Marxism and Moral Concepts

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Marxism and Moral Concepts William Ash

Monthly Review Press New York

All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1964 by William Ash Published by MR Press 333 Sixth Avenue New York 14, N.Y. Manufactured in the U.S.A . Library of Congress catalog card number 64-23146

To PROFESSOR GEORGE THOMSON whose brilliant studies in ancient Greek society were my own introduction to Marxism

Contents

x1

Introduction CHAPTER I

VALUE JUDGEMENTS OR THE MEANING OF 'GOOD'

Introduction Value as Descriptive Value as Prescriptive Value as Nei ther Descriptive nor Prescriptive Value as Both Descriptive and Prescriptive Economic Value Value and the Division of Labor The Relation Between Value and Utility Objections to the Labor Theory of Value Value and the Marxist Theory of Knowledge CHAPTER JI

3 6 12 17 19 21 25 31 35 38

NOR.MATIVE JUDGEMENTS OR THE MEANING OF 'RIGHT'

Introduction Rights as Claims on Other People Rights as Claims to Things Commodity Production and Ethical Interpretations of Right Class Divisions and Ethical Ideas Modes of Production and Ethical Ideas A Marxist Analysis of Philosophical Ideas in a Concrete Historical Period Ethical Relativism ix

45 46 48 53 57 60 71 79

CONTENTS

x

Ethical Implications of Changes in the Mode of Production Conscience and Social Consciousness CHAPTER III

83 91

MORAL OBLIGATIONS OR THE MEANING OF 'OUGHT'

Introduction Motives and Results of Moral Acts Ourselves and Others Freedom and Class Interest Freedom and Prediction The Dialectics of Freedom and the Consciousness of Necessity Freedom and Time Conclusion CHAPTER IV

99 100 104 107 112 118 126 129

ALIENATION AND POLITICAL CHANGE

Introduction The Concept of Alienation Further Development of the Concept of Alienation in Marx's Early Writings Transition from the Early Manuscripts to Capital Alienation and Ethical Values The Political Form of Marxist Ethics The Proletariat as the Agent of Social Change Revolutionary Transformation and the Problem of Ends and Means Conclusion Notes to Chapter I Notes to Chapter II Notes to Chapter III Notes to Chapter IV List of Works Cited

133 135 137 141 146 152 155

Introduction

As the title indicates, this book represents an attempt to derive certain basic moral concepts from the material condi­ tions of life in various forms of society. It is argued that differences in the content of ethical expressions largely reflect differences in the economic ordering of this or that society, or differences in the economic role of this or that group within the same society. Moreover, insofar as a common moral language exists, providing for the exchange of ethical ideas across the barriers of time and place, it represents cer­ tain common factors in the way people at various periods in diverse parts of the world have organized the business of living. That such a common moral language does exist is proved by the persistence of certain philosophical problems recur­ ring in slightly altered forms whenever men have reflected on matters of conduct. Is ethics merely_art of individuals; and if so, just what is meant by such freedom'? An attempt to answer this question involves us in an analysis of the concept 'ought'. When we say that a person ought to do a certain thing, we normally mean both that he has some kind of obligation to do it and that he can do it. We would not say that a person ought to do something he could not conceivably accomplish. Nor would we be likely to say that he ought to do something he cannot possibly help doing. This ordinary usage indicates some element of freedom in the very meaning of 'ought'. We must try to discover what that element is and whether Marxists with their views about the springs of hutnan actions, can legitimately use 'ought' sentences implying a choice which is in some sense free.

Motives and results of moral acts

In the first chapter it was pointed out that one use of the word 'good' is for the purpose of commendation. A thing can be designated as good because it is something which ought to be approved. This use of 'good' as the ought-to-be-approved cannot be a mere description of what the thing actually is, for commending it implies that it need not have been what it is,

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that it could have been something else of an inferior nature. Descriptive statements about a thing's utilizable qualities are limited to the present; but the prescriptive meaning of 'goodness', as expressed in the injunction that it ought to be liked or approved, refers us back in time to the purpose for which the thing was originally made and the constructive efforts of its maker. In other words, value judgements, by linking an object's observable properties which satisfy a human need here and now with the purposive effort which went into its fabrication at some time in the past, give us the history of that object in human terms. Such judgements thus combine, in making appraisal possible, the presently-existing object with a reminder of its non-existence in a previous period when it was as yet only an unrealized intention.3 Similarly, any moral judgement that an action is what ought to have been done and therefore one of which we ought to approve, includes not only a description of that act in terms of its immediate consequences but also a reference back to the motives of the actor before it was ever performed and to the moral exertion its performance required. Accord­ ing to whether the present results of an act or the past deci­ sion to perform it is emphasized, we get quite different theo­ ries of morality. If the descriptive aspect of an act is stressed, our moral judgements can be translated into factual proposi­ tions about the objective changes which the act has effected; if more importance is given to the original choice of per­ forming that particular act rather than some other, then we must concern ourselves with such subjective considerations as the nature of the impulse which led to its performance and whether, on the information available, the most reasonable means to a proposed end was selected. There are serious ethi­ cal difficulties involved in subscribing to either view. To say that a particular effect of some action is good or bad irrespective of how or why it was brought about, thereby

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detaching the idea of morality from the motive for producing that effect, would make all action a complete ethical gamble with no possibility of knowing till after a thing was done and its results observed whether it had been right or not. In plac­ ing the onus of moral judgement on the act as objectively described we are saying that the act itself has the character of ought-to-be-done-ness, which makes obligation a function of the act's performance. And yet we have already noted that part of the meaning of 'ought', the very part we are inter­ ested in as the source of some degree of freedom, is bound up with the possibility of an enjoined act's not being done. "When we make an assertion containing the term 'ought' or 'ought not', that to which we are attributing a certain charac­ ter is not a certain activity but a certain man."4 In attempt­ ing to explain the morality of actions in terms of their objec­ tive results alone, we are either denying ourselves the use of a moral language and cannot even say that a particular result is good or bad in any ethical sense, or else we are committing the naturalistic fallacy of employing moral terms which can­ not be legitimately deduced from the general theory of human actions which we have adopted. But if we attempt to attach moral significance solely to the motives from which an act is performed, we encounter other difficulties which are just as serious. For one thing, motives are seldom simple; and we can hardly ever say, even in the case of our own actions, to what an extent they are to be accounted for in terms of doing our duty, serving the interests of others, wishing to be thought well of or any number of other considerations, some admirable, some not. In the case of actions performed by others the problem of judging motives is still more complicated. And even more important, while at any particular moment we can decide to do a certain thing, we cannot decide then and there to have certain motives for doing it. Our motives seem to be part of

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the given situation in which the decision to act occurs; and if 'ought' sentences are about them, we are no closer than be­ fore to finding the element of freedom which is part of the meaning of 'ought'. Objections to either the view that we are obliged to pro­ duce certain results or that we are obliged to act from certain motives have led some philosophers to argue that morality consists in the setting of ourselves to produce certain results.5 · It is thus the intention in an act, including to some extent both motive and result, which makes that act right or wrong. This way of considering the matter does meet some of the criticisms already noted. On the one hand, if the setting of ourselves to achieve a particular result is what we are obliged to do, we do not have to know in advance all the effects of our acts nor even whether it will actually prove feasible for us to carry out our intention. On the other hand, it may be that within limits we can set ourselves to act from one motive rather than from another. However, in the latter case, if it is psychologically possible for our intentions at the moment of choice to be distinguished so completely from our motives as to be able to select among them, such intentions, divorced from any compelling force to act, are likely to remain idle; and if it is not possible, then we have not really avoided the difficulties of a purely subjective account of obligation. Now these two aspects of any action subjected to moral analysis, the objective results it brings about and the subjec­ tive motives which led to its. performance, cannot be ex­ plained separately nor can the relationship between them be found by fixing our eyes steadily on the individual action itself-any more than we could account earlier for the two aspects of a commodity, its utility and its value, simply by staring hard at any particular commodity. "Turn and exam­ ine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. "6

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Study an isolated act as we may, we do not discover what it is about the act or its performance that gives it moral signifi­ cance. We only succeeded in accounting for the value of commodities by considering their history as extended in time and by understanding the social relationships incapsulated in them. It is only by looking at actions in the same manner that we can hope to explain the real nature of their morality and to understand the extent of our own freedom to conduct ourselves in certain ways. Ourselves and others

Once we have put actions back i_n to the social context in which they actually occur, the distinction between objective results and subjective motivation appears to us at first as a distinction between the actions of others and our own acts. In the case of our own acts we are primarily aware of what we intended to do; but as far as other people's actions are con­ cerned, we tend to describe them solely in terms of their observable effects. Since 'ought-to-be-done-ness' cannot, as we have already seen, be a characteristic of actions themselves and since the moral conduct of other people appears to be limited to the actions we observe them performing, we seem to be in the curious position of only being able to apply 'ought' sentences to ourselves. In fact, when we judge the behavior of others, we do often make such remarks as: 'With such a background what would you have expected?' or 'Could a man with his habits have done anything else?' We are much less likely to exonerate ourselves in this manner; and, indeed, it sounds odd to say: 'I know I did wrong, but with my past history how could I have done otherwise?' It sounds odd be­ cause we are in a position to know whether we could have avoided a particular action or not and if we could not, we would not characterize it as morally wrong. And yet while we

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take our intentions and our limitations into account in any self-appraisal, others judge us as we judge them-strictly in terms of the objective results of our acts. Thus there is not only room for considerable difference between what we think of ourselves and what others think of us, but also what seems to us a relatively free expression of some intention appears to others as but one act in a completely determined series of actions and consequences. 7 This discrepancy which complicates the question of moral judgement is precisely like the problem of other minds which has so absorbed the attention of analytical philoso­ phers. The same sort of distinction between ourselves and others in respect to an analysis of moral actions also appears in an analysis of mental facts. If we say that we are in pain, we are referring at least as much to our awareness of suffering as to any overt signs of it; but if we say that others are in pain, all the statement can mean is that they display certain expressions or that their bodies are in a certain physical state. Propositions about personal feelings thus have different meanings for those who make them and for those to whom they are addressed. Just as we found that we only seemed able to make moral judgements about ourselves, so by the same sort of analytical approach we can only assume the existence of our own minds. This analogy helps us to see where we have gone wrong. The view that everyone is shut up incom­ municado within the confines of his own experience is not really tenable because, philosophically speaking, we cannot be content with drawing attention to a peculiarity of any statements we happen to make about our own feelings as uniquely concerned with mental facts: we wish to generalize this into a theory about all statements of feelings. We cannot develop such a solipsistic theory with consistency because for anyone to say that only he can experience mental states is false if the person saying it is anyone but ourselves. Since we

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know we have such experiences and yet can imagine someone else holding the view in question, we must perforce realize that the view is false.8 Our mistake on the ethical plane, as at the level of epistemology, consists of starting from an unreal basis-ourselves as isolated individuals arrived at by a Carte­ sian abstraction. Putting actions back into their social context is not enough : we must also put ourselves firmly back into the society in which we developed in order to understand what morality is.9 It is only through our relationships with others that we have obligations at all. To construct moral beings like our­ selves out of the obligations we happen to feel or on the basis of particular actions we merely observe, like inferring other minds from facial expressions, is a perverted s0phistication which reverses the real order of our developing awareness in a social context. Once we realize that it is ourselves and others as moral agents within society, and not this or that individual act, which must be the starting point for an inves­ tigation of ethical concepts, we can begin to understand the relation between motive and results. As long as attention was concentrated on the isolated act, the impulse to perform it and the effect actually achieved appeared to be quite distinct. But when the object of study becomes the moral agent over the whole course of development, this distinction gradually fades. In the case of specific acts the motive for them seems to be 'given', almost as part of the situation with which we are confronted; and the intention to produce certain results has no scope in which to operate. But over a longer period of time we can intend to be animated by different motives and can succeed, within limits, in changing the nature of the impulses which move us. The injunctions that prompt iso­ lated acts are addressed solely to the will, urging the choice of this or that explicit alternative almost as an end in itself; but when a longer period is taken into account, there is room for

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the reason to review and criticize these discrete decisions in the light of an overall direction or purpose. While any par­ ticular act may be more or less typical of our general moral attitude, the sum of our actions over a lifetime expresses that attitude faithfully, together with all its modifications in the course of development. In fact, the total consequences of everything we have done simply is our morality, in a far more sig-nificant sense than an attempt to formulate it at any par­ ticular period of our lives. It is not by this or that specific action that we expect to be judged in ethical terms, nor even by what we may say of ourselves at this or that period, but by a way of life revealed in the whole succession of our responses to the human situation. With its emphasis on practice, Marx­ ism does · judge men n:ot by the formal propriety of their moral ideas nor by the motives they profess at any given moment, but by the chain of effects which their thoughts and actions have brought about in the course of their lives in society. Freedom and class interest

It is not possible to arrive at any proper conception of morality by starting from a particular act performed by a certain person at a precise moment in time. But once the nature of morality has been understood in its social and temporal aspects, then individual acts can be considered in moral terms. We have seen how an appreciation of produc­ tive relationships interacting through time gave us the mean­ ing of 'value' as a measure of the effort to create useful goods; and we were thus able to understand what was involved in making a value judgement about any particular object. An appreciation of socially-determined human relationships in­ teracting across the lifetime of individuals gives us the meaning of morality as the measure of the effort to act in

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accord with these obligations; and this standard, once formu­ lated, can be applied to individual actions. Moral judgements may also be compared with value judgements in terms of a certain limitation implicit in these definitions. No more value may be incorporated in the ob­ j ects society really needs than in the shoddy, frivolous and even harmful things it pays capitalists to palm off on people. To describe cheaply-made articles which soon break in use or improperly tested drugs which have harmful side-effects or all the sensational, pornographic trash in the way of films and books-to describe such things as 'goods' seems to do violence to our language. Similarly, a great deal of 'moral' effort may be involved in the work of missionaries who pave the way for the conquest of primitive peoples, of officials and police devoted to their duty of upholding an unpopular regime or of teachers untiring in their efforts to inculcate ideas of racial supremacy; but there would be a sense in which we could not call their actions 'right', even if they had the moral approval of their contemporaries in a particular society. There is nothing in the mere deduction from material circumstances of our definitions of value and morality to indicate when concepts like 'good' and 'right' are being abused in this way. Only a moral critique of a particular society such as was attempted in the last chapter, based on a critical appraisal of that society's material foundation, can guide us in estimating whether the moral language in use really means what it appears to say. We must now consider the question of how the freedom of choice which is implicit in the concept of 'ought' can be reconciled with the social determination of our moral obligations. One sense such freedom might have has already been suggested by the analysis of what is meant by commending an object as 'good'. Just as some man-made article can be better than it need have been because of the extra labor and crafts-

