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1 See Capital, I, p. 321. 2 See Engels' letter to F. A. Lange, 1 1 .3.65, and Marx's letter to Kugelmann, 27.6.70; see also the author's Critical examination of the work if Karl Kautsky, pp. 40 et seq. 59 KARL MARX whole school in the shrewd sentence, "Thus there was history, but there is no more."1 Thus bourgeois theorists have dealt with all earlier forms of society as barbaric preliminary stages leading up to their own, ultimately established civil society. This truly "barbaric" procedure was, according to Marx, unavoidable so long as their principal task consisted in fighting out their historical struggle with feudalism under the conditions of a bourgeois society not yet finally constituted. It served as a weapon in the battle for progress and did not need, as long as it still had a revolutionary spark in it, any further justification. It appears, from a historical viewpoint, as a last faint echo of those stronger, if more naïve, forms in which during the Peasant War and the English Revolution the "pre-history of humanity" pictured in the Bible and during the French Revolution the natural state of man, were opposed as a true civil state of society to the feudal and corrupted order of the middle ages. Those were revolutionary slogans of the new bourgeois class against feudalism. When Adam delved and Eve span Where was then the gentleman? There was no such excuse for the further preservation of that antiquated method at a time when the victory of the bourgeois principle over feudalism had been finally won and the theorists of the triumphant bourgeoisie awoke to find themselves transformed unawares from revolutionary pioneers into the tedious panegyrists of an established order of society. Compare, for instance, the characteristic phraseology of the scientific founder of bourgeois "Ideology," Destutt de Tracy, who boasted that among the "Ancients" (i.e., in all epochs previous to the present "French Era") "social art" had not been sufficiently perfected "to give their empire that state of higher civilization and that strong organization which are necessary to secure the existence 1 See Misère de la Philosophie (MEGA, I, vi, p. 188). 60 THE PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM of nations effectively policed."1 Or, compare those bourgeois historians of the French Restoration period in the 19th century who, like Guizot, Thiers, and Thierry, expressly set themselves the task of rewriting world history as the history of the bourgeois class. In this phase the real progress of social science no longer consisted in the further development of bourgeois principles, but in their critique. The genuine self-criticism now for the first time arising within bourgeois science originated with the growth of classical political economy from Adam Smith to Ricardo and found its complete expression in the last phase of the development of classical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel. Hegel's philosophical system is, as the last system of classical German philosophy, the sum and recapitulation not only of all the earlier phases of bourgeois social theory, but also of its inherent contradictions. Like Ricardo, the last classical writer in the field of economics, so Hegel in his philosophy brought into sharper relief the striking contrasts within the structure of civil society which had already been revealed to a certain extent by Mandeville, Ferguson, Adam Smith, Kant, etc., but which with them had been ultimately harmonized in some "higher" or "deeper" unity. Even Hegel, in dealing with the material conditions of existing society, nowhere passed beyond the range of bourgeois thought. Still this new world of the bourgeoisie with its internal oppositions ranging themselves like so many unbridgeable chasms, as it was now philosophically exposed by Hegel under the direct influence of Ricardo, stood in a striking contrast to that "best of all possible worlds" into which even the most daring among the bourgeois thinkers of the preceding generation had ideologically transfigured the hard facts of existing social life. In Ricardo's economic system and in Hegel's philosophy, 1 See Eléments d'idéologie (1800-1805), Vol. II, Introduction, p. 6. 61 KARL MARX bourgeois society reached the highest grade of critical self-consciousness of which it was capable without violating its own principles. This happened at a time when, in the most developed capitalistic countries such as England and France a "criticism from without" had opposed itself to bourgeois society in the growing revolt of the proletarian class. Just as the last classical economist (Ricardo) had already been faced by a consciously socialist critic of all bourgeois economic science (Sismondi), so Hegel reflected the tremors set up in his philosophical exposition of "civil society" under the foundations of bourgeois society by the new class of the hired labourers. He had realistically described this new "class" which had been brought into being by the bourgeoisie itself, as one "bound to the particular work of modern industry" and as one living "in need and dependence" and "excluded from all the advantages of bourgeois society ;" as a "great mass" submerged below that "mode of subsistence" which is a necessary premise to the enjoyment of social rights, and sinking, by an inevitable law of bourgeois society itself, in the same proportion as the "excess of wealth" is increased into an increasing "excess of poverty."1 He furthermore accurately indicated that it is not a question here of "misery" alone, such as had inevitably arisen in earlier times through the parsimony of nature. It is a "social question" in the real sense of the term, pertinent to modern society, and one which must be solved by society. "No one can assert a right against nature, but, in the state of society, the defect takes at once the form of an injustice inflicted on one or the other class. The important question as to how poverty is to be relieved is one which particularly agitates and annoys society."2 He described in characteristic language the "temper" of the great masses of industrial workers which is inseparably bound up with the socially inflicted poverty in which they are forced to live. 1 See Hegel, Philosophy of Law, §§ 243-45. 