What Marx Really Said

What They Really Said series
Edited by a. n.gilkes
WHAT MARX REALLY SAID
•
Other titles in this series
What Freud Really Said, by David Stafford-Clark

What Shaw Really Said, by Ruth Adam
What Darwin Really Said, by Benjamin Farrington
What Jung Really Said, by E. A. Bennet
H. B. ACTON
WHAT
MARX
REALLY
SAID
Schocken Books New York

Published in the United States of America in 1967
by Schocken Books Inc., 67 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016
Copyright © H. B. Acton, 1967

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 67-25233
Manufactured in the United States of America

1
Contents
Preface / vii
Chapter i THE ORIGINS OF MARXISM

§i Marx and Engels and the Publication of The
Communist Manifesto of 1848 j i
§2 The Eighteen-forties / 6
§3 Laissez-faire Liberalism / 8
§4 Pre-Marxist Socialism / 13
Chapter 2 MARXIST MATERIALISM

§1 Hegelian Philosophy and FeuerbacKs
Criticism of It / 17
§2 "Religion is the opium of the people" j 24
§3 Changing the World / 28
§4 Main Features of Marx's Materialism j 30
Chapter 3 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

§1 Philosophies of History / 32
§2 Historical Materialism in Outline / 39
§3 item tfw^ Superstructure 48 j
§4 77*e Technological Theory of History / 54
§5 Maw #s # Tool-making Animal / 58

§6 77*£ Economico- Technological Theory of
History j 66
§7 77*e L^a/ and Political Superstructure j 68
§8 The Ideological Superstructure / 75
§9 Historical Dialectics / 8
vi / Contents
Chapter 4 PROFIT AND EXPLOITATION

§1 Socialism and the Theory of Value / 85
§2 Surplus Value and Exploitation / 89
§3 Some Inherent Defects of Capitalism j 98
Chapter 5 REVOLUTION, THE STATE AND THE

COMMUNIST IDEAL
§1 The Coming Catastrophe / 103
§2 Organizing the Workers / 106
§3 Making the Revolution / 109
§4 The Post-revolutionary Social Order j 113
§5 Marxist Morality / 121
Chapter 6 CONCLUSION / 130
Further Reading j 142
V>/^jc / 144
Preface
As the object of this book is to ascertain what Marx really

did say rather than what he might have said or is reputed
to have have gone to the original German text (or in
said, I
the case of The Poverty of Philosophy the original French
text) and made my own translations from that. In doing
this I have tried to be as literal as possible rather than to
aim at elegance of style. H. B. Acton.
/
I The Origins of Marxism
§i Marx and Engels and the Publication of The

Communist Manifesto of 1848
Marxism, both as a theory and as a social and political
movement, was created by Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels in collaboration with one another. They began
working together in 1844 and their first joint production
was a book called The Holy Family which was published
in Stuttgart in 1845. Marx had written most of this, but
Engels contributed a great deal to The German Ideology
which was written in 1845-6 but not published until long
after they were both dead. The famous Communist
Manifesto (1848) was put together by Marx from a draft,
much of which he ignored, given to him by Engels and
was published as their joint work. If we start by tracing
the separate careers of these two men and by seeing how
they came to join forces, we shall obtain a preliminary
view of what Marxism is and what it sets out to do.
2 / WHAT MARX REALLY SAID
Karl Marx was born at Trier in the Rhineland, then a

part of Prussia, in 1818. He was the
son of Jewish parents
both of whom were descended from well-known rabbis.
His father, a lawyer, had become a Protestant Christian
in 18 17, in order to avoid the disabilities then being
placed on Jews in Germany. Karl Marx went in 1835 to
the University of Bonn to study law, and in 1836 to
Berlin where, after a further period working at law he
turned over to philosophy in spite of his father's en-
deavours to persuade him to continue with a course that
would have prepared him for a safe career. What
fascinated Marx about philosophy was the controversy
going on about the views of Hegel who had been professor
of philosophy at Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1832.
Hegel had developed an elaborate and comprehensive
system of thought in which he appeared to argue that
mind and spirit are fundamental in the universe, that
Christianity expresses in pictorial form the absolute
truth about God and man, and that human history is a
progress towards rational freedom that takes place,
however, by means of dialectical oppositions and struggles
rather than by gradual stages. Hegel's most influential
followers regarded him as a defender of Christianity and
of a moderate political conservatism, but others, known
as '
'Young Hegelians", accentuated his account of
dialectical opposition and used it to arrive at radical
views in politics and religion. Marx attached himself to
this latter group and one time hoped to become a
at
university teacher of philosophy. Having been convinced,
however, that his political views would make this im-
possible, he began his literary career as editor of the
Rheinische Zeitung in 1842. He vigorously defended the
The Origins of Marxism \ 3
freedom of the press against those who believed that

subversive religious and philosophical views should be
kept from publication, but in 1843 tne Prussian govern-
ment suppressed the paper as a result of complaints from
the Tsar of Russia who resented attacks on him that had
been printed in it.
So in November 1843 Marx went to Paris to collaborate
in a new journal, the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher.
Attempts were made to get contributions from various
distinguished French authors. The Catholic social
reformer Lammenais was approached, but was unwilling
to contribute to a journal which he rightly suspected
would be hostile to Christianity. The French socialist
Louis Blanc also refused, for somewhat similar reasons,
as did the poet Lamartine, for whom the journal's aims
were far too revolutionary. In the event only one issue of
the journal appeared, in March 1844, and there were no
French contributors. Marx himself provided two articles,
one On the Jewish Question, and the other on Hegel's
Philosophy of Right. It is in the latter article that Marx
described religion as "the opium of the people". The
poet, Heinrich Heine, contributed some poems that
mocked King Ludwig of Bavaria, and there were two
by Friedrich Engels. One of these, entitled "The
articles
Condition of England", was a detailed discussion of
Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, which had appeared
in 1843. The other, entitled Sketch of a Critique of
Political Economy, is a remarkable first sketch of what
was be called Marxist socialism, and one can say,
later to
with only very slight exaggeration, that Engels was the
first exponent of the view. In the autumn of 1844 Engels
came to Paris and a lifelong partnership began.

Engels' career had been less academic than that of

Marx. He was bornat Barmen in 1820, the son of a
prosperous manufacturer. At the age of seventeen
textile
he entered his father's business and in the following year
went to learn commerce with a friend of his father who
had an export textile business at Bremen. But Engels
did not give all his time to commerce. He wrote poetry,
and during 1839 started contributing articles to various
newspapers. During the same year he read David
Strauss' Life of Jesus (1835) and was led by it to become
an atheist. Strauss was one of those who had been
influenced by Hegel but drew revolutionary conclusions
about religion from their study of his writings, and so
Engels began to move in a similar direction to that being
taken, quite independently, by Marx. Engels arranged to
do his military service in Berlin where he made the
acquaintance of some of the "Young Hegelians" and
attended a course of lectures in defence of the Christian
revelation given by the famous anti-Hegelian philosopher
Schelling. In 1842 Engels published two pamphlets
attacking these lectures and towards the end of the year
he went to Manchester to work in a textile firm in which
his father had a financial interest. In England Engels got
to know some leading Chartists and contributed to Feargus
O'Connor's journal, The Northern Star, as well as to
Robert Owen's The New Moral World. Engels' journal-
istic activities from 1843 to 1845 consisted in sending
articles about Chartism and the English working class to

papers on the Continent and articles about continental
socialism to the English Chartist papers. When Engels
began to work with Marx in 1844 he knew much
more about economics and about industrial and social
The Origins of Marxism / 5
conditions than Marx did and brought to the partnership

a knowledge that was indispensible to its success.
In The German Ideology the unpublished joint work to
,
which we have already referred, the central Marxist

doctrine, that was subsequently called Historical Material-
ism, was developed in some detail. Marx himself gave
another brief account of it in The Poverty of Philosophy
(1847), written in criticism of a book called The Philosophy
of Poverty by the French socialist, Proudhon. By this
time Marx and Engels were both active among socialists
and working-class organizations, and when a body known
as the Communist League, with members in Paris,
Brussels and London was founded in 1847, it was decided
that a statement of its principles should bedrawn up.
The London Committee wrote Marx, who had had to
to
leave Paris for Brussels, asking him to do this. Engels
had suggested to him the title "Communist Manifesto"
and had given Marx a catechism of communist ideas and
proposals, but Marx worked this up into a more eloquent
and forceful version which was published as their joint
work in German in London in February 1848. It
appeared in French in Paris before the Revolution of
1848 and an English version was published in 1850 in
The Red Republican, a paper edited by George Harney.
Harney was one of those Chartists who believed in
insurrectionary violence and were hence called "physical
force" Chartists. The Communist Manifesto stated that
all history hitherto had been a history of class struggles,
that the bourgeoisie, having ousted the feudal aristocracy,

were now confronted by the proletariat, that the proletariat
was now the only revolutionary class and that the com-
munists, with their demand for the abolition of private
property, would lead the proletariat to victory over

the bourgeoisie and to the formation of a society free
from class antagonisms "in which the free develop-
ment of each is the condition for the free development
of all". The Manifesto ended with these ominous
words:
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.

They openly declare that their ends can be attained only
by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to gain. Working men of all countries,
unite!
§2 The Eighteen-forties
By the eighteen-forties, when Marx and Engels began
their joint career, industrial capitalism was developing
fast. Most of the early factories had been built in the
countryside but by the eighteen-forties they were being
concentrated in large towns, and large populations were
growing up in places like Roubaix in France and Man-
chester in England. Railways were spreading all over
western Europe, extending the market for what the
factories produced and making it easier for people to
change their place of work. Some men became very rich
in organizing all this, some gained fortunes and lost them
again, many found they could not continue at their old
crafts and had to search for jobs in the factory towns.
In the factories the discipline was often strict and the
hours worked very long. Furthermore, employers and
governments tended to regard associations of workmen
as conspiracies, so that strike leaders were often deported
or imprisoned. had become apparent well before the

It
eighteen-forties industrial development was not

that
taking place in an orderly and steady way, but spurts of
activity with high profits and increased wages were
succeeded by slumps when fortunes were lost, thousands
became unemployed and wages dropped. Working men
who had lived through the period called it later on "the
hungry forties", for little had been done to help those
who fell out of work through no fault of their own. In
Past and Present (1843) Carlyle tells of a widow who
failed to obtain relief and in the course of trying to get
help, infected seventeen people with typhus fever of
which they died. He writes, too, of parents who poisoned
three of their children to defraud a burial society of
£3. 8s. Engels, in his Condition of the Working Class in
England (1845), describes the miseries of the workers in
the new factory towns more coherently though no less
indignantly than Carlyle.
The
eighteen-forties was a period of political unrest
too. In England the Chartists were putting forward
demands for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments;
in Germany, as we have seen, there was press censorship
in defence of the monarchy and the Church; and in
France under Louis-Philippe it was said that society was
"dancing the polka on a volcano". The volcano erupted
in 1848 when the French monarchy was swept away.
But in Germany the revolution collapsed in ignominy.
Engels was one of the few who actually took up arms
against the government. In England, too, there were
riots and conspiracies, but Chartism was defeated, and it
was left to a conservative, Disraeli, to make the next
moves towards the enfranchisement of the working classes
nearly twenty years later. It became clear in the eighteen-

forties,however, that "the masses", as the "Young
Hegelians" called the working classes, or the proletariat,
as Marx and Engels called them, were becoming a force
to be reckoned with in capitalist society. Priests like
Lamennais and Frederic Denison Maurice and novelists
likeGeorges Sand and Eugene Sue were calling attention
to the plight of the proletariat. Marx and Engels did
so too, but believed that the proletariat could not be
succoured from without but would so assert itself as to
become identical with the whole of mankind. They
therefore decided to provide it with a faith and with a
leadership.
§3 Laissez-faire Liberalism
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the govern-

ments of Europe pursued policies of state control over
trade and commerce with the aim of strengthening
national power and national wealth. Governments
forbade the emigration of skilled workmen, placed tariffs
on imports, granted monopolies to trading companies,
fixed wages and prices and enforced systems of apprentice-
ship, subsidized the building of merchant ships and
carried out many other policies of control in pursuit of
national wealth and aggrandizement. These networks of
controls and regulations often hampered trade and
discouraged industry, and in eighteenth-century France
a number of able writers urged that they should be
removed. These critics of Mercantilism, as the system of
state control has since been called, named their system of
economic thought "Physiocracy", using this word to
emphasize their belief in a spontaneous and natural
'
economic order (the Greek word phy sis meaning 'nature")
as opposed to the regulated one that then prevailed. One
of these Physiocrats expressed their demand for a policy
of economic freedom in the words: "Laissez faire laissez y
passer , monde va de lui-meme" ("Let people produce,

le
let them move about freely, the world goes on its own").
Now Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) is gener-
ally regarded as the foundation of classical political
economy. A large part of this book is a detailed criticism
of the mercantilist system, and although Adam Smith
rejected some of the physiocrats' theories he concluded
that national wealth would be much increased by adopting
the natural or free system of commerce and industry. He
argued that monopolies and tariffs sheltered the inefficient,
that individuals were more likely than governments to
recognize and seize opportunities for new forms of trade
and production, and that the self-interest of business
men could be relied upon in most cases to promote the
production and sale of the goods that consumers need.
He believed, too, that Mercantilism favoured producers
at the expense of consumers, and he argued that com-
petition between producers and between merchants
benefited the community as a whole.
In the generation after Adam Smith's death, his views
were developed and elaborated so as to provide a sort of
moral defence of the capitalist system as it was then
emerging. Smith himself had shown little admiration for
business men, whom

he suspected of being only too ready
to conspire against the public. His plea for free and
spontaneous economic activity, however, was welcomed
by those who were setting up new firms and industries
and wished to break free from the restrictions which the
now conservative agricultural interests were anxious to

retain. It thus came about that the laissez-faire economic
outlook was adopted by middle-class business men who
were irked by controls maintained by the land-owning
aristocracy. These middle-class business men and
industrialists were employers of labour, and they opposed
combinations among workmen, just as they opposed
privileged monopolies and restrictions upon trade.
Writers on economics told them that trade-union pressure
to put up the wages of one group of workmen would only
lead to lower wages for other groups. Some economists
argued, too, that legislation to shorten the working day or
to produce safety and cleanliness in factories, would
prove crippling to the industry on which it was imposed.
Others said that public assistance to the poor and even
private charity were dangerous to the working of the
competitive system. Employers of labour were regarded
by some as benevolent abstainers from immediate enjoy-
ment who, as a result of their laudable sacrifices in the
form of savings, were able to provide wage-earners with
the opportunity to live and work and earn.
Such views as these did not go unopposed. Sismondi
( 1 773-1 842) suggested in 18 19 that unless steps were
taken to correct it, the competitive system tended to bring
about economic crises and unemployment as the result
of there not being enough money in the hands of the
working population to enable them to buy all the goods
produced. Sismondi proposed that this overproduction
(or underconsumption) should be dealt with, not by
reducing production but by raising wages to a level that
would make it possible for the wage-earners to buy all
the goods they produced. Malthus, one of the classical

economists, gave an analysis of the same predicament of

underconsumption in 1836, arguing that there was a
tendency for the savings of business men so to increase
the amount of capital that there was insufficient demand
to buy the goods that the increased capital was responsible
for producing. Malthus saw that it might be possible to
remedy this by issuing more money, but such an in-
flationary policy, he thought, would be unjust. Instead he
recommended that in periods of inadequate demand,
schemes of public works should be instituted to provide
employment for those thrown out of work. Thomas
Carlyle was another critic of extreme laissez-faire but his
',
criticisms were political rather than economic. In

Chartism (1839) he wrote that laissez-faire is "an abdication
on the part of governors" and jibed at the "Paralytic
Radicalism" which teaches that "nothing whatever can
be done in it by the wit of man who has simply to sit still
and look wistfully to 'time and general laws'." Carlyle
believed that if governments did not intervene to bring
economic affairs under control there would be a collapse
of authority and a revolution of the masses.
Engels' Sketch of a Critique of Political Economy of
— —
1844 it was written in 1843 therefore, important as it
was for its influence on Marx's views, was by no means an
isolated criticism of the laissez-faire outlook. Sismondi
and Malthus, however, like Keynes in our own day, had
suggested ways in which a predominantly competitive
capitalism could be made to work, whereas Engels argued
that competitive capitalism was bound to result in new
forms of monopoly that would bring about its own down-
fall. Addressing the supporters of the free enterprise
system, Engels writes:
You have destroyed the small monopolies so that the one

great basic monopoly, property, may function the more
freely and unrestrictedly; you have civilized the ends of
the earth to win new terrain for the unfolding of your low
avarice; you have made all men brothers, but it is a
brotherhood of thieves.
In this passage Engels is saying that the advances in

invention and production brought about under the system
of competitive capitalism have been at the behest of greed
and have spread greed among men. But Engels also
believed that out of all this a new would be born, so
society
that the capitalist and his supporting economists were un-
wittingly helping in the development of a new social order.
But the economist does not know himself what cause he

serves. He does not know that with all his egoistical
reasoning he nevertheless forms but a link in the chain of
mankind's universal progress. He does not know that by
his dissolution of all sectional interests he merely paves
the way for the great transformation to which the century is
moving, the reconciliation of mankind with nature and itself.
Out of the crises, monopolies and revolutions to which the

free enterprise system emerge a form of
will give rise will
society in which men and combine in order to
associate
produce for themselves the goods which they need.
If the producers as such knew how much the consumers

required, if they were to organize production, if they were
to share it out amongst themselves, then the fluctuations of

competition and its tendency to crisis would be impossible.
Produce with consciousness as human beings not as —
dispersed atoms without consciousness of your kind, and
you are beyond all these artificial and untenable antitheses.
§4 Pre-Marxist Socialism
In the above-quoted passages from Engels' essay, we may
notice that he criticizes the competitive system on moral
and economic grounds. He says, in the first place, that
it is a system based on greed, yet he also says that it is a
system that is bound to destroy itself. But out of this

destruction something better is to emerge, a system in
which goods are co-operatively produced in accordance
with a plan and distributed to those who need them. His
central idea is that a spontaneous and allegedly chaotic
economic order should and will be replaced by an order in
which production and distribution are planned for society
as a whole. This, of course, is the central idea of socialism.
We have seen that in the eighteen-forties Marx and
Engels were active among socialist groups in Paris,
Brussels, Manchester and London. Their relations with
these groups, however, were by no means harmonious.
Marx's Poverty of Philosophy was an attack on the views
of the French socialist, Proudhon (whom Marx regarded
as a petit-bourgeois rather than as a supporter of the
proletarian cause). In the unpublished German Ideology
various German socialists had been attacked. In The
Communist Manifesto several pages are devoted to attacks
on forms of socialism that Marx found unacceptable.
For example, Christian Socialism was ridiculed as:
The holy water with which the priest consecrates the

spite of the aristocrat.
In the same work, Marx refers to what he calls "critical-

Utopian socialism", and mentions Saint-Simon, Owen
and Fourier. He praises these socialists for their criticisms
of capitalist society, but condemns them for their failure

to provide political leadership for the working classes.
What then, did Marx and Engels accept and what did
they reject from the socialist views already in existence?
We need not at Robert
present consider Saint-Simon.
Owen (1771-1858) and Francois-Marie Charles Fourier
(1772-1837) may be described as advocates of voluntary
socialism. That is, they looked forward to the establish-
ment of planned and organized non-capitalistic societies
by men and women who had withdrawn from capitalist
society to form for themselves a non-competitive,
harmonious, co-operative social order. Owen tried to
interest leading statesmen and even royalty in his
schemes, and Fourier waited at a fixed time every day for
the wealthy backer who never came. Owen himself
founded a community called New Harmony in Indiana
(then a frontier area), and some of Fourier's disciples
set up "phalansteries", as they were called, in other parts
of the United States. None of these communities per-
sisted for very long in their original form, although some
lasted to the end of the nineteenth century as somewhat
unusual types of industrial companies. The failure of
Owen's experiment at New Harmony was apparent long
before Marx and Engels became socialists. Now although
Owen was an opponent of Christianity, and although
Fourier's advocacy of sexual experiment and variety went
against Christian teaching, the Owenite and Fourierist
communities something in common with such
had
religious sects as the Shakers and Rappists which had
established themselves in the United States in the
eighteenth century. Indeed, socialist communities some-
times established themselves in settlements abandoned by
such bodies. These voluntary socialists abandoned "the

world" and endeavoured to pursue a new way of life
devoted to ideals of brotherliness and love. They were
a sort of secular church withdrawn from the trading and
huckstering which deformed life in the capitalist world.
In marked contrast to these pacific forms of socialism
were those that traced their origin back to the French
Revolution of 1789. That revolution was, of course, in
its main developments a revolution of the peasants and
middle-classes against the aristocracy. It was, however,

a revolution which proceeded by means of insurrection,
terror and violence, and in the course of it necessity and
perhaps some popular pressures brought about rationing
and price control. With the fall of Robespierre and the
Jacobins in 1794, however, the Revolution took on a more
conservative form. But in 1796 Baboeuf and some other
socialists joined with a group of disgruntled Jacobins and
some disaffected army men in a conspiracy to set up a
dictatorial government that would have enforced the
nationalization of the land and of industry and then
would have introduced a democratic constitution to
ratify and continue these socialist measures. The plot was
betrayed and Baboeuf went to the guillotine. One of the
leading conspirators, Buonarotti (1761-1838), a descendant
of Michelangelo, was deported and then released. He
settled in Belgium where he wrote an account of the
movement and of its aims. This was published in 1828
and provided inspiration for socialists who took part in the
French Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It was translated
into English by the Chartist leader, Bronterre O'Brien, in
1838. One of O'Brien's associates, George Harney, the
"physical force" Chartist we have already referred to,
was much impressed by this and by the French revolu-

tionary literature, and affected a style of Jacobin journalism
in some of his articles in Chartist newspapers. Engels
knew O'Brien and Harney and also members of a body
known as the League of the Just who continued to uphold
Baboeuf's insurrectionary tradition. Marx knew them
too, and, with Engels, wrote The Communist Manifesto
at the request of the Communist League, a body with a
similar outlook. We
have already seen that the first
English translation of The Communist Manifesto was
published in Harney's The Red Republican.
Marx was undoubtedly impressed by this insurrection-
ary tradition. His surviving notebooks show that he made
a close study of the French Revolution. He thought that
the peasant and middle-class revolution succeeded because
the time was ripe for it, and that Baboeuf's plot failed
because it was premature. He thought, too, that it was
unrealistic of Owen and of Fourier to expect men of
wealth to support them in schemes whose outcome, if
successful, would be a form of society in which there

would be no aristocracy and no capitalists. Successful
revolutions are brought about by those who have an
interest in their success. The French peasants and
bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century had an interest in
not being mulcted for the benefit of the aristocracy, and
so they took forcible steps to dispossess them. A new
class of wage-earners or proletarians was being formed
and exploited by the growth of capitalist industry. A
revolution that favoured their interests was bound to
succeed if system of capitalist
the competition was
inherently unstable as Engels said it was.
/ 17
2 Marxist Materialism
§i Hegelian Philosophy and Feuer bach's Criticism of It
We have seen that while Marx was a university student he

turned from the study of law to the study of philosophy
and soon became involved in the current controversies
about the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel is described in the
textbooks as an idealist, but this term does not greatly
help in understanding his complex and comprehensive

system. Perhaps the fundamental feature of Hegel's
philosophy was its opposition to materialism and to
empiricism, two points of view which had been widely
held in the eighteenth century. Materialism is the view
that nothing is real but what is material and that minds
must therefore be forms of matter. Empiricism is the

view that knowledge is based on sense experience and
that thought and reasoning cannot be anything but
elaborations of sense experience; a French writer, Destutt
de Tracy, had summarized this latter theory in the phrase:
"penser, cest sentir". At the very end of the eighteenth