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manship bestowed upon it, so an action performed in accord with the prevalent ideas of morality may go beyond what is strictly required. Even if this extra effort can be accounted for in terms of early training or personal traits, even if its motivation can be traced to a desire to be thought well of or to deserve some special reward, still the difference between it and a more conventional response can only be described in moral terms as a free exercise of will over and above the riorms for that society. But usually nothing so ordinary as this is meant by free­ dom of choice. Such freedom is often understood as implying the possibility of acting in quite unexpected ways, and by 'unexpected' is meant in ways which are against the actor's own interests. It is assumed that conduct dictated by personal interests is rational but neither moral nor free, and freedom would consist in a person's ability to perform actions which were contrary to his own interests if he so chose. But 'interest' itself is a term which can have a different significance in a different social context. In primitive tribal groups the dis­ tinction between individual and communal interests hardly exists. As we have seen, the idea of private as contrasted with public interest is largely bound up with the development of private property; and extreme individualism is closely associ­ ated with the rise of capitalism and its tendency to substitute for the human relationships which draw men together a cash nexus which interposes the mediation of things between man and man. Only in a highly competitive society does interest come so exclusively to mean rights asserted against others. And yet even in our atomized society a mother may risk her life to save her child. This does not mean that she acts against her own interests but that her interests include the well­ being of her child. In the same way people in socialist coun­ tries can accept stringent limits on the production of con­ sumer goods to increase the output of heavy industry which

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will raise the standard of l iving of the next generation; and they do this not by way of acting against their own interests but by extending their interest to cover even those as yet unborn. Acting on behalf of class interests may mean sup­ porting the 'right' of a minority to exploit the vast majority of mankind or it may mean identifying oneself with people who are struggling to put an end to exploitati9n. The former involves a check on freedom not because it is grounded in considerations of class but because the range of people in­ cluded in that class is so narrow that their interests can only be enforced by severe restrictions on the liberty of others which react unfavorably on their own liberty. "Those who enslave others cannot themselves be free." 'Interest', then, has an indefi'nite extension ranging from a single person's self-interest to a concern for the well-being of millions: it refers to whatever individual or group com­ mands that person's sympathies as practically expressed in purposive actions. The idea that freedom involves acting against one's interests would really mean, therefore, that only random and pointless acts could be free. And yet if impulsive acts of this kind are unconscious and instinctive, thus pro­ viding no opportunity for reasonable direction toward a con­ sidered end, they seem farthest removed from any area of freedom; and a deliberately purposeless act is inconceivable since even its performance simply to prove the possibility of such acts would give it point enough to keep it from qual­ ifying. We have already seen how this peculiar notion of freedom arises. The division of labor between manual and mental tasks leads, on the part of those only concerned with the latter, to an idealistic attitude in which concepts become detached from their roots in material reality. These 'free' ideas which can be juggled with, transposed and recombined without reference to the objective world suggest the possi­ bility of actions which would be free in the same sense. The

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equivalent of ideas completely abstracted from reality would be actions without effects; but since actions can only be per­ formed in the objective world they can never have this sort of detached meaninglessness. The same idealistic attitude is responsible for another distorted view of freedom which ends in a similar kind of frustration. Subjective states such as happiness or equanimity are seen, like the most abstract ideas, as somehow separate from the objective conditions which they normally reflect. Thus detached, they can be set up as goals to be achieved without attempting to do anything about material circum­ stances. We are free, it is argued, to attain peace of mind or contentment with our lot whatever those circumstances may be. But quite apart from the fact that it is one thing to rise superior to petty vexations and another thing entirely to be calmly detached when one's children are starving, this striv­ ing for purely subjective ends proves psychologically self­ defeating. Those who pursue happiness directly are least likely to find it. The wish merely to have a good conscience seems of itself to corrupt the means to it. The unhappiness of dedicated hedonists and the moral doubts of monks who must realize that the very assurance of salvation can cost them that hope are each in their way the penalty of chasing shadows. Marxism, just as it does not attempt to change moral ideas but the conditions on which those ideas are based, gives no warrant for seeking solace in subjective states. It counsels, instead, the active effort to achieve objective ends, with such states being realized as by-products of the concerted struggle for a better ordering of society. So far Marxism · only appears to deny idealistic concep­ tions of the freedom of choice implicit in actions which con­ form to 'ought' sentences. Although the obligations we feel are held to be conditioned by the type of society we live in and by our class position in that society, no philosopher could

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reasonably maintain in any case that we make up our own sense of obligation just as we please. The very word 'obliga­ tion' indicates a link or tie with something outside ourselves and not therefore subject to our private whims. But to the extent that Marxism correctly reveals the source of our obli­ gations in social circumstances which can be changed, it dis­ closes opportunities for an exercise of freedom which tran­ scend those provided by alternative courses of action within a given social context. Freedom to live up to a particular ethi­ cal standard is the bare minimum for acts to be considered moral at all. In showing the possibility of criticizing that standard through understanding the conditions which gave rise to it and of proceeding to change those conditions, . thereby coming to recognize quite different obligations from those acquired by the accident of growing up in particular surroundings, Marxism opens up a whole new vista of freedom. Freedom and prediction

This freedom of choosing one's moral standards de­ pends, as we saw in the last chapter, on being able, quite consciously, to identify oneself with a certain class. And in our own times this choice can only have objective moral con­ tent if it involves making one's own the struggle of the prole­ tariat against the exploitation of man by man, a struggle that must end successfully in the establishment of a classless so­ ciety. Critics of Marxism contend that this freedom is incom­ patible with historical materialism. If, they argue, Marxism is a science of society which claims to make necessary predic­ tions, like the supercession of class-divided society by a society without classes, it cannot at the same time issue a valid call to ethical action. If the capitalist system of exploitation is inevi-

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tably doomed, then it cannot be anybody's duty to bring about its end. These critics, either intentionally or inadvertently, have usually mistaken historical materialism for some form of mechanical determinism which prescribes the lines of human advance as ineluctably and automatically as metal rails fix the route of a train. But the determining agency in Marxism is a specifically human reality. The economic conditions which are a preponderant influence in shaping men's ideas about themselves and thus guiding their future actions are simply a system of human relationships. "History itself is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends."10 To say, there­ fore, that if a particular system of exploitation is doomed, no one can have the duty of bringing about its end is like saying that, because a cure for cancer will one day be found, re­ search workers need not bother to go on looking for it. In both cases one is speaking not of something which will hap­ pen in spite of men's actions but of something which will be brought about through that very agency. Marxist predictions are not about an inescapable fate that is to overtake mankind-as if the end of capitalism were like the cooling off of the sun! On the other hand, they are not mere pious hopes for the future which take the form of imagining ideal utopias or of encouraging men to behave differently without any change in the circumstances that lead them to behave as at present. Marxist predictions are about what men will do, based on an understanding of what men are, and what they are depends on the productive relation­ ships they have entered into in order to sustain human life and enrich it. If a group of men at a particular stage of de­ velopment are confronted with an enormous boulder denying them access to a source of food, the prediction that, sooner or later, they will organize themselves in such a way that, with the help of simple tools like levers, the obstruction will be

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removed does not, of course, represent a constraint on their freedom of action. It is this kind of prediction, refined by an understanding of the complex productive relationships of contemporary society, that Marxism enables us to make. Such understanding can only arise at a stage in those produc­ tive relationships when the possibility of altering them already exists. Indeed, a proper appreciation, of historical development in general is a result of the extent to which men are able to enter into those developments and take a con­ sciously active part in shaping their own destiny, of the extent to which, history having made men, men begin to make history. This connection between understanding historical de­ velopments and being able to enter into and control them explains why the criticism of Marxist prediction takes the form it does. History itself appears quite differently to a class which has enjoyed power and feels itself threatened than to a class which is gathering its strength to assert itself positively on the world stage. A class which is losing its control of his­ torical processes is bound to view those processes as inimical, as something imposed on them in spite of their own will. The spokesmen of such a class would like to deny that any pattern can be found in history because any pattern they can discern is working against their interests. And, since they are ceasing themselves to make history, they really do find it more and more difficult to understand history's course. It has become alien and malign to them. The same class ideologists, who in the period of capitalism's ascendancy saw history as a steady progressive advance, now, in capitalism's decline, dismiss the very idea of progress and describe history as just "one emer­ gency following on another." At the peak of bourgeois power their historians could praise the revolutions which laid the basis for it; but at a time when social change could take that power away from them, all change becomes suspect-even

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that change in the past from feudalism to capitalism. If it was previously possible for a ruling class to be overthrown, it might happen again; and in order to deny that such a change will ever occur in the future, it becomes necessary to deny that real social change has ever occurred at any time.11 Even if change were conceivable, it could only, from the point of view of representatives of the capitalist class, be for the worse. Tinkering with things as they are to effect a few minor adjustments is as much as they dare contemplate. "Piecemeal technology" or "social engineering"12 are among the terms used for this kind of superficial tampering which leaves everything basically as it is. Since history is assumed to have no discoverable pattern, all change is blind, its conse­ quences quite unforeseeable; and therefore only the irre­ spons ible could ever embark on a course of radical alteration. One reason sometimes advanced in support of this petty re­ formism is that any prediction of change is bound to have its prior influence on society, thus destroying the objectivity of the prediction. An example which has been given of the futil­ ity of forecasting future social events is that if a fall in the price of shares in three days' time were predicted, everyone connected with the market would sell before that time caus­ ing an earlier decline and falsifying the prediction.13 Any­ one relying on the accuracy of the forecast would have been badly caught out. While this may be true within the limits of change allowed by the theory of "piecemeal technology" itself, there are countries where, on the basis of Marxist pre­ dictions of real social change, that kind of gambling in commodities has been done away with altogether. Marxism would · certainly not deny that predicting the overthrow of an exploiting class is bound to have its prior influence of provoking that class into frantic efforts to falsify the prediction. A great deal of economic and sociological writing since Marx's time has been devoted to proving, on

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paper, just how wrong he was; and Keynesian techniques, as we have already noted, were largely devised to eliminate the more vulnerable aspects of capitalism while preserving its basic character. What Marxism denies is that any amount of subtle argument or improvised tinkering can save a system whose demise has been predicted on the grounds of contra­ dictions of a fundamental nature. The only way a ruling class could effectively meet the challenge of an openly predicted change in class relationships based on contradictions in the material conditions of life would be by removing those con­ tradictions itself-in which case, of course, it would not have falsified but anticipated the prediction, eliminating itself in the process. All criticisms of Marxist prediction which take the form of trying to prove that in tipping its hand Marxism allows itself to be circumvented are really based on the theory that ideas determine material conditions and therefore that com­ batting the idea of material change, through being fore­ warned of it, is tantamount to preventing change itself. But then idealism, as we have seen before, is the characteristic attitude of a class no longer in the ascendant-and particu­ larly of the intellectuals of that class who by the very nature of their mental tasks tend to be cut off from reality. These spokesmen may not call themselves idealists, but the new empiricism they advocate is as different from the practical philosophy of trial and error of a · more hopeful period of bourgeois history as is their attitude of deploring change from an earlier belief in progress. An empiricism of observa­ tion alone, divorced from experimental practice, can prove nothing about the future of anything and ascribes its own disability to history's inscrutable nature. Far from being a method for securing tentative social advances, neo-empiri­ cism has become a check on any change at all; and it betrays its non-materialist character by the utterly sterile and scholas-

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tic quality of its formulations. By arguing that no prediction can be absolutely correct in every detail and therefore that no major social changes should ever be envisaged, this so-called empiricism shows itself to be as static an idealism as the philosophical foundations of Plato's frozen Republic. If one prong of the critical attack on historical materi­ alism takes the form of denying the possibility of valid pre­ diction in the name of a random and unplanned 'freedom', the other maintains that if prediction is possible there must be laws of social development and if there are such laws, if Marxism is a science, then it can have nothing to do with morality and has no right to urgent expressions of the 'ought' type. Social conduct, explained in terms of class interests rooted in the material conditions of life, is thus no more moral than obeying the law of gravity. But this argument depends on ignoring the distinction Marxism makes between history which is the account of men's actions in pursuit of their aims and the physical sci­ ences which describe the pre-existent natural stage on which those actions take place. Both social science and physical science have their laws; but while the laws of physics operate in the same manner whether anyone is aware of them or not, the laws of social development, which are simply the pattern of changing human relationships, are not unaffected by the consciousness of them men come to have. Such consciousness is determined by men's social existence, and therefore the idea of change cannot arise till the material conditions of society as described by those laws of development are ripe for it. That is why Marx limits the scale of conscious action in a society which has discovered the law of its own movement to "shortening and lessening the birth-pangs" of a new order.14 Such a new order does not originate in an ideal conception but is generated out of contradictions in the basis of the social organization it replaces-contradictions which are al-

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ready in the process of destroying that older form of society and which can be set down with all the scientific rigor dis­ played in Capital. However, once men understand this proc­ ess of change, they can judge the possibilities it holds of a better society and, having judged, they can devote themselves to realizing those possibilities in the quickest and most pain­ less way. They can even set aside their immediate and per­ sonal interests in the old order to act in the name of a general interest in the new. This is the not inconsiderable area of moral action in the Marxist conception of predictable social change. Of course, it cannot be denied that a social change which is to free the proletariat from the yoke of capital is at the same time a curtailment of the liberty of capitalists. 'Free enterprise' is nothing but the liberty to exploit the labor of others. Just as 'freedom of the press' is the freedom of capitalists to buy up newspapers and to buy up journalists all in the interests of creating a public opinion favorable to the bourgeoisie. Or just as prohibitions against the right of work­ ers to enforce union discipline as their only weapon against their employers is called 'freedom of work'. To the ideologists of the capitalist class any change which diminishes the pre­ rogatives of those for whom they speak is bound to seem totalitarian. But a struggle to free the masses of mankind, even at the expense of the relatively few who exploit them, obviously deserves the title of libertarian in its most practical sense. The dialectics of freedom and the consciousness of necessity

Some degree of freedom is presupposed in making normative judgements and acting on them. Freedom has been described by Hegel as the consciousness of necessity; but Marxists can no more take over this conception uncritically

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than they could take over without alteration the idealistic dialectic. If consciousness is simply the passive privilege of becoming aware of the latter part of a historical pageant al­ ready written out to its final conclusion, and if that play of ideas is beyond criticism since at every stage the rational is the real, then freedom can indeed be no more than the con­ sciousness of necessity. But such an account of history as the inevitable categorical unfolding of self-evolving thought is not · at all the Marxist view; and the difficulty of under­ standing what meaning moral effort could have in terms of such an account does not apply to Marxism. Let us consider examples of freedom as the consciousness of necessity taken from the realms of physical science and social science. Consciousness of the necessity of the law of gravity and the constant behavior of an air stream might enable a man to construct an aeroplane, thus soaring above the earth not in defiance of but in compliance with the law. Similarly, consciousness of the necessity of the overthrow of capitalism might enable a man to resign a company director­ ship and assume an important place in some progressive movement, thus maintaining a special position for himself in the new situation through knowledge of the law of this de­ velopment. Now the first of these actions can be described in terms of value as the measure of the effort to create useful goods; but the second action, even though it occurs in the sphere of social activity where moral considerations apply, does not seem, as stated, to conform to our idea of morality as the measure of the effort to effect good results. The reason for this is that, while a freedom operating through a knowledge of natural laws without in any way changing them is suffi­ cient for the production of value, morality in the highest sense presupposes a freedom through a knowledge of the laws of social change which actually brings about a new situation Where new laws apply and the agent himself is not un-