2 Ibid., addition to § 244. 62 THE PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM "It is," he says, "an inner revolt against the rich, against society, against the government, etc."1 The impassable limit for Hegel, as for all other social scientists of the bourgeoisie, consisted in the fact that he saw the new social class only negatively as the "mob," and did not realize at the same time its positive revolutionary implications.2 Even more distinctly than in its contents, the critical element inherent in Hegel's philosophy manifests itself in his method. Hegel, unlike Ricardo, had not contented himself with stating the fundamental "principles" and letting the most glaring theoretical discordances stand as so-called "modifications." He endeavored to confine within one philosophical system, both the given condition of the existing bourgeois State and what he called its "idea." The "dialectical method" is the great instrument by which Hegel in his philosophy, complying with the needs of a class pressing toward the termination of the revolutionary movement and to a political and social "restoration," performed the remarkable task of reconciling within a so-called “unity of contradictions," the most irreconcilable oppositions resulting from the historical development of bourgeois society itself, and from its later confrontation with the rising class of the proletarian wage-labourers. Whilst his basic description of the existing conditions of "civil society," though suffering from vagueness, abruptness, and arbitrary judgments, still contains the deep insight of a genius fully aware of bourgeois reality, the cloven foot of his philosophy unequivocally reveals itself in the “speculative" super-structure of Hegel's system, which, in an apparent endeavour to establish a new idealistic creed corresponding to the needs of the present time, actually restores the
2 See MEGA, I, iii, pp. 204-208. While here Marx, quite correctly confronted the restricted view-point of his former companions of the road among the "left" Hegelians, who had not gone beyond Hegel's bourgeois suggestions, with the revolutionary implications of proletarian class struggle set forth by such contemporary writers as Proudhon, some years later he, less appropriately, raised the same point against Proudhon himself in Misèrie de la philosophie (MEGA, I, vi, p. 191). 63 KARL MARX whole bulk of old Medieval metaphysics – inclusive of the Christian dogma – which had been so utterly refuted by the spokesmen of early bourgeois materialism in the intervening centuries of progressive thought. 1 This Hegelian method, which had proved so efficient in swallowing the most powerful contradictions, offered no small temptation to the generation of radical thinkers which arose in the period immediately following Hegel's death, when the unchallenged sway of Hegelian philosophy preceded, during the 30's and 40's of the 19th century, the final decline of the Hegelian and, indeed, all bourgeois philosophy.2 They thought that the mighty instrument, forged by the last great philosopher of the bourgeois class, could easily be made available for the more advanced criticism raised against the very principle of the bourgeois status quo in the name of the new revolutionary class. All that was needed was to consider the “premature” termination of Hegel's philosophy in the glorification of the bourgeois society, its State, its philosophy, its religion and art, to be only an “inconsistency,” on the part of the conservative “systematizer,” in the application of his own revolutionary “method.” In fact Lassalle – and Proudhon for a time – did assign this new historical task to Hegel's dialectical method. Marx and Engels saw clearly that the old bottle could no longer hold the new wine. It is true that they too, in the formation of their new proletarian and materialistic criticism of bourgeois society, too, their departure from Hegel's idealistic philosophy and even preserved the term “Dialectic”as a comprehensive name for the several new principles which they worked out and applied in the process of their scientific investigation. But, as will be shown in the third part of this book, all that apparent “Hegelianism” did not ammount, in Marx, to more
2 For a more detailed description of this period see the author's Marxism and Philosophy, second edition, 1930. 64 THE PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM than what he at one time most appropriately called an “occasional flirtation with Hegel's peculiar mode of expression.”1 In actual fact, he completely broke with the whole of Hegel's speculative philosophy. He transplanted the dialectical method of Hegel from an idealistic to a materialistic basis, and in the process of that materialistic “reversal” stripped from it all those elements which he had already thoroughly exposed in an earlier phase of his philosophical development as its underlying “mystification.”2 The theory of the new revolutionary movement of the 19th century no longer needed to exercise itself in the art of moving forward and backward at the same time, and to represent its new aims as the “restoration” of the old. It “left the dead to bury their dead” in order to come to its own content.3 The principles of the Marxian critique of existing society, being proletarian and no longer bourgeois, are opposed to the philosophical system of Hegel not only in content, subject matter, and aim, but quite as much in theoretical form. If Marx, indeed, took his start from a critical and revolutionary reversal of the principles inherent in Hegel's method, he certainly went on to develop, in a strictly empirical manner, the specific methods of his own materialistic criticism and research. There is, aside from the theoretical self-criticism of bourgeois society represented by the later classical writiers, another, and entirely different, criticism which flows from the latter of the the two above-mentioned currents of 19th century bourgeois thought4 and which, this time, is directed against the very principle of theoretical analysis itself. Marx, from his new standpoint, saw at once the Historico-Romantic School which after the close of the the great French Revolution had 1 See Postscript, 1873. 