Karl Marx’s great book Das Kapital is a unique and complex work, which demands a different kind of analysis from that which it usually gets. At the time when Marx was working on the first volume, he wrote Engels (July 31, 1865) that whatever the shortcomings of his writings might be, they had “the merit of making an artistic whole”; and in his next letter to Engels (August 5) he speaks of the book as a “ ‘work of art,’ ” and mentions “artistic considerations” in connection with his delay in getting it finished. Certainly there went into the creation of Das Kapital as much of art as of science. The book is a welding-together of several quite diverse points of view, of several quite distinct techniques of thought. It contains a treatise on economics, a history of industrial development and an inspired tract for the times; and the morality, which is part of the time suspended in the interests of scientific objectivity, is no more self-consistent than the economics is consistently scientific or the history undistracted by the exaltation of apocalyptic vision. And outside the whole immense structure, dark and strong like the old Trier basilica, built by the Romans with brick walls and granite columns, swim the mists and the septentrional lights of German metaphysics and mysticism, always ready to leak in through the crevices.
But it is after all the poet in Marx who makes of all these things a whole—that same poet who had already shown his strength in the verses he had written as a student but whose equipment had not been appropriate to the art of romantic verse. Marx’s subject is now human history; and that bleak inhuman side of his mind which disconcerts us in his earlier writings has been filled in with mathematics and logic. But it is the power of imagination as well as the cogency of argument which makes Das Kapital so compelling.
Let us, then, before we go behind Das Kapital, take into account the tremendous effect which it produces on us the first time we read it.
It is characteristic of Marx’s work in general that there is more of the Hegelian interplay between opposites than of the Hegelian progression from the lower to the higher about his use of the dialectical method. His writings tend to lack formal development; we find it hard to get hold of a beginning or an end. But this is less true of the first volume of Das Kapital, as Marx finally got it into shape, than perhaps of any other of his productions. Once we have worked through the abstractions of the opening, the book has the momentum of an epic.
It is a vision which fascinates and appals us, which strikes us with a kind of awe, this evolution of mechanical production and of the magnetic accumulation of capital, rising out of the feudal world, with its more primitive but more human handicrafts; wrecking it and overspreading it; accelerating, reorganizing, reassembling, in ever more ingenious complexity, ever more formidable proportions; breaking out of the old boundaries of nations; sending out the tracks and cranes of its commerce across countries and oceans and continents and bringing the people of distant cultures, at diverse stages of civilization, into its system, as it lays hold on the destinies of races, knocks new shapes out of their bodies and their minds, their personalities and their aspirations, without their really grasping what has happened to them and independently of any individual’s will. Yet all this development is not merely technological; it is not actually the result of the operation on humanity of a remorseless non-human force. There is also a human principle at work—“those passions which are,” as Marx says, “at once the most violent, the basest and the most abominable of which the human breast is capable: the furies of personal interest.” For another element of Marx’s genius is a peculiar psychological insight: no one has ever had so deadly a sense of the infinite capacity of human nature for remaining oblivious or indifferent to the pains we inflict on others when we have a chance to get something out of them for ourselves.
In dealing with this theme, Karl Marx became one of the great masters of satire. Marx is certainly the greatest ironist since Swift, and he has a good deal in common with him. Compare the logic of Swift’s “modest proposal” for curing the misery of Ireland by inducing the starving people to eat their surplus babies with the argument in defense of crime which Marx urges on the bourgeois philosophers (in the so-called fourth volume of Das Kapital): crime, he suggests, is produced by the criminal just as “the philosopher produces ideas, the poet verses, the professor manuals,” and practising it is useful to society because it takes care of the superfluous population at the same time that putting it down gives employment to many worthy citizens.
Marx has furthermore in common with Swift that he is able to get a certain poetry out of money. There is in Swift a kind of intellectual appetite for computations and accounts and a feeling almost sensuous for currency. In the Drapier’s Letters, for example, we seem to see the coins, hear them, finger them. But with Marx the idea of money leads to something more philosophic. We have seen how, in writing of the wood-theft laws, he had personified the trees on the landowner’s estate as higher beings to which the peasants had to be sacrificed. Now—improving on Sir Thomas More, who, at an earlier stage of capitalist development, at the time when the great estates were being depopulated and turned into sheep-runs, had said that the sheep were eating the people—Marx presents us with a picture of a world in which the commodities command the human beings.
These commodities have their own laws of movement; they seem to revolve in their orbits like electrons. Thus they keep the machinery moving, and they keep the people tending the machines. And the greatest of the commodities is money, because it represents all the others. Marx shows us the metal counters and the bank-notes, mere conventions for facilitating exchange, taking on the fetishistic character which is to make them appear ends in themselves, possessed of a value of their own, then acquiring a potency of their own, which seems to substitute itself for human potency. Marx had stated the whole theme in a sentence of an English speech of 1856: “All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.” Mankind is caught helpless in a web of wages and profits and credit. Marx’s readiness to conjure up these visions of independent and unpetitionable fetishes, which, though inanimate, usurp the rights of the living, is evidently primarily derived from his own deficiency in personal feeling, which he projected into the outside world. Like other great satirists, he punished in others the faults he felt to be dangerous in himself; and it was precisely this blinded and paralyzed side of Karl Marx’s peculiar personality which had made it possible for the active and perceptive side to grasp and to explain and to excoriate, as no one else had been able to do, that negation of personal relations, of the responsibility of man to man, that abstract and half-unconscious cruelty, which had afflicted the life of the age.
Marx, to be sure, loves his abstractions, too; he elaborates them at inordinate length. A good deal of this part of Das Kapital is gratuitous and simply for show; and one’s interest in it is naturally proportionate to one’s capacity for enjoying exercises in pure logic. Marx’s method does possess a certain beauty: it enables him, as Mehring has said, to make distinctions infinitely subtle—though, if one looks at it the other way round, he may appear to be almost perversely turning concrete industrial processes into the elusive definitions of metaphysics. (Engels used to complain that it was difficult to recognize the historical processes behind the steps of the dialectical argument.) But the chief value of these abstract chapters which alternate with the chapters of history is—in the first volume, at any rate—an ironic one. It is a great trick of Marx’s first to hypnotize us by the shuttling back and forth of his syllogisms, to elevate us to the contemplation of what appear to be metaphysical laws; and then, by dropping a single phrase, to sting us back to the realization that these pure economic principles that lend themselves to such elegant demonstration are derived simply from the laws of human selfishness, and that if they may be assumed to operate with such sureness, it is only because the acquisitive instinct is as unfailing as the force of gravitation. The meaning of the impersonal-looking formulas which Marx produces with so scientific an air is, he reminds us from time to time as if casually, pennies withheld from the worker’s pocket, sweat squeezed out of his body, and natural enjoyments denied his soul. In competing with the pundits of economics, Marx has written something in the nature of a parody; and, once we have read Das Kapital, the conventional works on economics never seem the same to us again: we can always see through their arguments and figures the realities of the crude human relations which it is their purpose or effect to mask.
For in Marx the exposition of the theory—the dance of commodities, the cross-stitch of logic—is always followed by a documented picture of the capitalist laws at work; and these chapters, with their piling-up of factory reports, their prosaic descriptions of misery and filth, their remorseless enumeration of the abnormal conditions to which the men and women and children of the working class have had to try to adjust themselves, their chronicle of the sordid expedients by which the employers had almost invariably won back, minute by minute and penny by penny, the profits that legislation, itself always inadequate and belated, had tried to shave down a little, and with their specimens of the complacent appeals to morality, religion and reason by which the employers and their economist apologists had had the hypocrisy to justify their practice—these at last become almost intolerable. We feel that we have been taken for the first time through the real structure of our civilization, and that it is the ugliest that has ever existed—a state of things where there is very little to choose between the physical degradation of the workers and the moral degradation of the masters.
