William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
We now reach the most fundamental Marxian theories. We shall consider not their full range but their application only to economic theories. These two absolutely basic concepts are historical materialism for the story of man and dialectical materialism for a comprehensive method of studying man’s universe.
It has been urged by many critics of Marxism (usually by sympathetic ones) that there is no need of this philosophical approach to understand Marx’s economic theories. It is argued that his examination of labor and wages and value and his description of the capitalist mode of production and exchange and the observed tendencies of the system would be equally valid without a basic orientation.
English socialists, the heirs of inductive philosophy, steeped in the spirit of David Hume, French socialists, natural rationalists and wits and sons of Diderot and Auguste Comte, and practical Yankees, to whom all theories are not worth a single practical invention of Edison,1 all regard this apparatus with suspicion, and many ask for its discard.
An interesting example is that of the essayist, Max Eastman, who views Marx as dealing with the notion of cause whereas the engineering approach is to study a given conditioning. He thinks that Marxism suffers because it carries so much philosophical baggage that it cannot win the race against capitalists. He attributes this mistake of Marx to the backward state of German thought compared to progressive, scientific Anglo-Saxon thinking. (Eastman is an Anglo-Saxon.)
Marx and Engels, although German by birth, spent their working lives in England and the critique of just that attitude of Eastman is repeated by them in detailed studies of Hume, Bentham, and others of that school.
In Chapter 1 we have seen that Marx and Engels hold that the appearance of reality is often the reverse of scientific truth. The sun appears to rise in the east, the world seems flat (certainly to hill-dwellers), bodies seem to fall at rates proportional to their weight, etc.
They were compelled to examine economic phenomena to see if things were what they seemed. Did the worker receive the full value of his labor when he was paid? And, if he did, what accounts for profit? Does the capitalist really employ the laborer? He seems to. Is he the real leader and inspirer of production because he risks his investment? He seems to be.
In order to penetrate these appearances, they found that ordinary inductive thinking was not helpful. The contradictions were wrapped up in relations that were not apparent on the surface. Hence they required a technique that would enable them to disentangle the elements and present their real working. They found, so they believed, that this real world bore no resemblance, fundamentally, to the superficial world, so laboriously depicted and analyzed by economists.
As the method they employed to discover these contradictions was that of dialectical materialism, they naturally assigned to it special importance. The real question goes much deeper but this suffices to show that for them the dialectic method was the method of economic science.
What the Student Already Knows
Before proceeding to an elementary exposition of historical materialism and dialectical materialism, let us sum up the cognate information already contained in the previous pages. It includes:
That Marxism is a historical science of economic phenomena; that it formulates laws applicable to concrete situations only; that it takes changes in the mode of production to be fundamental; that these changes in the mode of production are reflected in different class relations; that this division into classes leads to struggles; that the political and social institutions of man are functions of that class organization, varying ultimately with changes in the mode of production; that political economy is not static but treats of the law of motion of the capitalist system; that the very categories it uses, such as wages, apply only to a wages-system and are not eternal; that capitalism itself is a concept of a living, changing society embodying whole aspects of former systems and showing features that indicate its supersession; that economic reality is not ascertained by observing economic appearances; that without an approach over and above political economy it cannot be apprehended; that the capitalist system produces socially but appropriates privately; that science, especially in political economy, is the thought-picture of class interests but that there is objective political economy, but its apprehension is a testimony to the maturity of class development which enables thinkers to arise and identify its aspects.
Political economy is an illustration of historical materialism which is merely the human aspect of dialectical materialism. This latter philosophy gives the modes of discovery of political economy and also is the touchstone of the legitimacy of its conclusions. The history of institutions is explained by variable factors, the principal one of which is the aforementioned changes in production. Other factors vary slightly or not at all. They are relatively constant factors, such as geography and race. Every specific event, such as wars, etc., may have a different significance at different times, hence formal resemblances are not enough to lead to similar conclusions; it is the class content at any given time that is decisive. A change in the quantity of any social form changes its quality. For example the production of x cotton is compatible with a manufacturing system, but x6 only with a capitalist system. Every institution changes into its opposite when it is in a different setting; for example, the gentile society becomes aristocratic when there is a larger quantity of goods. Political economy deals with objective and quantitative relations and deals with the totality of values, exchanges, etc., instead of with individual, subjective transactions. Historical materialism asserts that institutions are determined by economic factors, but this has no resemblance to economic determinism, which assumes that the everyday actions and psychic expressions of men are the direct functions of economic motives. The uneven development of capitalism and socialism is an instance of the distinction. Gathered haphazard in the preceding pages, these will reappear in an ordered form in the following exposition (as far as possible leading to economic theory).
Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical materialism is a theory of evolution.
(1) That nature is primary; that man perceives an external world whose real motion is reflected in his perceptions and reasoning.
(2) That in so far as science progresses it uses a materialist basis.
