Delhi university library

10

KARL MARX

of the truth, a peculiarly vicious form of hypocrisy or self-deception, repeatedly exposed by history. This fundamental difference of outlook, and no mere dissimilarity of temperament or natural gifts, is the property which distinguishes Marx sharply from the bourgeois radicals and utopian socialists whom, to their own bewildered indignation, he fought and abused savagely and unremittingly for more than forty years.

He detested romanticism, emotionalism, and humani- tarianism of every kind, and, in his anxiety to avoid any appeal to the idealistic feelings of his audience, systematically removed every trace of the old democratic vocabulary from the propagandist literature of his movement. He neither offered nor invited concessions at any time, and did not enter into any dubious political alliances, since he declined all forms of compromise. The manuscripts of the numerous manifestoes, professions of faith and programmes of action to which he appended his name, still bear the strokes of the pen and the fierce marginal comments, with which he sought to obliterate all references to eternal justice, the equality of man, the rights of individuals or nations, the liberty of conscience, the fight for civilization, and other such phrases which were the stock in trade (and had once genuinely embodied the ideals) of the democratic movements of his tune; he looked upon these as so much worthless cant, indicating confusion of thought and ineffectiveness in action.

The war must be fought on every front, and, since contemporary society is politically organized, a political party must be formed out of those elements which in accordance with the laws of historical development are destined to emerge as the conquering class. They

INTRODUCTION

must ceaselessly be taught that what seems so secure in existing society is, in reality, doomed to swift extinction, a fact which men may find it difficult to believe because of the immense protective fa5ade of moral, religious, political and economic assumptions and beliefs, which the moribund class consciously or unconsciously creates, blinding itself and others to its own approaching fate. It reqmi^ft-both-ipteller.tnal courage and acuteness of vision to penetrate this smoke-screen and perceive the real structure of events. The spectacle of chaos, and the imminence of the crisis in which it is bound to end, will of itself convince a clear-eyed and interested observer—for no one who is not virtually dead or dying, can be a disinterested spectator of the fate of the society with which his own life is bound up—of what he must be and do in order to survive. Not a subjective scale of values revealed differently to different men, determined by the light of an inner vision, but knowledge of the facts themselves, must, according to Marx, determine rational behaviour. ?The society which is judged to be progressive, and so worthy of support, is that which is capable of further expansion in its initial direction without an alteration of its entire basi^J A society is reactionary when it is inevitably moving into an impasse, unable to avoid internal chaos and ultimate collapse in spite of the most desperate efforts to survive, efforts which themselves create irrational faith in its own ultimate stability, the anodyne with which all dying institutions necessarily delude themselves. Nevertheless, what history—to Marx an almost active agency—has condemned will be inevitably swept away: to say that it ought to be saved, even when that is not possible, is to deny the


14 KARL MARX

to perform. It may well be that there is not one among his views whose embryo cannot be found in some previous or contemporary writer. Thus the doctrine of communal ownership founded upon the abolition of private property, has probably, in one_Qr_other form, possessed adherents at most periods during the last two thousand years. Consequently the often debated question whether Marx derived it directly from the writings of Mably, or from some German account of French Communism, is too purely academic to be of great importance. As for the more specific doctrines, historical materialism of a sort is to be found fully developed in a treatise by Holbach printed a century before, which in its turn owes much to Spinoza; a modified form of it was restated in Marx’s own day by Feuerbach. The view of human history as the history of war between soqal classes is to be found m Saint-Simon^ and was to alarge extentadopted bysuch contemporary liberal French historians as Thierry and Mignet, and equally by the more conservative Guizot. The scientific theory of the inevitability of the regular recurrence of economic crises was probably first formulated by Sismondi; that of the rise of the Fourth Estate was certainly held by the early communists, popularized in Germany in Marx’s own day by von Stein and Hess. The dictatorship of the proletariat was adumbrated by Babeuf in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and was explicitly developed in the nineteenth in different fashions by Weitling and Blanqui; the present and future position and importance of workers m arfindustrial state fvas more fully worked out by Louis Blanc and the French State Socialists than Marx is prepared to admit. The laWuTtheoryofvalue derives FdnTLocke, Adam Smith

INTRODUCTION 15

and the classical, economists; the theory of exploitation and surplus value, and of its remedy by deliberate State control, is found both in Fourier, and in the writings of early English socialists, such as Bray, Thompson and Hodgskin; the list could easily ~be continued further.

There was no dearth of such doctrines particularly in the eighteenth century. Some died at birth, others, when the intellectual climate was favourable, modified opinion and influenced action. Marx sifted this immense mass of chaotic material and detached from it whatever seemed to him original, true and important; and in the light of it constructed a new instrument of social analysis, the main merit of Which lies not in its beauty or consistency, nor in its emotional or intellectual power—the great utopian systems are nobler works of the speculative imagination—but in the remarkable combination of simple fundamental principles with comprehensiveness, realism and detail. The environment which it assumed actually corresponded to the personal, first-hand experience of the public to which it was addressed; its analyses, when stated in their simplest form, seemed at once novel and penetrating, and the new hypotheses which represent a peculiar synthesis of German idealism, French rationalism, and English political economy, seemed genuinely to co-ordinate and account for a mass of social phenomena hitherto thought of in comparative isolation from each other. This provided a concrete meaning for the formulae and popular slogans of the new communist movement. Above all, it enabled it to do more than stimulate general emotions of discontent and rebellion by attaching to them, as Chartism had done, a collection of

l6 KARL MARX

specific but loosely connected political and economic ends. It directed these feelings to systematically interconnected, immediate, feasible objectives, regarded not as ultimate ends valid for all men at all times, but as objectives proper to a revolutionary party representing a specific stage of social development.

