We must now give some more thoroughgoing description of the structure and mechanics of the system which the activities of Marx and Engels assumed.
They called their philosophy “Dialectical Materialism”—a name which has had the unfortunate effect of misleading the ordinary person in regard to the implications of Marxism, since in this label neither the word dialectical nor the word materialism is used in the ordinary sense.
The “Dialectic” of which Marx and Engels talked was not the argumentative method of Socrates, but a principle of change conceived by Hegel. The “dialectic” exploited by Plato was a technique of arriving at truth by reconciling two opposite statements; the “Dialectic” of Hegel was a law which also involved contradiction and reconciliation but which was imagined by Hegel as operating not only in the processes of logic but also in those of the natural world and in those of human history. The world is always changing, says Hegel; but its changes have this element of uniformity: that each of them must pass through a cycle of three phases.
The first of these, called by Hegel the thesis, is a process of affirmation and unification; the second, the antithesis, is a process of splitting off from the thesis and negating it; the third is a new unification, which reconciles the antithesis with the thesis and is known as the synthesis. These cycles are not simple recurrences, which leave the world the same as it was before: the synthesis is always an advance over the thesis, for it combines in a “higher” unification the best features of both the thesis and the antithesis. Thus, for Hegel, the unification represented by the early Roman Republic was a thesis. This prime unification had been accomplished by great patriots of the type of the Scipios; but as time goes on, the republican patriot is to take on a different character: this type turns into the “colossal individuality” of the age of Caesar and Pompey, an individuality which tends to disrupt the State in proportion as the republican order begins to decay under the influence of Roman prosperity—this is the antithesis which breaks off from the thesis. But at last Julius Caesar puts down his rivals, the other colossal individualities, and imposes upon Roman civilization a new order which is autocratic, a synthesis, which effects a larger unification: the Roman Empire.
Marx and Engels took this principle over, and they projected its action into the future as Hegel had not done. For them, the thesis was bourgeois society, which had originally been a unification out of the disintegrating feudal regime; the antithesis was the proletariat, who had originally been produced by the development of modern industry, but who had then been split off through specialization and debasement from the main body of modern society and who must eventually be turned against it; and the synthesis would be the communist society which would result from the conflict of the working class with the owning and employing classes and the taking-over of the industrial plant by the working class, and which would represent a higher unity because it would harmonize the interests of all mankind.
Let us pass now to the materialistic aspect of the Dialectical Materialism of Marxism. Hegel had been a philosophical idealist: he had regarded historical changes as the steps by which something called the Absolute Idea achieved progressive self-realization in the medium of the material world. Marx and Engels turned Hegel upside down, as they said, and so set him for the first time right side up. “For Hegel,” writes Marx in Das Kapital, “the process of thought, which, under the name of the Idea, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, while the real world is only its external appearance. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing other than the material after it has been transposed and translated inside the human head.” Marx and Engels had declared that all ideas were human and that every idea was bound up with some specific social situation, which had been produced in the first instance, in turn, by man’s relation to specific material conditions.
But what did this mean precisely? To many simpleminded persons who have just heard about Marxism, it means something extremely simple: it means that people always act from motives of economic interest and that everything mankind has thought or done is susceptible of being explained in those terms. It appears to such persons that they have discovered in Marxism a key to all the complexities of human affairs and that they are in a position—what is even more gratifying—to belittle the achievement of others by pointing out the money motivation behind it. If such people were pressed to justify their assumptions and if they were capable of philosophical argument, they could only fall back on some variety of “mechanism,” which would represent the phenomena of consciousness, with its accompaniment of the illusion of will, as something in the nature of a phosphorescence generated by mechanistic activity, or perhaps running parallel to it, but in either case incapable of affecting it. To lend itself to the misunderstanding of such people has been one of the main misfortunes of Marxism ever since the days when Engels had to tell Joseph Bloch in this connection that “many of the recent ‘Marxists’ [of 1890]” had certainly turned out “a rare kind of balderdash.”