From time to time, with telling effect, Marx will light up for a moment the memory of other societies which have been fired by other ideals. The disgrace of the institution of slavery on which the Greek system had been founded had at least, in debasing one set of persons, made possible the development of an aristocracy of marvelous taste and many-sided accomplishment, whereas the masses of the people in the industrial world had been enslaved to no more impressive purpose than “to transform a few vulgar and half-educated upstarts into ‘eminent cotton spinners,’ ‘extensive sausage makers’ and ‘influential blacking dealers.’ ” The feudal system of the Middle Ages, before it had been thrown into disorder by the rebellion of the nobles against the king, had at least guaranteed certain rights in return for the discharge of certain duties. Everybody had in some sense been somebody; whereas when the industrial depression occurred and the mill closed its door on the factory worker, neither his employer nor the State was responsible for him. Where the baron had blown in his plunder in such a way as to give his dependents a good time, the great new virtue of the bourgeois was thrift, the saving of money in order to reinvest it. And though Marx has always kept our nose so close to the counting-house and the spindle and the steam hammer and the scutching-mill and the clay-pit and the mine, he always carries with him through the caverns and wastes of the modern industrial world, cold as those abysses of the sea which the mariner of his ballad spurned as godless, the commands of that “eternal God” who equips him with his undeviating standard for judging earthly things.
Something like this is our first impression of Das Kapital. It is only later, when we come to think about it coolly and after some further acquaintance with Marx’s writings, that its basic inconsistencies become plain.
The most obvious of these is the discrepancy between the scientific point of view of the historian and the moral point of view of the prophet. “What astonished me most in Marx,” writes the Russian sociologist, Maxim Kovalévsky, “was his passionate partisanship in political questions, which did not jibe with the calm objective method which he recommended to his disciples and which was supposed to be intended as an instrument for investigating economic principles.” And H. M. Hyndman was also struck by “the contrast between [Marx’s] manner and utterance when thus deeply stirred to anger [over the policy of the Liberal Party] and his attitude when giving his views on the economic events of the period.”
On the one hand, Marx is telling you in Das Kapital that a certain “historic” development, indispensable for the progress of the race, could only have been carried out by capitalism; and, on the other hand, he is filling you with fury against the wickedness of the people who have performed it. It is as if Darwin had been a kind of Luther Burbank and had caused the blood of his readers to boil over the inadequacies, in the sight of the ideal, of the species produced by evolution and the wrongs of those animals and plants which had been eliminated in the struggle for life. Marx, the scientific historian, declares that the centralization required for socialism could have been provided in no other way than by the competitive processes of capitalism. In a striking passage in the second volume, he accepts the very horrors of the system as an aspect of its beneficent development: “Looking upon capitalist production in its details … we find that it is very economical with materialized labor incorporated in commodities. But it is more than any other mode of production prodigal with human lives, with living labor, wasting not only flesh and blood, but also nerves and brains. Indeed, it is only by dint of the most extravagant waste of individual development that human development is safeguarded and advanced in that epoch of history which immediately precedes the conscious reorganization of society. Since all the economies here mentioned [on the part of the operators of coal mines] arise from the social nature of labor, it is just this social character of labor which causes this waste of the life and health of the laborer.” The capitalist forces, then, could not have operated otherwise: even in their destruction of human beings, they are somehow the agents of human salvation; and yet every individual manufacturer must be blasted as either a cold-blooded slave-driver or a canting and rationalizing fraud.
We may allow ourselves at first to be persuaded that Marx has somehow proved “scientifically” the turpitude of the capitalist class, that the triumph of the cause of the worker is somehow guaranteed by “economics.” There is the Marxist Theory of Surplus Value.
The worker, according to Marx, has sold his capacity to labor like any other commodity on the market; and its value has been determined by the minimum amount required to keep him alive and capable of working and of procreating a fresh supply of workers—which is all the employer has an interest in enabling him to do. The worker, then, is hired for this minimum amount, which is due him for, say, six hours of labor, and is then compelled to work by the employer, on penalty of losing his job, for as long as eight or ten hours. The manufacturer thus robs the worker of from two to four hours of work and sells the product of this work at its value. This value of the stolen work is characterized as “surplus value” and said to constitute the manufacturer’s profit. On this the manufacturer grows fat and insolent while the worker is kept down as close as possible to the necessaries of bare subsistence.
Now certainly, the manufacturer, left to himself, will tend to work his labor as hard as possible and to pay them the least possible wages. But what does it actually mean to say that labor determines value?—an idea which Marx had found in embryo in Ricardo and Adam Smith. It was easy to point out many things of which the value was obviously not determined by labor: old furniture, old masters, radium; and in the case of manufactured products themselves, it by no means held true that their value on the market was proportionate to the amount of work that had gone into them. It was not true that the profits of a manufacturer who employed a great many workers and spent relatively little on plant was larger than the profit of another manufacturer who spent a great deal on plant and employed relatively little labor—though on Marx’s theory it seemed that it should be so. The English Fabians, taking their cue from Stanley Jevons, elaborated a counter-theory which made value dependent on demand: the price of any commodity is determined by the degree of its utility to the persons to whom it is available, and this in turn may be said to determine the value of the labor which has gone to make it.
Marx did not attempt to deal with this problem in the only section of Das Kapital he published. The solution was put off till a later volume, which he never lived to complete; and it was not until 1894 that Engels was able to bring out the posthumous section (Volume III) of Marx’s manuscript which contained it. It now turned out that Marx had frankly recognized that “as a general rule, profit and surplus value are really two different magnitudes.” All profits did come out of surplus value; but the effect of the competition of the capitalists—since the pouring of capital into some lucrative line of industry tended to scale down the rate of profit, while its withdrawal from some less profitable line had the effect of bringing it up—was to level out this rate of profit so that everybody made about the same. The total amount of profit would correspond to the total amount of surplus value; but the individual surplus values had, as it were, been pooled by the individual capitalists, and the profits divided up in such a way that each one got a share which was proportionate to the amount of the capital he had invested. As for the merchant, he did not create value in the same way that the worker did; he merely saved money for the manufacturer in distributing the latter’s product and he got a cut out of the latter’s surplus value. The people who worked for the merchant did not really create value either; they, too, got a cut out of the manufacturer’s profit, but they were cheated out of a part of what they had earned in the same way that the factory workers were cheated by the manufacturer. As for the landlord in capitalist society, he collected his cut of the surplus value in the shape of the rent which was paid him by the manufacturer and the merchant.
Thus the value that was supposed to be derived from labor appeared as a purely abstract conception which had nothing to do with prices and relative profits, and which indeed exhibited a character almost mystical inasmuch as it was an essence inhering only in farm and factory labor and not possessed by the labor of the merchant or of the manufacturer himself, or even by that of the merchant’s clerks. In order to prove that this value of labor had any objective reality, it would have been necessary to show that the total profit realized at a given moment was equal to that part of the combined prices on the market of the total amount of goods produced which was appropriated by the manufacturer after he had paid his workers—a calculation that Marx never attempted. And it is hard to see how Marx’s abstract argument in Volume III—of which John Strachey has recently made so much in his book on The Nature of Capitalist Crisis—can be accepted as proving anything at all. If profit is equal to surplus value, says Marx, then as industry becomes continually more mechanized and needs to employ less and less human labor, one would expect the rate of profit to decrease, Now the rate of profit does decrease. But, assuming that the rate of profit does fall, how does this prove that there is any direct relation between the proportion of human labor employed and the manufacturer’s rate of profit, which is reckoned on his whole investment? It was quite possible, as we shall see in a moment, to show the mechanism of capitalist crises without invoking the Labor Theory of Value; and certainly the former does not prove the latter. The Labor Theory is thus simply, like the Dialectic, a creation of the metaphysician who never abdicated before the economist in Marx—an effort to show that the moral values which he wished to impress on people were, independently of our ideas about them, somehow involved in the nature of things.
But in the meantime, for more than a quarter of a century, from 1867 to 1894, the idea that all value was created by labor had been steadily marching on. It had been accepted by Marx’s followers as one of the fundamental tenets of their faith, and they had been confidently looking forward to the day when the master would resolve all problems and give the irrefutable reply to their enemies. And now when the third volume of Das Kapital came out, even economists sympathetic to Marx expressed disillusion and disappointment.
One is almost inclined to conclude that there may have been something in the contention of the Italian economist Loria, who thought that Marx had never really wanted to face the world with the later developments of his theory but had purposely left it for Engels to deal with them after his death. Certainly the moral effect of the overwhelming first volume of Das Kapital is likely to be weakened by an acquaintance with its successors. If all value is created by labor only in some metaphysical sense, then there may be more in those utility theories of value which Marxists regard as capitalist frauds than we had formerly been willing to admit. If it is possible for values to be reckoned as Marx reckoned them, in units of an abstract labor power, why was it not possible—what Marx had denied—to reckon them in units of an abstract utility?—especially when the supposed value of labor seems to have nothing to do with fixing prices, whereas the demand of the consumer obviously has.