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affected. In our example the company director in his concern for continuing to occupy a special position in altered circum­ stances is not really exercising the moral freedom of choosing to assist in the creation of an order where individuals no longer enjoy special positions. A profound understanding of social change which is the condition of acting freely in an ethical sense depends, in fact, on our willingness to change ourselves. Knowledge and morality, while closely connected and similarly derived from material conditions, are not identical. The utilization of physical laws by men in a particular rela­ tionship with each other is the social means whereby they provide for their material needs-or, , in other words, produc­ tion. And production is, practically, the process of knowl­ edge, which is also social. If we can prove the correctness of our conception of some natural phenomenon by reproducing it ourselves and, further, by making it serve our own pur­ poses, we have knowledge that is certain beyond anything we could know in terms of a passive, 'copy' theory of the rela­ tionship between idea and reality. What we can actually make we thoroughly understand; and in the productive proc­ ess of making, object and subject interpenetrate each other in a mutually transformative way that does not leave over, as inexplicable isolates, the dichotomies of mind and matter or of man and nature. The Kantian ungraspable thing-in-itself becomes, once we are able to produce it, a thing-for-us.15 The utilization of the laws of society's development in order to hasten the advent of a better system of productive relation­ ships is morality, which, again, is social. If we can apply our knowledge of the way our society actually functions in such a way as to help bring about a fairer and more efficient order­ ing of social effort, we have acted morally in a sense that goes beyond any compliance with customary ethical rules. For in this activity of changing the material conditions of social

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existence we also change ourselves. Changing ourselves is the greatest freedom we can know and where freedom is greatest there the highest form of morality is possible. But if knowl­ edge and morality are distinguishable, they are also closely related. The practical effect of the sort of moral action we have been considering is an improvement in productive rela­ tionships which, in turn, results in an increase in knowledge; and greater knowledge, of course, discovers new occasions for the free exercise of moral choice. Since morality depends on freedom and since freedom depends on consciousness, we must decide as a moral issue whether consciousness is merely the awareness of dialectical changes which would have worked themselves out along the same lines anyway or whether it is itself a moment in that dialectic which must, to some extent, be taken into account in the course of subsequent developments. Marxism sub­ scribes to the second of these alternatives: consciousness does react on the material conditions that gave rise to it, and the sort of freedom which morality presupposes is an emergent aspect of matter's having, at a particular stage of develop­ ment, become conscious. This historical development is re­ capitulated in each specific example of the dialectical unity of theory and practice. We start with a concrete situation which is l ike the objective material conditions prior to the origin of consciousness; that situation is reflected in abstract thought, lik e the appearance of consciousness on the natural scene, and those thoughts take the form of an ideal theory about the init ial circumstances; that theory is then validated or refuted by application through action to the situation with which the process began, and this final stage represents consciousness reacting on material reality. At the various stages of the process different philosoph­ ical attitudes seem to provide an adequate account of that particular moment. The concrete situation as passively re-

1 22

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fleeted in ideas can be described in terms of mechanical materialism. Freedom does not appear at this level at all. The subsequent phase of active thought shaping abstract ideas into a theory about the situation can be seen as idealism. Freedom in the sense of a release from the bare 'givenness' of the original circumstances comes into the picture at this point; but so far it is the freedom of a purely · conceptual movement without any actual consequences. In the act of applying this theory to the posited situation, the freedom of conception is subjected to the stern criticism of objective conditions and only such elements of novelty are retained as can be incorporated into whatever new situation develops out of the first. If these objective conditions are physical, the result of this process is the transformation of things in con­ formity with natural law which is production at the level of action and knowledge at the level of consciousness. If the conditions are social, the result is the transformation of soci­ ety in conformity with the laws of man's productive relation­ ships which at the level of consciousness is freedom and at the level of action is political change and, combined together, are social morality. The freedom this morality implies does not have the limitless but ineffective scope of pure thought: it has the narrower but practical range of thought acting in a material context. Not only . do these various phases of the dialectic of change have their distinctive philosophical implications, they are each expressed in somewhat different languages. The language of the first phase is purely descriptive-empirical propositions about objective conditions as reflected in con­ sciousness. The language of the second phase is either logical, drawing deductive conclusions from abstract formulations, or imaginative, spinning out ideal fantasies about what the future might hold. Only in the final phase do we get pre­ scriptive sentences in the form of value or moral judgements

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with their implicit injunctions that some object ought to be approved as worthy of choice or that some action ought to be performed as productive of good results. This moral 'ought' has been prepared for by the appearance of an ideal freedom in the preceding stage. It is because Marxism realizes the interconnectedness of the whole process and does not take the various phases as separate alternatives that it can be at once a sci�nce of society, a logic of social consciousness and a call to action. All these languages can be found in Capital which contains a description of how a particular form of society actually functions, shows logically the nature of its inner con­ tradictions and goes on to judge that society in moral terms and to indicate the sort of action required to change it.16 While it is true that in parts of Capital where Marx's purpose is mainly descriptive he uses the language of conven­ tional determinism, this is not ultimately incompatible with the strong sense of moral indignation which is expressed in other parts. Their relationship is dialectical and the distinc­ tion between them is resolved in a summons to act which is at once practical and ethical. This summons is philosophically legitimate because men do make their own history, even if they do not make it just as they please nor choose all the circumstances in which their social decisions are taken. Marxists who have best understood what their theory implied, those in fact who have been most successful in acting it out in practice, have always, when viewing the dialectic of change as a whole, allowed sufficient scope for the dynamic role of consciousness to avoid any imputation of mechanical determinism. As Engels has put it: According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduc­ tion of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the eco­ nomic element is the only determining one, he transforms that

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proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle, . . . constitu­ tions established by the victorious class . . . judicial forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants . . . also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in de­ termining their form.17

Lenin in attacking the idea of 'economism' to which a dogmatic interpretation of Marxism had given rise states quite categorically: "Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,"18 which would cer­ tainly not be the case unless consciousness was understood to play a part in the shaping of social events. And Mao Tse­ tung argues at length: Some people think . . . that in the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the productive forces are the principal aspect; in the contradiction between theory and practice, practice is the principal aspect; in the con­ tradiction between the economic foundation and its superstruc­ ture, the economic foundation is the principal aspect: and there is no change in their respective positions. This is the view of mechanistic materialism, and not of dialectical materialism. True, the productive forces, practice and the economic founda­ tion generally manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But under certain conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and the superstructure in turn manifest themselves in the princi­ pal and decisive role; this must also be admitted . . . . In saying this are we running counter to materialism? No. The reason is that while we recognize that in the development of history as a whole it is material things that determine spiritual things and social existence that determines social consciousness, at the same time we also recognize and must recognize the reaction of spirit­ ual things and social consciousness on social existence, and the reaction of the superstructure on the economic foundation. This is not running counter to materialism; this is precisely avoiding mechanistic materialism and firmly upholding dialectical mate­ rialism.19

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Most bourgeois critics of Marxism fail conspicuously to understand the nature of dialectical materialism and either confuse the materialist aspect with crude determinism or the dialectical aspect with Hegelian idealism.20 Of course if dia­ lectical materialism could only be split in two and turned against itself, it could be made to appear self-destructive, the very thesis advanced by materialism being denied by the dia­ lectic according to which every thesis is bound to become its opposite. But dialectical materialism is not a loose collection of incompatible ideas borrowed from here and there which can be attacked separately. Its distinguishable but interrela­ ted aspects have unity; but it is the unity of process, not of static identity. Dialectical materialism is the dynamic pattern of change and growth in the objective world and, since minds developed in that world, it is also the form of the relationship between subject and object, between thought and action, between consciousness and the material conditions in which it arose and on which it in turn reacts. Dialectical material­ ism, in short, takes its character from the nature of changing reality as extended in time. It may be contrasted with any method of investigation which attempts to stop the whole process in order to have a closer look, obtaining thereby a view of reality as static and dead on which it is thus impos­ sible to act.21 Marxists themselves have to guard against distortions in emphasis when employing dialectical materialism. Overstress­ ing the dialectical aspect leads to idealism on the mental plane and reformism on the plane of action. Overstressing the aspect of materialism leads to a mechanical interpretation of reality and dogmatism about the means to be used in achieving political ends. In terms of thought alone it might appear a very delicate task to maintain the proper propor­ tion; but in action, in application to objective situations, the method is ultimately self-corrective.

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Freedom and time

We have already seen the importance of extension in time for an understanding of individual morality. An analysis of specific acts at a particular moment did not yield any element we could designate as moral, and only when we con­ sidered the agent over the course of his lifetime in a given social context were we in a position to appreciate the nature of moral choice. The question of time is essential to an un­ derstanding of the role of consciousness as the source of what­ ever freedom morality in general presupposes. Kant has described man as living in two worlds, the phenomenal and the n9umenal. In the former he is subjected to the necessity of natural law and, since every event is inevi­ tably linked to its cause, there is no scope for human freedom and hence no possibility of moral action. But through his mind he belongs also to the transcendental realm of pure reason which exists behind the mere sensuous appearance of the phenomenal world; and in this realm he is free because he is capable of responding to the dictates of universal reason which legislates for things as they really are. Every action can be explained deterministically insofar as its results occur in the physical world of strict causation; but it may also be free if it is motivated by purely rational considerations which do not originate in that world. Now -what most likely suggested this Kantian solution to the problem of necessity and free­ dom is the experience we all have of past and future-the encountered and unalterable past where necessity reigns absolute and the free and undetermined future which is the realm of moral choice. The present seems to stand as an instant without duration between what has already been irrevocably done for all time and what is still a matter of free election. Even if we can extend experience of the past into the future, as we do whenever we plan to bring about a

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certain effect, the very act of setting up ends to be realized becomes itself a part of the past the moment it has been willed and thus subject to an unbreakable causal change, as is also the case with each means toward the attainment of that end as it comes to be employed and, eventually, with the end itself. By this account freedom takes on the illusory character of a distant mirage which always disappears as soon as we get to it.22 But the consciousness on which freedom depends must not be tied to an instantaneous present, helplessly watching the endless transformation of the undetermined into the determinate. Its field is rather an 'effective present' which is simply the measure of time between ideal objective and actual achievement which it is possible to grasp. The extent of its reach is precisely what distinguishes man from other animals. And this distinction is grounded in the material fact that men, unlike animals, "produce their means of subsist­ ence."23 Consciousness thus originates as the mental corre­ late of the productive process requiring time for its comple­ tion. In terms of discrete instants consciousness would be quite inconceivable. Consciousness as an effective present implies that the spurious isolates of thoroughly necessitated past and completely free future must be seen in their dialec­ tical relationship as qualifying each other in the course of purposive action to achieve some end. Necessity qualifies freedom but it does not devour it. Normative judgements relating to actions which ought to be performed are possible as well as factual propositions referring to what is already the case; and their relationship is maintained through this effec­ tive present which consciously combines elements of future and past. Few philosophers would wish to deny the pattern of necessity and freedom in our individual lives appearing to us as an extended present within which a planned course of

1 28

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action has meaning. Without predictable regularities based on the past, planning would be pointless; without an element of freedom drawn from the future, choice would be impos­ sible. And yet critics of Marxism often seem to agree that when we turn from individual to social action no such pat­ tern is discernible. It is quite impossible, they argue, to find any regularities in history or any trends of development in the organization of societies. There is either no change at all or change is completely free in the sense that any social for­ mation can arbitrarily succeed any other. This freedom would be meaningless to us because we could not hope to bring about some happier state of affairs by a course of con­ scious social action. Indeed it would be pointless on this read­ ing of the matter so much as to pass any opinion at all on the existing state of affairs; and it is doubtful if we would ever have acquired so otiose a faculty as a capacity for judgement. But these critics are apparently quite prepared to accept the conclusion that history is meaningless-such is their dislike for what a meaningful history might hold in store for their class. We can study the past and learn more about it; but we must not draw any lessons from it for that would be to fall into the error of historicism. We must not, in other words, try to make sense of the life of societies by applying to them the concept of an effective present which enables us to make sense of our individual lives. And yet "history is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their a ims" ; and if history is meaningless, so are the lives of the men who make it; and the men who make it are all of us. It seems rather a heavy price to ask us to pay for their own fear of social change. Although Marxist morality is firmly rooted in the mate­ rial conditions of life, it must be more than the passive re­ sponse to a particular social situation or it could not include the notion of actively participating in the change of that situ­ ation into another. This notion can only signify that human

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awareness is a dynamic moment in the process of history­ that, as previously pointed out, consciousness is itself an al­ teration in being, a broadening of its scope for purposive action which must in turn be reflected in a yet more com­ prehensive consciousness. This is not, of course, to suggest that conscious ideas effect any real changes of themselves, but only that in revealing the objective nature of a situation which is not itself static they also show something more-what it is possible through practical human effort for that situation to become. It is in taking up an active attitude toward this possibility, still lying outside a present social context though realizable through a conscious extrapolation of its current laws of development, that Marxists find their warrant for moral judgement and action. Conclusion

There is a peculiar difficulty in writing about morality from a Marxist point of view. The basic thesis of the unity of theory and practice makes any act of knowledge incomplete till it has been validated by the active submission of an ab­ stract formulation to the conditions, general or specific, which provoked our thought about them. But any exposition of Marxism, however clearly it may define the successive stages of this process, occurs at the level of abstract thought. It is bound, therefore, to seem somewhat provisional; and it must even strike the reader as being in a sense self-contradic­ tory-like the feelings we naturally have on hearing some­ one, from an arm chair, expounding a credo of action. That is why Marx and Engels themselves were always suspicious of philosophy in its usual guise of a logically-developed system of abstractions involving no explicit command to do any­ thing. It is impossible to evade this problem without robbing

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Marxism of its essential meaning. It must simply be realized that no statements about Marxism can ever be final. Marxism ultimately proves itself not on paper but in action. It can never rest in its efforts because those efforts themselves create new conditions which are the starting point for a fresh advance. It is necessarily self-critical in its capacity for turn­ ing its own tools of research on itself and constantly chang­ ing its practice in the light of changing circumstances. The dialectic of theory and practice is the clue to the relationship of ends and means. Taken separately, the one results in an ineffective idealism which promises everything-but not in this world; the other stumbles from crisis to crisis with a pragmatic short-sightedness. Combined, they check and sup­ plement each other, setting Marxist morality in motion to­ ward its goal of a "community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is con­ sciously applied as the combined labour-power of the com­ munity."24 In such a community the conscious application of man's skill to the task of satisfying in the fullest and most direct way the needs of all, under conditions from which exploitation has been eliminated, provides the material basis for ethical freedom. What we are therefore obliged to do, in terms of social commitment, is to help realize the conditions in which 'ought' sentences themselves would have the widest scope and the deepest significance.

