Home

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.

Copyright information:

© 1962 by H. B. Acton. The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by H.B. Acton’s estate. It is reproduced here by permission and may not be reproduced in any form without written permission.

Fair use statement:

This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit.

Part Two

Scientific Socialism

I

Historical Materialism

1.

Anti-metaphysical, Positivistic Aspect of Historical Materialism

We have now examined the most fundamental notions of the Marxist philosophy, and have seen what is meant by the assertion that Marxism is both a materialistic and a dialectical view of the world. We have seen, in particular, that Marxists deny the efficacy of speculative thinking and assert the all-sufficiency of scientific thinking in which theory and practice are conjoined. Now considered in its most general aspect, the Marxist version of Historical Materialism is the view that a scientific understanding may be—indeed has been—obtained of the development of human society. It is thus one of the several attempts at constructing a “science of history” that were made in the middle years of the nineteenth century and aroused those controversies that are associated with the names of Buckle, Froude, Spencer, and Droysen. That Marx recognized some kinship between his view of history and the “scientific” view expounded by Buckle in his History of Civilization in England (1857) may be seen from the letter—best known for the discussion of Darwin contained in it—he wrote to Engels on 18 June 1862. Referring to the announcement of the death of Buckle, he says: “Poor Buckle, whom a ‘friend’ slanders in today’s Times by means of a testimonium pietatis.” The friend was Mr. J. S. Stuart Glennie, who had been with Buckle when, a few weeks before, he had died in the Middle East (the letter is written from Beyrout), and the testimonium pietatis, I suppose, is Mr. Glennie’s hope that Buckle was “now enjoying that immortality without the hope of which, as he once said to me with tears in his eyes, ‘life would be insupportable,’ and in the more immediate presence, and with deeper knowledge of that God in whom he firmly believed.” Mr. Glennie, however, goes on to summarize Buckle’s “science of history” in the following terms: “(1) Political economy—the science of wealth—is the deductive science through which the investigation of natural is connected with that of social phenomena, and thus the way is prepared for one universal science. (2) The laws of society are different from those of the individual; and the method of averages, with which has to be compared the mathematical theory of probability, is that by which the former are to be investigated. (3) In social phenomena the intellectual, in individual the moral, laws are chiefly or alone to be considered: all moral social changes are thus preceded by intellectual changes.”1 Although this is very different from the Marxist view, such points of kinship as the importance attributed to economics and the secondary character attributed to morals are striking enough. Buckle, too, like Marx, associated his “science of history” with an attack on speculative philosophy, which he calls “metaphysics.” “In no other department,” he had written, “has there been so much movement, and so little progress,”2 but his conclusion was that as there are no means of settling the dispute, there would always be supporters of the two parties, “sensationalists” and “idealists.”

Let us, then, make our transition from the fundamental notions of the Marxist system to the theory of Historical Materialism by considering the positivist, anti-metaphysical foundations of the latter. Marxists claim to give a scientific account, not only of the development of human society, but also of the human propensity to engage in theological and metaphysical speculation. That is, those who accept the theory of Historical Materialism both deny the theoretical efficacy of metaphysical speculation and also claim to show how it is that men come to misdirect their thinking by vacuously speculating instead of observing and experimenting. Perhaps it should be pointed out at this stage that to give a “scientific” account of how men come to adopt religious ideas and to work out theologies and metaphysical theories is not the same thing as to refute the religious, theological, and metaphysical theories in question. For these theories might be true even though men came to adopt them for some such reason as that belief in them rendered their lives more bearable. If such “scientific” accounts of religious and metaphysical theorizing are also to be refutations of it, then it must also be shown that metaphysical speculation is incapable of revealing truths about the world, that the methods of the empirical sciences are the only methods by which the world can be understood, and that these methods can be successfully applied to human and social affairs. Thus the fundamental Marxist thesis is identical with that of positivism, viz., that nothing can be known but what sense perception and the methods of science reveal. If this were rejected, then it would be possible to hold both that the Marxist account of the human origin of religion and theology was correct, and that certain religious, theological, or metaphysical propositions were true. That the Marxists unquestionably regard their account of the social origin of religion, theology, and metaphysics as showing the illusory character of religious, theological, and metaphysical “truths,” is an added indication that they accept the positivist view about metaphysical speculation. Psychologists who give somewhat similar accounts of religious belief sometimes guard themselves against criticism by saying that they are speaking only as psychologists, not as theologians or metaphysicians. But on the positivist view, to speak as a theologian or metaphysician (i.e., as a speculative philosopher) is to speak idly, pointlessly, misleadingly. The theory of Historical Materialism is held to unmask the deception, but it can only claim to do so on the basis of the positivist theory of science.

It will be remembered that I illustrated Marx’s positivism by reference to his jibe that metaphysical or speculative thinkers—he had Hegel particularly in mind—suppose that the particular things of the world are manifestations of the Idea, as if the various species of fruit such as apples and pears and strawberries were manifestations of Fruit Itself.3 In the technical language of the philosophy of his day, Marx accused the metaphysicians of mistaking the predicate for the subject, the general characteristic (“fruitness”) for the real thing (the particular apple). Now Marx accused Hegel of making this same mistake in his theory of politics. In § 263 of his Philosophy of Right (1821) Hegel had written: “The actual Idea is mind, which, sundering itself into the two ideal spheres of its concept, family and civil society, enters upon its finite phase, but it does so only in order to rise above its ideality and become explicit as infinite actual mind. It is therefore to these ideal spheres that the actual Idea assigns the material of this its finite actuality, viz. human beings as a mass, in such a way that the function assigned to any given individual is visibly mediated by circumstances, his caprice and his personal choice of his station in life.”4 This is extraordinarily obscure, and we need not enter upon a detailed interpretation. But from the context it appears that Hegel is asserting (among other things) that it is the Absolute Idea as manifested in the State which provides the rational explanation of the family and the economic organization of society—if we may thus roughly designate what Hegel called “civil society”—and that without these manifestations the Absolute Idea would not be infinite and real.

In commenting on this passage, Marx writes: “In this passage his logical, pantheistic mysticism shows itself very clearly. . . . The real relation of the family and civil society to the State is conceived as their inner imaginary activity. The family and civil society are preconditions (Voraussetzungen) of the State; they are the genuinely active beings, but in speculation it is the other way round . . . [in fact] the family and civil society form themselves into the State. They are the active element (Sie sind das Treibende). But according to Hegel they are made by the actual Idea; it is not their own life that unites them into the State, but it is the life of the Idea which has made them from itself (die sie von sich dezerniert hat) . . . the fact is that the State emerges from the masses (aus der Menge—from the individuals?) as they exist as members of the family and of civil society, but speculation announces this fact as a deed of the Idea, not as the Idea of the masses, but as the deed of a subjective idea different from the fact. . . . The fact that serves as a point of departure [for Hegel] is not conceived as such but rather as a mystical consequence.”5 Again, in commenting on § 270 of the Philosophy of Right Marx describes Hegel’s method as follows: “The real interest is not the philosophy of right but logic. The work of [Hegel’s] philosophy is not to embody thought in political determinations but to dissipate existing political determinations into abstract conceptions. The philosophical moment is not the logic of the real fact but a mere matter of logic (. . . nicht die Logik der Sache, sondern die Sache der Logik). Logic does not serve to prove the State, but on the contrary the State serves to prove logic.”6 The next year Marx was to write in the Paris Manuscripts: “Sense experience (die Sinnlichkeit) (see Feuerbach) should be the basis of all science. Science is not real science unless it sets out from sense experience in its double form, sense awareness and sensed need (des sinnlichen Bedürfnisses)—unless therefore it sets out from nature. . . . The natural sciences will finally subordinate to themselves the science of man, just as the science of man will finally subordinate the natural sciences to itself; the sciences will thus become one.”7

We have here to deal with a number of obscure comments on a very obscure author, but it is clear at least that Marx rejects the Hegelian plan of explaining certain facts of human society in metaphysical terms. Now in his Preface to the Philosophy of Right Hegel had written: “This book then, containing as it does the science of the State, is to be nothing other than the endeavour to apprehend and portray the State as something inherently rational.”8 Rationality, according to Hegel, is displayed in a whole the parts of which are intimately related with one another so that the whole is implicit in each part and each part is essential to the whole. Thus, his Philosophy of Right was, among other things, an attempt to show that families and civil society are not rational wholes of this nature, but that the State, and particularly a constitutional monarchy, is nearer to being a whole of this nature. Aristotle had attempted something of the same sort when, in Book I of the Politics, he had argued that individual men, families, and villages were incomplete beings by comparison with the city-state. It will be seen that Hegel’s method is not only based on his metaphysical view of rationality, but is also one in which judgments of value are aimed at, for the less rational forms of social organization are judged to be defective by reference to the more rational ones, however unavoidable the defects may be. It is this whole metaphysical-evaluative method that Marx rejects in the writings that I have just quoted from. He is asserting that society should be studied by the methods of the empirical sciences. The facts of social life should, therefore, first be ascertained by observation (“sense experience”); among these facts will be the actual needs of men (“sensed needs”); the value of social institutions should then be assessed in terms of these empirically ascertained “sensed needs” rather than in terms of some logical or metaphysical ideal; and then it will be found that the nature of real men and their “sensed needs” will throw light on the ideal society and on the nature of metaphysical thinking, rather than vice versa.

Such, it seems to me, is a principal theme of these early essays of Karl Marx, a theme which already points toward what later came to be known as the Materialist Conception of History. The rejection of metaphysics leads to a demand for the “scientific” examination of human society, and this, in its turn, leads to the claim that any assessments or valuations of human institutions should be in terms of needs that can be ascertained by scientific methods of examination. Theories about human society, it is argued, should be based on observed facts (“sense experience”), and social institutions should be assessed in terms of human desires (“sensed need”). Social institutions may thus be observed with a view to finding more effective means of satisfying human needs, and since both natural and social science are human concerns for the satisfaction of human wants, both are really subordinate to a fundamental science of human wants which is social science par excellence. These, I might say, were also the views of Auguste Comte, which had been published in Paris in the form of lectures between 1829 and 1842.

Now there is a difficulty in this whole conception which we should notice before we pass on to further aspects of the Marxist view. The difficulty arises from a certain vagueness in the word “need.” A man’s needs may be understood in the sense of everything he desires. To satisfy his needs would then be to satisfy as many of his desires as possible. But what one man wants may conflict with what another man wants, and so the problem arises of deciding which wants of which men shall have precedence. It would be generally supposed that one man’s desire to torture another one is a desire that ought not to be fostered, and we generally take it for granted that social science should find means for satisfying, not any and every desire, but legitimate desires. If this is taken for granted, then the notion of a “need” is not a purely empirical one based solely on “sense.” On the contrary, it conceals a moral assessment behind its apparently purely factual façade. Anyone, therefore, who claims to show that men’s moral ideals arise from their “needs,” in this sense of the word, is misleading himself and others, since the “needs” on which moral ideals are allegedly based are already charged with moral meaning.

A second sense of the word “need” is that in which a man’s needs are what he must have in order to keep alive (his “necessities”), as distinct from the luxuries and superfluities of his life. On this interpretation, to satisfy men’s needs is to secure their necessities. Now the line of demarcation between a necessity and a luxury is a shifting one that varies, as Marx well knew, with the state of civilization. The cigarette that was a luxury in 1900 becomes, it is said, a necessity in 1950. Man’s basic physical structure, however, has not changed during that period, so that the food and warmth and shelter that would have sufficed to keep a man alive in 1900 would also do the same in 1950. If by “being alive” we just mean “not dying,” then the means that would just succeed in keeping men alive are fairly constant. But, of course, when we talk of “keeping alive,” we often assume that living is living at the standard of life customary to the individuals in question. Thus this notion of “needs” generally relates to a standard of life regarded as customary or decent. Indeed, many people feel that it is wrong for anyone to fall below a certain level of life, so that a man’s needs are the means to a standard of life in the determination of which moral considerations have played an essential part. Here again, therefore, the notion of a “need” is far from being the purely “scientific” or morally neutral conception that it was held out to be.

It might be argued that these difficulties which are, of course, commonplaces to students of economics,9 can be avoided by assuming that the function of social science is to ascertain the means of satisfying most wants, or of satisfying the maximum of want in society as a whole. Now in the first place such a programme requires a means of counting and measuring wants. Methods would have to be devised, for example, to show whether, or the extent to which, freedom to act on the desire to hurt someone else in fact leads to a diminution of the satisfactions of other people as a whole. In general, some instrument would have to be constructed for measuring the rise and fall of satisfaction in a society. This is not the direction that Marxist thought on social science has taken. In any case, there is a second difficulty in the view we are considering. “Why,” the critic may ask, “should social scientists aim at increasing the number or amount of satisfied needs?” If the answer given to this is that it is right that they should do so, then social scientists are not mere scientists after all, but moralists as well, and so morality has not been reduced to science. If the answer given is that everyone in fact does aim at the maximum amount of satisfied need, then the answer is probably false. I say “probably false,” because it is not at all clear what could be meant by “maximum amount of satisfied need.” I say “probably false,” because many people appear to prefer their own satisfactions to anything even remotely resembling the satisfaction of society as a whole.

We may conclude from this discussion that much of what we say about human beings, even when, on the face of it, it appears to be purely factual, contains implicit evaluations of them and their conduct. This should not surprise us, for human beings are normally regarded as capable of choice, as free, responsible agents whose conduct may be good or bad. Thus, when we talk about ourselves and our kind we usually assume that we are concerned with such free moral agents. This assumption is so ingrained in us that words that were originally coined for scientific use, such as “fixation” or “sublimation,” rapidly acquire a moral flavor when they are constantly employed. We can, of course, set before us the ideal of extruding all moral assessment from some of our discussions of human beings. We should then find that we were discussing them as if they were animals unable to act freely or morally. We could, for example, discuss them in biological terms, as organisms or as a species that maintains itself. In this way many true things may be said about men, things of a character common to them and other living creatures. But such a manner of speech is singularly ill adapted to describe and explain what is specifically human. When, for example, the same word “response” is used for a moth’s movement toward the light and a man’s answer to a question, very little indeed is being said about the man’s behavior.

If what I have just said is correct, then, whatever may be the case with the extrusion of metaphysics from it, the extrusion of ethical considerations from social science is seen to be fraught with difficulties.

We must now pass on to consider how the Marxist rejection of religion, theology, and metaphysics, and the Marxist account of what they are, arose from Feuerbach’s treatment of the same theme. In doing this we shall, I hope, prepare the way for a more specific grasp of the Materialist Conception of History. The view that we are to discuss is the view that men’s religious, theological, and metaphysical views are not true in the way that their adherents suppose them to be, but are fantasies and illusions based on their circumstances and experienced needs. According to the Marxists, the dogmas of religion and theology and the theories of metaphysics should not be discussed as if they were genuine views with evidence to support them, but should be traced back to the human wishes and desires from which they spring. Marxists do not normally argue against the religious and metaphysical theories of their opponents, but claim to “unmask” them as the expressions of class interests or socially determined wishes. Marxists do not, for example, give detailed “refutations” of the arguments put forward by theologians and philosophers to prove that God exists, or that the world is fundamentally spiritual, or that there are two main types of essentially different being, the physical and the mental. Instead of doing this sort of thing, they argue that this or that theological or metaphysical theory was developed in order to support this or that class interest. This is a feature of Lenin’s discussion of phenomenalism that non-Marxist philosophers find both puzzling and disquieting. As we have seen, this method of discussion can only be accepted as a result of first accepting the positivist view that the sort of reasoning used both by theologians and their anti-theological but metaphysical opponents is beside the point and cannot possibly lead anywhere. It is a method that is obviously most unsettling for those against whom it is used. To be told not merely that your point of view is unacceptable, but that it is not even worth discussing in the way that you have been used to discuss it, is to be treated as a somewhat comic figure. The character in the comedy thinks, let us suppose, that he is doing his duty with dignity and authority, but he is laughed at by an audience that sees the real point that, in being hidden from him, makes him ridiculous. Religious persons, theologians, and metaphysicians cannot but feel that they are being made to appear absurd when they are told that all their arguments count for nothing in themselves, but are a sort of squeaky noise given out by the grinding of their own axes.

Let us then see how the Marxist theory of “ideologies” arose out of Feuerbach’s theory of the nature of religion, theology, and metaphysics expounded chiefly in The Essence of Christianity (1841), Preliminary Theses towards the Reform of Philosophy (1842), and Foundations of the Philosophy of the Future (1843).

2.

Feuerbach’s Theory of Religion and the Marxist Theory of “Ideologies”10

Fundamental to Feuerbach’s argument is the proposition that to say something exists is not merely to say that it can be thought or conceived, but is to say that in addition to being thought or conceived it can also be perceived or sensed. “Existence, empirical existence,” he wrote in The Essence of Christianity, “is proved to me by the senses alone.”11 It follows from this, Feuerbach argued, that God’s existence can never be proved by arguments that do not lead up to some perception of him. Hence the arguments of natural theology fail because they remain mere arguments, mere thoughts, and do not lead to the only sort of situation in which existence can be proved, viz., perception. This is the foundation of the whole view.

“The fundamental dogmas of Christianity,” wrote Feuerbach, “are realized wishes of the heart.”12 Belief in God, he held, arises from man’s tendency to compare particular, imperfect human beings with the general notion of the highest conceivable human perfection. This latter conception, which is constructed from the particular admirable men we are acquainted with, is then “projected” outside the human sphere altogether, as though there really were a single particular being to which all the scattered human excellences belonged.13 Human predicates are thus attributed to a divine subject, whereas subject and predicate are really both of them human. “The identity of subject and predicate is clearly evidenced by the progressive development of religion, which is identified with the progressive development of human culture. So long as man is in a mere state of nature, so long is his God a mere nature God—a personification of some natural force. When man inhabits houses, he also encloses his Gods in temples. The temple is only the manifestation of the value which man attaches to beautiful buildings. Temples in honour of religion are in truth temples in honour of architecture. . . .”14 When they thus project or objectify human characteristics as a non-existent God, men frequently deny themselves real satisfactions and indulge instead in imaginary ones. The monk or nun who refrains from sexual enjoyment receives substitute satisfactions on an ideal plane: “. . . The sensuality which has been renounced is unconsciously restored, in the fact that God takes the place of the material delights which have been renounced. The nun weds herself to God; she has a heavenly bridegroom, the monk a heavenly bride . . . and thus in reality, whatever religion consciously denies—always supposing that what is denied by it is something essential, true, and consequently incapable of being ultimately denied—it unconsciously restores in God.”15 In a somewhat similar manner, Feuerbach goes on, belief in immortality and in the divine justice established in heaven compensates man in an imaginary fashion for the lack of justice in human affairs: “. . . The other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish”—and he illustrates this by quoting St. Augustine’s moving epigram: Ibi nostra spes erit res.16 (“There our hope will be a reality.”) Feuerbach, indeed, maintained that there is an important affinity between religious belief and dreams. “Feeling is a dream with the eyes open; religion the dream of waking consciousness; dreaming is the key to the mysteries of religion.”17 But it is not only dreams that throw light on the nature of religion, for according to Feuerbach the aberrations of religious fanatics and the religious extravagances of savages call our attention to what is at the core of the most developed forms of civilized religions.18 “The mystery of theology,” he wrote in the Preliminary Theses towards the Reform of Philosophy, “is anthropology.”19 That is, religion and the more or less naïve theorizing of it that is theology, can be seen for what they are if we come to understand how they emerge from the emotional and imaginative life of man. Once he understands this, and sees his religious imaginings for what they really are, man will no longer be obsessed by them, and will cease to be divided in his nature, with his ideals in one world and his failures in another: “. . . only the perception of things and natures in their objective reality makes man free and devoid of all prejudices,”20 he wrote in the Preliminary Theses, and in the Essence of Christianity he calls this freedom “the identity of the human being with itself.”21

According to the speculative philosophy of Hegel, the Absolute Spirit is self-conscious spirit, and self-conscious spirit is free. Feuerbach, it will be seen, gave a naturalistic, materialistic version of this theory. The free man, according to Feuerbach, is the man who has no illusions about himself. To man’s systematic study of his own nature Feuerbach gave the name “anthropology”—today we call it psychology—and Feuerbach’s view was that as men came to know more about themselves religion would lose its hold on them and cease to play any part in their ordinary calculations. In the Preface to the second edition of the Essence of Christianity he claimed “that Christianity has in fact long vanished not only from the Reason but from the life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea, in flagrant contradiction with our Fire and Life Assurance companies, our rail-roads and steam carriages, our picture and sculpture galleries, our military and industrial schools, our theatres and scientific museums.”

This is by no means an adequate account of Feuerbach’s views on religion, but it is sufficient, I hope, to show their importance, both in preparing the ground for the Marxist theory of ideologies, and in setting in motion the naturalistic psychology that was later to undermine the religious faith of whole generations. It is important to notice, in the first place, how, in Feuerbach’s hands, certain of Hegel’s metaphysical conceptions were transformed into allegedly empirical ones. I have already indicated that Hegel’s conception of the free self-consciousness of the Absolute was the basis of Feuerbach’s conception of the free man who had cured himself of religious illusions. It should also be noticed that Hegelian conceptions form the basis of Feuerbach’s view that men attempt to cure their personal and social ills by unconsciously providing for themselves a projected compensatory world of imaginary satisfactions. Feuerbach talks of God as man “objectified” (vergegenständlicht). He says that religious satisfactions result from the “externalization” (Entaüsserung—literally “alienation”) of feelings. And he stigmatizes the division in man between his real needs and their imaginary fulfillment as human self-estrangement (Selbstentfremdung). There can be no doubt that the origin of these notions is in Hegel’s conception of nature as the Absolute Idea alienated from itself. Thus, in the Logic (Book III, I, i, B) Hegel refers to nature as “the ‘outside-itself-ness’ of the Notion.” He also uses the conception in a more detailed manner in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he writes of the individual mind which is conscious of its self-estrangement (Selbstentfremdung) when it sees the effects of human thought and effort in the products of human culture. The individual is here regarded by Hegel as a mind confronted by an objective world in which it seems to recognize something that is both akin and alien to it. The resulting tension, Hegel holds, can only be removed by absolute knowledge in which the divorced aspects of mind are re-united. Whereas for Hegel man’s self-estrangement was ended in an experience that was rationally religious, for Feuerbach it was ended when religion was seen to be self-estrangement and was replaced by a clear-sighted recognition of the earthly tasks to which embodied human beings were committed. Marx, in the Preface to the second edition of Capital, said that he had turned Hegel’s dialectic, which had hitherto been standing on its head, the right way up, but Feuerbach had preceded him in this task.

No one who is acquainted with Freud’s account of religion in The Future of an Illusion can fail to be impressed by the similarities between it and Feuerbach’s views. There is the same refusal to believe that the existence of God—or of anything else—could be based on anything but the evidence of the senses. Like Feuerbach, too, Freud stresses three main tasks of religion: that of relieving men from their fear of natural forces they do not understand, that of reconciling them to their miseries, and that of “making amends for the sufferings and privations that the communal life of culture has imposed upon man.”22 Like him, again, Freud argues that as knowledge of nature develops, it is the last of these tasks that assumes the greatest importance. He is as unwilling as Feuerbach to accept the imaginary or substitute compensations that religion offers, and thinks that men could free themselves from this “universal obsessional neurosis” if they listened to the voice of the intellect—“in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience.” At the end of the essay, indeed, Freud more than once refers to “our God Λόγος.” I suggest that these likenesses may even indicate that Freud was directly influenced by Feuerbach’s writings on this subject. “I have said nothing,” writes Freud, “that other and better men have not said before me in a much more complete, forcible and impressive way. The names of these men are well known . . . I have merely added a certain psychological foundation to the critique of my great predecessors.” Whether or not Feuerbach was one of these “great predecessors” that Freud had in mind, there can be no doubt that Feuerbach’s theory of religion contains ideas that adumbrate certain features of Freud’s system of psychology. There is the suggestion that the ravings of insane people and the beliefs of savages may provide clues that help us to understand the workings of more civilized and normal minds; there is the idea of the satisfaction in imagination of essential desires of which the individual is unconscious; there is the association of this process with dreaming; and there is the governing principle that when someone comes to know himself more fully, he will be less obsessed with thoughts of an imaginary world, and will be able to deal more adequately with the real one. Feuerbach’s observation that theology is pathology hidden from itself23 is most significant in the light of later theories. It should also be observed that notions such as that of “projection”24 and that of “self-consciousness” were metaphysical before they became scientific. Their history would suggest, therefore, not a metaphysical level of thinking followed by quite a distinct scientific level, but rather a development of one into the other. This, in its turn, suggests that perhaps science and metaphysics are more closely bound together than some positivists have allowed.

There is a further aspect of Feuerbach’s view which should be emphasized before I pass on to show how the Marxist theory of “ideologies” is formed from it. I said above that according to Feuerbach men who worship God and believe in his providence are in fact (a) unconsciously glorifying the highest achievements of mankind, and (b) obtaining imaginary satisfactions for needs that are real. Now Feuerbach did not think that (a) and (b) involved quite the same sort of illusion. He thought that (b) was just the mistaking of the shadow for the substance, but (a) was the misplacing of values that were real. Feuerbach had no doubts whatever about the genuineness of the human values themselves, but thought that people deceived themselves when they projected them on to a supernatural being. He emphasized this in The Essence of Christianity by saying that the true atheist is not the man who denies God as subject (i.e., the man who denies that there is a being with the divine predicates), but the man who denies the genuineness of the moral predicates that have been falsely attributed to God. “He alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being—for example, love, wisdom, justice—are nothing; not he to whom the subject of these predicates is nothing. . . . It does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom are chimaeras, because the existence of God is a chimaera, nor do they become truth because God exists.”25 Indeed, Feuerbach says, somewhat rhetorically perhaps, that when the divine predicates are seen to be really human ones, humanity is more deeply revered and human actions are sanctified. Feuerbach advocated disillusionment as regards God, immortality, and divine justice in heaven, but only so as to achieve a clearer insight into what love, goodness, justice, and wisdom are here below. He does not apply the method of disillusionment to our moral notions. On the contrary, he thinks that the destruction of religious faith will lead to a heightened sense of human worth and possibility.

Marx and Engels, as I have already pointed out, became enthusiastic admirers of what Feuerbach published in 1841–43. Marx’s “Criticism of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” which appeared in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in Paris in 1844, is obviously written in this spirit. It is in this article that religion is described as “the opium of the people.” The whole sentence, however, reads as follows: “Religion is the sigh of the hard-pressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people.” It is clear from this that Marx thought that religion was the opium of the people in the sense that they use it to help them to bear their misfortunes, not in the sense that their rulers deliberately keep them quiet with it. In this article, too, Marx refers to the religious viewpoint as a “transposed (verkehrte) consciousness of the world,” and argues that it is thus misleading. “The criticism of heaven transforms itself into a criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into a criticism of law, the criticism of theology into a criticism of politics.” “It is evident,” he goes on, “that the weapons of criticism cannot take the place of criticism of weapons; material force can only be overcome by material force, but theory becomes itself transformed into material force once it penetrates the masses. . . . The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is, for man, the supreme being. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative of overturning all the relationships in which man is debased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible. . . .” The lesson to be drawn, therefore, from the criticism of religion is the need for a revolution in the social conditions that produce the religious illusion, and in this article Marx asserts that it is the proletariat, a class which is “the complete loss of man, and cannot reconquer itself except through the complete victory of man,” which will carry out this revolution. “Revolutions,” he continues, “need a passive element, a material basis. A theory is realized in a people only in so far as it is the realization of the needs of that people. . . . It is not enough for thought to seek (drängen zur) realization, but reality itself must seek the thought.” And so he concludes: “Just as philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons.”26

Now Feuerbach had recognized that a consequence of his view of religion was that men should concern themselves with improving their life on earth rather than with hopes of a divine justice hereafter. In 1842 he had written: “Only when you have given up the Christian religion do you get, so to speak, the right to a republic: for in the Christian religion you have your republic in heaven, and therefore do not need one here. On the contrary, here you must be a slave, otherwise heaven would be superfluous.”27 According to Marx, such revolutionary observations, although they do occasionally occur in Feuerbach’s writings, “are never more than isolated surmises,”28 and in the event Feuerbach devoted most of his subsequent career to the “anthropological” analysis of religious belief, to uncovering its human and social origin, in the hope, presumably, that this would lead to greater moral enthusiasm in the affairs of this life. The passages just quoted from Marx’s article of 1844 show a very different attitude, since the emphasis is on transferring the criticism of religion from the intellectual to the social sphere. The argument is that the thinker who has “seen through” the religious illusion must find allies among those who, because they suffer most, have the strongest motive to press for real rather than for merely imaginary alleviations. Philosophers will never achieve justice by merely pulling off the illusions that are draped over injustice. They must transmit their instructions to the men who will push it away. Thus the proletariat was to be the “passive element,” the “material basis,” for the realization of a just social order. The passage in question almost suggests that the proletariat happened to be the most convenient agency for the philosophical ambition of destroying religious illusion. The expressions used by Marx here give the impression that he felt that the proletariat was a likely instrument for the exercise of philosophical reform. I do not know that he expressed himself in this way elsewhere, but Lenin in What is to be Done? (1902) wrote: “We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness. . . . The theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals.”29

We have not so far made use of the word “ideology”—for the use of the word itself, as well as for discussion of the thing, we have to turn to The German Ideology, which Marx and Engels wrote in 1845–46, but which remained unpublished until 1932. What we have so far seen is that according to both Feuerbach and Marx religious and metaphysical ideas convey false views of the world, but that these false views arise from the aims and desires of men and from the social arrangements which prevent these aims and desires from being realized. Feuerbach thought that, once this was clearly recognized, men would free themselves from their obsession with another world, and would endeavor all the more strongly to realize love, justice, goodness, and wisdom in the human world. Marx, in 1844, held further that the instrument by which freedom from religious illusion and the resulting improvement in human living would be achieved was the proletariat, a class which, if its material strength were fortified with a correct philosophy, would change the conditions in which they and most men were forced to live lives that were “debased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible.” At this time both Feuerbach and Marx held that religion resulted from human failure both in the intellectual and moral spheres, but that it was no delusion that men with physical bodies live on this earth trying to achieve ideals of human perfection. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels not only used the word “ideology,” but also passed a long way beyond Feuerbach’s conception of the thing it stood for. This was because they had by this time definitely established their materialist conception of history. In this book they criticize Feuerbach, and by implication themselves too, for having falsely supposed that there is such a thing as “man” in the abstract rather than the different sorts of men who exist at different times and places. Men, they argue, are social beings whose nature changes with the sort of life they lead, and the sort of life they lead changes according to the way in which they get their living, according to the tools and organization of labor they employ to get food and shelter and to satisfy their other needs. As men have improved their tools, a division of labor has developed, so that some men live in towns, others on the land, some organize production and others carry out manual tasks under the supervision of masters. The division of labor leads to class divisions, and at different times different classes have dominated human societies in accordance with whatever was the predominant mode of production. For what the mode of production is and what sort of division of labor this requires determine which class shall dominate. There is also a division of labor between material and mental work. When this division has taken place within a dominant class, there will be a sub-class who specialize in the production of ideas. Since these ideas are produced from within the dominant class, they will be imposed upon the whole society. They will in fact be expressions of the needs and aspirations of the dominant class, though they will seem, both to those who frame them and to many others too, to be of universal significance. It is not only religious and metaphysical ideas, therefore, which reproduce a false consciousness of things, but other ideas, too, produced by specialists at the behest of a given class or within the framework of a given historical epoch. A given historical epoch is a period during which a given mode of production prevails. “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects in the retina does from their physical life-process.”30 That is, it is in the nature of things that men should get distorted views of the world, just as it is in the nature of things that they should receive inverted images on the retina.