Marx and Engels had rejected what they called the “pure mechanism” of the French eighteenth-century philosophers. They saw, as Engels says, the impossibility of applying “the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature,” in which, though the laws of mechanics had also a limited validity, they were certainly “pushed into the background by other and higher laws.” And so in society, to quote another of Engels’ letters, it was “not the case that the economic situation is the sole active cause and everything else only a passive effect.”
What then? In what sense was it true that economics determined social relations and that ideas were derived from these? If the ideas were not “passive effects,” what was the nature and extent of their activity? How could they act upon economic conditions? How could the theories of Marx and Engels themselves help to produce a proletarian revolution?
Well, the truth is that Marx and Engels never worked out their own point of view in any very elaborate way. What is important and inspiring in it is the idea that the human spirit will be able to master its animal nature through reason; but they managed to make a great many people think they meant something the opposite of this: that mankind was hopelessly the victim of its appetites. For Marx had dropped philosophy proper with the fragments of the Theses on Feuerbach; he had intended to write a book on the Dialectic after he should have got done with Das Kapital, but he never lived to undertake it. Engels did attempt late in his life—first in Anti-Dühring, which had the approval of Marx, and then in his short work on Feuerbach and his long letters to various correspondents, written after Marx’s death—to explain the general point of view. But Engels, who had confessed in his youth, at the time when he was studying philosophy most earnestly, that he had little natural aptitude for the subject, provided no more than a sketch for a system. And if you look up and piece together all that Marx and Engels wrote on the subject, you do not get a very satisfactory picture. Max Eastman, in his remarkable study, Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution, has shown the discrepancies between the statements that Marx and Engels made at various times; Sidney Hook, in his extremely able but less acutely critical book, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, has tried to iron out the inconsistencies, to state with precision what has been left in the vague, and to formulate a presentable system. The main point about the philosophy of Marxism for us here is that its emphasis is considerably shifted between the first phase of its creators and their latest. If we read The German Ideology of 1845–46—into which an element of satire enters—we find that we are having it drummed into us that all the things that men think and imagine grow straight out of their vulgarest needs; if we read Engels’ letters of the nineties, written at a time when people interested in Marxism were beginning to ask fundamental questions, we get an old man’s soberest effort to state his notion of the nature of things, and it produces an entirely different impression. “Marx and I,” he wrote, “are partly responsible for the fact that at times our disciples have laid more weight upon the economic factor than belongs to it. We were compelled to emphasize its central character in opposition to our opponents who denied it, and there wasn’t always time, place and occasion to do justice to the other factors in the reciprocal interactions of the historical process.”
Let us see now how Engels envisaged these “reciprocal interactions.”
The first image which comes to our mind when we hear about the Marxist view of history—an image for which, as Engels says, he and Marx themselves are partly responsible—is a tree of which the roots are the methods of production, the trunk is the social relations, and the branches, or “superstructure,” are law, politics, philosophy, religion and art—whose true relation to the trunk and the roots is concealed by “ideological” leaves. But this is not what Marx and Engels mean. The ideological activities of the superstructure are regarded by them neither merely as reflections of the economic base nor as simple ornamental fantasies which grow out of it. The conception is a great deal more complicated. Each of these higher departments of the superstructure—law, politics, philosophy, etc.—is always struggling to set itself free from its tether in economic interest and to evolve a professional group which shall be partly independent of class bias and the relation of whose work to the economic roots may be extremely indirect and obscure. These groups may act directly on one another and even back on the social-economic basis.