Chapter I V Alienation and Political Change

Even if consciousness has the dynamic quality ascribed to it in the last chapter, of reacting on the social and material conditions which gave rise to it, those conditions are still fundamental-not only in the sense that objective develop­ ments in the material conditions provide the occasion for such a conscious reaction, but also in the sense that the reac­ tion itself is only effective to the extent that it represents a practical possibility of the further development of those con­ ditions. Conscious social change can only occur when the objective conditions are ripe for it; and since it depends on those conditions, our original thesis, that the social existence of men determines their consciousness, remains true-though not in any mechanically deterministic way. Marxism cannot, therefore, expect the ethical behavior characteristic of a soci­ ety based on a particular mode of production to be trans­ formed by the moral efforts of individuals acting within the range of their own personal relationships. The consciousness of those individuals and hen.ce their concept of what is 'right' in terms of personal relationships will also have been largely conditioned by that mode of production. In a situation where growing contradictions in the basic mode of production have involved society in a general moral crisis, the corruption of personal relationships may for a time lag behind the deterio­ ration in ethical standards of society as a whole. But the area of personal relationships does not serve as a check to moral 133

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decadence, only as a temporary refuge frorri it. Certain of the Nazi leaders in fascist Germany are reported to have been kindly fathers and husbands; but this could have been of small consolation to the millions who perished in extermina­ tion centers; and in the long run, of course, such political moves as encouraging members of the Hitler ]ugend to in­ form on parents critical of the regime, were bound .to pervert personal relationships also. Marxism is by no means unconcerned with the morality of such individual relationships as those between husband and wife, parent and child or friend and friend; but realizing how these relationships can be stunted or strengthened by the prevailing social climate, it addresses jtself to the task of cre­ ating an atmosphere in which they can flourish. That is to say, it calls for an economic foundation of society which can support wholesome, happy, mutually beneficent relationships -not just in this country or that, not just among this class or that, but among all people without distinction. This call for the establishment of the very conditions in which higher ethical standards can be realized is itself supremely moral; but it can only be answered in terms of united political activ­ ity. And yet this political activity devoted to transforming society has its moral implications for the area of personal relationships. Intimate associations in the family or among friends are not unaffected by the concerted political struggle to achieve a better ordering of social life. Before considering the ethical aspects of such a struggle we must first decide whether radical social change is really necessary. Now the fact that someth ing is wrong with society in the advanced industrialized countries of the West is widely attested; but there is a great variety of opinion on the score of what the trouble is and how it can be remedied. In the works of contemporary sociologists we find a good deal about the alienation of modern man, his sense of estrangement and

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frustration, his inability as he becomes more and more iso­ lated to communicate with others at all. Different theories are proposed to account for this feeling of 'homelessness' : life has become too complex for the individual to do more than resignedly fill in the forms which fix his place in a welfare state; the conventional morality of a stagnant social system has made men 'other-directed' instead of 'inner-directed' as they were in more adventurous times; science has outstripped knowledge of how to live and looms threateningly as a mon­ ster out of control; or contractual relationships which engage men in limited capacities have replaced those natural group­ ings to which they belonged as whole persons. Philosophical movements like existentialism reflect this same sense of alien­ ation and the absurdity of life. It is to be found also in much current literature about the essential loneliness and incom­ municability of the human plight. To understand what this alienation is, how it came about and what can be done to remedy it, we must begin with a brief recapitulation of the recent sociological history of the term itself. The concept of alienation

Hegel uses the word 'alienation' in connection with the ideal process of creativity. The act of creation is to some extent a self-diminution on the part of pure Mind or Spirit, a derogation from its own unity and perfection in order to · project a natural world which thus has a quality of 'other­ ness' about it as alienated from its maker. In much the same way, man exteriorizes his own powers in institutions and objects which are similarly 'other' to his essential nature as pure consciousness. Moreover, although as generalized man he is responsible for this extension of his being in forms of social life and objects of production, in his individual capac-

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ity he cannot recognize them as his own creations and seems to move in a foreign world in which he is a bewildered alien. When Marx began his criticism of Hegelianism in his early writings, he recognized the validity of 'alienation' as a description of the state of man in Western society; but he could not, of course, accept Hegel's derivation of the term. A man is not mere consciousness: he is an objective being whose consciousness reflects his existence. A being who is objective acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He creates or establishes only objects, because he is established by objects-because at bottom he is nature. In the act of establishing, therefore, this objective being he does not fall from his state of "pure activity" into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, establishing his activity as the activity of an objective natural being.1

If man was alienated, it was not because of some ideal consequence of the act of creation as such: it was because of the specific conditions of production in an historical period of social development. In not realizing that man naturally ex­ presses himself in productive social effort and in not appreci­ ating that other forms of society are possible than the one he was familiar with, Hegel considered the alienation of human labor under a capitalist system as the eternal character of all creative effort. Alienation thus becomes identified with any . objectivizing activity whatsoever and must remain man's fate as long as he is involved in the process of production. The problem of alienation conceived simply as a state of mind requires only an ideal solution. Hegel argues that the idea of private property is transcended by the idea of moral­ ity; but as Marx points out, this dialectic of thought leaves objective reality precisely where it was before. "In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to

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abolish actual private property." 2 The Hegelian concept of annulling what is estranged from man by appropriating it for himself can only become positive once this appropriation is seen, not as an ideal process in which consciousness annihi­ lates the 'otherness' of the objective world, but as an actual appropriation of the products of man's labor through a com­ munistic suppression of private property.3 This appropria­ tion is necessary because man's sense of alienation is rooted in the fact that "the object which labour produces-labour's product-confronts it as something alien, as a power inde­ pendent of the producer." "The worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object" ; and "the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien ob­ jective world becomes which he creates over against himself and the poorer he himself-his inner world-becomes."4 Further development of the concept of alienation in Marx's early writings

At this period of the early 1 840's Marx, partly as a result of the influence of Feuerbach, was interested in the question of religion. He compares man's alienation in respect to the objects of his labor with the estrangement in the realm of consciousness which takes a religious form. In religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independ­ ently of the individual-that is, · operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity-in the same way the worker's activ­ ity ceases to be his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. 5

The gods are the effect of man's intellectual estrangement, as private property is the effect of his alienated labor. Marx therefore, at this stage of his sociological studies, sees a close relationship between atheism and communism: in the one

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case what is involved is man's reappropriation of the products of his own consciousness; in the other, it is his reappropria­ tion of the fruits of his own objective labors. "Just as atheism, being the annulment of God, is the advent of theoretic humanism so communism, as the annulment of private prop­ erty, is the justification of real human life as man's possession and thus the advent of practical humanism."6 But this nega­ tive idea of 'annulment' only applies to the stage of transi­ tion from alienated life to socialism. Once the real existence of man and nature has been reasserted in practical, sensuous and perceptible terms, Marx goes on to say: when man has become for man the bei_ng of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question of an_ alien being above nature and man has become impossible. Atheism has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postu­ lates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in need of such a mediation. . . . Socialism is man's positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the annulment of religion, just as real life is man's posi­ tive reality, no longer mediated through the annulment of pri­ vate property.1

If man's labor is alienated because its products do not belong to him, and if those products are turned into money, then money is the universal form assumed by the alienated ability of mankind. In this role of representing man's pro­ ductive capacity money arrogates to itself the right of pro­ nouncing which of man's actual needs can be realized and which cannot. Since a demand on the part of one without money is a mere thing of the imagination, ineffectual and objectless, money thus becomes the arbiter between the real and the unreal. "The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need . . . is the difference between the imagined which exists merely within me and the imagined as it is outside me as a real object."8 Money is the common medium which turns an

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image into reality and reality into a mere image. As the out­ ward form of value by which all things are exchangeable, it is the general confounding of all things, including natural and human qualities. As the effective link between man and man it is the determinant of all human relationships. Money is the pimp between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person. . . . Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other's very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot -general exploitation of communal human nature. Just as every imperfection in man is a bond with heaven, an avenue giving the priest access to the heart, every need is an opportunity to ap­ proach one's neighbor in the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: "Dear friend, I give you what you need; but you know the conditio sine q ua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you."9

And if every need exposes one to having his very sub­ stance taken away from him, the basis has been laid for that morality of extreme asceticism and miserliness which tends, at any rate, to characterize a period of primitive accumu­ lation. Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs is its cardi­ nal doctrine. The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save­ the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being. . . . All the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political eower-all this it can appropriate for you . . . yet being all this, it is inclined to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for every­ thing else is after all its servant. And when I have the master . . . I feel no need of the servant.10

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In our so-called affluent society some of this miserly asceti­ cism may have disappeared-but not the sense of alienation. Man is as alienated in his pleasures as he was formerly in his hoarding. Alienated labor is the source of estrangement among the exploited classes of society; but the alienated ability of mankind in general, which takes a monetary form, gives all men a sense of estrangement. "The worker is alienated in his life; but the non-worker, the bourgeois intellectual, is alienated in his thought."11 He, too, is a victim of a world of alienation which strikes at each man or group of men through precisely what is dearest to them, so that the transcendence of estrangement appears to each in a different guise. Comparing various countries at the time he was setting down these early reflections, Marx comments on how they tend to view the over­ coming of alienation in terms of the respective form of es­ trangement which is dominant: in Germany through a philosophical extension of self-consciousness; in France through a political realization of equality; in Britain through a practical application of economic doctrines. 12 And these of course-German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy-are the three strands woven into the texture of Marx's own views at this period. But in so far as he already finds the real roots of alienation in commodity pro­ duction, which dehumanizes the worker in turning him, also, into a commodity, and brutalizes the capitalist in making him a dealer in men, Marx has isolated the common source of estrangement in all societies where commodity exchange is the dominant economic relationship. It was this preoccupation with the actual �aterial foun­ dations of society that enabled Marx to criticize the social ideas of those who, in thinking about society abstractly, merely reproduced in theoretic form their own estrange­ ment. Starting with economic relationships themselves, in-

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stead of the manner in which they might be reflected in this or that individual consciousness, he succeeded, even at this early stage of the development of his ideas, in making a sub­ stantial contribution to the new science of sociology. To put this contribution in Marx's own words: The history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers, the expo­ sure to the senses of human psychology. Hitherto this was not conceived in its inseparable connection with man's essential being, but only in an external relation of utility, because, mov­ ing in the realm of estrangement, people could only think man's general mode of being (religion or history in its abstract-general character as politics, art, literature etc.) to be the reality of man's essential powers and man's species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry. . . . Since all human activity hitherto has been labour-that is, industry-a psychology (or sociology) for which this, the part of history most contemporary and accessible to sense, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, compre­ hensive, and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness?l3 Transition from the early manuscripts to Capital

Because Marx took his stand firmly on this solid basis, without which any study of society becomes partial and irrel­ evant, all sociology since, in the work of Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Mannheim and so many others has tended to be, either openly or implicitly, "a debate with Marx."14 Much of what Marx wrote during the period of the Economic and Ph ilosophic Manuscripts has been found acceptable by soci­ ologists who would certainly reject with alarm any positive prescription for action which would actually transform soci­ ety. As long as communism could be described in such general terms as "the real appropriation of the human es­ sence by and for man, the complete return of man to himself

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as a social being-a return become conscious, and accom­ plished within the entire wealth of previous development," as long as communism was, in short, a form of humanism to which men, in spite of their own class interests, might at least pay lip-service, sociologists could profess to find Marxism illuminating and perceptive. They could declare with Marx that the "only alternative to the socialization of the individ­ ual mind and character is its alienation."15 But socializing actual property, as the only way in which this socialization of individuals could be realized, was a different matter. The idea of humanizing productive relationships was perfectly accept­ able; but the demonstration, that humanism was an empty concept as long as class divisions p�rsisted and that they could only be ended by a revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, tended to stimulate the critical faculties of ideologists who could not dissociate themselves from the interests of the ruling class. They were even prepared to theorize about the unity of theory and practice, so long as no one showed any signs of acting on it. In h is early writings can be found most of Marx's lead­ ing ideas in embryonic form. But they have not yet acquired the firm, closely-drawn, systematic structure of his mature work. They are philosophical jottings about the material conditions of life rather than a science of society rigorously deduced from those conditions. For example, he puts forward the view in the Manuscripts that "the emancipation of workers contains universal emancipation because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production ;" 1 6 but this is a very general reflection which could apply to any society at any period since the disruption of tribal communism. Similarly, the concept of 'alienation', purged of the idealism with which Hegel invested it, proves a very fruitful approach to the problem of understanding soci­ ety; but it is too loose a formulation from the point of view of

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acting on some specific society with the purpose of changing it. Since, in commodity-exchanging societies, all men are more or less alienated, the term 'alienation' does not in itself clearly reveal the class contradictions in such societies. Even though Marx has already grasped in these youthful writings the basic principle that there is no human essence apart from "productive forces and social forms of intercourse" and that "all history is nothing but the continuous transformation of human nature," he still tends to include statements about man in the abstract, about man's essential powers. Four years after the period of the Manuscripts, in the Communist Mani­ festo of 1848, Marx firmly rejects all such vague references to "Human Nature, to Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philo­ sophical fantasy."17 In Capital the word 'alienation' hardly appears at all. The general fact, that throughout the history of class-divided society the products of labor have never wholly belonged to those who made them and have stood over against their makers as alien objects, is now expressed in economic terms as surplus value-a form of expression which could only have been conceived when commodity production had reached its fullest development under capitalism and the worker him­ self, in respect to his capacity for labor, had become a com­ modity. All the vaguer sociological characterizations of capi­ talist society as profit-seeking, acquisitive, competitive or atomistic are summed up in this concrete fact of surplus value which not only indicates the precise economic form of exploitation under a specific mode of production but also, unlike looser qualifications, designates clearly who exploits whom. Surplus value, as the appropriation through owner­ ship of the means of production of the difference between goods produced and goods consumed by the working force, a difference which increases with a rise in productivity so that

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human progress itself can be measured by the degree of ex­ ploitation, simply is the law of capitalism. Capitalism cannot change unless this basic economic law of the appropriation of surplus value has changed; and any claim that capitalism is gradually turning into something else, as long as this law may still be observed in operation, is merely terminological quib­ bling. Do all people within the 'free' world bear the same relationship to the means of production? Do all people in the 'free' world share in the advance of productivity which could provide for a general standard of living well above the subsistence level? If the answer to these questions is "No," then that world is a capitalist world betraying the usual hall­ marks of capitalism-however its apologists may choose to de­ scribe it. The various pernicious influences and distortions of vision affecting man in society which Marx had earlier as­ cribed to 'alienation' are shown in Capital to be strictly deducible from commodity exchange. What commodities are actually produced in a given situation directly depends not on human needs but on expectations of profit; therefore, those whose labor creates value determine neither by their material demands nor by their conscious will the direction of the productive process. And even those who do control pro­ duction in their own class interest do not have the same de­ gree of control over the market where these interests and the demand for goods must be resolved in the conversion of com­ modities into profits. Both classes pay tribute, but by no means in equal proportion, to a state of society in which the process of production has the mastery over man instead of being controlled by him. These two classes are quite clearly distinguishable by the fact that only one of them, the prole­ tariat, insofar as it must offer for sale on the market its own labor power, takes on itself a commodity-form. In a commodity-exchanging society the social character

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of men's labor appears to them as an objective value stamped on the product of that labor. "A definite social relation be­ tween men thus assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a re lation between things."18 But these things which embody their relationship with other men in society neither belong to them nor were produced at their instigation, and so the rela­ tionship itself tends to become quite incomprehensible. Membership in society determines the very nature of the in­ dividual human being, but this membership, as mediated by things, has become a mystery to him. To find an analogy for this strange plight of man in society, Marx returns to his earlier comparison of the Manuscripts, reformulated in the light of his subsequent work in economics: We must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the reli­ gious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relations both with one another and the human race . So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands . This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.rn

Commodity fetishism includes all the aspects of es­ trangement which Marx had noted previously and relates them firmly to a particular mode of production. The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through.20 ·

But when we come to its highest development under capitalism, this appearance of simplicity vanishes. What was only one aspect of social existence and could be compared