The following passages may serve to illustrate the notion of an “ideology” developed in The German Ideology. On page 14, Marx and Engels refer to “morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness”; on page 16, they say that the French and the English, though they have been “in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry”; on page 20, they say that the division of mental from material labor leads “to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.”; on page 23, they write that “all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another. . . .”; on page 30, they say that those who endeavor to understand any epoch of history in terms of political and religious issues “share the illusion of the epoch”; on page 40, they refer to the “active, conceptive ideologists” of a class “who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood”; on page 43, they write of “the illusion of ideologists in general, e.g. the illusions of the jurists, politicians (of the practical statesmen among them, too)” and to “the dogmatic dreamings and distortions of these fellows”; and on page 80, in criticizing the “true socialists,” Marx and Engels say that those theorists of socialism “have abandoned the realm of real history for the realm of ideology.”

The first feature that emerges from these passages is that Marx and Engels regarded ideologies as systems of misleading or illusory ideas. But no one can justifiably describe something as misleading or illusory except by comparison with something he thinks is not misleading and not illusory. What, then, according to Marx and Engels, is it that is not misleading and not illusory? In The German Ideology they state quite clearly what they think it is. “We set out,” they say, “from real active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.” On the next page they say: “Where speculation ends—in real life—there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical process of development of men.”31 That is to say, there is, according to Marx and Engels, a system of ideas (“the representation of the practical process of development”) about man, his religions and his societies, which is not illusory, which is not ideology. This system of ideas is the positive science of man and society, a science based on observation of men as they really are in their day-to-day concerns. Thus the positive science of man in society is contrasted with “ideological reflexes.” This is, of course, quite in accordance with Feuerbach. In his opinion, the only way to discover what exists is by means of sense observation, and since this does not lead rationally to a revelation of God, heaven, or immortality, the religious view of things needs to be explained in terms of what the senses reveal. Marx and Engels accept this, but proceed to argue that an empirical science of man must trace back all his other activities to the ways in which he gains a living, and to the social organization involved in this. This contrast between “ideologies” on the one hand, and “real, positive science” on the other, is clearly based, as was Comte’s contrast between positive science and theologico-metaphysical thinking, upon a distinction between what is held to be unverifiable and what is believed to be verifiable. And lest it be urged that The German Ideology, an early work, was later superseded in this respect, I refer also to the famous Preface to Marx’s A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)—frequently cited by Marxists as fundamental for an understanding of the Materialist Conception of History—where we find the view of The German Ideology repeated as follows: “In considering such revolutions the distinction should always be made between the material revolution of the economic conditions of production which can be accurately substantiated in the manner of the natural sciences, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical—in short ideological forms, in which we become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”32 It should be noticed that the phrase I have translated by “accurately substantiated in the manner of the natural sciences” is, in the German naturwissenschaftlich treu zu konstatierenden and thus gives the idea of an accurate, honest natural-scientific procedure. “Ideology” was used in this sense right to the end of Engels’ life, since he wrote to Mehring on July 4, 1893: “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all.”33 The fundamental idea is of a scientific procedure that enables its users to show what are the real aims of men who are conscious only of their own apparent aims.

A second important feature of the Marxist theory is that the “ideological” thinker is held to be not only theoretically, but also practically, misleading and misled. Feuerbach, Marx and Engels argued, was too sanguine about the results of unmasking the religious illusions. His books and lectures, they considered, opposed the religious false consciousness in a purely theoretical manner, whereas the only effective way of opposing it was to overthrow in deed as well as word the social conditions that give rise to it. I have already discussed, in Part One, the Marxist view that genuine science is a practical as well as a theoretical activity. Just as, on the Marxist view, the sciences of nature involve practice, in the form of experimentation and manufacture, so the science of society, properly understood, involves the transformation of human society, as well as understanding how it works. It should here be observed that one of the problems that caused the most puzzlement to nineteenth-century thinkers was how the methods and teachings of empirical science fitted into a society that had hitherto seemed to be based on religious belief and Christian morality. Some of the theories of the natural sciences—in geology, for example, and in biology—appeared to conflict with Christian dogmas, while the technological changes associated with scientific advance seemed to weaken the whole religious attitude, causing many people to adopt spontaneously the view that nature must be a self-regulating mechanism. Thus the question arose whether the science which was undermining the Christian view of things could also provide standards for human conduct. Comte and his followers thought that science itself was a moral enterprise; the qualities that led to successful scientific research were moral qualities of humility and disinterestedness that would also lead to the regeneration of human society. Marx and Engels did not share this view, but they did believe that, as a scientific understanding of physical processes was at the same time a mastery over them, so a scientific understanding of human society would involve the subjection of social forces to human control. On their view, pure theory is an abstraction, not something that could really exist and be true. Genuine theory, on the other hand, they held to be at the same time a practical mastery over events. Thus Feuerbach’s exposure of religion and metaphysics was, they held, an abstract, merely contemplative exposure, and therefore not fully scientific in the way in which the Marxist theoretical-cum-practical exposure is. It is clear, of course, that this view involves morality with empirical science as Comtism does, though in a different way, but before I can discuss the matter further, there are some other features of the Marxist theory of ideologies that need to be brought out.

A third aspect of the Marxist theory of ideologies concerns what is to count as an ideology. We began this account of the theory of ideologies with an exposition of the religious-theological-metaphysical one. The passages I have quoted from the writings of Marx and Engels show that they also included as ideologies, that is, as forms of “false consciousness,” “morality,” “ethics,” “political ideology,” and “legal,” “artistic,” and “philosophical” ideologies. We may suppose that the philosophical ideology is the same as the metaphysical, and that no important distinction is being drawn between morality and ethics. We must then ask in what sense ethics or morality, art, law, and politics are forms of false consciousness. The language used would suggest that we are as deluded when we make moral, aesthetic, legal, or political judgments as, on the Marxist view, we are when we make religious and metaphysical judgments, that, for example, the differences between right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, legal and illegal, constitutional and unconstitutional, are merely imaginary, and hide from us some real experienced need or desire. Feuerbach rejected God and heaven in favor, as he thought, of human love and justice, and for this was jibed at as “a pious atheist.”34 But Marx seems to have thought that moral ideas themselves were a sort of illusion the reality of which was something more fundamental in human life; and so too for art, law, and politics. People are only free from illusions, on this view, when their pronouncements on matters of morality, art, law, and politics are consciously related to the scientifically ascertainable realities which they reflect. But we cannot go further into this until we have looked more closely at the Marxist account of social reality.

Before we turn to this, however, there is a fourth aspect of the Marxist theory of ideologies that must be referred to. We have seen that Marx and Engels use the word “ideology” to refer to misleading or false views about the world of nature and society, and do not apply the word to scientific knowledge of things as they are. In contemporary Marxism, however, there is a tendency for the word to be applied to any sort of theory whatever, true or false. Thus, “Marxism-Leninism” is regarded as a scientific theory of nature and man, and would therefore, in the usage of Marx and Engels that we have been discussing, not be called an “ideology” at all. But in his report at the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1934, Stalin referred to “our tasks in the sphere of ideological and political work,” and said that one of them was “to intensify ideological work in all the links of the Party.”35 By “ideological work” he clearly means education in principles that are not, on his view, illusory. In A Soviet History of Philosophy the authors write: “The struggle of the materialistic ‘line of Democritus’ with the idealistic ‘line of Plato’ was an ideological partisan struggle between a progressive slave-holding democracy and the reactionary landowning aristocracy.”36 Here, “ideological” seems to have the meaning given to it by Marx and Engels. On pages 43–44, however, they write: “It will be shown that Lenin and Stalin in their struggle against revisionism developed the materialistic conception of history and worked out the ideological foundations of the Party and questions about the mutual relation between spontaneity and consciousness in the workers’ movement, about economic and political struggle, about the formation of the socialist ideology of the proletariat, about the role of revolutionary theory. . . .” It is clear that in this passage the word “ideology” stands for ideas that are held to be neither false nor misleading. Again, in the article “Ideology” in their Handbook of Philosophy,37 Rosenthal and Yudin say it is “a term used during the past century to denote the whole complex of views, ideas, concepts, notions, functioning on a social level—a form of social consciousness. Political views, sciences, philosophies, ethical systems, arts, and religions are forms of ideology, in this sense of the word, regardless as to whether they are true or false, progressive or reactionary.”

This development in the terminology is, in my opinion, very important. I suggest that the juxtaposition of “partisan” with “ideological” shows how the development has taken place. According to Marx and Engels, “ideologies” were false thinking determined by class interests, but they also held that the final victory of the proletariat would bring into being a society not divided into classes. In declining capitalist society the rising, progressive class is that of the proletariat, and its views of social questions, being those of the class that will end all classes, are not limited in the way in which other class theories are. The class character and partisanship of “Marxism-Leninism” make it natural enough to call the theory an ideology, but it is at the same time “scientific” because it will ultimately cease to be limited to a single class, and will be accepted throughout a society the transformation of which will be the theory’s verification. It will be observed, furthermore, that Marxists do not clearly state that natural science is an ideology except in the sense that it involves theorizing. They talk about “bourgeois” science, but when they do I think they are suggesting that elements of distortion, arising from class interests, enter into the natural sciences. They can hardly mean that bourgeois natural science as a whole is distorted, since, for example, Engels was at great pains to support the theory of dialectical materialism by reference to discoveries made by bourgeois scientists in the nineteenth century. Again, it may be that the wider use of “ideology” has been adopted in order to evade the conclusion that would appear to follow from Marx’s account of ideological thinking, viz., that in communist society not only would religion disappear, but art and morality as well. (Politics and law, as we shall see, will, according to the Marxists, disappear in the classless society.) However that may be, a problem of very great importance for the understanding of Marxism emerges from our discussion of the theory of ideologies. For on the one hand Marx and Engels regard morality as an ideology and thus as involving false consciousness, and on the other hand they hold that a scientific understanding of human society would be at the same time its practical regeneration. But we cannot deal with this until we have considered in outline the social “reality” with which the ideological “reflexes” and “illusions” are compared. This brings us to the central ideas of the Materialist Conception of History.

3.

The Materialist Conception of History in Outline

In this section I propose to deal with the fundamental elements of the Marxist theory of history, and to leave details of the theory of ethics and politics for discussion in the next chapter.

According to the Marxist theory of Historical Materialism, the form assumed by human society is influenced by such factors as geographical environment and the level of population, but is determined by what Marx, in the Preface to his Critique of Political Economy, called “the material conditions of life,” in which the “legal relations and forms of state,” as well as religious, philosophical, and artistic ideas, are “rooted.” In order, however, to understand this very general statement of the view, we must first see how the Marxists analyze the notion of “the material conditions of life.”

What, on the Marxist view, differentiates man from the other animals is that whereas the other animals keep themselves alive by making use of the physiological equipment they are born with so as to seek and find their food and shelter, men produce their food and shelter (their “means of subsistence”) by the use of instruments (tools) which are not parts of their original physiological equipment. Even though other animals make such shelters as nests, hives, and webs, these works of theirs remain much the same from one generation to another. But human beings, through the use of tools, produce works which permit of indefinite improvement by succeeding generations. The tools which one generation has made and used are handed on to the next. The new generation starts where the previous one had left off, and may in its turn transmit improved tools to its successors. The skill, experience, and tools thus received and used Marx called “productive forces.” “Productive forces,” on his view, are not individual products. Any improvements made by individuals are made on the basis of what is already current in the society to which the individual belongs. The man who, for example, improves on a spade, is improving something which is itself the result of many men’s work in past epochs. “The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting-point with Smith and Ricardo belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century. They are Robinsonades. . . .”38 Thus each generation of men inherits a set of productive forces which are social in their origin.

“Productive forces,” however, are social in their use as well as in their origin. A man who digs with a spade may be digging his own field, but he is able to do this only because there is a social organization that permits individuals to own fields, and perhaps to sell what they produce in them. The individual who uses some socially inherited instrument of production to produce goods that he sells to others, is dependent upon the readiness of other people to buy from him or to barter with him. Thus an individual tool user does not merely use a particular instrument to change the parts of nature he applies it to; he uses it within the context of a social organization. Spades, ploughs, canoes, or looms are not merely instruments by means of which an individual man breaks the earth, gets fish, or makes cloth. The breaking of the earth, the fishing, and the weaving involve relations of men to one another, in operating the tool (as with a large canoe), in disposing of the product (as with the wheat that the plough prepares for), or in both (as with the cloth woven in the cottage and sold to a merchant). Thus the men who brought the “blue stones” from Pembrokeshire to Stonehenge showed their mastery over natural forces, but their task could not have been accomplished without a most elaborate organization among the men themselves, though we do not know what it was. Associated with the “productive forces,” therefore, are what Marx called “productive relationships.” “Productive relationships” are the ways in which men are related to one another as they operate the “productive forces.”

According to the Marxists, specific types of “productive relationship” are linked with each main type of “productive force.” They hold that there are five main levels of productive force, and with these, it would seem, five main types of productive relationship must be associated. There was the era of stone tools, with which was associated a primitive communism in the means of production and in the distribution of the product. “Here,” writes Stalin, “there was no exploitation, no classes” (sic).39 When metal tools were first used, society divided into masters and slaves. (“It was iron and corn,” Rousseau had written, “which civilized man and ruined the human race.”) The windmill is mentioned by Marx on one occasion as the technological basis of feudalism. Corresponding to the production of goods in factories with power-driven machinery was the industrial capitalist order of society, though an earlier form of capitalism had existed prior to the introduction of such machinery. Capitalist society will be replaced by a socialist order as the highly elaborate productive forces that result from the application of modern science bring about control and ownership by the community as a whole.

Before I pass on to further aspects of the theory, it is necessary to make it clear that my outline of the Marxist theory is based on the belief that it is fundamentally a technological theory of history. Many but not all interpreters of Marx and Engels adopt this interpretation. There are, as Professor Bober points out,40 serious difficulties in it. For example, Marxists do not show in detail precisely how technological changes bring each new epoch into being. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, appears to argue that it was the use of iron that caused the advent of the ancient slave society, but he mentions other causes, too, that are not technological. Marx, in a famous epigram in the Poverty of Philosophy says that “the windmill gives you society with the feudal lord,” but I am not aware of any detailed attempt to substantiate this. Again, in Capital, volume 1, Marx says that in the earliest phase of capitalism men work for wages in small factories, but the difference between this and what went before seems to be one of scale rather than of technique. It is at a later stage of capitalism, that of modern industry, a phase that began toward the end of the eighteenth century, that technological changes had great influence. In explaining this Marx writes: “The machine that gives rise to the industrial revolution is one which replaces the worker handling a single tool, by a mechanism operating simultaneously a number of identical or similar tools, and driven by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power may be.”41 This would seem to be a more careful statement of the epigram in the Poverty of Philosophy that the steam mill gives you society with the industrial capitalist. Marx does, however, state the technological view very strongly, in general terms, in a long footnote in Capital, volume 1, from which I cite the following: “Technology reveals man’s dealings with nature, discloses the direct productive activities of his life, thus throwing light upon social relations and the resultant mental conceptions. Even the history of religion is uncritical unless this material basis be taken into account. Of course it is much easier, from an analysis of the hazy constructions of religion, to discover their earthly core than, conversely, to deduce from a study of the material conditions of life at any particular time, the celestial forms that these may assume. But the latter is the only materialistic method, and therefore the only scientific one.”42 Stalin, in Dialectical and Historical Materialism, is rather vague about the matter. He gives a brief account of the development of technology and of its association with the various historical epochs, but he does not make it quite clear how the technologies and social systems are connected. However, he makes a point of arguing that technological innovators are unaware of how their inventions will affect society, that the men who introduced iron did not know that they were preparing the way for slavery, that the men who started “large manufactories” never imagined that royalty and aristocracy would be destroyed by them. This appears to support the technological interpretation, if we are prepared to regard “large manufactories” as technological innovations. In fact, they do not seem to be new inventions, in the sense in which metal tools or steam engines once were, but only expansions of something already in being. This, of course, may well be an example of the transformation of quantitative changes into a change of quality, and I shall discuss it as such later. My main reason for accepting the technological interpretation of the theory is that it does at least purport to provide a definite theory of history, whereas the alternatives are almost too vague to discuss. Furthermore, if we accept it, we are able to understand the importance in Marx’s argument of his view that man is a tool-making animal. Anyone who reads part 4 of Capital, volume 1, will see that Marx attempted to investigate the origins of industrial society as a historian, trying to find out what really happened and to make some sense of it. This part of his work has value independently of the Materialist Conception of History.

The main point, then, of the Materialist Conception of History is as follows. The basis of any human society is the tools, skills, and technical experience prevalent in it, i.e., the productive forces. For any given set of productive forces there is a mode of social organization necessary to utilize them, i.e., the productive relationships. The sum total of productive relationships in any society is called by Marx its “economic structure.” This, he holds, is the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. Radical changes in the basis sooner or later bring about changes in the superstructure, so that the prime cause of any radical political or moral transformation must be changes in the productive forces. In effect, the idea is that human society has a “material basis” consisting of the productive forces and associated productive relationships. This is also called the “economic structure.” This, in its turn, determines the form that must in the long run be taken by the legal and political institutions of the society in question. Less directly but no less really dependent on the economic structure of society are its moral and aesthetic ideas, its religion, and its philosophy. The key to the understanding of law, politics, morals, religion, and philosophy is the nature and organization of the productive forces.

There are three further aspects of the theory that must be briefly touched on before I come to discuss it in detail.

In the first place it must be emphasized that Marxists do not assert that the superstructure has no influence whatever on the development of a society. On the contrary, they hold that there is interaction between basis and superstructure, and that such interaction is only what would be expected in a dialectical system.

In the second place, the Marxist theory of classes forms an important element in the doctrine of Historical Materialism. Briefly, the theory is that each main arrangement of the productive forces calls into existence its own form of the division of labor, and that this, in its turn, leads to a division of society into classes. Corresponding to each form of the division of labor there is a division of society dominated by a single class—slave owners in ancient society, feudal landowners in the Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie in modern times. Both the political and intellectual life of society is dominated by the class that has the upper hand in making use of the productive forces and is thus able to exploit the rest. Furthermore, within each governing class there is division of labor between the thinkers and the men of action. The thinkers of each governing class are “its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood.”43 When the proletarian class, the class with the broadest basis, has finally consolidated its power, class divisions will have been overcome and the division of intellectual from physical labor will have been brought to an end. Then the ideological “false consciousness” will have disappeared, to be replaced by a permanent union of theory and practice.

In the third place, the theory of Historical Materialism is a theory of revolutions. The source of social revolution, on the Marxist view, is the qualitative “leap” to a new form of productive force, such as the “leap” to steam-powered machinery which was the real basis of the bourgeois revolution against the feudal system. When one of these qualitative changes in the productive forces has first manifested itself, the old forces of production and the old political and ideological forms continue to exist for a while. Hand-looms, for example, continue to exist alongside power-looms, Parliament remains unreformed, and landowners are still regarded with veneration. But as the new productive forces are developed, they render the old ones obsolete, and new ideologies develop critical of those that had prevailed earlier; at the same time the new class that is interested in the new productive forces begins to demand new political and legal institutions to give scope for its own development. The bourgeois capitalists, for example, dispute the political supremacy of the landowners, and do so in terms of the new ideology of laissez-faire economic theory. Conversely, widespread criticism of a given order of society is a sign that that order is in process of being replaced by a new “progressive” one. A “progressive” class is a class that controls the new productive forces that are ousting the obsolete ones. Thus the moral protests of “progressive” publicists are signs that the old order is in fact giving place to a new one. The “reactionary” defenders of the old order will, of course, cling as long as they can to their political power and to the moral and religious notions that go with it, but their plight is hopeless, since the ultimately determining social influences are the productive forces, and if qualitatively new productive forces have been brought into operation, the whole of society will be transformed in accordance with them.

It will have been noticed that Stalin, in his compressed statement of this theory of revolution, says that the new productive forces may for a time develop while productive relationships appropriate to the old productive forces continue in existence and so give rise to social “contradictions.” This simplified view does bring out what is essential in the theory, but in fact the Marxist theory allows for various types of disproportion in social development. The new productive forces could conflict both with the political and legal relationships and with the moral, religious, and philosophical ideologies of the society in question. Or the legal and political relationships could be brought into line with the new productive forces while the ideological superstructure still remained unreconciled with them. It is conceivable, too, that the ideological superstructure might be brought into line with the new productive forces before the legal and political relationships had become so adapted—this last would be the condition in which men’s minds and hearts already approved a new social order although the political revolution lagged behind. In our next section we shall have to consider how these different tiers or layers could be connected.

As I have been making a point of comparing the Marxist views with those of Comte and other contemporary nineteenth-century thinkers, it may be of interest to notice the theory of revolution that Comte had expounded in 1838. “By a necessity that is as evident as it is deplorable,” writes Comte, “and is inherent in the weakness of our nature, the passage from one social system to another can never be a direct and continuous one; it always presupposes, for the space of at least several generations, a sort of more or less anarchic interregnum, the character and duration of which depend on the intensity and the extent of the renovation to be secured; thus the most marked political advances essentially consist in the gradual demolition of the old system, the chief bases of which had been constantly undermined beforehand. This preliminary upsetting is not only inevitable by reason of the strength of the antecedents that bring it about, but is also quite indispensable, both to allow the elements of the new system, which up to this point had been slowly and silently developing, to receive, little by little, their political establishment, and to give a stimulus toward reorganization by means of knowledge of the inconveniences of anarchy. . . . Without this prior destruction, the human mind would never be able to reach a clear conception of the system that is to be brought into being.”44 The notion that is clearly common to Positivism and to Marxism is that of a new society starting its growth within the old one that it will finally destroy. Comte’s “anarchic interregnum” corresponds to the Marxist “leap,” though Comte, as I understand him, does not regard this as such a clear-cut affair as Marx appeared to do. Comte brings to light also the most important problem of how the members of one type of society could foresee the type of society that is to replace that in which they themselves live. His view seems to be that as men come to dismantle the old society they will find a new one developing in which will appear in embryo form the lineaments of that which is to come. It was, he thought, from an examination of the essential features of science and industry, already existing in dying feudalism, that an idea of the future could be obtained. This conception is clearly most important for the Marxist view, since if there were an absolute novelty the other side of a “leap,” then it could not possibly be predicted, whereas a new society, once it has found its way, by whatever means, into the old one, may conceivably bear marks that the whole society may some day exhibit. I should also mention that Comte, in the section from which the above passage is quoted, also argued that the dying feudal society was unsettled by “fundamental inconsistencies”; for once it made any compromise with the new scientific ideas, and once it allowed some scope to modern industry, it had abandoned the only basis from which they could be consistently attacked. This is an earlier version of the theory that their “contradictions” bring dying societies to their destruction.

4.

Examination of the Materialist Conception of History

We have now described in outline the social reality with which Marxists compare the false views of society that they call ideologies. Our next step must be to consider the reasons they give for holding that the Materialist Conception of History is a true account of social reality. This is not easy, however, since Marxists tend to regard the theory as one that any candid person is bound to accept as soon as he understands it, or as one that the whole creation conspires to proclaim, or as one that immediately illumines the dark places of history. But there are one or two specific arguments that can be examined.

Stalin, following Lenin, argues (1), that if matter is primary and mind derivative, then “the material life of society, its being, is also primary, and its spiritual life secondary,” and (2), that if mind “reflects” an objectively existing material world, then “the spiritual life of society” reflects “the material life of society,” which is “an objective reality existing independently of the will of man.”45

Let us then consider (1). The contention is that from the materialist thesis that matter existed first and mind evolved from it; it follows that it is changes in “the material life of society,” that is, in the productive forces, that bring about the major changes in social life, and in art, religion, and philosophy. More briefly still, the contention is that philosophical materialism entails historical materialism. It is not difficult to see, however, that this is not so. The matter that is “primary” in the doctrine of philosophical materialism is such things as gases, seas, and rocks, but “the material life of society” consists of tools, inventions, and skills. The alleged social primacy of “the material life of society,” therefore, is quite a different thing from the alleged primacy of matter over mind, for the “material life of society” that determines the political and ideological forms itself contains mental components, whereas, on the Marxist view, it is from mindless matter that mind has sprung. From the premise that mind sprang from matter, nothing can be concluded about the causes of social development. The fact that Frankenstein had made his monster did not prevent the monster from destroying Frankenstein, and if the monster had made Frankenstein, Frankenstein might still have had the power to control it.

No one who is convinced by my argument against (1) will accept (2) either, for (2), like (1), rests upon an equivocation between “material” in the sense of “purely physical” and “material” in the sense of “technological.” “The material life of society” is, indeed, something that individual men are born into and have to accept much as they do the physical world itself, but it depends upon mankind as a whole in a way that physical nature does not. Once it is clear that “the material life of society” includes socially inherited skills and experience, then the difference between the Materialist Conception of History and theories such as Comte’s, according to which intellectual development is the cause of social progress, is very much diminished. The Marxist theory might, indeed, be reworded so as to state that social advance depends in the first instance upon the success with which men solve their technological problems. But among the factors involved in the solution of such problems are the intelligence and persistence of the human beings concerned. Intelligence and persistence are, in a broad sense, moral as well as physical or physiological qualities. Another way, therefore, of putting the Marxist view would be to say that the application of a given amount of intelligence and energy to technological problems has an enormously greater influence on social development in general than the application of that same quantity would have if it were directed to political, moral, and other ideological problems. I do not know whether this is true, but its truth or falsity cannot be decided by reference to the view that mind came from matter or that individual men have to submit themselves to already existing ways of life.

The above arguments show that Lenin and Stalin thought that the Materialist Conception of History was seen to be obviously true once philosophical materialism was accepted. Both Marx and Engels thought that there is something obvious about the theory. In the Communist Manifesto Marx wrote: “Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?” And in his speech at the graveside of Marx, Engels said that Marx “discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc.” Marx’s view thus is that it does not require “deep intuition” to see that the Materialist Conception of History is true, and Engels refers to it as “a simple fact.” What is this “simple fact”? The simple fact seems to be that in order to pursue politics, religion, and art men must keep alive, and that in order to keep alive they must eat and drink. This, surely, has never been denied, unless by someone who argues that angelic politicians, priests, and artists operate beyond the grave. And no one, surely, would deny that people’s ideas change as the things and situations change about which the ideas are ideas. Such truisms hardly seem to establish the Materialist Conception of History. They are held to be relevant, I suppose, to an evolutionary theory of the origins of human society, according to which the first men are supposed to have been a sort of animal that could keep themselves alive but were ignorant of politics, science, and religion. There was a time, it is supposed, when these creatures were only just able to keep themselves alive, and during this time influencing one another, thinking, and praying were activities that they could not afford. First there had to be the activities that kept them alive, and only then could they start on these less vital ones. Now let us leave aside the question of prayer, and consider only the activities of influencing one another—or any other political activity—and thinking. Are we to suppose that these do not play a part in keeping men alive? Do men think only after they have found food and shelter? Do they quarrel with one another and maneuver with friends and enemies only when the day’s work is done? On analysis, I suggest, this sort of argument can do no more than say that early men must have found it very hard to keep alive and succeeded in doing so only in so far as they found food, drink, and shelter. To say that success in these directions must have preceded politics, science, and religion is like saying that eggs must have preceded hens, or that hens must have preceded eggs.