Engels, in one of these letters, tries to give some idea of what he means by examples from the department of law. The laws of inheritance, he says, have evidently an economic basis, because they must be supposed to correspond to various stages in the development of the family; but it would be very hard to prove that the freedom of testamentary disposition in England or the restricted right of disposition in France can wholly be traced to economic causes. Yet both these kinds of law have their effect on the economic system in that they influence the distribution of wealth. (It should be noted, by the way, that in The Housing Question [Section 3, II], published in 1872, he gives a rather more “materialistic” account of the development of legal systems.) Marx had once—in a first draft for an Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy—made some attempt to explore the difficulties of the connection between art and economic conditions. The periods of the highest development of art do not coincide, he says, with the highest developments of society. Great art—the Greek epic, for example—is not even necessarily the product of a high period of social development. In any given instance, it is possible to see why a particular kind of art should have flourished at a particular moment: the very naïveté of the Greeks, who had not yet invented the printing press, their closeness to primitive mythology at an epoch before the prevalence of lightning rods, when it was still possible for people to imagine that a thunderbolt meant the anger of Zeus, their childlike charm in the childhood of society—this rendered their art “in certain respects the standard and model beyond attainment.” The difficulty lay only in discovering the general laws of the connection between artistic and social development. One would say that Marx had found a great deal of difficulty in explaining the above specific case and that his explanation was far from satisfactory. The trouble is that he has not gone into the question of what is meant when the epoch of the lightning rod is called a period of “higher” social development than the epoch of the Homeric epic. That he was working toward an inquiry into this matter is indicated by another passage from the same document: “The unequal relation, for example, between material and artistic production. In general, the conception of progress is not to he taken in the sense of the usual abstraction [italics mine]. In the case of art, etc., it is not so important and difficult to understand this disproportion as in that of practical social relations: for example, the relation between education in the United States and in Europe. The really difficult point, however, which has to be gone into here is that of the unequal development of relations of production as legal relations. As, for example, the connection between Roman civil law (this is less true of criminal and public law) and modern production.” But this manuscript is remarkable chiefly—like the scraps of the Theses on Feuerbach—for indicating that, though Marx was aware of the importance of certain problems, he never really got around to going into them. He dropped this discussion and never went on with it.
In regard to the role of science in their system, Marx and Engels became quite confused, because their own work is supposed to be scientific, and they must believe in its effect on society at the same time that they are obliged to acknowledge its kinship with the other ideologies of the superstructure. In Marx’s preface (a different work from the fragment mentioned above) to his Critique of Political Economy, he says that, in studying the transformations resulting from social revolutions, “the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical—in short, ideological forms, in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.” Natural science then, is not to be numbered among the ideological outgrowths of the superstructure, but has a precision of which they are incapable; and this precision social science may share. Yet at the time when he and Engels had been discrediting the “abstract man” of Feuerbach, they pointed out in The German Ideology that “even the ‘pure’ natural sciences begin by deriving their aims as well as their materials from trade and industry, from the sensible activity of men”; and he was later to declare in Das Kapital that “in the domain of political economy, free scientific research encounters not merely the same enemies that it encounters in the other domains,” but others more formidable still, because “the very nature of the subject with which it is dealing brings into the field against it those passions which are at once the most violent, the basest and the most abominable of which the human breast is capable: the furies of personal interest.” Engels in Anti-Dühring claims little for the precision of science. In those sciences, he says, such as Mechanics and Physics, which are more or less susceptible of mathematical treatment, one can speak of final and eternal truths, though even in Mathematics itself there is plenty of room for uncertainty and error; in the sciences that deal with living organisms, the immutable truths consist solely of such platitudes as that all men are mortal and that all female mammals have lacteal glands; and in the sciences which he calls “historical,” precision becomes still more difficult: “once we pass beyond the primitive stage of man, the so-called Stone Age, the repetition of conditions is the exception and not the rule, and when such repetitions occur, they never arise under exactly similar conditions,” and when it does turn out, “by way of exception,” that we come to be able to recognize “the inner connection between the social and political forms of an epoch, this only occurs, as a rule, when these forms are out of date and nearing extinction.” And he adds that in the sciences that deal with the laws of human thought—Logic and Dialectics—the situation is not any better.
Conversely, in regard to politics, the interests of their doctrine demand that the value of institutions should be shown to be relative to class; but there are moments when they are forced to admit that in certain situations a political institution may have something like absolute value. It was one of the prime tenets of Marxism that the State had no meaning or existence save as an instrument of class domination. Yet not only does Marx demonstrate in The Eighteenth Brumaire that the government of Louis Bonaparte did for a time represent an equilibrium between the various classes of French society; but Engels in The Origin of the Family asserts that “by way of exception … there are periods when the warring classes so nearly attain equilibrium that the State power, ostensibly appearing as a mediator, assumes for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. Such were the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balanced the nobles and burghers against each other; the Bonapartism of the First and, more especially, of the Second Empire in France, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.”