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with other areas relatively untouched by exchange relation­ ships comes to pervade the entire framework of life in society, leaving no alternative standard by which its influence might be judged. Just as all the general characteristics of capitalism disappear only when the law of surplus value has been abro­ gated, so commodity fetishism, or man's sense of alienation, will only vanish when production is planned for use, directly determined by the real needs of society, and not for ex­ change.2 1 This return to the commodity brings us back to the point from which we started in an attempt to define the value­ word 'good'. Indeed, the method of procedure can be seen, in a sense, as the reverse of Marx's development from the writ­ ing of the Manuscripts to the publication of Capital. He suc­ ceeded in giving his philosophical ideas about the ethics of social organization the concise, scientific form of an economic analysis of a particular type of society and what it was capable of becoming. We have been trying to release from that form its philosophical implications in order to gain a better under­ standing of morality in general and to see certain ethical problems in a clearer light-not as an intellectual exercise but in answer to an urgent social need. A lienation and ethical values

Exploitation of man by man has existed in one form or another since human society first became divided into classes; and, to a greater or lesser degree, the exchange of commodi­ ties has been a part of economic activity in some place or other for many centuries. It remained for capitalism to de­ velop commodity production to the point where it became a cloak for the grossest forms of exploitation and at the same time, for those who penetrated the disguise, suggested the possibility of a society which had nothing to conceal because

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the exploitation of one class by another had been abolished. It is the very impersonality of economic oppression under capitalism which not only permits excessive abuses but seems to put them beyond the reach of moral criticism. Few men brought up in society are completely without humane senti­ ments; but if the victimization of millions of people can be made to appear as the result of the movement of unforeseen forces, then no one, not even the wealthiest, need feel respon­ sible. Are over half of those living in the capitalist world on the verge of starvation? Well, the terms of trade have moved against primary producers, that is all. Are underdeveloped countries continuously thwarted in their efforts to raise their standard of living by the commanding positions previously won by the original capitalist powers? Well, that merely proves that the economic conditions for the 'take-off', when industrialization gains sufficient momentum to be self­ sustaining, are more complicated than we thought and, per­ haps, another book ought to be written about it. And of course many books must be written to show that this kind of economic determinism whereby an impersonal market in commodities automatically impoverishing primary producers is 'freedom', while any attempt of men to assert control of their economic destiny and assume responsibility for their actions, both as they affect themselves and as they affect others, is materialistic bondage-the road to serfdom. But this assumption of irresponsibility for the objective results of capitalism is not, in the long run, very reassuring. We who participate in the greater riches and better condi­ tions of the 'more fortunate' portions of the capitalist world are confronted with an insoluble dilemma: either the greater wealth we enjoy is a providential accident for which we can­ not be held accountable and which, therefore, can be snatched from us by another accident or else we are respon­ sible for its acquisition, in which case we can either accept the

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reproach of having more than our share or must assume that our lion's portion has been earned by our superiority. But to feel superior ourselves we must despise others. We must be­ lieve that their misery is as much deserved as our good for­ tune. And yet to despise those who are much more numerous than we are, and thus to provoke their hatred and envy, pro­ vides a very precarious foundation for our greater wealth. What we really want is to add to our other luxuries and amenities just one more-a good conscience; but all we are offered on the market are further distractions from the fact that we have a bad one. And certainly we do not wish to purchase a good conscience at the cost of the very privileges we would like to maintain. We want peace but not on any terms. We want peace in a world still divided into rich and poor-a world therefore in which war is inevitable. If we could only forget all that and just cultivate our own gardens, just enjoy a few intimate relationships outside the sphere of politics! But we live in a state of alienation, dominated by objects, our very relationships with others translated into relations among things. And where are we to turn for guidance in escaping from this estrangement? To our writers and artists? But their very works are commodities, produced for a market and subject to the same laws as any other articles made to sell. In fact, their talent itself, like the labor-power of workers, is bought' and sold at current prices, thus transforming them also into commodities.22 How are we to find our way through this commodity-world to the reality behind it when the media of information, the newspapers we read together with the news printed in them, the pro­ grams we watch or hear, and even most forms of education are all commodities offered on the market. We are like Midas, desperately needing natural sustenance and human love, yet condemned to turn everything we touch, the food

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we eat and the very people we cherish, into gold-itself merely the most general form commodities can take.23 If life in capitalist countries has become atomized, man set against man in competition for jobs and the things money can buy, human relationships changed into monetary ones, perhaps these effects can be overcome by a new impulse to­ ward social living. Since "socialization of the individual mind and character is the alternative to alienation," perhaps all that is needed is for us to recover our sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves, a feeling of 'togetherness' in respect to other members of a group. But the kind of group we choose as the context for regaining our sense of social existence makes all the difference. Psychiatric treat­ ment takes the form of helping us to adapt ourselves to living in our alienated world as it is-in spite of the fact that it is probably just that alienation which is at the root of our in­ dividual psychological problems. Fascism offers us the sense of belonging to a corporate society; but it is a society that finds its only reason for existence in the hatred and fear of some other group thought to be more alien than we are our­ selves. Any attempt to combine 'togetherness' with con­ tinued exploitation will always end in some form of fascism. Even joining a revolutionary movement simply to lose one's personal feeling of estrangement by belonging to something is likely to prove of doubtful therapeutic value. Such move­ ments, if serious, are not clinics for maladjusted bourgeois intellectuals who want to reconcile their anarchistic individ­ ualism with a comfortable feeling of putting themselves 'right' in social terms. They are not substitutes for a regretted religion precociously lost.24 Real revolutionary activity has nothing to do with losing oneself in society-only with find­ ing oneself in society, which means identifying oneself con­ sciously with a class actually or potentially capable of chang­ ing that society. This identification does not involve, for

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detached members of the bourgeoisie, adopting the superficial habits of the proletariat which, in many cases, the proletariat itself would dispense with if it could afford to; nor does it involve seeing the proletariat as other than it is in order to have exalted feelings about it.25 Only by being what it is and knowing itself to be what it is, has the proletariat been cast for its dynamic role in social change; and only by assuming the objective character of what the proletariat really is can those of a different class-background participate constructively in that change. The common bond is rational belief in a society from which exploitation of man by man has been eliminated and mutual agreement about the means of achieving such a society. There are two moralities existing side by side in our present world-the one rooted in the decaying economic system of capitalism, the other founded on the socialism which has already been established over a wide area of the globe. In Britain the situation is not dissimilar to that of an earlier Elizabethan Age. That, too, was a period of transition in which the newer ethics of bourgeois society still coexisted with the tiered order and personal loyalties of feudalism. Then as now there was considerable ideological confusion as the result of this moral polarization under two different standards-a confusion which was to be found in the minds of individuals as well as in society itself. Often a man's senti­ ments pulled him one way and his reason another, or his very reason might be divided against itself. Sometimes a man might think he belonged to one party when his actions proved him to belong to the other. Shakespeare might ex­ press a nostalgia for the vanishing order in which each man knew his place; but what we know of his life leads us to suppose that he actually lived according to the newer dis­ pensation.26 The idea of betrayal which haunted the minds of those

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poets and dramatists is with us as pressingly. We have our own Bosolas and Iagos who turn court rooms into stages and with rhetorical flourishes and much breast-beating repudiate espoused beliefs and inform on old friends. Sometimes this delation can be accounted for by bribes offered in the name of a threatened establishment, but not always. Violent shifts from one set of standards to another may be accompanied by little in the way of material rewards and thus appear, from one point of view, as incomprehensible malevolence, from another, as a return to the true faith after dabbling in here­ sies. But then intentions are hard to follow across the trans­ valuation involved in suddenly altering the very standards by which judgement is possible. Looked at in one way the ac­ tions of these unstable characters seem quite unmotivated, their explanations no more than a vain hope that a multiplic­ ity of inadequate reasons will eventually add up to a single sufficient one. Looked at in another way their outrageous conduct is accepted as a confession of having sinned against the divine order of things as they are. Our times are like theirs also in the wild fluctuations from the heights of optimism to the depths of despair, de­ pending on an identification of interest with a world that is being born or one that is visibly cracking up. Like them we are obsessed with sexual relationships-partly from the illu­ sion that physical passion may be the one enduring thing where all else is in flux and partly from the fact that the disjunction between past and future in an age of transition frees this relationship like others from any natural context­ so that it becomes isolated, an act in itself, all-important and at the same time, meaningless. Irresponsibility, jealousy and frustration at the personal level are added to the frantic din of partisan controversy. The controversy is continuous and not at all lessened in volume because one side controls most of the organs by which it is waged. So many arguments are

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hurled forth into the ether or slapped down on paper or shouted from public platforms that it is difficult to believe the disputation can ever end. And yet it is an idealistic misconception to suppose that the march of events waits on some ideological resolution. While hired intellectuals fulminate, those who understand the real conditions of society and are thus capable of chang­ ing it will have altered the objective premises on which all useful discussion about society must be based. The political form of Marxist ethics

Because Marxism has been so critical of moral systems _ which ignored or explained away or tried to justify class divi­ sions in society, the political movement incorporating Marx­ ist ideas has often been accused by its opponents of having no ethical principles of its own at all. But when Marx says: "Communists preach no morality. They do not put to people the moral demand: Love one another, be not egoists, because they know very well that egoism is under certain conditions the necessary form of the individual's struggle for survival; " h e is not rejecting morality-only its hypocritical form. He is refraining from judging people for acting as they are condi­ tioned to act in order to make a normative judgement about those conditions themselves. Lenin's reply to this accusation-has already been quoted: "Of course there is such a thing as communist ethics . . . " but "our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat." Now this may seem a very flat and unrelieved statement of the moral ideal in its politi­ cal guise; but it can be shown to contain by implication all that is necessary in the way of ethical principles for establish­ ing the material basis of a higher moral order of society. These implications must be considered in order to demon-

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strate just what is involved in being committed to the class struggle on the side of the proletariat and just how such commitment does, in fact, represent the practical implemen­ tation of a normative judgement which sums up this partic­ ular stage of history. The struggle of the proletariat is directed toward ending its own economic exploitation. This exploitation, as we have seen, takes the form in capitalist society of surplus value ex­ tracted from those whose labor is value-creative by those who control the means of production. It can only be ended by socializing the means of production to conform with the so­ cialized methods of work in economically advanced societies. Individual property rights are quite incompatible with vast industrial enterprises and can only be maintained by arbi­ trary limits on their fullest development and planned inte­ gration with the rest of the economy. 27 Since ethical ideas of 'right' are largely grounded in specific rights to things which make up the property relationships of a particular society, the social conquest of private ownership of the means of pro­ duction implies the socialization of the very concept of 'right'. Revolutionizing the institution of property on which class divisions are based thus amounts to revolutionizing soci­ ety's ethical standards. Some notion of what this means can be gained from the care taken in socialist countries to educate children to respect public property which is, in fact, a respect for value-creative labor, for the associated efforts of men working together for the benefit of all. In contrast to the heavy penalties in capitalist societies for infringements of private property rights, the severest punishments under so­ cialism are reserved for crimes against the rights of a whole people as vested in the goods they have cooperatively pro­ duced and communally own. This change in a society's ethical standards which re­ quires an alteration in property rights implies also a revolu-

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tion against the state as the political embodiment of those : rights.28 The bourgeois state is the political form of class f domination reflecting the economic fact of class appropria-,'. lion. If that basic fact is to be repudiated, the resulting alter-' ation in economic relationships can no longer be reflected by · the same political institutions-any more than reforms in those same institutions could ever of themselves have effected fundamental economic changes. When Marx says, therefore, that the bourgeois state apparatus cannot simply be taken over by the working class for its own purpose, that the whole bureaucratic military machine of government must be smashed, this is not a case of wanton destructiveness. It is an earnest that real social change is intended and not yet an­ other attempt to fob off an oppressed class with the appear- \ ance of improvement in their conditions. Revolutionary intent is Marxism's proof of good faith, the evidence that it means what it says; thus it is the real test of Marxist morality. Since the proletariat is the class of those who l ive by the sale of their labor-power and since the class standing over against them are those who through their relationship to the means of production are in a position to traffic in laborpower, the ending of exploitation involves the elimination of the class of exploiters by cutting off its roots in property ownership. But in the process of eliminating this class the proletariat also eliminates itself as a class. A society in which one class has incorporated or allied itself with the majority who are willing to cooperate and has neutralized the minor­ ity who are not, is, in fact, on the way to becoming a classless society.29 Carrying through the conflict engendered by the polarization of society into exploiters and exploited to its logical conclusion in victory for the far more numerous party thus involves using the class struggle itself to put an end to classes-a cure for society's ills by a kind of social home­ opathy.

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The prole tariat as the agent of social change

Economic exploitation gives the proletariat its incentive to revo lt against existing conditions; a state of crisis in those conditions provides the occasion; and the consciousness that some other ordering of society is possible lends direction to the revolutionary impulse. But in addition to these general circumstances presupposed by political action to alter the basic productive relationships, there are certain conclusions to be drawn from our earlier analysis which help us to under­ stand how the proletariat is adapted to fulfil its revolutionary role. As we have seen, Marxism is not without its moral in­ dignation at the plight of oppressed and exploited peoples; but unless there are also sound objective reasons for believing that the remedy for their ills lies in their own hands, this sympathy will degenerate into futile pity. The proletariat as a class is forced by its very conditions of existence to maintain a realistic attitude toward life. The division in commodity-producing societies between work done and satisfactions available, for a class which does no work or performs only intellectual tasks, can take the form of an illusion that ideas command the existence of things, that desires create the substance of their own fulfilment. The pro­ letariat can have no such illusion: to them useful articles are always the result of specific labor and desires are only satisfied to the extent that labor-power has been sold. This idealistic illusion of a non-productive class can be expressed in eco­ nomic terms as the distorted view that money, from being simply a measure of the equivalence of values as created by a common human labor, appears actually to have called that labor into being. An abstraction thus seems to be the real source of all value. Carried to extremes such a distorted vis ion tends to incapacitate a ruling class and its spokesmen for dealing with real social issues at all. Money and the ab-

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stract speculation which is its ideological reflection, instead of being recognized as the by-products of a system of commodity exchange, are thought of as its mainstays, and, as such, are invoked in defense of the system. Difficulties arising from contradictions in the material basis of society can either be 'bought off' or 'thought' out of existence. The proletariat can never really forget the connection between utility and value, no matter how obscured it may have become behind the movement of commodities. Because they themselves have largely assumed the qualities of a com­ modity by having to sell their labor-power in the market, they preserve within their own nature, however uncon­ sciously, that essential relatedness . of the amount of work done and the worth of things made. For them duty and pleasure, reason and emotions are never driven so far apart as is the case with members of the class standing over against them. In daily working contact with their physical environ­ ment they cannot but be aware through their own muscles and their own brains of the true origin of all our values and the ultimate source of all our knowledge. There is nothing sentimental in Marxism's recognizing this characteristic of the working class: it is theirs by virtue of the part they play in the productive process. The proletariat's revolutionary impulse is simply the recognition on the part of proletarians of this characteristic in themselves. It is their realization that they contain within themselves all ·the necessary constituents of a cooperative society rich in material goods and free from exploitation. It is their understanding that while they can do perfectly well without the class above them, the ruling class is not self-sustaining and if it were not propped up by the pro­ letariat would collapse completely. This coming to awareness of its own potential for effect­ ing fundamental changes in society, this growth of a genuine proletarian class consciousness marks the difference between