2 See Marx's “critical revision” of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, 1843, in MEGA, I, 1, i, pp. 401-453, and the reference to that earlier analysis in Postscript, 1873. 3 See Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Luis Bonaparte, 1852. 4 See above, p. 45. 65 KARL MARX joined, and even in part preceded, the socialists in the attack upon the victorious bourgeois principles. He disclosed in his article on The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law,1 and in the analysis of the “Reactionary Socialism” embodied in the Communist Manifesto, the essentially reactionary trend of that apparently “anti-bourgeois” and “anti-capitalistic” current which – like reactionary Fascism and Hitlerism to-day - “up-braided the bourgeoisie more for having produced a revolutionary proletariat than for having produced a proletariat at all.”2 He has also seen the theoretical loss bound up with this sentimental regression from the only present and real form of social life to mediaeval feudality and even further back to archaic conditions of society, - the so-called “origins” of culture, are, economics, etc. “The Historical School,” jests Marx, “has so emphasized its affection for 'sources', that it requires the sailor to sail, not on the stream but on its source.”3 While thus refuting the entire theoretical and practical “philosophy” of the Historical School, in agreement with all progressive spirits of the age,4 Marx was at the time aware of the actual progress which had been made by this new school of social research from a purely scientific point of view. Moreover, he discovered the critical and forward tendency inherent in the apparently backward turn. Writing to Engels on the 25th of March, 1868, he said: “The first reaction against the French Revolution and the 'enlightenment' bound up with it was 1 See MEGA, I, 1, i, pp. 251 et seq. 2 Ibid, I, vi, p. 547. 3 Ibid, I, 1, i, p. 251 4 See the report in MEGA, I, 1, i, pp. XLIX-L, on the four essays by which young Marx in 1842 intended to refute the several aspects of the Historico-Romantic School. See also the vigorous indictment, in MEGA, I, v, p.325, of such forerunners of that school, of the first French theorists of the counter-revolution, Bonald, de Maistre, etc., and their followers during the French Restoration – the real founders of all later “Tory-Socialism.” The same people are referred to in the Communist Manifesto as a section of the French Legitimists and of “Young England” who “waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner but carried the old feudal coat-of-arms on their hind quarters.” (MEGA, i, vi, p. 547.) 66 THE PRINCPLE OF CRITICISM naturally, to see everything as mediaeval and romantic. Even such writers as Grimm are not free from this. The second reaction is to see beyond the Middle Ages back into the primitive history of each people. That corresponds to the socialist view, although the scholars have no idea of the connection. Thus they are surprised to find the newest in the oldest, and even 'Egalitarians,' to a degree which would scandalize Proudhon.”1 To this sentence, to which a hundred similar ones might be added from Marx's and Engels' writings, can be seen the main significance that the study of primaeval society, then passing through its first great period of discovery, had at that time acquired for the revolutionary science of Marx.2 The very fact that now, for the first time, those social forms of existence which had hitherto been so far removed from present-day conditions and had been accessible to the modern world at best in legend and poetry were opened up to sober scientific research, was for Marx and Engels a sign that bourgeois society in its present stage of development already contained within itself the tendencies toward a change more radical than any achieved by previous historical revolutions. The basic importance of primitive history rests on this general assumption rather than on the analogy which Marx, half in joke, draws between the “egalitarian” conditions of primaeval society and the communist society of the future. While the term “primaeval communism,” created by the first discoverers, has since been rather indiscriminately applied to the various types of early society, there still remains a striking, and even somewhat paradoxical, difference between the bourgeois and the Marxian use of the underlying concept. The idea of an historical past repeating itself in the future fits in very well with the bourgeois concept of development, with its glorification of existing bourgeois conditions, and with its rejection of “communism” as implying a general loss of culture and