(3) That the freedom of man consists in his understanding of necessity. So long as he does not comprehend necessity he thinks himself helpless. Human freedom is impossible, though, except within natural necessity, for it can never run counter to it by an act of will or thought.
(4) Objective law in nature, that is, necessity, is made available to human freedom by science, and to do this it uses the logical method known as dialectics.
(5) Dialectical materialism is not mechanical, it is not “gross or material in the common use of the word.” It assumes that the world is not to be viewed as a complex set of fully fashioned objects but as a complex of processes in which apparently stable objects arise and disappear as do the images of them within the human brain.
(6) This process of change means that everything must decline, to make way for new things, that nothing in nature or society is fixed or “sacred,” since it must share the process of transformation.
(7) That the theory of evolution is correct, but not in the old-fashioned sense of a constant progression from simple to complex, nor is it a direct path of “progress.”
(8) That the idea of evolution must be applied all-sidedly so as to include apparent departures from straight development. That unless this is done, thought is metaphysical, that is, a philosophy outside of science, and, therefore, useless in the real world.
(9) That human nature—the nature of that animal which observes the world—is a synthesis of animal endowment and definite, concrete, historically evolved and everlastingly changing social relationships. Hence man’s freedom consists not merely in interpreting the world but in actively changing it. This is the imperative of revolution.
(10) Dialectical materialism uses only one tool apart from external science itself, the science of thinking. Its laws are termed formal logic and the notion of dialectics.
(11) Dialectics is the general science of motion of both the external world and of human thought and behavior.
(12) Dialectics means specifically that the stages of each development repeat former stages but on a different plane. That is, each step is the negation of the previous step, and the next step must be a negation of that negation; it does not restore the original situation, but invariably creates a third situation, which is different because of the double process of negation.
(13) Hence development is, picturesquely, expressed by spirals and not by straight lines. (This is merely an illustration.)
(14) Development includes leaps and bounds, instead of motion at the same rate, and takes account of catastrophes and revolutions (what philosophers call “accidents,” that is, events not within a given system but entering it, apparently from outside), but there are long intervals when motion is gradual.
(15) A change in quantity produces, in and of itself, a change in quality, and conversely, changes in quality produce changes in quantity.
(16) The conflict of outside forces and inner tendencies bring out inner forces of development that become concrete only when this contradiction forces them to move; this is especially true of society.
(17) All events, all sides of every event, are interrelated and this accounts for our discovering ever new aspects of things. Interpenetrations of motion reveal undisclosed connections. This means that there is a general law of motion for the totality of the real world about us.
Now all this looks very fearful and ponderous and for that reason a great many people, impressed by the purely historical position of Marxism, regard this set of doctrines as superfluous. Let us relate it to political economy, proposition for proposition, and we shall see why Marx esteemed it so highly.
Economic Illustrations of Dialectical Materialism
(1) The capitalist system exists outside of us; we perceive what is already there.
(2) Political economy cannot progress unless it uses this real capitalist system as a basis instead of ideal constructions.
(3) That by apprehending his part in the process of production and the present superfluity of the capitalist, the worker can translate the real contradiction between social production and private property by an act of the social will, that is, by a revolution. But his will is subject to necessity. If these contradictions are not objectively enough developed to threaten the system, his will cannot overturn it.
(4) Necessity is transformed into freedom by the worker only through science, that is, by a theory based on an ordered perception of the capitalist system. Without socialist theory, no socialist action.
(5) The capitalist system is not a permanent, static object, the same in all times and places. It is a complex of processes. These differences are mirrored in the perceptions of its critics.
(6) Capitalism arose out of feudalism and it must decline in favor of socialism. Socialism must give way, ultimately, to communism, which in turn makes away with the State, the representative of class divisions.
(7) Capitalism does not develop straight from simple capital to complex. It deflects the middle classes from a propertied group into higher-paid workers. It transfers real property into share certificates or shadows of property. It seeks to deflect free labor by Fascism so as to fall foul of its destiny. The worker must understand these temporary adaptations.
(8) Hence the worker cannot rest content with the “inevitable” end of capitalism (that will put him in a world outside of reality), that is, a concept that cannot be reflected in action. In a real world, labor and capital must often, therefore, fight out partial issues such as hours of labor, rates of pay, union recognition.
(9) The working class, indicated as a future governing class, must prepare, in the daily struggle, for a situation which will call for a transformation of this struggle into a revolution, that is, a transfer of class power based on the control of the means of production.
(10) The workers must apprehend the method of dialectics, for without it they can see no movement in their struggle with the capitalists, only an aimless series of guerrilla battles.
(11) Comprehended in 10.
(12) Capitalism negated feudal relations, socialism negates capitalism; the consequence is not a return to feudalism but to a further stage, free communism.
(13) Illustration of the above.