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a class-in-itself and a class-for-itself. Productive relationships have created a proletariat whether it fully recognizes itself as such or not. In fact, the whole force of the propaganda machine controlled by the ruling class is directed toward pre­ venting this self-recognition, since only when the proletariat has become a class-for-itself is it revolutionary. As long as it labors under a false consciousness, as long as its actions and thinking are confused by sharing an ideology that really be­ longs to another class, it is effectively disarmed in the con­ tinuing class struggle. Even when it does resort to political action, it is likely to make the mistake of fighting according to the enemy's rules, of trying to use in advancing its own ends the very institutions designed to keep it in suppression. This sharing of another class's ideology reflects, of course, some degree of sharing in the surplus product at the ruling class's disposal. While it is true that the ruling class only makes concessions when forced to do so by the growing militancy of the working class as a whole, it carefully con­ trives to accede to these demands in a way that divides the proletariat and thus blunts the edge of that very militancy. It endeavors by means of such concessions as are wrested from it to set skilled worker against unskilled, clerk against bench­ hand, male operator against female, even young against old; nor does it scruple to play up for this purpose such irrelevant distinctions as racial or religious differences. Most success­ fully it attempts to set all workers in the homeland of a capi­ talist empire against the workers in its colonial territories, thus associating the metropolitan proletariat in an imperi­ alist ideology.30 Critics of Marxism have frequently argued that its analy­ sis in terms of class conflict must be wrong or the conditions of the working class would have deteriorated into absolute impoverishment. Undoubtedly large sections of the prole­ tariat in Western Europe and the United States have im-

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proved their standard of living, though the possibility of dying in either a colonial or a more general war resulting from aggressive capitalist policies must be set against the advantages of owning washing machines or automobiles bought on credit. But then Marx never held the view that the tendency of the ruling class to force down wages and conditions by such means as creating a reserve army of unemployed or importing cheap labor could not, in this place or that, be checked by other tendencies-any more than he ever sub­ scribed to the view that the 'iron law of wages' determined the value of labor-power. This value depends on the level of economic development in a particular country, in terms of the cost both of what is acceptable as a basic standard of life and of what training and education are required to produce a worker of average skill for that time and place. But even more important than these qualifications is the fact that the model of capitalism described by Marx in his greatest work must, especially in its final imperialist phase, be applied not to individual countries but to whole economic empires and, increasingly, as the challenge from the socialist bloc grows, to the entire capitalist world. The same critics who gleefully point out that the standard of living of the proletariat in Britain or the United States has actually improved under capitalism profess to be amazed that in the capitalist world as a whole rich countries keep getting richer and poor countries keep getting poorer.81 The older capitalist countries have not eliminated absolute poverty: they have exported it. But all these tactics by which the ruling class divides the proletariat do not really resolve the basic contradictions of capitalism which express themselves in class struggle; they merely alter its forms and postpone the day when that strug­ gle ends in a revolutionary solution. Concessions to one sec­ tion of the proletariat involve an intensified exploitation of some other section. When that other section protests with

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sufficient vigor at these conditions, the ruling class is forced to victimize yet a third section or, if that is impossible, to re­ consider concessions previously made. But any withdrawal of concessions already granted immediately removes the blind­ fold of false consciousness from that section's eyes, whereupon it resumes its membership in a class-for-itself, the proletariat as aware of its revolutionary vocation. Capitalism could only sustain itself indefinitely by conceding to all sections of the proletariat the entire sum of surplus value taken from them­ in which case, of course, the profit motive having been aban­ doned, it would have ceased to be capitalism. As a system capitalism can never finally escape the contradiction of hav­ ing to depend, either for extending its sway or for defending what it has, on those who are not themselves capitalists. Revolutionary transformation and the pro b lem of ends and means

The transition from class-divided to classless society re­ quires a radical change in the relations of production which destroys the basis in property rights of an exploiting class. But it might be suggested that the same transformation of society could be achieved without struggle by persuading the ruling class on moral grounds that it ought to renounce its exorbitant claims. And yet the dominant group in capitalist soc iety simply is the class of those who live and profit by surplus value. The very existence of such a class precludes, by the definition of its being, susceptibility to such persuasion. Individuals may be so persuaded, but their number is limited by the amount of genuine individualism to be found in such a class whose members are conditioned by all the influences of their position in life throughout their personal develop­ �ent. If individuals are persuaded that there is no ethical Justification for the ruling class, they become dissociated from

1 60

MARXISM AND MORAL CONCEPTS

that class, again by definition-not to stand above the class struggle, but to change their allegiance in it. There is no way to opt out of such struggles, for a refusal to engage is, in fact, a declaration in favor of whatever social force presently en­ joys power. History affords us no example of a privileged minority, as a distinct class, voluntarily resigning its special position and sharing its worldly goods with other members of society, simply because belonging to such a class carries with it the ideological conviction of the 'rightness' of that privileged position. But even if it were conceivable, it would not satisfy the Marxist conditions for a properly-based system of moral­ ity. Charity on the widest scale might mitigate some of the more obvious forms of distress resulting from class exploita­ tion, but it would not fundamentally alter the relationship between dominant and dependent classes. Being able to give away goods is itself an expression of a special position in society and to that extent a privilege, however rarely it might be exercised. On the other hand, to be grateful for gifts of what they have made themselves would, from the point of view of the proletariat, merely add humiliation to injustice. A revolution in economic relationships which establishes an entirely new social foundation is not simply a means to an end: it has intrinsic value as the assertion, through united action by the vast majority, of a common human dignity. The struggle required to end exploitation is not a necessary evil but an eloquent expression of all that is best in the con­ sciously achieved solidarity of exploited peoples everywhere. And just as material values are measured by the labor incor­ porated in them, so moral values can only be estimated in terms of the amount of human effort involved in their realiza­ tion. A revolution looks very different depending on the class perspective from which it is viewed. The same social move-

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ment which will positively substantiate the full democratic rights of the working class as a whole appears to the ruling class as the threat of proletarian dictatorship. But then the existing social order which the spokesmen of the ruling class describe as 'democratic' is itself, from the point of view of class-conscious workers, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie-as any challenge to the bourgeois state will quickly demon­ strate. Arguments about democracy in the abstract are quite irrelevant to class-divided society; democratic institutions cannot accommodate mutually opposed interests and so the important question is democracy for what section of a split community. One class's 'open society' is another class's 'to­ talitarian state'. This difference in perspective must also be considered in any discussion of the use of force in the transi­ tion from one form of society to another. The explicit force required to establish a new social order is precisely the im­ plicit force maintaining things as they are-a potential force which reveals itself openly at any real hint of change. If a man is sitting on another man's chest, their relationship may ap­ pear to be non-violent-until the man on the bottom tries to get up. Peaceful transition to socialism is possible under ex­ actly the same conditions as peaceful maintenance of capi­ talism-when the force at the disposal of those who wish to change the existing order or of those who wish to preserve it is so preponderantly great that their class opponents cannot challenge it. Marxists are often criticized for holding the view that the end justifies the means, even to the extent of counte­ nancing the use of violence. But since the violence of revolu­ tionary change is only the other face of the violence inherent in the existing situation and since this latter form of violence goes uncriticized, one must assume that it is not really Marx­ ism's means which are being objected to but its end-the establishment of a classless society. After all, what can justify

162

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any means except the end? And yet because the end also conditions the means of attaining it, Marxism would never argue that all means whatsoever may be employed. The very aim of uniting the international working class to put an end to exploitation logically rules out, even for short-term advan­ tages in this place or that, any appeal to particularist or divi­ sive interests like racism or chauvinism, any incitement to action not based on the fundamental equality of all men everywhere. The morality of means must be considered in terms of a normative judgement about ends; and it will be found that the effort to preserve a system incorporating ob­ vious injustices and the effort to reorganize society on a more equitable basis, color through and through the respective means employed to achieve one end or the other. Violence need not necessarily take the form of forcible detention or corporal punishment or mass killings, though no imperialism has ever been able to dispense for long with such means. Millions of people living at a bare subsistence level are also the victims of violence, even if no one has so much as lifted a hand against them. But crimes of violence of this sort tend to be overlooked by pacifists who save their indignation for the more obvious acts of brutality and the retaliation such acts provoke. Over-scrupulosity about means can often be an excuse for doing nothing at all or, worse, for conniving at present injustices which do not affect one closely or which may, perhaps, be to one's advantage. Even so appar­ ently beneficent a desire as the longing for peace cannot afford to be uncritical of its motives and means. Peace move­ ments which fail to specify the source of aggression in the contradictions of capitalism or which would put a halt to further social disruption at a stage when so many people live under conditions of intolerable economic oppression are, in fact, serving the interest of an exploiting class.32 It must also be remembered that the force which Marx-

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163

ism is prepared to sanction in order to liberate people from economic bondage and establish the basic conditions for truly moral relationships is not directed at individuals but at a class and the institutions which support its dominating posi­ tion. Those who have something to lose in a better ordering of society and would like to make any move for change seem as bad as possible, interpret the 'liquidation' of the exploiting class as the physical suppression of its individual members, thiis involving so much suffering that civilized people could not countenance it. But the elimination of a class implies no such thing: the class of criminally negligent motorists, for example, can be liquidated without a single person's being subjected to violence-unless, of course, those motorists insist on defending by force their 'right' to continue to drive just as they please.83 Reducing politics to the question of individual rights is a way of evading real political issues, just as stressing the individual act avoids any consideration of the real prob­ lems of morality. As long as the ruling class can limit political and moral criticism to the rights and duties of the individual they have effectively removed their interested actions as a class from the realm of debate. We have already seen how the full development of commodity production under capitalism, by substituting money relations for personal ones and by treating the mem­ bers of a community as units competing with each other in the market for jobs and goods, has the effect of atomizing society and isolating the individual. This alienated individ­ ual34 can be generalized as the subject of political study and his abstract rights can be enshrined in the institutions of bourgeois society-as the right to vote or the right to own property, the right to pursue his own happiness or the right to think as he chooses. But these abstract rights do not in themselves enable anyone to publish dissident views nor obtain remunerative work nor so much as buy a single loaf of

164

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bread; and they do not limit in any way the privileges actu­ ally exercised by those who possess the means for turning such rights into material benefits. Moreover, the capitalist class is not threatened by the isolated individual which capi­ talist society tends to produce, particularly in the middle ranks of those who, ideologically dissociated from the work­ ing class though not in control of the means of production, have an ambiguous social role. What the ruling capitalist class has to fear is mass action on the part of the proletariat; and any institutions which appear to give that proletariat freedom to express its political will while restricting that expression to isolated acts by discrete individuals are useful in counteracting the trend toward proletarian unity implicit in the relations of production. Casting a vote in secret or writing letters of protest to some elected representative or to the daily papers are peculiarly bourgeois, individualistic forms of political expression and if the political activity of the proletariat could be confined to these forms, not only would mass action never develop but also such aspirations as were expressed would come out as purely bourgeois de­ mands.35 At a time when increasing class opposition and growing militancy on the part of workers were leading to a revolutionary situation nothing would be more likely to enable the ruling class to regain control than to persuade people to await the outcome of a general election. That these political institutions are not intended to express the prole­ tarian will is demonstrated by the fact that, in any circum­ stances where it seems possible for the proletariat to make use of such institutions for its own ends, they are hastily abolished-usually on the grounds that democracy is in danger! In non-revolutionary situations the proletariat must do what it can to advance its aims within the existing institu­ tional framework but always with the knowledge that the

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apparatus of a static bourgeois state can never be made the vehicle for a transition to socialism. It is not destructiveness for its own sake but a realization that revolutionary ends require revolutionary means which impels the proletariat to smash the political machinery of class-divided society in the move to establish a new order. It may be asked, then, what institutions will replace those that have been discarded. Now it has often been noted that Marx provides no detailed blue­ print of the political institutions which would characterize a socialist society. Since it is his thesis that such institutions are determined by material conditions, it would be illogical to predict the precise form they will take when those conditions have been altered. Nor does Lenin, in speaking of communist morality, attempt to describe the spec'ific nature of the ethical system which will express human relationships in the classless society of the future: he prescribes instead the course which must be followed if the communist base of that system is to be established. This does not mean that Marxism has no idea, no conception of what it is possible for society to become once exploitation has been abolished.36 It does mean that Marxism by its own reasoning cannot provide in advance a moral strait-jacket for the society of the future, nor even expect to be able to apply the principles of socialist morality in the early stages of constructing the very foundations on which such a morality must eventually rest. Conclusion

In class-divided society where the opposition of different sections of the community is reflected in the existence of a state and all the institutional paraphernalia of class rule, effective morality must inevitably take a political form. In classless society, however, politics takes a moral form. This is what is meant by the "withering away of the state"-that

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whereas, before, the individual could only participate in the life of the community as a member of some class, "in the community of revolutionary proletarians, who establish their control over the conditions of existence of themselves and the other members of society, the individuals participate as indi­ viduals."37 This disappearance of the state as a reflection of class conflict represents the disappearance of the distinction between the "personal and the class individual"; j ust as the ending of the alien constraint of the division of labor through conscious control of the productive forces ends the distinction between the personal life of the individual and his life as it is determined by the accidental nature of some circumscribed task. Marxism is not utopian. It does not portray · in glowing colors some New Jerusalem into which people may wish themselves without the effort of constructing on sound prin­ ciples the necessary approaches. What Marxism says is that the free development and activity of individuals, the possi­ bility of humanizing production and laying the foundation of truly moral personal relationships, requires them "to bring under their own conscious control the material conditions of life, conditions which have previously been abandoned to chance and which have thus acquired an independent exist­ ence over against individuals."38 Marxism is not Messianic. It does not hold out the hope that if men wait patiently enough society will one day become just and free. What Marxism shows is the actual mechanics of social change which must be understood and utilized if men are to free them­ selves. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical neces­ sity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Free-

ALIENA TION AND POLITICAL CHANGE

1 67

dom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associ­ ated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of neces­ sity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, w.hich, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.39

Marxism is thus a program of action for laying the eco­ nomic foundation for a society in which individuals are freest to develop their full potential in amiable association with others-a society in which people's relationships, based on complete equality, naturally express themselves in the most moral terms. Such a community from which all exploitation of man by man has been eliminated would be the practical realization of the Kantian idealistic conception of a Kingdom of Ends in which men are not treated by each other as means. A communistic society is not, however, to be thought of as a final stage of human development in which all contradictions are resolved and from which, therefore, no further advance is possible. Marx describes it not as the end but the beginning of history, true history made by men consciously in cooperative pursuit of their aims; and everything leading up to it, the various forms of class-divided society with their strife and blindness and inhumanity, must be regarded from this per­ spective as a prehistoric period.

Notes

Notes to Chapter I

Complete publishing information on all works cited in these notes can be found in the alphabetical List of Works Cited, pages 201-204.

1 . The difficulty of avoiding the naturalistic fallacy may be shown by the following quotation from David Hume, in spite of his having actually formulated the principle, no "ought" from an "is": "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the pas­ sions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." (A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 4 15.) Another classic example is provided by Jeremy Bent­ ham's well-known statement: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to de­ termine what we shall do." 2. In this brief account of the intuitionist point of view G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica was the reference most in mind. However much the same line of argument is employed by W. David Ross who takes 'right' as his irreducible ethical term and by A. C. Ewing who ascribes the same characteristic undefinability to 'fittingness'. More recently, in Secon d Thoughts in Moral Philoso­ phy, Ewing has reconsidered his view that value judgements are like descriptive propositions in being true or false but refer to non-natural qualities cognized in a special way. He would still insist that the 'ought' character of ethical statements cannot be explained in non-ethical terms. But the role of intuition has been modified to a recognition that 171

1 72

NO TES TO PA GES 13-18 we can know what is a good reason for ari ethical judgement without having to give another reason why it is good; and the non-natural element has been re-defined as a general realiza­ tion that ethics has a special subject matter which cannot be resolved into statements of feelings or statistics of how people do behave in a particular society.