To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which most occupied men’s minds at this time, and to have deduced from them direct practical consequences without creating obviously artificial links between the two, was the principal achievement of Marx’s theory, and endowed it with that singular vitality which enabled it to defeat and survive its rivals in the succeeding decades. It was composed largely in Paris during the troubled years between 1843 and 1850, when, under the stress of a world crisis, economic and political tendencies normally concealed below the surface of social life, increased in scope and in intensity until they broke through the framework which was secured in normal times by established institutions; and for a brief instant revealed their real character during the luminous interlude which preceded the final clash of forces in which all issues were obscured once more. Marx fully profited by this rare opportunity for scientific observation in the field of social theory; to him, indeed, it appeared to provide full confirmation of his hypotheses.

The system as it finally emerged was a massive structure, * heavily fortified against attack at every strategic point, incapable of bang" taken by direct assault, containing_withinjts walls “elaborate resources to meet every conceivable contingency^ of war. Its influence has been immense on friend and foe alike,

INTRODUCTION 17

and in particular on social scientists, historians and critics. It has altered the history of human thought in the sense that after it certain things could never again be plausibly said. No subject loses, at least in the long run, by becoming a field of battle, and the Marxist emphasis upon the primacy of economic factors in determining human behaviour led directly to an intensified study of economic history, which, although it had not been entirely neglected in the past, did not attain to its present prominent rank, until the rise of Marxism gave an impulse to exact historical scholarship in that sphere-^kiuch as in the previous generation Hegelian doctrines acted as a powerful stimulus to historical studies in general. The sociological treatment of historical problems which Comte, and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Maixism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense.

In 1849 Marx was forced to leave Paris, and came to live in England. Life in that country hardly affected him at all. To him London meant little more than the library of the British Museum, ‘the ideal strategic vantage point for the student of bourgeois society’, an arsenal of ammunition whose importance its owners did not appear to grasp. He remained almost totally unaffected by his surroundings, living encased in his own, largely German, world, formed by his family and a small group of intimate friends and political associates. He met few Englishmen and neither understood nor cared for them or their mode of life. He was a man unusually impervious to the influence of environment: he

i8

KARL MARX

saw Jittle that was not printed in newspapers or books, and remainecTuntil his death comparativelyTmaware of the quality of th^lire~arounJ himof itsjodaLand natural background^ So far as his intellectual develop- * ment is concerned, he might just as well have spent his exile on Madagascar, provided that a regular supply of books and journals could have been secured: certainly the inhabitants of London could hardly have taken less notice of his existence if he had. The formative, psychologically most interesting, years of his life were over by 1849: after this he was emotionally and intellectually set and hardly changed at all. He hkd, while still in Paris, conceived the idea of providing ^complete account ancT explanation of the^ risg' and^rmimncnt fall of tte~capitalist~system7”Hrr work upon TT’was begun in the'sprmg of 1 Sijojlmd continued, with interruptions, caused by day-to-day tactical needs and the journalism ' by which he tried to support his household, until his death in 1883.

1 His pamphlets, articles and letters during the next thirty years form a coherent commentary on contemporary political affairs in the light of his new method of analysis. They are sharp, lucid, realistic, astonishingly modern in tone, and aimed deliberately against the prevailing optimistic temper of his time, j As a revolutionary he disapproved of conspiratorial methods, which he thought obsolete and ineffective, calculated to irritate public opinion without altering its foundations, and instead set himself to create an open political party dominated by the new view of society. . His later years are occupied almost exclusively with the task o£ gathering evidence for, and disseminating, the truths which he had discovered, until they filled the

INTRODUCTION ig

entire horizon of his followers, and became consciously woven into the texture of their every thought and word and act. For a quarter of a century he concentrated his entire being upon the attainment of this purpose, and, towards the end of his life, achieved it.