In the Communist Manifesto, however, Marx puts forward what looks like another argument in favor of the Materialist Conception of History when he writes: “What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed?” Here he seems to be supporting his case by reference to history. But to say that the Materialist Conception of History is a historical theory is not to say anything very precise, for there are different sorts of historical enquiry agreeing in little except the claim to report or explain the human past. Now when Marx supports the Materialist Conception of History by historical considerations one of the things he does, I think, is to construct what Dugald Stewart, writing early in the nineteenth century, had called “Theoretical or Conjectural History,” and what French writers of the eighteenth century had called Histoire Raisonnée. Dugald Stewart, in explaining what “Theoretical or Conjectural History” consists of, wrote: “In examining the history of mankind, as well as in examining the phenomena of the natural world, when we cannot trace the process by which an event has been produced, it is often of importance to show how it may have been produced by natural causes.”46 Now Marx, it seems to me, arrives at the Materialist Conception of History in this way, except that he seems to claim to know how the events must have been produced. This may be seen from Capital, volume 1, chapter 5, § 1, which is entitled “The Labour Process.” Here Marx endeavors to explain what human labor is. Men are parts of nature who act on the rest of nature with their bodily organs so as to make it supply their wants. They thus change the rest of nature, and in doing so they develop their own potentialities. (I imagine that an example of this would be the development of human skill through agriculture so as to produce new tastes and such works as Virgil’s Georgics.) Bees just build cells, but men transfer to nature cells that previously had existed in their heads—their works are realizations of themselves. Unlike other animals, men use tools to transform nature into something that they have previously conceived. As they use tools to do this, and as the use of tools is a specific characteristic of men, Franklin was right to call man “a tool-making animal.” It therefore follows that the various sorts of tool that men have made and used in the past enable us to distinguish one human epoch from another, as with the stone, bronze, and iron ages. Just as we can from an examination of fossil bones discover what sorts of animal once inhabited the earth, so, from an examination of tools left behind by them, we can reconstruct the nature of men and societies that are now extinct. The types of tool enable us to discern “the social relations amid which labour was performed.”47

It will be noticed that this argument has two strands. In the first place it is argued that tool making and tool using (technology) are the specific human characteristic. In the second place, variations in the use of tools are regarded as evidence for fundamental variations in the societies and men that use them. As to the first strand in the argument, it is as if Marx had agreed with Aristotle that man has an essence but had disagreed with him about what that essence is. Whereas Aristotle had said that man is a rational animal, Marx said he was a tool-making and tool-using animal. Thus the argument fundamentally is that since men are essentially tool makers and tool users, their society is the necessary outcome of their tool-making and tool-using activities. It is also worth noticing that the proposition that men, in transforming nature, develop their own potentialities, is obviously suggested by the thesis of Hegel’s Phenomenology that men, in changing the natural world by their labor, gain a fuller consciousness of their own nature. Indeed, Hegel’s metaphysical observations on human labor are transformed by Marx into a theory of society and of human progress according to which men discover and unfold their powers in the process of controlling nature.

Let us start our examination of this view by seeing how it is linked with the Aristotelian theory of essences. Very briefly, an essence is that without which something could not be what it is, that which makes the thing the sort of thing it is. To take an example, the essence of a knife is to cut by means of a blade fixed into a handle. Something without a blade or handle would not be a knife, for knives cut, and cannot do so without these parts. On the other hand, however, knives may have handles of different colors and blades of different shapes without ceasing to be knives. These features that knives may cease to have without ceasing to be knives are called their accidental features in distinction from the essential features they must have if they are to be knives. Now there are different sorts of knife, such as paper-knives and carving knives. These, too, have their essential and their accidental features. It is essential to the paper-knife to cut paper, and to the carving knife to cut meat, and as these are very different operations, different sorts of blade and handle will be needed if they are to be these sorts of knife. Paper-knives, for example, will have to be smaller than carving knives, carving knives broader-bladed than paper-knives. Again, it does not matter what color their handles are. Now Marx’s view, so far as it is that tool making and tool using are the essence of man, is that, just as all knives must cut by means of a blade fixed into a handle, so all men must be tool makers and tool users; that just as there are paper-knives and carving knives, so there are men who make and use stone tools, and men who make and use metal tools; and that just as cutting paper requires one sort of blade and cutting meat requires another, so making and using stone tools requires one sort of politics, law, and ideology, and making and using metal tools requires another. On the basis of the theory of essences, therefore, the analogy between man and a knife is as follows. Technology is an essential feature of man, as cutting by means of a blade fixed in a handle is essential to a knife. Having a stone age technology or a bronze age technology corresponds to being a paper-knife or a carving knife. Stone age politics, law, and ideology correspond to the blade and handle essential to a paper-knife, and bronze age politics, law, and technology correspond to the blade and handle essential to a carving knife. But when we draw out the analogy in this way we see that it cannot be fully maintained from the Marxist point of view. For it is a well-known Marxist contention that politics, law, and ideology belong only to class societies, and will not exist in the future communist society after the withering away of the state and the rise of social self-awareness. But, if we follow our analogy, this would be as though there could be a specific sort of knife that had no specific sort of blade and handle. But there could not be any such thing. Hence, the Marxist view that technology is of the essence of man and determines the different sorts of society and ideology is not consistent with the other Marxist view that there will be no politics and no ideology in the communist society of the future.

In noting this, we discover, I suggest, a most serious flaw in the Marxist view of history. If man is to have an essence in anything like the way in which knives have essences—and this is what is implied by the view that he is a “tool-making animal”—then this essence sets a limit to the possibilities open to him, so that he cannot evade or transcend anything that the essence necessitates. But if the various types of technology involve various types of politics, law, and ideology, by what right can we say that one particular type of technology gets rid of all politics, law, and ideology? There can be little doubt, I think, that Marx felt this difficulty and endeavored to meet it by the theory that men develop their own powers as they work on the natural world. This last view may be interpreted as a theory of progress rather than as a theory of essences. Knives must always be knives, and we know pretty much what sort of thing they are. There is nothing about knives, as knives, that can ever cause more than a slight or momentary astonishment. They go on cutting, perhaps better and better, but it is still cutting that they do, and we know just what that is. Progress in knives is progress in the same rather simple thing. It is approaching nearer and nearer to an already clearly conceived end, the perfect cut. But human progress is not like this. It does not consist in getting closer and closer to some foreseeable perfect consummation, but rather in developing new possibilities that can only occur to men in the course of their attempts to develop those already known to them. This is so even if we admit that technology is the essence of man, for the purposes and types of machines can only be foreseen a stage or two ahead, and the technology of even the fairly near future is quite unpredictable by us.48 To say that man has an essence is to suggest that he is a fairly simple and predictable sort of thing like a knife, or even an oak tree. To say that his essence is tool making and tool using is to modify this suggestion somewhat, but still to restrict the sphere of his development to one only of his activities. If someone is bent on talking of the human essence, then I think that rationality is more suitable than technology, since it is more fundamental and manifests itself more widely. However that may be, it was by committing himself to the view that technology is the essence of man that Marx convinced himself and others that the Materialist Conception of History is obviously true.

In the passage I am discussing, Marx gives what appear to be archaeological reasons for holding that technology is of the essence of man. From its fossilized remains, he argues, the structure and mode of life of a prehistoric animal can be reconstructed. Similarly, he goes on, from the tools of a vanished people the organization of its society can be inferred. But we cannot infer from the fact that certain parts of its body have survived that these were its fundamental or essential parts when the animal was alive, and so too, I should have thought, we cannot conclude that the tools that survived from an extinct culture were more essential to it than other things that have completely disappeared. The archaeological argument only has force if we already believe that technology is the determining feature in human life. From the fact that something survives of an extinct animal or culture it does not follow that it must have been the essential feature of that animal or society. The Stone Age is so called because the men of that time were unable to work metals and so left only stone implements behind them, not because everything else in their lives was determined by or depended on the stone that they worked. The Stone Age was not stone in the way in which Old Red Sandstone is red.

We have now considered the principle behind the conjectural history involved in the Materialist Conception of History. We have seen that Marx’s account of it is based upon his view that the essence of man is his technology. We have argued that man is not the sort of being that has an essence, since, unlike such things as knives, whose structure is determined by a single end, such as that of cutting, men are complex beings who constantly discover new aims as they achieve or fail to achieve their old ones. We have argued, furthermore, that Marx’s appeal to archaeology does not show that technology is the fundamental determining force in history but only presupposes that technology is the essence of man. We have also argued that Marx, in saying that man has an essence, was implying that human progress is a much more simple and limited thing than in fact it is, and that in saying that man changes himself in changing the world he is in effect denying that man has an essence at all. Our next step must be to consider the claim that the Materialist Conception of History is not conjectural history at all, but a comprehensive view based on the facts of history. For when, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx said that his view was supported by “the history of ideas” he may well have meant something of this sort. The Materialist Conception of History, that is, would be an account of social development supported by the facts of history, much as the geological theory of the formation of the earth’s surface is supported by the nature and position of rocks and fossils. That Marx held such a view may be seen from his constant references, in The German Ideology, to the empirical nature of his view of history, as well as from his general criticism of Hegel’s speculative philosophy of history.

The Materialist Conception of History has undoubtedly had a great influence on historical study in the twentieth century. Many non-Marxists are prepared to admit that it suggests a fruitful method for historical investigation, and it has been held to be of value as “a sort of recipe for producing empirical hypotheses.”49 It would, indeed, be foolish to deny that since the theory was first formulated there has been, at least in part under its influence, a good deal of interesting research into the technology and economic life of past societies. It should not be forgotten, however, that Marx had been preceded in this by Adam Smith and others. The growth of economic science, quite apart from Marx, naturally led historians to look with new eyes at the commerce and industry of past ages, while the growth of inventions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries aroused interest in the technologies of the past. But all this relates primarily to historical description, i.e., to discovering and recording economic and technological facts in addition to the political and religious and literary ones that had interested previous historians. The Materialist Conception of History, however, is a theory of historical explanation. It is one thing to admit that historians have done well to consider the commerce, industry, class structure, competing interests, and changing outlooks of past societies, but quite another to say that the technological factors determine all the rest. If this last is a coherent hypothesis, then it should be possible to test it, to see whether those things are which would have to be if it were true. If, on the other hand, it is not a coherent hypothesis, then we do not know how to test it, and any good that comes from considering it will be accidental. It is my view that it is not a coherent hypothesis, and that therefore historical research cannot confirm it, but on the contrary is likely to be led by it into confusions. This is not to say that it may not also help in the advancement of historical knowledge; incoherent hypotheses, such as Kepler’s astrological ones, have often led to important discoveries, though they get rubbed away and lost when their work is done. Marxists, however, do not regard the Materialist Conception of History as an expendable hypothesis but rather as a truth which reveals why history happened as it did and what is next to come of it. It would be impertinent for a philosopher to criticize the coherence of a hypothesis that was being used in a provisional way in the course of some particular investigation. The examination of eternal truths and established dogmas, however, is his proper business.

In the Materialist Conception of History three main sorts of notion appear. There are, in the first place, those such as “matter,” “contradiction,” “dialectics,” “nodal lines,” which I have called metaphysical and which Marxists themselves would prefer to call philosophical or fundamental. In the second place, there are those that relate primarily to the Marxist analysis of society, such as “productive forces,” “productive relationships,” “division of labor,” “classes,” “revolution.” And thirdly, there are the various historical epochs recognized by Marxists, such as “primitive communism,” “feudalism,” “capitalism.” The first two sets of notions are used to explain how the epochs distinguished in the third set have emerged and developed, and to predict the coming epoch. In brief, the Marxists claim to have established the outlines of a science of history which, in its general structure, is not unlike the science of geology. Just as the geologist, by interpreting his observations in the light of physics, chemistry, and biology, is enabled to establish a sequence of geological epochs, so the Marxist claims to utilize his analysis of society in terms of division of labor, classes, productive forces, etc., in order to plot the series of past social epochs and to predict the coming of the next.

In what follows I shall say something about the principal notions in each of these three main classes.

In the first class I select for discussion (a) the notion of “contradiction” and (b) the notion of “nodal lines.”

(a) When I discussed the notion of “contradiction” as applied by Marxists to the material world, I suggested that it is primarily a logical notion and agreed with those critics of Marxism who have said that physical events or things cannot contradict one another. But I also pointed out that a man who asserts what another man denies is contradicting that other man, that in contradicting him he is, in a sense, opposing him, and that it is only a short step from opposition to struggle. To say that physical events contradict or oppose one another is to speak anthropomorphically. That being so, we cannot say out of hand that “contradiction” is not a suitable notion for applying to human societies. The contradictions that hold between propositions or statements are involved in the assertions and denials that form part of the social interplay of human beings. Now the social contradiction most frequently cited by Marxists is probably that which they say holds between “social production” and “capitalist appropriation.” This is explained by Engels as follows. Before the advent of the capitalist system, the workman, owning his own tools and raw materials, produced commodities that were his property until he sold them. He was the owner, that is, of the products of his own individual labor. Under capitalism, however, the workman is a member of an elaborately organized group; his labor is no longer individual but social. The plant and tools he works with and the raw material he works on belong to the capitalist, and the commodities so produced belong to the capitalist also. The capitalist, that is, becomes the owner of the products of other people’s labor. But, Engels argues, individual ownership of a commodity presupposes that the commodity has been individually produced, so that to have individual ownership of a socially produced commodity is to treat what is socially produced as if it were individually produced. This, according to Engels, is a contradiction.50 There are many points at which this argument might be criticized, but what I am concerned with is the notion of contradiction involved in it. Engels believes, I suggest, that the social production of commodities cannot go on indefinitely in association with the individual ownership of the commodities so produced. He seems to be arguing that the organization of production under capitalism is so very different from the organization of production under the system that preceded capitalism that capitalism cannot for long retain the pre-capitalist system of ownership of the commodities produced. This must be because there is something about the capitalist, social, method of production that will ultimately make private ownership of the commodity unlikely or impossible. A simple example of a social change which makes the retention of an old social arrangement unlikely is that of the adoption of printing. Once books came to be printed, it was unlikely, though not impossible, that books would continue to be copied and illustrated by hand. It was unlikely, because printing is so much cheaper than hand copying; it was not impossible, because the copyists might have had sufficient social or political influence to induce the community to continue paying a higher price for a proportion of its books. It might be quite naturally said, therefore, that there was a contradiction involved in wishing to have both cheap printed books and hand-produced books, though it might be better to say that these two things were incompatible with one another. A simple (and simplified) example of a social change that makes the retention of an existing state of affairs impossible is the following. In a community where the level of production is not rising and cannot rise it is decided that there shall be an increase of investment abroad without affecting the level of consumption or of investment at home. But it is impossible that this should take place, for it is impossible that something should be taken from a finite quantity and for that quantity to remain the same. Yet it might well happen that people should unthinkingly try to do both these things, or to do other things that were really logically impossible. Perhaps Engels’ use of the word “contradiction” means that he thought that “capitalist appropriation” and “social production” are contradictory in this last, most stringent, sense, though his use, in the same discussion of the word “incompatibility” (p. 298) and, in an analogous discussion, of the word “antithesis,” may suggest the first sense. However that may be, it cannot be justly argued that the Marxist use of the term “contradiction” in social contexts is open to the objections that are rightly made to its use as descriptive of physical events.

There is a good deal that might be enquired into about contradictions in human affairs. For example, when A seeks to be superior to B, and B to be superior to A, they cannot both be superior to the other in the same respect, though each may succeed in achieving equality with the other. The relationship between A and B has then some analogy with that between contradictory and contrary propositions in the Aristotelian logic, where, of contradictories one must be true, and of contraries both can be false. Only one man can win, but both may fail to win. Again, the man who makes contradictory statements succeeds in saying nothing, but the man who unwittingly pursues a policy and the negation of that policy may undo each of the things he sets out to do, but he cannot be said to do nothing as the man who contradicts himself says nothing. Some philosophers, furthermore, have argued that just as there is a logic of propositions, so there is a logic of imperatives. Of these, some have argued that the logic of imperatives is similar to the logic of propositions, while others have said that there must be great differences between them—that, for example, while from the conjunctive proposition “He put on a lifebelt and jumped into the water” we may validly infer either of the conjuncts, e.g., “He jumped into the water,” we cannot, from the imperative “Put on a lifebelt and jump into the water,” infer the single command “Jump into the water.” These considerations show that there are some interesting problems to be investigated here, and it is to be regretted that Marxists, whose theory of social contradictions raises some of them, have, as far as I am aware, left them unexplored.

(b) There is, then, some merit, or at least some philosophical suggestiveness, in the notion of contradictions in society, but I am afraid that the theory of qualitative leaps across nodal lines, when applied to social affairs, can bring little but confusion. Now we saw in Chapter II that Hegel and, following him, Marx and Engels, lumped together a number of different things under this heading. One of these was the sort of change that occurs when substances form a new substance by chemical combination as distinct from mere mechanical mixture. Most people have seen that sort of change take place in a test tube. When the chemicals are mixed there is a striking change of color or condition. I do not imagine that we need spend long in disposing of the suggestion that social changes are at all like this. For the individuals who make up society do not get fused or transmuted, as in chemical combination, but remain, changed perhaps, but still recognizable, as in mechanical mixtures. And if it be argued that it is organizations, or institutions, that coalesce in this way, then it is clear that they are being metaphorically regarded as substances like sulphuric acid or sodium chloride. The important conception, for our present discussion, is clearly that of a series of gradual quantitative changes terminated by a sudden qualitative leap, as in the cooling of water and its transformation into ice. We have to consider whether there is anything to be gained by applying this notion to the changes that take place in human societies. And it is not without interest that Hegel seems first to have thought of this in connection with human affairs and only later applied it in his reflections about nature. In the Marxist theory, the most important nodal lines are, of course, those that run between one historical epoch and another. If we take technology as basic, we must suppose that a form of technology that is the foundation of a certain social system for a time develops in ways that contain nothing new but are merely variations on a single technological theme; then the economic, political, religious, and other ideological changes that result from this will be of the same gradual, unoriginal sort; next, there is a technological revolution, and instead of another variation there is an absolutely new theme—there is now a new technology imbedded in the old society; new ideologies and a new social system will ultimately follow. What we have to consider is, first, the nature of this technological leap, and secondly, the nature of the social changes that result from it.

That there is a difference between gradual technical improvements and new inventions I am fully persuaded. Once the working of iron, for example, has been introduced, it is natural and not very difficult to foresee the working of other metals. The thing that was not natural, and could not have been foreseen, just was the working of metals. We must distinguish, that is, between routine inventions and creative inventions. The latter are unpredictable though their routine development can be foreseen. No particular invention can be predicted, for to predict it in detail would be to make the invention. But it is often easy to see, in a general way, the directions in which a new invention may be developed. If what is the other side of a nodal line is an unpredictable novelty, then creative inventions are the other side of nodal lines. But not every creative invention starts a new social system. The invention of the wheel seems not to have had this effect, yet it is surely as much of a technological leap as the invention of metal-working. Furthermore, while the invention itself may be described as a leap, its acceptance may well be so gradual as to be describable as a crawl. As the new technology comes to be adopted, the society which adopts it is gradually changed. What is sudden or abrupt, I suggest, is the noticing rather than what is noticed—the new order surprises people because their main concern was with the old things that they were used to rather than with the new thing that was creeping up behind them. If we turn our attention again to the invention itself we may ask whether it is preceded by a series of gradual changes that correspond to the gradual lowering of temperature that precedes the freezing of the water. There does not seem to be any such thing, for the gradual changes are seen in the development of an invention rather than in the preparation for it. It may sometimes happen that a new idea was, as we say, “in the air” for a time before it took definite form, but the analogy between this and the dropping of temperature over continuous degrees is obviously very slight. There is an analogy, however, between this and the gradual increase in size of the workshops in which workmen were employed for wages—the growth of what Stalin calls “large manufactories.” Fairly large factories, it is argued, existed in the pre-capitalist era, but when many of them got beyond a certain size the change of scale was at the same time a change in the nature of the system, and hence quantity has become transformed into quality. But on the face of it this is an example, not of the water-ice transformation, but of the grains-heap or not-bald-bald transformation, which, as I pointed out in Chapter II, involves a decision on our part about how many grains we are going to call a heap, or about how great a lack of hair we are going to call baldness. This does not mean that between not-heap and heap, or between not-bald and bald, there had been a tremendous jump, but only that different words are going to be used for the different sides of an almost invisible division. We are going to call it capitalism when there are a lot of very large workshops—a verbal leap does duty for a factual crawl, and justifiably so because the opposite ends of the crawl are so very different from one another. We can now see one of the reasons for the obscurities in the technological aspects of the Materialist Conception of History. The transition from primitive communism to slave society, and from the earlier phase of capitalism to industrial capitalism, was by means of sudden, unforeseeable inventions, the use of iron and the use of power-driven machinery respectively. The transition from the slave society to feudalism, and from feudalism to the first phase of capitalism, however, was by means of cumulative improvements that at a certain stage suggest a change of name. The expression “transformation of quantity into quality” is used to cover both, and hence is here a source of confusion.

It would be most misleading, of course, to suggest that Marx’s own account of the coming of capitalism is vitiated by this confusion between a qualitative change in the things described and a decision to draw a line between the application of the words “feudalism” and “capitalism.” When we consider his description of how “co-operation,” the first phase of capitalism, came about, we find him saying such things as that the employer of a large number of workmen has more assurance of getting an average performance from them than the employer of only a few, since these few may happen to be unusually stupid or unskillful. Again, he points out that it is likely to be cheaper to provide a single building for a large number of workmen than to provide several separate buildings for small groups of them. He says, furthermore, that when a considerable number of men work together under the same roof, their output may increase because of “emulation” and “a certain stimulation of the animal spirits.”51 Now here are three different reasons for the spread of larger workshops than had hitherto been favored, viz., that the employer of a considerable number of workmen is less dependent on the abilities of any one of them than a small employer is; that it is less costly to construct a large factory for, say, one hundred men, than to construct ten factories each housing ten men; that men working together in large groups feel the urge to work harder than they would work if they were alone or in small groups. How miserably inadequate to this sort of discussion is the “quantity-quality” formula. Here are three different reasons that lead in one direction. The first reason concerns the number of men, regardless of whether they work in a factory or not. The second concerns the costs of building and their effects on the price of what is produced in them. The third concerns an alleged principle of group psychology applied to men who have not yet formed trade unions. There is no single category here, such as temperature, that permits of measurable degrees of increase or decrease, nor is there a single quantity that all three factors move toward—for there is no reason to suppose that the number of men required to avoid having too many useless workmen is anything like the number required to get the most economical building or to stimulate the “animal spirits.” The “quantity-quality” formula gives rise to the misleading picture of feudalism being lowered in degree, unit by unit, until it is replaced by the first unit of capitalism, icy but exhilarating. But the difference between feudalism and capitalism is most dissimilar from the difference between a liquid and a solid, and not very like the difference between the “look” or “form quality” of a number of grains and a heap of grains. It may at first sight appear, to take Hegel’s example, that there is some analogy with the case of the constitution that works well for a small state and then breaks down when the state grows beyond a certain size. But when we look into the matter, we find that the constitution broke down because there was too much work for the officials, or because they failed to adapt themselves to the new jobs they were called upon to do, or because the population lost interest, or for a combination of these and other reasons, just as there were a number of very different reasons, according to Marx, for the development of feudal workshops into capitalist factories. When Hegel put forward this view of a right proportion between population and constitution he was not only influenced by Montesquieu’s explanation of the decline of Rome, but was concerned to show that there was a degree of truth in Pythagoras’s theory that “things are numbers.” The social theorist is not bound to accept such speculations.

So much, then, for the main metaphysical notions involved in the Materialist Conception of History. We must now turn to the most important part of the theory, the part that comprises the Marxist analysis of society. Certain of the conceptions used by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin are common to Marxism and to non-Marxist social theory, and I need not, therefore, discuss them here. But basic and essential in the Marxist analysis are the notions of “productive forces,” and “productive relationships,” which together constitute “the material conditions of life.” If these are coherent conceptions, then the theory may still be coherent in its main outlines, but if they are not, then the Materialist Conception of History cannot be coherent. Now I have already shown very briefly what is meant by these terms, basing my interpretation on the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (the most frequently quoted text) and on Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. The distinction between the “productive forces” and “productive relationships” is also drawn, though not always in the same words, in the early pages of The German Ideology, and the following passages from the Communist Manifesto are of importance: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” The bourgeois productive forces are listed as “. . . subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground.” Unfortunately, in no passage known to me is the distinction between productive forces and productive relationships illustrated by detailed examples, and I must therefore make my own attempt to repair this omission, and develop my criticisms in doing so.

Now a relationship between a number of different men is involved in the use of most large tools and machines. A fishing vessel, for example, needs several men to operate it, and we should therefore be prepared to say that the vessel itself is a productive force, and that the relations of its crew to one another as helmsman, cabin boy, crew, and captain, are productive relationships. It might be said that this does not hold for small tools, since, for example, an individual can make and use a spade all on his own. This objection, however, is what Marx called a “Robinsonade.” Just as, on his view, there are no isolated hunters or fishers, so there are no isolated agriculturalists. Unless the man with the spade could expect that the land he was digging would be left alone for the crops to grow, there would be no point in his digging. Although his fellow men may not be physically present when he digs, his behavior is part of a system of social relationships in which he, as an individual, is playing a recognized part. He and the people who do not trample down his crops are co-operating, though not so obviously, just as the cabin boy and helmsman are.

The examples of the fishing vessel and the spade may be used to call attention to yet a further element in the notion of productive relationships. If we suppose that the fish and the agricultural produce in question are not merely consumed by the families of the actual producers but are exchanged or sold, then the men who fish and the men who dig are in fact involved in still wider relationships. For their work is done largely with a view to supplying other people with what they want, and getting from these other people things other than fish and farm produce. We see, therefore, that there are three main types of productive relationships: (a) those involved in the very operation of the instruments of production (e.g., steering a ship while someone else looks after the sails); (b) those wider relationships that grow up in order to allow production to go on without interruption (e.g., the explicit or tacit agreement that land that has been dug shall not be trampled); (c) the economic relationships that exist when the objects produced are commodities for exchange (e.g., the fisherman throws away, or consumes himself, some sorts of fish he knows he will not be able to sell). If only (a) were in view, the theory could hardly be called anything but the Technological Theory of History, but with (c) in mind it is natural to think of it as an economic theory of history. A mingling of all three may be seen in the following passage from the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy: “The aggregate of these productive relationships constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of the material means of existence conditions the whole process of social, political, and intellectual life.”

The passage quoted above from the Communist Manifesto appears to stress the technological element of the theory, for the bourgeoisie are represented as “revolutionizing” the relations of production as a result of “revolutionizing” the instruments of production. What does such a view amount to? We can best decide, I suggest, if we consider in turn what connections there are between changes in the instruments of production on the one hand, and those sorts of productive relationship that we have labeled (a), (b), and (c).

It seems to me that to say that changes in productive forces bring about changes in productive relationships in sense (a) is to utter a sort of tautology. Let us imagine a society of fishermen who fish from small canoes each of which is paddled by one man. The productive forces are the men paddling their individual canoes, and individually fishing from them. The productive relationships are their putting to sea individually and working as independent individuals. Now let us suppose that someone invents and constructs a large sailing vessel. This will be a new sort of productive force. But it will bring with it a change in the productive relationships, for the new craft will require someone to man the sails, someone to steer, and perhaps several men to cast large nets. Now in what way does the new invention bring with it new productive relationships in sense (a)? It seems to me that in talking of the new invention we are talking of new job-relationships. In designing the large sailing vessel, the inventor was also arranging for new functions to be performed. What he invents is not only a new physical structure, but also the system of working it. Vessel and crew, contrivance and workmen, are elements in a single design. In designing the fabric the inventor has also designed the working functions. His invention is a new division of labor. When, therefore, it is said that any considerable changes in productive forces must bring about changes in productive relationships, and when “productive relationships” is understood in sense (a), the “must” indicates a tautology, for new machines are not merely differently constructed machines but machines that have to be worked in new ways. I do not call this proposition a tautology in order to disparage it, for it is often a most important thing to bring tautologies to light, and I think that the present one is by no means unilluminating. What we have to beware about with tautologies, however, is the tendency to transfer the certainty that they possess to other propositions that are not tautologies at all. That this has happened in the Materialist Conception of History I hope to show in a moment. First, however, let us give the name “technological relationships” to productive relationships in sense (a).52

Suppose, then, we understand “productive relationships” in sense (b), in the sense of wider relationships than those involved in actually operating the tools or machines but necessary if they are to be worked at all. Let us call such relationships “para-technological relationships.” It is easy to see in general what these are. No one would dig if the crops were constantly trampled down; no one would take a trawler to sea if it were liable to be taken from him. If the instruments of production are to be operated at all, there must be rules about who operates them and what happens to them when they are not being operated. There must be some law or custom of property. One way of settling these matters would be to have private property in land and trawlers, and this, according to Marxists, involves a division into classes, classes, according to Lenin being divisions among men arising from their different relations to the instruments of production. On this interpretation, then, the Materialist Conception of History is the theory that corresponding to each main type of productive forces there is a set of property relations and class divisions, and that important changes in the former are necessarily followed, sooner or later, by important changes in the latter. (We must emphasize “sooner or later,” for it is an important part of the theory that for a time the old productive relationships can linger on, hampering the new methods of production.) What sort of connection is this, between the productive forces and the para-technological relationships? Not the same sort of connection as that between the productive forces and the technological relationships. That sort of connection, it will be remembered, was simply that a change in the form of a tool or machine is at the same time a change in the form of the jobs performed by the men who use it. Hence it could not possibly be the case that the new type of machine was being used and the old type of productive relationships survived. But when “productive relationships” is understood in the sense of para-technological relationships, it is expressly maintained that old para-technological relationships can, for a time, exist alongside the new productive forces. On the face of it, therefore, the connection between productive forces and para-technological relationships is a fairly loose one. There are many conceivable ways, for example, in which the newly invented vessel might be guarded between voyages or controlled in the course of them, but on the Marxist view, although there are many logical possibilities, only one of them is in fact possible at any given time. If a sufficiently important change is made in the forces of production, there is only one way of dealing with the resultant indirect problems of social organization that could in fact be adopted in the long run—once the new productive forces have been set in motion, there is only one possible way open for dealing with their indirect effects.

I have not been able to find in the writings of leading Marxists any reason for this social fatalism, but from what has already been said, it is easy to see how they came to adopt it. For it is easy to see how the constraining necessity that holds between productive forces and technological relationships should be transferred in thought to para-technological relationships also. The notion of “productive relationships” is left vague, and the devil of confusion enters in and confounds two different forms of it. And a further confusion arises as follows. When agriculture was first introduced, the hunting or pastoral people who had discovered it must have had to devise some land regulations that would enable cultivation to go on unhindered. A modern example is the need for new sorts of international treaty when aircraft comes to be widely used. Nomads need no land law, and earth-bound people need no air law. Failure to develop a land law or air law would have prevented the development of agriculture or air travel. In the absence of suitable para-technological arrangements, the technological innovations would have been nothing but ingenious dreams. Luck might have preserved a season’s crops or enabled the aircraft to make some flights, but as agriculture or aviation were pursued more persistently, either chaos would have ensued or else some para-technological rules would have had to be accepted. These rules, of course, need not have been promulgated by anyone, but may just have “grown” in the course of action. To say, therefore, that agriculture and aviation flourish is to imply that suitable para-technological rules have been adopted. Looking at the matter retrospectively we see that the para-technological relationships “had to be,” since those things exist that could not have existed without them. But before they were adopted it was by no means certain that they would be. Furthermore, all sorts of possible para-technological relationships are consistent with any given type of productive force—all sorts of systems of land-tenure, for example, with the early techniques of agriculture—so that there is no justification for supposing that those actually adopted were necessarily adopted.