(14) A new process of production, like the automobile, by creating garages, rubber plantations, petroleum developments, etc., took rubber, oil, and trained mechanics outside their steady line of development. It was a leap. On the other hand, the carriage trade went on for generations at a slow pace with few changes in its forms (slow development of hansom cabs, etc.). Fascism, although a development of capitalism, acts as a catastrophe for workers. They must, accordingly, vary and speed their tactics to counter it. They must, for example, protect the civil liberties of the middle class, even though these were not quite so primary when development took a straight line.
(15) The steam engine changed the quantity of things produced. It thus changed the manufacturing system into the machine system of high capitalism. The alizarin chemical process allowed red dyes to be made synthetically. It annihilated, by its qualitative movement, the immense fields devoted to madder in many countries.
(16) The development of capitalism produced a class of calculators that were not met with in the Middle Ages because they were not required in that poor economy. Great reserves of curiosity were brought into play by the development of physical science. Uninventive sergeants and corporals, crushed by the class discipline of the French army when commanded by nobles, produce dozens of superb military talents as a result of class displacements, e.g., the French Revolution.
(17) The discovery of America resulted in supplies of the precious metals that ruined the social structure of Europe by increasing prices at an inconceivable speed.
These are not the best illustrations, but this section is only a epilogue to the study of political economy. The dialectic method has been used throughout the text.
Historical Materialism
The student is advised to disregard the repetition of ideas formerly encountered and to take up this section afresh.
Historical materialism is based on the following assumptions (Marx’s own words are largely employed):
(1) In the social production of the means of life, or the means of further production of the means of life, we enter into definite and necessary relations independent of our will.
(2) These production relations correspond to the stage of development in the arts of production, or in the utilization of forces of production.
(3) The totality of these relations in production constitute the economic structure of society.
(4) This economic structure is the real basis for
(a) The legal superstructure (codes), (property relations in law).
(b) The political superstructure (monarchy, republic).
(c) Social consciousness (expression of ideas).
These superstructures are generally determined (but not in every detail).
(5) Consciousness is not the author of social forms but the social forms determine consciousness.
(6) At a certain stage of development, changes in the material productive forces come into conflict with the property relationships hitherto established.
(7) These property relationships, which were once useful for production then become the opposite; they are drags on development.
(8) With any social revolution—that is, a change in the classes that control the means of production, and, therefore, change property relationship—the gigantic superstructures are more or less rapidly rebuilt.
(9) There are two concurrent developments:
(a) Changes in the economic conditions of production;
(b) Legal, political, aesthetic, philosophical ideas in which the consciousness of material changes is embodied and which are the weapons with which the issues are fought.
The first change is more clearly recognized than the second, because it is quantitative.
(10) No epoch can be judged by its consciousness of itself. That consciousness is itself the outcome of the conflict between material forces of production and class relationships based on property.
(11) The totality of social phenomena must precede the study of its individual or partial movements within.
(12) The activity of the masses is paramount.
What does the historical materialist imply by these assertions? First, that the history of men does not originate in their ideas. The idea of liberty is not the cause of wars of liberation. The idea of chivalrous love is not a new psychic outburst, without rhyme or reason, but a definite outcome of sex relations, these in turn being dependent on class relationships that gave women an auxiliary and decorative position.
Religion does not begin with man’s search for the infinite but with property taboos, with the division of society, consecrated by sacred and profane groupings.2 Idealist philosophies show the rise of the bourgeois mode of production, which seems to originate in the directive individual. Hence his idea that the universe is his image. He shapes the cosmos as he shapes his profits. Science does not arise because men become more fair-minded and curious but because the need for measuring the Nile and the Euphrates led to a crude trigonometry if the crops were to be arranged for at all.
Even if Thackeray is right in saying that we do not know what goes on under every hat that passes, this observation is of no consequence. For the consciousness that alters matters is social.
It imposes a negative limit. Nothing that goes against the prevailing mode of production, until that mode comes into contradiction with property relations by its development, can possibly succeed. No class that holds power has a complete range of action, for it can never do anything that contradicts its control as a class.
So while there is no limit to individual generosity, as was evidenced by Robert Owen, no class can be generous to a point that alters its property relations with another class.3 The limits of liberalism are rigidly fixed. The concept of social collaboration cannot be indefinitely extended.
The difference between historical materialism and other conceptions of history is easily described. There are the geographical explanations dear to Ratzel and Brunhes and, to some extent, to Gibbon and Buckle. There are the spiritual explanations, held by the Bible, Bishop Bossuet, and Hegel. There is the ideological explanation, that is, that ethical ideas determine everything, held by liberals like Lecky. There is the triple theory of Taine that race, environment, and the felicity of the moment are the vehicles of change. There is the race theory of Gobineau. The evolutionary hypothesis is held by Spencer, who views man’s history as an extension of the development from protozoa to the gorilla. There is the force theory of Dühring, that the passion for power of one over the other motivates history. The diverse theories include those as romantic as Carlyle’s, that great men are everything and the masses nothing, the apocalyptic of Spengler, with a theory of psychic, pattern, and economic correspondences, and, above all the skeptical viewpoint, that there is no theory of history, that it is a series of occurrences that had best be studied each for itself.
