Fatalism

Fatalism is the philosophical doctrine that all events are predetermined and inevitable, and that human agency is powerless to change outcomes. In the context of Marxism, fatalism manifests as vulgar determinism, the belief that socialism will arrive automatically from economic development without the need for conscious revolutionary struggle.

Forms of fatalism

Metaphysical fatalism: The general philosophical position that the future is fixed and human actions cannot alter what is destined to occur.

Economic fatalism: In Marxism, this takes the form of believing that the development of productive forces automatically and mechanically produces socialism without the necessity of class struggle, revolutionary organization, or political intervention. This is closely related to economism and mechanical materialism.

Historical fatalism: The belief that history follows predetermined stages that cannot be altered or skipped, leading to passivity in the face of reactionary developments or the postponement of revolutionary action.

Fatalism vs. Historical materialism

Fatalism fundamentally misunderstands historical materialism. While historical materialism recognizes that material conditions set the parameters and create the possibilities for historical development, it insists that human agency, conscious, organized class struggle, is necessary to actualize those possibilities.

As Marx wrote:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

This formulation rejects both fatalism (history makes itself) and voluntarism (pure will can change anything). Instead, it recognizes the dialectical relationship between objective conditions and subjective action.

Lenin also systematically combated fatalist interpretations of Marxism that reduced historical materialism to mechanical determinism.

The idea of determinism, which postulates that human acts are necessitated and rejects the absurd tale about free will, in no way destroys mans reason or conscience, or appraisal of his actions. Quite the contrary, only the determinist view makes a strict and correct appraisal possible instead of attributing everything you please to free will. Similarly, the idea of historical necessity does not in the least undermine the role of the individual in history: all history is made up of the actions of individuals, who are undoubtedly active figures.

Lenin distinguished between:

• Scientific determinism: Understanding the objective laws and tendencies of social development.

• Fatalism: Believing these laws operate automatically without human intervention.

Fatalism in practice

Fatalism produces several political errors:

Passivity in the face of reaction: Believing that capitalism's contradictions will automatically produce socialism, fatalists fail to organize active resistance to fascism, imperialism, or counter-revolution, assuming history will "take care of it."

Menshevism and stagism: The belief that backward countries must wait for capitalism to fully develop before socialism becomes possible, thus postponing revolutionary struggle for generations or centuries.

Deterministic economism: Assuming that improving workers' economic conditions automatically produces revolutionary consciousness, without the need for political education and organization.

Defeatism: In revolutionary situations, believing that defeat is inevitable rather than fighting to change the balance of forces.

The revolutionary alternative

Against fatalism, Marxism-Leninism insists on the necessity of conscious intervention:

Revolution requires organization: Socialism does not arise spontaneously from economic development. It requires a revolutionary party, strategy, and organized class struggle.

Consciousness must be developed: Revolutionary consciousness does not emerge automatically. It must be cultivated through political education, struggle, and the development of class consciousness.

Revolutionary situations must be seized: Even when objective conditions are favorable, revolution requires subjective factors, leadership, organization, correct tactics, to succeed.

To the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old   way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action.

This formulation shows that revolution requires both objective crisis (the ruling class cannot rule) and subjective readiness (the masses are organized and conscious). Neither alone is sufficient.

Dialectical opposition

Dialectical materialism resolves the false opposition between determinism and free will, between objective laws and human agency.

Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject.

Thus, understanding the objective laws of social development (material conditions, class forces, contradictions) does not produce fatalism but rather enables conscious, effective intervention to change those conditions in a revolutionary direction.