Before we consider productive relationships of type (c), there is an important point to notice that arises from what we have just said. For it has now become apparent that para-technological relationships comprise moral, customary, and legal ones, and that therefore law and morals cannot properly be regarded as superstructures. Our previous examples serve to illustrate this. If a hunting people become agriculturalists, the land and its preservation, ipso facto, acquire a new importance. Rules for allowing or preventing access to the land are necessary. Conduct that had previously been permissible is now frowned on or prohibited. Trespassing is a new crime, respecting one’s neighbor’s landmark a new virtue. New sorts of disputes arise between agriculturalists and hunters—there are still farmers who resent the hunting pack—and between agriculturalists themselves. These new types of dispute will require new types of judgment, and these will have to be enforced. Hence, productive relationships, in the sense of para-technological relationships, are moral, legal, and political. The Marxist scheme is of a material basis comprising productive forces and productive relationships, of a legal and political superstructure forming the next layer, and of an ideological superstructure, comprising morals, as well as religion, art, and philosophy, at the very top. We now see, however, that an analysis of the Marxist distinctions uncovers moral and legal and political relationships as aspects of the productive relationships themselves, and hence as aspects of the material basis of society. Since the theory itself is thus confused, attempts to verify it are like trying to carry water in a sieve.

We now come to the third type of productive relationship, the type involved when what is produced is produced for barter or sale. As I mentioned earlier, it is this type that sometimes secures for the whole Marxist complex of “material conditions of life” the epithet “economic.” Let us call such relationships “market relationships.” Then according to the Materialist Conception of History important technological changes bring with them important changes in market relationships. This view is obviously correct. When goods are exchanged, improved means of producing them may lead to their becoming cheaper, to their producers making a higher profit, or to both. In terms of people this means that more people enjoy more of the goods in question, that some producers are able to enjoy more other things than they could before, or both. The technological changes have changed people’s lives. The extent of such changes becomes even more apparent if the technological innovation is a means for producing a type of commodity, such as a television set, that had not existed before. A new activity of living has then been introduced. But it is equally obvious that market considerations influence the course of technological change. In a society where money is used, the producers aim at producing more or different goods partly because they think that the goods would be bought if produced. This, surely, is an influence of market relationships, via men’s conception of them, on the productive forces. Once there is production for sale, then the producers’ estimates of what the buyers want will influence the producers’ thought about their tools and machines. Productive forces on the one hand, therefore, and productive relationships of type (c) on the other hand, are distinguishable in thought, but are not so distinguished from one another in fact as to permit observations to be made, in societies where money is used, of productive forces that are not also elements in productive (i.e., market) relationships.

This brings us to a further fatal weakness of the Materialist Conception of History as a theory for which the support of factual evidence is claimed. The theory concerns the relationship of various social elements to one another. These elements are: productive forces, productive relationships, a political and legal superstructure,53 and an ideological superstructure. The theory is that the productive forces are the prime causal agency. If there is to be evidence for such a theory, the elements must not only be distinguishable in thought, but must be met with apart from one another. Or alternatively, if they cannot be found, each of them, in a pure state, it must be possible to assess the influence of each by some sort of statistical device, as psychologists have endeavored to do with certain factors of the mind. For if the elements are never found apart, and if there are no means of separating them out statistically, there is no means of deciding whether the theory is true or false. The elements of the Materialist Conception of History are distinguishable neither in thought nor in fact. We have already shown that men using their instruments of production are men in social relations with one another. It is not a case of men using their productive instruments and of this causing social relations between them, as though there could first be something purely technological and then something social. Perhaps the use of the word “material” in the expression “material conditions of life” has led people to think of productive instruments as purely physical things, like rocks or rivers, the purely physical changes of which produce social changes. Marx himself, before his dogmas took possession of him, had no such idea, but emphasized how tools and machines are socially inherited. We may refer to his letter of December 28, 1846, to P. V. Annenkov, in which he says that society is “the product of man’s reciprocal activity” and mentions “the productive forces won by the previous generation.” But if the instruments of production are like that, then it is not possible to say: “Here is a purely technological, productive, material change that is the cause of those social changes.” For the technological is not really distinguishable, even in thought, from the social, nor production from co-operation. In their early days, again, Marx and Engels saw this very clearly when they wrote: “It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a ‘productive force.’”54 Our analysis of the notion of “productive relationship” has shown that this involves law, morals, and politics, and we can see that it is not fanciful to regard them as parts of the means of production. For good laws, good morals, and good government can help production, as bad laws, bad morals, and bad government can hinder it. The “material or economic basis” of society is not, therefore, something that can be clearly conceived, still less observed, apart from the legal, moral, and political relationships of men. Since this is so, there is no definite hypothesis to which evidence is relevant, and this is why discussion of the Marxist theory of history is apt to become a futile beating of the air. I venture to suggest that it is a merit of the analysis I have given of the Materialist Conception of History, that it serves to explain why that theory has seemed so obviously true to so many well-informed and intelligent people. It has seemed obviously true because of the tautologies concealed in the language in which the theory is formulated. The theory gives the appearance of being based on facts, and of being subject to the verdict of facts in the way that, say, Boyle’s Law is. On the one hand, the theory seems to say, there are productive forces, and on the other there are productive relationships which carry, poised one on top of the other, like the baskets of a Billingsgate porter, political and legal relationships and ideologies. Analysis of what is being said, however, shows that the porter is not separable from the baskets, and the baskets are not separable from one another, so that what had seemed a wonderful feat of balancing turns out to be as commonplace as walking with one’s head on one’s shoulders.

I will conclude this critical discussion of the Materialist Conception of History with a few comments on the third aspect of it, the division of history into epochs. As this is a part of Marxism that Professor Popper has dealt with very fully in his Open Society and Its Enemies under the title of “historicism,” I shall only make some brief remarks of my own.

(1) I have already pointed out that it is natural enough to compare the Marxist series of epochs with the series of geological strata. Indeed, the early writers on geology regarded themselves as a sort of historian. Thus the subtitle of Leibniz’s Protogaea refers to “the first appearance of the earth and the traces of its most ancient history in the very monuments of nature.” In the eighteenth century, fossils were compared with coins discovered in ancient ruins from which their date and origin may sometimes be re-constructed. (Sunt instar nummorum memoralium quae de praeteritis globi nostri fatis testantur, ubi omnia silent monumenta historica.) The phrase “medal of creation,” used, I believe, in the Bridgewater Treatises, illustrates this view. Geology, we might say, is the most historical of the natural sciences. But its full success is due to the existence of other, non-historical, natural sciences. Fossils provide the information they do largely because of what biologists have discovered. Chemistry and physics make their essential contributions to the geological accounts of rock strata and their relations to one another. If these other sciences could not be brought to its aid, geology would not be an explanatory science at all but a mere chronicle. Now if I am right in arguing that the fundamental conceptions of the Marxist theory of society are incoherent, then they are incapable of bringing the sort of order into the events of human history that has been achieved for the physical development of the earth and of the living beings on it.

(2) When Marx and Engels began their careers, geology was already attracting the attention of the intellectual world. In the Paris Manuscripts Marx writes that geognosis, as he calls it, makes it unnecessary to appeal to creation to account for the development of the earth and of animal species.55 His archaeological references in Capital, volume 1, show how he was influenced by the geological analogy. “The relics of the instruments of labor,” he writes, “are of no less importance to the study of vanished socio-economic forms, than fossil bones are in the study of the organization of extinct species.”56 In itself this observation is valuable, but I think it is important to see that the analogy of geological with historical epochs can be most misleading. (a) Clearly there is an analogy between geology and archaeology. With geology there are two definite sets of data, fossils of a certain type and rocks of a certain composition. It is thus possible to ascertain which fossils are found in which rocks, and thus to date the appearance of various types of living being. With archaeology there are also two sets of data, tools, buildings, or ornaments of a certain type, and soil at certain depths, though this last is not nearly as definite as are the different sorts of rock. Still, it is possible to say such things as that paleolithic remains are likely to be found at lower levels than neolithic remains. It is possible that remains of our own civilization will be dated by future archaeologists in terms of their depth in the soil or even in terms of the type of soil they are found in. Now the method of correlating types of life with certain sorts of rock may well exaggerate the definiteness of the break between one pre-human epoch and another, since in some cases at any rate the division between one epoch and another was not as abrupt as the division between one stratum and another. The strata are our means of discovering about the epochs, not the epochs themselves. But however this may be with geological epochs, epochs of human history certainly should not be regarded as so definitely delimited one from another. Even archaeology does not present us with a series of earth strata to correlate with types of tool, and when we come to consider the living civilizations themselves there are no clear-cut divisions in them that we can associate with types of tool. Of course, someone might decide to distinguish historical epochs from one another by the type of tool used in them, but this would be like defining geological strata in terms of the fossils found in them instead of finding a correlation between fossils of a certain type and strata of a certain composition. And we could also decide to distinguish historical epochs in terms of religions or of political organizations. We distinguish pre-historic periods in terms of material objects such as tools because they are all we have to go on. (b) This brings us to a different but associated point. We know that, once the various geological epochs have been distinguished from one another, they will remain so distinguished for all time unless there is an enormous unnoticed mistake in the theory. It has been established as well as anything of the sort can be that the earth has passed through such and such phases of development. But it is difficult to believe that the epochs of human history distinguished at one time will be the same as those to be distinguished later on, even though the earlier historians had not made any enormous unnoticed mistake. There are two main reasons for this. One is that new sorts of knowledge develop that enable us to look back on the past with new eyes. There is no doubt, for example, that the development of economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a fruitful re-examination of the past. The Reformation, and the Puritan Revolution, for example, can now be seen differently and more perspicuously than before. I have no doubt that future scientific developments will have similar effects, and that such re-assessments could only cease if knowledge ceased to grow. But it is not only the growth of science that will lead to constant re-assessment. As one event succeeds another, we are able to use more and more recent experiences to throw light on earlier events. For example, the taking of the Bastille, the September Massacres, the Committee of Public Safety, present a very different appearance when seen as steps toward Napoleon and nineteenth-century demagogic nationalism, from that presented even to the coolest and most rational observer in 1796. As the stream of history is prolonged new vantage points are constantly set up from which its higher reaches can be the better surveyed. A fixed series of historical epochs could only be established and believed in by a people whose science had stopped developing and whose experience was atrophied. To use Marxist jargon against the Marxist view, the theory that there is a series of definite epochs of mankind is unprogressive and undialectical.

(3) The Marxist theory of epochs is not only an account of the past, but is also, and mainly, a prediction of the end of capitalism and of the coming of communism. Now it is important to notice at this stage that there are certain sorts of prediction of human affairs that could not possibly be made. These are, to make a rough list, predictions of what I have called creative inventions, of new scientific discoveries, of new social devices and techniques, of new religions, and of new forms of art. It is particularly important that the student of Marxism should be aware that creative inventions and scientific theories cannot be predicted, since science and technology are regarded by Marxists as fundamental features of society. If the rest of society depends on technology and science, and if the future of them is not predictable, then the future of society as a whole is not predictable. Now we have seen that it is possible to say, with good reason, that a certain sort of invention is likely to be made—for example, that there will soon be color television. What is not possible is the prediction of a radically new invention, for to predict such an invention would be to make it. Mother Shipton is said to have predicted airplanes, and Erasmus Darwin mentioned them in a well-known poem. But such unfounded and vague speculations do not deserve to be called predictions. What a queer thing science would be if hypotheses and formulae flashed into the minds of scientists and were then verified or falsified by reference to facts. It is not just prediction that makes science, but rational prediction, and science itself, as well as technology, is only in part subject to rational prediction. There is often good reason to say that further members of a certain range of problem, earlier members of which have already been solved, will be solved before very long, but it is never possible to do more than this. If we could specify the scientific discovery, we should have made it.57 This holds, too, of such social devices as joint-stock companies and life insurance. That it holds also of types of religion and art is, after what has been said, obvious. Indeed, it was in connection with such matters that the principle was first enunciated, in rather vague terms, in the nineteenth century, by such writers as J. A. Froude and F. H. Bradley. Froude, for example, in his lecture on the “Science of History,” given at the Royal Institution on 5 February 1864, said: “Well, then, let us take some general phenomenon, Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. These are large enough. Can you imagine a science which would have foretold such movements as those?”58 In all such fields an act of creation is achieved from time to time. When it has happened, we can sometimes see how it has come about, but the signs that are afterward seen to lead toward it are not signs at all before it happened. When Marxists speak of “leaps” in history, they ought to mean something like this. But when they suppose they can predict the future of society as a whole, they have abandoned this view for a “scientism” that is incompatible with it. Rational prediction would be possible of a whole society only if it was no longer progressing. “For a people only in the period of their stagnation,” writes Bradley, “for a person only when the character and the station have become fixed for ever, and when the man is made, is it possible to foreknow the truth of the fresh achievement; and where progress has its full meaning, and evolution is more than a phrase, there the present is hard, and the future impossible to discover.”59

5.

The Ideological Superstructure

We have seen in Section 2 of this chapter that Marx and Engels used the word “ideology” for false conceptions of the world which men come to adopt for reasons they themselves are unaware of. We have seen further that Marx distinguished legal, political, moral (or ethical), artistic, religious, theological, and philosophical ideologies, and contrasted ideological thinking with thinking that can be “faithfully substantiated in the manner of the natural sciences.” It will thus be seen that it is not a valid objection to Marxism to argue, as is often done, that Marxism makes science an ideology and therefore, in claiming scientific status, stultifies its own position. We have now considered, in outline, the view of society which Marx, Engels, and Stalin believed was thus “substantiated in the manner of the natural sciences,” and we must now return to consider somewhat more carefully the Marxist notion of an ideology.

A first point to notice is that the list of ideologies must have been suggested by the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel regarded morality, law, and politics as aspects of the State, and the State he regarded as Spirit manifesting itself as freedom, and as the highest form of “objective spirit.” It was not his view, however, that the State was the highest manifestation of Spirit altogether. He held that other, and higher, manifestations of it were art, revealed religion, and philosophy, philosophy being the rational working out of what in revealed religion is still not fully conscious of itself.60 It will be seen, therefore, that, whereas in Marx’s system the legal and political ideologies are closer to “the material conditions of life,” i.e., to social reality, than art, religion, and philosophy are, in Hegel’s system art, religion, and philosophy are closer to the reality of Absolute Spirit than law and politics are. It was with these views in mind that Marx attempted to show that law and politics distort the real less than art, religion, and philosophy do, and that his social science of industry and warring classes, being faithfully substantiated in the manner of the natural sciences, does not distort the real at all. Furthermore, the Materialist Conception of History, since it is thus scientifically established, is, he believed, more than a mere theory—it is a step in the transformation of society, just as natural science is a practical activity of controlling nature. This follows from the view that science is a union of theory and practice. Since the Materialist Conception of History is a science, Socialism is a science, and science is something practical.

A further point to notice is that Marx and Engels applied the term “ideology” to systems of ideas, outlooks, or theories. Ideologies, in their view, are more or less misleading conceptions of the world. Religious and philosophical ideologies, i.e., theology and metaphysics, distort our view of nature as a whole, including society, and ethical, legal, and political ideologies distort our view of society. What artistic ideologies are, and what they distort, is not made clear in the works that Marx published.61 But we still need to consider what sorts of systems of ideas these ideologies are. Are the moral, legal, and political ideologies, for example, such practical systems as the Christian or Buddhist ethics, Roman or English law, or the political outlooks of Toryism and Liberalism? Or are they philosophical systems of morals, law, and politics, such as Utilitarianism or Intuitionism, Neo-Kantian jurisprudence, and the Idealist theory of the State? I think that both sorts of system were regarded by Marx and Engels as ideologies, and that the various philosophies of morals, law, and politics were not usually classed as elements of the philosophical ideology, but were associated with their respective subject-matters. An example of this may be seen in Engels’ letter to Conrad Schmidt of October 27, 1890, where he writes: “The reflection of economic relations as legal principles is necessarily also a topsy-turvy one: it happens without the person who is acting being conscious of it; the jurist imagines he is operating with a priori principles whereas they are really only economic reflexes.” A practicing lawyer, I imagine, does not often consider whether or not the legal principles he uses are a priori. That is the sort of problem that might occur to a philosophizing lawyer. Hence it seems that “jurist” here refers to philosophers of law, unless, indeed, Engels means that lawyers regard the law they practice as having an authority like that of logic or arithmetic and as being fixed like them, and, like them, quite distinct from the economic life of their society. This, surely, could not have been the case in Engels’ day, since the law was then constantly being changed, and a very large part of it, as always, related to industry and trade. Lawyers of all people, I should have thought, must always have been well aware of the importance that people attach to money and property.

However this may be, the Marxist view, so far as one view can be extracted from the texts, is that both systems and philosophies of morals, law, and politics, and religious systems, and theology, and philosophy itself, are or involve systems of ideas that represent in a distorted form the real things they purport to relate to, the distortions resulting from the social situation of their framers and concealing from them what is really going on. People who accept systems of ideas like the Christian morality, Ethical Intuitionism, the law of their country, Toryism, Liberalism, the theory of sovereignty or of political pluralism, Platonism, Idealism, etc., do not know what they are really doing. They are all, in varying degrees, deceived. The Christian thinks he is trying to worship God and serve his fellow men, whereas in actual fact he is helping to perpetuate those false views of the world that make it easier for the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat. The Ethical Intuitionist—the philosopher, that is, who holds that there is a quasi-mathematical knowledge of moral principles—thinks he is showing precisely what ethical judgments are, but really he is arguing for the retention of the current morality and for the continuing supremacy of the class that it favors. Tories or Liberals, thinking they hold their political principles because they believe them to be for the good of their country, really hold them as a result of the unconscious promptings of their class interests. Platonist and Idealist philosophers believe that they have followed the argument whithersoever it led, but in fact their philosophies are thinly disguised theologies, theologies are justifications of irrationally accepted religious practices, and religious practices, with their “fanes of fruitless prayer,” are futile gesturings arising from illusory hopes. Feuerbach had thought that if religious illusions were exposed by means of “anthropology” they would lose their attraction and shrivel up. Those psychiatrists who suppose that the neurotic’s self-knowledge may cure his neurosis have had a similar idea. Marx did not suppose that ideologies would disappear once their adherents had seen through them, if “seeing through” is taken in the ordinary sense that would distinguish it from practical activity.

With this in mind, then, let us consider, in a way that Marx does not, some of the principal ways in which men might be related to their ideologies. In the first place, we have to distinguish between (a) those believers in an ideology who belong to an exploited class whose interests the ideology does not serve, and (b) those believers in the ideology who belong to classes whose sectional interests are both marked and promoted by it. On the assumption that most people are more than ready to accept points of view which harmonize with what they believe are their interests, we may suppose that believers of type (a) will tend to abandon their ideology if they come to think that it is a means of exploiting them. For, it can be argued, they have no strong vital urge for holding it, but have only come to accept it as part of the stock of ideas of their class-divided society. I suppose a Marxist would hold that because their interests incline them that way, believers of type (b) are unlikely ever to see through it. Our deep-rooted desires cunningly keep us from thinking thoughts that are too dangerous. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels were certainly members of the class that they called the exploiting class, so that it has to be admitted that sometimes people can see through an ideology from which they might expect to profit. It would seem that exploiters who have seen through the exploiting ideology have two main courses open to them: either to renounce their origin and attach themselves to the proletariat, or to uphold their sectional interests consciously, by not attacking or by actually promoting ideas they no longer believe in themselves, much as a wealthy atheist might give financial support to a church which he thought helped to maintain public order. When Marxists accuse their opponents of hypocrisy (perhaps “deceit” would be a better word), it is some such conduct they have in mind. But in so far as, on the Marxist view, science is a union of theory and practice and Marxism is a scientific view of society, no one who does not actively promote the proletarian cause has succeeded in gaining a scientific understanding of society. If the criterion of practice be insisted on, therefore, only those members of the bourgeois class who actually work for the Communist Party can claim to have seen through an ideology scientifically, “in the manner of the natural sciences.” In this way the Marxist is enabled to argue that no one who does not work on behalf of the Marxist Communist parties can really understand what Marxism is. Once more the similarity with Pascal’s advice to learn to be a Christian by going to Mass is obvious.

Earlier in this chapter I distinguished between the politico-legal superstructure and the ideological superstructure. This is in accordance with Marx’s account of the matter in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. In that same Preface, however, he speaks of legal and political ideologies, and I have not so far considered this apparent discrepancy. Is it merely that terminology was not tidied up, or is there some fundamental confusion? In my opinion the latter is the case, and the confusion is the same as the one we exposed in the previous section. No doubt Marx was drawing a distinction between legal and political behavior and legal and political theories. Legal and political behavior was superstructural by comparison with “economic” behavior, but legal and political theories were superstructural by comparison with legal and political behavior as well as by comparison with “economic” behavior. Now we have already argued that there is no such thing as purely “economic” behavior, but that moral, as well as legal (or quasi-legal) and political factors are involved in production and exchange. It is now necessary to point out that, in saying this, we are saying that moral, legal, and political ideas, outlooks, theories, are involved in production and exchange, for moral, legal, and political behavior is conscious behavior that requires thought and talk. A man’s conduct is right or wrong in terms of some system of moral assessment that guides his conduct; lawyers are occupied all their working lives with the interpretation of legal principles; and even the most unprincipled political adventurer is aware that there are various systems of political ideals that he must take account of. All conscious human action is in terms of standards and principles of some sort, however dimly conceived they may be. When Engels quoted the aphorism: “In the beginning was the deed,” he should have added that the deeds of men, unlike those of the beasts, are conceived in, and sometimes perpetuated by, words. Thus, the distinction between the politico-legal superstructure and the relevant ideological superstructure can only be a distinction between behavior in which ideas and theories are neither explicit nor the prime object of attention, and explicit theorizing about such behavior.

We now come to a matter which leads on to the subject of the next chapter. It will be remembered that in the first section of the present chapter I showed that the Materialist Conception of History was meant to be an anti-metaphysical theory based on the evidence of our senses. The facts and “needs” revealed by our senses were, as we have seen, to be examined “in the manner of the natural sciences.” Now it is commonly supposed that one important characteristic of the method of the natural sciences is to be free from any preconceptions about the value, the goodness or badness, the perfection or defect, of what is being investigated. At one time the heavenly bodies were regarded as divine or quasi-divine beings whose special essence (or “quintessence,” as it was called) rendered them superior to the things here below. One of Galileo’s many contributions to experimental science was to apply to the movements of earthly bodies mathematical principles which had previously been regarded as specially applicable to the moon, sun, and other planets. Under his inspiration physics ceased to distinguish between grades or orders of being, and became, as it is put today, “value-free.” It is natural, therefore, for anyone who aspires to be the Galileo of the social sciences, to suppose that they, like the natural sciences, must be value-free. In the generation after Galileo, Spinoza was already making this demand. In our own day we are told, in the same spirit, that there must be no preconceptions about what people ought to want, or how they ought to act, but they must be studied to ascertain what they do want and how they do act. In this spirit, therefore, the material or economic basis of human society is human behavior as revealed to observers who seek to find out how people in fact desire, behave, and believe. Ideological thinking, part of which is moral thinking, is always the outcome of the thinker’s wishes and interests, however much disguised they may be. The scientific thinking, however, to which Marxists aspire, would be undisturbed by such extraneous factors, and would seek to discover how society works in order to predict what it will become. Adherents of ideologies are, on this view, people who, because of their class situation, have failed to free themselves from emotional hindrances to scientific observation. The scientific observer of society, through his microscope of Historical Materialism, sees such people as they really are—as people whose view of both physical and social reality is distorted by their wishes and interests. The Materialist Conception of History, it is held, is not just another new view, but is the view which corrects and explains all other views, and differs from them in that, as scientific, it is not influenced by sectional prejudices. As a scientific theory of how things in fact happen, it claims to call the moral bluffs of mankind by showing how moral outlooks depend on class interests. At the same time, as a genuine scientific theory in which theory and practice are combined, it claims to provide a practical solution to our social difficulties. We must now consider the details of these remarkable claims.

II

Marxist Ethics

1.

Marxist Social Science as a Form of Social Regeneration

It is well known that one of the problems that nineteenth-century thinkers found most disturbing was that as natural science developed it appeared to overthrow religion and morality by demonstrating the subjection of mankind to a natural order of things where strife ruled and the weak were thrust aside. Thus Tennyson asked whether the conclusion to be drawn from geology was that man

Who loved, who suffered countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or sealed within the iron hills?

About the same time Clough wrote:

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
As of the unjust, also of the just—
Yea, of that Just One too!
This is the one sad Gospel that is true—
Christ is not risen.

Clough remained perpetually in a somewhat distressed unbelief, but Tennyson thought that scientific knowledge could be supplemented by a higher wisdom in which love and faith were comprised. What is mere knowledge, he asked

cut from love and faith,
But some wild Pallas from the brain
Of Demons? fiery hot to burst
All barriers in her onward race
For power.

Comte and his followers thought they could meet the situation by finding both religion and morality, faith and love, in science itself. Humanity replaced God as an object of worship, the earth became the Great Fetish, and honesty, patience, disinterestedness, and justice were held to be virtues inseparable from the pursuit of scientific truth. Comte, indeed, argued that in the last resort all science was absorbed into sociology, the science of society, and that sociology was at the same time a complete code of morals.

I have already shown, in Section 1 of the previous chapter, that in 1844 Marx, too, had played with the idea of a social knowledge which, in becoming scientific like the natural sciences, would “subordinate them to itself.” But the main line of argument used by Marxists is that just as natural science is the progressive mastery of nature by man, so social science is man’s mastery over his social conditions. There is a sort of Promethean pride about this view, and it is worth noting that at the end of the preface to his Doctoral Dissertation Marx had written: “Prometheus is the chief saint and martyr of the philosophical calendar.”1

In presenting this view, Stalin writes: “Hence the science of the history of society, despite all the complexity of the phenomena of social life, can become as precise a science as, let us say, biology, as capable of making use of the laws of development of society for practical purposes. Hence the party of the proletariat should not guide itself in its practical activity by casual motives, but by the laws of development of society, and by practical deductions from these laws. Hence Socialism is converted from a dream of a better future for humanity into a science. Hence the bond between science and practical activity, between theory and practice, their unity, should be the guiding star of the party of the proletariat.”2 Many years before, he had written, in his Anarchism or Communism, “Proletarian Socialism is based not on sentiment, not on abstract ‘justice,’ not on love for the proletariat, but on the scientific grounds quoted above.”3 Engels had written in the Anti-Dühring that the earlier socialism criticized the existing capitalist mode of production and its consequences, but could not explain them, and hence “could not get the mastery over them; it could only simply reject them as evil.”4 And he went on to say that with the “discovery” of the Materialist Conception of History and the Theory of Surplus Value “socialism became a science. . . .” Some such view appears to be expressed, though not very clearly, in the eighth of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, where he writes: “All social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which urge theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” The following passage, however, from Marx’s Preface to the first edition of Capital, volume 1, is somewhat clearer. “When a society has discovered the natural laws which regulate its own movement (and the final purpose of my book is to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society), it can neither overleap the natural phases of evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by decrees. But this much, at least, it can do; it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.”

Tennyson, we have seen, thought that the pursuit of science apart from moral considerations necessarily became a pursuit of power. I am not sure that this is so, since a man of science might desire knowledge itself quite apart from the power it brought him. But on the Marxist view of science as a union of theory and practice, natural science just is power over nature, and social science just is power over society. Engels’ word “mastery” is significant. The science that is theory and practice combined is power over, mastery or control of, nature and society, and as such is held to be good. The obvious objection to this is that control over nature and society may be good or bad according to the use that is made of it. The chemical knowledge that enables disease to be cured may also enable enemies to be poisoned, and knowledge of social mechanisms may be used by some only all too enlightened despot for purposes of enslavement. Why did Marx admire Prometheus? For his defiance of the gods? This could only be good if there were gods and they were bad. For his courage? Courage can be exercised in a bad cause, as the career of Dr. Goebbels shows. For his power of invention? Certainly, knowledge and ingenuity cannot fail to evoke our admiration, as do the gait of a tiger and the marking of a snake, but as these examples show, admiration is no proof of the moral excellence of its object. Perhaps, then, he admired Prometheus as a benefactor of mankind. If so, it would seem that the cause of his admiration was that Prometheus courageously defied the envious gods and suffered for it in the service of mankind. The intelligence and inventiveness that enabled him to bring fire to the earth would, unless they had been used for the benefit of others, have had no more moral significance than the song of a bird. That mastery of nature does not, in itself, connote any desirable moral qualities, is recognized in the modern mythology of demon scientists such as Professor Moriarty and Doctor Moreau. The superiority over physical nature and the animal world that man shows in his intelligence and skill is not, in itself, morally desirable. This I take to be the defensible element in Rousseau’s criticisms of civilization.

The Marxist, no doubt, will attempt to meet this difficulty in the following manner. As science and industry develop, he will argue, man too develops morally, for in developing his technology he necessarily changes his productive relationships, and with them his law, politics, and ideologies; morals, therefore, as ideology, are linked with science and industry. It should be observed, however, in answer to this argument, that according to Marxism the development of technology (i.e., of science and industry) is basic and real, whereas the development of ideologies, including the moral one, is nothing but a shadowy transformation of one illusion into another. The argument provides no means of passing, therefore, from the practice of science and industry to a non-illusory moral outlook. The Marxist is bound to the dogma that morality is parasitical on science and industry, though the non-Marxist will readily admit that science and industry, being human activities, are subject to moral assessment as all human activities are, and cannot themselves provide the standards in terms of which they may all be judged.