These enumerations do not begin to cover the theories of history. Up to 1870 they are masterfully summarized in Flint’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Those who can read German can follow with profit Rocholl’s Philosophie der Geschichte.4
There are those who turn their backs on any history, like Böhm-Bawerk, the fiercest and most powerful opponent of Marx, and declare that it has no significance for political economy.
But for Marx, economic activity is political economy. What then is politics?
Politics in Essence
Politics appears to be an opposition of principles. To take an interesting example, Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy, wrote a view of the Civil War (a post-mortem). In a set of Socratic questions, which he answers to his satisfaction, that war is treated as a constitutional question, primarily turning about states rights (the strict construction of the Constitution) and the logically derived right of secession.
Stephens thought that the war turned about these concepts. Slavery was for him the fulcrum, but not the lever, of the war.
Constitutional theory, then, was the cause of the multiple deaths of Gettysburg, and the Blue and Gray slept under laurel and willow to serve a differing set of constitutional interpretations. Rarely has a lawyer’s mania gone further.
But basically Stephens’s treatment is not exceptional. Politics in America are supposed to turn about different ideas of the scope of state intervention in industry, etc.
When the Continental Congress inveighed against the offenses of George the Third, they unrolled the set of everlasting principles he had transgressed. Their specific grievances were relegated to a later enumeration.
So in France, the Radicals state that they believe in equality, fraternity, liberty, whereas the Republican-Democratic Union declare that they value authority above justice, order above any idea of social welfare. These are supposed to be the reasons for which they divide.
According to Marx, this is all veneer. The reason parties exist is as expressions of the economic interest of a class or a subsection of a class.
For example, when a party says it prefers order to justice it means that it does not want property, as now held, to be disturbed. The proof is that the moment revolutionary committees are triumphant and establish a most rigorous order, these same conservatives go in for counter-revolution, so as to restore their property.
When a party says it favors progress, it usually represents the interests of those who are not efficient in obtaining economic control and so seek legal modifications that will give them some of the spoil.
All divisions of politics, then, represent the economic interests of classes. This explains their apparent confusion. When the liberals, representing manufacturers, imposed free trade on England, the landlords, who feared that policy, endorsed the factory acts and gave household suffrage to the workers. In that way they brought workers’ pressure to bear on the manufacturers. When the Tory Party of the landlords obstructed the merchants’ policy, the Liberals, in vengeance, gave the vote to the agricultural laborers. Hence, in the conflict between sections of the capitalists, the workers have gained some rights, but even these were dependent on their own activities, in the long run.
The Northern capitalists called for a harsh policy toward the defeated Southern plantation owners and pretended a great solicitude for Negro rights under President Grant. But so soon as the factory system, almost entirely in the hands of Northern capital, was successfully established on the ruins of the Southern interests, the North favored “reconciliation” and understanding, and forgot the Negro’s rights to the extent that they allowed two amendments to the Constitution to be effectively nullified. They acquiesced in a political resistance they had once fought. It paid them to, for they had the South as an area of “colonial” investment.
If, then, politics is the conflict of economic groups disguised under the sauce of ideas, it follows that economics is not wholly divorced from history. For if it were, why would the state interest these various groups? Underneath the most benign appearance of state indifference, as in the epoch of individualism, called laissez-faire, the state control was always worth a party contest, or, if not a party contest, then a brutal abolition of parties by a dictatorship which is disguised party rule.
It may be argued that although politics is economic, it does not follow that economics is political. Economic interests may clash in the state, but the study of their formation still resides outside of political reference, that is, studies a prior mode of action. In other words, the subjective and abstract school argues that subjective valuation is the foundation of values, and these express the worth of goods. To obtain these goods is the object of party warfare. But the valuation is not political, it is antecedent to politics.
Economics Is Political
The Marxian answer begins at the foundations. Value is objective and is determined in the mode of production. Since the mode of production is interwoven with the political texture, it must be considered in this many-sided manner instead of being artificially abstracted. We know the motion of a mode of production by its behavior in interaction with other factors. Nothing is knowable in and of itself. The ultimate test of the method of historical materialism is in life. If the analysis of Marx makes good in actual working-out, the subjective non-historical method is beaten.
Although Marxian theory utilizes pragmatism (that is, that truth is ascertained by finding out what works), it employs it only as a method of confirmation, for it holds that nothing can replace science, the organization of ascertained and grouped data.
It is not a question for the Marxian, then, which economic activities are precedent to politics, but which economic setting is precedent to those activities (that is, what relation of classes conditions economic valuation, distribution, etc.). For the Marxian there will be no political economy under Socialism because then there will be no classes. There will be engineering, physical, or chemical distribution, or economic geography, but not political economy. That is a science that will die with capitalism.