And yet Marx and Engels were never skeptical about their own theory of the social revolution; they never doubted that the purpose they derived from this theory would eventually be accomplished. Nor did they trouble themselves much to explain how their own brand of “ideology,” avowedly itself a class ideology designed to promote the interests of the proletariat, could have some different kind of validity from that of others.
Where do these validities begin and end? the reader may ask today of Marx and Engels. How shall we determine to what extent a law or a work of art, for example, is the product of class delusion and to what extent it has some more general application? To what extent and under what conditions do the ideas of human beings react upon their economic bases? The last word that Engels leaves us on the subject (in his letter to Joseph Bloch, September 21, 1890) is his assertion that, though the economic factor is not “the sole determining factor,” yet “the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor in history” [italics in both cases Engels’]. But what about the carry-over value of a system of law or a literary culture? No doubt the Roman Empire, “in the last instance,” ran itself into an economic impasse. But did the Roman jurists and Virgil really perish with the passing of Rome? What does “the last instance” mean? No doubt there would be no Aeneid without Augustus; but then it is equally true that there would be no Aeneid, as we know it, without Virgil’s Alexandrian predecessor, Apollonius Rhodius; and to what degree does Virgil, in turn, enter as a principle of cultural life into the new forms of society which are to follow him? Is the “last instance” last in time or is it ultimate in the quite different sense of being the fundamental motive of human behavior?
We may perhaps clear up the difficulty for ourselves by putting it that races or classes who are starving will be incapable of producing culture at all, but that as soon as they prosper, they reach out to one another across the countries and classes, and collaborate in a common work; that the economic ruin of a society unquestionably destroys the persons who compose it, but that the results of their common work may survive to be taken up and continued by other societies that have risen to the level from which the preceding one had declined. But Marx and Engels do not clear up this problem. Marx, who had studied Roman law, was evidently about to address himself to the subject in the notes I have quoted above. Why did he never do so? Why, in a word, were he and Engels content to leave the discussion of the relation between man’s conscious creative will and the relatively blind battle for survival at such meager generalizations as the statements that “men make their own history, but not just as they please. They do not choose the circumstances for themselves, but have to work upon circumstances as they find them, have to fashion the material handed down by the past” (Marx: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852); or that “men make their own history, but not until now with a collective will according to a collective plan” (Engels’ letter to Hans Starkenburg, 1894)?
Engels’ fullest attempt to state the point of view is in his essay, written in 1886, on Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of German Classical Philosophy. “Men make their own history,” he writes, “whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end; and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions and of their manifold effects upon the outer world that constitutes history. Thus it is also a question of what the many individuals desire. The will is determined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds. Partly they may be external objects, partly ideal motives, ambition, ‘enthusiasm for truth and justice,’ personal hatred or even purely individual whims of all sorts. But, on the one hand, we have seen that, for the most part, the many individual wills active in history produce quite different results from those they intended—results often, in fact, quite the opposite; so that in relation to the total result, their motives are also of only secondary significance. On the other hand, the further question arises: what driving forces, in turn, stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which, in the brains of the actors, transform themselves into these motives? The old materialism never put itself this question.”
Engels answers with “class struggle for economic emancipation.” But he never puts to himself the question of precisely how the “ideal motives” can in turn affect the progress of the class struggle.
The point is that Marx and Engels from the beginning had had something that had prevented their putting these questions in the terms in which we have been discussing them above: they had the Hegelian Dialectic. From the moment that they had admitted the Dialectic into their semi-materialistic system, they had admitted an element of mysticism.
Marx and Engels had both begun as idealists. They imagined they had brought Hegel down to earth; and certainly nobody had ever labored more deliberately and energetically than they had to discredit men’s futile illusions, to rub men’s noses in their human miseries, to hold men’s minds to their practical problems. And yet the very fact of their insistent effort—which an Englishman or a Frenchman would never have found necessary—betrays their contrary predisposition. They had actually carried along with them a good deal of the German idealism that they thought they were warring against. The young Marx who had lampooned the doctors for imagining the soul could be purged with a pill was still present in the dialectical materialist.