century a number of German philosophers criticized
both materialism and empiricism, holding that they were
inconsistent with the very possibility of scientific reasoning
and human freedom. Indications of this line of thought
are found in some of the writings of Kant (i 724-1 804),
but it was pursued in a more positive way by Fichte
(1762-1814), Schelling (1775-1854) and Hegel (1770-
183 1). It is interesting to notice that the English poet and
writer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was greatly impressed
by Kant's and Schelling's writings, some ideas from which
he utilized in formulating his views on poetry. These
German idealists claimed to show that thought and
freedom are inseparable, that is, that no being could
think and reason unless it had will and freedom. It was
Hegel who gave the most elaborate exposition of this
point of view. The first part of his system was concerned
with logic, by which he meant the concepts in terms of
which the world is understood. The second part was the
philosophy of nature and the third part the philosophy
of mind. It seemed to his contemporaries that Hegel
believed he could somehow derive or deduce the philo-
sophy of nature from the logic and the philosophy of
mind from the two preceding parts. It certainly was his
view that the very concepts used by materialists and
empiricists, such concepts as number, shape> quantity,
space, movement, are unstable and contradictory and lead
on to more adequate concepts that culminate in those of
mind, society, art, religion and, in the end, philosophy.
It was an important idea in Hegel's philosophy that
specialists in the sciences, such as mathematicians,
chemists and biologists, carry on their researches without
Marxist Materialism / 19
asking questions about their own fundamental assump-

tions. Mathematicians do not ask what numbers are,
chemists do not question the notion of interacting sub-
stances, biologists write about animal species and about
life itself as if these ideas are in no need of examination.
But it is the task of philosophy, according to Hegel,

to subject these and cognate conceptions to critical
scrutiny, and to show how they are related to mind and
thought, to human society, and to art, religion and
philosophy itself. Thus Hegel believed that any account
of man and of his place in the world that took the material
world and ordinary sense experience for granted was
bound to be superficial and inadequate. The last word on
ultimate problems, he held, must be uttered by the
philosopher. Hegel called this ultimate and authoritative
philosophical task Speculative Philosophy. In using the
adjective "speculative" he did not mean to imply that
philosophy proceeds by hunch or by guess, like speculators
in risky shares, but rather that it goes beyond anything that
sense experience and scientific enquiry could establish (Kant
had used the word in this way previously). According to
Hegel, then, Speculative Philosophy shows the limitations
of the concepts of scientific specialists; shows, too, that
the concepts of mind, of freedom and of social life are less
inadequate, leading on to art, religion and philosophy.
It will be noticed that in Hegel's system religious con-
cepts are thought to bring us very close to the ultimate
truth of things. Their defect, according to Hegel, is that
they express the ultimate truth in imaginative or pictorial
forms. Genuine philosophical thinking, he held, takes
us beyond pictures and images to a self-conscious grasp
of what is ultimate, the absolute mind.
Views somewhat similar had been put forward

in scope
before Hegel, by Leibniz example, and
(i 646-1 71 6), for
they were revived later in the nineteenth century by

philosophers who are known as neo-Hegelians. These
ideas have an intellectual and human appeal, which makes
it unlikely that they will never be revived again. Hegel's
version of this type of philosophy, however, was published
at a time when natural science was advancing very rapidly
and was beginning to claim an intellectual superiority
over theology and philosophy. In France, in the eighteen-
twenties and thirties Auguste Comte (1 798-1 857) was
already advocating Positivism, the view that human
knowledge can only be obtained by using the methods of
the natural sciences. If Comte and the Positivists were
right, then Hegel's Speculative Philosophy was an
immense and pretentious mistake. In Germany in the
late eighteen-thirties and early eighteen-forties Ludwig
Feuerbach (1804-72) was coming to a similar conclusion.
He had attended Hegel's lectures and had started by
accepting his main views. But in 1839 he published a
Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy to show how funda-
mentally unsound they are. One of his criticisms was that
what Hegel thought was a proof or demonstration of his
system was really nothing but a statement of it, since
Hegel assumed throughout the truth of the conclusions he
sought to establish. Hence, instead of showing what is
the case, Hegel was arbitrarily elaborating concepts of
his own choosing. Feuerbach also objected that Hegel
was seriously at fault in his account of nature. As we
have seen, Hegel seems to have held that nature somehow
emerges out of thought and the categories of logic.
Feuerbach asserted, however, that the very idea of nature
involves the sense experiences of creatures possessing

sense organs and therefore bodies. We get to know nature
by seeing and touching and hearing, and would not do
these things without eyes and hands and ears. This
being so, men and their thoughts must be regarded as
parts of nature. Feuerbach did not say that thoughts are
nothing but movements of material things (though he
did say that "man is what he eats"), but he argued that
thinking should be regarded as something that human
beings do, and that they are creatures with sense organs
and brains, parts and products of the natural world. It
was Feuerbach's view that Hegel had lost sight of these
fundamental facts and had hence come to regard thought
and thinking in an unrealistic way. Thought, according
to Feuerbach, arises within nature and cannot rightly be
supposed to be beyond or above it.
In the Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach applied
these ideas to Christianity. We do not see or hear or
smell God, nor have we such evidence for his existence
as we have for stars or atoms. Nor can we go to heaven
or hell and report upon them on our return. Our thoughts
about these subjects, therefore, must have arisen from
our human nature and from the human situation. We
have never met an infinitely powerful and loving being,
and hence our idea of God as such a being must be a
human creation based on our knowledge of human power
and human goodness. God, according to Feuerbach, is a
projection of the highest qualities that exist among men,
and a fusing of them together in an imaginary being. In
worshipping God, men unwittingly elaborate human
perfection, and in yearning after Him, they unwittingly
yearn after what they hope to be. "God", says Feuerbach
in a phrase that stuck in Marx's mind and was echoed in

a passage we shall soon be examining, is an 'inexpressible
'
sigh deep in the souls of men". In heaven the good are

rewarded and in hell the bad are punished, and justice
is secured thereby. But according to Feuerbach, heaven
and hell are imaginary places and the justice secured in
them is an imaginary justice. In the real world things do
not always work out this way, and it is because they cannot
secure justice on earth that men imagine its achievement
elsewhere. Feuerbach believed that if justice reigned on
earth, a supernatural mechanism for obtaining heavenly
substitutes for it would be superfluous. Men fail to
fulfil themselves in their earthly lives, the only lives they
have, and compensate for this by imagining supernatural
fulfilments. They do not do this wittingly, but if they
become conscious of what they are doing, they would
turn from fantasies to earthly things.
In books that were published soon after the Essence of
Christianity, Feuerbach argued that theology is empty
theorizing about religion and that Speculative Philosophy
is theology in disguise. Once theologians and philosophers
became conscious of this, they would cease to engage in
these fruitless activities and would start studying man and
his real problems instead. "The mystery of
earthly
theology," Feuerbach wrote, "is anthropology." By
"anthropology" he meant what today we call psychology
and sociology. So what he meant by this phrase was that
if we came to understand what men are doing when they
construct theological systems or engage in Speculative

Philosophy, turn our attention to human
we should
beings, their aims and social organizations.
motives,
Theology and Speculative Philosophy would then be, so
Marxist Materialism j 23
to say, explained away, for no one would wittingly chase

will-o'-the-wisps.
Feuerbach's general philosophical view may be de-
scribed as materialism, and Marx and Engels regarded it
as such. But it is not the sort of materialism that reduces
thoughts to brain events or to atomic or sub-atomic
transformations. It is the sort of materialism according to
which thoughts are human activities, human beings are
parts of nature, and nature is something which has
developed on its own, without creation or pre-ordained
plan. Feuerbach's materialism is a sort of inversion of
Hegel's idealism. According to Hegel the doctrines of the
Christian religion take us very close to a knowledge of
reality, and Speculative Philosophy gives this knowledge
its ultimate rational form, whereas sense knowledge and
the sciences based upon it reveal only superficial aspects
of the world. But according to Feuerbach it is sense
experience and the special sciences which reveal the
world as it is, while theology and Speculative Philosophy
mislead their practitioners and should be regarded as
expressions of hopes and wishes rather than as knowledge
of things as they are. In the Essence of Christianity
Feuerbach regarded the various Christian dogmas as signs
that need interpretation, as indications, not of a super-
natural world, but of human aims and hopes that are
denied fulfilment. He instituted a practice that has been
widely adopted since he wrote, of treating what people
say as an unwitting revelation of what they do not say.
One development of this method is the Freudian practice
of regarding dreams, slips of the tongue and even some
deliberate utterances as symptoms of underlying wants.
Another is the Marxist practice of rejecting the overt
meaning of economic or political theories and of interpret-

ing them as disguises for class interests. Both Freud's
method of seeking for the latent or hidden content of
dreams behind their manifest content, and Marx's
method of "unmasking" the class interests concealed
behind the words of social and political theorists, owe
their origin to Feuerbach's revelation, as he put it, of the
"mystery of theology". It was he who first claimed that
suitably trained observers, skilled in interpreting signs
and symptoms, could understand people better than they
understand themselves.
§2 "Religion is the opium of the people"

Marx's contribution to the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahr-
biicher of 1844, Towards a Critique of the Hegelian Theory
of Law: Introduction, was written under the influence of

Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and, indeed, is in
large part an exposition of Feuerbach's views. This can
be shown if we consider the whole passage, near the
beginning of the article, in which the phrase, "Religion is
the opium of the people", occurs. The third, fourth and
fifth paragraphs of Marx's essay are as follows:
The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion,

religion does not make man. Religionindeed the self-
is
consciousness and self-feeling of man who has not yet

gained possession of himself or has already lost himself
again. But man is not an abstract being lurking outside
the world. Man is the world of men, state, society. This
state, this society produces religion, an inverted conscious-
ness of the world, because it is an inverted world. Religion
is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic
compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point

d'honneur, enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its ceremon-

its
ial enhancement, its general ground for justification and
consolation. Religion is the realization of the essence of

man in the imagination because the essence of man has no
true realization. The battle against religion is thus in-
directly the battle against that world whose spiritual aroma
religion is.
Religious want is both the expression of real want

and the protest against real want. Religion is the sigh
of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,
the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of
the people.
To remove religion as the people's illusory happiness is
to demand happiness for the people. The demand for
real
the abandonment of illusions about one's condition is the
demand to give up a condition that needs illusion. The
criticism of religion is thus in embryo the criticism of the
vale of sorrows whose halo is religion.
There are several important points we should notice

here. In the first place it is Marx, like Feuerbach,
clear that
regarded religion as something produced by man himself.
Marx held, that is, that religion is a natural phenomenon
that arises in human societies, and is not, as religious
people themselves believe, an opening into a world
beyond nature and superior to it. Once this is granted
and many of course would refuse to grant it then the —
question that needs to be answered is: How does human
society give rise to religion? The answer that Marx,
again following Feuerbach, gives to this question is that
human society is so constituted that most men are in
want and human nature is frustrated, is unable to achieve
all it might achieve, cannot realize its true nature or
essence. Since men cannot satisfy their wants or over-

come their frustrations in society as it is, in "this vale of
sorrows", they imagine another world beyond in which all
their wants are satisfied, ruled over by a Being in whom is

realized man's supreme potentialities. In this way they
are consoled for their present unhappiness and are
enabled to justify its continuance. If they could not do
this they would find the unhappiness of the world un-
bearable. The religious view of things is an inverted
image of the real world (the phrase "inverted world" is
from Hegel), in the sense that whereas in the real world
there is unhappiness, in the imagined supernatural world
there is happiness, and whereas in the real world there is
failure, in the inverted image there is success. If, therefore,
we investigate the religion of a people we are not really
exploring a world beyond this world, but are examining
symptoms that reveal the social diseases from which the
people are suffering.
What, then, does Marx think is the remedy for the
religious illusion? Feuerbach devoted much of his life
to the task of explaining what the religious illusion is and
how it arises, so that men who accepted his views might,
to use his own expression, become "disillusioned" about
it. He had also said that the need for religious illusions
would be lessened if social conditions were improved. He
actually wrote: "Let politics become our religion", a
demand which has been fulfilled in the twentieth century
in ways with which we are only too familiar. This last
was the course that Marx advocated when he said that the
demand to abandon illusions about the human condition
was "the demand to give up a condition that needs
illusion". In a "heartless world" men must seek for
consolation beyond the world. Men suffering under

oppression that they see no means of getting free from,
sigh for release, and their sigh is religion. Religion brings
them temporary relief, as opium brings relief to the poor
and hopeless. But just as it is better to face the world
rather than to escape into opium dreams, so it is better to
reform society than to take refuge from it in an imaginary
supernatural kingdom.
Marx does not mean that priests are necessarily
impostors who cunningly divert the workers' attention
from their grievances by telling them lies about God and
a spiritual world. Still less does he mean that men could
be "cured' of their religious beliefs by proving them
'
false, as men might possibly be cured of drug addiction
by lectures about the injury it does to them. The central

idea is that religion is a social and psychological mechanism
that makes the lives of unhappy men bearable to themselves

and serves as a justification for the sufferings they undergo.
It is, symptomatic of these sufferings. The
indeed,
sufferings themselves are due to social maladjustments,
and if these were remedied, religion would lose its raison
d'etre and cease to exist. Attacks on religion are in-
directly attacks on the evils of society. Attacks on the
evils of society are indirectly attacks on religion. Social
revolution is therefore essentially anti-Christian and
irreligious, since if successful it would abolish the con-
ditions in which religion arises. It is not surprising that,
accepting these views about religion and society, Marx
and Engels believed that socialism and irreligion go
together. What is surprising is that any Christian could
ever have thought that Christianity and Marxism are
reconcilable.
§3 Changing the World

In the article we have been discussing, Marx maintained
that philosophy must henceforth be practical. On this
Marx differed from Hegel who, in
Philosophy of his
Right, had said that history cannot be rejuvenated by
philosophy but may only be understood by
it. Although
Marx rejected Speculative he considered
Philosophy,
that this very rejection must ensure that critical philosophy
or philosophical criticism becomes an agency of social
change. For the philosophical critic is necessarily an
opponent of religion and of its associated phantasies,
and in opposing these things he comes into opposition
with the real world that gave rise to them. To criticize
religion effectively, it is necessary to transform society.
Marx put this by saying that philosophy is bound up with
Praxis. (This word, which has been repeatedly used by
Marx's followers, was borrowed by Marx from a book
entitled Prolegomena znr Historiosophie (1838) by A. von
Cieszkowski (1814-94), who held that Hegel was wrong
in regarding philosophy as interpreting the past rather
than as making the future. Cieszkowski used the word
''Praxis" for the practical effect which he thought philo-
sophy should have, and wrote that philosophy should
influence the life of men "not only in present reality, but
in the more developed reality of the future".) But
practice, if it is to be effective, must, Marx held, utilize
the proper means, and when practice is directed towards
social change it must utilize whatever favourable social
forces there are available. Marx believed that the revolu-

tionary force in capitalist society is the proletariat, the
men and women who have to earn wages in order to live.
In capitalist society this class is deprived and depressed
but were properly

if it led, Marx believed, it could free
itself and in doing so free mankind as a whole. The
emancipation of the proletariat would become the
emancipation of mankind. Marx rhetorically concluded:
The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart

the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without
an uprising of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot
raise itself up without the realization of philosophy.
Various themes and arguments converge in this passage,

which is the first indication of the doctrinally united
revolutionary party thatMarx and Engels always worked
for. who recognize the importance of
Philosophers
sense experience and who regard the methods of the
natural sciences as paramount, Marx is arguing, oppose
the whole idea of seeking the illusory and imaginative
satisfactions which are all that religion can provide. They
understand why these illusory substitute satisfactions
have been sought, and they then ascertain how genuine
satisfactions can be obtained here on earth. Finding that
the proletariat are the chief victims of the capitalist
system, the philosophers conclude that the proletariat
must have strong motives for overthrowing it. This is
what Marx means when he says that the proletariat is
"the heart" of emancipation. The overthrow of capitalism

is something that must be close to the hearts of the
proletariat. The philosopher, therefore, helps the prole-
tariat by providing it with leadership and a doctrine,
which Marx calls its "head". Correct philosophical
doctrine, consciously pursued opposition to religion, and
efficacious social revolution are clearly associated with one
another. True social understanding and realistically
undertaken social revolution are inseparable. Marx

expressed this view a year later in some notes about
Feuerbach which Engels discovered and published in
1886, one of which reads:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world

differently, the point isto change it.
§4 Main Features of Marx's Materialism
(a) Marx passionately rejected all forms of supernatural-

ism. That is, he rejected all views, whether couched in
religious or in philosophical terms, which attempt to
explain man and nature as products or manifestations of
a mind that transcends nature. Thus his view is a species
of Naturalism.
(b) Marx thought that human knowledge must be
based upon sense experience, and thus his view is a
It is because he is an empiricist
species of Empiricism.
that he is a naturalist.
(c) Marx rejected the claims of Speculative Philosophers
(to use his expression) or of metaphysicians (to use the
term current today) to obtain knowledge of the world
other than the knowledge obtained by use of the scientific
methods. This view, that the only knowledge of the
world is that obtained by the special sciences such as
physics, chemistry or biology, is called Positivism. Marx
was undoubtedly a positivist, although he would not
have called himself by that name, as he disliked many of
the social views of Comte, the leading positivist of the
nineteenth century.
(d) Marx (like Feuerbach) believed that religious
beliefs and practices do not have the significance that their
adherents think they have. He held, rather, that they

must be explained in natural terms, and that these natural
terms are psychological and social. That is, Marx was
an atheist.
Marx believed that philosophical and scientific
(e)
knowledge are inherently practical. The view that

knowledge is essentially practical is today called Prag-
matism, and pragmatism is undoubtedly an aspect of
Marx's materialism.
Marx's materialism, then, is a combination of natural-
ism, empiricism, positivism, atheism and pragmatism.
But even these descriptions do not exhaust the complexity
of his materialist view, for Marx also considered that his
materialism was "dialectical". The expression "dia-
lectical materialism" is not used either by Marx or by
Engels, but was invented by the Russian Marxist,
Plekhanov (i 856-1 91 8). It is therefore anachronistic to
apply it to Marx's own theories. Nevertheless, Marx
regarded its dialectical character as one of the merits of
Hegel's philosophy which he had incorporated into his
own. But main concern with dialectics was in his
as his
account of society and of history, we can defer discussion
of this topic until the next chapter.
32 /
3 Historical Materialism
§i Philosophies of History
Even the most savage peoples have some interest in their

ancestors and in the origins of their society. More
civilized peoples look back to such heroes as Abraham
and Aeneas, and sometimes imagine a Golden Age before
men were corrupted by lust and greed. Religious teachers
have contrasted the benighted condition of the world
before its saviour came with the enlightenment that
followed His arrival. In Christianity a line is drawn
between the period before Christ's coming and the era
when the Church is spreading His influence in the world.
Christians look forward, too, to the end of history, when
all men will be judged. Thus myth and religion provide
various simple schemes for introducing an order into the

human past and for showing the present generation its
place in history.
Historical Materialism / 33
About the seventeenth century, however, a major new

concern was introduced into human life, experimental
science. Once this was well established, it provided a
new principle of historical order, for it enabled men to
look at the past as a gradual advance in invention and
scientific understanding. Thus, at the end of the
eighteenth century, Condorcet (1743-94) conceived of
human history as a growth in human knowledge or
enlightenment. Condorcet was a leading figure in the
French Revolution, and like others among his revolu-
tionary associates, he believed that mankind was at that
time moving into a new epoch. In the past men had been
subjected to a nature they did not understand and to rules
they could not control, but by breaking the power of
priests and kings and by taking their lives into their own
hands, men would recreate society and themselves.
Scientific advance, it was thought, opened the way for
indefinite moral improvement.
Two branches of knowledge that were being created at
the beginning of the nineteenth century encouraged the
growing tendency to divide up the past into epochs. One
of these was geology, or geognosis, as it was first called.
Earlier generations had thought that the earth and the
animal species on it were created all at once. But ex-
amination of rocks and fossils was making it pretty clear
that the earth had passed through various phases of
development and that different sorts of animals had
inhabited the earth during the periods when it was possible
for each species to keep alive. Archaeology was also
presenting reasons for believing that the earliest men had
been able to use only weapons and tools made of stone,
and that later on they learned the use of iron and bronze.
Hence prehistoric society was divided into a Stone Age

and an Iron Age, on the basis of the tools that men had
invented and had come to utilize. About the same time
there was much speculation about the historical succession
of various types of society. The most penetrating and
fruitful writings on this topic were those of Henri de
Saint-Simon (1760-1825). He held that the history of
civilization falls into three main periods. First there was
the period that ended with the collapse of the Roman
Empire. The prevailing religion of this first period was
polytheistic, and the social order rested upon slavery. As
a result of the barbarian invasions this social order was
succeeded by a new one in which a monotheistic religion
was associated with the feudal system. This second epoch,
Saint-Simon believed, was in process of being replaced
by a new industrial order in which monotheistic religion
was being ousted in favour of a belief in positive science.
Saint-Simon also held that the periods of transition from
one civilization to another were periods of intellectual
criticism and political upheaval. One such period of
criticism and breakdown was that which followed the fall
of the Roman Empire. Another such period was that in
which Saint-Simon and his contemporaries were living, a
time when the feudal system was in its last throes and
industrialism was being born. The feudal-theological
system harboured within itself "the germ of its own
destruction", for although it was fundamentally agri-
cultural and military, it fostered the growth of the natural
sciences and allowed the establishment of trading classes
in the cities who possessed property of a non-feudal type.
This idea that a type of civilization may contain within
itself elements that will eventually destroy it and be the
basis of a new civilization, greatly influenced Marx and

Engels. Another feature of Saint-Simon's view that also
entered into Marxism was the assertion that specific
types of social organization (e.g. feudalism) were closely
associated with specific types of outlook or belief (e.g.
monotheism). Directly connected with this is the sugges-
tion that in periods of transition from one civilization to
another there is both a clash of ideas (e.g. those who
uphold the scientific outlook attack supporters of the
medieval religious beliefs) and a clash of classes (e.g. the
new industrial classes oppose the interests of the feudal
landlords).
Thus Saint- Simon had endeavoured to distinguish the
main epochs of history, to show how they differed from
one another in their main social structure, and to indicate
how the transition from one to another takes place.
Auguste Comte, who had been Saint-Simon's secretary,
elaborated a somewhat similar system, according to
which mankind passes from a theological stage of develop-
ment in which he understands the world in terms of gods
or spirits, a metaphysical stage in which he thinks
in terms of unexperienced principles or forces, and a
positive stage in which his views and organizations
are based on experience and experimental science. Like
Saint-Simon, Comte held that both the ideas and
the social characteristics of the new society came to
birth inside the old society, and like Saint-Simon too,
he hoped that the transition would be gradual and
peaceful.
During this period when French and
revolutionaries
social critics were thinking in terms of dying epochs and
of a new era, philosophers too were endeavouring to
descry the course and destination of human history.