For Böhm-Bawerk, this is untrue. The profit of capital is a category antecedent to class. It may be socialized but remains as the reward of past accumulated goods used in production or, rather, as its imputation, that is, a compensation for the part it plays in production. Rent for differential fertilities may be socialized, but it remains a factor in accounting for different production on different soils. In other words, distribution is natural and does not arise out of historic modes of production.
These differences between Marx and the deductive school show the vital importance of the apparently unrelated question of historical materialism to the very foundations of political economy. For Marx these economists confuse human or natural differences with economic phenomena. Economic phenomena are always social products.
Historical Materialism Is Not Economic Determinism
Although we lack space to go into the questions of historical materialism outside of direct economic inference, we must amplify its difference from economic determinism. About 1870, the diligent and gifted Thorold Rogers, an Oxford man, elaborated the economic interpretation of history. He held that all history is a direct product of immediate economic interests and, almost completely, that men’s everyday activities are crudely motivated thereby.
Ordinary bourgeois cynicism rarely departs from this point of view. Why? Because, the Marxians hold, for it money is set up as the god of society and the bourgeois mind can imagine no other motive for behavior. “Every man follows his pocketbook,” “It all gets down to dollars and cents,” “You can sell your fine sentiments for £/s/d,” “No one shoots Santa Claus before Christmas,” are typical expressions of this barroom wisdom.
This has no relation to Marxian theory. Marxian theory holds that history and, above all, its rich ideological and emotional superstructure, is varied, contradictory, and full of other factors than the direct economic.
The Human Philosophy of Marx
That men differ from women, children from parents, fishermen from mountaineers, people in hot countries from those in cold, Christians from hard-boiled sinners, dreamers from hard-cash men, the weak from the strong, the poet from the historian, that some men are more agile than others, that individual men court martyrdom, loss, and suffering, that old uncles work their eyes out for nephews they think are great painters (though doomed to poverty), that mothers worship the one son who is a ne’er-do-well, and defend him against their respectable children—there is no need to enumerate these and a thousand others. Who denies them, denies humanity.
For this reason, Marx in his Gotha Program Notes denies the formal equality of men and points out that this slogan has a meaning only when it calls for the abolition of classes, since the rich variety of personality and interests is the aim of socialism, that is, the infinite multiplication of inequalities in men under the form of the abolition of classes. This gives the clue to his system. Just as he ridicules the idea that labor creates all wealth, so he never forgets a historical “factor.” Economic causes—that is, the mode of production—set up classes. These classes are consecrated by codes. These classes are the origin and purpose of politics. The struggle of these classes internally is the history of a nation; outside, it is the record of its wars, treaties, and commerce. These classes honestly see the world, and even the heavens, in the image of their class interest. Nothing in political economy or history, or even in the major outlines of expression, is comprehensible without it. It is a unified concept that binds the contradictory factors that make history, not one that ignores them.
This influence of classes, then, is the mode in which history is realized.
Marx Stresses Environment
But it is true that Marxism does stress environmental factors. These are requisite to its understanding of history as a web of social relations. It cannot ignore the differences between Polish Jews at home, averaging five feet three, and their American grandsons five feet nine and weighing half as much again, if not twice as much. The difference in food has changed the “race” from scholastic retreat to athletics.
The philosophic and easy-going German became a different man as conqueror and capitalist. At times one race and then another has been on top. Hamites, Semites, Dorians, Teutons, Mongols have each had their little day and been convinced that the others were inherently stupid.
Religions that swayed hundreds of millions—those of Osiris, Jupiter, Bel—have not a single follower left. The Spaniards lost the world. The Scotch, poorest of Europeans, turned en masse from Hell-Fire to Accountancy. For these group differences, economic explanations alone can account for the variation in behavior and fortune.
Social Changes Are Never Serial
The evolution of capitalism itself was as irregular as Marx holds the transition into socialism will be. England, for example, was the first country to realize complete capitalism. Yet England retained a monarchy, an aristocracy, an oligarchy in government, a hereditary upper chamber, an established church.
The worship of titles is almost sickening. Mr. Plutocrat is not happy until ennobled; Mr. Climber wants not merely money but the marriage of his daughter to a graduate of Eton and the possessor of a mortgaged deer park.
In France capitalism was established later. Yet it was formulated in the Code Napoléon with a legal purity that England lacks. King, nobles, Church are swept away. Yet it retains a colonial empire in which it refuses full civic rights in impudent denial of its ideal of equality. And, though legally the most capitalist land, it has the largest proportion of an independent or quasi-independent peasantry. In England, the peasantry is almost liquidated, but not in France. The Commune of Paris, the most revolutionary act of labor, was ended in blood by the suspicious peasantry acting as allies of the rich bourgeoisie of Paris.
Compare Germany and the United States. These were the two capitalisms whose industrial development from 1870 on were the greatest. In Germany this arose within the framework of the state and the army, and throughout, its economic realization was limited by the needs of these two powerful institutions. Yet without the Prussian state and army, that capitalism could not have developed so greatly nor even have been sustained. Hence the dead weight of those two institutions was a necessary cost.