But the truth is that all such theories are incomplete: real prices are the results of situations much more complex than any of these formulas, and complicated by psychological factors which economists seldom take into account. The economist tends to imagine that value—and value in the sense of actual prices is easily confused with value in a moral or philosophical sense—is something mainly created by the group to which he belongs or whose apologist he aims to be. The stupider type of old-fashioned manufacturer was practically under the impression that he was creating both the product and the labor by supplying the brains and the capital which gave the factory hand his opportunity to work. The Fabian Socialists represented the middle-class British consumer, and they believed that the human being as consumer rather than as farm laborer or factory hand determined the value of commodities by his demand for them. Henry George, who as a poor printer in California had been appalled to see that land of plenty transformed into a merciless monopoly where the rich were crowding the poor off the earth, had been led to conceive all value as primarily derived from the land. Karl Marx, who was not only on the side of the worker but wanted to see him inherit the earth, asserted that all value was created by labor. His effort to support this assertion with a theoretical justification exhibits clearly—it is perhaps the most striking example—the inconsistency in Dialectical Materialism between the tendency to represent everything as relative, every system of economics as an ideology projected by special class interests, and the impulse to establish principles with some more general sort of validity, upon which one’s own conduct may be based.
Engels of course was furious with Loria and in a reply to those who had complained of the third volume—it was one of the very last things that he wrote, and he did not live to do a projected second section—advanced one preposterous argument which gave the whole Marxist position away. Falling back on his studies in anthropology, he tries to prove that among primitive peoples the actual prices for which commodities are exchanged are determined by the labor that has gone into them. “The people of that time,” he declares, “were certainly clever enough—both the cattle-breeders and their customers—not to give away the labor-time expended by them without an equivalent in barter. On the contrary, the closer people are to the primitive state of commodity production—the Russians and Orientals, for example—the more time do they still waste today, in order to squeeze out, through long tenacious bargaining, the full compensation for their labor-time expended on a product.” This is a droll picture of the innocent Engels buying some brass jewelry from a Persian merchant and accepting the protestations of the latter as simply the efforts of an honest fellow to get from the buyer the full value of his work—a picture which appears all the stranger when we remember the youthful Engels’ little drawing of the smirking commercial traveler who has just sold the connoisseur some bad wine. And it shows up a central fallacy of Marxism. After all, Marx and Engels had devoted a large part of their lives to demonstrating that human beings will sell things for a good deal more than they have cost them. “Human beings?” Engels would have retorted. “No: only the bourgeoisie.” But this lands him in the ridiculous position of assuming that, say, the Caucasian horse-trader or the oriental seller of trinkets is incapable of overcharging his customer. No: the desire to get the highest possible price for something we have to sell seems to have distinguished the human race from a period antedating capitalist society.
We shall return to this point a little later; but in the meantime let us note the crudity of the psychological motivation which underlies the world-view of Marx. It is the shortcoming of economists in general that each one understands as a rule only one or two human motivations: psychology and economics have never yet got together in such a way as really to supplement one another. Marx understood sordid self-interest and its capacity for self-delusion, and he understood the proud human spirit throwing off degradation and oppression. But he tended to regard these as exclusively the products of class specialization rather than as impulses more or less common to humanity which might be expected to show themselves, or to be latent, in people of any class.
Marx would have run up against more complicated questions of the motivation of economic groups if he had gone on with his class anatomy of society. What he shows us in the first volume of Das Kapital is always the factory worker immediately confronting the manufacturer, the peasant confronting the landowner; in this section it is always the direct exploiter who is meant when Marx speaks of the capitalist. But in the second and third instalments, which deal with the circulation of capital, Marx must reckon with the tradesmen and the bankers and with what we now call the white-collar class, who work for them; and the picture becomes much more complex. Marx did not, however, get around to discussing the interrelations between these class forces until the very last pages of his manuscript; and it seems significant that of the chapter called The Classes he should have written only a page and a half. Modern capitalist society, Marx says here, may be divided into three great classes: “the owners of mere labor-power, the owners of capital, and the landlords, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent.” But there are also “middle and transition stages,” which “obliterate all definite boundaries.” The question is, What constitutes a class? “At first glance, it might seem that the identity of the revenues and of the sources of revenue” of each makes the basis of each of the three great classes. But from this point of view the physicians and the officials would constitute classes, too. “The same would also be true of the infinite dissipation of interests and positions created by the social division of labor among laborers, capitalists and landlords. For example, the landlords are divided into owners of vineyards, farms, forests, mines, fisheries. [Here the manuscript ends.]”
Marx dropped the class analysis of society at the moment when he was approaching its real difficulties.
What Karl Marx, then, had really based his prophecies on—as Reinhold Niebuhr has recently pointed out—was the assumption that, though the employer had always shown himself to be grasping, the socialist worker of the future—having made what Engels describes in Anti-Dühring as the “leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom”—would always act for the good of humanity. The dominant class of the capitalist era had never willingly done anything but rob the poor in the interests of the well-being of their own group; but the dominant class of the proletarian dictatorship would never dream of abusing its position.
It ought also to be noted at this point that Marx and Engels had come to believe that there had been an epoch in the prehistoric past when a different standard of morality had prevailed. Since writing the Communist Manifesto, they had had occasion to revise their opinion then expressed, that “the history of all human society, past and present, has been the history of class struggles.” In the later editions, Engels added a note in which he explained that in 1847 little had been known about the communism of primitive societies. In the meantime, he and Marx had read the books of certain recent anthropologists who had convinced them that a communistic gens had been the true primitive form of social organization. Especially had they been impressed by the work of Lewis H. Morgan, the American ethnologist, who had studied and written about the Iroquois Indians. As a result, Marx and Engels now looked back—and thereby nourished their faith in the future—to something in the nature of a Golden Age of communist ownership and brotherly relations.
Marx himself had intended to write on this subject, but he had never got to the point of doing so—so that Engels, after Marx’s death, published an essay on the German mark (a free rural commune), based on the researches of G. L. von Maurer, and a little book called The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Here he attempted to demonstrate from Morgan that the “simple moral grandeur” of the “old gentile society without classes” had been “undermined and brought to its ruin by the most contemptible means: theft, violence, cunning, treason,” and that, in consequence, the “new system of classes” had been “inaugurated by the meanest impulses: vulgar covetousness, brutal lust, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth.”
Now this raises the same sort of question in regard to this communist past that the rule of the proletariat does in regard to the socialist future. How had the members of the human race, who had once been happy and good, managed to become so unhappy and bad? This latter condition, on Engels’ own showing, had been brought about by these primitive peoples themselves in the course of their intertribal warfare. The victors had never hesitated a moment in taking advantage of their ascendancy over the vanquished to plunder them and reduce them to slavery. Here again we are brought up against the inadequacy of the Marxist conception of human nature. Certainly there is some plausibility in the assumption that a primitive community of equals is sounder within its limits than modern society—as the Pueblo Indian villages of the American Southwest have survived with their communist economy in the teeth of their more predatory nomad neighbors and of the massacres and bankruptcies of the white man; and that any society of the future which is to be stable must have gravitated to some such equilibrium. But is it really only impulses which may be characterized as “vulgar,” “brutal” and “selfish” that have given rise to the class societies?
With this question of the primitive past we need not attempt to deal at length, since Marx gave it but little attention in his writings and since I cannot find that even Engels made very much effort to fit it into the dialectical theory of history. But the question for the future is important. Why should we suppose that man’s brutal and selfish impulses will all evaporate with a socialist dictatorship?
The answer is simply that there remained with Marx and Engels, in spite of their priding themselves upon having developed a new socialism that was “scientific” in contrast to the old “utopian” socialism, a certain amount of this very utopianism they had repudiated.
Let us consider why Marx should have assumed that the morality of the revolutionary proletariat would necessarily be more improving for humanity than the morality of the exploiting bourgeoisie. The moralities which people profess are, according to Marx’s theory, inextricably tied up with their class interests; so that there are a morality of the bourgeoisie and a morality of the proletariat, and the two are antagonistic. The morality of the bourgeoisie has had for its purpose to cultivate those virtues which were necessary to build up its own position and to justify the crimes of which it has been guilty in dispossessing and destroying the workers; the morality of the proletariat consists in the loyalty, the self-sacrifice and the courage which will make it possible for it in turn to dispossess and destroy the bourgeoisie. Yet it is right for the proletariat to expropriate the bourgeoisie, and even to imprison them and kill them, in some sense in which it has not been right for the bourgeoisie to do the same things to them. Why? Because, the Marxist would answer, the proletariat represents the antithesis, which, in the course of the dialectical evolution from the lower to the higher, is coming to carry the thesis into the synthesis. But in what way is the revolutionary morality distinguishably superior to the morality with which it struggles and which it will ultimately supplant?
