
that’s perfectly intelligible: we’re all bound together in one unity. The really
important thing about this unity is that my freedom within it depends on your
freedom, because I can’t be free while you’re unfree. Why? There are so
many arguments for this. At a cosmic level, you’re a part of me in the way
I’ve suggested. At a simpler level, let’s look at the empirical fact of global
interconnectedness. Does anyone believe they can escape from the
consequences of global warming, from the consequences of the generalized
panic and hysteria that has set in around the events which we call 9/11? Or
does anyone believe they can avoid the consequences of a chronic and
growing indebtedness in the third world, or the increased privatization and
liberalization that the aggressive imperialist policies pursued through the
World Bank and the IMF impose on third world countries? We’re all bound
up together. We sink or swim together. Never before has global
interconnectedness become such an empirically identifiable fact. Now
somewhere between those two kinds of arguments you have intermediate
114 ROY BHASKAR & ALEX CALLINICOS

concepts in virtue of which I can show how my freedom depends on yours. I

would like at some point to go back to Jenneth’s question about the other two
forms of materialism,4 but I feel we might have to have a rematch.

4
These were discussed in the second half of the session.