The idealist philosophers, we have already mentioned, all
concerned themselves with this topic. We

have seen that
a central feature of idealist philosophy was the concept of
human freedom, for idealists rejected materialism and
empiricism because they thought that these outlooks
were incompatible with the possibility of free and rational
choice. Kant's discussion of the philosophy of history
was undogmatic and tentative, but he did suggest that
the apparent injustices and failures of history might be
necessary steps leading towards a free and peaceful
social order. It was not unreasonable to hope, Kant
believed, that the vicissitudes of human history would
emerge into a period of freedom and perpetual peace.
Fichte gave a great deal of attention to the problem of
historical epochs, and argued that each epoch must
correspond with a phase of rational development. In
early, traditional societies, he held, reason is present but
operates automatically and unselfconsciously. The men
living insuch an era see human society as something that
works according to laws of its own, to which men have
not contributed and to which they must conform. To
men in this condition history appears as something
foreign to them in whose processes they are caught up
and lost. When they come to think consciously about
themselves and their purposes, they regard reason as an
authority that prescribes conduct for them. At a further
stage they revolt against this authority, and indeed
against all authority, as they have come to regard reason
as something which they themselves prescribe, as the

exercise of their own freedom. According to Fichte, there-
fore, human history is moving towards a stage in which it is
Historical Materialism \ 37
freely created by men who not only understand but have

the art of rational behaviour. In the culminating age of
mankind, according to Fichte, men's knowledge and their
free activity will be in unison, and history will be under
their free and rational control.
This idea that men might sometime create their own
history in unfettered, rational freedom, captivated Marx
and Engels. But, as we have seen, the philosophical
system which chiefly influenced them was that of Hegel.
Like the other idealist philosophers Hegel believed that
the course of human history was a development towards
greater freedom. Peoples who have as yet failed to
organize themselves into states, he thought, can hardly
be regarded as participating in history, and so he omitted
from his account of history those African and Australian
tribes which lived without state government. In the
oriental states of antiquity such as Egypt and Persia,
one man ruled despotically, and one man only was free,
the despot himself. In the Greek world, where small
groups controlled the state, a few men were free. In the
Germanic or Christian world, although there was still a
great deal of oppression, the Reformation had adumbrated
the freedom of all men with its doctrine of the priesthood
of all true believers, and the French Revolution had made
this doctrine of universal freedom a political reality.
Hegel believed that at each stage of history one particular
nation achieves the fullness of what is possible at the
time and then exhausts itself when its task is completed,
only to be succeeded by another nation which develops
another theme in the great symphony of history. Further-
more, the rise and fall of the world-historical nations
takes place through conflict and war. Thus freedom
develops through struggle and defeat, and human history

is a sort of harsh debate, a bloody dialectic.
This last word brings us to an important feature of
Hegel's philosophy which we have mentioned but have
not yet discussed. Hegel believed that the correct philo-
sophical method was to state a thesis, to show that there
are contradictions latent in it, and
overcome the to
contradictions by eliciting a synthesis which unites them.
This is called the dialectical method, and it is one of the
methods, although not the only one, that philosophers
have utilized since Socrates used the method of dialogue
in ancient Athens. Hegel, like Fichte before him, placed
this method at the centre of his philosophy. It was not
inappropriate for him to do so, since as an idealist he
believed that what is ultimately real is mind or spirit,
and if this is so then there is some plausibility in the idea
that everything, even the material and animal world,
must partake of the nature of dialogue, the life of mind,
even if the dialogue is in some cases subdued or dis-
guised. In his Philosophy of Right (a work which Marx
as a young man had commented upon in some detail) and
in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel had
endeavoured to show that the progress towards freedom
takes place through dialectical oscillations and that
nothing good is achieved without opposition and struggle.
Marx, we have seen, rejected Hegel's idealism, but he
did not reject Hegel's dialectical view of history. Hegel,
on the other hand, made no attempt to predict future
forms of civilization, whereas Marx, as we shall see, was
confident that he could do this. In this respect, he
followed Condorcet, who believed that the historical past
provides evidence that makes possible the scientific
Historical Materialism j 39
human future, and Saint- Simon, who

prediction of the
had maintained that the future society is somehow
implicit in the present.
We have now had a view of some of the problems about
history which were being discussed at the time when
Marx and Engels began to collaborate. The continuous
growth of experimental science suggested the possibility
of continuous intellectual and moral progress. Geologists
were dividing the history of the earth into epochs, and
archaeologists were dividing the prehistory of mankind
into Ages determined by the nature of the tools they had
discovered. The impact of industrialism had led Saint-
Simon and Comte to ask how the scientific-industrial
society then emerging had been able to come to birth
from the theologico-feudal society that had hitherto
existed. The idealist philosophers had used the concepts
of freedom and reason as clues to the course of history
and had said that the culmination of history must be a
society that is consciously created and controlled. All of
these speculations played their part in generating the
theory of historical materialism.
§2 Historical Materialism in Outline

We have seen that Marx used the term "materialism" for
a this-worldly view from which everything supernatural
had been excluded. A materialist account of things,
according to Marx, is an account in terms of natural
events or natural processes that can be experienced
through the sense organs. A account or
materialist
explanation of historical events, therefore, would describe
or explain them in terms of natural phenomena. But
there are many such phenomena that might possibly be

used in explaining the course of history, as far as it can
be explained at all. Climate, soil and the prevalent type of
plant and animal life might have a preponderant influence
upon history, as many have thought they do. Those who
are impressed by such facts have formulated a Geo-
graphical Theory of History. The biological struggle for
existence or the rather more sophisticated struggle for
domination have been thought by some to justify a
Biological Theory of History. Others have taught that
civilization is based on the fundamental instinct of sex
and is at the same time a repression and a refinement of it.
We might call this a Sexual Theory of History. Geo-
graphical, biological or sexual theories of history might
all,therefore, be called types of historical materialism,
but they are not the historical materialism of Marx and
Engels. Let us consider, then, the brief statement of
their view given by them in The Communist Manifesto:
Does it require deep insight to grasp that men's ideas,

outlooks and concepts, in a word, their consciousness,
changes with the conditions of their life, with their social
relationships and with their social existence?
What does the history of ideas prove than that
else
intellectual production alters as material production alters?
The ruling ideas of a time always were the ideas of the
ruling class.
People speak of ideas which revolutionize a whole
society; in so speaking they are only expressing the fact
that within the old society the elements of a new society
have formed, that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps
step with the dissolution of the old conditions of life.
The authors go on to illustrate this by reference to the

rise of bourgeois-capitalist society. In the eighteenth
century, particularly in France, there was a movement,
now known as the Enlightenment, which was highly
critical of traditional philosophical, political and religious
beliefs. Marx and Engels believed that thinkers of the
Enlightenment destroyed the effectiveness of the Christian
religion at the very time when the bourgeois revolutionaries
were destroying the feudal regime by the Revolution of
1789. They also held that the liberal belief in freedom of
religion and freedom of conscience was nothing but an
expression in the sphere of knowledge of that free com-
petition in economic affairs which the new capitalists
were demanding.
It is clear that in this passage of The Communist
Manifesto Marx and Engels are concerned with revolu-

tions and with the part played in them by ideas and ideals.
Their view is that there is something basic in human
society, which they call "conditions of life'*, "social
relationships' and "social existence". It is in this basic
'
aspect of society that changes first take place, and changes

in "ideas, outlooks and concepts' follow after. This, of
'
course, contradicts the beliefs of most of those taking

part in social movements and political revolutions, who
believe that they are altering society by putting forward
new ideas, new outlooks and new concepts. Thus Marx
and Engels are saying that it is not ideas that change
history but changes in men's "conditions of life" which
change ideas and history with them. In this passage
little is said about the basic aspect of society, the "con-
ditions of life", but the one thing that is said is impor-
tant, for the expression "material production" is used.
Included in the "conditions of life", then, is material

production, and as this alters, intellectual (or spiritual)
production alters too. Basic in society, then, is pro-
duction of material things presumably by material means,
and the contention is that the production of ideas, out-
looks and concepts alters with, and as a result of changes
in, material production. Material production means such
activities as growing and harvesting crops, and making

tools and clothes. Hence the view being advanced by
Marx and Engels is that changes in men's ideas, outlooks
and concepts follow changes in the methods of producing
material goods. The moving force in society is material
production, while intellectual or spiritual production is
somehow secondary.
We may note also that Saint-Simon's theory of the way
in which civilizations are transformed is incorporated
into the theory of revolution expounded in The Communist
Manifesto. For Marx and Engels say that when radical
intellectual are being made upon a form of
attacks
society, this means that the elements of a new form of
society have been engendered within it and are creating a
new outlook and new concepts as the old form of society
begins to decline. They also refer to classes, and in so
doing they borrow another element of Saint-Simon's
theory, for, like Marx and Engels, Saint-Simon had
believed that the traders and industrialists of capitalist
society had evolved from the traders who had been allowed
by the nobility to live and work on sufferance in the
towns of feudal society. The theme of class conflict is
central to The Communist Manifesto, but whereas Saint-
Simon, who had fought for the colonists in the American
Revolution and had been in danger of his life in the
French Revolution, hoped that the new order could come

without bloodshed, Marx and Engels were not averse to
the possibility of violence. In The Communist Manifesto,
again, Marx and Engels look forward to the victory of the
proletariat over the bourgeoisie, whereas Saint- Simon
considered that employers and workmen together formed
a single interest in society which would break the power
of the non-productive, lazy classes. On this matter
Saint- Simon seems to have made the more fortunate
guess, for in twentieth-century capitalism trades' unions
and managements generally band together at the expense
of consumers and shareholders.
Marx went to London in 1849 anc^ lived there for the
rest of his life, subsisting, somewhat precariously, on
constant subventions from Engels and on what he could
get from articles he contributed to newspapers. He took
with him from Paris an unfinished book which he had
worked on in 1844 after the beginning of his association
with Engels. This was not published until long after
Marx and Engels were dead, and we can now see in it
the first draft of a comprehensive treatise on economics
and society which Marx was trying all his life to bring to
completion. This first draft is generally referred to as the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. It shows
the great influence on Marx of Hegel and of Feuerbach,
and it shows, too, that Marx had come to believe that in
capitalist society the individual worker was forced to sell
himself in selling his labour. As Engels had already done
in his Sketch of a Critique of Political Economy, Marx
endeavoured to show that in capitalist society the in-
dividuals by their unplanned activities produced a social
network in which they were trapped, much as they
regarded themselves as subjects and worshippers of a

Supreme Being when in fact He was really their own
creation. In a communist society they would
socialist or
be free from and this "self-estrange-

this "alienation"
ment", to use two words which Marx borrowed from
Hegel and Feuerbach. In this unfinished work there is
also an attack on the way in which money, in a capitalist
society, is able to buy services and to corrupt the most
valuable human relationships. Here the influence of
Carlyle's attack on "the cash nexus" is apparent. "Cash
"
Payment", Carlyle had written in Chartism (1839) nas
become the sole nexus of man to man." "Money," wrote
Marx in these manuscripts, "is the pimp between need and
the object, between human life and the means of life".
Once he was established in London, Marx set to work
in an attempt to complete this treatise. He did an
enormous amount of research in the Reading Room of the
British Museum and by 1857-8 he had produced a rough
draft of very considerable length. He neither completed
nor published this (it was first published in Moscow in
1939 and 1 941), and

appeared instead in
in 1859 there
Berlin in German a shorter book entitled Towards a
Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. The second
volume was never written. It is the Preface to this
Critique of Political Economy that concerns us here,
because itcontains the most adequate statement of the
theory of Historical Materialism that Marx ever pub-
lished. Marx here refers to Engels' Outlines of a Critique
of Political Economy of 1 844 and to the unpublished book
they had collaborated in, The German Ideology of 1846.
He also refers, however, to his own article on Hegel's
Philosophy of Right, published in 1844, an<^ t0 tne
considerations it gave rise to. It is clear, therefore, that

Marx himself believed that the theory of Historical
Materialism arose out of his earlier reflections on religion
and law. This is what Marx wrote in 1859 m tne Preface
to Towards a Critique of Political Economy:
The work, undertaken to settle the doubts that

first
assailedme, was a critical revision of Hegel's Philosophy
of Right, a work, the introduction to which appeared in
Paris in 844 in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher. My
1
investigation led to the result that legal relationsand forms

of state cannot be understood from themselves nor from
the so-called general development of the human mind,
but have their roots rather in the material conditions of
life, the aggregate of which Hegel, following the procedure
of the English and French of the eighteenth century,

grouped under the name of "civil society'', but that the
anatomy of civil society is to be found in political economy.
I began to study the latter in Paris and continued it in
Brussels where I had settled in consequence of an ex-
pulsion-order issued by M. Guizot. The general result
that emerged and which, once reached, served as the
guiding thread in my studies, can be briefly formulated
as follows: In the social production of their subsistence,
men enter into definite, necessary relationships that are
independent of their will, relationships of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of
their material forces of production. The aggregate of these
relationships of production forms the economic structure
of society, the real basis on which a juridical and political
superstructure arises, and to which definite social forms
of consciousness correspond. The mode of production of
the material means of subsistence determines the social,
political and spiritual life-process as a whole. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their being, but

on the contrary it is their social being that determines
their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development
the material forces of production of the society come into
contradiction with the existing relationships of production,
or, what is only a legal expression for these, with the
property-relationships within which they had hitherto
moved. From being forms of development of the forces of
production these relationships are transformed into their
fetters. There then comes a period of social revolution.
With the change in the economic production the whole
huge superstructure is slowly or rapidly revolutionized.
In considering such revolutions one should always
distinguish between the material revolution in the economic
conditions of production which can be faithfully sub-
stantiated by the methods of the natural sciences, and the
juridical, political, religious, artistic, in brief, the
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this
conflict and fight it out. Just as we do not judge what an
individual is from what he thinks about himself, so we
cannot judge an epoch of revolution from its own
consciousness, but on the contrary we must explain this
consciousness from the contradictions of material life,
from the existing conflict between social forces of
production and relationships of production. A social
system never perishes before all the forces of production
have developed for which it is sufficiently large, and new,
higher relationships of production never come into being
before the material conditions for their existence have been
incubated in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore,
mankind only sets itself problems which it can solve, for
when we look closely we shall always find that the problem
itself only arises where the material conditions for its
solution are already in existence or at least just in process

of becoming. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal
and modern bourgeois modes of production can be

described as progressive epochs of the economic structure
of society. The bourgeois relationships of production are
the last antagonistic form of the social process of
production, antagonistic, not in the sense of individual
antagonism, but in the sense of an antagonism that grows
out of the social conditions of the life of the individuals.
But the forces of production developing in the womb of
bourgeois society create at the same time the material
conditions for the resolution of this antagonism and with
this social system, therefore, the pre-history of human
society is brought to a close.
The view set out in this passage is an elaboration of the

passage we quoted from The Communist Manifesto. There
is the same between what is basic in society and
distinction
ideas, outlooks and concepts, which in Towards a Critique
'
of Political Economy are called 'ideological forms". In

The Communist Manifesto the basic aspect is described as
"conditions of life" and there is reference to production.
In Towards a Critique of Political Economy the basic
aspect is described as "civil society" and this in its turn
is said to have "political economy" as its "anatomy". A
further reference to "economic conditions of production"

confirms the importance of economic factors in the basis
of society. The Saint-Simonian account of social change
and of revolution is repeated, but it is now said that the
antagonisms of bourgeois society will be ended and that
this will also be the end of "the pre-history of human
society". The implication is that history itself will only
begin when the revolution against capitalism has ended
in victory. We must now attempt to give an analysis and
explanation of these assertions.
§3 Basis and Superstructure
Marx's first assertion is and forms of

that legal relations
state are not self-explanatory but need to be understood
in terms of "the material conditions of life" or of what
English and French writers of the eighteenth century had
called "civil society". The English (or rather Scottish)
writer Marx had in mind Adam
Ferguson who, in his
is
Essay on the History of Civil Society (1766), had argued

that the improvement of the "commercial arts" can be
taken as an indication of the development of civilization.
Furthermore, Ferguson had endeavoured to base his
history of "civil society" upon the means used at various
periods in order to obtain a living. At the savage level,
for example, men gathered food and went hunting; at the
level of barbarism they had learnt to make pots, to tame
domestic animals, to grow crops and to work metals; at
the level of civilization they discovered the art of writing.
Ferguson's History of Civil Society was not concerned
with the rise and fall of heroes, kings and dynasties, but
with social transformations of a more pervasive and
fundamental kind, and this is part of what Marx meant by
"civil society". Saint-Simon had read Ferguson and had
incorporated some of these ideas in his view that industrial
society is of more importance than that part of society
that promotes and engages in politics and wars. Still a
further source of this notion was Hegel, who in his

Philosophy of Right used the expression "civil society"
for that aspect of society in which individuals seek their
own interests by competitive production and commerce.
Thus when Marx says that legal relations and forms of
statehave their roots in civil society, he means that they
have their roots in what we might call the business side
of life, in modes of production, types of product, methods

of exchange and distribution.
The "material conditions of life", or "civil society" are
distinguished by Marx into two aspects, the "forces of
production" and the "relations of production". By the
former he appears to mean the types of technique and
of tools and machines which men use to preserve and to
further their life-activities. Among "forces of production"
there would be included agriculture, hunting, the use of
windmills, steam power, and so on. It is not quite so
clear what he means by "relations of production", but
they must be forms of organization that go beyond
industry or business in its narrowest sense, since he says
not only that relations of production can correspond with
a stage of development of the material forces of pro-
duction, but also that they can conflict with the forces of
production. Relations of production, therefore, must be
such things as types of property, property in men, for
example, or in land, chattels or company shares, or the
ways in which goods are distributed and used. Un-
fortunately Marx is very sparing of examples to illustrate
this view, but in The Communist Manifesto he had said
that as capitalist industrial production developed it
became incompatible with retention of the existing
feudal organization, and in particular with "the feudal
relations of property". These became fetters constraining
the growth of the developing system. "They had to be
burst asunder; they were burst asunder." Feudal methods
of farming involving strips and common land, prohibitions
on the movement of men and of commodities, tithes and
tariffs, were relations of production associated with
dying forces of production. If these feudal relations of
production had been persisted in, they would have

prevented the growth of new forms of agricultural and
industrial production which, as forms of production,
were superior to the old. Their technical superiority
must inend lead to their prevalence. Superior
the
productive forces must finally establish relations of
production that enable them to operate effectively.
In our examination of Marx's theory of history, we
have not yet reached beyond or above the basis. But the
basis itself is obviously not all of a piece, for within it
Marx distinguished between the forces of production and

the relations of production. It is the forces of production
which, in his view, are ultimately basic, since although
the relations of production can pull against them
for a time they must finally be brought into line with
them. Under the heading "forces of production" Marx
must have included such things as food-gathering at one
stage of social development, agriculture at another stage,
and the use of steam power at yet another stage. His idea
is that when a more effective productive force has been
invented, say agriculture, then it will drive out the earlier,
less effective forces and the types of property that went
with them. In a society of food-gatherers private property
would hardly be necessary, so agriculture could not drive
that out, but, once established, agriculture would
make food-gathering over-laborious and even pointless.
Furthermore, if agriculture is to proceed, people must be
kept from trampling down the growing crops by walking
over them, and hence property in land, hitherto non-
existent, becomes a necessity. Hostility on the part of
food-gatherers to rules against trampling the crops
would at the same time be hostility to agriculture and to
the benefits it So the fetters, in this case hostility

brings.
to the enclosure of land, must be burst asunder, and burst
asunder they are.
But must they be? Agricultural production is so very
much superior to grubbing around in pursuit of roots
and berries that it is not surprising that it got established
along with the sorts of land enclosure that were necessary
for it. But the superior technique or instrument is not
always adopted, at least not straight away. In the twenties
and thirties of the nineteenth century, for example, a
new type of steam-carriage was introduced on to the
roads, in London and elsewhere. These provided faster
and better transport than what was obtainable from the
use of horse-drawn carriages. But the coaching interests,
alarmed at the possibility of losing their livelihood, brought
their influence to bear upon Parliament so that absurdly
low limits were placed upon the speeds at which the
steam-carriages were allowed to go. This drove them off
the roads, and when steam traction was reintroduced a
little later, it was along privately owned tracks. But if the
original steam-carriages had not been prevented from

operating, it might not have been necessary for railways
to be constructed as in fact they were. If goods and
people had been carried by road in the eighteen-thirties,
there might have been no Railway Age. Population
might have settled in different places, there might have
been more but smaller towns, and the face of the country
might have been very different indeed.
To this it may be objected that although the coaching
interests, which were a part of the old relations of pro-
duction, succeeded in retarding steam locomotion for a
while, and thus succeeded in holding back a new form of
production, they were only able to do this for a short

time. This is so, but in consequence of this delaying
action the new form
industrial age took a very different
from what it would have done without it. In this case,
and no doubt in many others, the relations of production
which, according to Marx, belonged to an outmoded set
of productive forces, modified the operation of the new
productive forces in very important ways. The steam
locomotives did not run on the public highways, and the
railway companies had to buy land for private tracks. In
doing this they submitted themselves not only to an Act of
Parliament but also to the existing laws about property,
even though they had to get parliamentary approval of
what they proposed to do. There is no such sharp break
between one epoch and another as Marx said there was.
In Germany, as Marx knew, the freedom of trade that was
widely regarded as necessary for capitalist advance was
never granted, so that controls over commerce persisted
from the pre-capitalist into the capitalist era. In our own
day, indeed, all sorts of mercantilist devices such as
tariffs, state monopolies and export subsidies have
persisted or have been revived in capitalist societies.
Nor should it be overlooked that in Great Britain in-
telligent feudal aristocrats engaged in capitalist enterprises
of their own and found means of reconciling what, on
grounds of Marxist theory, should have been mutually
contradictory activities. Something was done which, if
Marx was right, could not possibly have been done.
It appears, then, that Marx's revolutionary zeal led him
to over-emphasize the breaks between one historical
period and another and to underestimate the continuities
between them. But we must now ask whether Marx
really expressed his theory coherently, whether the main

concepts he used in it are consistent or adequately defined.
The fundamental concepts are, first, the concept of a
basis. This basis is distinguished into two parts or aspects,
the forces of production on the one hand and the relations
of production on the other. The forces of production,
we have seen, are, if the expression may be allowed, more
ultimate than the relations of production, and the latter
have their "legal expression'' in property-relationships.
Marx uses the term "civil society" for this whole complex
basis and says that its anatomy is found in political
economy. Then he distinguishes between the basis of
society and its superstructure. In the Preface of Towards
a Critique of Political Economy\ Marx mentions the legal
and political superstructure and the "ideological forms".
Now if property-relationships are the legal expression
of the relations of production, then it would seem that at
any rate the law of property belongs to the basis. Yet
on the other hand, Marx writes as if law belongs to the
superstructure along with politics. This is just one of
many problems of interpretation which this important
passage gives rise to. Another fundamental problem of
interpretation is this: did Marx intend to assert that the
ultimate source of social and historical change is to be
found in the forces of production alone? Did he hold,

that is, that no important social or historical change
takes place except as a consequence of changes in the
forces of production? If he did hold this, then he was
really putting forward a technological theory of history.
If he held, on the other hand, that it is changes in the
basis as a whole, in productive relations as well as pro-
ductive forces, that bring about all other important social
and historical changes, then his theory would be better

described as an economico-technological theory of history.
Can we say which it was of the these theories that Marx
really held? Unfortunately we can not, since Marx
himself was far from clear on the matter. But we must
look elsewhere in his writings for more evidence about
what he really meant.
§4 The Technological Theory of History

That Marx himself was not altogether clear about the
exact nature of his own theory may be seen if we briefly
compare the terminology he used two letters he wrote
in
to Engels. In the first of these, written on 25th September
1857, Marx says that the theory held by Engels and
himself asserts "the connection of the productive forces
and social relations". In the second, written on 7th July,
1866, a year before the publication of Volume I of
Capital, Marx wrote of ''the determination of the organiza-
tion of labour by the means of production". In the one
letter it will be seen, Marx said that the productive forces
are connected with social relations, and in the other that
they determine the organization of labour. Even if we
ignore the between "connected with" and
difference
"determine", and take it that Marx really meant the
latter (for how could anyone deny anything as vague as
the former?), there is a very considerable difference
between the organization of labour and social relations.
Marx is quite right in saying that means of production
determine the organization of labour. A solitary man can
use a spade or hoe, for example, whereas it takes several
men to handle a trawler. Different types of tool or
machine determine different types of job-relationships.
Some tools can be used by one man or woman. Some

machines require a whole crew or team to be in attendance.
But when Marx says that productive forces are connected
with social relations, it is far from clear what he means. It
might mean that means of production (tools or machines)
determine social relations, but we must then ask: which
social relations and how? The implication would seem to
be that all social relations, not merely job-relationships, are
determined by the tools and machines men use. I do not
doubt that Marx meant something of the sort. It would
certainly constitute a technological theory of society and
of history, and we must now ask whether Marx ex-
pressed such a theory in his more considered writings.
The most celebrated passage in Marx's writings in
which he appears to express a technological theory of
history occurs inThe Poverty of Philosophy, the book
attacking Proudhon which appeared in 1847. Here
Marx writes:
M. Proudhon the economist understands well enough

that men make cloth, linen or silk materials in definite
relations of production. But what he has not understood
is that these definite social relations are just as much
produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are
closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring
new productive forces men change their mode of
production, and in changing their mode of production,
their way of earning their living, they change all their
social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the
feudal lord, the steam-mill, society with the industrial
capitalist.
But the same men who establish their social relations in
conformity with their material productivity, produce also
principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their

social relationships.
Thusthese ideas, these categories are as little eternal as
the they express.
relations They are historical and
transitory products.
Welive in the midst of a continual movement of growth
in the productive forces, of destruction in social relations,
of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the
abstraction of movement mors immortalis.
The doctrine here set forth is concentrated in the

statement that the hand-mill gives you society with the
feudal lord, the steam-mill society with the industrial
capitalist. The idea is that hand-mills bring about
feudal and steam-mills bring about industrial
society
capitalism. course we need not take this literally.
Of
Marx probably means that hand-mills and such like means
of production bring about feudal society, and that steam-
mills and other sorts of power -driven machinery bring
about capitalist society. This is an assertion of the
technological theory of history, and it is important for us
to examine closely how Marx supports it.
In this passage, then, Marx begins by saying that when
men make cloth, etc., they do so in definite relations of
production. By this Marx appears to mean that in order
to make cloth, etc., the makers have
be organized in
to
factories or workshops in the way that the tools and
machines they use require them to be. If this is the point
he is making, then by "definite relations of production''
he means what in his letter of 7th July, 1866, he called the
"organization of labour". Marx then goes on to say that
these relations of production are produced by men just
as the cloth is produced by them. This is a step in his
exposition that is missing from the passage we have

considered in the Critique of Political Economy. It is
important because it serves to bridge the gap between
forces of production and relations of production with the
assertion that the latter are produced by the former.
Thus Marx says that when men use tools and machines
they produce not only goods or commodities but also the
job-relationships in which they are organized. But
he then passes on from job-relationships to "social
relations" which he says are "closely bound up with
productive forces". How does this come about? Accord-
ing to Marx, new methods of production bring new
job-relationships, and these in their turn bring new ways
in which men earn their living.
Marx, here as elsewhere, gives no examples, so we
must try to illustrate his point in our own way. When
steam locomotion was introduced, coach-drivers were
replaced by engine-drivers and a new class of workers,
plate-layers, came into existence. Engine-drivers might
be rather like coach- drivers in their working lives, but
there had never been any plate-layers before, and to that
extent a new mode of livelihood was created by the new
productive force. And so Marx says: "they change their
—
way of earning their living they change all their social
relations". But do they change all their social relations?
Of course, engine-drivers and plate-layers have different
sorts of working lives from those of coach- drivers and
road-menders. But it does not follow that their social
relationships outside their working lives are so very different
from those of their coaching and road-mending pre-
decessors. Engine-drivers and plate-layers occupy rather
humble positions in society, much as coachmen and
road-menders had done. It may be said, however, that a

coach-driver in the coaching age could own and drive his
own coach, whereas no engine-driver ever owned his own
locomotive. Returning to our example of the steam-
carriages,however, we may remark that, but for the
opposition of the coaching interests, individuals might
possibly have owned and driven their own steam-
carriages. was partly because of legislation against the
It
steam-carriages that railway companies bought land on
which to run their locomotives. The new relations of
production, then, as distinct from mere job-relationships,
took the form they did as a result of interplay between
old and new and not solely because of the nature of the
new productive forces. When new technological inven-
tions are adopted, the social conditions within which they
operate are not determined solely by the nature of the
invention itself, but also by give and take with the social
conditions that already exist.
§5 Man as a Tool-making Animal

