William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
Westermarck, a leading anthropologist, contested both the method and the results of Morgan’s work. He, on the other hand, has been assailed as infantile in reasoning by Cunow, long the official anthropologist of the German Socialists. Even now, while Morgan’s monumental achievement is still honored, the tendency of scholars to seek psychic explanations in preference to material ones, has rendered it unfashionable.
But a convergence of scholarship still favors the implications of his studies of primitive society. The most delicate of historians, Fustel de Coulanges, in his Ancient City, pointed to a familial organization of Rome and Greece that made every word they employed, such as “liberty” or the “people” have a radically different context from that of a non-familial society such as we live in.
The most social of ethnologists, a lifelong opponent of Marxism, Emile Durkheim, in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, insisted that the source of religion was the separation of material goods, some sacred for the priests, some profane for the people, and that in this property demarcation was found the source of faith.
It has become a commonplace to state that the assumptions of Engels are too easy, that the scheme of evolution he proposed is too uniform, that systems of kinship do not everywhere prove the primacy of primitive communism and then the matriarchate, etc. Eduard Meyer, the pontifical historian of antiquity, denies that there has ever been a society without the state.
For primitive communism the weight of learning is favorable, as it rarely is for any hypothesis. Nasse, Cunow, Sir Henry Maine, Laveleye, William Stubbs, L. H. Morgan, Otto von Gierke (the greatest modern authority on Genossenschaft or the voluntary community), Kovalevsky, etc., are all united. Against it is only one voice, Fustel de Coulanges, whose own superb study of historic antiquity brought him into anthropology. Max Weber attempts a neutral position, in his General Economic History (New York, 1927); he doubts if either side can ever be “proved.” But his objections are methodological. The weight of evidence is crushing.
As to political systems and the state: Engels holds that there is a territorial expression but it is loose and not the foundation of the kinship societies, and applies to hunting grounds about homes. He agrees that there is a political society, that is an organization by the gentiles, over and above the situations within any gens. But there is no state, nor political life. Politics is a question of single tribe policy for survival, and there is no authority outside the clans. That the clan is absent from the very rudest people is possible; that rather assists Engels’s notion.
So neither the discovery of some territorial nexus for kinship, nor so-called clan politics, nor people too promiscuous to have clans, is against Morgan’s main thesis, but rather illustrate it. It is admitted by all critics that
(a) primeval political units were insignificant in numbers;
(b) habitat was necessarily constituted in large measure by blood kindred.
But it is contended that Morgan’s ideas that all American primitive society was democratic is refuted by exceptions from British Columbia and that the Natchez Indians even have marked class (?) distinctions. Conquered lands were distributed (for hunting? horticulture?) among the warriors, so they become a favored class.
Now what Engels contends is that at the hunting stage, democracy is universal, but when horticulture enters, when there is a fixed abode and parceled land has special value, you have classes (perhaps made of victorious warriors) breaking through the kindred system. The ethnologists who produce their exceptions must furnish us with complete material backgrounds for these exceptions to have related meaning, for if they were subsequent to horticulture, Engels is confirmed.
Now it is admitted that there is considerable justification for Morgan’s heaven-opening view, but “the local bond is by no means in abeyance” among blood kindred. But only when correlated with kindred! But it is also granted that a union of neighbors differs wholly from one of kinsmen. Kinship dwarfs the territorial factor but never wholly eliminates it.
What a fuss for nothing! Morgan says, territorial aspects are derivative. Really, they are saying, “Morgan is right but let us hope for an exception or two, and then only for a minor detail.”
Critics say, Morgan does not notice social units not connected with clan, sib, etc. Where absolutism reigns, as in Africa, blood ties are weak. Surely these experts must have noticed that the Africans have a penal system, the Iroquois, for example, none in our sense. A penal system points to classes. That weakens blood ties and that points to the change in material conditions as given by Morgan and Engels.
On specific questions of the time-table of descent systems, of course, Morgan may need some material modification. Perhaps maternal right is more mature and derives from horticulture before that system became more prized than hunting. Certainly many systems can prevail at one time, but the question is, do they correspond to certain material levels, appropriate to each one of these contemporaneous societies? New York and Point Barrow in Eskimo-land are of the same age as to culture.
And even Morgan was not “unilateral”; he was not sure that the clans, but perhaps looser familial groupings, came after non-organization. Certainly the territorial state is based on classes (all ethnology grants that) and the modern state, founded on exchange of goods, and on personal claims to money, is the least familial of all.
The main thesis of Morgan is unshakable. It is rejected not so much as whittled down. But necessarily so when Lowie (formerly a Socialist writer) can say that social phenomena pursue no fixed sequences, or that they are so intricate as to elude perception.
Those who wish to pursue the debate can read Lowie’s Primitive Society (1920—a modernization and correction of Morgan), and Schurtz, Alterklassen und Männerbunde (Berlin, 1902). I am convinced they will redouble in admiration for the primitive history given us by Engels, after reading the “modern” views.
Various non-Marxian schemes of economic history are worth noting for comparison. I leave out Roscher, who denied that any theory whatever had meaning in economic history. Knies, his more adept disciple (and far more learned), holds that modified economic laws are possible in the stream of historical change. Gustav Schmoller attacked the classical economists for “premature” generalizations, and stated that we must go a long way before we can acquire the needful data on which to construct theories. His Grundriss d. allgemeine Volkswirtschaftslehre (1900) is nevertheless chock-a-block with theories.
Werner Sombart in Der moderne Kapitalismus admits his indebtedness to Marx, to whom we owe the very notion of Capitalism and of a Capitalist System. He divides economic history into these stages (I) pre-capitalism, (II) early capitalism, (III) developed capitalism, (IV) late capitalism. The last phase, in his opinion, is degenerate, but not in the Marxian, rather in a physical sense.
The best of all bourgeois theoreticians, and the only original one, is Max Weber. He holds a typological theory; that is, he thinks emphasis should not be devoted to generic ideas, like Capitalism, but to historically significant groupings of economic facts. These facts become isolated or crystallized into ideal limits, or “marginal” ideas.
Max Weber, alone, requires reading, for he was at least aware of the implications of the Marxian challenge, and, without the elephantine journalism of Sombart, he deals with the issues.
But he does not understand Marx’s ideas of economic categories at all, because for him the appearance of economic relations are the data we have; for Marx they are merely the first stage in exploring internal relations.
Detailed Notes
Clapham pays high tribute to Marx as, effectually, the initiator of economic history in the modern sense. He gives the same reasons as Marx for the rise of capitalism: expansion in the volume of domestic trade was assisted by colonial and foreign trade, and there was a corresponding change in commercial organizations and law and financial devices and other helps to expedite commerce. The need for larger shipments of goods made co-operative manufacturing profitable; large-scale manufacturing stimulated the need for better equipment; and last of all came the widespread application of scientific ideas to the specific machine needs of capital.
He does not deal with the more serious challenge: how did money crack open every pore of the feudal system? This is Engels’s first-rate study in the Anti-Dühring (see Bibliography).
Clapham holds that North-English industry had passed through a complete evolution by 1830; that it was a developed capitalism in our present use of the term. Despite the fact that French commerce was first in the world in 1789, the long wars and blockade transferred her primacy to England, which then enjoyed both trade and manufacturing supremacy, nearly a monopoly in fact.
Nevertheless the Napoleonic wars are not the only explanation, as the class structure of France had been too rigid, due to military needs for centuries, and its break-up by the merchants and manufacturers was more costly. Nor were the French behindhand in invention. The tubular boiler and above all the water-turbine, equally important with the steam engine, were French. So was chemical bleaching. The ingenious Jacquard loom was a wonderful replacement of manual labor in detailed operations. But it served for silk and cotton was king.
By 1850 the United States enters capitalism. Its dear labor made it necessary to specialize in machinery fitted to turn out a great mass of one kind of article. The frontier demanded cheap goods, serviceable and labor-saving and not the British long-lived, polished, or well-finished goods. “Yankee ingenuity” produced parts of standard size, quickly assembled by unskilled labor.
After 1880, Indian industry began to develop, and for the first time the white race expanded its modes of production to its colonies. Japan had already begun on her own; even before her modernization in 1868 she had been developing a money economy and a wages system, out of feudalism.
In the twentieth century, says Corey, two tendencies in machinery prevail:
(a) The conveyor system, which is the last term in the intensive division of labor and specialization of machines for single tasks.
(b) Large automatic machine-units combining a whole series of automatic operations in a single movement.
(Note to Chapter IV)
The bibliography for this section is the following:1
M. M. Knight, Economic History of Europe to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1926).
Henri Sée, Origins of Modern Capitalism (London, 1928).
Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus (3 volumes, third edition 1928). The monster work of Sombart has been vigorously contested as to its methods and conclusions by scholars like Brodnitz, but its accumulation of data and racy theories are compelling.
J. A. Hobson, Evolution of Modern Capitalism (London, 1899).
A. P. Usher, History of Mechanical Inventions (New York, 1929).
G. Brodnitz, Handbuch der Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1923?). A perfect model of objective science; vigorously written. Brodnitz is more philosophic than Clapham, and is the foremost authority on British economic development.
J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of France and Britain (second edition, Cambridge, 1930. Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914 (third edition, Cambridge, 1922). No one can go wrong with Clapham: he is a conservative, but scrupulous and entertaining and has a fine sense of generalization.
J. L. and B. Hammond, The Rise of Modern Industry (third edition, London, 1927). Liberal history with the working class always in the forefront, as also the diminishing peasantry.
V. S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States (1929). Elaborate source-book.
E. L. Bogart, Economic History of the American People.
E. C. Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life (New York, 1939).
J. R. Commons, History of Labor in the United States (Macmillan, New York, many editions). Invaluable bibliography.
The leading statistical source book on industry was for years Woytinsky’s compilation, Welt in Zahlen (6 volumes, Mosse, Berlin); since Woytinsky’s exile from Germany, the League of Nations’ statistical annuals are without a serious rival.
(Note to Chapter XXX)
An interesting summary of crisis theories is given in two books: Persons’s Forecasting Business Cycles (New York, Wiley, 1931), which does not do the Marxian theory the honor of mentioning it, and Wagemann’s treatise on crises,2 which has immensely valuable statistical appendices and which grudges the existence of the Marxian hypothesis.
Persons classifies bourgeois theories as follows:
Periodic agricultural cycles:
(a) W. S. Jevons (Sunspot theory).
(b) H. L. Moore (Forecasting the yield and price of cotton, laws of wages, etc., much more subtle calculation of rainfall in the Ohio Valley cycles, etc., as correlated with crops and then pigiron production, etc.).
(This hypothesis, though non-Marxian, is materialist in its basis and has met with some sympathy in Marxian circles in Moscow, as a guide to the timing of crises, given the class contradictions of capitalism.)
2. Uneven expansion in output of organic and inorganic materials.
(Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, Leipzig.)
This theory has some vague correspondences with the former, but emphasizes the disproportion in production as leading to lags in costs between the two elements in production and is not related to external weather cycles.
3. Theory of specific disturbances such as bad harvests, new minerals, war, inventions, etc.
Upheld in substance by Thorstein Veblen and partly by Irving Fisher.
4. Result of disturbances in the minds of businessmen.
This romantic theory is upheld by the Cambridge pundit, A. C. Pigou.
5. Given Capitalism, it is its special method of suddenly making way for growth and development.
The optimistic advocates of the eruption method are Josef Schumpeter (head of the Vienna University economics department) and Gustav Cassel of Stockholm.
6. The roundabout system of production causes maladjustments because of the numerous adjustments it requires.
Followers, Robertson, Aftalion (of Paris), J. M. Clark.
7. Excessive accumulation of capital-equipment accompanied maldistribution of income.
This quasi-Socialist conception is upheld by Tugan-Baranowski, J. A. Hobson and, strangely enough, the most honored British government official expert on unemployment, Sir W. H. Beveridge.
8. The fluctuation of money profits is sufficient.
W. C. Mitchell (I think this description somewhat unjust to Mitchell), Jean Lescure of Paris.
9. The nature of the flow of money.
This distributionist hypothesis, centering in maladjustments of the price system, is held by R. G. Hawtrey and the “Social Credit” prophet, Major C. H. Douglas.
Wagemann classifies theories somewhat differently, and of course has German variants, but they can easily conform to Persons’s scheme.
From the Marxian viewpoint, these theories are not all wrong, but they often confuse the phenomenal appearances of capitalism with the fundamental cause of them, as the efficient cause of crises.
The variations within these theories are much larger than the drybones plan above indicates. For example, Veblen has worked out an ingenious study of price, credit, profits and capacity of expected production, and expectation of profits, as related to recapitalization, etc., in its part in the whole cycle. J. M. Clark is really suggestive in his ideas of the mechanism of crises: how they proceed, without special reference to the underlying reason why they proceed at all, etc.
Statistics have been sparingly used in this textbook, first, because it expounds theory, and secondly, because statistical method, whatever its value, presents more problems than it solves.
What good is it to know that per capita “wealth” has risen from $1200 to $3000, or something like that, since 1900 in the U. S. A.? Entirely apart from the question of cost-of-living indices, which would reduce that $3000 probably to nearer $1600, the question of the rate of capitalization of wealth would enter. If money is cheaper now, “wealth” is reckoned higher. It would take us far away indeed from the concrete Marxian notion of labor-time.
Nor would it explain the constituents of wealth in any serious sense. Real estate—that is, land, houses, franchises, etc.—is reckoned at 65 per cent of “national wealth.” What a hash in economic terms! Land, not produced by labor, a mere claim on surplus-value, houses, partly for consumption, partly for production, franchises, entirely for production; who is to unscramble these items? The trained Marxian statistician, perhaps, but the mere figures open questions; they do not answer them.
Nor are the hotly disputed “figures” of class income too significant. Once a man put his money into hay and horses; today he lives in town and puts it into the savings bank. The conservative “points with pride” to phenomenal increases in savings and insurance policies, the radical “points with alarm” to the loss of independent function and laments the ruin of enterprise.
Sometimes figures tell us a great deal, such as when from 1923 to 1929 production goods rose by 70 per cent and consumption by 23 per cent. There can be no dispute: this is a relative gain in constant over variable capital.
Hence wherever figures have been cited here, it is because their theoretical meaning has appeared indisputable, making allowances for every statistical trap. And even here the reasoning is to be preferred to the figures, for sound thinking is the foundation of political economy.
Not that statistics do not have their function, and we are much the gainer by certain exact knowledge. But it is doubtful if bourgeois political economy has much bettered the deductive Ricardo, fused with life inductions, or the statistics raging about Marxism have much affected the colossal structure built by that prince of theoretical architects.
1. Also see references to Kullischer and Cunow in Bibliography.
2. E. Wagemann, Economic Rhythms (New York, 1933).