The abstractions of German philosophy, which may seem to us unmeaning or clumsy if we encounter them in English or French, convey in German, through their capitalized solidity, almost the impression of primitive gods. They are substantial, and yet they are a kind of pure beings; they are abstract, and yet they nourish. They have the power to hallow, to console, to intoxicate, to render warlike, as perhaps only the songs and the old epics of other peoples do. It is as if the old tribal deities of the North had first been converted to Christianity, while still maintaining their self-assertive pagan nature; and as if then, as the Christian theology became displaced by French eighteenth-century rationalism, they had put on the mask of pure reason. But for becoming less anthropomorphic, they were not the less mythopoeic creations. The Germans, who have done so little in the field of social observation, who have produced so few great social novels or dramas, have retained and developed to an amazing degree the genius for creating myths. The Ewig-Weibliche of Goethe, the kategorische Imperativ of Kant, the Weltgeist with its Idee of Hegel—these have dominated the minds of the Germans and haunted European thought in general like great hovering legendary divinities. Karl Marx, in the passage I have quoted above, described the Idea of Hegel as a “demiurge”: this demiurge continued to walk by his side even after he imagined he had dismissed it. He still believed in the triad of Hegel: the These, the Antithese and the Synthese; and this triad was simply the old Trinity, taken over from the Christian theology, as the Christians had taken it over from Plato. It was the mythical and magical triangle which from the time of Pythagoras and before had stood as a symbol for certainty and power and which probably derived its significance from its correspondence to the male sexual organs. “Philosophy,” Marx once wrote, “stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as onanism to sexual love”; but into his study of the actual world he insisted on bringing the Dialectic. Certainly the one-in-three, three-in-one of the Thesis, the Antithesis and the Synthesis has had upon Marxists a compelling effect which it would be impossible to justify through reason. (It is almost a wonder that Richard Wagner never composed a music-drama on the Dialectic: indeed, there does seem to be something of the kind implied in the Nibelungen cycle by the relations between Wotan, Brunhilde and Siegfried.)
The Dialectic lies deep in all Marx’s work; it remained with him all his life. It formed his technique of thought and with it his literary style. His method of stating ideas was a dialectical sequence of paradoxes, of concepts turning into their opposites; and it contains a large element of pure incantation. It is most obvious in his earlier writings, where it is sometimes extremely effective, sometimes artificial and tiresome: “Luther vanquished servility based upon devotion, because he replaced it by servility based upon conviction. He shattered faith in authority, because he restored the authority of faith. He transformed parsons into laymen, because he transformed laymen into parsons. He liberated men from outward religiosity, because he made religiosity an inward affair of the heart. He emancipated the body from chains, because he laid chains upon the heart.” But it continued to figure in his writing up to the time when he brought Das Kapital to its climax with his phrase about expropriating the expropriators.
In later life, he devoted much time to the study of Higher Mathematics, in which, as he told Lafargue, he “found the dialectical movement again in its most logical as well as its simplest form.”* And Engels worked at Mathematics and Physics, Chemistry and Zoölogy, in an effort to prove that the dialectical process governed the natural world. The Russians since the Revolution have carried on these researches and speculations; and with the spread of political Marxism, they have been cropping up in other countries. Recent examples are the distinguished British scientists, J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane, who have been trying to show the workings of the Dialectic in Physics and Chemistry and in Biology, respectively. One’s attitude toward this sort of thinking is naturally determined by one’s appetite for pure metaphysics. To anyone who has always found it difficult to feel the inevitability of any metaphysical system and who tends to regard metaphysics in general as the poetry of imaginative people who think in abstractions instead of in images, the conceptions of the dialectical materialists recommend themselves only moderately. They do provide a dramatic formula for the dynamics of certain social changes; but they are obviously impossible to apply to others.