So far we have examined various passages in which Marx
expounded his theory of historical materialism. In none
of those considered so far, however, does he give any
reasons in favour of the view. One might expect that a
view of scope and importance would be supported by
this
references to a great number of historical events, but
Marx does not do this, so perhaps he intended his theory
to be the sort that is based on some fundamental analysis
of human nature and human life. In the passage from
The Communist Manifesto we have already considered,
Marx and Engels begin by asking whether it requires
deep insight to grasp that men's consciousness changes
with the conditions of their life. Clearly they did not

think it did require deep insight. Of course, The Com-
munist Manifesto was not mainly drafted as a piece of
scientific and philosophical argumentation, but even if we
recognize this and look elsewhere for Marx's reasons, we
do not find it easy to disengage them from what seem to
be mere assertions. Near the beginning of The German
Ideology, however, Marx and Engels give what seems to
me be the chief reason in favour of their theory.
to The
passage runs as follows:
Men can be distinguished from animals by conscious-

ness, religion or anything else you like. They them-
by
selves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as
soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence,
a step which is conditioned by their bodily organization.
By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly
producing their material life itself.
The way in which men produce their means of sub-
sistence depends first of all on the nature of the means of
subsistence they find in being and have to reproduce. This
mode of production must not be considered simply as
being the reproduction of the physical existence of the
individuals. Rather it is a definite form of the activity of
these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life,
a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express
their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides
with their production, both with what they produce and
with how they produce. What individuals are thus depends
on the material conditions determining their production.
The first thing that Marx and Engels say in this im-
portant passage is that there are various arbitrary ways
in which men may be distinguished from animals, but

that the way of distinguishing them from animals that is
inherent in men themselves is the fact that they produce
their means of subsistence. That is, they produce their
food, their dwelling-places, their clothes, their tools.
In
doing this, producing these things, they indirectly
in
produce their material life itself. Why should it follow
from their producing their means of subsistence that they
also produce "their material life itself"? In the German
text the nature of the transition is more clearly apparent
than in the English translation. The expression "means
of subsistence" is a correct translation of the German
word "Lebensmittel", but a literal translation would be
"means of life". Thus in German the transition from
"means of subsistence" to "material life itself" is mediated
by the appearance of the word for "life" in both expres-
sions, whereas in English there is no obvious connection
between food, dwelling-places, clothes and tools on the
one hand, and "material life itself" on the other, for
clothes and tools are not alive.
However, Marx and Engels support their argumentative
transition from the production of means of subsistence to
production of material life by reasons other than verbal
ones. They say that each new human individual who
comes into existence finds a stock of "means of sub-
sistence" already in being and has to play his part in
replenishing this stock. In doing this he is not only
taking steps to maintain his existence as a bodily, physical
being, but is also maintaining himself in a definite way of
life. He is expressing his life in the activities he under-
takes in using and replacing the means of production, in
using and replacing both the tools concerned with how he
produces and the other objects (clothes, food?) which he

produces, which comprise what he produces. What men
are, or, as one translator has it, their nature, is determined
by the material conditions which make them the sort of
men they are. If they are hunters they will live one sort
of life and be one sort of men, if they are agriculturalists
they will live a different sort of life and be a different
sort of men.
Now two very different lines of thought are fused
together in this argument. In the first place, what Marx
and Engels say is influenced by Hegel's discussion of
labour in his Phenomenology of Mind (1807). Although
Hegel was an idealist, he did not think that the mind is
something withdrawn and hidden from the material
world. On the contrary, he believed that mind had to
reveal itself in its products and that the process of work or
labour was one way in which mind developed. In shaping
or forming objects in the material world the worker has to
overcome obstacles, resistances to his desires, but when
he has made what he set out to make, his initial wish or
desire has turned into the form of what he has made, and
the independent product now existing outside him is at
the same time his mind, is himself. He is in what he makes
or creates. In a sense, therefore, the objects that men
make are themselves, are, we may put it, forms of their
consciousness, forms of their life. When, therefore,
Marx and Engels say that men's means of subsistence
"express their life", they are undoubtedly following out
this Hegelian conception. But they fused it with some-
thing less metaphysical and more mundane, with the
obvious fact that men's work is organized in accordance
with the nature of the requisite tools and methods. The
forces of work and forms of life are therefore bound

together and both tools and products, the how and the
what of production, express the lives of men. To under-
stand the workings of society, therefore, it is necessary
to explore its "material life", that is, its production and
its products. These are the basic expressions of social life.
The sequence of ideasroughly of this order: life

is
— —
work production and products the social order which
does the producing and uses the products.
This theory received its final form in Marx's Capital:
Critique of Political Economy y
Volume I, (1867). In
Chapter V, §1, entitled "The Labour Process" there
appears the following passage:
We are not here concerned with the first animal and
instinctive forms of labour. A great period of time has

elapsed between the time when human labour had not yet
got rid of its first instinctive form and the time when man
entered the commodity market as the seller of his own
labour-power. We are considering labour in a form in
which it belongs exclusively to man. A spider carries on
operations like those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame
many a human builder by the way in which it constructs
its cell. But what from the very first distinguishes the
worst builder from the best bee, is that the builder has
built the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the
end of the labour process a result emerges that was already
in the imagination of the worker, that was already in
existence in an ideal form. It is not merely that the worker
brings about a change in the natural world; at the same
time he realizes his purpose in the natural world; and his
purpose determines the kind and manner of his action as
a law governing it and as something to which he must
subordinate his will.
A little further on in the same chapter Marx writes:
As soon as the labour process has developed to some

degree, has need of already fabricated instruments of
it
labour. In the most ancient caves inhabited by men we

find tools and weapons of stone. Alongside worked up
stone, wood, bones and shells, animals, tamed and bred
and thus altered through labour, played a principal part
as instruments of labour at the beginning of human
history. The use and creation of instruments of labour,
although in embryo it is characteristic of certain animal
species, characterizes the specifically human labour
process and Franklin therefore defines man as "a tool-
making animal". The remains of instruments of labour
have the same importance for the study of extinct economic
social formations as the structure of fossil bones has for a
knowledge of extinct animal species. It is not what is
made, but how, with what instruments of labour it is made
that distinguishes economic epochs. Instruments of labour
are not only the standard for judging the development of
human labour power, but also indications of the social
relationships within which the labour takes place.
If we compare these passages from Capital with the

passage we have quoted from The German Ideology we
notice one rather important difference. In The German
Ideology Marx and Engels say that individuals express
both in what they produce
their lives in their production,
as well as in how they produce
it. In Capital Marx says
that what distinguishes economic epochs is not what is
made, but how it is made. Now it is surely more plausible
to maintain that the nature of human society expresses
human production as a whole, both the manner of pro-
ducing goods and the goods themselves, than to maintain
that it means of production only, the tools, that

is the
constitute what is essential in human activity. In Capital
Marx seems to have moved from what we might call a

material theory of history, according to which all aspects
of material production are basic, to a technological theory
of history, according to which it is tools and machines
that are basic. According to the earlier, material theory,

human society can and should be understood in terms of
the means of producing goods and of the goods produced
and consumed. According to the later, technological
theory, human society can and should be understood in
terms of the means of production only. In placing so
much importance on Franklin's definition of man as a
tool-making animal, Marx is deliberately belittling the
things the tools are used to make and the use that these
final products are put to. He is placing all his stress on
the means of production and none on the objects con-
sumed. This is partly because, unlike The German
Ideology, Capital is concerned with economic theory, and
Marx, like many other economists of his time, accepted
the labour theory of value, according to which it was the
labour put into them that bestowed economic value on
things.
If we look closely at what Marx says we might conclude
that he has not expressed his view exactly as he wished to.
Both in The German Ideology and in Capital Marx
notices that individuals come upon the scene and find a
lot of material artifacts already in existence. These, in
fact, are not only tools, but consumer goods as well. The
important thing, I suggest, is not that men make tools,
but rather that each new generation of men receives the

organized collection of artifacts that other generations
have produced and makes its own additions to them.

Houses, roads, machines, books, improved soil, schools,
insurance companies, are handed on by one generation to
the next. Marx noticed that spiders and bees make
things, and he says that they from man in that men
differ
first imagine or conceive the things they make. It is not
impossible, however, that have some prior
beavers
imagination of the dams they build. Surely a more
significant difference between the things that animals
make and the things that human beings make is that the
latter are constantly improved. I do not suppose that
bees or beavers make any better cells or dams now than

they made thousands of years ago, whereas men who once
lived in caves now live in houses, men who once cut with
flints now cut with knives, men who once drank brackish
water now drink vintage wines.

Marx says that it is men's social being that determines
their consciousness, that what men are depends on the
material conditions determining their production. But
social being, material conditions and forces of production
do not spring up on their own. They are not merely
brought about by men, but in many cases are devised
or invented by them. I suggest that it is ability to invent
and improve rather than the ability to plan and to make
which differentiates men from animals and is responsible
for the essential difference between animal and human
societies. Marx recognized this important characteristic
on the occasions when he referred to the way in which
new generations find a set of material things and institu-
tions waiting for them, but he misunderstood its signifi-
cance when he thought that it could be adequately
described as an ability to make tools. If man is to be
66 I
characterized in some and fundamental way, it is

single
better to describe him makes or creates
as the animal that
than merely as the animal that makes tools, for he makes
more than tools and makes tools in order to do so. He
bequeaths a social inheritance for future generations to
improve indefinitely. Animal production is uniformly
monotonous, human production is cumulatively various.
§6 The Economico- Technological Theory of History

We have already suggested that Marx's account of
Historical Materialism is open to two interpretations.
The technological interpretation we have now discussed
and it is the economico-technological interpretation
which we must now briefly consider. It is this second
way of understanding his view which Marx must have
had in mind when he said that the anatomy of "civil
society" or of "the material conditions of life" is to be
found in political economy, and when he wrote of "the
economic structure of society". No doubt this wider
view established itself in Marx's mind because of his
familiarity with the economic theories of the time accord-
ing to which labour is the source of economic value, and
production a major theme of economic science. Men must
produce to live and in consequence economics is basic in
life and society. If Marx had asserted that the economy
plays an important part in human society and human

history he would have been saying something that needed
saying at the time at which he was writing, when the
importance of economic factors had not been fully
appreciated by all historians and social theorists. It is
true that among others, Adam Smith and Saint-Simon
had preceded Marx in this, but Marx developed the idea
in new ways and gave an impetus to the study of social

and economic history. But the observation that economic
factors play an important part in history does not dis-
tinguish Marxism from the views of such writers as
Thorold Rogers who in his Economic Interpretation of
History (1888) wrote that "economical causes have had
much to do with the events about which the philosopher
of history dilates and prates chaotically" (7th edition,
p. 250). Rogers did not, however, like Marx, hold that
economic factors are the sole independent determining
factors in history, but on the contrary allowed weight to
religious and political factors too.
According to Marx, however, politics is part of the
superstructure and religion is an "ideological form".
In putting this forward he is saying that political and
religious changes always follow after and as a result of
economico-technological changes. One might expect that
such a view would have to be supported by a mass of
historical evidence collected from different places and
periods. But although Marx brought forward a lot of
evidence to support his case, he did not look around for
examples that might have counted against it. His grounds
for it appear to be mainly theoretical and to depend upon
the theory that man is essentially or fundamentally a
tool-making animal and that his other activities are
dependent on this. Marx believed that politics, law and
the ideologies (religion, must be secondary or
art, etc.)
and historical phenomena by comparison
tertiary social
with the economico-technological features of society.
Why this, on Marx's view, must be so can only be under-
stood by reference to his account of politics and the
ideologies.
§7 The Legal and Political Superstructure
Marx's view is that law and politics are subordinate

in brief
to technology and economics. He means that no funda-
mental political change can be understood in political
terms but must receive its explanation in terms of the
economic structure of society. We don't know what is
really going on until we look beyond such things as the
deposition of kings and the removal of aristocratic
privileges to such things as expanding markets and new
methods of production. I have referred to fundamental
political changes, because it can hardly be suggested that
every political change, for example the death of a king
or the success of an intrigue, must have deep economic
causes. An example that was constantly in Marx's mind
was the series of revolutions in France, the so-called Great
Revolution of 1789 and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
Marx read a great deal about the Revolution of 1789
and at one time thought of writing a history of it. In
The Holy Family there is a whole section devoted to it,
and in 1852 in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
he prefaced his discussion of Louis Napoleon's coup
d'etat of 1 85 1 with some comments on the significance
of the earlier revolutions. Marx referred to the way in
which the leaders of the Revolution of 1789 had regarded
themselves as like Roman republicans establishing and
maintaining the ancient republican virtues. They used
the high-flown language of the ancient heroes to dignify
the great historical task they obscurely felt that they were
carrying out.
Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just,

Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and masses of
the old French Revolution, completed in Roman dress and

Roman phrases the task of their time, the releasing and the
establishment of modern bourgeois society. The first
named of these men broke the feudal basis into pieces and
mowed heads that had grown from it. The
off the feudal
last namedcreated within France the conditions under
which free competition could be developed, the parcelled
out landed property could be exploited, and the unfettered
industrial productive force could be utilized. Outside the
frontiers of France he everywhere swept the feudal
organizations away as far as was necessary in order to
provide a suitable up-to-date environment on the European
continent for the bourgeois society in France. Once the
new social organization was established, the antediluvian
colossuses disappeared and with them the resurrected
—
Romans the Brutuses, Gracchuses, Publicolas, the
tribunes, the senators and Caesar himself. Bourgeois
society in sober reality had produced its true
its
interpreters and mouthpieces in the Says, Cousins,
Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots, its real
army commanders sat at financiers' desks, and the blubber-
faced Louis XVIII was its political head. Completely
absorbed in the production of wealth and in the peaceful
battle of competition, it no longer noticed that ghosts from
the days of Rome had watched over its cradle. But
however unheroic bourgeois society is, it had had need of
heroism, of self-sacrifice, of terror, of civil war and of
battles of the nations in order to get into the world.
And its gladiators found Roman Republic the ideals
in the
and the forms of art, the self-deceptions which they
needed in order to hide from themselves the bourgeois
limitations of their battles and to raise their passion to the
level of the great historical tragedy. Similarly a century
earlier at another level of evolution, Cromwell and the
English people had borrowed speech, passions and
illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois

revolution. When the real aim was reached, when the
bourgeois transformation of English society was completed,
Locke supplanted Habukkuk.
There are some puzzles in this brilliant passage. For

example, Marx could not have really meant that Camille
Desmoulins, a mere journalist, and politicians such as
Danton, broke the feudal basis into pieces, for the basis
consists of technological and economic factors. But they
did play their part in "mowing off" the feudal heads
that —
had grown from the feudal basis the king and queen
and the aristocrats who were guillotined or massacred.
What Marx does emphasize here is that these political
revolutionaries did not really understand what they were
bringing about. They looked upon themselves as Romans
attacking against tremendous odds, whereas in fact they
were making France and Europe safe for industrial
capitalism. They were "releasing and establishing
bourgeois society". That is, they were freeing it from the
feudal chains that still bound it, from legal and political
arrangements which belonged to a feudal society and
could only be trammels and hindrances to the newly
formed forces of production. They pictured themselves as
rebelling with stoic virtue against blood-stained tyrants,
whereas their republican declamations and posturings
were directed against men whose power had already been
lost. The dying pomp of feudal aristocracy was faced
and extinguished by men masquerading as Ancient
Romans whose pre-feudal civilization was even less
relevant to the economic circumstances. This heroic age
of the Revolution was followed by one in which the
bourgeois outlook was more consciously expressed, when

J.-B. Say, the economist, developed the views of Adam
Smith, Victor Cousin pieced together new philosophical
positions, Royer-Collard combined philosophy and
Benjamin Constant elaborated the philosophy of
politics,
liberalism and Guizot moved from historical research and
interpretation to political leadership, and, as has been
seen, had Marx deported from Paris. The real power was
now that of the men who controlled finance and industry.
The significance of "the blubber-faced Louis XVIII"
was that, although the rightful heir to the throne of
France as brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, he was a
mere figure-head presiding over the very form of society
which his brother's executioners had fought for. What,
Marx is here suggesting, could more clearly show how
subordinate politics and government are to the techno-
logicaland economic basis of society?
In Marx's opinion the Revolution of 1830 which led to
the replacement of the Bourbon Charles X by the Orleanist
Louis-Philippe was a shift of influence within the
bourgeois class from those closely associated with land-
ownership to those among whom industrial influences
predominated. Marx wrote that
The great landed property interest, in spite of its

flirtation with feudalism and in spite of its pride in race,
was rendered fully bourgeois through the development of
modern society. Thus, the Tories in England imagined
for a long time that they were enthusiasts for the monarchy,
the Church and the beauties of the old English constitution,
until the day of danger made them realize that they were
enthusiasts only for groundrents.
As a result of the Revolution of 1848 the Orleans

monarchy was overthrown and a republic established.
In February sudden outbreak of revolution
1848 a
removed the king and government was set up,
a provisional
containing various political groups, even socialists. But
socialist influence was strongly resisted by the other
parties and when the socialists attempted violence they
were put down, as happened in the workers' risings in
Paris and Lyons in June 1848. A Social-Democratic
Party was formed, which set out to unite the working
class with the small bourgeoisie, called by Marx the
petite-bourgeoisie. Marx describes the smaller bourgeoisie
as a "between-class", a class of shopkeepers and waiters.
One must not imagine that the democratic repre-

sentatives all shopkeepers or are enthusiastic for
are
them. They can be poles apart from them in education
and in personal circumstances. What makes them
representatives of the smaller-bourgeoisie is that it never
enters their heads to transcend the bounds which confine
the lives of the smaller-bourgeoisie. Therefore these
representatives are driven to the same tasks and theoretical
solutions of them that the material interests and social
situation of those they represent in practice force upon
them. This is in general the relationship of the political
and literary representatives of a class which they represent.
After giving his version of the events that followed the

revolts of June, 1848, Marx says that a law of 31st May,
1850 finally brought the manoeuvring to an end and
re-established the bourgeois class in supreme control.
The law of 31st May 1850 was the coup (V'etat of the
bourgeoisie. All the conquests it had hitherto made
against the Revolution were only provisional in character.

They were put in doubt as soon as the National Assembly
of the period left the scene. They now all depended upon
the chances of a vote with universal suffrage, and the
history of voting since 1848 conclusively proved that in the
degree to which the actual rule of the bourgeoisie
developed, its moral leadership over the mass of the people
was lost. Universal suffrage declared itself on 10th March
right against the rule of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie
replied with the outlawing of universal franchise. The
law of 31st May was thus one of the necessities of the
class struggle.
From this analysis we can see that Marx took class

interests as the clue to political events.Although working
men supported the revolutionaries of 1789, 1830 and 1848,
it was the bourgeoisie and peasantry who gained most
from them. The period 1789-93 was the heroic age of the
bourgeoisie when they gained political power and used it
to further the development of industry and commerce.
The restored Bourbons played in, so to say, with those
members of the bourgeois class who had land-owning
interests. The Revolution of 1830 was the reassertion of
the position of the financial and industrial wing of the
bourgeois class. In this revolution, as in 1789, the working
class or proletariat supported the bourgeois revolution-
aries. They also supported the Revolution of 1848, but
this soon became a parting of the ways. Working-class
revolts were now suppressed by the bourgeoisie, who used
the services of gangs of poor men whom Marx describes
as ''the ragged proletariat" (Lumpenproletariat). Small-
scale bourgeoisie, shopkeepers and the like, attempted to
ally themselves with the proletariat so as to mitigate the
strugglebetween the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Such attempts at class reconciliation, Marx believed, were
doomed to failure, and he also thought them wrong as
well, as in his opinion the smaller bourgeoisie are con-
temptible because they endeavour to withdraw from the
struggle that must develop once the bourgeoisie are
established as the ruling class. This struggle would be
between the two opposed classes, the wage-earning,
exploited proletariat and the bourgeoisie consisting of
land-owning, financial and industrial capitalists and their
hangers-on. In his coup d'etat of December, 1851,
Louis Napoleon had used gangs of men to assault and
intimidate his opponents. Marx recognized that these
men were mostly from the working classes, and he
supposed that they must have been too poor and demoral-
ized to refuse the pay they were offered. But just as the
petit-bourgeois were too cowardly to affect events, so
these ragged proletarians could not be of decisive influence,
since they were separated from the class to which they
really belonged.
We can therefore put Marx's interpretation of events in
this way. There main factors involved in the
are three
economic production process, viz.,land, labour and capital.
The French Revolution of 1789 seemed to its leaders to be
a rising of the people against arbitrary tyranny. Liberty,
equality and fraternity were sought for all, and unjust
privileges were removed. This, however, is a superficial
reading of events. It is true that the peasants and workers
supported the revolution against the aristocrats, but it was
the bourgeoisie, the men of business and industry, who
chiefly gained by it. At the Bourbon Restoration, some
of the pre-revolutionary figureheads were reinstated, but
it was the bourgeoisie who now ruled. In 1830 the

in fact
Bourbon figureheads were removed and power shifted
more definitely towards the industrial capitalists. Even
so, the working supported this revolution, as they did
class
the Revolution of 1848 in its early stages. But once it
became clear that the working classes might have aims
that conflicted with those of the bourgeoisie, the franchise
was limited and the bourgeoisie turned against their former
allies. From then onwards events had to be interpreted in
terms of a struggle between two classes, the bourgeois

ruling class and the proletarian exploited class. The
formation of parties, the introduction of legislation,
the adoption of illegal measures, were forms taken by this
overmastering struggle. The distinctions within the
bourgeoisie between industrialists and agriculturalists and
the distinction between large and small capitalists, are
relatively unimportant. What is important is some
that
men live by employing others to work for wages and most
men live by selling their labour so that their employers may
make profits. The struggle which determines the major
political movements is that between profit-makers and
wage-earners. The politics of capitalist society is the
politics of holding the working classes in check. Whether
this is done by democratic or means depends on
dictatorial
circumstances. The between democrats and
distinction
anti-democrats is secondary and evanescent, that between
proletariat and capitalist is primary and decisive. That is
how Marx interpreted the politics of his time.
§8 The Ideological Superstructure

movements then, according to Marx and Engels,
Political
depend upon technological and economic movements, and
political groupings and manoeuvrings are surface

phenomena by comparison with the economic
conflicts of
interest that give rise to them. But political regimes and
governments and parties justify their proceedings by
reference to doctrines, theories and philosophies, by what
in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels called
"ideas, outlooks and concepts". The men who produce
these doctrines and theories are still further removed from
the industrial and economic fundamentals of social life
than the kings and politicians, and hence there is an
ideological superstructure in need of even more inter-
pretation than the political superstructure. What men say
about what they are doing and why they are doing it cannot
be relied upon as an account of what they are really doing.
This is not necessarily because they are lying, but because
they do not understand the forces that are moving society,
and with society themselves. According to Feuerbach,
religious believers think they are serving a supernatural
Creator when in reality they are celebrating the achieve-
ments of mankind or are indulging in wishful thinking.
They are misled by illusions which arise from their earthly
circumstances. According to Marx and Engels, this is the
position of most of those men who write books on moral
and political philosophy, who write plays and novels,
and even of those who compose music and paint pictures.
They look upon themselves as maintaining and creating
the culture of their society, whereas it is trade and industry
that do this while they merely justify or decorate what they
do not fully comprehend. They are symptoms rather than
causes, surface phenomena rather than underlying reality.
Interpreting what they say in their own terms is rather like
accepting what Freud later called the manifest content
Historical Materialism \ 11
of a dream as if it were all that the dream signified. Those

who grasp what is really going on in industry and trade,
however, can interpret these ideological productions,
much dreams explains them in terms
as the interpreter of
of the latent content. Like Feuerbach before him and
Freud after him (see David Stafford-Clark, What Freud
Really Said, Schocken Books, 1967, Chapter 3, especially pp.
63-4), Marx employed this method of seeking to elicit the

basic from the derivative, to penetrate the disguise, to dis-
illusion. Those who can practise the method of historical
materialism can understand what religious apologists,
philosophers and artists are doing better than they can
themselves.
Marx and Engels formulated the theory of ideologies in
their unpublished book, The German Ideology. This, as
the title indicates, was concerned with the illusory
philosophies and doctrines current in Germany at the
time they wrote the book. They were thinking of the
Hegelian philosophy and of the various philosophers
'
such as the 'Young Hegelians" who claimed to criticize
and develop The men whom Marx and Engels were
it.
Germany in
criticizing interpreted the reality of life in
terms of their own ideas, but Marx and Engels claimed
to interpret their ideas in terms of the German reality.
This is what they wrote about the place of ideology in
society:
The production of ideas, conceptions, of consciousness

directly interwoven with the material activity and
is at first
the material commerce of men, the language of real life.

