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'fa-yKgJjt'Hntsi SJhmibesrs, rf the previous oanttMav, wfai'dh appeared la ninetcenth-tv ntwry liberals amd latjcwsslKts in an almost sacred li'gbt, as the fuBest and ticlbssi expression off the ituM'idit-sTs ytrewafflos idealism, ibis triumph over the Hand farcies of nature and over this own ^disciplined appetites, was to Pranidlifflsn the greatest of aft evils, the prrveixioa of all tire faculties towards the unnatural iprevvaefa.r: of an acquisitive and. tfcazdfcne, unjust sucstitv, in wittth the advantage of each depended on, even oorvistod in, his ability to outwit, defeat, ®r exterminate the others. The evil was identical with that attacked earlier by Fourier and Sisntentii, but it was differently expressed and differently accounted for. Fourier was heir to both the thought aiad the style of the eighteenth century, and interpreted the calamities, ©This time as tits results of ihc suppression of reason by the deliberate policy of those who feared its application, the priests, the well bom, the rich. ProtxHion was to souse extent affected by the historicism of his age: he knew no German, but had had Hegelianism poured into hint by Bakunin and later by German exiles. ItoudhssiTs attempt 10 adapt the new theory to his own doctrine with its' stress on justice aad human rights, led *0 results which to Marx .seemed a crude caricature ffif Hegelianism.

The method, indeed, by which everything was described in the term, of two antithetical tonceptksns, which made every statement seem at once realistic amid paradoxical, suited Proudhon’s talent for omniiinig sharp and arresting phrases, his love of epigram. Ms desire to move, to startle and to provoke. Everything is rov- tradictory; property is theft; to be a citizen is to toe deprived of rights; capitalism is at once the despotism

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of the stronger over the weaker, and of the lesser over the greater; to accumulate wealth is to rob; to abolish it is to undermine the foundations of morality. Proudhon’s remedy for this is the suppression of competition and the introduction in its place of a ‘mutualist’ cooperative system under which limited private property should be permitted, and indeed enforced, but not the accumulation of capital. Whereas competition evoke, the worst and most brutal qualities in men, co-operation, besides promoting greater efficiency, moralizes and civilizes them by revealing the true end of communal life. The state may be endowed with certain centralizing functions, but its activity must be severely controlled by the associations by trades, professions, occupations, and again of consumers and producers, under which society would be organized. Organize society into a single economic whole on non-competitive ‘mutualist’ lines, and the antinomies will be resolved, the good remain, evil disappear. Poverty, unemployment, the frustration of men forced into uncongenial tasks as a result of the class maladjustments of an unplanned society, will disappear and men’s better natures will find it possible to assert themselves; for there is no lack of idealism in human nature, but under the existing economic order it is rendered ineffectual or, through misdirection, dangerous. But, for Proudhon, it is useless to preach to the rich; their generous instincts became atrophied long ago. The enlightened prince dreamt of by the encyclopaedists will not be born, being himself a social contradiction. Only the real victims of the system, the small farmers, the small bourgeoisie and the urban proletariat can be appealed to. They alone can alter their own condition, since being at once the most


PARIS 115

numerous and the most indispensable members of society, they alone have the power to transform it. To them consequently Proudhon addressed himself. He warned the workers against organizing themselves politically, since by imitating the ruling class they will inevitably place themselves at its mercy. The enemy, being more experienced in political tactics, will by bullying, or by financial or social bribes, succeed in luring over the weaker or less astute among the revolutionary leaders, and so render the movement impotent. In any case, even if they were victorious, they would, by acquiring control over, and so preserving the political forms of authoritarian government, give a new lease of life to the very contradiction from which they seek to escape. The workers and small bourgeoisie must therefore seek, by purely economic pressure, to impose their own pattern on the rest of society; this process should be gradual and peaceful. Again and again Proudhon declared that the workers must on no account have recourse to coercion; not even strikes were to be permitted, since this would infringe upon the individual worker’s right to the free disposal of his labour.

Proudhon had the unwisdom to submit his book, La Philosophic de la Mislre (the Philosophy of Poverty) to Marx for criticism. Marx read it in two days and pronounced it fallacious and superficial, but written attractively and with sufficient eloquence and sincerity to mislead the masses. ‘To leave error unrcfuted’, he declared in a similar situation many years later, ‘is to encourage intellectual immorality.’ For ten workers who might go further, ninety may stop with Proudhon and remain in darkness. He, therefore, determined to destroy it, and with it Proudhon’s reputation as a

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serious thinker, once and for all. In 1847 in answer to La Philosophic de la Mislrc there appeared La Mishc de la Philosophic, by Dr. Karl Marx, containing the bitterest attack delivered by one thinker upon another since the celebrated polemics of the Renaissance. Marx took immense trouble to demonstrate that Proudhon was totally incapable of abstract thought, a fact which he vainly attempted to conceal by a use of pseudo-Hegelian terminology.