It has not been difficult for the critics of Engels—who took certain of his examples straight from Hegel’s Logic—to show that he was straining a point when he asserted that the “negation of the negation” (that is, the action of the antithesis against the thesis) was demonstrated in mathematics by the fact that the negation of the negation of a was + a2, “the original positive magnitude, but at a higher level.” The negation of—a is obviously not a2, but a; and if you want to get a2, you do not have to negate at all: you can simply multiply a plus by a plus. Engels did, to be sure, admit that one has so to construct the first negation that the second “remains or becomes possible.” But since in that case the dialectical materialist has always to provide his own conditions in order to arrive at dialectical results, what becomes of his claim that the Dialectic is inherent in all the processes of nature? And so with the “transition of quantity into quality,” an Hegelian principle of which Marx believed he could see the operation both in the growth by a gradual process of the mediaeval guildmaster into a capitalist and in the transformations, through the addition of molecules, of the compounds of the carbon series. Professor Hook, in his paper on Dialectic and Nature in the second number of the Marxist Quarterly, has pointed out that, in the case of such an example of Engels’ as the sudden transformation at certain temperatures of water into steam or ice, the transformation for a different observer would take place at a different moment and would be a different transformation: for a person from whose point of view the water was concealed in a radiator, the sudden transition of which he would be aware would be that—perhaps marked by a sneeze—of the dropping of the temperature of the room from a comfortable warmth to distinct chilliness. And who knows but that the application to water of a microscope which would disclose its component electrons would banish the illusion that, at the point of boiling, it begins to change from a liquid to a vapor?
And so with the examples given by Bernal and Haldane. After all, the various discoveries invoked by Bernal were arrived at quite without the intervention of dialectical thinking—just as Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table, which so much impressed Engels as an instance of quality determined by quantity, owed nothing to the antithesis and the synthesis; and it is difficult to see how they are improved by being fitted into the Dialectic. In the case of one of them, the Relativity Theory of Einstein, the discoverer has himself gone on record as of the opinion that the writings of Engels did not have “any special interest either from the point of view of present-day Physics or from that of the history of Physics.” In the case of another of Bernal’s examples, the Freudian theory of repressed desires, the dialectical cycle is certainly far from inevitable. The instinct is the thesis; the repression is the antithesis; the sublimation is the synthesis: good! But suppose the patient goes insane instead of being able to sublimate; suppose he kills himself: where is the reconciliation of opposites in the synthesis? Where is the progression from the lower to the higher? Certainly it is true in various fields that changes occur through accumulation which look to us like changes in kind. It may be true, as J. B. S. Haldane says, that the transformation of ice into water is still a mysterious phenomenon. But in what way does this prove the dialectical Trinity? In what way is that Trinity proved when Professor Haldane maps out the processes of mutation and selection as triads any more than it was proved by Hegel when he arranged all his arguments in three parts—or, for that matter, for Vico, when he persisted in seeing everything in threes: three kinds of languages, three systems of law, three kinds of government, etc., or by Dante, when he divided his poem into three sections with thirty-three cantos each?
In an interesting recent controversy in the Marxist quarterly Science and Society, Professor A. P. Lerner of the London School of Economics has brought against Professor Haldane what would seem to be the all too obvious charge that he is trying to pin the Dialectic on Biology, which has hitherto derived nothing from it, in a purely gratuitous effort to bring his science into the Marxist Church. Professor Haldane replies, however, that since he was “compelled” by one of the State publishing houses in Moscow to formulate the Mendelian theory of evolution in terms of the Dialectic, he has found the dialectical way of thinking a great help to him in his laboratory work. He does not go so far as to claim, he admits, that the result of his researches “could not have been attained without a study of Engels”; he merely states “that they were not reached without such a study.” So far from “suffering,” as Professor Lerner has suggested, “from an overpowering emotional urge to embrace the Dialectic,” Professor Haldane, who has been active in the defense of Madrid and who takes care to let the reader know it in the course of his first paper, explains that the process of embracing the Dialectic has taken him “some six years, so it was hardly love at first sight.” “And I hope,” he goes on, “that no student of biology will become a user of the Dialectic unless he or she is persuaded that it is (as I believe and Dr. Lerner does not) an aid both to the understanding of known biological facts and to the discovery of new ones.” He “must thank” Professor Lerner “for his stimulating criticism … But the most valuable criticism would be from workers who were engaged in the same branch of science as myself and had accepted Marxist principles.”