Let us now consider somewhat more closely Marx’s contention that a knowledge of Marxist social science enables us to know that certain events—notably, the proletarian revolution—are bound to happen, and that when we know this we can use our knowledge to make their coming less unpleasant than it otherwise would have been (“to shorten and lessen the birth-pangs”). There is clearly a comparison with the way in which science can help us to soften the impact of physical disasters. We must all die, but with the help of medical science we can defer death and lessen its pains. We cannot abolish hurricanes, but meteorologists can forecast them, and we can strengthen our houses accordingly. We foresee death and storm, and make use of science to go through with them as comfortably as may be. This, clearly, is the analogy that Marx is working with. Capitalism will break down, the proletarian revolution will come, and, armed with this foreknowledge, we can make the interim less miserable than it otherwise would have been. The two examples I have given, however, are not of exactly the same type. The meteorologist can predict the hurricane, but we can do nothing to stop it or to slow it down. It needs no scientist to tell us we all must die, but scientists can help us to defer our deaths. It would seem, from the passage I have quoted, that the breakdown of capitalism and the proletarian revolution are thought by Marx to be more like death than like a hurricane—that they cannot be prevented altogether, but can be delayed or hastened. No one wants hurricanes, and most people want their death delayed. But some people will want to delay the breakdown of capitalism, and others to hasten it. Marx, in this passage, appears to suppose that everyone will want to get through with it as quickly as possible. Now since there is a remarkable agreement about what are physical evils—such things as death, disease, cold, hunger, and physical injury—there is also agreement about the proper function of science in foreseeing, mitigating, delaying, and preventing them. With social breakdowns and revolutions, however, it is very different, for some will be opposed to the very things that others look forward to. Mark Pattison, like Marx, though for different reasons, thought that socialism was inevitable, but his comment was “I hate it.” Furthermore, as physical science has developed, some things that at one time were thought to be inevitable have been found to be preventable. Diseases are the best example of this. Marx should not have considered it impossible for other social scientists, to whom the breakdown of capitalism was unwelcome, to discover, perhaps even with the aid of his diagnosis, means of keeping it indefinitely in being. Against this it may be argued that all previous social systems have ultimately broken down and that capitalism can hardly be an exception. This, however, is not a clear-cut argument like the argument that as all previous generations of men have died we shall too. Social systems or historical epochs cannot be instances in an induction in the way that men or ravens can be. We have a very clear notion of what it is for a man to die, but we have no such clear notion of what it is for a social system to break down. Indeed, as I have already argued, the distinctions between one historical epoch and another are unlike those between geological strata, and therefore still less like those between individual men or animals. Blurred notions such as that of a historical epoch do not permit of the definite sort of predictions that can be made when there is a number of clearly distinguishable individuals. We are all agreed as to the tests to ascertain whether a man is dead, but how do we decide that capitalism has broken down? We deceive ourselves with almost empty phrases if we suppose that we can make predictions about such things as societies, civilizations, revolutions, classes, social orders, and constitutions, as we can about men, genes, gases, and stars. If anything even approaching this is to be possible, these terms must be given definitions that will allow precise differences to be recorded.

It is not without interest, perhaps, in this connection, to mention that in 1857, two years before Marx published his Critique of Political Economy, a body was founded known as the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. Its Transactions were arranged under the following five heads: Jurisprudence and the Amendment of the Law; Education; Punishment and Reformation; Public Health; and Social Economy. The sort of topics discussed in each section may be seen from the following examples, one from each section, taken from the first volume of the Transactions: Judicial Statistics; An Inquiry on Early Withdrawal from School in Swansea and Its Neighbourhood; Crime and Density of Population; Houses for Working Men—Their Arrangement, Drainage, and Ventilation; the Early Closing Movement. The papers submitted vary greatly in merit, but the prevailing manner of approach is to provide information on the topic chosen, to analyze the information provided, and to make suggestions about remedies for any evils brought to light in this way. The notions employed are seldom so general as “society,” “capitalism,” “revolution,” etc., but are rather of the relative particularity of “convictions,” “sentences,” “bankruptcies,” “adulteration of food,” “drainage,” and “penny banks.” It is true, of course, that at some stage enquiries of this sort need to be linked together, and the policies they suggest have to be co-ordinated. But this would seem to be the sort of approach to social science that is most likely to ensure that its exponents know what they are talking about. Furthermore, since these men made no claims to a godlike detachment from human affairs, they did not easily disguise their prejudices from one another, as can be seen from the reports of their discussions.

To return, however, to our theme—the idea that just as science and history enable men to master nature, so Marxist social science enables us to control society. Mastering nature is discovering its laws of operation and making use of this knowledge to serve human ends, as men do when, discovering that friction causes fire, they are enabled to keep themselves warm and to cook food. One form of controlling society is for some people to discover how others can be threatened and cajoled and to use this knowledge to control these others. This is the sort of control that can be got by skillful use of propaganda, and it presupposes a division into enlightened (i.e., scientific) masters and ignorant followers. Just as mastery over nature is manipulation of physical things for the satisfaction of human desires, so mastery over society would be the control of the many by the few for the prime satisfaction of the few. Clearly this is not the sort of control over social processes that the Marxists consciously advocate. Whatever control over social processes is, it is regarded by them as something opposed to class domination, and something which would readily appeal to unprejudiced people. The view they are endeavoring to put forward is, I think, something to the following effect.

If we did not know some of the causes of disease or cold or storm we should be pretty much at their mercy, as savages still are. When we know some of their causes we can prevent them from happening or protect ourselves against them when they do happen. Similarly there are social disasters, such as unemployment, slumps, and wars, which come to men ignorant of their causes just as if they were physical catastrophes like epidemics. If we could discover what causes them, they too could be prevented, or at least guarded against. Such social occurrences are like purely physical occurrences in one very important respect—no one wills them or decides that they are to happen. They are by-products of what people do decide. Thus someone invents a new machine, and men are put out of work though neither the inventor nor the employer aimed at this; a number of company directors decide to postpone capital developments, and there is a slump which they would have paid a lot to avoid; or two governments make a completely mistaken assessment of one another’s intentions and find themselves involved in a war that neither of them wanted. There are, of course, important differences between these examples, notably the difference between a slump, which is never declared, and a war, which generally is. But in all these cases individuals, and even governments, find themselves, as it is popularly expressed, in the grip of forces they cannot control. The unemployment, slump, and war result from many decisions on other matters by people aiming at other things. (“War-mongers” are characters in Marxist propaganda and do not feature in Marxist social theory.) We may say that such occurrences are unwilled and impersonal, unwilled because no one aims at producing them, impersonal because to their victims they seem like such natural catastrophes as storms and epidemics. Now one thing that Marxists mean by mastery over social processes is the knowledge of what causes such phenomena, and the resulting ability to prevent them from happening. (Incidentally, we can prevent some, but not all diseases, but storms and death we cannot prevent at all, so that Marxists are more optimistic about the possibilities of “social control” than experience of the natural sciences justifies.) The result would be that only those things would happen in human society that men had decided should happen. Fear of slumps is like fear of epidemics, and as no one now fears the Black Death, so no one in a society from which the unwilled and impersonal had been eliminated would have to fear unemployment, slumps, and war.

It should be noticed in the first place that the contrast between what is willed and what is unwilled is not necessarily a contrast between what is good and what is bad, for some people deliberately aim at harming others. The removal from human society, therefore, of what is unwilled may not mean the removal of all that is evil, for intended evil would still remain. This being so, the improvement of human society depends on the aims of those who direct the improvements as well as upon the knowledge they may have of social forces. We may ask, in the second place, whether everything in society that is unwilled is bad like storms and epidemics. Marxists appear to assume that it must be, probably as a result of some trace, in Marx’s thought, of the Hegelian view that “self-consciousness” was the perfect condition of spirit. But surely employment (supposing it to be good, in contrast to unemployment), booms, and peace are often as little the result of deliberate effort as are their less welcome contraries. The New York skyline is no less to be admired because no one designed it, and not all the effects on society of educational systems that were left to take their own way, or of haphazardly competing outlooks and theories, have been regrettable. Control over nature, we may observe, is a small area of control in an immense desert of uncontrol. The background of human effort is still an untamed accumulation of seas, mountains, and planets. Nor, unless we are in a particularly “Promethean” mood, do we regret this. Is there any reason why we should want something radically different in society? That we should wish to see nothing there but what has been deliberately put there? Before answering “Yes” to this question, we should consider what it implies. Its chief implication is that there should be no conflicting aims at all, for as soon as aims conflict, circumstances grow up which neither of the conflicting parties had aimed at, that is to say, unwilled circumstances. If A wants policy X, and B, who wants policy Y, opposes him in this, then perhaps X, perhaps Y, or perhaps neither X nor Y, will result. This, in its turn, implies that if there are to be no unwilled circumstances, everything that anybody does must be willed in accordance with some universally accepted or imposed set of co-ordinating principles. It is only by successful total planning that unwilled social by-products can be completely eliminated. The qualification “successful” is, of course, very important, since if in any respect the plan breaks down, things will happen that no one has intended. For if the single authority aims at X and fails to achieve it, then whatever results is something that was not planned. When we consider how little of intention there is in an individual personality or the spirit of a people, how the structure of scientific truth and the evolution of artistic styles have provided mankind with a succession of not altogether unwelcome surprises, and how most languages proliferate from uncontrolled sources, the idea of achieving a self-conscious mastery over all social processes is seen to be as impracticable as it is depressing. It may be argued that it is only necessary to plan to prevent bad unwilled events, such as unemployment and slumps, and that therefore I have exaggerated when I said that the Marxist’s aim requires total planning of society. But it is characteristic of Marxism to stigmatize as “reformism” the removal of particular evils one after another. It is true that there is every reason to suppose that mistakes will be made by those who carry out particular, limited reforms, so that as the reforming process continues, new, unwilled difficulties will present themselves. This, I suggest, is a good reason for not expecting any human arrangements to be perfect. But the Marxist’s response is to conclude that “reformism” is necessarily bad and that its evils can be avoided by “revolution,” that is, by a complete overthrow of the old system of things and its replacement by a new one decreed by the revolutionaries. This is to substitute total re-modeling for piecemeal improvement, and requires those who do the re-modeling to be very clever indeed if they are not to be confronted by a much more formidable array of unintended evils than face the reformers. For if so very much is risked on one venture, the penalty of failure is correspondingly great.

From Marx’s earliest writings there has been, in the Communist movement, an emphasis on basic human wants or needs. The idea seems to be that Marxist social science has become morality, or rather has become a more desirable substitute for morality, in that it teaches how the basic wants and needs of men can and will be satisfied. This will come about as the power of the proletariat is extended until it becomes a ruling class and finally brings classes to an end. In a classless society all basic wants will be satisfied because there will be no exploiters. But an account of social policy in terms of wants or desires must suppose both that satisfaction is better than frustration and that some wants or desires are more worthy of satisfaction than others. If this were not so, there could be no reason why most men should not be slaughtered to allow the rest to live in luxury in the ruins of civilization, nor why widespread happiness should not be induced by universal indulgence in opium. In any case, the words “needs,” “basic,” and “exploitation” introduce moral conceptions. I have already discussed the ambiguities of the word “needs,” and the word “basic” introduces similar difficulties. Clearly, by basic needs Marxists mean amounts and kinds of food and shelter which every person in a highly developed society like our own is entitled to, or has a right to. Again, by “exploitation” they do not mean merely the making use of some social opportunity, but the wrongful use of it to the detriment of others. This moral use of the word is particularly likely to predominate in the German language, since the German word—Ausbeutung—is formed from Beute, which means loot, prey, spoil, plunder, much as the English word “booty” does. The Marxist can derive moral precepts from his social science only to the extent that they already form, because of the vocabulary used, a concealed and unacknowledged part of it.

In the course of his account of Historical Materialism in his Karl Marx, Mr. Isaiah Berlin says that the theory cannot be rightly objected to on the ground that in it moral recommendations are illicitly derived from mere matters of fact, since “Marx, like Hegel, flatly rejected this distinction. Judgments of fact cannot be sharply distinguished from those of value: all one’s judgments 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. . . . 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.”5 Now it is true that Hegel objected to the procedure (characteristic of the Understanding, and, on his view, needing correction by the Reason) of making clear-cut oppositions such as that between what is matter of fact and that which only ought to be but is not. It is true also that he maintained that social institutions were moral creations as well as matters of fact, and that he concluded his Philosophy of History with the following words: “That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development, and the realization of Spirit—this is the true Theodicaea, the justification of God in History. Only this insight can reconcile spirit with the History of the World—viz., that what has happened, and is happening every day, is not ‘without God,’ but is essentially His Work.”6 It cannot be denied that Marx was influenced by such views. They do not, however, form part of, and are, indeed, inconsistent with, the Materialist Conception of History. If I am right in my interpretation, that theory is established “in the manner of the natural sciences.” It is held by its exponents to be a science of morals, aesthetics, and religion, but moral, aesthetic, and religious judgments are shown, by means of this “science,” to be ideological distortions of social realities. Therefore for Marx to say that judgments of fact and value are necessarily mixed up with one another would be for him to say that no science of society is possible. Indeed, it would involve him in a skepticism about the truth of natural science too, which, as I judge, he would have found most shocking. It seems to me that an important feature of the Materialist Conception of History is the attempt to show that valuations are superstructural forms of “false consciousness” which Marxist social science enables us to “see through.” Mr. Berlin, I suggest, implicitly acknowledges this when he interprets Marx as holding that “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 ultimately perish.” Hegel’s view was that the course of history, taken as a whole, is divinely good; historical events, he held, were at the same time divine events, so that whatever happened was, in its degree, good; facts were more than mere facts, they were elements in the goodness of things. But the view that Mr. Berlin is attributing to Marx in the sentence beginning “The only sense . . .” is the view, not that facts are also valuable, but that value is reducible to fact, that to say that Communism is right is merely to say that it will prevail, and that to say that liberalism is wrong is merely to say that it will disappear from the world. The contrast may be seen if we compare the broad outlines of the two theories. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is, in effect, a comprehensive system of political philosophy in which no attempt is made to avoid moral assessments, and in which even titles of divine honor are openly bestowed on the state. Marx, on the other hand, set out to explain, in terms of what he considered to be natural facts, how the institutions of society come to be decorated with pretentiously misleading moral and theological coloring.

2.

Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History

So far my discussion of Marxist ethics has been confined to the Marxist attempt—which, historically considered, is a branch of the nineteenth-century Positivist attempt—to derive principles of right conduct from some alleged science of society. We must now, however, look somewhat more closely at what Marxists say about moral beliefs, remembering that in their view morality is an ideology. In the present section I shall be concerned with the most general aspects of the theory, the account, we might put it, of what morality itself is held to be. In later sections I shall discuss some of the chief Marxist proposals for the reform of morality. For the texts show that, inconsistent as it may appear to be, Marxism is a program for the reform of morality as well as an attempt to reduce it to science. All students of Marxism must at some stage have felt that there is at the very least a difficulty in reconciling the Marxist attack on class divisions and “exploitation” with the view that moral ideals are masks that cover interests. This is a problem to be kept in mind throughout all that follows.

The chief account of the matter is that given by Engels in chapters 9, 10, and 11 of his Anti-Dühring. Here Engels argues that there are no “eternal truths” in morality, but that moral codes must vary with changes in the conditions of human life. Engels held that at the time when he was writing (1877) there were three main moralities being preached, “the christian-feudal morality,” “the modern bourgeois morality,” and “the proletarian morality of the future.” The first of these was based on economic forces that were rapidly dying; the second was the ideological construction of the capitalist ruling class; the third was emerging as capitalism produced the proletariat, and would replace the other two when the proletarian revolution had been effected. Although he does not say what they are, Engels admits that there are likenesses between these three moral systems. These likenesses have two main causes: in the first place, the feudal, capitalist, and emerging proletarian society are different stages of a single economic development; and in the second place, the economic fact of private property requires recognition in all non-communist moral systems, although “Thou shalt not steal” would be quite unnecessary in “a society in which the motive for stealing has been done away with.” Engels argued, furthermore, that as one class has succeeded another in the conflicts of the past “there has on the whole been progress in morality, as in all other branches of human knowledge,” and that “a really human morality which transcends class antagonisms and their legacies in thought becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class contradictions, but has even forgotten them in practical life.” It is the proletarian morality that “contains the maximum of durable elements” and “in the present represents the overthrow of the present, represents the future.” The chief element of the morality of the future, it appears, will be equality: “. . . the real content of the proletarian demand for equality is the demand for the abolition of classes. Any demand for equality which goes beyond that of necessity passes into absurdity.”7

When we read that moral codes depend upon conditions of life, that these vary with changes in the economic basis of society, and that each class has its own morality, we are tempted to conclude that Engels was arguing for what is called a relativist view of morality, i.e., a view according to which there are many different groupings of men each with its own standards of moral conduct, but that there is no universal standard of moral conduct in terms of which the manifold particular codes can be rationally assessed. It might seem, furthermore, that the Marxist version of Relativism is somewhat as follows: The differences between human groupings are all, in the last resort, differences between their economic structures; all non-communist societies are class-divided and therefore all moral codes in them will be class codes; when an economic system is firmly established, the generally accepted morality will be that of the exploiting class, and justice will be, as Thrasymachus the Greek Sophist said it was, “the interest of the stronger”; but when a new economic system is in process of development, the rising class whose interests are tied to it will develop a moral outlook that will bolster its own interests as opposed to those of the class that has hitherto ruled supreme, and in this way a conflict of class interests will manifest itself as a clash of moral codes. From all this it would follow that moral fervor is a disguise for class interest, and that, since classes judge one another in terms of incompatible standards, conflict between them can never end by their submitting themselves to some commonly accepted rule; their interests may conceivably bring them to a truce, but they can never submit themselves to the tribunal of an agreed morality. That this is Engels’ view seems to be suggested by his remark that “the proletarian demand for equality” is “an agitational means in order to rouse the workers against the capitalists on the basis of the capitalists’ own assertions.”8 Lenin, too, has let fall a number of phrases which suggest this form of Relativism, as when, in his “Address to the Third Congress of the Russian Young Communist League,” he said: “When people talk to us about morality we say: for the Communist, morality lies entirely in this compact, united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we expose all the fables about morality.”9

Nevertheless, however much relativist arguments may be used to confute and discourage those who accept the traditional codes, there is in Marxist ethics a claim to absoluteness. It has already been pointed out that Engels held that there are elements common to the feudal, bourgeois, and proletarian moralities, and that “there has on the whole been progress in morality, as in all other branches of human knowledge.” So too Lenin, in the sentence following the passage I have just quoted from his speech to the Russian Young Communist League, said: “Morality serves the purpose of helping human society to rise to a higher level, and to get rid of the exploitation of labour.” Rosenthal and Yudin’s article on “Ethics” in their Handbook of Philosophy concludes with these words: “Communist morality takes the position that only that which contributes to the abolition of human exploitation, poverty, and degradation, and to the building and strengthening of a system of social life from which such inhuman phenomena will be absent is moral and ethical.” And Mr. Shishkin is quoted as having written as follows in an article entitled “The Decay of Anglo-American Ethics” in the Soviet periodical Voprosy Filosofii: “The chief struggle [in Anglo-American ethics] is against Marxist ethics, and its objective and rigorous norms and principles derived from a scientific understanding of society; ethical relativism was important in the thought of Rosenberg and Goebbels.”10 From all this it will be seen that moral standards are not held by Marxists to be merely different from one another, but are said to have progressed as the earlier codes gave way to others that were closer to the Communism of the future. How, then, in view of what has been said in the previous chapter about the nature of ideologies, can we understand the claim that Communist morality is superior to the morality that went before it?

From the passages I have quoted it will be seen that there are four main respects in which Marxist ethics differs from ethical relativism. In the first place it is held that there are elements common to the feudal, bourgeois, and proletarian moralities. Little is said about these common elements, but undoubtedly the view is that no society could survive in which there was no respect for human life or for personal possessions, no loyalty, no courage, no care for the helpless. These “conditions of human peace,” as Hobbes called them, are referred to by Lenin as “the elementary rules of social life that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all school books.”11 To call attention to such principles, however, is not sufficient, on its own, to eliminate ethical relativism, since, although a rule such as “murder is wrong” may be universal in the sense that every society recognizes it as binding within itself, it may not be universal in the sense that every society regards it as applying to its conduct toward foreigners as well as within its own bounds. The universal acceptance of a rule such as “It is wrong to murder fellow-tribesmen” (or “non-backsliding fellow party-members”) is compatible, therefore, with the belief that it is right to kill anyone else. The Marxists’ references to elements common to all moral codes, although they may be meant to constitute a rejection of Relativism, do not conclusively show that they are this.

In the second place, however, it is quite clear that Engels wrote of progress in morality, and that this implies some standard in terms of which the various stages are estimated. He speaks, too, of “a truly human morality which transcends class antagonisms,” and asserts that this will be achieved when classes have been abolished. We should note, too, Lenin’s phrase “helping human society to rise to a higher level” and Rosenthal and Yudin’s talk of getting rid of such “inhuman phenomena” as “human exploitation, poverty, and degradation.” Thus, those societies are the better ones in which there is the least exploitation, the least poverty, the least “degradation.” “Human,” in this context, has two meanings. A “human” morality is, in the first place, one in which religious and theological elements play no part. In the second place, it is a morality which extends to all human beings by requiring the abolition of all poverty and all exploitation. It is “human” in the sense of being both atheistic and applicable to all men.

In the third place, the emerging proletarian morality is held to be superior to all those which preceded it. This is because the proletariat is the class which, exploited as it is in capitalist society, will surely bring capitalist society to an end, and in so doing will abolish classes, exploitation, and poverty. It does not seem that proletarian morality is preferred by Marxists solely because it is the morality of the class that has a future, of the class that will become the ruling class. They also prefer it because it is the morality of the class that will bring classes to an end. They appear to have the picture of a morality that extends the ambit of its respect as it spreads from a few feudal lords to the more numerous bourgeoisie, and thence to the proletarians who will finally be the whole of mankind.

It must be said in the fourth place, however, that the standard of moral assessment is itself held by Marxists to depend upon the level of economic (or technological) development of society. Here we come to the central, and most difficult, aspect of Marxist moral theory. There can be no doubt that capitalist industrial society is much more effective, from an industrial point of view, than any society that has gone before it. The standard of comparison between it and its predecessors in this regard is the quantity and quality of goods producible during any given time, “quality,” of course, being understood in a sense that excludes artistic excellence or moral suitability. It is obvious that a society in which wireless sets and cyclotrons are produced is industrially more advanced than one in which steam power has not yet been employed. Now the Marxists maintain the following theses: (a) that moral codes are parasitic on industrial achievement; (b) that private ownership of the means of production is a hindrance to the industrial progress of modern society; (c) that when this hindrance has been removed by the abolition of capitalism, industrial progress will be vastly accelerated; and (d) that the classless morality of the new society will show a corresponding advance on that of the class-divided societies of the past. The view is summarized in an article in Soviet Studies as follows: “Just as each stage of human development possesses a certain level of consciousness which is the highest attainable in the historical conditions, so it also possesses an understanding of good and evil which is the highest attainable in the same conditions. Since we needs must love the highest when we see it, it is the duty of each individual not to aim lower than the ethical ideals of his society; and a society or social group which falls short in its ethical ideal of those ideals previously established is morally retrogressive. It follows from the general propositions of historical and dialectical materialism that a community in a higher stage of organization will reflect its social attainments in its higher stage of morals; and consequently ethical studies may be closely related to, and based on, the exact knowledge (“science”) which is provided by sociology.”12

What is the relation between (a) and (d) above? Surely it does not follow that, because moral codes depend upon industrial systems, the more advanced the industrial system, the higher the moral code. If “industrial progress” is understood in a sense that is independent of “moral progress,” then no amount of industrial progress can give the slightest ground for supposing that there has been any moral progress whatever. Moral progress must be understood in moral, not in technological, terms. One is tempted to suppose that Marxists, having relinquished the view that morality is strengthened by divine support, have nevertheless felt the need for something else to support it when there is no God to do so, and have picked on technology for the role of substitute deity. The Marxist view must be either that industrial progress is the same thing as moral progress, or else that industrial progress is a sure sign of moral progress. We have rejected the first suggestion, and if there is to be anything in the second it will have to be possible to know what moral progress is independently of knowing what industrial progress is. For to know that changes in one thing are a sure sign of changes in another, both things must have been observed changing. For example, thermometers can only be used to measure the temperature of a room because we have been able to experience both the changes from hotter to colder and colder to hotter, and changes in the height of the column of mercury. The Marxist is rather like a man who, disgusted at the idea of feeling hot or cold, will refer only to the “objective and rigorous norms” on the temperature scale, and asserts that they are what hot and cold really are. Indeed, there is a further analogy between the use of thermometers and the Marxist correlation of industrial with moral progress. Once a scale of temperature has been established, the scale can “register” both discriminations and quantities that no one can have experienced. For example, no one is conscious of a change of temperature of (say) half a degree Fahrenheit, and no one has ever been conscious of a heat of 2000° Fahrenheit. Once the scale has been established it acquires a certain independence and appears to measure things that are quite beyond the range of human experience. The initial correlation between the marks on the scale and what people feel gets lost sight of. The Marxist use of the notion of industrial progress appears to have broken loose in a somewhat similar way from its initial conjunction with moral progress. First it was correlated with a norm, and then it became a norm itself.

According to the French Hegelian scholar M. Jean Hyppolite there is in Marx’s Capital a conflict between two inconsistent points of view, the one Darwinian and the other Hegelian.13 There is a similar conflict, it seems to me, between the ethical implications of the Materialist Conception of History and Engels’ and Lenin’s view that there has been and will be moral progress. For, as I have pointed out, the Materialist Conception of History is held to be “faithfully established in the manner of the natural sciences,” and must therefore, like them, be amoral. It purports to show that the struggle between classes will in fact cease with the victory of the proletariat. Each class has its morality, the victory of the proletariat will be the victory of proletarian morality, and the dissolution of classes will bring the dissolution of class morality. This is the amoral Darwinian theory which is held to explain the genesis of moral standards and their role as weapons in the class war. On this view, the superiority of a moral standard consists in its replacing the standards of vanquished classes, and the superiority of a classless morality consists in its having ousted all others, just as, for Darwin, the fittest are those who succeed in surviving, not those who, in some moral sense, ought to survive. When Marxists talk of moral progress, however, they desert this amoral Darwinism for something not unlike the Hegelian theodicy. Out of the clash of classes, they suppose, superior forms of society are developed which would never have existed at all if the clashes had been mitigated or suppressed. In spite of apparent retrogressions man is progressing. His earliest stage was one of primitive, almost innocent communism. His fall from this state was necessary if he was to advance to a developed, self-conscious (i.e., planned) industrial communism. Industrial civilization, thinks the Marxist when he is in the Hegelian frame of mind, makes possible the mastery of man over himself so that, want and exploitation having been abolished, free men can each develop, without hindrance from others, the latent powers which class-divided societies had inhibited. In the progress of man what, to use Hegelian language, was merely implicit and ideal becomes explicit and real. Such a state of things would not be merely the latest in the succession of social orders, but would be both their consummation and the standard in terms of which their shortcomings would be judged.

We have now seen some of the Marxist attempts at making these inconsistent views go along together. The least Darwinian element in the first amoral theory was the view that the struggle between classes would come to an end through the abolition of classes altogether. (Darwin did not suggest that one species would oust all the rest.) Now the abolition of classes is a conception that readily gives rise to moral judgments. In so far as class differences involve exploitation, that is, the unjust use of power, the disappearance of classes may be supposed, rightly or wrongly, to lead to the disappearance of exploitation. (It is by no means certain that other forms of injustice would not arise after class injustices had been removed.) A classless society, again, is readily conceived as one in which moral respect is given to all men instead of only to some. It is easy, that is, to pass from the amoral conception of a classless society to the moral conception that Kant described as a Kingdom of Ends, i.e., a society in which everyone is an object of moral respect. The link, I suggest, is the notion of universality; it is supposed on the one hand that if classes are abolished all men will belong to a single society, and it is supposed on the other hand that moral progress consists in more and more men being accepted as members of a single moral world. In combining the two views, however, Marxists inconsistently hold both that morality is mere ideology and that it is capable of real improvement.

At this point it will be useful to revert for a moment to the Marxist discussion of phenomenalism. The exponents of phenomenalism, we said, generally deny that they are saying that there are no physical objects. They claim instead to be providing an analysis, in terms of actual and possible sense data, of what it is to be a physical object. Now it might be suggested, at this stage of the argument, that the Marxist account of morals as ideology is really an analysis of what morality is rather than a denial of the validity of moral judgments. It might be said, that is, that the theory of ideologies, as applied to morals, is the view that when people make moral judgments they are really giving expression to their attitudes and endeavoring to get other people to share them. This is a view held today by a number of philosophers who are not Marxists at all. The chief difference between the Marxist analysis of morals, therefore, and these “attitude and persuasion” theories would be that the Marxists have a lot to say about how the attitudes are formed, whereas these philosophers ignore that side of the matter as altogether irrelevant to what they call “philosophy.” On this interpretation, then, when Marxists say that morality is an ideology they are saying (a) that moral judgments are expressions of people’s attitudes and at the same time attempts to get other people to have the same attitudes toward the same things, and (b) that these attitudes arise from class situations, and that these, in their turn, arise out of economic circumstances. Now Marxists object to the phenomenalist analysis of physical objects on the ground that it is idealism in disguise. Might we not have expected them to have objected to the “attitude and persuasion” theory of morals on the ground that it is a disguise for all that is arbitrary and unprincipled in human conduct? (Mr. Shishkin, it will be remembered, seems to have taken this view, though in an inconsistent way.) That is how the Stoics, whom I earlier compared with the Marxists, looked at the matter, but in this regard Marxism is more like ancient skepticism than it is like Stoicism. The reason why they treat ethical subjectivism differently from how they treat perceptual subjectivism is, I suggest, that they think they can find scientific evidence for the existence of men with various wants, but feel that there is no evidence at all for such things as moral values. If this is so, then Marxists think they can “reduce” morality to wants and persuasions in a way in which physical objects cannot be reduced to sense data. Now I criticized phenomenalism on the ground that its view of physical objects was based on such things as reflections in mirrors and the images of dreams and delirium, whereas the status of these last can only be understood in terms of real things that are not reflections, not dreams, not delirium; the phenomenalist assumes, in saying what sense data are, that physical objects are not sense data and his alleged analysis of matter is a hollow, painted substitute for it. Now I suggest that the “interest and persuasion” analysis of morals suffers from an analogous defect. There is the same zeal for immediately perceived ultimates—in the case of morals these are wants, desires, and persuadings. But there is also the same failure to notice that these “ultimates” are not real existences at all, that wants, desires, and persuadings are themselves moral, or are understandable by relation to or in contrast with what is moral. We have seen this sort of false abstraction in another context, when the attempt was made to describe a “material basis” of society that was supposed to have in it none of the features that belonged to the “superstructure.” Phenomenalism, the Materialist Conception of History, and the “attitude and persuasion” analysis of morals are all of them, in their different ways, results of misleading abstraction, a misleading abstraction that fabricates unreal units, sense data, the “material basis” of society, and “wants, desires, and persuadings.” A further point to notice in this connection is that, just as the phenomenalist bases his theory on illusions, hallucinations, images, so the moral subjectivist bases his analysis on moral divergences, and as the realist bases his view on developed and successful perception, so the moral objectivist bases his analysis on developed and successful moral conduct.