In the United States capitalism was based on the isolated farm on free land, on free immigration, on immense borrowing, but at the same time, although a democratic republic, with far less control over public utilities or railways or financial institutions than in any European state.
Imperialism, too, is not resorted to in America as much as in Europe, even when a fixed surplus of capital at home brings interest rates to near zero. There is a social carryover here that is unique.
Material Social Causes Act Only through Psychic Media
Nor can institutions like the state or the church be disregarded even in an economic theory. That the Catholic Church in Spain has been an active economic agent is well known. It is easy to say that this influence is due to its immense landed and financial possessions. But why an ancient institution like the Church should be allowed to hold so much property only in Spain, when the wolves of finance and industry in that country are hungry, cannot be explained by economics alone.
Nor can the worship of the flag. All Americans, irrespective of political affiliation, except for a few dissenters such as Seventh Day Adventists, are devoted to their government.
This national binder is an economic reality. It can be invoked by spurious patriots to force a protectionist policy. It can be used as chauvinist excitation against imperialist rivals. It can be used to emancipate slaves and for this purpose billions in treasure and hundreds of thousands of young men’s lives are offered.
It is easy to say that this use of the country in the Civil War served the interest of industrial capitalism in the North by letting down feudal territorial barriers in the slaveholding South.
But this is an explanation only as to results. It does not explain the totality of this phenomenon. Men do not offer their lives to spread the interests of industrial capitalism.
And if the subjective picture is not given, neither is the objective. The nation itself was sine qua non for the development of industrial capitalism. Every property relation is bound up in a judicial wrapper. The nation itself must originally have served the material requirements of the colonists, and it must still not conflict too seriously with basic production relations.
As we have seen, Marxian theory rejects what is commonly called “economic determinism.” For it, economics is a part of society, society a part of biology, biology of chemistry and physics, and all these a branch of astronomy, to be most comprehensive.
The larger aspects of economic theory must include, then, the nature of all economic relations, the causes of their change, their principal ingredient (for Marx in the class structure and consequent conflicts), etc.
Historical Materialism Stresses Variables
The Marxian theory seeks the variables in economics, since the constants give us no clue to history. They give us only the bases of all history. The soul of man, geography, injustice, etc., all these concepts are equally valid for the most diverse societies. The effective cause of change, for Marx, is a changed mode of the production of goods. Where (as in the instances of France and England above cited) a change in the mode of production does not account for certain differences in economic or socio-economic history, we must make a more profound study of production relations rather than assume the variations to be due to special national characteristics or to the spirit of the times or other such vaporous explanations.
The British retained their landed aristocracy and the French lost theirs, for one reason among many that the English nobility paid taxes and the French did not.
The British nobility, owing to the curious fact that it was not a nobility, that is, not a fixed order of society but one to which admission by marriage was easy and descent into the rank of commoners by younger sons equally easy, was in this way easily united with the rising bourgeoisie, whereas the French nobility would have been degraded thereby.
And the reason why England had no true noblesse or order of nobility was that the fighting of foreign wars ended in 1453, so far as large land warfare was concerned, whereas in France it subsisted 330 years later.
Another reason was that the English nobility was a caste of French conquerors and that it was subject to a special royal fealty, due to its having originated as members of the marauding gang of William the Conqueror, whereas the French feudal nobility was antecedent to the king and resisted his legal claims. Land in England was held by the nobility on a military tenure basis so as to extract tribute from the Saxons.
Even the foregoing explanations of the differing economic functions of the two nobilities are far from adequate, but they do indicate that there are remote economic reasons back of social discrepancies where there appears superficially to have been the same development in two countries and yet where it is clear that the consequences were not similar.
Marxism Ignores Formal Resemblance
What applies to two countries applies with equal force to two different situations. For example, according to Marx, two wars between two states may be wholly different in class significance. The war of Prussia against France in 1870, however vicious the tactics of Bismarck, was necessary so as to realize Germany’s economic unity which it was the interest of Imperial France to throttle. But so soon as France was proclaimed a republic, within less than two months after the war began, the war became inadmissible for Germany because it reduced working-class possibilities in France, enthroned naked reaction in Germany, and now acted as the reverse of a war of liberation.
Marx and Engels never weary in their analyses of insisting on the specific class content of any given situation. This eliminates vulgar fortunetelling. It no longer follows that when all the apparent circumstances are the same, the consequences are equally predictable. Very often, the mere passage of time makes one analysis sound and the next one false. The total setting reverses the significance of similar events. Thus Marxian theories can never be learned as a breviary, but, to change metaphors, serve only as a lamp to our feet.5
We have not learned to understand categories like “capitalism” because any such summarized word merely tells us that we are observing a host of fermentations. For all that, these categories are extremely important guides to understanding, if they are used by men and not by Dry-as-Dusts. For if economic relations in production, expressed in classes, is the basis of history, the categories refer back to real men who constitute these classes. And as these class relations are themselves determined by economic changes, we need a synthesis that will go beyond history and economics both. That synthesis is historical materialism.