“I hope no —— will become a —— until he or she is persuaded that it is (as I believe and Dr. Lerner does not) an aid to the understanding, etc… . But the most valuable criticism would be from workers who had accepted —— principles.” Where have we heard these accents before? Was it not from the lips of the convert to Buchmanism or Roman Catholicism?
The Dialectic then is a religious myth, disencumbered of divine personality and tied up with the history of mankind. “I hate all the gods,” Marx had said in his youth; but he had also projected himself into the character of the resolute seaman who carried the authority of the gods in his breast, and in one of his early Rheinische Zeitung articles on the freedom of the press, he declares that the writer must “in his way adopt the principles of the preacher of religion, adopt the principle, ‘Obey God rather than man,’ in relation to those human beings among whom he himself is confined by his human desires and needs.” And as for Engels, his boyhood had been spent under the pulpit of the great Calvinist evangelist Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher, who preached every Sunday in Elberfeld and reduced his congregation to weeping and stupefaction. Engels tells in one of his Letters from the Wupperthal how Krummacher would subdue his auditors by the logic of his terrible argument. Given the preacher’s primary assumption—the total “incapacity of man by dint of his own effort to will the good, let alone to accomplish it”—it followed that God must give man this capability; and since the will of God himself was free, the allotment of this capability must be arbitrary; it followed that “the few who were chosen would nolentes volentes be blessed, while the others would be damned forever. ‘Forever?’ Krummacher would query; and answer, ‘Yes, forever!’ ” This seems to have made an immense impression on the young Engels.
Karl Marx had identified his own will with the antithesis of the dialectical process. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world,” he had written in his Theses on Feuerbach. “Our business is to change it.” The will had always tended in German philosophy to play the role of a superhuman force; and this will had been salvaged by Marx and incorporated in Dialectical Materialism, where it communicated to his revolutionary ideas their drive and their compelling power.
For an active and purposeful man like Lenin it may be an added source of strength to have the conviction that history is with him, that he is certain of achieving his goal. The Dialectic so simplifies the whole picture: it seems to concentrate the complexities of society into an obvious protagonist and antagonist; it gives the confidence not only that the upshot of the struggle will certainly be successful, but that it will resolve all such struggles forever. The triad of the Dialectic has thus had its real validity as a symbol for the recurring insurgence of the young and growing forces of life against the old and the sterile, for the coöperative instincts of society against the barbarous and the anarchic. It is an improvement over the earlier point of view it superseded: “Down with the tyrant! Let us have freedom!”—in that it conceives revolutionary progress as an organic development out of the past, for which the reactionary forces have themselves in their way been preparing and which combines the different resources of both sides instead of merely substituting one thing for another.
But conversion to the belief in a divine power does not have always an energizing effect. It was in vain that Marx tried to bar out Providence: “History does nothing,” he had insisted in The Holy Family; “it ‘possesses no colossal riches’; it ‘fights no fight.’ It is rather man—real, living man—who acts, possesses and fights in everything. It is by no means ‘History’ which uses man as a means to carry out its ends, as if it were a person apart; rather History is nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends.” But as long as he keeps talking as if the proletariat were the chosen instrument of a Dialectic, as if its victory were predetermined, he does assume an extra-human power. In the Middle Ages in Germany, he was to tell the English Chartists in a speech of 1856, there had existed a secret tribunal called the Vehmgericht “to take vengeance for the misdeeds of the ruling class. If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the Vehm. All the houses of Europe are now marked by the mysterious red cross. History is the judge; its executioner, the proletarian.” There is then a higher tribunal for which the working class is only the hangman. There is a non-personal entity called “History” which accomplishes things on its own hook and which will make the human story come out right, no matter what you or your opponent may do. The doctrine of salvation by works, as the history of Christianity shows, is liable to pass all too readily into the doctrine of salvation by grace. All too naturally, by identifying himself with the antithesis of the Dialectic, that is, by professing a religious faith, the Marxist puts himself into the state of mind of a man going upstairs on an escalator. The Marxist Will, which once resolved to change the world, has been transformed into the invisible power which supplies the motive force to run the escalator; and if you simply take your stand on the bottom step, the escalator will get you to the top, that is, to the blessed condition of the synthesis. The only other situation conceivable is that of a man who tries to walk down the same escalator and who either is able to make no progress or goes backwards. Though there is in Marxism a strong element of morality that makes the escalator too mechanical a simile—since the man who is on the way up knows with certainty that he is a noble fellow, though he may not exert himself to move a step, while the man who has had the misfortune to move against the upcoming stairway, though he may be full of the most admirable intentions, is doomed, like the damned of Pastor Krummacher, to be carried, not merely rear-end foremost toward the synthesis, but into inevitable ignominy and torment So the German Social Democrats of the Second International, assuming that the advent of socialism was sure, were found supporting an imperialist war which was to deprive the working class of all its liberties; so the Communists of the Third International, leaving history to the dialectical demiurge, have acquiesced in the despotism of Stalin while he was uprooting Russian Marxism itself.
