Stalinist Revisionism

In our own time, Woltmann’s intimate association with Marxism is rarely, if ever, cited—and one of the principal sources of the revolutionary racism of the twentieth century thereby obscured. It was the decay of classical Marxism that contributed racism to the mix of revolutionary ideas that were to torment our time. Neither Moses Hess nor Ludwig Woltmann can be dismissed as anomalies. As the subsequent history of revolutionary Marxism was to reveal, racist and reactive nationalist variants of Marxism were to inspire revolutions throughout the doleful history of our most recent past.

Woltmann’s position was that human volition, the product of human thought and moral judgment, was not determined, although it might be conditioned, by economic factors. He argued that it could not be shown with any degree of empirical plausibility that human thought submissively followed socioeconomic “laws of motion.” He insisted that every piece of evidence available indicated that human thought and human will were governed by processes peculiar to themselves. Human thought was governed by epistemological criteria of its own —and the truth that emerged informed the will—and while human beings possessed of truth certainly did not always prevail in history, they did, on occasion, and under certain circumstances, significantly influence its passage.

Woltmann contended that complex human thought could not reasonably be understood to be a simple “reflection” of anything—neither as reflections of anything going on in the processes of biological, nor anything transpiring within the domain of social, evolution. That was true for at least one reason: all Marxists recognized that throughout human history, there have been those who articulate “premature” moral concepts. That is to say, the Stoics of antiquity, the first Jews and Christians, and some thinkers of the earliest societies, advanced notions of fundamental human equality, unqualified brotherhood, universal compassion, and world peace, long before there existed any “mature economic base” to which any of that might “correspond.”

It was at that point that Woltmann insisted that whatever the laws governing evolution, such laws could not be projected over social evolution without recognizing the possibility of grievous error.13 He dismissed the attempt on the part of “bourgeois Darwinists” to see the direct operation of Darwinian laws in human behavior. When Social Darwinists attempted to apply the laws of organic evolution to society, by conceiving laissez faire business practices, for example, the economic equivalent of the “struggle for existence” that typified the animal world, Woltmann argued that they made the same mistake made by those who seek to impose social “laws” on the “laws” of thought. It was at that point that Woltmann introduced a major modification in the Marxist system as it had been inherited.

Woltmann maintained that once some collection of higher primates were no longer content with the spontaneous groupings in which they found themselves in nature—and created the first human societies, there was a qualitative change in the processes governing their association. Social evolution in organized human communities, he insisted, does not follow the same identifiable regularities as general biological evolution. Animal societies may follow the laws of biological evolution, but social evolution among human beings was, in his judgment, qualitatively different. Social evolution among humans proceeds with considerable independence of the laws of biological development— following regularities peculiar to itself.