It is distinguished by its recognition of certain fundamental human rights. Karl Marx in his early writings has had a great deal to say about these rights. Later on, when he is writing Das Kapital, he no longer invokes them so explicitly; and Engels asserted in Anti-Dühring (of 1877) that “the idea of equality both in its bourgeois and in its proletarian form” was “itself an historical product” and “therefore anything but an eternal truth”; that it owed its popularity merely to what he called “the general diffusion and the continual appropriateness of the ideas of the eighteenth century.” Yet for Marx it had been certainly something more; its “appropriateness” had been felt with passion. And the inheritor of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a faith, not unlike Rousseau’s, in the fundamental worthiness of man, and even haunted, as appears from his attitude toward the primitive communities described by Morgan, by the phantom of the “noble savage,” is always there behind the scientific historian, who indicates coldly that “human development” has been “safeguarded and advanced in that epoch of history which immediately precedes the conscious reorganization of society” at the cost of an immense waste of “flesh and blood.” We have seen how Marx had ridiculed Proudhon for introducing into contemporary economics the eighteenth-century abstraction of a universal natural man endowed with a fundamental right to own property. But Marx himself was to be assuming throughout his life that every human being was entitled to what was described by another exponent of the eighteenth-century philosophy as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” When a governing-class Englishman like Palmerston asserted that “the legislature of a country has the right to impose such political disabilities upon any class of the community as it may deem necessary for the safety and the welfare of the whole … This belongs to the fundamental principles on which civilized government is founded”; Marx would be prompt to retort: “There you have the most cynical confession ever made, that the mass of the people have no rights at all, but that they may be allowed that amount of immunities the legislature—or in other words, the ruling class—may deem fit to grant them.”
And now we have got to the real bottom of Marxism—to the assumption that class society is wrong because it destroys, as the Communist Manifesto says, the bonds between man and man and prevents the recognition of those rights which are common to all human beings. If no such human rights exist, what is wrong about exploitation? But there is no ultimate way of proving they exist any more than there is of proving that in the sight of God all souls are of equal value. You cannot reason an English Tory into a conviction that the lower classes are not unalterably inferior to the upper; and it would be useless to dispute with a Nazi over the innate inferiority of non-Nordics. Engels was later to provide in Anti-Dühring an admirable historical account of the development in the modern world of the belief in equal rights—showing how the idea of equality was maintained under the mediaeval hierarchy by the claims of the various national states; how the industrial middle class, as it progressed out of handicraft to manufacture, required freedom from the restrictions of the guilds in order to sell their labor, and freedom from discriminative trade laws in order to exchange their commodities; and how the working class eventually created by the new economic system, the “shadow” of the bourgeoisie, had taken over from it the ideal of equality and demanded, not merely the abolition of class privileges, as the bourgeoisie had done, but the “abolition of the classes themselves.” But even with the aid of historical evidence, you cannot necessarily convince people that the progress of human institutions involves a process of progressive democratization: you can only appeal to them by methods which, in the last analysis, are moral and emotional. And this Karl Marx knew magnificently how to do. The great importance of his book is not at all that it establishes an incomparable essence of value inherent in agricultural and factory work, but that it shows in a concrete way how the worker has been misused by the employer and that it makes the reader indignant about this. While Karl Marx is pretending to tell us that all these horrors have advanced human civilization and that all morality is a relative matter, he is really convincing us that a true civilization will be impossible without our putting an end to them, and is filling us with fervor for a morality of his own.
It was here that Karl Marx as a Jew had his great value for the thought of his age. The characteristic genius of the Jew has been especially a moral genius. The sacred books of the people of Israel have served as a basis for the religions of three continents; and even in the case of those great men among the Jews who do not occupy themselves with religion proper, it is usually a grasp of moral ideas which has given them their peculiar force. Freud’s discovery of emotional compensations is in reality a kind of moral insight: the irrational and the destructive in personality must be distortions of the creative and the natural; and to correct them, the patient and the analyst alike are required to exert a self-discipline which is the only price of mastery and adjustment—a point of view distinctly different from that of the more purely Germanic Jung, who leads his patients away from their troubles into the dreamland of primitive myths and is likely to leave them there. It was probably the Jew in the half-Jewish Proust that saved him from being the Anatole France of an even more deliquescent phase of the French belletristic tradition. Certainly the moral authority of the Jews has figured to a considerable extent among the factors that have caused the Nazis in Germany to persecute them. To a people who are attempting to recapture a barbarian self-confidence and ruthlessness, such moralists are disconcerting: they are always trying to remind one of principles that transcend country and class when one wants to believe in a hierarchy based on race. It is interesting to look back on the role which the Jews have already played in this chronicle: Renan’s Semitic studies, the influence on Anatole France of Mme. Caillavet, the Jewish disciples of Saint-Simon; the working-class leader Andreas Gottschalk; the communist Moses Hess; the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. And so Karl Marx brought into economics a point of view which was of value to his time precisely in proportion as it was alien to it. Nobody but a Jew in that middle nineteenth century could have commanded the moral weapons to crack the fortress of bourgeois self-satisfaction.
Nobody but a Jew could have fought so uncompromisingly and obstinately for the victory of the dispossessed classes. The great Jewish minds of these first generations that had been liberated from the closed Judaic world still remembered the mediaeval captivity, and they were likely to present themselves as champions of other social groups or doctrines which had not been freed or vindicated yet. So Freud saw the vital importance of those sexual impulses that civilization had outlawed or that puritanism had tried to suppress, and forced psychiatric science to take account of them. So Einstein became preoccupied with the few unemphasized anomalies in the well-operating system of Newton and made them the corner-stone that the builder had rejected on which to build a new system that should shake the authority of the old. So Lassalle took up the cause of feminism at a time when German women were largely at the mercy of their fathers and their husbands; and so Proust transferred from a persecuted race to the artist and the homosexual both that race’s tragic fate in society and its inner conviction of moral superiority. So Marx, as has been shown already, had substituted for the plight of the Jew the plight of the proletariat.
But Marx is of the tradition of the Old Testament, not of that of the New. His daughter Eleanor tells us that the version of the life of Jesus which he was in the habit of recounting to his children showed Jesus as primarily a poor carpenters son who had been executed unjustly by the rich. Marx could rub in the sufferings of the wronged; he could blast the exploiters with hatred. But he could not much love the first any more than he could pity the second. He was not among those working-class leaders who have merged themselves with working-class life. He himself had had no experience of modern industry; it was from Engels and the parliamentary blue-books that he had accumulated his mountains of data. And if he exposes the dark depths of the industrial system, it is less to move us to fellow-feeling with the workers than to destroy the human aspect of their masters. The bourgeoisie, in Karl Marx’s writings, are created mainly in caricature; and the proletariat figure mainly as their crimes. There is in Marx an irreducible discrepancy between the good which he proposes for humanity and the ruthlessness and hatred he inculcates as a means of arriving at this—a discrepancy which, in the history of Marxism, has given rise to much moral confusion.
Now where does the animus behind Das Kapital come from? It is the bitterest of all Marx’s bitter books. It has hardly a trace of the exhilaration which gives his earlier work a kind of fire. “Reading your book again,” he wrote Engels April 9, 1863—the book was The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844—“has sadly made me feel my age. With what freshness and passion and boldness of vision and freedom from learned and scientific scruples you have handled the subject here! And the illusion that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow the result will spring to life as an historical reality before our eyes gives the whole a warm and spirited humor—with which the later ‘gray on gray’ makes a damnably unpleasant contrast.”
But it is not only age which makes the difference between Engels’ book and Marx’s. It is impossible to read Das Kapital in the light of Marx’s life during this period without concluding that the emotional motivation, partly or totally unconscious no doubt, behind Marx’s excoriation of the capitalists and his grim parading of the afflictions of the poor is at once his outraged conviction of the indignity and injustice of his own fate and his bad conscience at having inflicted that fate on others. Marx himself is not only the victim, the dispossessed proletariat; he is also the exploiting employer. For has he not exploited Jenny and Engels? Is he himself not responsible, not merely for the being of his beloved daughters, but for the handicaps and hardships they have been born to? In a letter to Siegfried Meyer, written April 30, 1867, when he has finally got Das Kapital off to the printer, he speaks of it as “the task to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness in life and my family.”