Marx accused Proudhon of radically misunderstanding the Hegelian categories by naively interpreting the dialectical conflict as a simple struggle between good and evil, which leads to the fallacy that all that is needed is to remove the evil, and the good will remain. This is the very height of superficiality: to call this or that side of the dialectical conflict good or bad is a sign of un- historical subjectivism out of place in serious social analysis. Both aspects are equally indispensable for the development of human society. Genuine progress is constituted not by the triumph of one side and the defeat of the other, but by the duel itself vrhich necessarily involves the destruction of both. In so far as Proudhon continually expresses his sympathy for this or that element in the social struggle, he remains, however sincerely he may think himself convinced of the necessity and value of the struggle itself, hopelessly idealist, that is, committed to evaluating objective reality in terms of his own subjective desires and preferences, without reference to the stage of evolution which it has reached. This is followed by a laborious refutation of Proudhon’s economic theory, which Maix declared to rest on a fallacious conception of the mechanism of exchange: Proudhon had misunderstood

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Ricardo no less profoundly than he had misunderstood Hegel, and confused the proposition that human labour determines economic value, with the proposition that it ought to do so. This leads in its turn to a total misrepresentation of the relation of money to other commodities, which vitiates his entire account of the contemporary economic organization of capitalist society. The fiercest attack is directed against Proudhon’s crypto- individualism, against his obvious hatred of any tendency to collective organization, his faith in the sturdy yeoman farmer and his morality, his belief in the indestructible value of the institution of private property, in the sanctity of marriage and of the family, in the absolute moral and legal authority of its head over his wife and children; which was indeed the basis of his own life and was responsible for his deep-seated fear of any form of violent revolution, of anything likely to destroy the fundamental forms of life on a small farm, in which his ancestors were born and bred, and to which, in spite of his brave revolutionary phrases, he remained immovably loyal. In effect Marx accused Proudhon of wishing to remedy the immediate wrongs of the existing system without destroying the system itself, because, litre—all Frenchmen of his class, he was emotionally attached io it; of hot believing, in spite of his veneer of Hegelianism, that the historical process is either inevitable or irreversible, nor that it advances by revolutionary leaps, nor yet that the present evils are themselves as strictly necessitated by the laws of history as the stage which will one day supersede them. For it is only on the assumption that such evils are accidental blemishes that it is plausible to urge their removal by courageous legislation which need not involve the destruction of the social


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forms of which they are the historical product. In a rhetorical passage Marx exclaims: ‘It is not enough to desire the collapse of these forms, one must know in obedience to what laws they came into being, in order to know how to act within the framework of these laws, since to act against them, whether deliberately or not, in blind ignorance of the causes and character, would be a futile and suicidal act and would, by creating chaos, defeat and demoralize the revolutionary class, and so prolong the existing_agony.’ This is the criticism which he used against all Utopians who claimed to have a new message for the working class.

Marx was convinced that Proudhon was constitutionally incapable of grasping the truth; that, despite an undoubted gift for telling phrases, he was a fundamentally stupid man; the fact that he was brave and fanatically honest, and attracted a growing body of devoted followers, only made him more dangerous; hence this attempt to annihilate his doctrine and his influence with one tremendous blow. His brutality over-reached itself, however, and created indignant sympathy for its victim. Proudhon’s system survived this and many subsequent Marxist onslaughts and its influence increased in the following years.

Proudhon was not primarily an original thinker. He had a gift for absorbing and crystallizing the radical ideas current in his time: he wrote well, sometimes with brilliance, and his eloquence was felt to be genuine by the masses for whom he wrote, springing from wants and ambitions which he had in common with them. The tradition of political non-participation, and of decentralized federalism, of which he was the most eloquent advocate, survives powerfully to this day among


PARIS X I g

French radicals and socialists, and finds support in the individualist tendency, most pronounced in France and other Larin countries, and natural enough in a land the vast majority of whose inhabitants are small farmers, artisans, professional men, living at a distance from the industrial life of great cities. Proudhonism is the direct ancestor of modern syndicalism. It was affected by Bakunin’s anarchism, and half a century later by Sorel’s doctrine that, since economic categories were the most fundamental, therefore the units out of which the anticapitalist force must be constituted should contain men connected not by common convictions,—a mere intellectual superstructure—but by the actual occupations which they pursue, since this is the essential factor which determines their acts. Wielding as its most formidable weapon the threat of disorganizing social life by suspending all vital services by a general strike, it became the most powerful left wing doctrine in many parts of France, Italy and Spain, wherever indeed, industrialism had not gone too far and an agrarian individualist tradition still survived. Wherever centralization is difficult to achieve, and the tradition of political action is not strong, it still remains the most powerful single opposition to political socialism. Marx, who had an infallible sense of the general direction and political flavour of a movement or a doctrine whatever its ostensible appearance, at once recognized the individualistic, and therefore for him reactionary, substratum of this attitude: and consequently attacked it no less violently than avowed liberalism. La Mislrc de la Philosophic is now, like the specific views which it attacked, largely out of date. But it represents a definite stage in its author’s mental development: the first


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attempt to synthesize his economic, social and political views into the unified body of doctrine, capable if application to every aspect of the social situation, which came to be known as the theory of Historical Materialism.