2 See above, p. 50. 67 KARL MARX eventual relapse from the present "all time high" of human achievement to primitive barbarism and decay. On the other hand, the assumption that Marx and Engels should have seen in the conditions prevailing in a distant past an actual anticipation of conditions to be reached in an equally distant future, and thus reduced the Communist programme to a mere restoration of that long bygone past, utterly contradicts the materialistic principle underlying the whole of Marxian theory. Marx presents human society as an historical development progressing from a lower to a higher organization of the material productive forces. He sees in the modern capitalistic mode of production, with its immense unfolding of productive powers far exceeding all earlier epochs, an indispensable material foundation for that more highly developed form of communal life which will be inaugurated by the social revolution of the modern working class. Nevertheless, many bourgeois writers up to the present day, after a perfunctory recital of the well-known theoretical unsoundness of the assumption of a "Primaeval Communism," and after a scholarly refutation of the historical mistakes allegedly committed in this respect by the Marxists, quite naively go on to make use of the term and its underlying assumption. On the contrary, the idea of a primitive "Communism" preceding the various systems based on private property is openly accepted from the outset by the Marxists but at the same time is nowhere used by them as an argument for a positive historical statement. It serves them rather as a starting point for a more thorough and more critical investigation of the given conditions of existing society including even its most far-reaching and, from a less comprehensive view-point, remote developmental tendencies. There is then, from the very principle of Marxian materialistic research, a great significance in the investigation of the primitive conditions prevailing in the early history of mankind. Yet this investigation is made by the Marxists, not for the purpose of
THE PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM acquiring a direct knowledge of the really communistic forms and contents of a future, post-capitalist society, but rather with the indirect aim of a more comprehensive approach to the study of historical change. Marx and Engels saw in the scientific unfolding of primaeval history a necessary premise for their materialistic investigation of present-day society, whose basic forms can only be fully elucidated by an exact study of primitive society, its development and dissolution, and the different forms of its transition to the later systems based on private property and class opposition. For example, in order to explain scientifically the surviving remains of communal property and the various original types of private property in the Greek, Roman, Germanic, Celtic, and Slavonic social systems, it is necessary to back to the various forms of primitive communal property and the corresponding different forms cf their dissolution. Besides this main interest, there are some other advantages to be gained from that source for a critical and revolutionary science. The critical science of the proletarian class was the first to break loose from the accepted single track idea of progress, and to show that those apparently "wild" and "barbaric” conditions of the primaeval past, in spite of their material deficiencies, uncouthness, and benightedness, still contained many qualities which compare most favourably with present-day "civilized" conditions. Marx and Engels in that respect only continued, in a more highly developed form, the "criticism of civilization” which had been initiated before them by the first great Utopian socialists, above all by Charles Fourier in his vital attack on the self-complacent assurance of the bourgeois conception the world.1 It is only with a knowledge of the totally non-bourgeois forms of a primitive society that it becomes possible for the social revolutionary to imagine a further development 1 See Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1884, where Fourier's profound discernment of the contrast between civilized society and the primitive forms is recapitulated in a footnote to the penultimate paragraph. The theme is further elaborated in Engels' Anti-Dühring, 1878, and in his Preface to the fourth edition of Origin, etc., in 1891. 69 KARL MARX which will go beyond the bourgeois conditions of present-day society not only by a gradual readjustment of its existing pattern but by a fundamental change of the whole system. The communist societies of the future will, in proportion to their increasing distance from the present-day bourgeois status, "correspond," no longer merely to Mediaeval and Antique Society, but to a still further distant and entirely non-bourgeois past. They will not conform, however, to those early conditions commonly referred to as Primitive Communism in any other way than in their analogous position "equally aloof from present-day society." There need be, in fact, as little structural likeness between those primeval conditions of humanity (or for that matter the equally "primitive" conditions of the so-called "savage" tribes to-day) and the future conditions of a fully developed communist society, as there is at the present time between the "unconscious" elements of the mental structure of modern bourgeois man as recently disclosed by the psychoanalysts on the one hand, and the "corresponding" states of either primaeval man or the free individuals of a no longer bourgeois society of the future. The occurrence of a genuine critical impulse in the history of bourgeois social thought, then, is restricted to a short and clearly defined period. It emerged from the last phase of the revolutionary epoch of the bourgeoisie, and it ended with the expiration of this, the "classical" epoch of bourgeois social science. As we shall show in detail in the second part of this book, none of the post-classical schools of bourgeois economists has even approximated the critical detachment which, for a strictly limited time, had been reached by such thinkers as Ricardo. The same applies to the post-Hegelian developments of bourgeois philosophy and, indeed, to all other branches of post-classical bourgeois thought, even though more recently its hitherto prevailing tendency to accept unconditionally or to defend and Yüklə 0,99 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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