True—as he goes on to say—it has all been done for the ideal and for mankind: “I laugh at the so-called ‘practical’ men and their wisdom. If one had the hide of an ox, one could naturally turn one’s back on the sufferings of humanity and look after one’s own skin; but, as it is, I should have considered myself very unpractical if I had died without completing my book, at least in manuscript form.” “To work for humanity,” says Lafargue, “was one of his favorite phrases.” For that science to which one sacrifices others “should not be,” as Marx writes elsewhere, “an egoistic pleasure: those who are in a position to devote themselves to scientific studies should be also the first to put their knowledge at the service of humanity.”
Yet if you choose to work for humanity, if you will not write for money, why then you must make other people earn it for you or suffer and let others suffer, because you haven’t got it.
If it was true, as I have suggested, that Marx and Engels in relation to one another were like the electrodes of the voltaic cell, it became more and more obvious as time went on that Marx was to play the part of the metal of the positive electrode, which gives out hydrogen and remains unchanged, while Engels was to be the negative electrode, which gradually gets used up. “There’s nothing I long for more,” Engels wrote Marx, April 27, 1867, just after the last pages of the first volume of Das Kapital had finally been got off to the printer, “than to escape from this miserable commerce, which is demoralizing me completely by reason of the time it makes me waste. So long as I remain in it, I can’t accomplish anything—especially since I’ve been one of the bosses, it’s got to be a great deal worse on account of the increased responsibility.” He is going to give it up, he says; but then his income will be very much reduced, “and what I always have on my mind is what are we going to do about your” Marx replies on a note of contrition: “I confidently hope and believe that I shall be within a year’s time enough of a made man so that I can fundamentally reform my economic situation and stand finally on my own feet again. If it had not been for you, I should never have been able to bring this work to completion, and I assure you that it has always weighed like an incubus on my conscience that it should have been principally on account of me that you have been allowing your splendid abilities to be wasted and rusted in business and have had, besides, to live through all my petites misères with me.”
But, he adds, he cannot conceal from himself that he has “a year of trial” still ahead of him; and he intimates, without explicitly asking for it, that an immediate advance of money would be helpful. “What—aside from the uncertainty—frightens me most is the prospect of going back to London [he was in Germany arranging the publication of his book], as I must do in six or eight days. The debts there are considerable, and the Manichees [the creditors] are eagerly awaiting my return. That means family worries again, domestic collisions, a hunted life, instead of going freely and freshly to work.”
We have seen what the situation at home was. The next year Laura Marx was to succumb to the fate which her parents had been trying to stave off and take a position as governess. Poor Marx, more in torment than ever, with on the one hand the needs of his family and on the other the exactions of his book, had been suffering from a chronic insomnia. He had been visited by a succession of plagues which were none the less physically agonizing because they were probably partly due to the strain of the domestic situation, as Marx himself suggested, combined, as Engels thought, with his difficulties over his book. For years he was tormented almost incessantly by outbreaks of carbuncles and boils—an ailment of which only those who have had it can appreciate the exasperating character, with its malignant and nagging inflammations always coming out in new places, often inaccessible and sometimes crippling, as if a host of indestructible little devils were hatching under one’s skin. And these were diversified with influenza, rheumatism, ophthalmia, toothache and headache. But his most serious complaint was an enlarged liver. He had had trouble with his liver all his life: his father had died of cancer of the liver; and the fear of it had always hung over Karl. During the sixties his trouble became acute; later on, he was to be forced to take a cure. In the meantime, during the years when he is in labor with Das Kapital, he passes through a Valley of the Shadow of Death. He will write Engels that his arm is so sore with rheumatism that he cries out without being aware of it every time he moves it in his sleep, that his liver attacks have stupefied his brain, paralyzed all his limbs. We have seen how, unable to read or write, he had given himself up at one period, to “psychological reveries as to what it would be like to be blind or mad.” And he extends his afflictions to all about him in a way which betrays a conviction that he is doomed to be a bringer of grief. When Jenny takes a trip to Paris to arrange about a French translation of Das Kapital, she finds that the man she has gone to interview has just had a paralytic stroke; and on her way back in the train something goes wrong with the locomotive so that she arrives two hours late; then the omnibus in which she is riding upsets; and when she finally gets back to London, the cab in which she is driving home has a collision with another cab and she is obliged to walk the rest of the way. In the meantime, Lenchen’s sister, who had been staying at the Marxes’, had suddenly fallen ill and, just before Jenny’s arrival, had died. When Marx’s mother, upon whose demise he had, as we have seen, been counting, does finally die, he writes strangely to Engels that Fate has been demanding some member of his family: “I myself have one foot in the grave (unter der Erde).” And in one of his letters to Engels during his visit to Lassalle in Berlin, he reveals by another fantasy the symbolic significance which he attaches to illness: “Apropos Lassalle-Lazarus! Lepsius has proved in his big work on Egypt that the exodus of the Jews from Egypt is nothing more or less than the story that Manetho tells about the expulsion from Egypt ‘of the race of lepers,’ led by an Egyptian priest called Moses. Lazarus the leper is thus the prototype of the Jews and Lazarus-Lassalle. Only in the case of our Lazarus, the leprosy has gone to his brain. The disease from which he is suffering was originally secondary syphilis, imperfectly cured. He developed a caries of the bone from it … and something has still remained in one of his legs … neuralgia or something of the sort. To the detriment of his physique, our Lazarus now lives as luxuriously as his antithesis, the rich man, and this I regard as one of the main obstacles to his cure.”
And the better times to which Marx looked forward when the first volume of Das Kapital was finished, were never really to come. Engels had hoped, as he told him, that his outlook would now become less gloomy. But Marx’s poverty and his dependence on others were permanent features of his life; and as their consequences had become more painful, he could only grow more bitter. Hyndman tells us that, unlike certain other aging men, he grew less tolerant instead of more. Das Kapital is the reflection of this period. He said that he had written the terrible chapter on the Working Day at a time when, as a result of his illness, his head had been too weak for theoretical work; and when he had finally finished his book, he wrote Engels: “I hope that the bourgeoisie as long as they live will have cause to remember my carbuncles,” Thus, in attacking the industrial system, he is at the same time declaring his own tribulations, calling the Heavens—that is, History—to witness that he is a just man wronged, and damning the hypocritical scoundrel who compels others to slave and suffer for him, who persists in remaining indifferent to the agony for which he is responsible, who even keeps himself in ignorance of it. The book has behind it the exalted purpose, it is a part of the noble accomplishment, of Karl Marx’s devoted life; but the wrong and the hurt of that life have made the whole picture hateful or grievous. The lofty devotion and the wrong are inextricably involved with one another; and the more he asserts the will of his highest impulses, the blacker the situation becomes.
Marx may appear to have kept the two things apart when he has set the bad capitalist on one side and the good communist of the future on the other; but, after all, to arrive at that future, the communist must be cruel and repressive just as the capitalist has been; he, too, must do violence to that common humanity in whose service the prophet is supposed to be preaching. It is a serious misrepresentation of Marx to minimize the sadistic element in his writing. In his address to the Communist League of April, 1850, he had declared to the revolutionary working class that, “far from opposing so-called excesses, the vengeance of the people on hated individuals or attacks by the masses on buildings which arouse hateful memories, we must not only tolerate them, but even take the lead in them.” Nor was this, as we have seen from his correspondence, a tendency which he reserved for politics. In the letter to Engels just quoted, for example, there is a passage in which Marx tells his friend that the publisher who had let them down twenty years before by being afraid to bring out The German Ideology and who had unloaded “that young fellow Kriege on our necks” had recently fallen out of a window and “if you please (gefälligst), broken his own neck.”
If we isolate the images in Marx—which are so powerful and vivid in themselves that they can sometimes persuade us to forget his lack of realistic observation and almost produce the illusion of a visible and tangible experience—if we isolate and examine these images, we can see through to the inner obsessions at the heart of the world-vision of Marx.