CHAPTER VI

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

A certain person once took it into his head that people drown in water only because they are obsessed by the notion of weight. If only, he thought, they could rid themselves ot this idea, by calling it, for instance, superstitious or religious, they would thereby be saved from all danger of drowning. All his life he fought against the illusion of weight, concerning whose deleterious consequences statistics continually provided him with fresh evidence. This figure is the prototpye of the German revolutionary philosophers of our day.

karl marx, German Ideology

No formal exposition of Historical Materialism was ever published b y^M a rx h mu elf It occufs'Tn a fragmentary form in all his early work written during the years 1843-8, and is taken for granted in his later thought. He did not regard it as a new philosophical system so much as a practical method of social and historical analysis, and a basis Tor political strategy. Later in life he often complained of the use made of it by his followers, some of whom appeared to think that it would save them the labour of historical research, by providing ready-made solutions of all historical research by providing a kind of algebraic ‘table’, from which, given enough factual data, automatic answers to all historical questions could be mechanically ‘read off’. In a letter which, towards the end of his life, he wrote to a Russian correspondent, he gave as an example of dissimilar development despite analogous social conditions the history of the Roman plebs and of the European industrial proletariat. ‘When one studies these forms of evolution separately’, he wrote, ‘and then

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compares them, one can easily find the elite to this phenomenon; but one will never get there by the universal passe partout of particular historico-philo- sophical theory which explains everything, because it explains nothing, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.’ ,

The most extended statement of the theory occurs in a work which he composed together with Engels in 1846, entitled the German Ideology, of which only portions were published before the present century. It is a bizarre compilation, over six hundred pages in length, an amalgam of polemical outbursts against the ‘critical’ philosophers and exposition of the authors’ own views, and contains, among other oddities, an elaborate inquiry into the social significance of Eugene Sue’s novel, Les Myslires de Paris, a popular thriller of the day which displayed a great deal of specious sympathy with the insulted and the oppressed in the slums of Pans. It contains some effective satire, and passages of considerable critical power, but on the whole it is a verbose and tedious book, dealing with authors and views long dead and justly forgotten.

.The framework of the new theory is undeviatinglv Hegelian. It recognizes that the history of humanity is a singlg, non-repetitive process, which obeys discover- able laws. t These laws are different from the laws of physics or of chemistry, which being unhistorical, record unvarying conjunctions and successions of interconnected phenomena, whenever or wherever these may repeat themselves; they are similar rather to those of geology or botany, which _embody the principles in accordance with which a process of continuous change takes place. "Each moment of this process is new in the


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sense that it possesses new characteristics, or new combinations of known characteristics; but unique and unrepeatable though it is, it nevertheless follows from the immediately preceding state as a result of the similar . causes, and in obedience to the same natural laws, ju this last state from its own predecessor. But whereas according tp Hegel the single substance in the succession of whose sthtes history consists, is the eternal universal Spirit, the internal conflict of whose elements is made concrete, e.g. in the wars of national states, each being the embodiment of a developing Idea which it requires a supersensible intuition to perceive, Marx, following Feuerbach, denounces this as a piece of mysticism on which no knowledge could be founded. For if the world were a metaphysical substance of this type, its behaviour could not be tested by the only reliable method in pur power, namely, empirical observation; and an account of it could not, therefore, be verified by the methods of any science. The Hegelian can, of course, without fear of refutation, attribute anything he wishes to the unobservable activity of an impalpable world-substance, much as the believing Christian or deist attributes it to - the activity of God, but only at the cost of explaining nothing, of declaring the answer to be an empirically impenetrable mystery. It is this mere translation of I ordinary questions into less intelligible language which makes the resultant obscurity look like a genuine answer. To explaiq the knowable in terms of the unknowable is to take away with one hand what one affects to give wjifi the other.j Whatever value such _ procedure may have, it cannot be regarded as equivalent to a scientific explanation, that is to the classification under a comparatively small number of interrelated laws


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of the great variety of distinct, prima facie unconnected, phenomena. So much for orthodox Hegcliar ism.

But the solutions of the ‘critical’ schools of Bauer, Ruge, Stirner, even Feuerbach, are in principle no better. After having so mercilessly unmasked the defects of their master, they thereupon themselves proceeded to fall into far worse illusions: for Bauer’s ‘spirit of self-criticizing criticism’, Ruge’s ‘progressive human spirit’, the ‘individual self and its inalienable possessions’ apostrophized by Stirner, and even the notion of the human being whose evolution Feuerbach traces, are all generalized abstractions no less empty, no more capable of being appealed to as something beyond the phenomena, as that which causes them, than the equally insubstantial but far more magnificent and imaginative edifice offered by orthodox Hegelianism.