Conceiving, thinking, the mental commerce of men,
appears here as the direct efflux of their material behaviour.
The same is true of mental production, as it shows itself

in the language of the politics, of the law, the morality,
the religion, the metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are
the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., but real,
active men, as they are conditioned by a definite develop-
ment of their productive forces and of the reciprocal
relationships corresponding to them up to their most
extensive forms. Consciousness can never be anything
else but conscious being, and the being of men is their
actual life-process. If in the whole of ideology men and
their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera
obscura, this phenomenon arises from their historical
life-process just as the inversion of objects on the retina
arises from their directly physical life-process.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends
from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.
That is, the starting-point is not from what men say, what
they imagine and what they conceive, nor from men as
spoken about, thought about, imagined, conceived, in
order to arrive at embodied men: the starting-point is
with really active men, and from this real life-process the
development of their ideological reflexes and echoes of
this life-process are exhibited. The shadowy forms in the
brain of men are necessary sublimates of their material
life-process, which is empirically establishable and linked
to material pre-conditions. Morality, religion, metaphysics
and the and the forms of consciousness
rest of ideology,
corresponding to them, thus no longer retain the semblance
of independence. They have no history, no development,
but men, developing their material production and their
material commerce with one another alter, with this
their reality, their thought and the products of their
thought. It not consciousness that determines life,
is
but life that determines consciousness. In the first

way of looking at things, the starting-point is with
consciousness as the living individual; in the second,

with the real living individuals themselves, as they
are in real life, with consciousness considered only as
their consciousness.
It is very important to notice what Marx and Engels

here class as ideologies, or as types of ideology, and what
they exclude from this category. In the first of the para-
graphs we have just quoted reference is made to mental
production as it shows itself in "the language of politics,
of the law, the morality, the religion, the metaphysics, etc.
of a people". The noun "language" governs politics, the
law, moralists, religion and metaphysics, so that Marx and
Engels appear to be thinking of the language in which men
talk about and metaphysics.
politics, law, morality, religion
There is a gulf, they are arguing, between what men say
about these things and what they are really doing when
they concern themselves with them. Men cannot cease to
be embodied creatures producing their means of life in
association with their fellows, but the very conditions
under which they live may lead them to talk as if they
were, at least potentially, members of a supersensible
world. The ideologies, therefore, are ways of talking in
which men conceal themselves from themselves and one
another. They can do this in political, legal, moral,
religious and metaphysical talk.
In the second of the paragraphs quoted above, Marx and
Engels mention morality, religion and metaphysics "and
the rest of ideology". In neither of these lists do they
mention the natural sciences, and it is most important to
realize why they do not. Ideological thinking is con-
trasted with realistic thinking. We have already seen how
Marx and Engels accepted Feuerbach's views about the

illusory nature of religious thinking. They also accepted
his view that speculative philosophy (which, in The
German Ideology they call "metaphysics") is equally
misleading. The thinking that is not illusory is that which
is based on sense-experience of the world in which men
live and work. Men's "life-processes" can be observed,

described and interpreted without illusions. They are,
Marx and Engels say, "empirically establishable". Marx
uses a similar expression in the Critique
of Political
Economy, when, in the Preface, he says that the economic
conditions of production can be "faithfully substantiated
by the methods of the natural sciences". The ideas of
natural scientists, therefore, are not illusory, nor are the
ideas put forward by Marx and Engels when they subject
human society to realistic scientific analysis. It should be
noticed, too, that when Marx writes of the "ideological
forms" in the Critique of Political Economy he does not
include morality among them but does include art. We
shall see later that there are obscurities in Marx's account
of morality.
When Marx and Engels write of "ideologists" they are
not referring to members of any specific social class. The
division of society into social classes is a consequence of
its economics and technology and the types of property
connected with them. In modern society there are real

divisions into landowners and capitalists on the one hand
and wage-earners or proletarians on the other. On the
Marxist view these class distinctions and the subdivisions
within them are objective distinctions and divisions in the
facts of society itself. These distinctions are really there,
even though there are people who would like to deny them.
Furthermore, they give rise to real and

oppositions
conflicts in the lives of men. The pronouncements and
arguments of ideologists, on the other hand, result from
these real oppositions and conflicts, but do not initiate or
create them. Ideologists are a sort of shadow boxers, who,
by some strange misunderstanding, believe they are
landing real blows in the course of real fights. They can
be compared with those small boys who pretend and
perhaps for a while believe that they are driving the bus
when they turn an imaginary steering wheel from their
seat behind the driver.
We may now see that Marx and Engels conceived
themselves to have laid the foundations of an empirical
science of society. In society taken as it is at a given time,
the industrial and economic processes of life are the basis
of everything else, of law and politics, of religion,
philosophy and culture generally. The prime causes of
social change are also to be found in the industrial and
economic processes of life. Social change takes place
through class conflict, and the conflicting classes can be
objectively distinguished from one another in terms of
their relation to the basic industrial and economic con-
ditions. With this scientific knowledge of society at their
disposal, historians can distinguish the main epochs of
history on objective grounds. Indeed, when the notions
of basis and superstructure, of class and ideology, of
revolution and class-domination are properly understood,
history can be transformed into a science.
§9 Historical Dialectics
We have already mentioned Hegel's account of human

history a dialectic in which freedom emerges in

as
different forms as nations struggle with one another,
achieve their missions and are overcome by other nations
with new missions to perform. This was the background
which must have affected the conception of human
history that Marx and Engels came to adopt, and it is
natural to suppose that their theory of history was the
Hegelian one with classes substituted for nations. Some
present-day critics of Marxism take this view, and Lenin,
as well as the dialectical materialists of Eastern Europe
and China, emphasize the Hegelian features of Marx's
historical materialism. Marx himself, however, vacillated
in his attitude towards Hegel. Like Feuerbach, he
rejected Hegel's idealism. On his view, it was not spirit
that moved history, but economic and industrial processes.
He rejected philosophical speculation, and sought to
make the study of history scientific rather than philo-
sophical. A letter which Marx wrote on to Engels
14th January, 1858 issometimes referredshowing to as
Marx's admiration for Hegel, but, while it shows that
Hegel's Logic was at that time of interest to him, it shows
that he also had serious doubts about it. Marx returned
to the topic of Hegel in the Preface to the second edition
of Capital in 1873. Here Marx addresses himself to a
positivist critic of Capital who, in the Revue Positiviste
had reproached him for ''having treated economics
metaphysically". Marx defends himself against this by
quoting from other reviewers of Capital who had described
his work as employing "the deductive method of the
whole English school" and as "analytical". Marx then
considers a long passage from a St. Petersburg journal
which he reports as saying:
that my method of investigation is strictly realist, but that

my method of exposition is unfortunately German-
dialectical.
Marx then goes on to say that nevertheless this journal

had given good account of his attitude towards the study
a
of society. The review had emphasized the following
aspects of Marx's view: that he was seeking not only for
the laws of social phenomena of a given period, but also of
"the laws of their change"; that social orders follow one
another in necessary sequences; that social change is a
"natural-historical process" going on independently of
the wills of individual men; that "the laws of economic
life" are not the same in all societies, but that "every
historical period has its own laws"; that human society
proceeds according to different laws from those prevailing
in animal and vegetable organisms; that types of human
society grow, flourish and decline; that the dead societies
are replaced by "other, higher ones". Having quoted all
this, Marx then says:
When the writer describes what he calls my method so

aptly, and, so far asmy application of it is concerned, so
generously, what else has he described but the dialectical
method?
If this is so, what is the dialectical method here

described? It is like emphasis on change
Hegel's in its
and on struggle and on the development of new and

superior social orders. It is also like Hegel's in that it
regards human societies as different in nature from
biological organisms. It differs from Hegel's in treating
social change as a "natural-historical process". It differs

from Hegel's, too, in claiming to foresee, not only that the
present social order will decline and disappear, but also
that it willbe replaced by a specific type of social order,
that of communism. According to Marx, he had
developed "the rational kernel" of that dialectical method
which in Hegel's writings was a form of "mystification".
The paragraph with which he ends this Preface shows
what Marx had chiefly in mind:
The contradictory movement in capitalist society makes

itself most strongly felt by the practical bourgeois in the
vicissitudes of the periodical cycles to which modern
—
industry is subject, and in their climax universal crisis.
Such a crisis is again on the way, although it is only in its
preliminary phases. By the universality of its appearance
on the scene and the intensity of its effects it willbludgeon
itself into the heads of the playboys of the new, holy
Prussian-German Empire.
/ 85
4 Profit and Exploitation
§i Socialism and the Theory of Value
Marx's and Engels' most interesting and important

contribution to the understanding of history and society
is undoubtedly their theory of historical materialism.
They themselves, however, and their followers, have
attached great importance to the theory of exchange
value that Marx set out in a number of writings, notably
in Towards a Critique of Political Economy (1859) ano^ m
Capital, Volume I (1867). Like several earlier attempts by
Marx to expound comprehensive theory of human
a
society, neither of these works was completed. After
Marx's death Engels arranged the publication of Volumes
II (1885) and III (1894) of Capital from manuscripts
left behind by Marx, and later on some chapters entitled
Theories of Surplus Value, containing material that

might have been intended for a fourth volume, were
published by Karl Kautsky in 1905-10. It was only
/ WHAT MARX REALLY SAID
after thecommencement of his association with Engels

that Marx turned his attention to economic theory. He
then made himself acquainted with the so-called classical
economics of his day, as propounded by Adam Smith,
J.-B. Say, Malthus and Ricardo, and by their many
disciples. In developing his own economic views Marx
constantly had in mind John Stuart Mill's Principles
of Political Economy (ist edition, 1848) and Nassau
Senior's work with the same title which had appeared in
1825.
An assumption of the classical economists was that
their theories were universal in scope, applying to any
society in which wealth is produced. Central to their
theories was the notion of value. David Ricardo, the most
influential of the economists of the generation after
Adam Smith, wrote in the first edition of his Principles of
Political Economy and Taxation (18 17), that for anything
to have exchange value, it must first have utility or use
value, for if no one wanted an article no one would want
to exchange anything for it either. But not everything
that has utility has exchange value, for such things as
air and water which can be had in abundance have no
exchange value although they are useful, indeed necessary,
to those who enjoy them. In order to possess exchange
value, therefore, commodities must have two further
features: they must be scarce and they must be products
of human labour. Some objects, such as rare statues and
books, obtain their value from their scarcity alone but "by
far the greatest part of those goods which are the objects
of desire, are procured by labour".
Ricardo went on to argue that it is "the quantity of
labour realized in commodities" which is "the foundation
Profit and Exploitation j 87
of the exchangeable value of all things, excepting those

which cannot be increased by human industry". Thus
Ricardo expressed himself in terms of the so-called
Labour Theory of Value, a view which was widely accepted
by other economists of the time, although historians of
economics today suggest that Ricardo had a Cost of
Production Theory of value rather than a Labour Theory.
According to the labour theory of value, capital was
stored labour: if, for example, a man hunts an animal with
a spear, then if he succeeds in killing it, its value is
equivalent to the labour of hunting and the labour

necessary to make the spear for that This
purpose.
example was given by Ricardo but he also gives a more
realistic example: "the exchangeable value" of a pair of
stockings, he held, depends upon the labour spent in
growing the cotton, and in conveying the cotton to the
country of manufacture, the labour of the spinner and
weaver, the labour of the retail dealer, and a proportion
of the labour of those who built the factory and shop, and
so on.
According to this sort of theory, wages are the price
paid for labour, and wages tend to approximate to the
'
'price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one
with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race,
without either increase or diminution". If the demand
for labour increases, the supply remaining the same,
wages increase; if the demand falls, the supply remaining
the same, wages fall; but these movements tend towards
what it costs to enable workers to live and work at the
standard of life which is customary at the time. Thus
Ricardo held that wages, by and large, were equal to
whatever was necessary for the subsistence of the labourer.
/ WHAT MARX REALLY SAID
Profit was, according to Ricardo, the return necessary to

secure a supply of capital and to make it worthwhile to
the capitalist to go to the trouble and risk of providing it.
Just as wages tend towards the subsistence level, so profits

naturally tend to fall. "The farmer and manufacturer can
no more live without profit, than the labourer without
wages." Profits then, are essential features of the system
which Ricardo was endeavouring to understand and to
explain.
Ricardo indeed set out to understand the workings of
the economic system rather than to criticize or justify it.
In he came to see that labour is a

fulfilling this task,
commodity with a price, and that money and capital have

prices too. The labourer's wage is what it costs to pro-
duce and maintain him, just as profit is what it costs to
get a supply of capital and to maintain and replace it, and
interest is what it costs to get a loan of money. In working
out his theoretical scheme, Ricardo tells us that he
assumed a competitive system with private property.
Coolly and drily he drew the consequences involved in it.
He saw that more and better machinery might increase
the general prosperity, but he was by no means exuberant
in his optimism. He thought it was the increase of wealth
and capital which, by raising the demand for labour, had
most prospect of raising wages. He thought that wage
bargains, like all others, should "be left to the fair and
free competition of the market' Poor-law relief, therefore,
' .
in so far as it went against this principle, was bad. The

Poor Laws had "rendered restraint superfluous, and have
invited imprudence, by offering it a portion of the wages
of prudence and industry", and therefore they should be
gradually contracted "by impressing on the poor the
Profit and Exploitation / 89
value of independence, by teaching them that they must

look not to systematic or casual charity, but to their
own exertions for support".
It is not surprising that these views met with opposition
from socialist writers. The labour theory of value pro-
vided them with one line of criticism. Why, it was asked,
should capitalists receive anything at all if labour is the
source of all value? If labour is the source of all value,
then labour should receive the whole of what it produces,
without the intervention of landlords and capitalists.
Esther Lowenthal in her book, The Ricardian Socialists
(191 1 ),
has summarized the arguments used. The general
idea was that for the capitalist to receive more than a wage
for the actual work he has done in managing his firm is a
trick played upon the workmen. We have seen that
Engels, in his 1844 Critique of Political Economy, had said
that the whole system in which labour was a market
commodity was "a brotherhood of thieves". Marx
believed that he could show that the most pessimistic of
Ricardo's fears were inevitable features of the capitalist
system. He thought he could show, indeed, that the
system was even more dismal (to use Carlyle's word) than
Ricardo himself had believed, and that within it wages
must be kept low, small capitalists must be forced into
bankruptcy, and monopoly must prevail. Profits were a
trick and a cheat, but an inextricable and unavoidable
part of the capitalist system. Nothing therefore could be
done to improve the system itself. The only way to stop
the cheating was to abolish the system altogether.
§2 Surplus Value and Exploitation

What, then, is this trick which, according to Marx, is
inexorably played against the wage-earner in the capitalist

system? We have seen that Marx regarded it as Ricardo's
view that labour is the source of exchange value. In
enlarging on this Marx concluded that the values of
commodities are, by and large, determined by the amount
'
of 'socially necessary labour" incorporated in them. But

if this is so, how could an employer make a profit by
selling goods at prices determined by the labour put into

them by the men working to produce them for him? Or
we may put the question this way. The value of the
commodity produced by the workman for his employer
comprises the labour contributed and incorporated in the
commodity by the workman plus the labour stored in the
machines he uses and transferred to the commodity he
produces with their help. This being so, how could it
profit any capitalist to go into business? What advantage
is there for him in this process of incorporating value,
that is labour, into commodities which, by and large, sell
at prices which represent this value? Marx's answer to
this question is as follows.
What the worker sells to the capitalist is not merely the
labour he incorporates into the commodities he makes but
his labour power, his ability to work and produce, and the
capitalist pays for this labour power by agreeing to a rate
of wages. The worker's labour power, since it is bought
and sold, is a commodity, and as a commodity it has value.
This value, according to Marx, consists in the labour
necessary to maintain the worker and enable him to
reproduce his kind. Since things tend to exchange for
their value, theemployer pays his workers those amounts
of money which enable them to obtain their subsistence.
That is, he pays them wages that enable them to buy the
amounts of food and drink and housing that will keep

them and their families going. According to Marx's
labour theory of value, the value of the worker's labour
power is the amount of labour socially necessary to
produce the worker's subsistence. Amounts of labour
are measured by the time spent labouring, so that the
subsistence of the worker has as its value the hours of
work socially necessary to secure it. Marx reasoned that
the capitalist is able to strike a bargain with the wage-
earner which requires the latter to work for a longer
period than is necessary in order to secure his subsistence.
That is, according to Marx, the capitalist can get the
wage-earner to give him more value than the real value of
the work done. To this extra value Marx gave the name
surplus value. It is from this surplus value, he argued,
that industrialists and merchants get their profits, bankers
and other money-lenders their interest, and landowners
their rent. This is how the essential fraud of capitalism is
effected. Capitalism would be impossible without surplus
value and is hence, in its very nature, a system of ex-
ploitation. Exploitation is simply the obtaining of surplus
value, the extraction from the worker of more value
than he really costs the capitalist. It is not merely that
some capitalists sometimes exploit their workers, but
rather that all capitalists necessarily exploit their workers.
For without profits there could be no capitalists and
without surplus value and exploitation there could be no
profits.
It is to ask how it comes about that the
natural
capitalistcan induce the worker to work for more hours
than is necessary to produce the value of his subsistence.
Marx's main answer is as follows:
Wherever a part of society posses a monopoly of the

means of production the worker, whether he is free or a
slave, must add to the labour-time necessary for his own
maintenance surplus labour-time in order to produce
means of living for the owner of the means of production,
whether this owner is an Athenian KaXoKayados, an
Etruscan theocrat, a Roman citizen, a Norman baron, an
American shareholder, a Wallachian Boyar or a modern
landlord or capitalist. {Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 8, §2)
It is surprising that Marx should here give examples

taken from non-capitalist, as well as from capitalist,
societies, but it is clear that in the passage he is saying
that it is because of their monopoly position that capitalists
can exploit wage-earners. Exploitation would be rendered
more difficult, or even impossible, if wage-earners had not
to face a monopoly of capitalists who own the means of
production and hence can always get the better of the
bargain.
Another point to notice in Marx's account of surplus
value is that he argued that the wage-earner generally
gives credit to the employer. Marx's reason for saying
this is wages are generally paid after the work
that
contracted for has been done.
In all countries with the capitalist method of production,

the working time is only paid for when it has functioned
throughout the period specified in the contract, e.g. at the
end of each week. Everywhere, therefore, the worker lends
the capitalist the use-value of his labour-power; he allows
the buyer to consume it before he has paid the price; thus
the worker everywhere gives credit to the capitalist.
{Capital Vol. I, Ch. 4, §3)
should also be noted that Marx claimed that his

It
account of surplus value is purely scientific, a matter of
description and analysis, rather than a moral indictment.
From many passages in which this is said or implied we
may choose the following:
It is an extraordinarily cheap form of sentimentality to

regard as coarse or brutal this method of determining the
value of labour power, which in fact arises from the nature
of the case. {Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 4, §3)
The daily maintenance of the labour power costs only
half a day's labour, although the labour power can work
a whole working day,
[Marx takes this as an example and is not suggesting that

this is the proportion that always holds.]
so that the value that its use creates during a working day
is twice the value of a day's labour power. This is fortunate
for the buyer, but is in no way an injustice against the
seller. {Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 5, §2)
This repudiation of moral criticism is found also in the

chapter of Capital entitled "The Working Day" where
Marx writes:
The capitalist upholds his right as buyer when he tries

to make the working day as long as possible, and if possible
to make two working days out of one. On the other hand,
the specific nature of the commodity that has been sold
[to him] sets a limit upon the buyer's consumption of it,
and the worker upholds his right as seller when he tries to
restrict the working day to a normal length. Thus there is
here an antinomy in which right conflicts with right and
both are hallowed by the law of the exchange of

commodities. Between two equal rights it is force that
decides. (Capital Vol. I, Ch. 8, §i)
In these passages Marx appears to be deprecating the

passing of moral judgments condemning the exploit-
ation of the workers by the capitalists. It is sentimentality
to describe it as rough or brutal, and both wage-earners
and employers have right on their side. If this means that
the issue can only be settled by force, this is a statement of
fact and analysis, not a moral indictment. Marx seems to
be refusing to appeal either to men's hearts or sympathies
or to their sense of justice. Yet all this is belied by things
he says elsewhere in Capital. For example, in Chapter 8,
§5, Marx writes:
In its blind, unbridled drive, in its werewolf greed for

surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral
restrictions upon the working-day but also its purely
physical limitations. It usurps the time needed for the
growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body.
It steals the time needed for free air and the light of the
sun. . . .
Werewolves are greedy for the blood of their victims and

steal it from them, so that capital, if it does the same,
must be a particularly unattractive institution. Analysis
and description have been supplemented by denunciation,
and the profit-seeker is held to be Dracula in a rather thin
disguise. Can it be, then, that all this parade of economic
analysis covers, in spite of Marx's disclaimers, a moral
attack upon capitalism? It seems to me that Marx's Capital
is, in its fundamentals, such a moral condemnation.
Profit and Exploitation [ 95
Both in Towards a Critique of Political Economy and in