The following variations on a theme may be noted:6
(1) While the specified form of philosophy, art, and literature is not conditioned immediately by material conditions, Marxians generally hold that the conditions of the mind, habits, traditions, customs, and the type of abilities called forth by material changes are important, and are often the significant factors. Since these mental habits, etc., are themselves ultimately reflections of material conditions, the contingent influence of modes of production ought to be appraised. In technical matters this is obvious; the type of reeds determined certain organ styles, the invention of the pianoforte gave rise to a style based on greater shading. A Chopin could not have achieved his effects on the harpsichord. The influence of modern noises on strident composition is a case in point. The amusement of kings produces the courtly style, and cynical drama represents a class that feels its influence shaking. A new, vigorous class produces vital dramas or literature as a part of its exuberance; witness the golden ages of literature and art that usually coincide with economic impetus. A Shakespeare is more likely to be produced in a vital atmosphere than in a courtly, formal setting. At the same time no materialist explanation need be invoked for the difference between a Shakespeare and a Chapman.
(2) The presence of differing ideas at any given time, despite the domination of certain material conditions, is explained by the varying class interests within that framework. The hope of rising groups, the obstinacy of dying groups, the robust cruelty of dominant classes, and the eclecticism of declassed individuals may produce a medley. But for all that, each epoch has a different set of medleys from every other, for different class expressions are required.
(3) But one class viewpoint must overshadow all others, so as to give the dominant class scope for its vital part in society. Its belief in itself is essential for its well-being. In America, for example, the philosophy of the large magazines with circulations of a million and over, is conservative. The cinema, the most diffused of the arts, is the most full of platitudes, as a whole. Its by-plays are rare and inconsequential. The greatest amount of dissent is found in small theater companies, amateur dance groups, little precious magazines, in the book publishing trade where some artisanship remains—that is, in the nooks and corners of social expression. Mass goods for mass tastes must of necessity be conservative, otherwise the social order is impeached.
(4) Even where masses of men go against their individual interest it does not follow that they are exempt from historical materialism in a direct sense. Soldiers are engaged in an occupation in which they must lose either health, money, or life. But the material need of the governing classes that sends them to their destruction is rooted in economic struggle. Rupert Brooke found dream and surcease in war but he fought for the Bank of England. An exalted young Nazi who strikes a helpless old Jew thinks he wields the sword of Baldur the Beautiful against Oriental cunning and treachery. His ruffianly purity does not in the least militate against his being the unconscious agent of a camarilla in the government who thus seize Jewish-owned goods.
(5) The materialist interpretation of history distinguishes between material conditions and material interests. Thus, the early Christian martyrs were anxious to forget the burdens of this earth. They were impelled to this ascetic attitude by the material conditions of the decline of the Roman Empire. But their material interests were not served thereby, quite the contrary.
(6) If circumstances determine men, men change circumstances. The historical materialist by employing the conception that freedom is the recognition of necessity, rejects the mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century that considered man a machine, a mere product of circumstances. The conclusion of the historical materialists is optimistic.
(7) The collective will is the result of a multitude of individual wills. But since millions of individual wills have to be realized in the conflict with each other, the ultimate result is different from what each intended. To put it grossly, there are ten public issues. On A 56 per cent of the people are favorable, 44 per cent against. On B, 53 per cent for, 47 per cent against. But only 38 per cent voted for two laws. By the time ten laws are enacted, only 6 per cent of the people, say, voted for all, and only 21 per cent, say, for any six. The total will is unlike the sum of the individual wills. This crude analogy does not begin to picture the comprehensive thwarting of molecular wills by their mass collision. But the totality of wills must more nearly express adaptation to the then material setting of the community, or, rather, of that kind of need imposed by its class relationship. Each individual for himself is a universe; “my mind to me a kingdom is.” But his actions are social because he is always in the other fellow’s kingdom.
(8) Indignation arises when the material breakdown of a society’s class relation makes its further tolerance an absurdity. This is not useless indignation against what cannot be remedied, for that is just sentimental folly. When a class is rising, has a purpose, it does the best job that the then known modes of production afford, however deep its crimes. Indignation against it has no social function, however much it may move the heart. Social idealism is a property of any rising class, it is a means to action. It casts off fetters on the mode of production so as to release more life. Hence it can use great men, who, in one of the most felicitous phrases of Carlyle, are “beginners.” Their special personality has a real value, if it is shown at a right juncture. It cannot be overrated nor can it override social limits. But the hero is real. The worship by socialists of Marx and Engels and by communists of Lenin shows it to be a living idea.
These variations, not strictly germane to economic theory, nevertheless indicate the wide issues raised by historical materialism. In passing into political economy proper, the student, in the maze of its deductions, should hold tightly to the stout thread of Marxian Dialectical Materialism and its lesser strand, Historical Materialism, if he is to find his way back to the entrance of the sinuous caverns of Marxian economic theory.