3. The question Kant asks in the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, "Why ought I to do what is right?" is rephrased by Stephen Toulmin in The Place of Reason in Ethics as "Why is it right for me to do what I ought?" Toulmin tries to show that while good reasons offered for an act cannot amount to a demonstration that the act is right, nonetheless they do provide a _ logical means of passing from ethically neutral facts to supporting ethical judge­ ments. It is hard to see, however, that he really succeeds in escaping from the dilemma either of committing the naturalistic fallacy by deriving ethical judgements from purely factual premises or of failing to note that the good reasons he adduces are themselves evaluative and not really neutral at all. 4. This classification of propositions has a certain convenience; but it cannot be regarded as final. While classification itself depends on a disjunctive, Aristotelian-type logic, growth and change are better comprehended through a dialectical order­ ing of thought. If one logical system is more suitable than another, depending on whether we are pigeon-holing a stat­ ically-conceived reality or groping with the complexities of process, then the very laws of thought cannot be said to be completely without content but must be recognized as in some degree synthetic. Similarly, if one geometry out of many possibilities is most useful for a specific purpose, then geom­ etry is not purely analytical. 5. Language, Truth and Logic, Chapter VI.

NO TES TO PAGES 19-33

17 3

6. A s for example Everett W. Hall: "Perhaps in some sense it is possible just to have facts, quite independently of any true sentences asserting them, and indeed quite independently of language. I am inclined to think however, that this is not so. A world in which there are facts is a world already categori­ cally structured, a world already shaped up in the language (however vague) of some philosophical point of view." What is Value?, p. 227. 7. See for example R. M. Hare: "It is now time to inquire into the reasons for the logical features of 'good' . . . and to ask why it is that it has this peculiar combination of evaluative and descriptive meaning. The reason will be found in the purposes for which it, like other value-words, is used in our discourse." The Language of Morals, p. 1 27. 8. This analysis of the commodity to account for economic value is taken from Chapter One of the first volume of Capital, pp. 35-83. 9. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 74. 10. Indebtedness for certain of the ideas in this explanation must be expressed to Alfred Sohn-Rethel whose unpublished work on the deduction of categories of thought from an analysis of commodity-exchange has been of considerable help. 1 1 . As Marx says: "If you proceed from production, you neces­ sarily concern yourself with the real conditions of production and the productive activity of men. But if you proceed from consumption . . . you can afford to ignore the real living con­ ditions and the activity of men.'' The German ldeology, p. 1 64. 1 2. Capital, Vol. I, p. 1 7 1 .

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174

1 3 . Objections to the labor theory of value often take the form of setting forth the difficulties of computing labor-time as

an exact unit of measurement. This involves such problems as distinguishing between productive and unproductive or skilled and unskilled labor; it requires a consideration of the difference between hours actually spent on a job and socially necessary labor time; and it calls for separating labor ex­ pended over a given period from the value given up by capital goods in which labor has been embodied in the past. (See Joan Robinson's

Economic Philosophy,

pp. 41-44.) But

these difficulties arise in connection with misapplying the theory to try to determine the price of a specific article instead of using it to provide an explanation of the ap­ proximate price-relationships over a whole range of goods. These relationships may 'fluctuate with changes in produc­ tivity; but they can only be accounted for in any given period by the labor theory of value operating with the social norms of productive work relevant to that time. 14. For a full discussion of this issue see Chapter I, "The Re­ quirements of a Theory of Value," of Maurice Dobb's

Politi­

cal Economy and Capitalism. 15.

The Value judgement,

University of Edinburgh Press, 1 955.

16. "The first step in the process of knowledge is contact with the things of the external world; this belongs to the stage of perception. The second step is a synthesis of the data of perception by making a rearrangement or a reconstruction; this belongs to the stage of conception, judgement and infer­ ence . . . . But the process of knowledge does not end here . . . . The third step is the practical application of theoretic conclusions.

Knowledge starts with practice, reaches

the

theoretical plane via practice, and then has to return to practice. " Mao Tse-tung, "On Practice," Vol.

I,

Selected Works,

pp. 290-293.

Lenin makes the same point that idealism is one phase

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175

of the process of knowledge and only becomes absurd as a movement of thought out of this context. "Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated development of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosized." Collected Works, Vol. XXXVIII, p. 363. 17. "Critique of the Gotha Programme," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 23. The idea of labor as 'disutility', something painful and unpleasant by its very nature, partly reflects the actual con­ ditions of work where labor is exploited and partly the attitude toward manual effort of an intelligentsia.

Notes to Chapter I I

I. Second Treatise of Civil Government, p. 15. 2. "Division of labour and private property are . . . identical

expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with refer­ ence to activity as is affirmed in the ot,her with reference to the product of activity." The German Ideology, p. 22 .. 3. Capital, Vol. I, p. 79. 4. In much the same way as the wages paid to workers can be justified as the result of 'impersonal' considerations like supply and demand in the labor market, the consistent ex­ ploitation of primary producing countries by highly indus­ trialized capitalist states which dominate world markets can be made to appear as a 'natural' movement in commodity prices without any evident human intervention. 5. Capital, Vol. I, p. 71 3 . 6. Some sociologists treat class as a subjective phenomenon: people can be categorized according to the social role they think they play. Others use objective criteria; but these are based on consumption rather than production: class is de­ termined by status symbols like possessing a car or having a house in a certain neighbourhood. For Marx, class is an objective social fact based on the productive process and is to be defined ultimately in terms of people's relationship to the 176

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177

means of production. It is class in this sense which will help us to understand ethical questions. 7 . The Wealth of Nations, p. 13.

8. W. David Ross, Foundations of Ethics. The idea of a 'free' contract between employer and employee as the justification of economic relationships may be. compared with the social contract theory which is its political counterpart. Of course this general attitude toward contractual agreements does not leave other social relation­ ships, like marriage, unaffected. 9. The German Ideology, as quoted in Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, by T. B. Botto­ more and Maximilien Rubel, p. 78. Marx goes on to say that "the division of labour . . . manifests itself also in the ruling class, as a [further] division of mental and material labour, so that within this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active con­ ceptualizing ideologists, who make it their chief source of live­ lihood to develop and perfect the illusions of the class about itself), while the others have a more passive and receptive attitude to these ideas and illusions, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up ideas and illusions about themselves. This cleavage within the ruling class may even develop into a certain op­ position and hostility between the two parts, but in the event of a practical collision in which the class itself is endangered, it disappears of its own accord and with it also the illusion that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class." This ex­ plains how it is that there .can be such apparent enmity be­ tween industrialists and political leaders with the same class interests; and also why such conflicts can never have any sig­ nificant consequences.

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178

10. The close connection between money as an abstract symbol

of value and the capacity of men to think abstractly is shown by the historical coincidence in Greece, India and China of the beginnings of a circulating currency and the first stirrings of systematic philosophical thought. These early reflections on the nature of the world even take a similar course of seek­ ing a substance which can be the source of all na�ural objects (on the analogy of money which can manifest itself in the form of all man-made objects) and then, at a later stage, turn­ ing away from such materialist speculation to become con­ cerned with the relations of men in society-this new inter­ est being stimulated by the social effects of the disruption of old tribal forms of organization by class distinctions. 1 1 . The view that only economic considerations in the narrow­ est sense determine our philosophical ideas would rule out any possibility that those ideas, once abstracted from material conditions, could react on the circumstances which gave rise to them. This economism is a form of mechanical materialism and must not be confused with dialectical materialism. Cf. F. H. Bradley's refutation of mechanical materialism in which he argues that if a series of mental states are as­ sumed simply to mirror a series of events causally related, each particular mental state may be considered passive in respect to the event of which it is the image but nonetheless must be admitted to be active in respect to a successive event, since it is one element in its total cause. A ppearance and Reality, p. 327. This argument, as- we shall see in the next chapter, does not raise any problems for Marxism. 12. "The Prehistoric Aegean," Studies in A ncient Greek Society, pp. 357-358. 1 3. Politics, p. 1 9. 14. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the R ise of Capitalism, p. 53.

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1 5. In spite of the secularization of trading practices as the Church surrendered its right to legislate morally for the market place, religion still had a social function to perform. In class-divided societies some way has to be found of pre­ serving the idea of an integrated social life to counter the centrifugal tendencies of directly-opposed interests. Religion does not seek to put an end to these class divisions but to make some sort of communal life possible in spite of the facts qf economic exploitation. By recalling the past when tribal communities were not yet divided into rulers and ruled and by supposing that such brotherhood can exist ideally in the present, even though the actual material conditions militate against it, or by projecting this conception of fraternal harmony into a life after death, religion offers hope to the dis­ possessed while leaving everything as it is. From the point of view of the ruling class, religion serves to distract the masses from active steps to improve their lot, to inculcate the duties which subservient orders are expected to obey and to provide a means whereby they themselves can enjoy easy consciences without surrendering any privileges. From the point of view of the ruled, religion is a source of consolation prior to the time when political struggle to relieve their distress is feasible. Marx likens it to flowers entwined in the chains of the toiling masses which hide their bonds from sight. It is no help to pluck away the flowers; the chains must be broken. "The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions." (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right) Religion, then, provides a spurious reconciliation of divided societies whereby Dives and Lazarus can kneel down together in the same commun­ ion, the one content in his earthly possessions, the other anticipating a reversal of fortunes in a hypothetical life to come. It is possible for religion to perform this function in divided societies because man himself, as we have shown in

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analyzing commodity production, is divided. The dualism of commodities as useful and valuable reflects and is re­ flected by the dualistic nature of those who make them­ as having both a physical and a non-natural character. Men work to satisfy their material needs but the value of their work is incorporated in things that do not belong to them. Value thus appears to them as something inha�iting a dif­ ferent world from this one of sweat and toil, something only to be enjoyed in another life than this. Some additional effort on the moral plane seems required to possess what they them­ selves have made. This aspiration growing out of the nega­ tion of physical satisfactions takes a spiritual form; and it is to this aspect of man, the producer whose products slip through his hands to appear on the market as abstract values usually beyond his means, that religion speaks. 1 6. This brief history of the word 'usury' shows how a reprehen­ sible practice can become perfectly acceptable. Of course the opposite process also occurs and a practice once defended can fall into general disrepute-given the necessary alteration in the material basis of society. "If the moral consciousness of the mass declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it has done in the case of slavery or serf labour, that is a proof that the fact itself has been outlived, that other economic facts have made their appearance, owing to which the former has become unbearable and untenable." Frederick Engels, Preface to The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 1 3. 17 . The division of society into classes leads to a development of the arts which is comparable to the way our concepts have developed: they become relatively detached from the produc­ tive process of which they were originally an indistinguish­ able part. In the same manner that the cries and commands of associated labor become an articulate language and the terms of language, abstracted from an immediate reference, become the vehicle of speculative thought, so a dance simulat­ ing the movements of the hunt-a dance which, by training

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181

hand and eye and by magically trying t o insure plentiful game, was bound up with productive activity-becomes a separate art-form enjoyed in its own right. But the social distinction which permits this development can also lead to so deep a division that thinking becomes hopelessly idealistic and art becomes meaninglessly abstract. 18.

Laws, p. 235.

19. The Republic, p. 293. 20. The Republic, p. 287. 2 1 . The Republic, p. 3 16. 22. The flowering of idealistic system-building in nineteenth century Germany was partly the ideological reflex of a thwarted bourgeoisie who were cheated by the absence of any bourgeois revolution of playing their full role in the de­ velopment of capitalism. The same fact, of course, explains why liberal institutions have never really taken root in Germany. 23. The Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 222-223. 24. Politics, p. 15. 25. Capital, Vol. I, pp. 59-60. 26. The Nicomachean Ethics, p. 3 6. 27. Politics, p. 37. 28. "Critique of the Gotha Programme," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 23. 29. Even so obviously an ethic of consolation for the oppressed

182

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as original Christianity, through historical irony, could be­ come an ideological instrument of class rule. 30. Marx, "Preface to the Critique of Political Economy," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 329. 3 1 . Marx, "Preface to the Critique of Political Econo�y," p. 329. 32. It has been comfortably assumed by the apologists for capital­

ism that Keynesian techniques provide a means for securing stability. If the state embarks on massive investment in public works at appropriate times, slumps can be avoided and full employment can be maintained. In application, state investment has largely taken the form of arms expenditure and surpluses have been liquidated in the prosecution of imperialist wars-in Korea, Malaya, Kenya, Algeria and Angola, to mention only a few. Moreover, these Keynesian techniques have not prevented the major capitalist country, once the capital reconstruction necessitated by the Second World War was completed, from accepting ever higher levels of unemployment as socially tolerable. It can be argued that the state, as the political representation of capitalist interests, could have guaranteed the right to work, could have devoted surpluses to useful ends both at home and abroad-which is only to say that if capitalism were some­ thing other than what it actually is there would be no need to change it. 33. Marx's understanding of the dynamics of society has often been questioned on the grounds that the predicted socialist revolution has not occurred in the older industrialized coun­ tries. In fact of course it is in the process of doing so. The national liberation movements are the political forms as­ sumed by a revolt of the overseas proletariat in these eco­ nomic empires. Capitalism is closely associated with the rise of the nation state; but it has never confined its activities within national boundaries and its fate is not to be foreseen

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183

as a necessary sequence of events taking place within each separate country. 34. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Youth Leagues," Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 667 and following. 35. Lenin has pointed out that in the bourgeois revolution the new economic organization had gradually matured in the womb of feudalism while the socialist revolution is faced with the problem of creating all its institutions on an en­ tirely different foundation. "Report on War and Peace," Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 293. This suggests both that ideas play a more dynamic role in this most decisive of all social transformations and that the real nature of the class interests involved reveal them­ selves more clearly than in past transitions. 36. "Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously, in return for which the opposition of the non-ruling class against the new ruling class develops all the more sharply and pro­ foundly. Both these things determine the fact that the strug­ gle to be waged against the new ruling class, in its turn, aims at a more decided and radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could all the previous classes which sought to rule. "This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule of certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as society ceases at last to be organized in the form of class rule, that is to say as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest as a general inter­ est or 'the general interest' as ruling." The German Ideology, p. 4 1 .

Notes to Chapter I I I

I.

"Theses on Feuerbach," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 367.