Volume I of Capital Marx discusses the nature of
commodities, pointing out that they have use value, for
example, shoes are useful for protecting the feet of the
wearer, and that they have exchange value too, as when
the maker of them exchanges them for money or for some
other article made by someone else. We have seen that
Marx, like Ricardo before him, believed that the exchange-
value of commodities represented the labour required to
make them. Marx argued, both in his Critique of Political
Economy and in Capital that in pre-capitalist societies
which had the use of money, the exchange transactions
which men entered into took the form of "the trans-
formation of a commodity into money and the
retransformation of the money into a commodity"
{Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 4, §1). He
symbolized this in the
formula C-M-C, i.e., a commodity is exchanged for money
and the money is then spent on buying some other
commodity. The situation that Marx here calls attention
to is that inwhich money is used as a means of exchanging
goods. In such a situation it is the use-value of the
commodities that matters, and money is not sought for
itself but only for the things it will buy.
Marx contrasts with this plain and beneficial situation

that in which money is first used to buy commodities and
the commodities are then sold for money, symbolized as
M-C-M. In this second type of situation, he says, money
is no longer merely a means of exchange, but has become
capital. In the sequence C-M-C, someone sells a

commodity he is not in need of in order to acquire with the
money something else he is in need of. But in the sequence
M-C-M, a commodity is bought only to be sold again, and
there would be no point in doing this unless the money

obtained at the end exceeds that with which the operator
started the series. The buyer of the commodity only parts
with his money, says Marx, "with the sly purpose of
getting it back again". The use of the word "sly" should
put us on our guard, and Marx goes on to say that the
difference between the first M
in the sequence and the last
M is "surplus value". Capital necessarily implies surplus
value and surplus valueis something which sly men seek.
These men are not concerned with the things that money
will buy but with money itself. They are unnatural men,
veritable werewolves.
In this part of the argument Marx refers at some length
to Aristotle's Politics, Book I, Ch. 9, where Aristotle
distinguishes between the art of household management
("economics") and the art of acquisition ("chrematistic").
Aristotle there argued that it is right and natural to
acquire goods by one's own productive effort or by
purchase, with a view to using them in the proper purposes
of life. On the other hand there is a sort of acquisition
which has as its object merely the making of money.
Commercial activities which have the acquisition of
useful objects as their end are limited activities that cease
when human needs are provided for. But those com-
mercial activities which have money-making as their
object are unlimited and have no natural terminus. Reason-
able needs can be satisfied, whereas money can be, and is,
sought for ad infinitum. Hunger can be satisfied but the
desire for money has no end. From this it is quite clear
that the sequence that Marx labels C-M-C is the kind of
economic activity, with money as a means of exchange
only, that Aristotle thought was morally justified, while
the sequence M-C-M is the unnatural chrematistic which

Aristotle condemned. Aristotle's views on this matter
were influential in medieval Europe and were used as
arguments against charging interest for loans of money.
Strange as it may seem in the light of his own disclaimers,
what Marx did was to revive or reformulate the
Aristotelian and medieval arguments so as to condemn
capitalism as the form of society in which the endless
and infinite search for money perverted the life of the
community. Marx writes:
The capitalist knows that all commodities, however

shabby they look and however badly they smell, are in
faith and in truth money, are inwardly circumcized Jews,
and at the same time a wonderful means of making more
money from money. (Capital^ Vol. I, Ch. 4, §1)
Marx here coarsely identifies profit-seekers with Jews, as

he had already done in On the Jewish Question (1844).
The differencebetween Marx's attitude towards profit
and the medieval moralists' attitude towards usury is
that the latter sought to prevent usury without bringing
about a social revolution, whereas Marx held that profit
and exploitation are essential features of capitalism and
can only be abolished by abolishing capitalism itself.
According to Marx, in capitalistic society the M-C-M
sequence predominates over the C-M-C sequence, the
bad form of chrematistic over the justifiable form of
trade and economy, the insatiable search for the unrealiz-
able over moderation and stability. When we have
grasped this we see that his tortuous and obsolete economic
reasoning is a rather unimportant decoration, or perhaps
even a rather modest drapery, which conceals what is
fundamentally a moral analysis in the Aristotelian or

Thomist style.
A further aspect of Marx's view which should be

noticed that he held that the classical economists were
is
wrong supposing that the economic laws which they

in
claimed to have discovered held for all human societies.
At the end of Chapter 3 I called attention to what Marx
thought was involved in his dialectical method, and one
feature of it was that different forms of society had
different economic laws. Marx believed that capitalist
society had economic laws of its own different from those
of pre-capitalist society. In a sense he was right, in the
sense, namely, that the production of goods for sale so
predominates in capitalist society over production for
immediate use that profit and saleability occupy a special
and dominating place in it. Marx wished to conclude, of
course, that a form of society into which profit did not
enter was not only possible but was certain to emerge. He
did not consider, however, whether there are principles
about the least wasteful allocation of scarce resources
which must apply any economic system, socialist and
to
non-socialist alike. The
Classical Economists were hasty
in concluding that they knew what these principles are,
but if Marx intended to deny that there are any he was
too hasty himself.
§3 Some Inherent Defects of Capitalism
Marx thought he could show that the capitalist system

not only necessitated the exploitation of the workers by
their employers but contained inescapable internal
''antagonisms". One of these consisted in the tendency
towards increased poverty among the workers as the size
and power of was augmented. Linked with this

capital
"Law of Increasing Misery" is the occurrence of periodical
economic crises in the course of which workers lose their
jobs and are only too pleased to return to work on terms
dictated to them by the capitalists. Marx believed that
capitalism required for its working an "industrial reserve
army" of unemployed men. The defenders of capitalism
said that when new capital came into use there was an
increased demand for the labour-power to work it.
According to Marx, however, any advantage that this
might secure for those who got the new jobs was nulli-
fied by the pressure upon them of those who are out of
work:
. . . the pressure of the unemployed on the employed

compels the employed to busy themselves in supplying
more labour, and thus, in a certain degree, makes the
supply of labour independent of the supply of workers.
(Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 23, §3)
The only way in which this "despotism of capital"

could be lessened would be by co-operation between
employed and unemployed workers in trades unions.
But where does this "industrial reserve army" come
from? First, there are those thrown out of work by "the
changing phases of the industrial cycle, so that unem-
ployment is acute during the crisis and chronic in times
of slack trade". Then there are those who change their
jobs, those who are dismissed because of their age, and
those who enter the labour market as children. There is
also, according to Marx, a body of surplus workers always
ready to leave the rural areas, and those whose jobs are
irregular or who are not fit for uninterrupted employment.

Marx concludes:
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital,

extent and energy of its growth, and the greater therefore
the absolute size of the proletariat and the productive
force of its work, the greater the reserve army. The
available labour-power has its extent advanced by the
same causes as those which advance the expansive force
of capital. Therefore, the relative magnitude of the
industrial reserve army increases as wealth increases. But
the larger this reserve army is in relation to the active
labour army, the larger is the mass of the consolidated
surplus population, whose poverty is in inverse relation to
the anguish of its labour. Finally the larger the Lazarus
stratum of the working class and the industrial reserve
army, the larger too becomes official pauperism. This is the
absolute law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws,
it is modified in its realization by numerous circumstances,
the analysis of which would not be in place here. {Capital,

Vol. I, Ch. 23, §4)
A little later in the same section Marx writes:
The accumulation of wealth at one pole of society is at the

same time an accumulation of distress, of anguish in labour,
slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at
the opposite pole, that is, on the side of the class that
produces its own product in the form of capital.
We saw in Chapter i, §3 that quite early in the nine-

teenth century Sismondi and Malthus had called attention
to industrial crises and had suggested that a cause of them
was that the working classes had insufficient money to
buy all the products of capitalist industry. That is, they
had under-consump-
called attention to the possibility of
tion. Sismondi had urged the payment of higher wages
so as to increase the demand in that way. Malthus had
tentatively suggested public works and had also sug-
gested it would help if some classes went in for luxury
spending. Marx was aware of these discussions but,
although he agreed that there was under-consumption, he
rejected the proposed remedies. In Chapter XIX of
Theories of Surplus Value, the unpublished manuscript
that he had hoped to complete as the fourth Volume of
Capital, he was particularly critical of Malthus' advocacy
of luxury spending. Indeed, like most socialists, he
detested Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Popula-
tion (1798) had been first written in order to show that
increasing population was likely to counteract the benefits
(Marx's dislike for "Parson Malthus"
of social reform.
was extended to "other Protestant Parsons who have
shuffled off the Catholic command of celibacy of the
clergy and have taken the motto 'Be fruitful and multiply',
as their specific biblical mission with such success that
they everywhere contribute to the increase of the popula-
tion in a quite unbecoming degree, while at the same time
they preach 'the principle of population' to the workers".
This is only part of an extremely abusive footnote near
the beginning of Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 23.) It was only
natural Marx should be suspicious of Malthus'
that
theories, and he had no sympathy for any suggestions for
removing the evils from capitalism and trying to improve
its working. For he denied that it could be improved.
Surplus value was essential to it, this was exploitation,
exploitation must get worse and worse, the dread
capitalist werewolf must have his blood.
Unemployment, poverty and pauperization — these,

Marx wrote, are "the absolute law of capitalist accumula-
tion". Somewhat inconsistently he also wrote that this,
like all other laws, is subject to modification. But he can
hardly have expected that in capitalist economies unem-
ployment would be lessened or abolished, poverty
diminished and the majority of workers rendered prosper-
ous if not contented. Of course, the capitalism within
which these things have been done is not the laissez-faire
capitalism that Marx was analysing. Nevertheless it is
capitalism in the sense that a large part of the commerce
and industry that goes on in it is carried out with a view
to profit. Increased profits and increased capitalization
have not led to more poverty but to less. The ideas of
Sismondi and of Malthus have been revived and developed
and applied so as to even out trade cycles to some extent
and to lessen the amount of unemployment. The applica-
tion of these policies has brought problems with it, of
course, as the diminution of unemployment beyond a
certain point now presents labour with a monopoly which
society finds it hard to cope with. In Capital Marx was
analysing and stigmatizing a form of society that no
longer exists, and even if his indictment of it were to be
accepted, it would not be applicable or even relevant to
the society in which we live, which has faults of quite a
different order.
/ 103
5 Revolution, the State and the

Communist Ideal
§i The Coming Catastrophe

We have seen that Marx took over from Saint- Simon the
idea that a social system contains within itself the "germ
of its own destruction" which is at the same time the
growing-point of a new social order which will supersede
it. Marx believed that the capitalist order of society was
divided by irreconcilable antagonisms, of which the clash
of rights between worker and employer was the principal.
Like Hegel before him, Marx held that when two rights
clash, the issuemust be settled by force. Furthermore, if
the workers must get poorer and poorer, they will be
provoked to violence by despair. Marx also believed that
the profits of individual capitalists and firms must in-
creasingly diminish and that because of the increasing
poverty of the workers, markets would shrink and goods
remain unsold. Intensified competition between capitalists

would drive the weaker ones out of business and into the
ranks of the proletariat, while those that survived would
concentrate their forces and set up monopolies. The
whole system was then bound to come to an end in a
welter of economic crises, trade disputes, bankruptcies
and universal confusion. At this point, Marx believed,
the workers would rise against the system of capitalist
private property and bring it to an end.
One capitalist finishes off many capitalists. Hand in hand

with this centralization or the expropriation of many
capitalists by a few, the co-operative form of the labour-
process evolves in ever-increasing stages. There is a
conscious application of science to technology, a planned
exploitation of the earth, the transformation of instruments
of labour into instruments of labour that can only be used
in common, economies of all the means of production
through using them as means of production in joint,
social labour. All the peoples are enmeshed in the network
of the world market so that the capitalist regime assumes
an international character. With the constantly diminish-
ing number of the capitalist magnates who usurp and
monopolize all the advantages of this transformative
process, there is an increase in the mass of distress,
oppression, bondage, degeneration, exploitation. But
there is also a rising of the working class, who will have
been constantly growing in numbers and are schooled,
united and organized through the working of the capitalist
process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes
a brake on the method of production which has flourished
with it and under it. Centralization of the means of
production and socialization of labour reach a point at
which they are incompatible with the capitalist integument.
Revolution, the State and the Communist Ideal / 105
This bursts asunder. The hour of capitalist private

property strikes. The expropriators are expropriated.
{Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 24, §7)
This was published in 1867, and Marx did not regard

it as a very long-term prophecy. Like those early Chris-
tians who expected Christ to return in glory any day,
Marx thought that the capitalism of his time would
explode and be replaced by a new order. It was only
after the failure and suppression of the Paris Commune in
1 87 1 that Marx's hopes of a speedy transformation began
to fade. The ultimate hope, of course, remained, and was

transmitted to his followers, many of whom still cherish it.
But a hundred years after these words were published a

modified capitalism still remains, taking different forms in
different countries. Poverty has not increased. Profits
continue to be obtained, though they are heavily taxed.
Capitalist enterprisesexpand and merge with one another,
sometimes at the promptings of governments elected by
working class voters. But small new enterprises con-
stantly enter the system, some failing, others going on to
expand and prosper. As Marx predicted, scientific
discoveries are increasingly applied in the industrial
field. But trades unions now have a lot of influence in
deciding when and how rapidly these applications can be
made. Socialized and co-operative methods of production
have not so far proved incompatible with capitalist
private property. Indeed, the ownership of shares has
spread and unit trusts have made it possible for many
more people to participate in the ownership of trade and
industry. But, again as Marx predicted, the association of
workers in large industries has led them to form cohesive
groups. But Marx did not predict that when the workers
work shorter hours, the employments of their leisure take
on an added importance. Taking part in sport and watch-
ing it, give rise to different loyalties. Motoring tends to
tighten the family bond and to encourage individual
pursuits and explorations. The coexistence of capitalism
with universal suffrage and competing political parties
has shifted power towards organized labour and has
encouraged hostility towards employers without dis-
couraging the pursuit of private advantage. If collapse
and catastrophe do take place, they are as likely to result
from too much consumption and too little labour in-
judiciously deployed, as from underconsumption and
overwork.
§2 Organizing the Workers

In 1864 Marx was active in the formation of the Inter-
Working-men's Association, the so-called First
national
This had its headquarters in London, and
International.
Marx and his French and German associates had to get
the support of the less revolutionary English trade-
unionists. Among concrete reforms for which the
Association worked was the legal restriction of the length
of the working day. Marx, of course, looked upon this as
an attempt to limit the amount of surplus value which the
capitalist could extort from the worker, but some of his
English associates just regarded it as a means of bettering
the condition of their members within a system which

they did not question in any fundamental way. Marx
actually wrote the Inaugural Address. It is interesting to
read Marx's account of how he came to do this. In a

letter to Engels dated 4th November, 1864 Marx says
that Cremer (an English carpenter who later became a

Liberal Member of Parliament), Fontana (an Italian) and
Le Lubez, met in Marx's house bringing various papers
and drafts with them which Marx had not hitherto seen.
Marx immediately decided "that if possible not one
single line of the stuff should be allowed to stand".
In order to gain time, I proposed: before we "edited"

the preamble, we should "discuss" the rules. That is
what happened. It was one o'clock in the morning before
the first of the forty rules was accepted. Cremer said
{and that is what I had planned): we have nothing to put
before the Committee that meets on 25th October. We
must put it off until 1st November. Then the sub-
committee can meet on the 27th October and try to reach
a definite conclusion. This was agreed and the "papers"
"left" for me to look over. I saw it impossible to make
anything out of the stuff.
Marx goes on to say that at the sub-committee all his

proposals were accepted.
Except that I was obliged to include in the preamble to

the rules two phrases about "duty" and "right", ditto
"truth, morality and justice", which, however, are so
placed that they can't do any harm.
Then Marx's "Address, etc.was accepted by the General

Committee with great enthusiasm (unanimously)".
Further on in the letter Marx wrote:
It was very difficult to keep things so that our view

appeared in a form that made it acceptable to the present
standpoint of the workers' movement. In a few weeks the
same people will be holding meetings for the franchise
with Bright and Cobden. It needs time before the

reawakened movement allows the old boldness of speech.
It is necessary to be fortiter in re, suaviter in modo.
In 1844 Marx had was "the head"

said that philosophy
of the emancipation mankind, the proletariat its
of
"heart". The letter from which we have quoted shows
1
how the head set about gaining control of the heart.

Appeals to "truth, morality and justice" were simple-
minded, and to be borne with only when necessary and
then with reluctance. Cremer and workers who thought
like him could be made into instruments of history by
being manipulated by those who knew the direction in
which history was moving.
In their valuable book, Karl Marx and the British
Labour Movement (Macmillan, London, 1965), H. Collins
and C. Abramsky describe the manoeuvres that attended
the beginning of the First International, and also print
some extracts from Marx's Inaugural Address, composed
as a result of the methods we have just described. An
important passage runs as follows:
No improvement of machinery, no appliances [sic] of

science to production, no contrivances of communication,
no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets,
no free trade, nor all of these things put together, will do
away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but that,
on the present false base, every fresh development of the
productive powers of labour must tend to deepen social
contrasts and point social antagonisms.
The word "appliances" where "applications" is called for,

betrays Marx's incomplete grasp of English usage. But
the passage comes very close to stating the doctrine of

increasing misery expounded three years later in Capital.
Whatever Marx's readers understood by "the present
false base", Marx himself meant the capitalist system
with its essential connection with money, surplus value
and exploitation. Thus he is saying that, as long as
capitalism lasts, the gap between rich and poor must get
wider and social antagonisms must get greater. This was
accepted "with great enthusiasm (unanimously)" by men
whose minds did not grasp its import.
§3 Making the Revolution
The First International came to an end in 1872, but just

before this the events of the Paris Commune led to a
publication of importance for the subsequent
great
development of Marxist socialism, Marx's The Civil War
in France, the first edition of which appeared in June,
1 87 1, in English. It was published at twopence a copy
and described as "Address of the General Council of the

Working-men's Association". The members
International
had such
of the General Council listed in the pamphlet
English names as Boon and Bradick, but the "Corres-
ponding Secretary" for Germany and Holland was Karl
Marx and that for Belgium and Spain was Friedrich
Engels. After the defeat of France in the Franco-
Prussian War of 1 870-1, a revolutionary government had
seized power in Paris and proclaimed itself the govern-
ment of France. Many of its leaders were socialists of one
kind or another, and the troops of the defeated govern-
ment, with Thiers as Prime Minister, laid siege to Paris
and after a few weeks entered Paris and put down the
Commune with great bloodshed. While they had power
the regime of the Commune had destroyed important

monuments and had shot a number of hostages among
whom was Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris.
Many who sympathized with socialist aims were
shocked by these events, even though they were also
shocked by the executions which took place when the
regular troops regained control of Paris. But Marx was
full of enthusiasm for the Commune, which he regarded
as the first attempt to form a working-class government.

He expressed approval of the fact that this government
was not a parliament, but a body which combined
legislative and executive functions. He noted with
satisfaction that the members of this government were
paid workmen's wages, that they got rid of the army and
police force that had served the previous government,
that they disestablished and disendowed all churches and
sent the priests back into private life, that they had judges
elected by the people and revocable by them, that they
abolished certain forms of night work and prohibited
fines by employers on their workpeople, that they en-
couraged associations of workmen to take over workshops
and factories. The shooting of hostages which had
caused such widespread condemnation was justified by
Marx:
How could they be spared any longer after the bloodbath

with which MacMahon's praetorians were celebrating
their march into Paris? Would it have been right for the
last counterpoise against the relentless savagery of the
—
bourgeois governments the seizing of hostages to —
become nothing but a mockery? The real murderer of
Bishop Darboy is Thiers. The Commune had repeatedly
offered to exchange the Archbishop and a whole heap of
Revolution the State and the Communist Ideal
, /111
priests against Blanqui, the only one held by Thiers.

Thiers obstinately refused. He knew that with Blanqui he
would be giving the Commune a head, while the Arch-
bishop would serve his purpose best as a corpse.
The Blanqui here referred to was a revolutionary socialist

who had taken part in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848
and who advocated and took part in conspiratorial
preparations for taking over power, rather in the tradition
of Baboeuf. Blanqui outlived the Archibishop by ten
years.
It is not surprising that Marx's pamphlet aroused a
great deal of indignation, much of it ill-informed, against
the International Working-men's Association on whose
behalf it had been issued. Indeed, caused dissension
it
within the International itself which soon afterwards

moved United States and petered out there. But
to the
the pamphlet itself later became an important source of
Marxist socialist doctrine. Marx did not merely excuse
the Commune's use of violence, but positively gloried in
it. He propounded the view that it would be harmful if
the revolutionary workers accepted the existing state
power and expected that they could operate it on their
own behalf. The Central Committee of the Commune had
written of "seizing the governmental power", but Marx
said that "the working class cannot simply seize the
ready-made state machinery and use it for its own
purposes". Writing (a little earlier) to a German admirer,
Dr. Kugelmann, Marx had said that "the next attempt of
the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to
transfer the bureaucratic military machine from one hand
to another, but to smash it ." (letter to Kugelmann,
. .
1 2th April, 1 871). The army and civil service of the

bourgeois regime was not, in Marx's view, a neutral
apparatus ready to work on behalf of whoever occupied
supreme power. On the contrary, the bourgeois police,
bourgeois and bourgeois army were instruments
officials
of bourgeois class rule and would have to be replaced

by armed men and administrators from the working
class.
By writing in these terms, Marx made it clear how very
different his outlook was from the outlook of those who
supported parliamentary democracy. In a parliamentary
democracy a new government is voted in and has at its
disposal the officials and and army which had
police
previously served the government that had been voted
out. What Marx looked forward to was a violent attack
on the state apparatus itself and its replacement by a
new form of state acting directly on behalf of the working
classes and appointed by them to protect their interests
against any attempts by the capitalists to re-establish
themselves. This idea was later developed, notably by
Lenin, into the Communist Party doctrine of the "dictator-
ship of the proletariat". In the Critique of the Gotha
Programme Marx himself says that when capitalist society
is being transformed into communist society there will be
"a political transition period in which the state can be
nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the pro-
But it should be noticed that, although Marx
letariat".
advocated the destruction of the old state organization
and the use of violence, he approved of the fact that
also
the leaders of the Commune
were "chosen by universal
suffrage in various sections of the city and responsible
and revocable at short terms" {The Civil War in France).
Revolution, the State and the Communist Ideal [ 113
He seems to have believed that insurrection and violence

by and on behalf of the proletariat were consistent, even
while the violence continued, with popular democratic
control. He may well have over-simplified the possi-
bilities, for what happened during a local and short-lived
uprising like that of the Paris Commune is not likely to

be a useful precedent for a revolution on a national
scale.
Marx believed, then, that the working classes should be
encouraged to agitate against the conditions imposed on
them by their employers. He believed, too, that trade
union leaders should be enlisted in the cause of revolu-
tionary socialism, willingly if they accepted the aim,
unknowingly if they did not. He expected that the
revolution, when it came, would be violent and perhaps
bloody, because its success would depend upon "smash-
ing" the state that was manned and organized to uphold
the class domination of the capitalists.
We
must now consider what Marx thought would be
the outcome of all this, what benefits would be secured,
what form of life would emerge.
§4 The Post-revolutionary Social Order

In his Utopia (151 6), Sir Thomas More gave an account
of an imaginary society from which luxury and greed had
been banished. His idea in doing this was to bring out
the contrast between this good form of society that might
be and the existing society in which some men were
overworked and undernourished and others lived in idle
luxury. Since More wrote his Utopia, critics and re-
formers have imagined all sorts of ideal societies, and the
adjective "utopian" has come to be applied to social
schemes and visions of the future which are far removed

from practical possibility. Some of the socialist writers
known to Marx and Engels at the beginning of their
careers were Utopian socialists in this sense. In The
Communist Manifesto there is a section headed " Critical-
Utopian Socialism and Communism" in which Marx and
Engels wrote of "fantastic pictures of future society" and
"duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem". It was their
view that writers such as Fourier who described in detail
the form of life and society they looked forward to be-
longed to the earliest, pre-scientific phase of socialism.
Utopian socialists, Marx and Engels believed, failed to
realize the extent of the class division and class conflict
thatwas essential to capitalist society, and hence they
hoped to enlist support for their schemes from bourgeois
philanthropists and to set up socialist societies in the
midst of capitalism, without disarming and destroying it.
In so far as their descriptions of socialist societies to come

asserted or implied criticisms of the existing social order,
Utopian socialists were to be applauded. But in so far as
they hoped that once their schemes for an ideal society
were understood and accepted, mankind would hasten to
carry them out, the Utopian socialists were not only
themselves deceived but were sources of deception for
their followers. Because, therefore, they rejected Utopian
socialism, Marx and Engels did not have much to say
about the details of the society they aimed to establish.
They often preferred, in consequence, to use the term
"communism" for the movement which would overcome
the capitalist order, rather than for the society that would
ultimately emerge. An example of this usage occurs in
The German Ideology, where they say:
Communism not for us a condition which ought to be

is
established, an ideal towhich reality will have to conform

itself. We call communism the real movement which
abolishes the present condition.
Nevertheless, it would not have been reasonable or

even possible for Marx and Engels to remain completely
silent about the socialism or communism of the future. At
the very least it must be describable in negative terms, as
non-capitalism and post-capitalism, that is, as a non-
capitalist social order which is an advance on capitalism
and not a mere reversion to an earlier type of society.
One feature of clearly, will be that in it there will be no
it,
capitalist class owning the means of production. There

will indeed, be no classes at all, since the proletariat, the
great mass of the population, will, after its triumph,
dissolve all class distinctions. Another feature of it will be
that production and distribution will not be carried out
competitively, as under capitalism, but will be publicly
organized with the object of satisfying the needs of all.
It will be need rather than money demand that will keep

the economic and industrial system in motion. We have
already seen Engels' statement of this at the end of
Chapter i, §3, in the passage we have quoted from his Sketch
of a Critique of Political Economy, where he suggests that
the requirements of consumers would be ascertained and
the production of goods organized accordingly. In The
Communist Manifesto there is a vaguer statement that "all
'
production* ' be 'concentrated in the hands of a vast
will
association of the whole nation" and a still vaguer one
that there will be "an association in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free develop-
ment of all".
We pointed out in Chapter i, however, that The Com-

munist Manifesto was worked up from a catechism about
communism which Engels had written and had given to
Marx. This catechism, which is called Fundamental
Principles of Communism, is more explicit than the
Manifesto itself about the general features of the com-
munist society of the future. Question Twenty of the
catechism is: "What will be the consequence of the final
removal of private property?" Engels gives a lengthy
answer to this question. He says that society will remove
"the employment of all productive forces and instruments
of commerce from the hands of private capitalists and
use them in accordance with a plan based on existing
means and on the needs of the whole society". This is
nothing but a rephrasing of the passage from Engels'
Sketch of a Critique of Political Economy which he had
written in 1843. The use of the word "plan", however,
assimilates it, to some extent, with the conception of a
"planned economy" so dear to the political leaders of our
own day. Engels continues, however, in the following
manner:
Just as the peasants and handworkers of the previous

century altered their whole way of life and became quite
different men when they were dragged into large-scale
industry, so quite different men will be needed and will be
created when production is carried out in common by
society as a whole and when production accordingly
develops in new ways.
Engels goes on:
When industry is conducted in common and in

accordance with plans determined by the whole of society ^
it presupposes men whose dispositions are developed on

all sides, who are in a position to take a view of the whole
system of production. The division of labour now —
already being undermined by machines which makes —
one man a farmer, another a shoemaker, another a factory
worker, another a Stock Exchange speculator, will
therefore vanish completely. Education will enable young
people to experience the whole system of production; it
will put them in a position to pass over in sequence from
one branch of production to another, according as the
needs of society or their own inclinations require. Thus
education will take away from them the one-sided character
which the division of labour now impresses upon every
individual. In this way, society organized communisti-
cally will give its members the opportunity of bringing
into many-sided activity their many-sidedly developed
dispositions. Thereupon the different classes will neces-
sarily vanish. On the one
hand, therefore, a society
organized in the communist manner is incompatible with
the maintenance of classes, and on the other hand, the
establishing of this sort of society itself offers the means of
getting rid of the distinctions between classes.
Communist society, then, will be a society of many-

sided men engaged, each one of them, in many types of
activity. In pre-communist societies men are forced to
become and thus their spheres of activity are
specialists,
limited. This means that they are forced to become
limited men, men who can only do one or two things out
of the enormous range of possible things. Engels seems
to think that as machine-production develops, each
individual will be enabled, given the training, to pass
from one type of job to another. A farmer can only live a
farmer's life, a shoemaker only the life of a shoemaker,
but when production is organized along

large-scale
communist terms of an agreed plan, individuals
lines, in
can be educated so as to switch from one type of job to

another and so to develop all the different sides of their
nature instead of only one or two. From what Engels says
it is not clear precisely how this could happen. It might
be thought that if there were no division of labour and no
class differences, society would be more uniform than
before. Engels' point is, however, that with the abolition
of classes and of the division of labour, no man is held
down one type of life, whether it be that of a farmer or
to
of a domestic servant or man of wealth, but can develop
all the abilities he naturally possesses and not merely
those that his job or his class force upon him. The
division of labour and the distinctions between classes
diversify society but place limitations upon individuals.
When all men are placed on one level and can plan pro-
duction in terms of need, then it is open to anyone to turn
his hand to anything. Engels appears to be arguing that
when society is divided into classes, individual lives are
limited, and that when there are no classes, each in-
dividual can develop all his powers and is hence as free
from limitation as it is possible to be.
Nearly thirty years later Marx himself discussed the
nature of post-capitalist society in his Critique of the
Gotha Programme (1875). The occasion of this long letter
or memorandum was a document drawn up in an attempt
to bring together thetwo German socialist parties, one of
which claimed to support the views of Marx and Engels
and the other those of Ferdinand Lassalle. By the time
Marx wrote these comments he was a tired and dis-
appointed man, and they contain passages that are angrily
unconstructive. The writers of the programme had called

for a "just distribution" of the proceeds of labour, and
Marx, in the manner we have already referred to, says
that the existing distribution was "just" in terms of the
capitalist system itself. He
then goes on to say that in the
initial stages of communist society, it must bear the marks
of the capitalist society from which it has emerged. The

principle of distribution, therefore, must have some
resemblance to that which had prevailed before the means
of production had been taken from capitalist control. The
point of resemblance is would be paid
that the workers
equal rates for equal hours of work. "The same quantity
of labour which he has given to society in one form he
receives back in another." But when this principle is
used, then inequalities are set up, in that, when two men
are paid the same for the same amounts of labour, one
may be better off because he has no children, another
because he is stronger and is not so easily tired, and so on.
Equal pay for equal work, therefore, Marx points out, can
lead to inequalities.Furthermore, when this principle is
applied, men are regarded as workers only, not as in-
dividual men with specific individual needs.
Marx then gives a brief indication of what he calls "a
higher phase of communist society", the phase reached
when the traces of capitalism have disappeared.
In a higher phase of communist society, when the
enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of
labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental
and physical labour, has vanished, when labour has
become not only a means of life but life's prime need;
when the productive forces have also increased with the
many-sided development of the individual, and all the
springs of associative wealth flow more abundantly

only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be
completely transcended and society inscribe on its banner:
"From each according to his ability, to each according to
his needs".
It will be seen that Marx, like Engels, looked forward to

a form of society which individuals could develop as
in
many sides of their nature as possible. In communist
society men would not be condemned to one-sided and
limited careers through having to fall in with the division
of labour and with barriers between classes. There would
no longer be a division between men who work with their
minds and men who work with their hands. It would be
open to anyone to go in for anything, and in consequence,
Marx believed, industry would be more productive. Then
it would be possible for each individual to contribute his
best to the common task, and to receive in return whatever

he needed in order to do so. He would no longer be
rewarded as a worker, but would be sustained in accord-
ance with his individual requirements. He would not be
an abstract item on a payroll but a concrete member of a
united community. Work would no longer be an imposed
task but the realization of individual human achievement.
It is interesting to notice in this connection that Marx did
not think that child labour should be universally pro-
hibited. He believed, of course, that working hours
should be strictly limited, but he thought that some
proportion of child labour was essential to large-scale
industry and that its general prohibition was "a pious
hope". Moreover, he believed that it should be positively
encouraged in so far as it enabled children to receive a
suitable education at their place of work. I rather think
that Marx would have regarded the sharp separation

between work and leisure that is characteristic of our
times as an instance of that division and shattering of the
unified individual which are the baleful consequences of
class distinction and the division of labour. The newly
created man who was to emerge in communist society
would be many-sided but yet in harmony with himself
and others.
§5 Marxist Morality
From what has been said so far the reader must be in
some doubt as to Marx's attitude to morality and as to the
moral outlook he himself had, if indeed, he had one at all.
Did he, for example, regard morality as an ideology, and
therefore as a form of false consciousness like religion?
When he and Engels give lists of the ideologies in The
German Ideology, they include "morality" on one occasion,
and "ethics" on another, as one of the ideologies, along
with religion, metaphysics, theology and philosophy, and
the political ideologies. In Marx's Preface to Towards a
Critique of Political Economy, however, neither "morality"
nor "ethics" is listed, and when Engels discussed the
subject of ideologies in correspondence with Conrad
Schmidt in 1890,he did not mention morality either. On
the other hand, both Marx and Engels wrote of legal or
juridical ideologies, and it is difficult to separate law
entirely from morality. Furthermore, when Marx and
Engels wrote of the various ideologies, they often end
their list with "etc.", so that we cannot be sure what
items they intended to include. What cannot be doubted
is that Marx and Engels thought that moral standards
changed enormously from one historical epoch to another.

Thus The German Ideology they say that when the

in
aristocracy were dominant, honour and loyalty were
leading conceptions and that when the bourgeoisie gained
the ascendancy the dominant conceptions were "freedom,
equality, etc." This suggests but does not demonstrate
that Marx and Engels believed that moral codes and
standards are determined by and relative to the basic
economic and industrial organization of society, so that
there is no universally authoritative set of moral standards
or moral principles. It is possible that their view was the
less sceptical one that men in power in different forms of
society will in fact endeavour to justify their position by
arguments that are limited in scope and devoid of cogency.
Experience suggests that this is often done, but if we
condemn or criticize it, we must do so in terms of standards
which we regard as less limited and by means of arguments
which we consider more cogent. Marx and Engels
frequently gloat over the changefulness of things. They
deny that there are *
and obviously think
'eternal truths"
it naive to hold that there is an unchangeable moral
standard universally applicable to all men and all epochs.

But they do not state their own view carefully or examine
it with any rigour. They proclaim it rather as a means of
discouraging and disheartening their opponents. Change

and destruction fascinate them, stability they regard as
uninteresting and contemptible if not impossible, and
loyalty to the past as utterly misguided. Mors immor talis,
"immortal death", is their gleefully uttered watchword.
But in spite of all this, the conception of some moral
ideal haunts their writings. We have seen that Capital
was intended to be a scientific analysis of the logic of
capitalism, showing how it must work and how it must
produce crises of increasing magnitude until it destroys

itself. To say that capitalism is brutal is "sentimentality",
to accuse the capitalist of injustice is beside the point. But
we have also seen that Marx described capital as a werewolf
and that a central conception of Capital is that in the
capitalist system money dominates all, so that instead of
men seeking to satisfy their reasonable needs they are
enmeshed in an organization that has insatiable avarice as
its driving force. R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism (1926) described Marx as "the last of the

Schoolmen'', and the account I have given of the argu-
ment of Capital supports this judgment except that —
many writers since Marx, including Tawney himself,
also criticize capitalism on the ground that it depends on
greed. Thus Marx wishes to be "scientific" and only to
describe, analyse and predict, yet on the other hand his
descriptions turn into indictments, his analyses into
condemnations and his predictions into prophecies. If he
could have got his own way completely, there would have
been no references to "truth, morality and justice" in
the preamble to the rules of the First International. He is
moralist and anti-moralist in one, perhaps an anti-
moralistic moralist. Can we, then, find out more about
his attitude towards morality and about the nature of his
moral convictions?
One place in which we may look is the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which we mentioned
in Chapter 3, §2 above. Since these manuscripts were
first published, they have been widely quoted, although
less widely expounded and discussed, and a word

frequently used in them, "alienation", has by now become
something of a catchword. The word itself was familiar
to Marx from the writings of Hegel and of Feuerbach,

both of whom
had been struck by the fact that men's own
creations take on a form that appears independent of their
creator. We have seen that this is how Feuerbach re-
garded God and the spirit world; they were human
creations which their creators, however, regarded as
independent of them, and in consequence the human
being is divided into two, into a real being here on earth
and an imaginary being beyond the world. Feuerbach
believed that men could only free themselves from this
alienation and become effective unitary beings by dis-
illusioning themselves of their false beliefs. Marx believed
that this disillusionment could only take place when the
world had been so altered that religious beliefs were no
longer needed.In the 1844 Manuscripts, however, after
he had come under the influence of Engels, he applied
this idea in the economic sphere. Men's lives consist of
the things they do, the labour they perform, the things
they bring about by means of this labour, but in capitalist
society money
plays the part of a sort of god which sees
to it men's labour does them no good but is sacrificed
that
to a cruel impersonal Mammon. When the worker has to
produce commodities for sale, the fruits of his labour are,
in the legal sense, "alienated" from him, i.e. made the
property of another. Furthermore, he has to sell his labour
itself, and hence the very essence of his life does not belong
to him. He labours for an impersonal market, he does not

get what he makes, and he lives his working life in the
service of someone else. In primitive society men lived in
caves because they couldn't find anything better, but in
modern capitalist society they live in cave-like dwellings
because the money economy prevents them from living
anywhere else. Marx also used the word "estrangement"

to describe the situation of individual men in capitalist
society. Society is not something that corresponds to
their needs and desires, but is a hostile, menacing,
impersonal system in which they feel lost.
Estrangement appears in that my means of life belong to

someone else, in that what / wish for is the inaccessible
possession of someone else. It appears also in that every-
thing is always something other than itself, in that my
activity is something else y and, finally, in that in general
inhuman power is supreme.
If we disregard the somewhat self-pitying tone (like

A. E. Housman, Marx is indignant that he has been born
"in a world I never made"), we can extract certain basic
presuppositions of Marx's view. The complaint that
individuals have to sell their labour and hence themselves,
presupposes the ideal of men who are their own masters
and who can express themselves in their work without
having to conform to an impersonally organized system.
What Marx seems to have wished for was a society in
which individuality was given the fullest scope. He also
wished for a society in which there was no concealment.
In capitalist society, he believed, people did not really
know what they were doing, since each man's individual
effort contributed to a total outcome and was part of a
system of relationships of which he had little or no
understanding. Marx believed that freedom of contract
was a disguise that concealed capitalist domination, and he
wished to strip off the disguise and restore the independ-
ence of individuals. But this, he held, could only be done
by so arranging things that the social system comes under
the conscious control of co-operating individuals. His

principal aims seem to have been independence, creativity,
self-awareness and co-operation. He thought it bad that
individuals should be divided in their own personalities
and at odds with one another. The unalienated individual
would know what he was doing, would do it in concert
with his fellows, and would live in a social world that men
had organized for themselves and could feel at home in.
An equally important document for an understanding
of Marx's moral outlook is The Holy Family. This book is
particularly important because it throws light on what I
have called Marx's ambivalence towards morality, that
is, his frequently asserted desire to have nothing to do
with it, and his prophetic indignation at the injustices and

cruelties of his time. In The Holy Family Marx quotes
from a book by the French socialist, Fourier, entitled
Theorie des Quatre Mouvements (1808). Fourier held that
men's natural instincts (or passions, as he called them, in
the terminology of his day) should not be repressed, as
moralists of all ages had recommended, but should be
given the freest possible expression. Fourier used the
word "moralism" for this false view (as he held it to be)
that the passions should be repressed, and wrote: "what
is it (morality) in the body of the sciences, if not the fifth
wheel of the coach, powerlessness in action? Whenever

morality fights on its own against a vice, one can be sure
that it will be defeated". Marx quotes this passage in
one of the chapters of The Holy Family\ written by him
and not by Engels. Like Fourier, Marx believed that the
social order should be made suitable to the nature of man,
not the nature of man suppressed in order to conform to
the social order. Like Fourier, he believed that appeals to
right and duty effected nothing and that, instead of de-

nouncing and blaming, men should find out what makes
men unhappy and introduce the means of satisfying their
desires. Marx said in The Holy Family that materialism
is "the logical basis of communism". By this he meant
that men are shaped by their circumstances and environ-
ment, so that if they are to fulfil their natures they must
alter their environment, they must "form their circum-
stances so as to make them human". Marx makes it
clear, elsewhere in the book, that he disapproved of

retribution, of expiation and of remorse. He disapproved
of these things because he believed that they repressed
and depressed the natural instincts and desires. Instead
of blaming and punishing wrongdoers, the social circum-
stances which led to crime should be transformed.
Indeed, Marx rather approved of those criminals who
rebelled against the capitalist system of property and
respectability. To punish such people was to suppress
human vitality, and to make them sorry for what they
had done was to turn them into subservient hypocrites.
This sort of view is much more prevalent in our day
than it was when Marx put it forward. Psychiatrists
have enlarged on the dangers to the personality of too
great repression of the instinctive urges, and penal
reformers have argued that punishment should be
mitigated or even abolished altogether. "Fulfilment" is
regarded by many as an adequate and even as an admirable

ideal. But like Marx, "reformers" of do not fail
this type
to be indignant when people advocate repression of the
instinctive desires or justify severe punishment on
retributive grounds. They cannot help believing that
the advocates of repression must be suppressed or
circumvented. There are some sorts of fulfilment that they

are most anxious to prevent. Marx, in the passage from The
Holy Family about French materialism and morality,
(whom he approves) is in favour
says that the materialist
of "well-understood interest" and of "the positive power
to assert his true individuality". At the end of the chapter
in which he says this he includes as a sort of appendix
some quotations from Helvetius, d'Holbach and Bentham.
A paragraph from d'Holbach and a passage from Bentham
are of particular interest to us here. That from d'Holbach
reads: "Man can never separate himself from himself for
a single instant in his life: he cannot lose sight of him-
self." That from Bentham reads: "Individual interests
are the only real interests." It is clear that Marx's ideal
was that of unrepressed, completely fulfilled individual
men. It was an ideal which commended itself to many of
the "philosophers" of eighteenth-century France. The
difficulty in it, of course, is that some men, if unrepressed,
would injure other men, and their fulfilment would be
at the expense of other men's fulfilment. Professor
L. G. Crocker, in his An Age of Crisis (1959), points out
that this emphasis on self-interest reached its supreme
expression in the words and works of the Marquis de Sade
who wrote: "Give me a being in the world who by his
nature can be exempt of all humanity's ills; not only will
that being not feel any kind of pity, he will not be able
even to conceive it." Why should not the man who
enjoys cruelty perpetrate it? Because, of course, it causes
others to suffer unwanted pain. Then the sadist must be
held in check and this means rules, laws, morality,
punishment, sadists who have to repress their sadism. No
doubt Marx believed that no one is naturally a sadist, that
it is society alone that makes men cruel. But we do not

know that this is so and therefore we do not know what
would happen in a society of unrepressed men. Fulfil-
ment is a dangerous ideal. If, as Marx
as well as a vague
held, the fulfilment men united together
must be that of
for their common good, then much that individuals
would want to do has to be repressed, and we are back
with duty and renunciation once more.
130/
6 Conclusion
I have endeavoured to give a brief critical exposition of

the views of the man whose name has been given to a
movement which has had an historical impact greater
perhaps than that of Calvinism and comparable with that
of Protestantism as a whole. If this exposition is correct,
thenwe must conclude that there are serious vaguenesses
and inconsistencies in Marx's teachings. The precise
import, for example, of the central theory, that of historical
materialism, cannot be determined, although the historical
importance of technology and economic organization is
beyond question, and Marx was right to emphasize it.
Again, Marx's economic theory is expressed in an obsolete
idiom, and is permeated by a moral disapproval which he

was anxious to deny. Some of Marx's social predictions,
those, for example, about increasing technological con-
centration, have come off, while others, notably the
prediction that the rich would get richer and the poor
Conclusion / 131
poorer, seem a long way from being fulfilled. The social

system that Marx attacked between 1844 an ^ x ^^3 no
longer exists. Keynes revived and revised ideas such as
those of Sismondi and Malthus so as to get rid of the
under-consumption that gave rise to dangerous economic
and in consequence capitalism, although now in a
crises,
neo-mercantilist form, continues in existence. That is to
say, the pursuit of profit continues as an essential feature
of the economic system, even though there is much
interference, some of it ill-considered, with the workings
of the market.
But although the problem of under-consumption seems
to have been overcome, other problems have taken its
place and may prove just as difficult to solve. The
continuance of predominantly capitalist institutions has
not prevented great advances in the quantity and (in
some cases) quality of output, and although followers of
Marx say that greater advances would have been made
under communism, this has not been shown, and perhaps
could not be. Furthermore, a strange paradox has been
enacted. In Britain, France, Germany and the United
States, countries where capitalism has been highly
developed, the system has not collapsed, and communist
society has not been inaugurated. But in Russia and in
China, countries where there was comparatively little
capitalist development, forms of socialist societies have
been set up under the control of men who accept the
doctrines of Marx. Thus, men whose conviction it is
that new ideas and ideals are the results of industrial and
economic changes have utilized Marx's ideas and ideals to
institute great industrial and economic changes. Events
in the communist countries of the world, therefore, do
not seem to give support to the Marxist doctrines which

their governments profess. On the contrary, Marx's
doctrines seem to be disproved by the events they have
given rise to. How has this strange thing come about?
Itwould take many volumes to try to answer this question.
But we may make some guesses about the answer to
another question: What is it in Marx's writings that can
have favoured such an outcome?
I suggest that the central and decisive feature of Marx's
theory that tended in this direction was the historical
importance he attributed to the proletariat. We have
seen that in his 1844 essay on Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Marx said that the proletariat was the revolutionary class,
that would be the heart of the future revolution and
it
that philosophy (i.e. Marx's ideas) would be its head.
Marx then said that the revolution would be made by

and on behalf of those who had an interest in overthrowing
the existing social order. He and Engels thereupon
constituted themselves the proletariat's intellectual Egeria.
They provided the proletariat's natural passions with
reasons, or at least with rationalizations. Marx was not
alone, in the first half of the nineteenth century, in
realizing the power that the working classes possessed.
In various writings Carlyle had emphasized In this.
his French Revolution (1837), he had
for example,
repeatedly referred to the way in which "the people" rose
against the burdens that had been placed on them, and in
Past and Present there are references to an undercurrent
of popular menace. Earlier than this, Saint-Simon had
observed that if unemployment was allowed to develop to
too great proportions, the workers might be tempted to
attack the existing order. Marx maintained that capitalism
Conclusion / 133
could not exist without unemployment. Exploitation, he

held,was essential to it, and improvement or reform of it
quite impossible. He thus provided a rationale for
proletarian activity. If Mr. Cremer and other workers'
leaders did not have this conception of their role in
history, they were nevertheless to be guided by men who
did.
From their correspondence we may learn how Marx
and Engels kept in touch with working-class organizations
all over Europe and did their best to control them and to
denigrate anyone who opposed their views. While

Engels was still alive, Lenin read Volume I of Capital, the
Anti-Diihring and The Holy Family, a book which at that
time was very little known. It is interesting to notice
that in Chapter VI of The Holy Family there is a dis-
cussion of the role which the masses are to play in the
future of mankind, and it was Lenin's view that it is the
masses who are to count for most as capitalism comes to
its end. It was Lenin who put into practice this idea that
the revolutionary leader must ascertain the needs and

interest of the masses and make them irresistible. The
masses, that is, all the dependent workers, whether on
the land or in the factories, is a wider conception than
that of the proletariat, but it was this wider conception
that Lenin made use of when he gained power in Russia
by siding with the Russian soldiers in demanding the
peace for which they longed.
But if the masses were to be organized, this had to be
done by the right people, that is, by those who shared
Marx's understanding of capitalist society and his certainty
that it would collapse. Marx was therefore very much
concerned to refute rival socialist theories and to destroy
the influence of leaders whose socialism differed from

his own. The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) was hatchet-
work of this sort, designed to humiliate Proudhon, who
at that time was much better known than Marx —
indeed,
in The Holy Family, published two years earlier, Marx
had expressed his admiration for Proudhon's famous book,
Qiiest-ce que la Propriete? (1840). It is significant, too,
that about a third of The Communist Manifesto itself

consists of attacks on forms of socialism, including again
that of Proudhon, with which Marx and Engels disagreed.
We have seen, too, that the Critique of the Gotha Pro-
gramme was in large part an attack on what Marx held
were false conceptions of socialism. It is tempting to
conclude from all this that Marx just was an assertive
and quarrelsome man who could not brook opposition.
But this is not so. What he was trying to do was to
organize a movement that would conquer power for the
proletariat, and he was determined not to be handicapped
by half-hearted or other-minded associates. In a letter
dated 9th April, 1870, Marx says that his daughter Jenny
had got herself accepted as correspondent on Irish affairs
for the French paper La Marseillaise. She did this by
writing to the editorial board under the assumed name of
Jenny Williams, and the incident might seem to be
nothing but an amusing subterfuge. But the letter in
which Marx writes of this is concerned with the attitude
to be taken to Irish affairs by the First International.
Marx says that England is at the time the most important
capitalist country and therefore the country in which it is
most important "to hasten the social revolution". The
independence of Ireland would be a means of hastening
this, and therefore the English workers should be made
Conclusion j 135
aware that Irish independence is not a "question of

abstract justice or humanitarian feeling", but a step
towards "their own social emancipation". Social revolu-
tion by the working class under the correct leadership
was the aim to which everything else was subordinated.
Before 1917 anyone reading Marx's and Engels' corre-
spondence would have smiled at the quarrels and con-
spiracies they promoted and described. But when we
read it now we see these same events as leading towards
that union of proletarian heart and philosophical head
which Marx had conceived in 1844.
It was because Proudhon disagreed with Marx's
conspiratorial dogmatism that Marx broke with him.
Marx had admired Proudhon's writings and seems to
have met him and discussed with him in Paris in 1844-5.
On 5th May, 1846, a letter signed by Marx, with two
postscripts, one by Philippe Gigot and the other by
Friedrich Engels, was sent to Proudhon from Brussels,
asking him if he would collaborate with them in a corre-
spondence that would keep French, German and English
socialists in touch with one another and keep an eye on
socialist writings and propaganda. In the postscript by
Gigot it was stated that a certain Karl Grim, a German at
that time living in Paris, was a charlatan and a parasite.
Replying to this in a letter addressed to Marx himself, on
the 17th May, Proudhon wrote:
Let us seek together, if you wish, the laws of society,

the ways in which they are realized, the progress we make
in discovering them; but, for God's sake, after having
demolished all a priori dogmatisms, do not let us dream in
our turn, of indoctrinating the people; do not let us fall into
the contradiction of your compatriot Luther who, after
having overturned the catholic theology, straightway

started,with strong reinforcements of excommunications
and anathemas, to establish a protestant theology.
As to Grun, Proudhon said that he had learnt from him

about the writings of Marx and of Feuerbach and was
anxious to employ him to translate one of his forthcoming
books into German. Furthermore, he thought that Griin's
attitude towards working men who consulted him was a
guarantee of the rectitude of his intentions. The letter
makes it quite clear that Proudhon fully understood
Marx's aim of building up a cohesive, dogmatic group to
"indoctrinate" the proletariat and lead it into violent
revolution. In October 1846 Proudhon's Philosophy of
Poverty appeared and provided Marx with the opportunity
of attacking someone who might influence the workers in
ways that Marx did not approve of.
Marx's writings, then, contained the doctrine which
was to be used in preparing for proletarian revolution.
Not only did Marx, along with Engels, state the doctrine,
but he also, again with Engels, formed and fostered the
group of men from which twentieth-century communism
has developed.
Has Marx's doctrine, then, any importance apart from
its connection with the Marxist socialist movement? It
has certainly had considerable influence upon the growth

of social theory, both by way of positive theories and by
way of the reactions it gave rise to. After the publication of
Capital, Volume
I, Marx's economic theories attracted
some attention and were criticized by such leading

economists as Menger and Bohm-Bawerk. But the
development of economic theory has taken a turn which
Conclusion / 137
renders Marx's theory of value and of surplus-value

irrelevant, and even so sympathetic a critic as Professor
Joan Robinson writes that "logically it is a mere rigmarole
of words ..." {Economic Philosophy, Penguin edition,
1964, p. 39).
What has influenced the development of social theory
is the doctrine of historical materialism and, in particular,
the theory of classes. The term "sociology' ' was invented
by Auguste Comte, and sociology itself came into
existence quite independently of Marx. But Max Weber
(1 864-1 920), one of the greatest sociologists, was in part
stimulated to enquiry by Marx's theory of history and of
classes. Weber tried to show, for example, that capitalism
came to pervade the social system only when and where
certain religious and moral beliefs and attitudes favourable
to were already in being. This, of course, is to question,
it
on historical grounds,Marx's view that the ideologies

are produced by technological and economic factors.
Discussion of this theme has led to further fruitful
historical enquiries if not to greater historical under-
standing. Again, Weber believed that the state apparatus,
and in particular the bureaucracy, is not merely an
organization controlled by a ruling class as a means of
maintaining power, but is, in some circumstances,
itself in
a power of own, independent in some degree, of the

its
class relationships that Marx had emphasized. Discussion

of this theme has been a fruitful one for the development
of sociology. Again, Marx thought that classes are
objectively distinguishable entities corresponding to the
division between landlords, capitalists and wage-earners.
Whether classes can be distinguished in this objective
way, or whether they depend rather upon people's
about themselves and about their society, is another

beliefs
question that Marx's theory has given rise to by way of

reaction. There is less readiness nowadays to take
people's beliefs and statements at their face value than
there was in Marx's day, and no doubt his theory of
ideologies has worked in this direction. But, here, I
good and
suggest, the pioneer, for ill, was Feuerbach, who
influenced not only Marx, but, in a later generation,
Sigmund Freud.
Mention of Feuerbach brings us to Marx's attitude
towards religion. Marx followed Feuerbach in holding
that religious beliefs and hopes were a sort of imaginary
wish-fulfilment. We have seen (Chapter 2, §2) that Marx
described religion as a "halo" around the vale of sorrows
we live in. Although Marx believed that religion is an
outcome of poverty and hence of social conditions, his
conception of it is expressed in psychological rather than
social terms. He
never seems to have considered religion
as a social phenomenon with social functions. He looked
upon it rather as a sort of hallucination which would
fade away when society was reconstructed. If Marx had
been more of a social investigator and less of a revolution-
ary,he might have asked how religious institutions are
related to the other institutions of society, how they are
related, for example, to growing up and to marriage, and
how they are concerned with birth and with death.
Machiavelli believed that the ancient Roman religion
helped the Roman
people to prosper and that Christianity
was socially enervating. Possibly he was as much of an
atheist as Marx was, but unlike Marx he perceived, with a
cynical eye it is true, that religion is much more than a
matter of sighs and wishes. Burke regarded it as a merit
Conclusion / 139
of the Christian religion that in it and subjects

ruler
were equally humbled before God, and that rulers were
less likely, if they regard themselves as God's servants, to
act tyrannically towards their people. But Marx's ideal
did not comprise humility. Like Feuerbach, he regarded
man as creator of the gods, and he considered the augmen-
tation of human power to be the supreme end. In his
doctoral dissertation, Marx had written: "Prometheus is
the most distinguished saint and martyr in the philo-
sophical calendar." He was a very young man when he
wrote this, but this admiration for defying the gods on
behalf of mankind remained with Marx all his life.
Thus there is no room in Marx's outlook for reverence
towards superhuman powers. Marx had no feeling,
either, for that mysterium tremendum, the sense of awe and
admiration, which enters into some people's religious
consciousness. His reaction to mystery was not awe but
exasperation. In The Holy Family Marx has a lot to say
about mysteries, partly because in that book he discusses
Eugene Sue's novel, The Mysteries of Paris. Marx shows
anger and contempt at those who make mysteries of
things, who encourage "mystification". His aim, rather,
is to reduce and eliminate mystery, so that men may be
clear about the world and one another. In Capital,

Volume I, there is a section (Ch. i, §4) entitled "The
Mystery of the Fetichistic Character of Commodities".
Here Marx says that under the capitalist system the
reality of social life is somehow concealed from men,
and he looks forward to a time when "the relations
between human beings in their practical everyday life
have assumed the aspect of perfectly transparent and
reasonable relations between man and man and between
man and nature". Before this can be done, "the veil of

mystery' ' will have to be torn off. We have the picture
of a society of brisk and lucid men, confident that they
know or can know everything that can concern them,
amicably co-operating to keep nature and society under
conscious control. There would seem to be no place in
it for the dreamer, the mystic or the contemplative.
One strength of Marx's doctrine as regards its effective-
ness as propaganda was that it was in accord with the
direction in which things were going. In the eighteenth
century a movement was started which had the extirpation
of Christianity as its principal aim. The advocacy of
individual fulfilment which reached its intellectual
culmination in the writings of de Sade was only one side
of an attempt to gain acceptance for the view that in-
dividual men
are the supreme arbiters of their own
satisfactions. This individualistic atheism was Marx's
starting-point, the background to all he strove to attain.
He never argued for it but started from it. Marx assumed
that it was only the constraints and degradations of
coercive social institutions that prevented men from
developing all their powers in non-coercive association
with one another. It was nature and institutions that had
to be overcome, not man himself. It was society that had
to be reorganized, not men who had to be restrained.
This is not the same thing as the belief in the natural
goodness of man. Marx did not think in such terms.
The assumption, rather, is that men will spontaneously
co-operate without coercion and without the need for
resignation or self-sacrifice, once the last and worst form
of social tyranny, the capitalist system, has been destroyed.
The men who achieve this will be living in conditions of
Conclusion / 141
plenty, and since they will not have to compete with one
another for a living, they will, Marx fancied, freely
co-operate in fulfilling human potentialities.
We have seen that Marx was ready to engage in
decep-
tion, and bloodshed and the execution of
to justify
hostages in order to hasten the advent of this alert,
active, united community in which no one would ex-
perience religious awe or walk humbly or seek redemption.
He had jibed at the Christian for making a division
between the natural and the supernatural and between
the body and the soul. But he himself was encouraging
the formation of a more damaging division, that between
the existing social system in which strife and hatred are in
order, and a future society in which men quite different
from ourselves will live lucid and uninhibited lives. But
what is it to us what these men will do? Are not our tasks
and our standards with us now?
Further Reading
Books of Selections
KarlMarx and Friedrich En gels: Selected Works. 2 vols.
Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House; London:
Lawrence and Wishart Ltd.
Marx and En gels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy,
ed. Lewis S. Feuer. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Translations of Individual Works

Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Mani-
festo, ed. Harold J. Laski. London: Allen & Unwin, 1948.
The German Ideology. Trans, by R. Pascal. London

.
Lawrence and Wishart Ltd.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. I. Trans, by Eden and Cedar Paul,
with an Introduction by G. D. H. Cole. New York Dutton. :
.Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

Trans, by Martin Milligan. Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House; London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd.
(This volume also contains a translation of Engels' Sketch
of a Critique of Political Economy.)
There is another translation of the 1844 manuscripts, viz.,
Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed. and trans, by T. B. Bot-
tomore. London Watts, 1963 New York McGraw-Hill,
: ; :
1964. (This volume, like that edited by Feuer, above, con-

tains a translation of Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy
of Right.)
Further Reading / 143
There are translations of many other writings by Marx and

Engels, some in the series published by the Foreign Lan-
guages Publishing House, Moscow.
The works of Marx and Engels are being published in German
by Dietz Verlag, East Berlin.
Books about Marx and Marxism

Acton, H. B. The Epoch: Marxism-Leninism
Illusion of the
as a Philosophical Creed. London: Cohen and West, 1962.
Berlin, Sir Isaiah. Karl Marx. 3rd ed. Oxford and New:
York: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Plamenatz, John. German Marxism and Russian Communism.
London Longmans
: ; New York : Harper & Row, 1953.
. Man and Society. Vol. II, chaps. 5 and 6. London:
Longmans, 1961 ; New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.
Popper, Sir Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. {Hegel
and Marx, Vol. II.) 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University
:
Press, 1963.
Books about the History of Socialism

Cole, G. D. H. The Forerunners, 1789-1850. (History of
Socialist Thought, 5 vols., Vol. I.) London: Macmillan
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1953.
.Marxism and Anarchism, 1850-90. (History of Social-
ist Thought, Vol. II. ) London Macmillan New York St.
: ; :
Martin's Press, 1954.

Gray, Sir Alexander. The Socialist Tradition. London: Long-
mans, 1946.
Jackson, J. Hampden. Marx, Proudhon and European Social-
ism. London: English Universities Press; New York: Col-
lier Books, 1957.
Index
Age of Crisis, An, 128 Communism, 84, 114, 115, 127

Anti-Diihring, the, 133 Communist League, The, 5, 16
Aristotle, 96, 97 Communist Manifesto, the (Marx
and Engels), 1, 5, 6, 13, 16,
Baboeuf, 15, 16, 1 1 40, 41, 42, 43, 47, 49, 58,
Biological Theory of History, 40 59, 76, 115, 116, 134
Blanc, Louis, 3 Comte, Auguste,
Blanqui, 1 11 Positivism, 20, 30
Bohm-Bawcrk, 136 sociology, 137
Bourbons, the, 73, 74, 75 theory' of history, 35, 39
Bourgeoisie, the, 43, 73, 74, 112 Condition of the Working Class in
British Museum, 44 England (Engels), 7
Buonarotti, 15 Condorcet, 33, 38
Constant, Benjamin, 69, 71
Capital, 95-6 Cousin, Victor, 69, 71
Capital, 54, 62, 63, 82, 85, 92, 93, Cremer, 107, 108, 133
94,95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, Critique of the Gotha Programme
105, 109, 122, 123, 136, 139 (Marx), 112, 118, 134
Capitalism, 6, 97, 102, 104-5, Critique of the Hegelian Philos-
106, 131 ophy, 20, 21
internal antagonisms of, 98, 99
Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 7, II, 44, 89, Danton, 68, 70
'132 Darboy, Archbishop, no
Charles X, 71 de Sade, Marquis, 128, 140
Chartism, 1 1, 44 de Tracy, Destutt, 17
Chartists, 4, 7 Desmoulins, Camille, 68, 70
Christian Socialism, ridiculed by Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher,
Marx,13 3, 45
Civil Society, forces and relations Dialectical Materialism, 31
of production in, 49, 50, 53 "Dictatorship of the Proletariat",
Civil War in France, The (Marx), 1 12
109, 112 Disraeli, 7

Clark, David Stafford, 77
Class conflict, 42, 74, 75, 81 Economic and Philosophical Manu-
Classes, 42, 137 scripts of 1844 (Marx and
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18 Engels), 43, 44, 123, 124
Index / 145
Economic Interpretation of History, his materialism, 23

67 in opposition to Hegel, 20, 21,
Economic Philosophy, 137 82
Economic o-T echnological on religion, 21-3, 26, 76, 124,
Theory of History, 54, 66-7, 138, 139
68,75,76 Fichte, 38
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis on historical epochs, 36-7
Bonaparte, The (Marx), 68 First International, 106, 123, 134
Empiricism, 17, 30 Fourier, Francois-Marie Charles,
Engels, Friedrich, 13, 16, 114, 126
and the First International, 109 Franco-Prussian War, 109
and theory of Historical Franklin, Benjamin, 63
Materialism, 59-61 French Revolution, 132
and theory of ideologies, 75-81 French Revolutions,
arranges publication of Capital, of 1789, 15, 37, 68-71, 73, 74
article
—
Vols. II and III, 85
"The Condition of
of 1830, 68, 71-2, 73, 75
of 1848, 5, 7, 68, 72-3, 75
England", 3 Freud, 24, 76, 77
as a journalist, 4 Fundamental Principles of Com-
born at Barmen, 4 munism (Engels), 116
correspondence with Conrad
Schmidt, 121 Geographical Theory of History,
in arms in Germany, 7 40
in Manchester, 4 German Ideology, The, (Marx
in Paris, 3 and Engels), 1, 5, 13,
44,
influenced by Feuerbach, 80 63, 77, 80, 1 14-15, 121, 122
influenced by Hegel, 37, 61 Griin, Karl, 135, 136
influenced by Saint-Simon, 35 Guizot, Mons., 45, 69, 71
letter to Proudhon, 135
on culture,76 Harney, George, 5, 15, 16
rejects Utopian socialists, 114 Hegel,
view of post-capitalist society, his dialectical method, 38, 82,
115-18 .83,84
Essay on the History of Civil his philosophy, 2, 17, 18-19,
Society, 48 82, 124
Essay on the Principle of Popula- his philosophy of history, 37-8
tion, 101 Professor of Philosophy in
Essence of Christianity, 21, 22, 23, Berlin, 2
24 Speculative Philosophy, 19, 20,
Experimental Science, 23, 28, 80
archaeology, 33, 39 Heine, Heinrich, 3
as guide to historical order, 33 Helvetius, 128
geology, 33, 39 Historical Materialism, 5, 39-42,
Exploitation, 91-2, 97, 98, 133 44, 45-7, 50-54, 56-8, 82, 85
Holy Family, The (Marx and
Ferguson, Adam, 48 Engels), 68, 126, 127, 128,
Feudalism, 35 133, 134, 139
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 20, 30, 77, 138 Hungry Forties, The, 6-7, 8
146 / Index
Intellectual Production, 42 as an atheist, 31, 140

International Working-men's at University of Bonn, 2
Association (First Inter- attacks Proudhon, 13, 55, 134
national), 106, 109, in born at Trier, 2
condemns capitalism, 102
Jacobins, the, 15 critical of pre-Marxian
Jews, the, 97 socialists, 16, 114
editor of Rheinische Zeitung, 2
Kant, 18, 19 goes to London, 43
his philosophy of history, 36 his approval of violence, in,
Karl Marx and the British Labour 1 12, 141
Movement, 108 his belief in agitation, 113
Kautsky, Karl, 85 his influence on sociology,
Keynes, J. M., n, 131 136-7
Kugelmann, Dr., Ill his materialism defined, 30-31
his theory of Historical
La Marseillaise, 134 Materialism, 50-54, 56-8,
Labour, 102 59-61, 62, 63, 64-6
Laissez-faire, 8, 9, 10, II, 102 his theory of ideologies, 75-81
Lamartine, 3 impressed by French Revolu-
Lammenais, 3, 8 tion of 1789, 16
Lasalle, Ferdinand, 118 in Berlin, 2
League of the Just, the, 16 in Paris as journalist, 3
Lectures on the Philosophy of influenced by Feuerbach, 23-4,
History, 38 43, 44, 80, 124
Leibniz, 20 influenced by Hegel, 37, 43, 44,
Lenin, 82, 1 12, 133 61, 82, 103, 124
Life of Jesus, 4 influenced by Saint-Simon, 35,
Logic, 82 103
Louis XVI, 71 letter to Proudhon, 135
Louis XVIII, 69, 71 letters to Engels, 54, 82, 107
Louis Napoleon, 68, 74 on collapse of capitalism, 104-5
Louis-Philippe, 7, 71 on criminals, 127
Lowenthal, Esther, 89 on Cromwell and the English
Ludwig of Bavaria, King, 3 Civil War, 69-70
on culture, 76
MacMahon, Marshal, no on the French Revolution of
Machiavelli, 138 1789, 68-71, 73
Malthus, 10, 11, 86, 100, 101, on the French Revolution of
102, 131 1830, 71, 73
Marx, Jenny, 134 on the French Revolution of
Marx, Karl, 1848, 72-3
and the dialectical method, on Irish independence, 134-5
81-4 on morality, 94, 12 1-9
and the First International, on the Paris Commune, no,
106-7, 108-9 in
article on Hegel's Philosophy on religion, 24-7, 138-40, 141
of Right, 3, 38, 44 on Ricardo's views, 89, 90
Index J 147
philosophy and the proletariat, Profit, 97

29, 108, 132 Prolegomena zur Historiosophie 28 ,
rejects Speculative Philosophy, Proletariat, the,

28, 30 as a force, 8
rejects Utopian socialists, 114 as a revolutionary force, 28
view of post-capitalist society, historical importance of, 132
115, 118-21 Lumpenproletariat, 73
Material Production, 42 victory of, 43
Materialism, 17, 39, 127 Proudhon, 13, 55, 134, 135
Maurice, Frederic Denison, 8 Marx, 135-6
letter to
Mercantilism, 8, 9 opposes Marx, 136
Mill, John Stuart, 86
Qu'est-ce que la Propriete ? , 134
Monotheism, 35
Mysteries of Paris, The, 139 Railways, spread of, 6
Rappists, 14
Napoleon, 68 Red Republican, The, 5, 16
Naturalism, 30 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism,
Neo-Hegelians, 20 123
New Moral World, The, 4 Religious Philosophy of History,
Northern Star, The, 4 32
Revue Positiviste, 82
O'Brien, Bronterre, 15, 16 Ricardian Socialists, The, 89
O'Connor, Feargus, 4 Ricardo, David, 86, 87, 88, 89
On the Jewish Question (Marx), 3, views, on Poor Laws, 88-9
Robespierre, 15, 68
Outlines of a Critique of Political Robinson, Professor Joan, 137
Economy (Engels), 44, 89 Rogers, Thorold, 67
Owen, Robert, 4, 13, 14, 16 Roubaix, 6
Royer-Collard, 69, 71
Paris Commune, the, 105, 109,
no Saint-Just, 68
Past and Present, 3, 7, 132 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 13, 66,
Phenomenology of Mind, 61 103
Philosophy of Right, 28, 38, 48 his theory of history, 34-5, 39,
Physiocracy, 8 42
Plekhanov, 31 influenced by Ferguson, 48
Politics,Book I, 96 more farseeing than Marx, 43
Poverty of Philosophy, The on unemployment, 132
(Marx), 5, 13, 55 Say, J.-B., 69, 71, 86
Pragmatism, 31 Schmidt, Conrad, 121
Praxis, 28 Senior, Nassau, 86
Pre-Marxist socialism, 13, 14 Sexual Theory of History, 40
Principles of Political Economy Shakers, 14
(J. S. Mill), 86 Sismondi, 10, n, 100, 101, 102,
Principles of Political Economy 131
(Nassau Senior), 86 Sketch of a Critique of Political
Principles of Political Economy Economy (Engels), 3, n, 12,
and Taxation, 86 43, H5> n6
148 / Index
Smith, Adam, 9, 66, 86 Under-consumption, 10

Socrates, 38 Unemployment, 99, 100, 132-3
Strauss, David, 4 Unit trusts, 105
Sue, Eugene, 8, 139 Utopia (Sir Thomas More), 113
Tawney, R. H., 123 Value,

Technological Theory of His- Marx on exchange value, 85,
tory, 53, 54~°
f
137
Theorie des Quatre Mouvements, Marx on labour value, 90-91
126 Marx on surplus value, 91, 92,
Theories of Surplus Value (Marx),
93, 137
85, 101 Marx on use value, 95
Thiers, 109, 10
1
Towards a Critique of Political

Economy, Vol. I (Marx), 44, Wealth of Nations, 9
Weber, Max, 137
45.47, 53, .57, 80, 85,95, Ml
Tozvards a Critique of the Hegelian What Freud Really Said, 77
Theory of Law: Introduction Williams, Jenny, see Marx, Jenny
(Marx), 24
Trade Unions, 10, 99, 105 "Young Hegelians", 2, 4, 8, 77
!
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What They Really Said series

WHAT MARX REALLY SAID

What Freud Really Said, by David Stafford-Clark

Schocken Books New York

Copyright © H. B. Acton, 1967

Manufactured in the United States of America

Chapter i THE ORIGINS OF MARXISM

Chapter 2 MARXIST MATERIALISM

Chapter 3 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

§3 item tfw^ Superstructure 48 j

§4 77*e Technological Theory of History / 54

§5 Maw #s # Tool-making Animal / 58

Chapter 4 PROFIT AND EXPLOITATION

Chapter 5 REVOLUTION, THE STATE AND THE

Chapter 6 CONCLUSION / 130

Further Reading j 142

As the object of this book is to ascertain what Marx really

I The Origins of Marxism

§i Marx and Engels and the Publication of The

Karl Marx was born at Trier in the Rhineland, then a

freedom of the press against those who believed that

came to Paris and a lifelong partnership began.

Engels' career had been less academic than that of

articles about Chartism and the English working class to

conditions than Marx did and brought to the partnership

which we have already referred, the central Marxist

that the bourgeoisie, having ousted the feudal aristocracy,

property, would lead the proletariat to victory over

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.

or imprisoned. had become apparent well before the

eighteen-forties industrial development was not

nearly twenty years later. It became clear in the eighteen-

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the govern-

passer , monde va de lui-meme" ("Let people produce,

business men, whom

now conservative agricultural interests were anxious to

the goods they produced. Malthus, one of the classical

economists, gave an analysis of the same predicament of

criticisms were political rather than economic. In

You have destroyed the small monopolies so that the one

In this passage Engels is saying that the advances in

But the economist does not know himself what cause he

Out of the crises, monopolies and revolutions to which the

If the producers as such knew how much the consumers

to share it out amongst themselves, then the fluctuations of

system that is bound to destroy itself. But out of this

The holy water with which the priest consecrates the

In the same work, Marx refers to what he calls "critical-

of capitalist society, but condemns them for their failure

such bodies. These voluntary socialists abandoned "the

middle-classes against the aristocracy. It was, however,

was much impressed by this and by the French revolu-

successful, would be a form of society in which there

§i Hegelian Philosophy and Feuer bach's Criticism of It

We have seen that while Marx was a university student he

help in understanding his complex and comprehensive

must therefore be forms of matter. Empiricism is the

"penser, cest sentir". At the very end of the eighteenth

asking questions about their own fundamental assump-

But it is the task of philosophy, according to Hegel,