"The only possible region in which to look for this principle of historical motion must be one which is open to scientific, that is empirical, inspection: and since the phenomena to be explained are those of social life, the explanation must in some_sense reside in (he nature of the social environment which forms the context in which men spend their livest in that net v, ork of private and public relationships, of which the individuals form, the terms, of which they are, as it were, the focal points, the meeting-places of the diverse strands whose totality Hegel called civil society. Hegel had shown his genius in perceiving that its growth was not a smooth progression, arrested by occasional setbacks, as Saint-Simon and his disciple Comte had taught, but the product of continual tension between opposing forces which guarantee its unceasing forward movement: that the appearance of action and reaction


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is an illusion caused by the fact that now the fust, now the second, of the conflicting tendencies makes itself most violently felt. The progress is discontinuous, for the tension, when it reaches the critical point, precipitates a cataclysm; the increase in quantity of intensity becomes a change of quality; rival forces working below the surface grow and accumulate and burst into the~open; the Violence of their encounter-transloHns tKe~mecTium_in which it occurs; ice becomes water ancL water steam; slaves become serfs and serfs free men; all evolution ends Jn . creative revolution, in nature tlnd society^ alike. In nature these forces are physical, chemical, biological: in society they are specifically soqial.

(JVhat are the social forces between which the conflict arises? Hegel had declared that they were embodied in nations-each of which represents the”development of a specific culture or Idea. Marx, following Saint-Simon and Fourier, and not unaffected perhaps by Sismondi’s theory of crisis, replied that these forces were pre- dominantly economic. ‘I was led’, he wrote twelve years later, ‘to the copchision that legal relations, as well as forms of state, could neither be _understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that t]bey are roptcd in the material conditions of life which Hegel calls . . . civil society. The anatomy rof civil, society is_ to__bg_ sought in political economy.’ The conflict is always a^:~clSsh between economically determined classes, a class being defined as a group jif-persons jn a society^ whose lives are determined by their possessioii__o£.a eeirtmon __ economic status in that society. The status of an individual is determined by the part which he plays in

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the process of social production, and this in its turn directly depends upon me "character of the productive forces and their degree of development, at any given stage. All individuals act as they do in virtue of the economic relationships in which they in fact stand to the other members of their society, whether they are aware of them or not, The most powerful of these relationships is based, as Saint-Simon taught, on ownership of the means of subsistence: the most pressing of all needs is the need for survival!

Feuerbach for all his crudeness correctly saw that men eat before they reason. The satisfaction of this need can be fully guaranteed only by the control of the means of~matedal~production, that is of human strength and skill, of natural resources, of land and water, tools, machines, slaves. There is a natural scarcity of these in the beginning, and they are therefore the objects of violent competi tion,^all the more so because those who secure them are able to control the lives and actions of those whp lack them: until they in their turn lose possession of them to their subjects who, grown powerful and cunning in their service; oust them and enslave them, only to be ousted and expropriated by others in their turn. Immense institutions have been created to conserve their possessions in the hands of their present owners, not indeed Ity deliberate policy, but arising unconsciously out of the general attitude to life of a given society. But whereas Hegel had declared that what gave its specific character to any given society was its national character, the nation being for him the embodiment of a given stage in the development of the world Spirit, for Marx it was the system of economic relations which governed the society in question. In a

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celebrated passage he summarized this view as follows: S (In the social production which men carry on, they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these productive relations constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation on which rise legal and political superstructures, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode .of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. Tt is not_the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary their social existence dejerimhes- their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, qi>—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they had been at work before. (From forgns of develop- ment of the productive forces these relations turn info their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the whole vast superstructure is sooner or later entirely transformed. But in considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which pan be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical—in short tKe ideological forms in which

men become conscious of the conflict and fight it

out,

‘Just as it would be impossible to arrive at a correct

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judgement about an individual by noting onl y his own view of himself, so it is impossible to judge whole revolutionary^ periods by the conscious way in which they see themselves, for, on the contrary, such consciousness must be explained as the product of the contradictions of material life, of the conflict between the forces of social production and their actual relations. No social order ever disappears before all the products e forces, for which there is room in it, have developed, and the new higher relations of production never appear before the conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society . . . the problem itself only arises when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.’1

^Bourgeois society is the last form which these antagonisms take. After its disappearance the conflict will disappear forever. The pre-historic period will be completed, the history of the free human individual will at last begin.

^ The single operative cause which makes one people different from another, one set of institutions and beliefs opposed to another is, so Marx now came to believe, the economic environment in which it is set, the relationship of the ruling class of possessors to those whom they exploit, arising from the specific quality of.the tension which persists betweeiTtliem. .The fundamental spring of action in the life of a man, he believed, all the more powerful for not being recognized by him, is his relationship to the alignment of classesuTthe economicslruggle: the factor, knowledge of which would_epab]e anyone to predict successfully a given individnars behaviour, is 1 Critique of Political Economy, trans. by N. I. Stone, pp. 11 fl.


HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 12g

that individual’s actual social position—whether he is outside or inside the ruling class, whether his personal welfare depends on its success or failure, whether he is placed in a position to which the preservation of the existing order is or is not essential. Once this is known, his particular personal motives and emotions becomq comparatively irrelevant to the investigation: he may be egoistic or altruistic, generous or mean, clever or stupid, ambitious or modest. His natural qualities will be harnessed hv the circumstances to operate: jn^similar way whatever their natural tendency. Indeed, it is misleading to speak of ‘a natural tendency’ or an unalterable ‘human nature’. Tendencies may be classified either in accordance with the subjective feeling which they engender, and this is, for purposes of scientific prediction, unimportant, or in accordance with their actual aims, which are socially conditioned. One her haves bqfore one starts to reflect on the reasons for, or the justification of, one’s behaviour: and the majority of the members of a community will act in a similar fashion, whatever the subjective motive for which they wifi appear to themselves to be acting as they do. This is obscured by the fact that in the attempt to convince themselves that their acts are determined by reason or by moral or religious beliefs, men have tended to construct elaborate rationalizations of their behaviour. Nor are these rationalizations wholly powerless to affect action, for, growing into great institutions like moral codes or religious organizations, they often linger on long after the needs, to explain away which they were created, have disappeared. Thus they themselves become part of the objective social situation, part of the external world which modifies the behaviour of individuals,


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functioning in the same way as the invaria it factors, climate, soil, the physical organism, function in their interplay with social institutions^

_v< In the German Ideology the claims of the neo-Hegelians are examined one by one and ‘awarded’ their exact due. The brothers Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer are dealt with briefly and savagely in a section entitled ‘The Holy Family’. They are represented as three sordid peddlers of inferior metaphysical wares, who believe that the mere existence of a fastidious critical elite, raised by us intellectual gifts above the philistine mob, will itself effect the emancipation of such sections of humanity as are worthy of it. This belief in the power of a frigid detachment from the social and economic struggle to effect a transformation of society is regarded as academicism run mad, an ostrich-like attitude which will be swept away like the rest of the world to which it belongs by the real revolution which could not, by all evidences, now be long in coming. Stirner is treated at greater length. Under the title of St. Max he is pursued through five hundred pages of heavy-handed mockery and insult. Stirner believed that all programmes, ideals, theories, are so many artificially built prisons for the mind and the spirit, means of curbing the will, of concealing from the individual the existence of his own infinite creative powers, and that all systems must therefore be destroyed, not because they are evil, but because they are systems; only when this has been achieved, would man, released from his unnatural fetters, become truly master of himself and attain to his full stature as a human being. This view, which had a great influence on both Nietzsche and Bakunin, is treated as a pathological phenomenon, the agonized cry


HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 13 I

of a persecuted neurotic, belonging to the province of medicine rather than to that of political theory.

Feuerbach is more gently treated. He wrote more soberly, and had made an honest, if crude, attempt to expose the mystifications of idealism. In the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach which he composed during the same period, Marx declared that while Feuerbach had correctly perceived- that men are largely the product of circumstances and education, he had not gone on to see that circumstances are themselves altered by the activity of men, and that the educators themselves are children of their age. Feuerbach’s doctrine artificially divides society into two parts: the masses which, being helplessly exposed to every influence, must be freed; and the teachers, who contrive somehow' to remain immune from the effect of their environment. But the relation of mind and matter, of men and nature, is reciprocal; otherwise history becomes reduced to physics.! Feuerbach is praised for show ing that religion deludesi men by inventing an imaginary world to redress the1 balance of misery in real life, and thus becomes, in a phrase made celebrated by Marx,_the opium of the people: the criticism of religion must therefore be anthropological in character,_ and take the form of analysing its secular origins. But he is accused of leaving the major task untouched: of seeing that religion is the anodyne to soften the pain caused by _the contradictions of the material world, but then failing to see that these contradictions must, in that _case, be removed: the revolution which alone can do so must occur not_in the superstructure—the world of thought—^but _in its material substratum, the real world of men and things. ‘Philosophers have previously offered various

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interpretations of the world. Our business is to change it.’ The so-called ‘True Socialists’, Grun and Hess, fare no better. It is true that they wrote about the actual situation; but, placing ideals before interests in order of importance, they are equally far removed from a clear view of the facts. They believed indeed that the political inequality and the general emotional malaise of their generation were both traceable to economic contradictions which could only be removed by the total abolition of private property. But they believed that the technological advance which made this possible was not an end but a means; that action could be justified only by appeal to moral sentiment; that the use of force, however noble the purpose for which it was employed, defeated its own end, since it brutalized both parties in the struggle and made them both incapable of true freedom after the struggle was over. If men were" to be freed, it must be by peaceful and civilized means ajqne, to he effected as rapidly and painlessly as possible, before industrialization had spread so widely as to make class warfare inevitable. Indeed, unless this was done, violence alone would become practicable and this would in the epd defeat itseif; for a society set up by the sword, even if justice initially were on its side, could not fail to develop into a tyranny of one class over the rest, incompatible with that human equality which true socialism seeks tn create ,The ‘True Socialists’ opposed the doctrine of the necessity of open class war on the ground that it blinded the workers to those rights and ideals for the sake of which they fought. Only by treating men as equal from the beginning, by dealing with them as human beings, that is by renouncing force and appealing to the sense of human solidarity, the


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sense of justice, and the generous sentiments of mankind, could a lasting harmony of interests be obtained. Above all, the burden of the proletariat must not be removed by being shifted on to the shoulders of some other class. Marx and his _garty, they maintained, merely desiref to reverse the roles of the existing classes, to deprive the bourgeoisie of its power only to ruin and enslave it. But this, besides being morally unacceptable, would leave the class-war itself in exist- ence and so would fail to reconcile the existing contradiction in the only way possible, by fusing conflicting interests into one common ideal.