2. "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 225. 3. This practical combination of existent thing with the idea of its non-existence in order to appreciate it properly may be compared with the idealistic synthesis between Being and Non-being which sets the Hegelian dialectic in motion. 4. H. A. Prichard, as quoted by W. David Ross, Foundations of Ethics, p. 155. 5. See, for example, W. David Ross, Foundations of Ethics, pp. 1 59-1 60. 6. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 47. 7. Existentialist writers have made a good deal of this variance; and, since our amour propre is threatened by opinions others base on our naked acts, they have gone so far as to call other people our personal hell. However, this conclusion is prob­ ably derived as much from the conditions of life in capitalist society where all men are in competition with each other as from the analytical problems of moral judgement. 8. See A. J. Ayer, The Prob lem of Knowledge, p. 215. Of course 1 84

NO TES TO PA GES 106-120

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an extreme analytical approach to philosophy is itself an ideological reflection of the atomization of society under capitalism. 9. "What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of 'society' as an abstraction vis-a-vis the individual. The in­ dividual is the social being." Marx, Economic and Philo­ sophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 104. Man's very senses only become human to the extent that their objects have become social, human objects-objects emanating from man for man. "The senses and enjoyments of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct associa­ tion with others has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life." Ibid., p. 107. 10. Marx, The Holy Family, p. 125. 1 1 . According to Karl A. Wittfogel the West has always been 'free', while from the time of ancient hydraulic societies like Egypt or China down to the modem Soviet Union, the East has always been totalitarian. No change of any significance has ever taken place in either hemisphere; and the Cold War ought to be dated from about the close of the New Stone Agel Oriental Despotism, Yale University Press, 1 956. 12. See, for example, Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism. 1 3. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, p. 13. 1 4. "Preface to the First German Edition of Capital," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 409. 15. Frederick Engels, "Feuerbach and the End of Classical Ger­ man Philosophy," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 336.

1 86,

NO TES TO PA GES 123-125

1 6. K. Kautsky in his book, Ethics and the Materialist Concep­ tion of History, chides Marx for letting "the influence of the moral ideal break through his scientific research" since "science stands above ethics and its results are just as little moral or immoral as necessity is moral or immoral." For Kautsky the only part ethics has to play is in providing the proletariat with the morale for carrying out econom}c changes on the basis of a purely scientific analysis. But this attitude toward morality leads to mere opportunism; and the absolute distinction between scientific and ethical man which Kautsky maintained was part of his intellectual conversion to the revisionism of supposing that social change would come about automatically without the need for revolutionary struggle. 17. Engels, Letter to J. Bloch, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 443. 18. Lenin, "What Is to Be Done?" Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 163. 1 9. Mao Tse-tung, On Contradiction, pp. 45-47. 20. Isaiah Berlin, in a series of lectures on Historical Inevitability delivered in 1953, seems to think that in demolishing a de­ terminist, mechanistic interpretation of history he has finally polished off Marx, to say nothing of Hegel, Condorcet, Spengler and others. Certainly as far as Marxism is concerned, he never comes to grips with its real substance at all. 2 1 . Just as Marx describes history as, of itself, doing nothing, possessing no wealth or power, waging no battles and not "using man as a means for its own particular aims," so Ver­ non Venable writes of the Marxist dialectic: "The dialectic creates nothing, brings about nothing, is nothing in fact. Not in itself an entity, but merely the formal structure of material processes whose particular content, direction and tempo can be determined only by empirical examination

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and not by deduction from dialectical categories; the dialectic no more brings about or ends capitalism . . . than it brings about water when ice is melted and vapour when it is boiled." The process is dialectical but the description is not the cause. Human Nature: the Marxian View, p. 173. 22. This account of the realm of necessity and of freedom as a distinction between past and future may be compared with distinguishing them as belonging in one case to the world of nature described by the physical sciences and in the other to the world of men described by the social sciences. The two accounts are not unrelated since, as a result of certain regularities in the natural order, the future is the past in a way that is not equally true of social organization in which the human consciousness, differentiating past and future in terms of the scope for choice, has a larger role to play. 23. Marx, The German Ideology, p. 7 . 24. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 78.

Notes to Chapter I V

I.

Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 1 56.

2. Ibid., p. 124. 3. This communism must not be based on general envy in which avarice re-establishes itself in another form constitut­ ing the essence of competition. Marx calls the kind of levelling down which proceeds from such envy "crude communism". 4. Ibid., pp. 69-70. Marx also points out that it is not only the produced object that is alienated from the worker but his very activity of production itself. "Finally the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, 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." The German Ideology, p. 22. 5. Ibid., p. 73. 6. Ibid., p. 1 64. 7. Ibid., p. 1 14. 8. Ibid., p. 140. This is another and more cogent way of putting 1 88

NO TES TO PA GES 138-146

1 89

Kant's problem of the difference between a real and an imagined hundred thalers. 9. Ibid., p. 1 37. 10. Ibid., pp. 1 16-1 19. 1 1 . Roger Garaudy, Humanisme Marxiste, p. 68. 1 2. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 123. 1 3. Ibid., pp. 109-1 1 0. 14. Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Phi­ losophy, T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, p. 45. 15. Werner Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge, p. 142. 16. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1 844, p. 82. 17. "Manifesto of the Communist Party," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 55. 18. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 72. 19. Ibid., p. 72. 20. Ibid., p. 82. 2 1 . There has been a good deal of discussion in the Soviet Union about the role of commodity exchange and money relation­ ships in the transition from socialism to full communism. Stalin in his Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR points out certain limitations on the law of value as a regulator under socialism of the proportions of labor dis­ tributed among various branches of production. Otherwise "it would be incomprehensible why our light industries,

I 9Q

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which are the most profitable, are not being developed to the utmost, and why preference is given to our heavy in­ dustries, which are often less profitable." And certainly under communism "the amount of labour expended on the pro­ duction of goods will be measured not in a roundabout way, not through value and its forms, as is the case under com­ modity production, but directly and immediately-by the amount of time . . . expended on the production of goods. As to the distribution of labour, its distribution among the branches of production will be regulated . . . by the growth of society's demand for goods . . . . Computation of the re­ quirements of society will acquire paramount importance for the planning bodies." In an article on The Basic Economic Law (Voprosy Ekonomiki No. 1, 1 962) Stalin is taken to task for suggesting "that in the course of communist construction commodity and money relations outlive themselves and retard our progress toward communism." The basic law governing the de­ velopment of socialist economy is stated to be "the ever fuller satisfaction of society's needs by means of expansion and perfection of production," and in the work of building a communist society "the fullest use should be made of commodity and money relations, in k eeping with the new content they acquire under the socialist system." If this is merely an argument about dating the period at which commodity exchange and money relations will have served their purpose in the advance toward communism, only actual experience can settle the matter. But if the writ­ ers of the article on the Basic Law intend to suggest that expansion of production and the higher standard of living attendant on it, without at some stage the liquidation of commodity and money relations, can of themselves bring about communism, they are overlooking an important element in Marx's conception of the altered relations of production in a truly communistic society. As he writes in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "The labour of the individual is taken from the start

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191

a s social labour. Therefore whatever the specific material form of the product which he creates or helps to create may be, that which he has bought with his labour is not a special specific product, but a specific share of the communal pro­ duction. For this reason he has no special product that he has to exchange. His product is not an exchange value. The product does not have to be translated into a specific char­ acter form in order to acquire a universal character for the . individual. Instead of a division of labour, necessarily ending in the exchange of exchange value, we would have an organi­ zation of labour, which results in the participation of the individual in communal consumption." Or, in ethical terms, communist morality is not based simply on the availability of plenty, but also on the condi­ tions of human dignity and freedom in which that plenty is produced by conscious, self-expressive labor. 22. On the plight of the artist and writer in commodity-produc­ ing societies see Christopher Caudwell's Illusion and Reality, particularly pp. 106-109. As Bertolt Brecht has remarked of contemporary writers: "The fact that money-making is never the subject of their work makes one suspect that . . . it may be the object instead." 23. Awareness of the influence on human relationships of com­ modity exchange was naturally greater when its full effects were first being felt. Shakespeare writes of:

That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity, Commodity, the bias of the world, This sway of motion, this Commodity, This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word. . . . King John, Act II, i.

192

NO TES TO PA GES 149-150

24. That this is what certain individuals are seeking in tem­ porarily identifying themselves with a revolutionary cause is borne out by a well-known collection of articles by ex­ communists or ex-communist-sympathizers. The very name of the book, The God that Failed, shows to what an extent the contributors expected the Party to replace religion and redeem their souls. Arthur Koestler says at the beginning of his own confession: "A faith is not acquired by reasoning. One does not fall in love with a woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion." His career in the Party and his subsequent resignation, as described by himself, are as illogical and emotional as his original "con­ version" to Marxism. 25. George Orwell is a good example of one whose "socialism" took the form of feeling that he ought to love some entity called "the people" whom he did not, in fact, really like. As a failed narodnik, he could only vent his bitterness by imagining a future of endless suffering for those who had been unable to make him love them and by blaming it on some incredible state apparatus actuated by motiveless cru­ elty. In Nineteen Eighty Four he finds the model for his utopian hell-its drabness, its organized hatreds, its utter pointlessness, in short, its extreme degree of alienation-by selecting and exaggerating certain features of the society he lived in. 26. See, for example, the speeches railing against the effects of gold in Timon of A thens, Act IV, Scene iii. This dichotomy in our greatest dramatist between a distaste for the uglier aspects of bourgeois society, driving him back to an idealiza­ tion of feudalism, and a natural impulse as writer and man to take advantage of the freer opportunities offered by the dissolution of a more rigid order of social existence has prompted a few misguided critics with no real understanding of Shakespeare's times to ascribe his works to noble con­ temporaries. A full discussion of the way an author can

NO TES TO PA GES 150-154

193

think he holds one set of views and even express them quite explicitly while still betraying in his writing a sympathy with views directly the opposite can be found in George Lukacs' Studies in European Realism. 27. It need hardly be said that these observations do not refer to personal possessions but to the kind of property ownership which establishes class dominance. It may be added that joint ownership of an enterprise by stock-holders, with a board to direct operations in their interests, no less than individual ownership of a factory, is the sort of property relationship on which exploitation is based; nor is the idea of a "property­ owning democracy" in which workers acquire a few shares in the concern that employs them any more than an attempt to create in their minds the illusion of sharing in control. Nationalization itself, like any reformist measure introduced while leaving the capitalist state intact, has been twisted into a parody of socialist intentions in those western countries where it has been instituted: direct ownership is relinquished, with generous compensation, in industries like transport or coal mining which are necessary but do not yield high profits, and henceforth the public as a whole through taxation and increased charges finance these industries which continue to be managed in the interests of the privately-owned sector of the economy. 28. As Engels defines the state in "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State": "It is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contra­ diction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable an­ tagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power seemingly standing above society became necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power, arisen out of

1 94

NO TES TO PA GES 154-157

society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienat­ ing itself from it, is the state . . . . As the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, . . . in the midst of " the conflict of these classes, it is the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting ' the oppressed class." Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 289-290. Lenin therefore concludes in "The State and Revolu­ tion" : "If the state is the product of irreconcilable class ' antagonisms, if it is a power standing a b ove society and increasingly alienating itself from it, it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is . impossible not only with- 1 out a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this alienation." Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 1 45. 29. Such a result does not follow a bourgeois revolution in which a middle class enlists support from below to wrest power from an upper class. At some stage the struggle against the erstwhile dominant class has to be broken off to prevent an upsurge of the worst exploited elements in the broad class alliance from proceeding to sweep away classes altogether. Thus no bourgeois revolution is ever definitive and must end in compromises all around, a state of affairs reflected in the balance of powers written into bourgeois constitutions and in multi-party systems of government. The political form of capitalism, based on a series of uneasy truces in the class war, is the least stable of all superstructural organiza­ tions and in the perspective of history has the shortest course to run. 30. For an account of this attempt in Britain see B�rnard Sem­ mel's Imperialism and Social Reform. Lenin was always very aware of the need for the pro-

N O TES TO PAGES 157-162

1 95

letariat in the metropolitan bases of capitalism's monopoly­ imperialist phase to counter all efforts to divide them from their brothers in the oppressed territories. "The revolutionary movement in the advanced countries would in practice be a sheer fraud if, in their struggle against capital, the workers of Europe and America were not closely and completely united with the hundreds upon hundreds of millions of 'colonial' slaves who are oppressed by capital." "The second Congress of the Communist International," Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 660. 3 1 . Apologists for capitalism, while having to admit the much faster rate of economic growth in socialist countries, take comfort in the gap that still has to be made up. And yet this gap depends on taking . as the standard of comparison only the richer metropolitan areas of the capitalist world as meas­ ured against the socialist world in its entirety where such uneven development is not allowed to exist. In considering the climate of social change it is the relative strength of these larger groupings of states that counts; but at the same time successful socialist revolutions can only be achieved by the capture and transformation of state power in each particular country. 32. Nuclear blackmail is the most recent threat by which the ruling class would terrorize well-meaning people into ac­ quiescing in a grossly unfair distribution of the world's goods. By maintaining the fear that mankind is poised on the brink of total disaster which any madman might precipi­ tate at the push of a button, this class hopes to arrest history at a period which suits them. The danger of nuclear war is very real; but like any blackmail, the submission of those held to ransom gives no assurance of avoiding the blow and in­ creases the demands of the criminals. Ultimately, it is not things, even in the form of the most terrible weapons, which determine the course of history but people. The contrary belief is a particularly tragic example of commodity fetishism.

1 96

NO TES T O PA GE 1 63

33. The truly remarkable thing about the revolutionary trans­ formation of a vast country like China is the economy of force used. This tends to be obscured by the fact that the trial and execution by a people's court of one bad landlord looms larger in the minds of property owners anywhere than the freeing from virtual serfdom of thousands of peasants. But when one considers the enormous efforts made in the New China to rehabilitate members of the old exploiting class so that they can participate with their fellow citizens in building a peaceful, prosperous and just society, one realizes that the charge of caring nothing for the individual is groundless. This process of social education takes time and patience. Centuries of class division and intercommunal strife have inevitably left their marks on the. minds of individuals. If hands have been dirtied in acts of inhumanity, brains have been soiled, too, and also require a bit of scrubbing-so long as those involved in the cleansing process do not consider themselves spotless. A campaign in New China known as "Washing Faces and Rubbing off Smudges" was instituted for the very purpose of allowing people to criticize in a com­ radely, constructive way the defects of those taking the lead in purging society of the ideological remnants of old forms of injustice. See David and Isabel Crook, Revolution in a Chinese Village. 34. Such an individual, afflicted with a sense of the meaningless­ ness of life, also becomes the subject of philosophical con­ sideration which accepts his plight in particular social cir­ cumstances as the normal human condition-as if doctors should take being tubercular as a natural state to be palliated instead of looking for a cure. This may be compared with the acceptance by psychologists, particularly Freudians, of the small, isolated, ingrown bourgeois family with its com­ plex-ridden relationships as the inevitable context of human development. Just as Marxism sees a progression in social organization from primitive communism through various forms of class-divided society to a consciously formulated

NO TES TO PA GES 163-165

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communism at a higher level, so it envisages a corresponding change in the family-from its natural integration in the community under tribal conditions through various forms which reflect, in the position of women or the relations be­ tween parents and children, different kinds of exploitation in society to the reintegration of the family in the organized life of a commune. "It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic­ Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the eastern forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historic development. Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously devel­ oped, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery." Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 490. 35. By mass action is not meant, of course, the frenzied behavior of a mindless mob. The ruling class has nothing to fear from short-lived groupings of this sort and, indeed, may even en­ courage their formation to check the purposeful action of a genuine popular upsurge. Just as a mob is less in terms of moral purpose than the individuals constituting it, so mass action by people with the right leadership is more. Those involved in such action borrow a courage and enthusiasm from their solidarity with others which, properly directed through responding to and, in turn, inspiring their leaders, sweeps them forward in a challenge to arrogated authority they would never, acting singly, have dreamed of. 36. "A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure

NO TES TO PA GES 165-167

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in imagination before he erects it in reality." Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 178. 37. Marx, The German Ideology, p. 75. 38. Ibid., p. 75. 39. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, pp. 799-800.

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