The nineteenth century contains many remarkable social critics and revolutionaries no less original, no less violent, no less dogmatic than Marx, but not one so rigorously single-minded, so absorbed in making every word and every act of his life a means towards a single, immediate, practical end, to which nothing was too sacred to sacrifice. If there is a sense in which he was born before his time, there is an equally definite sense in which he embodies one of the oldest of European traditions. For while hisjrealism, his__empiricism, his attacks on abstract principles, his demand that every solution must be tested by its applicability to, and emergence out of, the actual situation, his contempt for compromise or gradualism as modes of escape from the necessity of drastic action, his belief that the masses are infinitely gullible and must at all costs be rescued, if necessary by force, from the knaves and fools who impose upon them, make him the precursor of the severer generation of practical revolutionaries of the next century, his rigid belief in the necessity of a com- plete break with the past, in the need for a wholly new social system^ as alone capable of saving the individual, who, if left J.Q .himself will lose his way and perish, places him among the gieat authoritarian founders of new faiths, ruthless subverters and innovators who interpret~the world in terms of a single, clear, passionately held principle, denouncing and destroying all that conflicts with it. His faith in his own synoptic-

20 KARL MARX

vision of an orderly, disciplined world, destined to arise out of the inevitable self-destruction of the chaotic society of the present, was of that boundless, absolute kind which puts an end to all questions and dissolves all difficulties; which brings with it a sense of liberation similar to that which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries men found in the new Protestant faith, and later in the truths of science, in the principles of the great Revolution, in the systems of the German metaphysicians. If these earlier rationalists are justly called fanatical, then in this sense Marx too was a fanatic. But his faith in reason was not blind: if he appealed to reasonpSe appeale3~nb less to empirical evidence. The laws of history were indeed eternal and immutable— and to grasp this fact a metaphysical intuition was required—but what they were could be established only by the evidence of empirical facts. His intellectual system was a closed one, everything that entered was made to conform to a pre-established pattern, but it w^s grounded on observation and experience. He was obsessed by no fixed ideas. He betrays not a trace of the notorious symptoms which accompany pathological fanaticism, that alternation of moods of sudden exaltation with a sense of loneliness and persecution, which life in wholly private worlds often engenders in those who are detached from reality.

The main ideas of his principal work appear to have matured in his mind as early as 1847. Preliminary sketches had appeared in 1849 and again ten years later, but he was incapable of beginning to write before satisfying himself that he had mastered the entire literature of his subject. This fact, together with the difficulty of finding a publisher and the necessity of

INTRODUCTION

21

providing for his own and his family’s livelihood, with its accompaniment of overwork and frequent illness, put off its publication year by year. The first volume finally appeared twenty years after its conception, in 1867, and is the crowning achievement of his life. It is an attempt to give a single integrated account of the process and laws of social development, containing • a complete economic theory treated, historically and, less explicitly, a theory of history as determined by economic factors. It is interrupted by remarkable digressions consisting of _analyses and historical sketches of the condition of the proletariat in particular durIng~tHe period of transition from manufacture to large-scale industrial capitalism, introduced to illustrate the general thesis, but in fact demonstrating a new and revolutionary method of historical writing: and in all constitutes the most formidable, sustained and elaborate indictmenl ever delivered against an entire social order, against its rulers, its supporLers, its ideologists, its willing slaves, against all whose lives are bound up with its survival. His attack upon bourgeois society was made at a moment when~itTiad reached the highest point of its material prosperity, in the very year in which Gladstone in a budget speech congratulated his countrymen on the ‘intoxicating augmentation of their wealth and power’ which recent years had witnessed, during a mood of buoyant optimism and universal confidence. In this world Marx is an isolated and bitterly hostile figure, prepared, like the early Clyistians^ or the_French revo- lutionaries, to reject boldly everything that it had to offer, calling its ideals worthless ancfits virtues vices, condemningjts_institutions, not because tKey were"bad but because they were bourgeois, becauseThey belonged

24 KARL MARX

this was possible; Germany was once more divided into feudally organized kingdoms and principalities, whose restored rulers, resolved to compensate themselves for the years of defeat and humiliation, set about reviving the old regime in every detail, anxious to exorcize once and for all the spectre of democratic revolution whose memory was sedulously kept alive by the more enlightened among their subjects. The King of Prussia, Frederick William III, was particularly energetic in this respect. Helped by the feudal squirearchy and such land-owning aristocracy as there was in Prussia, and following the example set by Metternich in Vienna, he succeeded in arresting the normal development of the majority of his countrymen for many years, and induced an atmosphere of profound and hopeless stagnation, beside which even France and England during Lhe reactionary years seemed liberal aq,d alive. This was felt most acutely by the more progressive elements in German society—not merely by the intellectuals, but by the bulk of the bourgeoisie and of the liberal aristocracy of the towns, particularly in the west, which had always preserved some contact with general European culture. It took the form of economic, social and political legislation designed to retain, and in some cases to restore, a multitude of privileges, rights and restrictions, many of them dating from the Middle Ages, sordid survivals which had long ceased to be even picturesque; and, since they were in direct conflict with the needs of the new age, they needed and obtained an elaborate and ruinous structure of tariffs to keep them in being. This led to a policy of systematic discouragement of trade and industry and, since the obsolete structure had to be preserved against popular pressure, to the creation

CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE 25

of a despotic officialdom, whose task it was to insulate German society from the contaminating influence of liberal ideas and institutions.

The increased power of the police, the introduction of rigid supervision over all departments of public and private life, provoked a literature of protest which was rigorously suppressed by the government censors. German writers and poets went into voluntary exile, and from Paris or Switzerland conducted passionate propaganda against the regime. The general situation was reflected particularly clearly in the condition of that section of society which throughout the nineteenth century tended_tQ_act_as^the most sensitive barometer of the direction of social change—the small but widely scattered Jewish population.