It will be remembered that in Chapter I of Part One of this book I called attention to the fact that one of Lenin’s arguments against phenomenalism was that phenomenalism is a form of idealism, that idealism is a disguised form of religion, that religion is dangerous to communism, and that therefore phenomenalism should be rejected. Basic to this argument is the assumption that it is legitimate to reject a philosophical theory on the ground that it appears to be a hindrance to the victory of the proletariat under Communist Party leadership. In still more general terms, Lenin’s argument assumes that it is legitimate to reject a philosophical theory on the ground that it appears to conflict with a political movement supposed to be working for the long-term interests of mankind. Now that we have discussed the Materialist Conception of History and the moral theory that goes with it, we are in a better position to discuss this assumption of Lenin’s than we were when our chief concern was the Marxist view of nature. We can now see that when Lenin dismisses phenomenalism on the ground that it is dangerous to communism, he regards it, as he regards all non-Marxist philosophical theories, as an ideology, i.e., as an expression of some class-interest. His view seems to be that, if the arguments its supporters put forward can be intellectually refuted, well and good, but that if they appear for the time being to be too subtle for this, then Marxists must try to prevent them from being accepted by such means as scorn or moral indignation or expulsion of the heretics. From Lenin’s procedure it can be seen that he regarded it as necessary both to deal with arguments on the intellectual plane, and also to unmask the ideologies that produce them. It will, of course, be remembered that Marxists consider that they themselves are being scientific when they expose the ideologies of other classes. They believe, too, that in doing this they are helping on the ultimate good of all mankind.

It cannot be reasonably denied that beneath the surface of philosophical argumentation there is often the desire to gain acceptance for a way of living and appreciating as well as for a way of thinking. There is no doubt that most of those philosophers who have accepted idealism have sought, in this philosophy, to justify some form of rational religion. Again, it is obvious that most positivists have the practical aim of getting rid of what they consider to be superstition. The idealist endeavors to show that religious hopes are not all in vain, the positivist to show that they are illusory and should be replaced by the clear-cut expectations that he imagines the natural sciences provide. Idealist views, as with Hegel, tend to be respectful of tradition, Positivist views, as during the French Enlightenment, to be contemptuous of it. (Hume and Comte, it is true, are very notable instances to the contrary.) Some realists and materialists, revolted by what seems to them to be irresponsible “cleverness,” aim, like the Stoics, to secure agreement on a set of basic truths that should provide a foundation for common agreement and mutual respect. Most of those who engage in philosophical thought have some such fundamental aims. Their thinking is associated with their meditations on life and death and with their conception of how men ought to conduct themselves. In their philosophizing they often approach near to prophecy or poetry. Philosophers who today talk of philosophical “puzzles” minimize these aspects of philosophical thought, whereas those who talk of “problems” or “predicaments” tend to stress them. But whether minimized or stressed, they are there.

Now it looks very strange when Lenin, in a book where the views of Berkeley, Mach, and Poincaré are under discussion, calls upon his comrades to close the ranks. It is important first to see what justification there could be for these methods. If someone asserts as true something he knows to be false, it is idle to argue with him about the truth of what he is saying, though it may be important to argue with those he might mislead. For he is making the assertion in order to deceive, not in order to add to the sum of knowledge. Again, if someone is carried away by his hopes and interests to enunciate false statements as gestures of faith or defiance, concern with the detail of his falsehoods may lead his opponents to lose sight of the practical reasons for which he uttered them. Such men, in uttering what have the appearance of statements, are chiefly endeavoring to achieve some practical aim. Since intellectual illumination is not their object, argumentative procedures that assumed that it was would be out of place, in the sense that they would not be directed at the main point of what the men were doing. Thus, when Lenin, in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, writes abusively, he is assuming that idealists are conscious or unconscious deceivers, that their arguments are not really concerned with reaching truth, but are a sort of slogan to rally supporters and discourage the enemy. He conceives himself as replying to slogans by slogans, to actions by actions. It is likely that he was all the more ready to behave like this in that he was convinced of the practical bearing of all genuine (Marxist or scientific) thinking. Furthermore, social circumstances or psychological concomitants can be enquired into in the case of any sort of view, whether it be true or false. For example, Marxists consider that the methods of the natural sciences, being based on experience and practice, lead toward truth. But although this is so, there is no reason why sociologists should not investigate the social background of physicists and compare it with that of biologists, nor why psychologists should not enquire whether there is a special type of personality that predisposes men to become scientists. Such enquiries, it will be seen, are quite irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the theories that the scientists put forward. Descartes’s pride no more discredits his scientific discoveries than Darwin’s humility accredits his. Whether a scientific theory is true or false is settled by scientific argument, not by reference to the nature of the propounder’s motives. Suppose, then, that a Marxist admits this but asserts that philosophy is in a different case since it is an ideology. But philosophy proceeds by argument, and whether an argument is acceptable or not depends on how well it has been conducted. Philosophical arguments may be a different sort of argument from scientific ones, but in the one case as in the other sociological and psychological questions about the arguers are quite different from and quite irrelevant to the acceptability of the arguments themselves. It is only when an argument is manifestly bad and yet its expounder sticks to it in the face of annihilating criticism that we begin to feel justified in asking why he should continue arguing in this curious way. That is to say, the unmasking of ideologies, in the sense of showing the class interests that prompt them, is only in place when the belief that is thus unmasked has already been shown to be false. Thus, quite apart from questions of good manners that may differ from place to place and time to time, no controversialist is entitled to refer to his opponent’s motives unless the arguments that his opponent has used have been shown by argument to be untenable. If someone refuses to consider an argument on the ground that the man who put it forward has an axe to grind, this refusal is a political act, not a scientific or philosophical one.

This completes what I have to say about the direct relationship of Marxist ethics with the Materialist Conception of History. I shall now pass on to consider some of the details of Marxist ethics, commencing with a brief account of some important arguments from Marx and Engels’ Holy Family. I have chosen this way of beginning both because the arguments are of considerable intrinsic interest and also because they enable us to see some of the moral considerations that influenced Marx and Engels at the time when their system of ideas had just been formed.

3.

Marx and Eugène Sue

In 1842–43 the Journal des Débats published in daily installments Eugène Sue’s novel The Mysteries of Paris. It was then published in book form and widely read throughout Europe. It is an extraordinary mixture of melodrama, moralizing, and social criticism. The main plot concerns the efforts of Rodolphe, Prince of Geroldstein, to rectify by his own efforts some of the wrongs of modern society that were to be found in the life of Paris. Fleur-de-Marie, a pure-hearted young waif (who is subsequently discovered to be Rodolphe’s daughter) is rescued from her miserable life among Parisian criminals, becomes conscious of sinfulness, repents, and dies after having been admitted to a convent and made its abbess. Le Chourineur (the Ripper), a simple-minded assassin whose crimes are due to poverty and misfortune rather than to an evil nature, is reclaimed by Rodolphe and gratefully saves his life. Le Maître d’Ecole (the Schoolmaster), a criminal who appears to be quite beyond reclamation, is blinded by the orders of Prince Rodolphe so that he may not be able to injure others any more and will also be forced to meditate on his crimes and perhaps repent of them. In the course of the many loosely knit episodes of which the story is composed, Sue describes the miseries of the poor and the callousness of the rich. He proclaims that much crime is due to poverty, that the poor are much less blameworthy for their crimes than the rich are for theirs, and that it is much more difficult for the uneducated poor to obtain justice than for the educated and well-to-do. Incidents in this and others of his novels are used by Sue to show the need for social reforms. Thus, he considers that the death penalty should be abolished, but that blinding might be the supreme penalty for particularly atrocious crimes. He also advocates the establishment of farms where ex-convicts could work and re-establish themselves in society. Regeneration, however, on his view, could only occur as the result of genuine repentance which, therefore, should be the chief end of punishment. In discussing the social evils of unemployment, he proposes the establishment of a People’s Bank to give help to men who are unavoidably out of work. He also sketched a scheme for pawnshops which would lend money without interest to respectable artisans. He holds that women were unjustly treated by the Civil Code, and that they should have the right to keep their own property and to obtain divorce. It should be mentioned that Sue took pains to give an accurate account of life in prisons and among the very poor. He later wrote The Wandering Jew and other “social novels,” and in 1850 was elected to the National Assembly as a deputy of the extreme left. Although Louis Napoleon, on the ground that he was a distant relation of his, struck Sue’s name from the list of his opponents who were to be imprisoned and exiled, Sue refused this privilege and insisted on accepting these penalties along with the rest of the protesting deputies. Under the influence of Sue there was founded in 1843 a periodical called La Ruche Populaire (“The People’s Beehive”). This was edited by artisans, and had at the head of the first issue the following quotation from the Mysteries of Paris: “It is good to give help to honest and unfortunate men who cry out for it. But it is better to find out about those who are carrying on the struggle with honor and energy, to go to their aid, sometimes without their knowing it . . . and to ward off betimes both poverty and the temptations that lead to crime.” Sue was accused by some of “disguising communism under entertaining forms,” by others he was praised for drawing the attention of the prosperous classes to the misery which they tried to ignore.14

Now in 1843 Bruno Bauer, a leading figure among the “Young Hegelians,” had founded at Charlottenburg a periodical called Die Allgemeine Literaturzeitung. A young man called Szeliga (who later had a reasonably successful career in the Prussian army) discussed in this periodical certain of the social ideas of the Mysteries of Paris. He took Sue very seriously, and sought to give his views the sanction of the Hegelian philosophy. Marx and Engels’ Holy Family, published in 1845, was intended as a general attack on the ideas of Bruno Bauer and his supporters as developed in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung. Two long chapters of the book, written by Marx himself, are given over to criticizing Szeliga for taking Sue so seriously, and to a destructive analysis of the moral and social ideals recommended in the Mysteries of Paris. It is thus possible to obtain from these chapters a pretty good idea of Marx’s moral outlook at the time when his social theories were being developed. In my view they throw considerable light on some important aspects of Marx’s ethics.

Marx considers that the “conversion” of le Chourineur by Prince Rodolphe transforms him into a stool-pigeon and then into a faithful bulldog. “He is no longer even an ordinary bulldog, he is a moral bulldog.”15 Similarly he considers that Rodolphe, in “rescuing” Fleur-de-Marie, has changed her from a girl capable of happiness “first into a repentant sinner, then the repentant sinner into a nun, and then the nun into a corpse.”16 So too, in blinding the Maître d’Ecole, Rodolphe has, according to Marx, acted in the true Christian fashion according to which “it is necessary to kill human nature to cure it of its diseases.”17 Again, Rodolphe deplores the fact that maid-servants may be seduced by their masters and driven by them into crime, but “he does not understand the general condition of women in modern society, he does not regard it as inhuman. Absolutely faithful to his old theory, he merely deplores the absence of a law to punish the seducer and to associate terrible punishments with repentance and expiation.”18 Marx’s general comment on the ethics of Rodolphe’s conduct is as follows: “The magic means by which Rodolphe works all his rescues and all his marvelous cures, are not his beautiful words, but his money. This is what moralists are like, says Fourier. You must be a millionaire in order to imitate their heroes. Morality is impotence in action. Whenever it attacks a vice, morality is worsted. And Rodolphe does not even rise to the point of view of independent morality, which rests on consciousness of human dignity. On the contrary, his morality rests on consciousness of human frailty. It embodies moral theology.”19 And in conclusion Marx argues that even Rodolphe’s morality is a sham, since his activities in Paris, though they have righting the wrong as their ostensible aim, are really a means of gratifying himself by playing the role of Providence. His moral hatred of wrong is a hypocritical cover for his personal hatred of individuals.20

Is all this an attack on morality as such, or is it merely an attack on what Marx considers to be false morality? It certainly looks as if Marx is both attacking morality as such and as a whole (“Morality is impotence in action”), and is also attacking false morality. (“. . . Rodolphe does not even rise to the point of view of independent morality, which rests on consciousness of human dignity.”) If this is what he is doing, then he is inconsistent. For false morality can only be criticized in the light of a morality held to be less false, whereas if all morality is rejected, this must be in favor of something that is not morality and that does not allow that the drawing of moral distinctions is a legitimate activity. Marx seems to be saying the following four things: (a) that it is bad for criminals to be cowed and rendered less than human by means of punishment, repentance, and remorse; (b) that those who advocate punishment and urge repentance do so out of revenge, hypocritically; (c) that punishment, repentance, and remorse, even if aided by reforms of the penal laws and by measures enabling the poor to help themselves, can never reach and destroy the roots of crime; (d) and that the moral approach to crime is powerless to check it. His comments on Sue’s novel show that he thinks there is something in human nature that should be preserved and is in fact destroyed by punishment and repentance. But it is not altogether clear what Marx thinks is wrong about them. Le Chourineur, from being a man, though a rough and dangerous one, repents and becomes, in Marx’s opinion, a mere “moral bulldog.” What, then, is bad about this new condition? Is it that le Chourineur has lost his pride and independence and now wishes only to be an obsequious hanger-on of Prince Rodolphe? If this is so, then perhaps Marx’s objection is not to repentance as such, but to false repentance, and not to punishment as such, but to the punishment that breaks a man’s spirit. Again, is it Marx’s view that all those who support the punishment of criminals are really doing nothing but find outlets for their own resentments or support for their own interests? Is all justice hypocritical?

Now Marx clearly has an ideal of what it is to live a truly human life. Fawning upon rich benefactors is not a part of this ideal, nor is dwelling on one’s personal guilt or renouncing the world in a nunnery. Someone lives a truly human life if he exercises his native abilities, enjoys nature and human society, and maintains a decent independence in relation to other men. In so far as punishment cripples the criminal, takes away his independence, and makes him obsequious, it has, according to Marx, done harm rather than good. It will be objected, however, that the criminal has ignored the rights of other people and can therefore hardly lay claim to remain unharmed by them. In an article he wrote in the New York Times in 185321 Marx considered this reply in the form given to it by Kant and Hegel, viz., that the criminal, in denying the rights of someone else, calls down upon himself the denial of his own rights by other people, so that his punishment is a fitting retort to his own deed. Marx admits that this view has the merit of regarding the criminal as a being who is worthy of respect, but he argues that the whole conception is dangerously abstract. For it takes account only of the free-will of the criminal and the violation of rights in general, but ignores the fact that the criminal is a concrete human being with particular motives and temptations living in a society organized in a specific manner. The view of Kant and Hegel, he asserts, only dresses up in philosophical language the ancient lex talionis of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And he concludes: “Punishment, at bottom, is nothing but society’s defence of itself against all violations of its conditions of existence. How unhappy is a society that has no other means of defending itself except the executioner.” But these comments in the New York Times do not reveal all of Marx’s mind on the subject. For from the passages I have quoted from the Holy Family it is clear that Marx thought that punishment was bad because the societies that inflicted it were bad. If a society is so organized that independent and courageous men are driven to crime, or if in the society acts are prohibited that are necessary for the proper development of human nature, then when the society in question “defends itself” by the punishment of criminals, its professions of justice are hypocritical. They are hypocritical, in Marx’s view, for two reasons: in the first place, because the criminals are either unusually independent men or helpless victims and therefore are in neither case deserving of punishment; in the second place, because the just course would be to change the society instead of forcing men into crime and then punishing them for what they could not help.

If I have interpreted Marx correctly, it would appear that no one, on his view, would commit a crime unless he was an unusually vigorous man pent in by bad laws, or a feeble man in the grip of bad social circumstances. He does not, in the passages I have referred to, consider the possibility that someone might deliberately violate the rights of another. The only wrongdoing that he appears to admit might be freely willed without excuse is the hypocritical ardor to punish the unfortunate. In so far as his admiration is for vigor and power, it is for something that certainly does command admiration, though the admiration is not for anything moral in it. Power or vigor is admired, as in a tiger, for the beauty or economy of its exercise, but is not a feature of human beings that necessarily commands moral approval. In any case, a man who admires power and vigor to the extent of even commending it in a man who breaks the chains of law, is hardly consistent in excusing these feeble criminals who are the victims of social circumstance. If power is good, then feebleness is bad, and if feebleness is excused, then it may be necessary to condemn power. Furthermore, even though a society is bad, it may nevertheless be better to punish and prevent certain violations of right such as murder that take place within it, than to allow the wrongdoer to go scot-free, however physically admirable or abjectly excusable he may be. The right to life and to personal property may be defended in a society that is in many other respects a bad one. Many of those in it who defend these rights may, by these very actions, be defending much else that ought not to be, such as exploitation of man by man. Is it wrong, then, to protect the genuine rights because other rights are violated? Ought those who support law and order in this society always to suffer the pangs of a bad conscience? Marx can hardly say “Yes,” because he has ridiculed the idea of remorse and expiation. Marx’s position, it would seem, ought to be that in such a bad society those who support the punishment of wrongdoers ought to work to remove the injustices that lead to wrongdoing—the sincerity of their remorse would be shown by the practical strength of their reforming zeal. But if remorse and repentance are rejected, a good deal of the driving force behind the activities of reformers will have been dissipated.

It is clear that, mixed up in Marx’s moral indignation—a thing which he himself has just described as impotent—is the belief that crime is the outcome of social circumstances, that social circumstances change in accordance with some impersonal impetus, and that in a classless society there would be no crime because there would be no occasions for it. We may see in Marx’s judgments some of the confusion that has beset much of the “progressive” moral thinking of our time. Morality is regarded as somehow inferior to science, and yet the most bitter moral criticisms are directed against industrial and scientific society. Or the “progressive” moralist will prefer one sort of morality, a morality of power and achievement, and will also profess a more than Christian solicitude for the welfare of those who have failed through weakness. He will say that it is “uncivilized” to indulge in moral indignation, and will nevertheless vehemently attack the vice of hypocrisy. But such criticisms as these, however justified they may be, do not take us to the heart of the morality, or moral substitute, that Marx gave to the Marxist movement. In the sections that follow I shall try to get a bit closer to it by considering both the critical and constructive aspects of it in some detail. The attack on morality may be better described, I think, as an attack on “moralism,” and this will be the theme of the next section. This will be followed by a section in which is discussed the Marxist doctrine of how man’s lost unity may be restored. In the section after that I briefly discuss the Marxist theory of the state, since Marx’s condemnation of punishment was at least partly the result of his view that the state which administers punishment is a means by which the dominating class interests are secured.

4.

Marxism and Moralism

The adjective “moralistic” is today used in spoken English to express criticism of exaggerated or misplaced moral judgments. For example, someone may be said to have a moralistic attitude toward crime if he is more concerned with the guilt of the criminals than with ways and means of stopping crimes from being committed. More generally, the noun “moralism” is used for an exaggerated or misplaced zeal for conventional moral rules. In chapter 25 of the Categorical Imperative Professor Paton says that his defense of the Kantian moral theory may be criticized by some people as “the product of moralistic prejudice” (p. 264), and it is clear from the context that a moralistic prejudice is one that results from an excessive emphasis on moral considerations. In the New Yorker for 26 September 1953 there is a criticism of a play based on the murder for which Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were hanged. The critic mentions the theory that Mrs. Thompson’s letters describing her own unsuccessful attempts to murder her husband were romantic imaginations, and writes that this hypothesis was “too much for a literal-minded and moralistic judge and jury.” Here the force of the adjective “moralistic” seems to be that the judge’s and the jury’s moral disapproval of Mrs. Thompson’s adultery prejudiced them against recognizing an important possibility. Perhaps there is also the suggestion that the judge and jury overestimated the badness of adultery. Again, in a leading article in the London Times of 28 October 1953, it is stated that those who wish for the general recognition of the Chinese government by other governments do not base their contention on the “moralistic conception” that recognition is a “moral benediction.” Here too the word “moralistic,” and the phrase “moral benediction” are used somewhat pejoratively to disclaim any fanatical concern with the making of moral judgments. The adjective “moralistic” and the noun “moralism” are, then, used to indicate and depreciate the exaggeration of morality itself, or the exaggeration of those parts of morality that are concerned with the reprobation of guilt. It is easy to see, therefore, that when Marx appears to be attacking morality, he may really be intending to attack moralism.

Now in the parts of the Holy Family in which he discusses the Mysteries of Paris Marx more than once refers approvingly to Fourier’s criticisms of capitalist morality, and it is interesting to notice that “moralism” was one of the things that Fourier had attacked. According to Fourier there are four “false and deceptive sciences,” and to these he gives the names “moralism,” “politics,” “economism,” and “metaphysics.” (The analogy with the theory of ideologies is striking.) Moralism was the term used by Fourier for what he regarded as the pre-scientific repressive methods of controlling the passions of mankind. It was his view that the passions should not be suppressed, but first studied, and then utilized. (A well-known example of this view of his is the scheme by which scavenging, an occupation that disgusts most grown-up people, should be undertaken by children, who enjoy playing with mud and dirt.) An objective study of contemporary society would show, he believed, that it was riddled with falsehood and hypocrisy; that what was thought to be repression of the animal desires was really a diverting of them from real to imaginary satisfactions; that men were cheated by appeals to their patriotism into sacrificing their lives for other men who were in search of commercial gain; that women were robbed of happiness by being educated to ideals of chastity; that reformers who persuaded governments to suppress social evils such as slavery were misled by the “philanthropic illusion” that mere repression was sufficient to stop evils that were rooted in human nature. Fourier thought that moralism was a lazy creed, resulting from an unwillingness to study and understand the workings of the passions. When Marx said that morality was “impotence in action” (he actually used the French phrase impuissance mise en action), he was no doubt thinking of Fourier’s view that moralists take the lazy, quasi-magical course of forbidding and suppressing crime instead of the patient, scientific course of understanding its motives and redirecting them to the social good (“harmonizing” was one of Fourier’s favorite expressions). “Moralism,” then, in Fourier’s system, was the name given to the complex of practices and attitudes in which (1) the part to be played by scientific understanding in improving the lot of man was ignored, in which (2) the human passions were to be suppressed instead of utilized for the common good, and in which (3) the inevitable failure of suppression and repression was followed by concealments and hypocrisies. The current senses of “moralistic” that I have just mentioned agree well enough with this conception. The critics of Kantian moral philosophy mentioned by Professor Paton think that Kant gave too much weight, in his analysis of morality, to the influence of moral reason as compared with men’s passions and self-interest. The writer in the New Yorker thought that the judge and jury were insufficiently informed of the realities of human passion, and were therefore hasty in their judgment of Mrs. Thompson. The writer in the Times thought that indignation at Chinese intransigence might lead governments to be concerned with punishment when they should be concerned with future good.

It seems to me that a fundamental feature of the attack on moralism is the idea that blaming social evils, or preaching against them, or suppressing them, are inadequate ways of dealing with them, and should at any rate be preceded, if not replaced, by an understanding of them. Marx put this very clearly in a review he wrote for the Gesellschaftsspiegel of a French book about suicide. “Man,” he wrote, “seems a mystery to man: one knows only how to blame him, there is no knowledge of him.”22 This is a view that is very easily confused with the idea that morality should be abandoned in favor of a science that is at the same time a transformation of the social world. I have already discussed this more general and radical idea, so that it is sufficient now to say something about the somewhat less radical one that I have just described. And in the first place I suppose I need take up very little space in saying how very widespread and important a view it is today. That preaching, moral indignation, and even moral seriousness could be well dispensed with if only the causes of social evils were known and remedies for them thereby became possible, is the conscious creed of some and an unexpressed assumption of many more. It is an important element not only of the Marxist outlook but of much that is regarded as “progressive” in liberalism and in non-Marxist socialism. Nor is it devoid of all foundation. For, as Marx himself pointed out, not all the evils of society are the result of deliberate wickedness on the part of individual men. Unemployment, for example, is something that is almost as unwelcome to some employers, many of whom may be put out of business in the course of it, as it is to its working-class victims, and it certainly cannot be prevented by telling employers that it is their duty not to dismiss their employees, or by ordering them to provide jobs and wages for them. Analysis of what brings it about, however, has suggested ways in which, in certain circumstances, governments can take measures that prevent it. If these measures are followed by other evils, this does not mean that anyone has aimed at producing these either, and further enquiry and ingenuity may discover new remedies to be applied by governments, by other corporate bodies, or by individuals. In general, many of the social evils from which men suffer are no more the result of human malevolence than are such physical evils as disease or earthquake. Revilings or penalties are, in such cases, as futile as shaking one’s fist at a storm. Furthermore, it is possible that some deliberately evil acts, such as looting or rape in wartime, or a cowardly suicide during a financial depression, would not have occurred if the situation within which they arose had been prevented from coming about. Thus, when a soldier is shot for rape or looting it may well occur to those who have to enforce the penalty that such crimes would not take place if war itself could be prevented. It is almost as though society were responsible for the crime rather than the men who are punished for it. But tempting as it is to talk in terms that appear to shift moral responsibility from the individual to society as a whole, we should not allow ourselves to be misled by this language, and the following seem to me to be some main considerations to be borne in mind.

(a) It is always the case that evil deeds depend upon circumstances in the sense that if the circumstances had been different the deed might not have been committed. If Judas had not met Jesus he would not have betrayed him, but no one would argue that it was the accident of their meeting rather than Judas himself that was responsible for the deed. (Some people, perhaps even Marx, sometimes speak as though circumstances give rise to passions and motives and that these drive men willy-nilly this way and that. But if this were so, there would be no actions at all, and so no responsibility and no morals, and discussion of the sort we are here engaged in would be nonsensical. But most people, and Marx and Marxists most of the time, do not speak in this way except in metaphor.) The idea rather is that there are persistent social circumstances, such as poverty, which offer temptations that a proportion of men may be expected to succumb to, so that the way to reduce wrongdoing is to remove or reduce the temptations to it by producing circumstances in which they can seldom arise. The production of such circumstances, of course, would also remove from some other people the chance of valiantly overcoming these temptations, but this would be justified chiefly on the ground that it is more important to protect those who would be victims of crime than to provide occasions for moral heroism. Marx seems to have thought, and perhaps he was right, that some of the “crimes” that take place in evil societies are not wrong at all, but are justifiable acts of revolt against intolerable restraints. The practical conclusion that may be drawn is that, besides the duties of protecting individuals from lawless acts and helping the victims of war, unemployment, and poverty, there is, somehow, a duty to overcome lawlessness in general, and to prevent war, poverty, unemployment, and other social evils.

(b) There is, I have said, “somehow” a duty to attempt these things. But whose duty is it? And how is it to be pursued? It is natural to suppose that the duty rests on those best able to fulfill it, that is, on those whose influence in society is greatest, and thus it came about in the nineteenth century that statesmen and well-to-do people concerned themselves with “the condition of the people,” as it was called. This meant that those who were influential in public life were thought to have a duty not only to uphold the law and to help the unfortunate but also to try to change those social conditions in which crime and misfortune accumulated. But on the Marxist view, the moral and social conceptions of the bourgeois ruling class must reflect and support their own interests, which are not the interests of the working classes. From this it is concluded that any benefits that the working classes have received from the bourgeoisie—and it cannot be denied that they have received some—have been unwillingly conceded to them, either as the price of their support against the landowning interest, or in the hope of enticing them away from more radical courses. Marxists, therefore, believe that the only duty that a member of the bourgeoisie can have to help promote the transformation of society must take the form of joining the working-class party that is out to destroy the capitalist order. The working-class Marxist is thus in the happy position of having a duty that is consistent with pride in his class, whereas the bourgeois Marxist must be ashamed of his birth and can only do good when he has renounced it. Thus all reforms promoted by non-Marxists are regarded as hypocritical maneuvers. Not only is moral endeavor diverted from the fulfillment of duties within the social order to the duty of transforming it, but it is not admitted to be moral endeavor unless it is under the direction of the Communist Party.

(c) It is obvious, therefore, that the Communist creed gives definite guidance about whose duty it is to take action to cure the evils that are held to pervade capitalist society. It is the duty (as well as the interest) of the proletariat to take this action, and particularly of the members of “the party of the proletariat.” From this it follows that anyone who seriously desires to cure the evils in question will join the party of the proletariat. The non-Marxist who wishes to see these evils brought to an end has no such definite course open to him. He may lose faith in the efficacy of individual action without knowing what is to replace it. In his perplexity he often turns to the state, for the state is a powerful body capable of drastic action in the public sphere. I do not think it is at all fanciful to say that a result of increased preoccupation with the cure of pervasive social evils has been a transfer of moral concern from individuals and families to state and party. Churches, both because they are conservative in outlook and because they wished to avoid political entanglements, have been more interested in the alleviation of social evils than with their cure. There was a period when industrial concerns like Lever Brothers endeavored to fulfill the newly conceived duties by such means as housing schemes for their employees. But when giant evils are regarded as maladies requiring equally giant cures, men look for giant physicians, therapeutic Leviathans, in the form of governments and mass parties. It may well be that there are other possibilities of remedy not yet apparent to us, but until these are manifest the attack on moralism must tend to a transfer of moral interest. Praising, blaming, and preaching have not been eliminated but have taken on new forms in other places. If the clergyman’s sermons no longer inspire many men to action, governments try to persuade traders to lower their prices or to preach workmen into temporary contentment with their wages.