Marx looked upon all this as so much worthless! earnestness. The whole argument, he wearily points out, rests on the premiss that men, even capitalists, are amenable to a rational argument, and under suitable conditions will voluntarily give up Jhe power which they1 have acquired by birth, or wealth, or ability, for the sake of a moral principle, to create a juster world. To Marx this was the oldest, most familiar, most outworn of all the rationalist fallacies. He had met it in its worst form in the belief of .his own father and his contemporaries that in the end reason and moral goodness were bound to triumph, a theory which had long become discredited by events during the dark aftermath of the French Revolutiom/To preach it now, as if one were still living in the early eighteenth century, was to be guilty either of boundless stupidity, or of a cowardly escape into mere words, or else of deliberate Utopianism, when what was needed was a scientific examination of the actual situation. He was careful to point out that he did not himself fall into the opposite error: he did not simply contradict this thesis about human nature, and

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say that whereas these theorists assumed man to be fundamentally generous and just, he found him rapacious, self-seeking and incapable of disinterested action. That would have been an hypothesis as subjective and irrelevant as that of his opponents. Each was vitiated by the fallacy that men’s acts were in the end determined byTfeir moral character^ which could be described in comparative isolation from their environment. Maix, trub~tq~Tfrf~ method if not to the conclusions of Hegel, maintained that a man’s purposes were made what the\ were by the social, that is economic, situation in which he~was in fact placed, and were made so, whether he knew" it or not. Whatever his opinions, a man’s actions

wc'rfTincvitab!v guided by his real interests, by the

requirements of his material situation; die conscious aims oF at~any rate the bulk of mankind did not clash with their real interests, although _they sometimes appeared disguised as so many independent, objective, disinterested ends, political, moral, aesthetic, emotional, or the like. Most individuals concealed their own dependence on*tHeIr environment and situation, particularly the class-affiliation, so effectively even from themselves, that they quite sincerely believed that a change of heart would result in a radically different mode of life,. This was much the profoundest error made by modern thinkers. It arose partly as a result of protestant individualism which, arising as the ‘ideological’ counterpart of the growth of freedom of trade and production, taught men to believe that the individual held the means for his happiness in his own hands, that faith and energy were sufficient to secure it, that every man had it in his power to attain to spiritual or material well-being, that for his weakness and misery


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he ultimately had only himself to blame. _Marx main- tained against this that liberty of action was severely curtailed by the precise position which the _agent occupied on the social map. All notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, altruism and egoism were beside the point_vas referring exclusively to~ the~mental states which, whilg in themselves quite genuine, were never more than symptoms of the actual condition of their owner. Sometimes when the patient was himself acquainted vyith the science of pathology he could accurately diagnose his own condition; this is indeed what was meant by genuine insight on the part of a social philosopher. But more frequently the symptom would pose as the only true reality occupying the whole attention of the__sufferer. Since the symptoms in this case were mental states, it was this which bred the otherwise inexplicable fallacy that reality was mental or spiritual in character, or that history could be altered by the isolated decisions of unfettered human wills. Principles and causes, unless allied to expressions of jeaJ iDte.ms.Ly were 30 jaw.oy exapty phrases; to .lead mfen in their name was to lead them into an impasse, into a state in which their very failure to apprehend their true situation would involve them in chaos and destruction.

ySo alter the world one must first understand the material with which one deals. The bourgeoisie which wishes not to alter it, but to preserve the status quo, acts and thinks in terms of concepts, which, being products of a given stage in its development, themselves served as instruments of its temporary preservation. The proletariat, irTwEose interest it is to alter it, blindly accepts the entire intellectual paraphernalia of middle- class thought bornof micTcfle-cIass needs and conditions,


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although there is an utter divergence of interest between the two classes. Phrases about justice or liberty represent something more or less definite when they are uttered by the middle-class liberal, namely, his attitude to his own mode of life, his actual or desired relation to members of other social classes. But they are empty sounds when repeated by the proletarian, since they describe nothing real in his life and only betray his muddled state of mind, the result of the hypnotic power of phrases which, by confusing issues, not only fail to promote, but hinder and sometimes paralyse his power to act. Mutualms. True Socialists, mystical Anarchists, however pure them motives, are thus even more dangerous enemies of the proletariat than the bourgeoisie: for the latter is at least an open enemy' whose words and deeds the workers can be taught to distrust: but these others, who proclaim their solidarity with the workers, spread error and delusion in the proletarian camp itself and thus w eaken it for the coming struggle. The workers must be made to understand that the modem industrial system, like the feudal system before it, like every' other social system, is, so long as the ruling class requires it for its continuance as a class, an iron despotism imposed by the events themselves, from which no individual, whether he be master or slave, can escape. All visionary dreams of human liberty, of a time when men will be able to develop their natural gifts to their fullest extent, living and creating spontaneously, no longer dependent on others for the freedom to do or think as they will, remain an unattainable utopia so long as the fight for control of the means of production continues. It is no longer a struggle strictly for the means of subsistence, for modem inventions and discoveries have abolished


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natural scarcity: it is now an artificial scarcity created by the very struggle for securing new instruments itself, which necessarily leads to the centralization of power by the creation of monopolies at one end of the social scale, and the increase of penury and degradation at the other; only one remedy—the disappearance of the class struggle—can achieve the abolition of this widening gulf. But the essence of a class is to compete with other classes. Hence this end can be achieved not by creating equality between classes—a utopian conception—but by the total abolition of classes themselves.