Here all is cruel discomfort, rape, repression, mutilation and massacre, premature burial, the stalking of corpses, the vampire that lives on another’s blood, life in death and death in life: “The Abbé Bonawita Blank … operated on magpies and starlings in such a way that, though they were free to fly about as they pleased, they would always come back to him again. He cut off the lower part of their beaks so that they were not able to get their food themselves and so were obliged to eat from his hand. The good little bourgeois who looked on from a distance and saw the birds perched on the shoulders of the good priest and apparently dining with him in a friendly fashion, admired his culture and his science. His biographer says that the birds loved him as their benefactor. And the Poles, enchained, mutilated, branded, refuse to love their Prussian benefactors!” “But capital not only lives upon labor. Like a magnificent and barbarous master, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.” “If the silkworm’s object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of the wage-worker” (both are condemned, thus, to living graves). “This miserable Assembly left the stage, after it had given itself the pleasure, two days before the anniversary of its birthday, May 4, of rejecting the notion of amnesty for the June insurgents. Its power shattered, held in deadly hatred by the people, repulsed, maltreated, contemptuously thrown aside by the bourgeoisie, whose tool it was, forced in the second half of its life to disavow the first, robbed of its republican illusions, with no great creations in the past, with no hope for the future, and with its living body dying bit by bit, it was able to galvanize its own corpse only by continually recalling the June victory and living it over again, substantiating itself by constantly repeated damnation of the damned. Vampire, that lives on the blood of the June insurgents!” “But from 1848 to 1851 there was nothing more than a walking of the ghost of the old revolution—now in the form of Marrast, ‘le républicain en gants jaunes,’ dressed up as Bailly; and now in the form of the adventurer who hid his commonplace and unpleasing physiognomy behind the iron death-mask of Napoleon.” “Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that it might before all men’s eyes draw up a holograph will, declaring in the name of the people: ‘Everything that exists is fit for the scrap-heap.’ ” “Neither a nation nor a woman can be forgiven for the unguarded hour in which a chance comer has seized the opportunity for an act of rape.” “Thetis, the sea-goddess, had foretold to her son Achilles that he would perish in the heyday of his youth. Like Achilles, the constitution has its weak spot; and, like Achilles, it has a foreboding of premature death.” “If, subsequently, the constitution was bayoneted out of existence, we must not forget that while in the womb it had been guarded by bayonets directed against the people, and that by bayonets it had been brought into the world.” “The champions of the Party of Order were still seated upon the shoulders of armed force, when they realized, one fine morning, that the seat had become prickly, for the shoulders had turned into bayonets.” “The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century had stationed the state as a sentry before the newly created petty land-holdings and dunged them with laurels, has now turned into a vampire, which sucks out their heart’s blood and brain-marrow and casts it into the alchemist’s retort of capital.” (This last has been pointed out by Max Eastman as an example of Marx’s bad taste. The metaphor is certainly mixed; yet the style is not so very much different from the apocalyptic parts of the Bible. It may be noted that Marx himself was always pitiless to the mixed metaphors of his opponents.)
These images have been excerpted almost as they come from the Marx of the most brilliant period: from his writings in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and from The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire; and they might be multiplied by countless examples from his more unrelievedly saturnine works. Here is his description of the worker from Das Kapital. We have seen, says Marx, “that within the capitalist system all the methods for increasing the social productivity of labor are carried out at the cost of the individual worker: that all the means for developing production are transformed into means of domination over and exploitation of the producer; that they mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed; cut him off from the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in exact proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power; that they distort the conditions under which he works, subjecting him, during the labor process, to a despotism which is all the more hateful because of its pettiness; that they transform his whole life into working time, and drag his wife and children beneath the Juggernaut wheels of capital’s car.”
There is a German expression “lasten wie ein Alp,” which means something like “weigh like an incubus,” to which Marx was very much addicted. We find it on the first page of The Eighteenth Brumaire, where he says that, “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like an incubus on the brain of the living.” We have seen it in the letter already quoted, in which he tells Engels that the injury to his friend’s career for which he feels himself responsible has weighed like an incubus on his conscience; and he had written to the Countess Hatzfeldt after Lassalle’s death that this event—in a similar phrase—had weighed upon him “like a hideous and evil dream.” In writing about Das Kapital to Engels, he says that the task weighs upon him like an incubus; and he complains that the Workers’ International “and everything that it involves … weighs like an incubus on me, and I’d be glad to be able to shake it off.” It is always the same oppression, whether Marx has objectified it and generalized it as the oppression of the living by the dead or felt it personally as his own oppression under the conviction of his own guilt or under the greatest of his own achievements. It is always the same wound, as to which it is never quite clear—as in the case of the Dialectic, which is now a fundamental truth of nature, now an action performed by human agents, as in the case of the development of the capitalist economy, which is now an inevitable and non-moral process, now the blackest of human crimes—whether the gods have inflicted it on man or man has inflicted it on himself. It is always the same burial alive, whether it is the past trying to stifle the present or the future putting away the past. The French constitution of 1848, which, according to Marx in one of the passages just quoted, has been guarded in the womb by bayonets, is brought out of the womb by bayonets only to be bayoneted to death.
“You see,” he had once written Engels, “that I’m the object of plagues just like Job, though I’m not so godfearing as he was.” No: he is not so godfearing. He sees himself also as “Old Nick,” the Goethean spirit that denies. Yet Old Nick is not the right symbol either: this Devil has been twisted and racked. Though he is capable of satanic mockery of the publisher who had sent Kriege on their necks and then fallen and broken his own, the mocker cannot jeer at such a doom without breaking, by a dialectical joke, his own neck as well; and, after all, had not the publisher buried Marx’s book alive? It is Prometheus who remains his favorite hero; for Prometheus is a Satan who suffers, a Job who never assents; and, unlike either Job or Satan, he brings liberation to mankind. Prometheus turns up in Das Kapital (in Chapter Twenty-three) to represent the proletariat chained to capital. The Light-Bringer was tortured, we remember, by Zeus’s eagle’s tearing, precisely, his liver, as Karl Marx himself—who is said to have reread Aeschylus every year—was obsessed by the fear that his liver would be eaten like his father’s by cancer. And yet, if it is a devouring bird which Father Zeus has sent against the rebel, it is also a devourer, a destroyer, fire, which Prometheus has brought to man. And in the meantime the deliverer is never delivered; the slayer never rises from the grave. The resurrection, although certain, is not yet; for the expropriators are yet to be expropriated.
Such is the trauma of which the anguish and the defiance reverberate through Das Kapital. To point it out is not to detract from the authority of Marx’s work. On the contrary, in history as in other fields of writing, the importance of a book depends, not merely on the breadth of the view and the amount of information that has gone into it, but on the depths from which it has been drawn. The great crucial books of human thought—outside what are called the exact sciences, and perhaps something of the sort is true even here—always render articulate the results of fundamental new experiences to which human beings have had to adjust themselves. Das Kapital is such a book. Marx has found in his personal experience the key to the larger experience of society, and identifies himself with that society. His trauma reflects itself in Das Kapital as the trauma of mankind under industrialism; and only so sore and angry a spirit, so ill at ease in the world, could have recognized and seen into the causes of the wholesale mutilation of humanity, the grim collisions, the uncomprehended convulsions, to which that age of great profits was doomed.
And now how far may the diagnosis in Das Kapital be taken today as valid? To what extent have Marx’s expectations actually been borne out by events?
Marx believed that the capitalist system involved fundamental contradictions which ensured its eventual destruction. His theory of these contradictions—which he thought of in terms of Hegelian opposites—may be stated with much simplification as follows:
The capitalist system was based on private property and so was inevitably competitive. The aim of every manufacturer was always to undersell the rest, so that there would be a continual stimulus to more efficient methods of production. But the more efficient an industry became—the faster the machines were able to do the work and the fewer people were needed to tend them—the more people would be thrown out of jobs and the more would wages be reduced. That is, the more the commodities produced, the fewer the people who would be able to buy them. In order to get rid of his goods under these continually tightening conditions, the manufacturer would have to undercut his competitors, and that would mean further reduction of wages and still more efficient machinery, and, consequently, again in the long run, fewer people able to buy what he was making. This situation had already produced a jam and a depression about every ten years; and the only way for the manufacturer to get a reprieve from the vicious cycle was to find new foreign markets for his products—an escape which would not in the long run save him.