Karl Marx, with his rigorous morality and his international point of view, had tried to harness the primitive German Will to a movement which should lead all humanity to prosperity, happiness and freedom. But insofar as this movement involves, under the disguise of the Dialectic, a semi-divine principle of History, to which it is possible to shift the human responsibility for thinking, for deciding, for acting—and we are living at the present time in a period of the decadence of Marxism—it lends itself to the repressions of the tyrant. The parent stream of the old German Will, which stayed at home and remained patriotic, became canalized as the philosophy of German imperialism and ultimately of the Nazi movement. Both the Russian and the German branches threw out all that had been good in Christianity along with all that had been bad. The demiurge of German idealism was never a God of love, nor did it recognize human imperfection: it did not recommend humility for oneself or charity toward one’s fellows. Karl Marx, with his Old Testament sternness, did nothing to humanize its workings. He desired that humanity should be united and happy; but he put that off till the achievement of the synthesis, and for the present he did not believe in human brotherhood. He was closer than he could ever have imagined to that imperialistic Germany he detested. After all, the German Nazis, too—also the agents of an historical mission—believe that humanity will be happy and united when it is all Aryan and all submissive to Hitler.
What Marx and Engels were getting at, however, was something which, though it may sometimes be played off the stage by the myth of the Dialectic and though an insistence on the problems it raises may seem to reduce it to disintegration, came nevertheless in its day as a point of view of revolutionary importance and which may still be accepted as partly valid in our own. Let us dissociate it from the Dialectic and try to state it in the most general form:
“The inhabitants of civilized countries, insofar as they have been able to function as creative and rational beings, have been striving after disciplines and designs which would bring order, beauty and health into their lives; but so long as they continue to be divided into groups which have an interest in injuring one another, they will still be hampered by inescapable limitations. Only from that moment when they have become conscious of these conflicts and have set their hands to the task of getting rid of them will they find themselves on the road to arriving at a really human code of ethics or political system or school of art as distinguished from these lame and cramped ones we know. But the current of human endeavor is always running in this direction. Each of the great political movements that surges up across social barriers brings about a new and broader merging of the rising aggressive element with the element it assaults and absorbs. The human spirit is always expanding against predatory animal pressure, to make larger and larger units of human beings, until we shall finally have realized once for all that the human race itself is one and that it must not injure itself. Then it will base on this realization a morality, a society and an art more profound and more comprehensive than man can at present imagine.
“And though it is true that we can no longer depend on God to give us laws that transcend human limitations, though it is true that we cannot even pretend that any of the intellectual constructions of man has a reality independent of the special set of earthly conditions which has stimulated certain men to build it, yet we may claim for our new science of social change, rudimentary though this still is, that it may more truly be described as universal and objective than any previous theory of history. For Marxist science has been developed in reaction to a situation in which it has finally become apparent that if society is to survive at all, it must be reorganized on new principles of equality; so that we have been forced to make a criticism of history from the point of view of the imminent necessity of a world set free from nationalisms and classes. If we have committed ourselves to fight for the interests of the proletariat, it is because we are really trying to work for the interests of humanity as a whole. In this future the human spirit as represented by the proletariat will expand to make the larger unity of which its mind is already compassing the vision.”
* See Appendix B.