NOTE: The following questions (among countless others) have been put by critics of the historical materialist hypothesis:
(a) If changes in the forces of production account for all change, what changes them? (Sidney Hook)
(b) If religion, say, as an independent factor, reacts on economics, how can you speak of its motion as derived from modes of production? Reaction presumes an action, and that originates. (Tröltsch and Max Weber)
(c) Marxism cannot analyze economic concepts without the legal system in which they take place. Then that is given as a concept to be utilized in economic relationships. (Stammler)
(d) What are productive forces that determine production relations? How are forces separated from relationships in action? (Jaszi)
(d) What is a stage of development? (The answer to this is attempted in Chap. IV of Bukharin’s Historical Materialism, but is much too hieratic.)
(e) If capitalism was established by violence, that is, primitive accumulation, where is economic superiority? (Jaszi)
The last question is simply inexact: Marx holds, with Engels, that force explains history only within a setting for which that particular use of force is significant. All societies are distinguished by force; it is their economic differences that enable us to distinguish the effect of force. The other questions are suggested to the student so that he may explore the literature; the ability to answer them indicates the stage of assimilation.
NOTE: The Role of Antagonisms and Fetiches
No picture of historical materialism is complete without the tableau of antagonisms and fetiches in society. These have been frequently referred to in the text, but they need to be programmized, so as to be remembered compactly.
Since Marx, socialist writers have never wearied of pointing out that owing to the necessity of a divided society to appear as a harmonious one, the compulsory distortion of all social relations results in everything “standing on its head.” Hence all laws of economists or sociologists also “stand on their heads.”
The antagonisms are principally, beginning with the most primitive and following it into capitalism:
| (a) rich and poor | (b) master and servant (now capi- talist and worker) |
| (c) man and woman | (d) ruler and ruled |
| (e) town and country | (f) manual and intellectual labor |
Derivative Divisions
| (a) buyer and seller | (b) lender and borrower |
| (c) landlord and tenant | (d) sacred and profane per- sons |
| (e) freeman and slave (g) oppressor and oppressed |
(f) patrician (nobleman) and plebeian. |
The above classifications are not exclusive; they are merely indicative. Nor are they philosophical; the ownership of means of production by private persons is the dominant form, of which the others are expressions.
Secondary Antagonisms within Classes
| mortgagee and house owner shippers vs. railroads businessmen vs. bankers |
landed magnates vs. capitalists rentiers vs. industrial specu- lators |
and so on to as many antagonisms as there are possible groupings.
Internal Diferences
small grocery proprietor vs. his clerks (workers) vs. chain stores (capitalists).
Engels states that in the “value form of the product, as in a folded bud, is the whole form of capitalist production, the antagonism between capital and wage-labor, the industrial reserve army and crises.” This means that political economy is first of all a study of class contradictions. The motor of society is the grouping of persons for economic ends.
If all things appear to be something else, that means that the thing that they appear to be must seem to be the incarnation or repository of certain characteristics which it has not. These appear to cause phenomena. This is fetichism. Here is a partial list.
(a) Goods being made to sell, it appears as though their value in exchange is proportional to the quantity of any commodity they command, and not as the exchange of human labor for human labor.
(b) Social labor is thus expressed not as the equivalent of social labor but as the equivalent of a commodity.
(c) Capitalists buy labor-power and thus production is made an attribute of capital, not of labor.
(d) Wages are a payment for time, and thus appear as a payment for full time.
(e) The rich own, but their ownership functions only because the laborers produce, but the fact that there are two in the relation makes them take on the masque of a “factor in production.”
(f) Value can only be realized by way of the body of another commodity, hence value appears as an attribute of goods.
(g) Value that is social can appear only as the attribute of a privately appropriated commodity; it appears to have value as property individually.
(h) Production increases but value diminishes.
(i) Value can never be realized, since price approximates it but must socially deviate from value, as individual price. Hence social and individual price contradict each other (but prices appear as value).
(j) A commodity has a social aspect (value), and individual aspect (use) in one thing, unseparated, yet it must be realized divided.
The list can be considerably extended from sources in the book.
1. Or a homely “Affurism” of Josh Billings.
2. This conception of Marx is pregnant with the greatest consequences for political economy. For it treats economic activity as objective. It joins issue with those who concentrate on individual differences as primary. It declares that for production relationships and for that superstructure that determines distribution, the will of individuals is nonexistent.
3. See Tolstoy’s often cited epigram, “The rich will do anything for the poor except get off their backs.”
4. Berr’s Le Synthèse en Histoire and Bernheim’s Lehrbuch d. Hist. Methode can be recommended for critical work.
5. On the Mexican War question, Marx and Engels would have applauded Thoreau and Lowell; in the Civil War they would have drafted them.
6. Not required for economic theory.