(d) Another feature of the attack on moralism is a rejection of moralizing. Moralizing is calling people’s attention to moral principles which they ought to follow, and those who reject moralizing have the idea that not only is it useless—and this is the point that we have so far been considering—but also that it is insincere. Marxists, and many non-Marxists too, feel that there is something mean and hypocritical about those who preach morality, as though the preaching were incompatible with the practice of it. I think that this attitude has arisen in part because of the social leveling that has been in progress since the French Revolution. People are unwilling to listen to sermons unless they accept the authority of the preacher or of his message, and throughout the nineteenth century the old message and the old preachers commanded less and less respect, so that now, in the mid–twentieth century, many people regard moral preaching as a base substitute for moral action. Just as Shaw held that “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” so the anti-moralist seems to believe that “those who will, do; those who don’t, preach.” (Well-bred, sheltered people often suppose that the main moral principles are so plain that there is something tedious and ill-mannered in mentioning them. They may be right as regards their own social circle, but there are levels of society in which there is very little, if any, conception of duty.) In Marxist morality moral approval is reserved for deeds only, and neither words nor intentions are allowed to have moral weight. This may be illustrated by a passage from The German Ideology in which Marx criticizes the German bourgeoisie for its cowardly acceptance of the morality of “the good will.”23 Marx seems to have believed that Kant taught that a good will was good in abstraction from deeds, but he was quite wrong in believing this, since in the passage in which Kant describes the good will he says that it is not “a mere wish,” but “the straining of every means so far as they are in our control.”24 But Marx, in the passage in question, was concerned to draw a contrast between French liberalism, which was a liberalism of deeds which carried through the French Revolution, and German liberalism, which he thought had been a liberalism of mere intentions that led nowhere; and to draw another contrast between the concrete interests (such as reform of taxation) which gave vigor to French liberalism, and the formalism which, he believed, had rendered German liberalism powerless.

Two associated but distinct theses are involved in this panegyric of action. In the first place Marx is asserting that if someone does not practice his professed moral principles, then they are not his principles at all but mere verbal professions. This is just what Kant holds in his doctrine of “maxims,” but in Marxism it becomes associated with the theory of the union of theory and practice and gets a peculiar moral application. It is argued, for example, that people who preach reform but give support only to projects of gradual improvement, show by their deeds that they have found little to quarrel with in the existing social order. Now part, but only part, of this argument is correct. Moral principles are practical principles, and we know what a man’s practical principles are from his deeds more than from his words alone, so that if what a man does differs widely and often from what he says he believes he ought to do, we feel justified in concluding that his moral talk was mere talk so far as it concerned himself. Involved with this is the view of the Theses on Feuerbach that there is no impassable barrier between thoughts (or acts of will) “in the mind” and practice (or deeds) in the natural world. But this truth should not be confused, as Marxists do confuse it, with the falsehood that sincerity in wanting to cure social ills is possessed only by those who work with the Communist Party for the violent overthrow of the capitalist system. If it were perfectly clear that the evils in question would be cured in this way, and would not be cured but would get much worse if this course were not adopted, then there would be some justification for doubting the sincerity of cautious bourgeois reformers. But once it is allowed to be possible that there may be other means of curing the evils in question, or once it is granted that some of them may not be curable at all, this “activism,” as the attitude in question is sometimes called, loses its plausibility. “By their fruits ye shall know them” is one thing, and Marxist “activism” is quite another. But this “activism” exerts a powerful spell on people of good will who wish to help in the cure of social evils and are persuaded that there is one way only in which this can be done.

A second point to notice in Marx’s attack on the “good will” is that he depreciates the intentions and aims of the agent by comparison with his deeds and their effects. This is different from the point that it is by the deeds of men that we chiefly get to know their intentions. This second point is that the intentions of men matter very little by comparison with what they set in motion by their deeds. I think that this view has colored Marxist thinking ever since Marx’s day and accounts, in part, for an aspect of it that puzzles non-Marxists. When some line of Marxist policy fails, the leader responsible for it may be cast aside, vilified, and shot, even though he may have struggled his utmost to bring the policy to success. It is well known that men like Bukharin who appear to have spent their lives in the Communist cause, are reviled as traitors to it because the policy they advocated was abandoned by the Party. The non-Marxist feels that to blame and disgrace a man merely because his policy fails is morally indefensible. Now part of the Communist objection to such men may be that if they do something that harms the Party they cannot sincerely believe in the Party. That is, part of the objection may result from a stupid misapplication of the dictum “By their fruits ye shall know them.” But I suggest that there is more in it than this, and that another reason for the Communists’ attitude is that they judge a statesman entirely in terms of what he achieves, and that they judge what he achieves entirely in terms of its success in promoting the aims of the Communist Party. I think it is important to notice that when this attitude is adopted the statesman is regarded as a means to the securing of certain aims and as nothing else. The judgment that is passed on him is passed merely in respect of the success or failure of his instrumentality and not in respect of him as a person. His loyalty to the cause as he understands it counts for nothing by comparison with the fact that he miscalculated or was frustrated by events. Thus the Marxists who behave in the way I have described are treating the men they call traitors not as persons, not as beings with some independent moral value, not, as Kant put it, as “ends,” but as broken links in some impersonal process. Yet there is something almost compelling about the way in which the Marxist comes to this. We judge men’s sincerity, he argues, by their deeds; intentions that are belied by deeds were never there, but are simulated by hypocritical words; men’s sincerity is shown by their work for the oppressed, and therefore by their work for the Party that champions the oppressed; men who, from within this Party, pursue policies that endanger its success are the most dangerous enemies of mankind. It is in some such way, it seems to me, that Marxists pass from the condition in which they demand responsible moral commitment to that in which they require only mechanical, and therefore irresponsible, obedience. They have followed the well-worn path that leads from moral indignation, through revolt and revolutionary administration, to cynicism and ultimate nihilism.

A further element in Marx’s criticism of the Kantian “good will” was, it will be remembered, that the German liberals who made profession of it were not pursuing any specific, concrete interests, but merely thought in terms of a formal equality of man that they failed to link with any of the real needs of their time. He accuses them, that is, of being for “equality” but not for any specific equalities. Marx, like Hegel and Fourier, suggests that morality is not an affair of pure practical reason detached from the passions of men. He regards Kant as holding that there is a pure moral reason, distinct from the passions, that ought to bring them into subjection to itself but is frequently unable to do so. We may develop Marx’s view on this matter somewhat as follows. Those who suppose that there is reason on the one hand and passion and interests on the other go on to maintain that morality requires the suppression of the latter by the former. They look upon man as split in two and hope for unity to be established by one half dominating the other. Yet in fact, the argument proceeds, the half that is to play the role of master is not a reality at all, but an abstraction, the shadow of a shade. The shade, on Marx’s view, is the soul as the central feature of religious belief, and the pure moral reason is the shadow of this. Marx thought that the morality of repression was bound up with belief in this soul, and that a morality of development would discard it. In the Christian morality, he held, man was divided against himself, whereas the rejection of supernatural beliefs and of their philosophical counterparts was implicit in any system that looked forward to the development of integrated human beings. In the next section, therefore, we must consider the Marxist ideal of man’s lost unity restored.

5.

Man’s Lost Unity Restored

In recent years, particularly in France, a good deal has been written about Marx’s so-called Paris Manuscripts or Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, an unpublished and uncompleted work in which Hegelian notions are associated with economic theory. It used to be held that the obscure arguments contained in this work find no place in the Materialist Conception of History that Marx developed soon after, but more careful study has made it clear that, although Marx gave up the terminology of these manuscripts, the ideas themselves had a lasting effect on his system of thought. They play no obvious part in the writings of Lenin and Stalin, but we are justified in giving some attention to them because of the part they have played in forming the Marxist moral ideal. What I shall have to say about them is, of course, only a very brief outline of what would need saying if our main concern had been with the development of Marx’s own views rather than with the Marxist outlook that has grown from them.25

Now there are two key words in Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, the word Entäusserung, generally translated “alienation,” which in German has the meaning of giving up, parting with, renouncing, and the stronger word Entfremdung, which means “estrangement.” Marx took these words from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, and we must therefore first see what they were there used to express. The fundamental idea of Hegel’s Phenomenology is that mind is not a simple, self-contained substance distinct from and independent of the external world, but a complex being that develops from mere sense awareness through a series of phases in which more and more of its potentialities are unfolded to an ultimate self-consciousness which contains in itself all the earlier phases. Mind is activity, and since there can be no activity without an object on which it is exercised, Hegel considered that mind could only become conscious of itself by becoming aware of the objects that its activity brought to being. We may get an idea of what Hegel means if we consider that an artist or man of science can only come to realize what he is capable of by producing works of art or by framing theories and then considering them as objective achievements—he will certainly learn more about himself in this way than by trying to catch himself thinking as Bouvard and Pécuchet tried unsuccessfully to do in Flaubert’s novel. There is no mind, according to Hegel, without distinction and opposition, and in the Preface to the Phenomenology he writes of “the earnestness, the pain, the patience, the labour of the negative.” This is no mere metaphor, and at various stages of the Phenomenology Hegel shows how mind’s consciousness of itself is improved by such means as the manual labor of the slave who comes to learn about himself in carrying out the plans of his master, or in the subtleties of speech and architecture, or in the worship given to the gods. “The labouring consciousness,” he says in connection with the slave, “thus comes to apprehend the independent being as itself.” It is Hegel’s view that mind could not develop by staying at home; it must work for its living, and this means that it grows by consuming itself, by putting itself into what, to begin with, appeared opposed and alien. (We may see here a development of Locke’s defense of property as something into which a man has put himself.) This going outside itself by which mind develops its powers is called by Hegel Entäusserung or alienation. Without it man would have remained at the level of mere animal life and there would have been no civilization. It follows that there could be no progress or civilization without opposition and division. And this division must be in the minds of men. On the one hand there is mind as externalized in its works, and on the other hand there is the mind that confronts them. Hegel mentions various occasions when this opposition between mind and its products was particularly acute. One was when the ancient city-state had collapsed and the individual, feeling oppressed and deserted under the Roman despotism, retreated into himself or fled to God, and thus opposed his religious life that was dedicated to God to his everyday life in which he was subject to Caesar. Whereas the Athenian of the age of Pericles had felt at home in the city, the Christian of the Imperial period felt a stranger in the pagan world. Again, with the coming of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, men lost their earlier assurance of their place in the scheme of things and were torn between their faith and their intelligence. (We may think here of the portentous conflict within the mind of Rousseau, and of the later “romantic agony.”) Hegel uses the word Entfremdung for these unhappy divisions in the mind of man as, through conflict, he moves on to new achievements. Briefly, the theme of the Phenomenology is the mind’s progress from mere unreflective living through opposition, labor, alienation, and estrangement, to the ultimate harmonious self-consciousness. This, fundamentally, is the theme of the Marxist philosophy of history in which mankind passes from classless primitive communism through class struggle to the ultimate communism in which, freed from class divisions, men take conscious control of their destiny.

I do not propose to discuss the details of Marx’s criticisms of Hegel’s Phenomenology—it is sufficiently obvious that, like Feuerbach, he considered that Hegel concerned himself with abstract categories instead of with concrete realities. But whereas Feuerbach had given to Hegel’s metaphysical language a psychological interpretation, Marx made use of it for social criticism. The main point of Marx’s translation of economic language into Hegelian language is that he draws an analogy between the condition of the proletarian in capitalist society and the condition of the estranged, divided mind that has not yet achieved harmonious self-consciousness. According to Hegel the estranged mind is lost in a world that seems alien to it, although it is a world that it has labored to construct. According to Marx men living in capitalist society are faced by a social order that, although it results from what they do, exerts a senseless constraint over them as if it were something purely physical presented to their senses. Again, according to Hegel the acute points of estrangement come after periods of relative harmony, and according to Marx the estrangement of man in capitalism has reached a degree not touched before. A savage living in a cave, he says, does not feel a stranger there, since he has discovered that by so living he can improve his life. But a proletarian living in a cellar is not at home there since it belongs to another who can eject him if he does not pay his rent.26 The contrast is between a man who by his labor transforms the alien world into something that he recognizes as his, and a man whose labor helps to construct a system that takes control of him. The one man’s labor is an enhancement and extension of himself, the other man’s labor is his own impoverishment. And it is not only the results of his labor that have this effect, but the labor itself is an activity quite foreign to his nature. “The worker feels himself only when he is not working and when he is at work he feels outside himself.”27 Under capitalism, then, the human labor which could, if consciously employed, extend the power of man, is blindly spent in subjecting him to his own unconsciously formed creations.

Before we comment on this let us see how, in the same work, Marx develops the idea by showing the part played by money. Money, he argues, leads to the substitution of an unnatural, distorted society for the natural society in which human powers come to their fruition. It does this by becoming the necessary intermediary between a desire and its satisfaction. For the possession of money enables a man to satisfy the most exorbitant desires, and the lack of it prevents him from satisfying the most elementary ones. Someone with no money cannot effectively desire to travel and study however much these activities might contribute to his development as a human being, whereas someone with money may realize these desires even though he is quite incapable of profiting from them. Thus money has the power of turning idea into reality, and of making a reality (i.e., a genuine human power) remain a mere idea.28 It is natural and human, he argues, for love to be responded to by love, trust by trust, for the man of taste to enjoy pictures, for forceful and eloquent men to influence others. But money distorts all this by enabling the man who is devoid of love to purchase it, the vulgar man to buy pictures, the coward to buy influence. Marx illustrates this by the famous passage in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens in which Timon says that “Gold! Yellow, glittering, precious gold” will “make black, white; foul, fair; wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant;” etc. This was a favorite passage of Marx’s throughout his life, and he quoted it twenty years later in Capital, volume 1, to illustrate his argument that it is not only commodities that may be turned into money but also “more delicate things, sacrosanct things which are outside the commercial traffic of men.” “Modern society,” he goes on, “which, when still in its infancy, pulled Pluto by the hair of his head out of the bowels of the earth, acclaims gold its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its inmost vital principle.”29 In Capital, volume 1, commodities are defined by Marx as goods produced for exchange,30 and it is money that makes such exchange possible on a large scale. In capitalist society almost all goods are produced for sale and are therefore commodities, and this, according to Marx, prevents most of the members of that society from seeing that the exchange value of these goods results from the labor put into their production. This is not concealed in feudal society where direct domination prevails, since a man who has to do forced labor or to pay tithes cannot fail to notice that, fundamentally, it is his labor, that is, himself, that he gives, and that it is to the lord or the priest that he gives himself. But in capitalist society the goods that are produced for sale take on a fetishistic character, as if their exchange value were something inherent in them, like the god that is supposed to inhabit the stone. Men are kept at it producing goods for money as if money or commodities were the end of life. First gold, and then capital, became the Fetish that commanded men’s lives just as some stone idol controls the lives of African barbarians.

Marx’s religious comparison here shows the continuing influence of Feuerbach. In Capital, volume 1, Marx underlines the comparison. He argues that primitive people believe in nature-gods because they do not know how to arrange their affairs with one another and with nature. “Such religious reflexions of the real world,” he writes, “will not disappear until the relations between human beings in their practical everyday life have assumed the aspect of perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations between man and man, and as between man and nature.” So too, he holds, with the commodity fetish. “The life process of society, this meaning the material process of production, will not lose its veil of mystery until it becomes a process carried on by a free association of producers, under their conscious and purposive control.”31 “Mystery” is one of Feuerbach’s key words, and “conscious and purposive control” is Feuerbach’s and Marx’s substitute for the Hegelian self-consciousness. The equation of “life process of society” with “the material process of production” is, however, a departure from his earliest views which obviously diminishes their moral impact.

In the first place, then, let us consider Marx’s view that when, as in capitalist society, goods are produced for sale, i.e., for money, most people’s lives are as pointless as are the lives of those who worship non-existent gods. The reference, it will be remembered, is to Feuerbach’s argument that it is because of their disappointments in this life that men have imagined a world of gods who provide merely substitute satisfactions for their real needs. Now it seems to me that Feuerbach and Marx were much too ready to suppose that the world can be so ordered that substitute satisfactions will not be necessary. Some of the chief evils that beset mankind seem to be inseparable from the condition of being human. Death is the source of many of our main griefs and the source, too, of many of our religious hopes, and as long as men die and want to live, and as long as some die when others remain alive, the need for religious consolation will continue. There is no need for me to dwell on other griefs such as personal ugliness or insignificance often cause which, though not universal as death is, nevertheless give rise to the same need for a spirit world. It is those who are lucky, sheltered, hard, or unusually intelligent, who may expect to escape this need, but it must remain, I should suppose, a feature of any human society that we are justified in thinking about. If this is so, no amount of social remodeling is likely to extinguish the propensity of human beings to split themselves and the world into something material and something spiritual.

But on the face of it money is not as closely linked with the condition of being human as belief in another world is, for men have lived without money and might conceivably do so again. Marx is on stronger ground, therefore, in looking forward to the dispelling of the money illusion. His view appears to be that money diverts men’s minds from their real concerns to illusory ones just as, on his view, the worship of the gods diverts them from their primary earthly concerns. Now I do not think that this matter is nearly as simple as Marx thought it was. He assumes that he knows what men’s “real concerns” are, or, as he puts it in the Paris Manuscripts, what a “human” life is and must be. In this work men’s real concern is to develop their powers free from illusion, but in Capital the reality of human society is, as the passage quoted in the last paragraph shows, “the material process of production.” This is one of the points at which confusion enters into the whole Marxist scheme of things. When we talk about men’s real concerns we are talking in moral terms about what they ought to concern themselves with, but when Marx talks about “social reality” he means society as it really is in contrast with society as it falsely appears to people who do not understand its workings. In the Paris Manuscripts he was still a moralist, whereas in Capital he claims to be a man of science saying what must be. Nowhere, it seems to me, is he clear whether he is thinking of moral illusions or of material illusions, of mistakes about what we ought to do or of mistakes about what is. This may be seen even in his use of the passage from Timon of Athens. It seems to me that Timon’s mistake was to have believed that money could buy friendship. He found when his money had gone that the men he had been giving it to were not his friends at all, and he ought to have concluded that you get friends by giving yourself rather than by giving money. Marx does not draw the conclusion that money cannot buy love or taste, but he rather concludes that it can buy these things and that therefore people without it cannot get them. The story of Timon shows that money is not all-powerful, not that everything can be done with it. In Capital Marx says that money is a “radical leveller, effaces all distinctions,” and there is a sense in which this is true. In an aristocratic society only members of the aristocracy may be allowed to live in manor-houses or to wear certain styles of dress, but once the society is sufficiently permeated by commerce anyone with the money to buy one may live in a manor-house and the style of clothes one wears will depend on what one is able and willing to buy. But it does not follow from this that money will buy even prestige, since this is something that nouveaux riches often fail to obtain with it.

This brings me to a further aspect of this point. Marx is arguing that in a money economy people mistake the shadow for the substance, the symbol for the reality. Money is a symbol enabling goods to be equated with one another, but people live on food not on money. Now this is true if we take “live” in the sense of “keep alive,” for coins and banknotes have no intrinsic power of nourishing. But money may also be regarded as a sign of success, and in this sense the possession of money, although it may not chiefly concern the buying of goods and services, is by no means empty or pointless, for the prestige it brings is real enough. Here again the Marxist tendency is to regard such things as prestige as illusory and to confuse this with the judgment that they are bad. Again, an individual whose life is spent in the pursuit of money may, if those psychologists are right who say so, be endeavoring to hoard it as a substitute for excrement, but he does get satisfaction of a sort from his strange behavior. People may obtain money (1) in order to buy goods or services with which to keep alive and develop their powers; or they may obtain it (2) in order to get social prestige—and this course is reasonable only in a society where money does give social prestige; or they may obtain it (3) to satisfy some unconscious desire. Now (1) and (2) are not quite as different as they may at first seem, for people tend to spend their money in ways that at least will not bring social disapproval. But (3) is quite different from (1) and (2), since the pathological miser hoards with a passion that is not much affected by social disapproval.32 Thus his obsession may bring pleasure in one way and pain in another, in so far as he meets social disapproval. It is also different from (1) and (2) in that the miser does not know what is leading him along the course he is following, would probably wish to do something else if he did know, and is generally unhappy except when he is adding to his hoard or counting it over. On the other hand, people may admit to themselves that they want “to get on,” and not want to do anything else when this is pointed out to them. At any rate their pursuit of money is not empty or mistaken merely because money is a symbol. If it is mistaken, it is because there are other things more worthy of pursuit than the prestige that money brings. It is not mistaken because money is a symbol for eating and drinking and other so-called “material” activities. It is worth noticing that religious belief cannot be regarded as significantly like the behavior of the pathological miser, since in any single community it is widespread, if not universal, and brings men together in activities that are esteemed, whereas the miser is at odds with his fellow men and therefore with himself.

The second point I should like to make about Marx’s early account of “estrangement” is that it is linked with his later view that it is through the division of labor that man is divided and repressed. Indeed, one of his criticisms of money is that it facilitates the division of labor. Now Marx distinguished different sorts of division of labor. In the first place there is what in Capital, volume 1, he calls “the social division of labour in society at large.” This includes the natural division of labor between men and women, young and old, strong and feeble, as well as that between the various crafts and professions.33 It is his view that in all societies except primitive communism it is inseparable from private property and classes. This he contrasts with what he calls “the manufacturing division of labour” in which capitalist employers assign to their workmen particular tasks determined by the organization of their industry. Men engaged in the manufacturing division of labor Marx calls “detail workers”; these are men who, for example, do not make a watch but only one part of a watch, and, Marx says, “a worker who carries out one and the same simple operation for a lifetime, converts his whole body into the automatic specialized instrument of that of that operation.”34 But even this is not the most specialized type of division, for the extreme of specialization arises when machinery has been invented and the individual worker’s job is determined by the structure and working of the machine. Marx calls this “machinofacture.” He says that machinofacture requires the “technical subordination of the worker to the uniform working of the instrument of labour”35 and leads to child labor, long working hours, and unhealthy working conditions. Now Marx holds that all types of the division of labor limit the activities of individuals and divide them. In The German Ideology he writes: “. . . As long as man remains in natural society . . . as long therefore as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as labour is distributed, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”36 And in Capital he writes: “Even the division of labour in society at large entails some crippling both of mind and body.”37 But of course in the latter work his chief concern is to show the much greater evils that follow from the subdivision of labor that is characteristic of machine industry. The question therefore arises of what communism is a remedy for, and of what sort of remedy it is. Is it a remedy for the evils of all division of labor? If so, then under communism there would be no division of labor. Or is it a remedy for the extremes of the division of labor such as occur in machine industry? If so, a division of labor that accorded with natural aptitudes might still exist in communist society. It will be seen from the passage I have quoted from The German Ideology that when that book was written Marx looked forward to the end of the division of labor, in the sense that no one would be confined to one sort of job. A few years later Engels wrote a little essay in the form of a series of questions entitled “Grundsätze des Kommunismus.” Question 20 is: “What will be the results of the eventual abolition of private property?” and in the course of answering it Engels says that industry will be managed according to a plan, that this will require men whose capacities are developed “on all sides,” and that in such a society children will be trained to pass easily from job to job. In this way, he continues, classes will vanish.38 Marx did not incorporate this idea into the Communist Manifesto where the communist society is vaguely described as “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” But in 1875, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx returned to this idea when, in describing the second phase of the communist society of the future, he says that “the servile subjection of individuals to the division of labour” will disappear, and with it the opposition between intellectual and bodily work. It is not clear whether this means that the division of labor will disappear or whether it will continue but that men will no longer be enslaved by it, but as communist industry is to be highly productive we may suppose that Marx meant that the jobs could be divided without the men who carry them out being divided.

The root of the matter, as with so much else in Marxist theory, is contained in The German Ideology. The paragraph following that which I quoted on pages 219–20 commences as follows: “This crystallization of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to nought our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.”39 What is here being said is that human inventiveness has led to an organization of society that no one has planned, and that this organization, with its division of labor, is something which each individual, and each generation of individuals, must accept as a social fact to which they must adjust themselves. The argument is that men have to fit themselves to the results of their efforts instead of producing by their efforts something that they want. Thus, when there is a division of labor individuals are drawn into some limited mode of work (which is therefore a limited mode of life) which directs their activities in a direction that they have not chosen. If people are to live complete lives instead of merely partial ones, they must, in a highly developed society, be able to choose and perform lots of jobs. (We need not pursue here Engels’ secondary point that in communist society a more generalized type of ability will be called for.) The communist ideal is one in which nothing happens that has not been planned and in which everyone can live the sort of life he wants to. Now quite apart from the obvious objection that such a state of affairs is most unlikely to be achieved, I think we may make the more radical objection that it could not conceivably be achieved. For if plans are to be carried out, things will be done that some people have objected to, or if nothing is done that anyone objects to plans cannot be carried out. Furthermore, as I argued on pages 176–77, to assume that a society is completely under human control is to assume that no one ever makes a mistake or miscalculation. Marxists are so anxious to free men from unwilled social forces that they propose to subject them to an infallible and unavoidable social plan, the organization and operation of which they have never explained.

I have already shown how very similar to the views of Fourier on “moralism” Marx’s views are, and now, in conclusion, I should like to show how closely Marx’s objection to the evils of the division of labor resembles another part of Fourier’s ethical theory. Fourier believed that the social order of his time ran counter to three of the most important and fundamental human passions, the Cabalist passion or passion for intrigue, the Butterfly passion or passion for variety, and the Composite passion or passion for mingling the pleasures of the senses and of the soul. The Cabalist passion we need not now discuss, although it is important enough since, according to Fourier, it involves the confounding of ranks so that superiors and inferiors come closer together, and thus is incompatible with rigid class distinctions. The other two, however, are regarded by Fourier as justifying two of his most characteristic proposals, the passage in the course of each working day from one job to another, and the mingling of bodily and mental elements in all work and all enjoyment. According to him the subdivision of labor in industrial society with the long hours at monotonous tasks that it then involved was quite incompatible with human happiness. In one of his accounts of what he called “attractive labour” he describes a day in the life of a member of the future society as consisting of “attendance at the hunting group,” “attendance at the fishing group,” “attendance at the agricultural group under cover,” and attendance at four or five other groups as well as work in the library, visits to the “court of the arts, ball, theatre, receptions,” etc. There is no need to underline the similarity between this and the account in The German Ideology of the member of communist society who hunts in the morning, fishes in the afternoon, rears cattle in the evening, and criticizes after dinner. In discussing the Composite passion Fourier argues that the attempt to enjoy intellectual pursuits without mingling them with the pleasures of eating, drinking, pleasant company, etc., leads to a thin and bored state of mind, whereas the attempt to enjoy the pleasures of the senses without any intellectual admixture leads to an unsatisfactorily brutish condition. He extends this idea in ingenious ways so as to maintain, for example, that an ambition that has no element of interest about it is inferior to one in which more is at stake than mere glory or reputation. If we consider Marx’s condemnation of the division of intellectual from bodily labor, his criticism of German liberalism for its detachment from real social interests, and his general requirement that social arrangements should satisfy the whole of human nature and not lead to its division into mutilated parts, we can see how much of the moral stimulus of Marxism came from Fourier. In Fourier this positive moral impetus is as strong as the criticism of moralism. Marx, however, more sophisticated but less clear-headed than Fourier, spent so much effort in criticizing the existing social order that he had none left for the task of describing the one that was to replace it.

6.

The Supersession of the State

It will be remembered that Marx, in his discussion of Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, and in a later newspaper article, criticized the institution of punishment on the ground that it was better to cure social evils than merely to repress their consequences. But another reason why Marx was hostile to punishment was that, in so far as it is a means of upholding rights, it is carried out by a state or government, and states or governments are organizations for protecting the interests of a ruling class. Because he believed that this is what the state essentially is, Marx held that all its activities, even those that might on the face of it appear innocent enough, must in some way express its nature as an instrument of class domination. “Political power,” he wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” We have already seen enough of the Marxist theory to realize that law and politics are held to be superstructural by comparison with the basic productive forces. Hence the nature and exercise of state (political) power can only be understood in terms of underlying technological or industrial conditions. The view is that as the various technological epochs succeed one another, different sets of interests proceed to organize their supremacy. In the Ancient World it was slave-owners who saw to it that the laws were formulated and enforced in ways favorable to them; in feudal society it was the landowners, and in capitalist society it is the bourgeoisie, who rule by methods that ensure the supremacy of the social arrangements that their interests require. The proletariat is destined to dispossess the bourgeoisie and to inaugurate a society without classes and without domination.

This is the general view, but we must now elaborate some of the details. Why is it, we may ask, that a government is needed to promote the interests of a ruling class, when the real power of this class consists in its control of the productive forces? The Marxist answer is that where classes exist, opposed interests exist, so that it becomes necessary for those whose position in the scheme of production is unfavorable to be kept from rebelling against those whose position is favorable, whether these dissidents are the adherents of an outmoded or the pioneers of a new system. Threats of force, and also the use of it, are therefore employed to prevent the social order from collapsing in continuous civil war. Now the state just is an organization which, within a given territory, makes and upholds by force and threat of force the rules of conduct that foster the interests of a ruling class. As Lenin put it in his literal way: “It consists of special bodies of armed men who have at their disposal prisons, etc.”40 Police, armies, judges, officials, punishment, prisons—these, according to Marxists, make up the state. Of course, a ruling class maintains itself in power by other means besides coercion. For example, there will be men who frame and advocate the view of the world, the ideology, that expresses the outlook and interests of the ruling class. Such ideologies will spread from the ruling class to the subject classes and bind the latter to the former by bonds of speculation. But on the Marxist view the essence of the state is coercion.