The more efficiently goods were manufactured, the more money would be needed for the plant; and it would seem to pay the manufacturer to build the plants bigger and bigger. Thus the industries would keep growing and the companies keep merging till each industry would be well on its way to becoming one great unified organization, and the money which kept them going would have been concentrated in a very few hands. But actually the bigger big business grew, the larger the sums of money it dealt in, the smaller its rate of profit became. At last the contradictions involved in this process would jam the whole system so badly—there being no more fresh markets available—that it would become intolerable, impossible, for society to function at all unless the money and the great centralized plants were taken away from the people who claimed to own them and who were incapable of conceiving them as a means to any more beneficent end than that of making themselves rich out of the profits, and were run for the public good. The working class would be able to accomplish this, because it would have increased to enormous proportions and have grown conscious of its interests as a class as incompatible with the interests of its employers; and it would now find itself so hard-pressed by privation that no alternative would be possible for it. All its scruples would be overcome by the realization that this privation coincided with an era when the production of what they needed had become possible with an ease and on a scale which had never been imagined in history.
Now, we may reject the Hegelian-Marxist Dialectic as a genuine law of nature, but we cannot deny that Marx has here made effective use of it to exhibit the impossibilities of capitalism and to demonstrate the necessity for socialism. Nothing else had so brought home the paradoxes of destitution imposed by abundance, of great public utilities rendered useless by the property rights of those who controlled them. Nor was it necessary to accept the metaphysics of the Labor Theory of Value and to argue from it a priori, as Mr. Strachey does, in order to be convinced by Marx that this process must land capitalism in an impasse. The great thing was that Marx had been able, as the bourgeois economists had not, to see the capitalist economy in the perspective of the centuries as something which, like other economies, had had a beginning and must have an end. Mathematician, historian and prophet, he had grasped the laws of its precipitate progress and foreseen the disasters of its slumps as nobody else had done.
Marx was not able to foresee with the same accuracy the social phenomena which would result from these collapses. There were several fallacies involved in the picture he had made of the future.
In the first place, the identification by the Jew of the Jew with the proletariat gives rise to a miscalculation. In Marx’s time, both the Jew and the worker had been disfranchised and shut off from society; but there was this difference between them, that the proletarian had been stunted intellectually as well as physically, that the proletarian children, as Engels had said, were not aware that they were unfortunate or unhappy because they had never been anything else; whereas the Jews, though their outlook had been narrow, had been accustomed to intellectual training; through all their migrations and their bondages they had preserved a traditional discipline; they had behind them a noble past and they looked forward to a national resurrection. Once the enclave of old Jewry was broken open, it was quite natural for a man like Marx to take up the instruments of modern thought like one who was coming into his own. Furthermore, he had inherited from his rabbinical forebears a tradition of spiritual authority.
But the proletarian, on his side, had no training and, even when he came to organize trade unions and to oppose the employer effectively, no tradition of the kind of responsibility required of a governing class. He knew little about the history of society, little about the rest of the world; and he had little opportunity to learn. The men who employed him had an interest in keeping him ignorant. By virtue of his very position, he was deprived of the things that would enable him to rise to a higher status. The mediaeval disabilities of the Jew were in the nature of a mere national accident; the disabilities of the proletarian were disabilities indissoluble from his class. Yet Karl Marx was quite sure that the workers would be able to acquire the science, the self-discipline and the executive skill which had been developed by the governing class, in proportion, precisely, as the gulf itself between them and these possessing classes would come to be more deeply dug, in proportion as their antagonism itself would become more acutely developed. Would there not be communists like Marx to teach them?—and would they not learn as quickly as he had?
With this basic misconception was associated (if the latter was not derived from the former) another analogy also partly false: the analogy between, on the one hand, the advance of the bourgeoisie during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, on the other, the victory of the proletariat which the communists predicted for the future. Now the European bourgeoisie, when it had taken over the governing power, had already been equipped with education and with a good deal of administrative experience; it had much property and a certain amount of authority. But the proletariat of industrial England—which is what Marx is chiefly dealing with in Das Kapital—have apparently, through their long stultification in the mines, through their long subordination to machines, through the meager opportunities of their lives in their allotted compartment of the caste frame, become unfitted for class politics and class action. Marx never seems to have taken into account an aspect of the industrial working class in regard to which Antoine Barnave, that early explorer of the economic categories, had made already an ominous observation: “The poor in this age of society are no less enslaved by their poverty; they have lost that natural sagacity, that boldness of imagination, which characterized the men who roamed the woods.” The bourgeoisie, before they had won their ascendancy, had already possessed property and culture, their right to which they had only to vindicate; but certainly the English proletariat had to fight hard to get any of either, and when by exception they succeeded in doing so, it brought with it the middle-class point of view. When they had succeeded, through trade union negotiation, in obtaining their better pay or lighter hours, they did not think about world revolution; when they produced an able parliamentary leader, he was bought up or absorbed by the governing class. Least of all was Marx the man to foresee that, following a wholesale killing-off of workers in the next of the big competitive wars, a small allowance of money judiciously administered by the governing classes, always resourceful in avoiding crises, would be enough to prevent their causing a scandal at the same time that it would keep them dependent and make it possible for them to degenerate gradually.
Nor was Marx himself very well fitted to sympathize with or even to imagine what the psychology of the workers would be when they should better their standards of living.
For Marx, the occupations and habits, the ambitions and desires, of modern man, which he himself had never shared, tended to present themselves as purely class manifestations, the low proclivities of an ignoble bourgeoisie. He could not imagine that the proletariat would take to them. When a proletarian gave any indication of wanting what the bourgeois wanted, Marx regarded him as a renegade and pervert, a miserable victim of petty bourgeois ideas. He could not conceive that in his own country and Italy it would become possible for a new kind of state socialism combined with an intensified nationalism to buy the acquiescence of the workers by making it possible for the more ambitious of them to create a new kind of governing class not unlike the old bourgeoisie; nor that even a revolutionary Russia with a dictatorship which had started out on Marxist principles would end up in very much the same way.
Above all, Marx did not know the United States. At the time of the American Civil War, he characterized the United States government, in his articles to The New York Tribune, as “the highest form of popular government, till now realized” and solicited the sympathy of the working class “for the only popular government in the world.” But he afterwards described the Republic in one of his letters to Engels as “the model country of the democratic imposture”; and, as appears from the last pages of Das Kapital, he regarded the United States after the war as a vast field for capitalist exploitation, which was then proceeding “at giant strides” and unhindered. What Karl Marx had no clue for understanding was that the absence in the United States of the feudal class background of Europe would have the effect not only of facilitating the expansion of capitalism but also of making possible a genuine social democratization; that a community would grow up and endure in which the people engaged in different occupations would probably come nearer to speaking the same language and even to sharing the same criteria than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Here in the United States, our social groupings are mainly based on money, and the money is always changing hands so rapidly that the class lines cannot get cut very deep. There is among us as compared to Europe—Mr. Lundberg to the contrary, notwithstanding—relatively little of the kind of class solidarity which is based on group intermarriage and the keeping of businesses in the hands of the same families. And it is also true that the democratic aims which the Republic announced to the new country, put forward though of course they were by a government of property-holders, have still preserved for us enough of their prestige so that it is still usually a serious matter in politics—something which is rarely the case in Europe—to bring charges of undemocratic conduct.
There has been plenty of industrial violence in America, a great deal more than is usual in Europe; but we do not work up to cumulative crises as they do in the more feudal European countries: we have the class quarrel out as we go along. And this is possible because in the United States, even where class interests divide us, we have come closer to social equality: our government does not guarantee a hierarchy to the extent that the European systems do. We are more lawless, but we are more homogeneous; and our homogeneity consists of common tendencies which Marx would have regarded as bourgeois, but which are actually only partly explicable as the results of capitalist competition. The common man, set free from feudal society, seems to do everywhere much the: same sort of thing—which is not what Marx had expected him to do because it was not what Marx liked to do himself. The ordinary modern man wants a home with machine-made comforts (where Marx had never cared enough about a home to secure for his wife and his daughters even moderately decent living conditions); he wants amusement parks, movies, sports (Marx claimed that he had once studied horsemanship, but Engels, who had had him on a horse once in Manchester, said that he could never have got beyond the third lesson); he wants an opportunity to travel in his country: cheap excursions such as they have in Nazi Germany, proletarian boat-trips down the Volga, American road-camps and trailers; he wants Boy Scout Clubs and Y.M.C.A.’s, German walking clubs and youth organizations, Komsomol “Physkultur.” He wants social services—hospitals, libraries, roads—whether he gets them through taxation by the State or by the State’s taking business over or, as has occurred on such a large scale in America, by the philanthropy of private persons. All these things that the peoples of the Soviet Republics as well as the fascist peoples want, the Americans have more or less managed to get during those periods when their capitalist economy was booming; and they have managed to get other things too, which other peoples will learn to want and will get: free movement and a fair amount of free speech.
It looks today as if some such conditions as these were the prerequisites for any socialist revolution which is to perpetuate as well as set up a new form of group domination. Socialism by itself can create neither a political discipline nor a culture. Even where a group of socialists come to the helm, they are powerless by themselves either to instil their ideals or to establish their proposed institutions. Only the organic processes of society can make it possible to arrive at either. And it seems today as if only the man who has already enjoyed a good standard of living and become accustomed to a certain security will really fight for security and comfort. But then, it appears, on the other hand, that from the moment he has acquired these things, he is transformed into something quite other than Karl Marx’s idea of a proletarian.
Marx could recognize as worthy of survival only those who had been unjustly degraded and those who rose naturally superior through intellect and moral authority. He had no key for appreciating the realities of a society in which men are really to some degree at liberty to make friends with one another indiscriminately or indiscriminately to bawl one another out—in other words, in which there is any actual approximation to that ideal of a classless society which it was the whole aim of his life to preach. And we must remember—unless we are willing to accept it as a simple act of faith in Scripture, as the people of the year 1000 expected the world to come to an end—that Karl Marx’s catastrophic prophecy of the upshot of capitalist development, the big short circuit between the classes, is based primarily on psychological assumptions, which may or may not turn out to have been justified: the assumption that there can be no possible limit to the extent to which the people who live on profits will continue to remain unaware of or indifferent to the privations of the people who provide them. The Armageddon that Karl Marx tended to expect presupposed a situation in which the employer and the employee were unable to make any contact whatever. The former would not only be unable to sit down at the same table with the latter on the occasion of an industrial dispute; he would be inhibited from socking him in the jaw until the class lines had been definitely drawn and the proletarian army fully regimented.
In other words, Marx was incapable of imagining democracy at all. He had been bred in an authoritarian country; and he had had some disappointing experiences with what were supposed to be popular institutions. His expectations of what was possible for democratic parliaments and tribunals had evidently been qualified by his memory of the ineptitudes of the Francfort Assembly, which had dispersed like a dandelion top when Friedrich Wilhelm had puffed it away, and by his failure to obtain redress against Vogt. Furthermore, he was himself, with his sharp consciousness of superiority, instinctively undemocratic in his actual relations with his fellows: he was embittered by the miscarriage of many projects undertaken with the various groups of his associates and his working-class constituents. Finally—what is doubtless fundamental—it is exceedingly difficult for one whose deepest internal existence is all a wounding and being wounded, a crushing and being crushed, to conceive, however much he may long for, a world ruled by peace and fraternity, external relations between men based on friendliness, confidence and reason. So that Marx was unable either to believe very much in the possibilities of such democratic machinery as existed in the contemporary world or to envisage the real problems which, failing this, would be created by the coming to power of an untrained proletariat in the future. He was sometimes willing to admit in his later years—see his conversations with H. M. Hyndman and his speech at a workers’ meeting in Amsterdam, September 8, 1872—that in democratic countries like England, Holland and the United States there was a chance that the Revolution might be accomplished by peaceful means; but in practice the main effect of his teaching (in spite of the revisionist efforts of the German Social Democrats) has been to get people into a state of mind where they expect a gigantic collision of class forces.
Since the events of 1848, with their failures of the French and German parliaments, Marx had added to his body of doctrine a new feature, not explicit in the Communist Manifesto, which he asserted to be one of his original contributions to socialist political theory: the dictatorship of the proletariat. It seemed clear to him that it would not be enough for the proletariat to seize political power: it would be obliged to destroy bourgeois institutions, to start socialism with a completely clean slate; and in order to accomplish this, it would be necessary for it to beat down all those forces which would inevitably keep on working to restore the capitalistic state. The government which Marx imagined for the welfare and elevation of mankind—though he sometimes spoke of democratic institutions inside the new dominant class—was an exclusive and relentless class despotism directed by high-minded bigwigs who had been able to rise above the classes, such as Engels and himself.
Yet Marx’s thought is not really a closed system, though it has supplied so many sects with dogmas. Das Kapital—unless we approach it as Scripture—should open the way to realistic inquiry.
Marx experienced throughout his life the utmost difficulty in finishing his works. He left documents that dealt with subjects of cardinal importance such as the Theses on Feuerbach and the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy in a fragmentary or sketchy state; and even the Communist Manifesto was extorted from him only under pressure. It took years of the combined insistence of Engels and the anguish of Jenny Marx to get him to bring out the first volume of Das Kapital This difficulty was probably partly neurotic: the never-resting apprehension of the man who, like the hero of his ballad, building his fortress out of a “patchwork of weaknesses,” is always afraid lest it may not prove to be strong enough—just as his learning and his elaborate logic are partly for academic show. But his long labors were also the consequence of the scope of his inquiries and interests and of the immensity of his undertaking: interests which were always to remain insatiable, an undertaking which could never be completed. Marx had expected, when he was seeing the first volume through the press in the spring of 1867, to have the second finished the following winter. He speaks then, in writing to Engels, of the “much new material” which has come in on the subject of landed property; and he seems to have decided at some point after this to make Russia his great example of the development of ground-rent in the second part, as he had used England for that of industry in the first. He learned Russian at the end of the sixties, read up Russian literature and history, and had documents sent him from Russia. It was probably an anxiety, however exaggerated, to deal authoritatively with the Russian economy rather than trepidation as to the fate of the Labor Theory of Value, which was the obstacle to his progressing with his work. He accumulated stacks of statistics to the volume of two cubic meters; and at the time when Das Kapital in its second volume had rolled back on the Marxist household like an infernal Sisyphean stone that had to be propelled up the mountain again, Engels once remarked to Lafargue that he would like to burn all this material up. One of the last of Marx’s unfinished writings was, as we shall presently see, an attempt to formulate some ideas on the revolutionary future of Russia and the possibilities of its presenting an exception to the capitalist laws he had demonstrated.
It is true, as Edward Bernstein says, that, though “where Marx has to do with details or subordinate subjects he mostly notices the important changes which actual evolution had brought about since the time of his first socialist writings, and thus himself states how far their presuppositions have been corrected by the facts,” he, nevertheless, “when he comes to general conclusions, adheres in the main to the original propositions based upon the old uncorrected presuppositions [of 1848].” But the point is that he was aware of the changes: his mind was always reaching out to know more, straining to understand better. It was colossal to have summed up as Marx had done the copious literature of his predecessors; but since his subject extended into the present and stretched away into the future, he was confronted with what was really the more difficult task of seizing the trend of contemporary events. If he devoted hours and weeks to reconstructing from documents in Old Slavonic the history of the land system in Russia, he also found it necessary to learn Rumanian in order to follow what was happening in the Balkans.
So Das Kapital was not only unfinished: it is, in a sense, endless—and this not merely in the sense that, after Marx’s death, Engels continued to work on the manuscript over a period of twelve years and that, even after the death of Engels, Karl Kautsky brought out further volumes (Marx’s critical summing-up of his predecessors) from 1904 to 1910—not merely that there still half-loom even beyond all this the unwritten or unfinished supplements: the philosophical book on Dialectical Materialism which was to hitch the Revolution up with the Universe, the anthropological work which was to justify the communism of the future from the communism of primitive times, the literary book in which Balzac was to be examined as the anatomist of bourgeois society, the studies in higher mathematics which were to illustrate the laws of the Dialectic by “putting the differential calculus on a new basis.” Not only must Das Kapital, like Michelets history, eventually break down as a Kunstwerk, because events will not accommodate themselves to its symmetry—since Marx himself became diverted while he was writing it into pursuing new researches into phenomena which were not allowed for by his original plan; but it leads inevitably to further thought and further writing—beginning with Engels’ addenda to the later volumes, to the whole growth of Marxist thought since Marx’s time—failing which, one may actually say, as one can say of few other books, that the original work would not continue to be valid. And its primary impulse deserts literature altogether when it animates such activities as those of Marx himself in connection with the Workers’ International which interrupted the writing of his book and that later participation by Engels in the organizing of the Social Democrats which delayed him in patching up the unfinished work (if it is difficult to give a really consistent and well-organized account of Marxist doctrine, it is precisely because Marx and Engels were continually being impeded and disorganized in the systematization of their ideas by the necessity of taking part in political movements under the pressure of contemporary events). Out of the brooding and laboring thought comes an instrument that is also a weapon in the actual world of men.