For Marx, no less than for earlier rationalists, man is potentially wise, creative and free. If his character has deterioriated beyend_recqgnition that is due to the long and brutalizing war in which he and his ancestors have lived ever since society ceased to be that primitive communism out~ of which, according to the current anthropology, it has developed. Until this state is reached again, embodying, however, all the conquests, technological and spiritual, which mankind has won in the course of its long wandering in the desert, neither peace nor freedom can be obtained. The French Revolution was an attempt to bring this about by altering political forms only—which was no more than the bourgeoisie required, since it already possessed the economic reality: and, therefore, all it succeeded in doing (as indeed was its appointed historical task at the stage of development at which the Great Revolution occurred) was to establish the bourgeoisie in a dominant position by finally destroying the corrupt remnant of an obsolete feudal regime. This task could not but be continued by Napoleon, whom no one could suspect of wishing consciously to liberate humanity-; whatever

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his personal motive for acting as he did, He influence of his historical environment inevitably m ’.de him an instrument of social change, and by his agency Europe advanced yet another step towards the realization of its destiny.

The gradual freeing of mankind has pursued a definite irreversible direction: every new epoch is inaugurated by the liberation of a hitherto oppressed class, nor can a class, once it has been destroyed, ever appear again. History does not move backwards or in cyclical movements : all its conquests are final and irrevocable. Most previous ideal constitutions were worthless because they ignored actual laws of historical development and substituted in their place the subjective caprice or imagination of the thinker. A knowledge of these laws is essential to effective political action. The ancient world gave way to the medieval, slavery to feudalism, and feudalism to the industrial bourgeoisie. These transitions occurred not peacefully, but were born in wars and revolutions, for no established order gives way to its successor without a struggle.

And now only one stratum remains submerged below the level of the rest, one class alone remains enslaved, the landless, propertyless proletariat, created by the advance of technology, perpetually assisting classes above itself to shake off the yoke of the common oppressor, always, after the common cause has been won, condemned to be oppressed by its own late allies, the new victorious class, by masters who were themselves but lately slaves. The proletariat is the lowest possible rung of the social scale: there is no class below it; by securing its own emancipation the proletariat will therefore'emancipate mankind. Its fight is thus not a


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fight for the rights of an oppressed section of society: for natural rights are but the ideal aspect of bourgeois attitude to the sanctity of private property: the only real rights are those conferred by history, the right to act the part which is historically imposed upon one’s class. The bourgeoisie in this sense has a full right fight its final battle against the masses, but its task is hopeless: it will necessarily be defeated, as the feudal nobility was defeated in its day. As for the masses, they fight for freedom, not because they choose, but because they must, or rather they choose, because they must: to fight is the condition of their survival; the future belongs to them, and in fighting for it, they, like every rising class, are fighting against a foe doomed to decay, and thereby fighting for the whole of humanity. But whereas all other victories placed injpoweta class itself doomed to ultimate disappearance, this conflict will be followed by no other, being destined to end the condition of all such struggles by abolishing classes; to abolish the state itself, by dissolving it, hitherto the instrument of a' single class, into a free, because classless, soeiety. The proletariat must be made to understand that no real compromise with the enemy is possible: that, while it may conclude temporary alliances with him to defeat some common adversary, it must ultimately turn against him. In backward countries, where the bourgeoisie is itself still fighting for power, the proletariat must throw in its lot with it, asking itself not what the ideals of the bourgeoisie may be, but what it is compelled to do in the particular situation: and must adapt its tactics to this. And while history is determined—and the victory will, therefore, be won by the rising class whether any given individual wills it or not—how rapidly this will occur,


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how efficiently, how far in accordance wi'h the conscious popular will, depends on human initiative, on the degree of understanding of their task by the masses and the courage and efficiency of their leaders.

To make this clear, and to educate the masses for their destiny is, therefore, according to Marx, the whole duty of a contemporary philosopher. But, it has often been asked, how can a moral precept, a command to do this or that, be deduced from the truth of a theory of history? Historical materialism may account for what does in fact occur, but cannot, precisely because it is concerned solely with what is, provide the answer to moral questions, that is, tell us what ought to be. Marx, like Hegel, flatly rejected this distinction. Judgements of fact cannot be sharply distinguished from those of value : all one’s judgements are conditioned by practical activity in a given social milieu: one’s views as to what one believes to exist and what one wishes to do with it, modify each other. If ethical judgements claim objective validity—and unless they do so, they cannot, according to Marx, be either true or false—they must refer to empirical phenomena and be verifiable by reference to them. He rejected any notion of a non-empirical, specifically moral intuition or moral reason. The only sense in which it is possible to show that something is good or bad, right or wrong, is by demonstrating that it accords or discords with the historical process, assists it or thwarts it, will survive or will inevitably perish. All causes permanently lost are by that very fact made bad and wrong, and indeed this is what constitutes the meaning of these terms. But this is a dangerous empirical criterion, since causes which may appear lost may, in fact, have

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suffered only a temporary setback, and will in the end prevail.

✓ His view of truth in general derives directly from this position. He is sometimes accused of maintaining that, since a man is wholly determined to think as he does by his social environment, even if some of his statements are objectively true, he cannot know it, being conditioned to think them true by material factors, not by their truth. Marx’s statements on this subject are vague to a degree ; but in general it may be said that he would have accepted the normal interpretation of what is meant by saying that a theory or a proposition of natural science or of ordinary sense experience is true or false. But he was not interested in this, the most common, type of truth discussed by philosophers. He was concerned with the reasons for which social, moral, historical statements are thought true or false, where arguments between opponents can so obviously not be settled by direct appeal to empirical facts accessible to both. He might have agreed that the bare proposition that Napoleon died in exile would have been accepted as equally true by a bourgeois and a socialist historian. But he would have gone on to say that no true historian confines himself to a list of events and dates: that the plausibility of his account of the past, its claim to be more than a bare chronicle, depends upon his choice of fundamental concepts, his power of emphasis and arrangement, that the very process of selection betrays an inclination to stress this or that event or act as important or trivial, adverse or favourable to human progress good or bad. And this tendency the social origin and environment and class affiliation of the historian affect only loo clearly.

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This attitude underlies his purely Hegelian view of freedom as identical with the knowledge of the laws of necessity. If you know' in which direction the world process is working, you can either identify yourself with it or not; if you do not, if you fight it, you thereby compass your own certain destruction, being necessarily defeated by the forward advance of history. To choose to do so deliberately is to behave irrationally. Only a rational being is truly free to choose between alternatives : where one of these leads to his own irresistible destruction, he cannot choose it freely, because to say that an act is free, as Marx employs the term, is to deny that it is contrary to reason. The bourgeoisie as a class is indeed fated to disappear, but individual members of it may follow reason and save themselves (as Marx might have claimed to have done himself) by leaving it before it finally founders. They can obtain their freedom by discovering the true state of the balance of forces and acting accordingly; freedom thus entails knowledge of historical necessity. Marx’s use of words like ‘right’, or ‘free’, or ‘rational’, whenever he does not slip insensibly into ordinary usage, owes its eccentric air to the fact that it derives from his metaphysical views; and therefore diverges widely from that of common speech which is largely intended to record and communicate something scarcely of interest to him—the subjective experience of individuals, their states of mind or of body as revealed by the senses or in self-consciousness.

, Such in outline is the theory of history and society which constitutes the metaphysical basis of communism. It is a wide and comprehensive doctrine which derives jits structure from Hegel, and its dynamic principle from Saint-Simon, its Eelief in the primacy of matter

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from Feuerbach, and its view of the proletariat from the French communist tradition. Nevertheless it is wholly original; the combination of elements does not in this case lead to syncretism, but forms a bold, clear, coherent system with the wide range and the massive architectonic quality which is at once the greatest pride and the fatal defect of all forms of Hegelian thought. But it is not guilty of Hegel’s reckless and contemptuous attitude towards the results of the scientific research of his time; on the contrary, it attempts to follow the direction indicated by the empirical sciences, and to incorporate their general results. Marx’s practice did not always conform to this theoretical ideal, and that of his followers even less: while not actually distorted, the facts are sometimes made to undergo peculiar transformations in the process of being fitted into the intricate dialectical pattern. It is by no means a wholly empirical theory, since it does not confine itself to the description of the phenomena and the formulation of hypotheses concerning their structure; the doctrine of movement in dialectical opposites is not a hypothesis, liable to be made less or more probable by the evidence of facts, but a metaphysical belief, known to be true by a special, non-empirical, historical intuition: to deny this would be tantamount, according to Marx, to a return to ‘vulgar’ materialism, which recognizes only those connexions as real for which there is the evidence of the physical senses.

j/' In the sharpness and the clarity with which this theory formulates its questions, in the rigorism of the method by which it searches for the answers, in the combination of attention to detail and power of wide comprehensive generalization, it is without parallel. Even if all its

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specific conclusions were proved false, its importance in creating a wholly new attitude to social and historical questions, and so opening new avenues of human knowledge, would be unimpaired. The scientific study of economic relations and their bearing on other aspects of the lives of communities and individuals began with the application of Marxist canons of interpretation. Previous thinkers—for example, Vico, Hegel, Saint- Simon—drew up general schemata, but their direct results, as embodied in the gigantic systems of Comte or Spencer, are at once too abstract and too vague, and as forgotten in our day as they deserve to be. The true father of modern economic history, and, indeed, of modern sociology, in so far as any one man may claim that title, is Karl Marx. If to have turned into truisms what had previously been paradoxes is a mark of genius, Marx was richly endowed with it. His achievements in this sphere are necessarily forgotten in proportion as their effects have become part of the permanent background of civilized thought.


CHAPTER VII

1848

Gegen Demokraten Helfen nur Soldaten.

(Against democrats, only soldiers help.)

Prussian Song.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity . . . when what this republic really means is Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery. . . .

karl