It is also an important Marxist view that in primitive communist society there was no state. The idea that state and society are not the same thing is familiar enough. Locke’s “state of nature,” for example, was a social condition in which there was no “political superior,” and many writers since have pointed out that in many of the simpler societies there is no distinct organization for dealing by force with breaches of custom. No doubt the distinction between society and state came into Marxism from the writings of Saint-Simon (which Marx and Engels both quote) and from the Saint-Simonian ideas that were discussed in Marx’s family and in the University of Berlin when Marx was a student there. Indeed, Saint-Simonianism was a very active movement in Europe at the time when Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels were forming their views, and Comte (who in his early years was Saint-Simon’s secretary) on the one hand, and Marx and Engels on the other, may be regarded as developing in rather different ways certain doctrines laid down by Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon, then, regarded the state as a relic of the military and theological era that was being replaced by the industrial era; hence in the state order was secured by means of authority and force, whereas industrial and scientific society, the spontaneous outcome of labor and inventiveness, needed no theological authority or military caste to foster its development. According to Saint-Simon the priests, kings, soldiers, and lawyers who support the state have no real functions to perform in industrial society and will soon find themselves out of work there.41 The Marxist theory is, then, that the state arises when an exploiting class organizes force in its interests. But if this is so, it will have no raison d’être when classes have been abolished and class conflicts have ceased to rage. The form of organization that primitive communism knew nothing of will, under the communism of the future, be superfluous. Marxists write of the following sequence of future events: (1) the proletarian attack on the bourgeois state; (2) the “smashing” (zerbrechen) of the bourgeois state by the party of the proletarian class (Marx’s letter to Kugelmann of 12 April 1872); (3) the establishment of a proletarian state which will act, as by their very nature all states must act, in the interests of a class, but this time of the proletarian class; (4) the overcoming of all opposition from other classes, and in particular from the bourgeoisie, by vesting all the means of production in the proletarian state—the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a phrase used by Marx himself more than once, and notably in his Critique of the Gotha Programme; (5) a period of “withering away” of the proletarian state which is completed when there is no more class opposition and when production has reached a point enormously higher than was possible in capitalist society—the “withering away” is indicated in Engels’ Anti-Dühring; (6) the transition from capitalism to communism is to proceed via “socialism,” a system under which private property has been abolished without yet removing all scarcity; under socialism it is not yet possible for each individual to receive all that he wants, and the principle of distribution is that each individual’s reward is proportionate to the amount of work he has done, deductions being made for depreciation of plant, new capital projects, sickness, and old age benefits, etc.; (7) under communism itself the individual, his work no longer “alien” to him, works according to his capacity and receives in accordance with his need. (I do not know of any explanation of the word “need” in this context. It seems to mean just “desire.”) (8) If a proletarian revolution takes place in one state while capitalism continues in others, then the proletarian state must continue in order that the transition to communism may not be interfered with from outside. This is the reason given by Stalin in his Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R., 1935, for the fact that the Soviet state has not yet “withered away,” and is showing signs of becoming stronger.

I feel pretty sure that the account of the matter given in Lenin’s State and Revolution is a reasonable interpretation of the views of Marx and Engels and a reasonable application of them to later circumstances. Perhaps there is some doubt about the meaning of “smash” in Marx’s letter to Kugelmann, since the qualification “on the Continent” might leave open the possibility of a revolution in England or the U.S.A. without this dismal act of destruction. However, Marx’s and Engels’ preface to the 1872 German edition of the Communist Manifesto seems to imply that the proletariat could not secure its ends by means of “the ready-made state machinery” anywhere. So far as the authority of dead writers can be used in such circumstances, it appears to tell against “reformist” interpretations of them in this regard. Nor is it unreasonable for Stalin to argue that internal social changes brought about in Soviet Russia need to be protected against possible attacks from without. The dubious element in his argument is that leading Communists such as Trotsky and Bukharin “were in the services of foreign espionage organizations and carried on conspiratorial activities from the very first days of the October Revolution.” The question to consider, therefore, is not whether the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state is a consistent development of the tradition—in the main it obviously is; nor whether Marx and Engels would have approved of present-day Communist Party interpretations of it—this we can never know; but whether, as it stands, it is a tenable account of the state and of what politics is, and whether the prophecies involved in it are credible.

Let us consider it first, then, as an account of the state and of politics. And let us agree straight away that the distinction between society and state is both valid and important. The word “state,” of course, is ambiguous, and can mean either a society governed through laws, police, judges, etc., or the governmental organization itself as a part of the state in the first sense of the word. But the Marxist theory does not run into any difficulties because of this ambiguity. The main difficulty in the theory, it seems to me, arises from the association in it between politics and the state. As with so many Marxist doctrines there is a good deal of vagueness here, but it seems pretty clear that Marxists, like many others, use the term “politics” in a sense that links it indissolubly with the state and hence with government and force. People are entitled to attach meanings and to develop them so long as they make their intentions clear. But social theorists have suggested, rightly, in my opinion, that there are disadvantages in associating “politics” exclusively with the state, with government, and with force, because the effect of this is to dissociate the term “politics” from other forms of organization where it is normally and usefully employed. This dissociation, of course, is intended by Marxists, but I think that their view of what is possible falls into error because of it, for if force and politics and domination are not merely aspects of the state but spread more widely than the state does, then the abolition of the state may not be the abolition of force and politics and domination. Now suppose we interpret “politics” widely to indicate the means used to influence people, to get them to do what one wants them to do. (This is the idea of Professor Harold Lasswell, but I am not developing it in his way.) Then politics will form a part or aspect of almost all social activity, whether within a family where children try to influence parents and parents children, or a church where differences of policy lead to party maneuvers. But influence is exerted in different ways for different ends. What is called “force” or “coercion” is influence by means of threat with some physical penalty as a pain in the event of non-compliance. Marxists rightly point out that influence is obtained or exerted by what they call economic means—by the threat of dismissal from a job or of lower wages, for example. And their theory is probably intended to mean that economic influence is more fundamental than, and the cause of, influence by means of laws and penalties, that the latter sort of influence is always sought for as a means of consolidating the former. This would amount to saying that state laws are always made and enforced in order to get people to work for purposes they would otherwise reject. (The idea that laws may develop from custom and, in some cases, protect some people from exploitation, is just completely ignored.) If it is objected that, say, the refusal to employ them could bring them to heel through fear of starvation much more readily than legal threats, the answer is that they might then use violence against their employers and the law has been made just to prevent this.

This, I think, is the sort of consideration that the Marxist theory is designed to emphasize. And the objection to it surely is that it is absurdly incomplete. In the first place, coercion, i.e., influencing by violence or the threat of violence, is more widespread than government is. It is a feature of what Locke called “the state of nature,” as in the “Bad Lands” beyond the United States frontier in the nineteenth century, or on the high seas before piracy was suppressed, as well as, sporadically, within organized societies. In the second place, the users of what might be called “naked force” in some circumstances prove more powerful than the wielders of economic power. Engels objected to this “force” theory, which Dühring had sponsored, that if it comes to fighting those win who have the best fighting equipment and therefore the most advanced industrial development. Now of course, other things being equal, a more industrially advanced people will win a war against an industrially inferior nation. But there are other things which may not be equal, particularly the will and energy to struggle valiantly. A notable example of this is the defeat of the highly armed forces of Chiang Kai-shek by the Chinese Communists who obtained many of their arms by capturing them. Indeed, an indifference to industrial advance can, in some circumstances, prove a strong lever to upset the plans of highly industrialized groups, as happened in the conflict between Dr. Moussadek and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The weak can often gain an end by blackmail, as when a beggar exposes his sores. This brings me to a third difficulty in the Marxist view. The Marxist theory of the state is based on the assumption that there is one basic type of exploitation, and that this is economic in the sense of being bound up with the productive forces and productive relations. Although it has not, as far as I know, been worked out in detail, the idea is that certain groups of people are in a favorable position in relation to others, in that through their ownership and control of certain means of production—slaves, land, factories, and raw materials—they can gain advantages for themselves at the expense of the rest of the community. Now I have already made the objection, on pages 155–57, that technological, political, and moral factors are all so intimately concatenated that to say that the first determines the other two is to move about abstractions, and it is now easy to see that questions of ownership and control are legal and political functions involved in the very processes of production. But even if (though baselessly) we grant that there are solely economic actions, these are not the only ones by which individuals can gain advantage for themselves at the expense of others. Clever people, for example, have natural advantages which they often use to their own benefit in pursuit of pre-eminence and power. It is true that clever people generally wish to exploit their abilities in the economic sphere, but this is as much because economic predominance is a sign of success as because it brings success. I suggest that Marxists are quite wrong in supposing that there is one fundamental type of favorable position in society, that of owning and controlling the means of production, and that all other types of favorable position are derivative from this and unimportant by comparison with it. In some circumstances, as the cases of the beggar and of Dr. Moussadek show, weakness can be a favorable position from which exploitation may be exercised. Granted that if people are in favorable positions then some of them will utilize them to exploit others, then the only way to abolish exploitation is to prevent there being any favorable positions. This is the point at which the optimism of the Marxist theory is so deceptive, for it is only if economic exploitation is the source of all exploitation that abolition of it can free everyone from all exploitation.

The term “exploitation,” of course, when it is used of the relations of men toward one another, is a moral term that suggests that the exploiters (a) get the exploited to do what the exploiters want them to do, (b) do this to the advantage of the exploiters, and (c) do it to the disadvantage of the exploited. Or we may say that exploitation is taking undue advantage of a favorable social position. It is clear, therefore, that use of the word “exploitation” normally implies a view about what taking undue advantage of a favorable social position is, or implies something about the morality of (a), (b), and (c) above. Is it always wrong to get someone to do what you want him to do? Is it always wrong to do this to your own advantage? Is it always wrong to do this to someone else’s disadvantage? An affirmative answer is more readily given to the third question than to the other two, but we need to consider them all if we want some idea of what constitutes undue influence of one person over others. Marxists leave these questions undiscussed but appear, from their criticisms and proposals, to argue somewhat as follows. Economic exploitation is the source of all exploitation and is essentially the exploitation of class by class. It is therefore of the first importance that this type of exploitation should be got rid of and that steps are taken to do what will lead to this. It is the dictatorship of the proletariat that will lead to this, so that anything that brings that dictatorship nearer is good. The argument loses all its force if economic exploitation is not the source of all exploitation, and it loses most of its force if there is any doubt about ending economic exploitation by means of a proletarian revolution.

Now most people would say that there must be quite a lot of doubt about this. For, they would argue, we cannot tell in advance how honorable or how clever or how energetic the proletarian leaders will be. Furthermore, large social upheavals are apt to raise problems that no one had foreseen, so that their ultimate outcome is something that we cannot reasonably regard as certain when we make our present decisions. Such considerations appear obvious to anyone who has had any contact with public affairs or who has any knowledge of history, but Marxists seem to regard them as unimportant. How has this come about? It is at this point of the argument that we must make brief mention of the notion of surplus value. According to the Marxist theory of surplus value there is nothing that a capitalist, whether an individual or a company, can possibly do that could put an end to his exploitation of his workpeople short of his ceasing to be a capitalist, since the extortion of surplus value is a necessary element in the process of employing men to make goods for sale in a market at a price that keeps the employer in business. Anything, therefore, that puts an end to profits puts an end to surplus value and puts an end to exploitation in this sense. Since the proletarian dictatorship is the dispossession and the suppression of the capitalists, it is also the end of exploitation, in this sense. We might almost say that exploitation is defined out of the social order through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Now in Marx’s Capital the capitalist system is indicted for the way in which workers are kept working long hours in unhealthy conditions that barely enable them to keep alive. Suppose that, as appears to be the case in this country now, workers under what is still predominantly a capitalist system—for that is what Marxists say it is—do not work long hours and are able to live fairly comfortable lives. Is anyone going to say that they are still exploited because, however comfortable they may be, surplus value is being filched from them so long as their labor contributes to the profits of any employer? This would surely be a most metaphysical sort of exploitation that could exist when no one was aware of it. It might be argued that what is wrong is that the employer usually obtains a much larger proportion of the proceeds than the employee does and that this inequality is unjust. According to Engels, however, as we saw on pages 181–82, it is absurd to demand any equality that goes beyond the abolition of classes. So we still seem to be left with the view that what is wrong about capitalist exploitation is neither misery nor inequality but something that can only be discovered by reading Marx’s Capital—or rather those parts of it that do not refer to the miseries of work in early Victorian England. This is so obviously unsatisfactory that Marxists have had to seek for other palpable evils to attribute to capitalism now that the old ones have largely disappeared from the areas in which capitalism prevails. These new evils are imperialism and war, and they are alleged to result from the capitalists’ search for profits. I cannot here discuss the Marxist theories about these phenomena, but it is obvious that they pursue their general plan of “economic” interpretations when they regard the pride, frustration, and miscalculation that seem to play such a large part in causing wars as merely phenomenal by comparison with such factors, which they dignify with the adjective “real,” as industrial expansion and the struggle for markets.

There is a great deal more that might be said about this view, but I shall confine myself to two points only. The first concerns Engels’ argument—for what he says may be taken as an argument—that since there was no state and no exploitation under primitive communism, there need (and will) be no state and no exploitation under the communism of the future. There is an element of truth here, viz., the claim that the state is not an essential feature of human society. But those societies in which there is no state, in which, that is to say, there is no specific organization for the making and maintenance of law by force if need be, are small and simple ones, and, I should have thought, necessarily so. For people can work and live together without ever clashing only when they share a common and fairly simple outlook and are all, so to say, under one another’s eyes. But industrial societies, as we know them, are large and complex, and offer all sorts of opportunity for idiosyncrasy and evasion. It is unbelievable that the members of such vast and complicated societies should work together with as little need for a law-making and law-enforcing body as the members of a small community. However, this is just what Marxists do believe. What is established first by the proletarian dictatorship, and is then upheld by force spontaneously exerted against lawbreakers by “the armed workers” (who are “men of practical life, not sentimental intellectuals, and they will scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them”), will, according to Lenin, become under communism a matter of habit.42

My second and last point concerns the Marxist objection to Utopianism. Lenin, in State and Revolution, recognized that the Marxist views about the future communist society might be criticized as Utopian. In rebutting this charge he says that “the great Socialists” did not promise that communism would come but foresaw its arrival; and in foreseeing communism, he goes on, they “presupposed both a productivity of labour unlike the present and a person unlike the present man in the street. . . .”43 Marxists, then, according to Lenin, do not say that they will inaugurate a communist society of abundance and freedom, but, like astronomers predicting the planetary movements, say that it will and must come. To promise to do something is Utopian, to foresee that it must come is not. And I think that he is arguing that “the great Socialists” also foresaw a greatly increased productivity and a new type of human being, whereas Utopians merely hoped for these things and called upon people to bring them about. Lenin’s objections are based on the discussion of Utopian socialism in Engels’ Anti-Dühring. According to Engels, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, the Utopian socialists whose views paved the way for Marx’s scientific socialism, regarded socialism as “the expression of absolute truth, reason, and justice,” thought that it was a mere accident that it had not been discovered earlier, and assumed that it needed only to be discovered “to conquer the world by virtue of its own power.”44 “What was required,” they held, “was to discover a new and more perfect social order and to impose this on society from without, by propaganda and where possible by the example of model experiments.”45 They imagined the outlines of a new society “out of their own heads, because within the old society the elements of the new were not yet generally apparent; for the basic plan of the new edifice they could only appeal to reason, just because they could not as yet appeal to contemporary history.”46 Hence they produced “phantasies of the future, painted in romantic detail.”47 Their inadequacy in this regard was due, according to Engels, to the fact that they lived at a time when capitalism was still immature and did not yet allow the lineaments of the new society to be discerned within it.48

Utopians, then, make promises rather than predictions. (It is not relevant to our present point, but surely promising is a guarantee that the promissee may make a prediction about the future behavior of the promissor.) They appeal to reason and justice, and imagine reasonable and just societies “out of their own heads,” instead of observing the first beginnings of a new society within the existing one. They think it is sufficient to advocate a new society of the sort they have imagined, or to try to bring it into being on a small scale, for the world to be convinced by their scheme.

Now this last point is important. It is a defect of Utopias of most sorts that they leave vague the means of transition from the existing state of affairs to the future ideal. This means that two things are left vague, viz., who are to bring the changes about, and how they are to proceed in doing it. Marxists claim that there is no vagueness in their view on these particulars. It is the proletariat, under suitable leadership, who will bring the changes about, and they will do so by a revolutionary dictatorship under which the bourgeoisie are expropriated and suppressed. But of course this very precision (such as it is) may turn many influential people against Marxist scientific socialism. But according to the Marxists this does not matter in the long run, because the already existing proletariat is the first beginning of the new society. When a party has been formed to lead it, socialism is no longer an aspiration but an actual movement. But although Marxists are right in pointing out that Utopians often fail to show how the transition from the actual to the ideal is to be effected, and although Marxists do have a theory and policy about this, this is not enough to show that their view is at all adequate. The first difficulty in it is this. Marxists claim that their view of the future society is not invented out of their heads, but is based on the first beginnings of the new society already apparent within capitalism. These first beginnings must be the proletarian class beginning to be organized by and in a party. But what is there here that certainly foreshadows a condition in which there is no force and no domination? Nothing, it seems to me, except the fact that Communists, if they get the chance, are going to put an end to private property, unless it be the increase in productivity that capitalism has brought with it—that other forms of organization will increase it still further is mere aspiration. Lenin, in the passage I have just quoted, says that men in communist society will not be like the present man in the street. Let us see what Engels says about this. We may look forward, he says, following Saint-Simon, to “the transformation of political government over men into the administration of things and the direction of productive processes.”49 “The seizure of the means of production by society,” he goes on, “puts an end to commodity production, and therewith to the domination of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by conscious organization on a planned basis. The struggle for individual existence comes to an end. And at this point, in a certain sense, man finally cuts himself off from the animal world, leaves the condition of animal existence behind him and enters conditions which are really human. . . . Men’s own social organization which has hitherto stood in opposition to them as if arbitrarily decreed by Nature and history, will then become the voluntary act of men themselves. . . . It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.”50 Anarchy, then, is replaced by plan, politics by “administration” (whatever this may be), the struggle for existence by peace, the animal by something “really human,” divided mankind by unified mankind, specialization by universal adaptability.

I feel sure that anyone who reflects on these contrasts must conclude that, for all that Marxists say about their views being based on observed facts in the capitalist world, in fact their future communism is even more out of touch with human realities than are the speculations of the Utopians whom they criticize. Furthermore, the future they depict is extremely vague, and they refuse to make it more precise on the ground that such precision is Utopian, that detailed specification of not yet developed societies are romantic fantasies. (We may compare this with the exponents of Negative Theology who can only say what God is not, but never what he is.) But if they are right in this last contention, then surely they are wrong in claiming that their view differs from Utopianism in being predictive in any important sense. Very vague predictions are of even less practical value than are detailed wishes. I do not think that the “predictions” about communist society have much more content in them than the more baffling among the utterances of the Delphic Oracle. What is this “administration” that is so different from “government,” and this “planning” and “direction” that are consistent with the full development of each individual and can be made effective without the use of force? They are so different from anything that we have had experience of in developed societies, where administrators (generally) have the law behind them, where planning and direction meet with opposition, and where all must reconcile themselves to some limited and specialized career, that it is hard to attach any definite meaning to them at all. And what scientific prediction can it be that says we shall leave the condition of animal existence behind us? This is something that even Fourier might have repudiated, and that Owen would have taken seriously only during that period of his life when he was in communication with departed spirits. It is difficult to see how any attentive reader of their works could have taken at their face value the Marxists’ profession of being scientific socialists rather than Utopians. They do in some manner fill in the gap between present conditions and the future society they look forward to—they insert between the two a real and active movement, but this has the function, not of making their system a scientific one, but of being a seat of authority which can give unquestioned guidance to any doubter within it. Marxism is Utopianism with the Communist Party as a visible and authoritative interpreter of the doctrine striving to obtain supreme power. The scientific part of Marxist politics concerns the methods by which the Communist Party maintains itself and aims to spread its power, and here Marxism and Realpolitik go hand in hand. But the alleged goal of the Marxist activities is a society in which there is administration without law, planning without miscalculation, direction without domination, high productivity without property or toil, and, it would seem, unrepressed men who nevertheless have left the condition of animal existence behind them.

[1. ]The Times, 18 June, 1862.

[2. ]The History of Civilization in England (3rd edition, 1861), vol. 1, pp. 150–51.

[3. ]See p. 47.

[4. ]Knox’s translation (London, 1942), p. 162.

[5. ]Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts, 1843, M.E.G.A., I, 1, i, pp. 405–8.

[6. ]Ibid., p. 418.

[7. ]Ibid., I, 3, p. 123.

[8. ]Knox’s translation, p. 11.

[9. ]“By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without.” Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, V, chap. 2.

[10. ]There is a good account of Feuerbach’s views in Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx (London, 1936). I have also found the following particularly valuable: Hans Barth, Wahrheit und Ideologie (Zurich, 1945); Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Zürich-Wien, 1941); Nathan Rotenstreich, Marx’ Thesen über Feuerbach, Archiv fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, XXXIX/3 and XXXIX/4 (Bern, 1951).

[11. ]Translated from the second German edition by Marian Evans (George Eliot), London, 1854, p. 200 (VI, 243). The references in parentheses refer to the collected edition of Feuerbach’s works by Bolin and Jodl (Stuttgart, 1903–11). That George Eliot should have published this translation at the time when she was helping to edit the Westminster Review shows that Feuerbach’s ideas had European influence. They fitted in, indeed, with the Positivism that George Eliot had adopted. “With the ideas of Feuerbach I everywhere agree,” she wrote in a letter.

[12. ]E. of C., p. 139 (VI, 145).

[13. ]Ibid., p. 13 (VI, 16).

[14. ]Ibid., pp. 20–21 (VI, 25).

[15. ]Ibid., pp. 26–27 (VI, 32–33).

[16. ]Ibid., p. 177 (VI, 215).

[17. ]Ibid., pp. 139–40 (VI, 169).

[18. ]Ibid., p. 178 (VI, 216).

[19. ](II, 222).

[20. ](II, 231).

[21. ]Ibid., p. 229 (VI, 279).

[22. ]The Future of an Illusion (English translation, second impression, 1934), p. 30. The other quotations from that work in this paragraph are from p. 76, pp. 94–95, p. 62.

[23. ]Werke, VI, 107.

[24. ]Schopenhauer’s metaphysical conception of the “objectification” of the will in the human body and in nature is also relevant here. Feuerbach had read Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea (the first edition of which had appeared in 1819) before he wrote The Essence of Christianity. This is not the place to discuss the respective influence of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on modern thought, but it should be mentioned that the latter was a metaphysician who regarded consciousness and the intellect as a sort of self-deception.

[25. ]P. 21 (VI, 26).

[26. ]The quotations in this paragraph are from M.E.G.A. (I, 1, i) in the following order: pp. 607, 608, 614–15, 620, 615–16, 620.

[27. ]Werke, II, 222.

[28. ]The German Ideology, p. 34.

[29. ]The Essentials of Lenin (London, 1947), vol. 1, p. 170. Cf. pp. 176–77 where Lenin approves of Kautsky. The statements of Kautsky are “profoundly true and important” (p. 176). Kautsky is quoted as saying that “the Socialist consciousness” is introduced into the proletarian class struggles from without, and is not something that arose spontaneously within it.

[30. ]The German Ideology (London, 1942, reprint), p. 14.

[31. ]Ibid., pp. 14–15.

[32. ]Second edition, ed. Kautsky (Stuttgart, 1907), pp. lv–vi. Also, translated by N. I. Stone (New York, 1904), p. 12. I have modified Stone’s translation to bring out the force of “naturwissenschaftlich treu.”

[33. ]Selected Correspondence, p. 511.

[34. ]Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, 2nd edition (Zürich-Wien, 1941), p. 363.

[35. ]Handbook of Marxism (London, 1935), p. 945.

[36. ]P. 8.

[37. ]New York, 1949. Translated from the Russian. The English translation of this book is described as having been “edited and adapted” by Howard Selsam, but the passage I have quoted is referred to in I. M. Bochenski’s Der Sowjetrussische Dialektische Materialismus (Berne, 1950), p. 138, and Bochenski made use of the Russian text.

[38. ]Critique of Political Economy, trans. Stone, pp. 265–66.

[39. ]Dialectical and Historical Materialism. History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, p. 124.

[40. ]M. M. Bober, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History (2nd edition, revised, 1950, Cambridge, Mass.), pt. 1, chaps. 1 and 3.

[41. ]Capital, p. 396.

[42. ]Ibid., p. 392.

[43. ]The German Ideology, p. 40.

[44. ]Cours de philosophie positive, leçon 46 (edition of 1864, Paris), pp. 35–36.

[45. ]Dialectical and Historical Materialism, p. 115. Lenin argues (2) in M. and E-C, p. 278.

[46. ]This account of “Theoretical or Conjectural History” is based on Gladys Bryson’s Man and Society (Princeton University Press, 1945), pp. 88ff.

[47. ]Capital, vol. 1 (Everyman edition), p. 172.

[48. ]More will be said about this later.

[49. ]W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History (London, 1951), p. 162.

[50. ]Anti-Dühring, pp. 296ff.

[51. ]Capital, vol. 1, p. 341.

[52. ]Some of the sentences in this paragraph are from my paper entitled “The Materialist Conception of History,” published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1951–52, pp. 207ff.

[53. ]Harrington, in Oceana, used the term “Superstructure” in this sense, contrasting it with the “Center or Basis of every Government” which contains “the Fundamentall Lawes,” which concern “what it is that a man may call his own, that is to say, Proprietie.”

[54. ]The German Ideology, p. 18.

[55. ]M.E.G.A., I, 3, p. 124.

[56. ]Capital, p. 172.

[57. ]I have discussed this in “Comte’s Positivism and the Science of Society” (Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 99, Oct. 1951), pp. 9–12, where I give references to recent discussions.

[58. ]Short Studies in Great Subjects (1894 edition), vol. 1, pp. 17–18.

[59. ]The Presuppositions of Critical History. Collected Essays, vol. 1, p. 5.

[60. ]Encyclopedia, §§ 553–77.

[61. ]In the unpublished Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx briefly discusses Greek art. He says that it “presupposes Greek mythology, that is, nature and the form of society itself worked up in an unconsciously artistic way by the imagination of a people” (Kautsky’s edition, p. xlix. I have altered Stone’s translation, which is misleading here). He says further that Greek mythology cannot be taken seriously in an industrial age, and that the delight that ancient Greek poetry gives us today is comparable with the delight that adults have in “the artless ways of a child.” “Why,” he asks, “should the social childhood of mankind, when it had obtained its most beautiful development, not exert eternal charm as an age that will never return?” We may note here (a) the significant reference to the unconsciously functioning imagination of a people (Volksphantasie), (b) the assumption that because the ancient Greeks had an inadequate conception of the physical world and a comparatively undeveloped technology, their social arrangements and cultural productions are childlike by comparison with those of 1859, and (c) the confusion of aesthetic appreciation with a sort of nostalgia for what can never be again. As to (a), we see Feuerbach’s observations on the religious imagination being applied to art, so as to suggest what we may call a Freudian-cum-Jungian view of it. As to (b) and (c), it should be observed, in fairness to Marx, that it was not he who published this Introduction.

[1. ]M.E.G.A., I, 1, i, p. 10.

[2. ]History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Moscow, 1939), pp. 114–15.

[3. ]Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1951, p. 66.

[4. ]Pp. 32–33.

[5. ]Karl Marx (2nd edition, London, 1948), p. 140.

[6. ]Translated by Sibree (New York, 1944), p. 457.

[7. ]This last quotation is from p. 121; the previous passages are from pp. 106–8.

[8. ]Anti-Dühring, p. 121.

[9. ]The Essentials of Lenin (London, 1947), vol. 2, p. 670.

[10. ]Soviet Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, Jan. 1950.

[11. ]State and Revolution (London, 1933), p. 69.

[12. ]Soviet Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, Jan. 1950, p. 227.

[13. ]“La Structure du ‘Capital’ et de quelques présuppositions philosophiques dans l’oeuvre de Marx,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, Oct.–Dec. 1948. Reprinted in Hyppolite’s Etudes sur Marx et Hegel.

[14. ]These details are to be found in Eugène Sue et le Roman-Feuilleton, by Nora Atkinson (Paris, 1929). The author does not mention Marx.

[15. ]M.E.G.A., I, 3, p. 342.

[16. ]Ibid., p. 353.

[17. ]Ibid., p. 355.

[18. ]Ibid., p. 373.

[19. ]Ibid., pp. 379–80.

[20. ]Ibid., p. 386.

[21. ]Gesammelte Schriften von Marx und Engels, pp. 80ff. (ed. Riazanov). Translated and quoted in Pages choisies pour une éthique socialiste, ed. Maximilien Rubel, Paris, 1948. M. Rubel’s collection and arrangement is a most valuable contribution to the understanding of Marx’s ethical teaching.

[22. ]M.E.G.A., I, 3, p. 394 (Der Mensch scheint ein Geheimnis für den Menschen: man weiss ihn nur zur tadeln und man kennt ihn nicht).

[23. ]M.E.G.A., I, 5, pp. 175ff.

[24. ]Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, chap. 1.

[25. ]The reader is referred to: Hyppolite, “La structure du ‘Capital’ et de quelques présuppositions philosophiques dans l’oeuvre de Marx,” Etudes sur Marx et Hegel, Paris, 1955, pp. 142–68. Rubel, Pages choisies pour une éthique socialiste (Paris, 1948). (This excellent anthology is almost indispensable for the student of Marx’s ethical ideas.) H. Popitz, Der Entfremdete Mensch (Basel, 1953). (A detailed, documented analysis.) Pierre Bigo, Introduction à l’oeuvre economique de Karl Marx (Paris, 1953). Abram L. Harris, “Utopian Elements in Marx’s Thought,” Ethics, vol. 60, no. 2, Jan. 1950 (Chicago).

[26. ]M.E.G.A., I, 3, pp. 135–36.

[27. ]Ibid., p. 85.

[28. ]Ibid., p. 148.

[29. ]Capital (Everyman edition), p. 113.

[30. ]Ibid., p. 9.

[31. ]Ibid., pp. 53–54.

[32. ]I rather think that Timon was a pathological giver.

[33. ]Capital, pp. 369ff.

[34. ]Ibid., p. 356.

[35. ]Ibid., p. 452.

[36. ]P. 22.

[37. ]I, p. 384.

[38. ]M.E.G.A., VI, 1, pp. 516–19.

[39. ]Pp. 22–23.

[40. ]State and Revolution, p. 10.

[41. ]See G. D. Gurvich, Vocation actuelle de la sociologie (Paris, 1950), pp. 572–80.

[42. ]State and Revolution, p. 79.

[43. ]P. 75.

[44. ]Anti-Dühring, p. 25.

[45. ]Ibid., p. 285.

[46. ]Ibid., p. 292.

[47. ]Ibid., p. 291.

[48. ]Ibid., p. 285.

[49. ]Ibid., p. 285 and p. 309.

[50. ]Ibid., pp. 311–12.

Home

The Forum

Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

The Library

Return to Title Page for The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed

The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

Search this Title:

Also in the Library:

Part Two: Scientific Socialism - H.B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed [1955]

Edition used:

About Liberty Fund: