Written: As a pamphlet of the same name published by Keep Left, London, January 1975. It comprises a series of articles that first appeared in Keep Left the weekly paper the Young Socialists (A British Trotskyist organisation - Ed.), Sept. 29, Oct. 6, Oct. 13, Oct. 20, Oct. 27, Nov. 10, Nov.17, Nov.24, Dec. 1, Dec. 8, Dec. 15, 1973. (Corrections to the original appear in [ ] Editor);
Source: Workers International to rebuild the 4th International;
Transcribed: Workers International to rebuild the 4th International;
HTML Markup: Zdravko Saveski.
Chapter 1. Materialism and Idealism
'PHILOSOPHY.’ When many members of the Young Socialists see the word they will no doubt think of something which they imagine strange and difficult, something done by ‘wise men’, often with long white beards!
So the first thing to get clear about at the start of this series of short articles is that the study of Marxist philosophy is not at all peculiar or over-difficult.
In fact, it is true to say that everybody has a philosophy, whether they are aware of it or not, whether they have worked it out or not.
For, by philosophy we mean a general conception of the world and the relationship of man and his thinking to this world.
And all of us have such a conception of the world. If this is the case, you might ask, why do we need to study philosophy? Simply because we have to develop a scientific and coherent conception of the world and the changes taking place within it.
For the revolutionary party, this is a vital question. Only if all its activities are guided by such a conception can it carry out its tasks of leading the working class to power and the establshment of socialism - the greatest change ever undertaken by man.
In Marxism lies the highest struggle by man to grasp the nature of the world in the course of his continual struggle to change it.
Hence the urgent need on the part of every Young Socialist to begin a systematic study of Marxism, individually and as part of his or her branch.
Now, in considering philosophy, we can start by saying that throughout history those who have been concerned with philosophy have been divided into two great basic camps.
On the one hand there have been the IDEALISTS.
On the other have been the MATERIALISTS.
Marxism belongs to this second great camp. In fact Marxism has developed materialist philosophy to its highest, most adequate level.
When considering these two basic philosophical outlooks, we come up against an immediate problem which we have to tackle at the start. In ‘ordinary language’ when we call somebody a materialist, we usually mean someone who is interested in money and material possessions, who is greedy, selfish and vain. On the other hand to be called an idealist is to be praised as somebody with high ideals, who puts the interests of others before himself and so on.
It is no accident that these words should be used in this way. Materialist philosophy has always been the object of abuse by the Church and by the ruling class generally. This way of using the word, is as Engels said, nothing but:
‘an unpardonable concession to the traditional philistine prejudice against the word materialism resulting from the long continued defamation by the priests. By the word materialism the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, miserliness, profit hunting and stock exchange swindling - in short all the filthy vices which he himself indulges in private. By the word idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy and in a general way in a “better world” of which he boasts before others’. (Engels, 'Ludwig Feuerbach'.)
So in considering the use of the terms we have to break from this vulgar understanding of the terms, used by the capitalist class to discredit materialism and Marxism.
In considering idealism and materialism we are considering the two fundamental answers to the question - what is the relationship of ideas to the world?
Materialism recognizes that our ideas are derived from and reflect the material world. Idealism supposes, on the contrary, that everything material, the world, is dependent upon and reflects some idea which is outside the world.
This is the basic opposition between these two conceptions and one which we must keep before us throughout this series and in the reading material which goes with it.
Engels put the matter clearly in his famous pamphlet 'Ludwig Feuerbach' from which we have already quoted.
‘The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of modern philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking to being . The answers which philosophers have given to this question have split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and therefore in the last instance assumed world creation in some form or another . comprised the camp of idealism. The others who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.’
For materialism, therefore, ideas are not something apart from the material world, but reflect the material world and the changes taking place within it.
By ‘material world’ we mean everything in the universe, or matter in its various forms - chemical, physical, biological.
We grasp the nature of this material world only through our five senses - touch, hearing, smell, sight and taste. The material world, acting on our sense organs, produces sensations. If we put our hand in the fire, we have the sensation of pain and take it out.
This ability to experience sensations depends of course on such things as nerves, retina and above all upon the brain. It depends therefore upon material objects. A damage to the brain seriously affects the ability to think; without the retina, sight is impossible.
If we understand this, it is clear that thought is a product of matter. Again we can quote Engels to sum up this basic starting point for materialist philosophy, this time from 'Anti-Duhring’ (Part 1, Chapter 3):
‘If the question is raised: what, then, are thought and consciousness and whence they come, it becomes apparent that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature which has been developed in and along with his environment.’
Or, the same point, this time from ‘Ludwig Feuerbach‘:
'. Our consciousness and thinking however supra-sensuous are a product of a material bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the product of nature.’
Let us end this opening article in the series by asking the question: Why is it important to grasp the basic point of materialism which we have examined briefly here and to think through every problem and question which we confront in relation to it?
Let us repeat the point once more: materialism understands that the material world exists independently of us and that this independently existing world is the source of all our ideas.
Of course the capitalist class, through their educational system, through the newspapers and television, teach quite the opposite. They teach that ideas are produced by the individual, in isolation from the world. And because of this, everybody is entitled to ‘his own’ ideas. And there is a further implication: if ideas are produced by the individual, in his head, then the world can be changed simply by changing the ideas in our heads.
This is of course the philosophy of individualism. It is idealist because it starts not from the material and social world, but from the individual as something apart from the world.
We will next discuss in more detail the nature of materialism as the Marxist world outlook and the changes which Marx brought to materialism, compared with the earlier versions which existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Chapter 2. Emergence of Materialism
The first systematic attempt to explain the nature of the universe in a materialist way was made in ancient Greece over two thousand years ago. The Greek materialists saw the world as consisting of hard, impenetrable material particles. They understood all change as arising from nothing but the motion and interaction of such particles.
This theory was revived and developed in modern times. It was however much richer in content than Greek materialism had been. For in the 16th and 17th centuries, scientists and philosophers tried to work out what were the laws of the interaction of these material particles, to present a picture of how all things, from merely physical changes to the life of man itself, were the result of the motion and interaction of the separate parts of matter.
It is important for us to understand that the re-emergence of materialism in this period was a reflection of the rise of the capitalist class in struggle with the old feudal landowning class.
In the feudal period, the Catholic Church - which as the predominant centre of culture and learning - had developed a natural philosophy in which everything in nature was explained in terms of its ‘proper’ place in the system of the universe, in terms of its supposed position of dependence and subordination within that system, and the end or purpose which it existed to serve.
The bourgeois philosophers, such as Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, destroyed these feudal, religious, ideas about nature. Regarding nature as a system of bodies in interaction, and rejecting all the feudal dogmas, they demanded an investigation of nature in order to find out how it really worked.
These investigations went along with the geographical discoveries of the period, the growth of trade and transport, the improvement of machinery and manufacture. The greatest strides of all were made in the mechanical sciences, closely connected as these sciences were with the needs technology.
We can call these early materialist philosophers, mechanical materialists in that they looked upon the world as a giant machine. This was the standpoint of the great physicist, Isaac Newton. For him, like the early Greek materialists, the world consisted of particles moving about in empty space. But in his attempt to explain the precise workings of the universe, Newton was not concerned with the question of its origin and development.
He took for granted that it was a stable piece of machinery - created by God. Not how it originated, how it changed, but how it worked, was the question which pre-occupied him.
Such philosophers and scientists treated the universe rather like a giant watch. It consisted of many parts which fitted neatly together; once it was wound up it worked in a predictable, uniform way which was known exactly to watch makers.
This form of materialism was a great advance in man’s understanding of nature. It represented a great blow against idealism and all religious conceptions of the universe, that is as something created by God.
The materialists of the 16th and 17th centuries tried to extend to the realm of the mind and society the same mechanistic conceptions which they used in their scientific investigations of nature. They sought to include man and his thinking in their mechanical conception of the world.
They regarded man himself as a machine. The doctrine was looked upon as shocking by the Church, an insult to both man and God. But the idea that man is a machine whatever its limitations, was a great advance on the idea that man was a wretched piece of clay, inhabited by an immortal soul - the religious view of man.
But despite these great advances as against idealism and religion, mechanical materialism suffered from a series of grave weaknesses. We shall end this article by considering some of these weaknesses and next week show how the materialism of Marx - dialectical materialism - overcame these deficiencies.
The first question which the mechanical materialists could not answer was this: if the world is like a machine, who started up the machine? And because they could not answer this question they were forced to introduce the notion of a ‘Supreme Being’ as something outside the world who had set it in motion even if this Being no longer interfered with its workings. The mechanical materialists were thus forced back in the direction of God and religion.
Second, while the mechanical materialists recognized change everywhere, because they tried to reduce this change to a series of mechanical interactions - change for them was merely a series of endless repetitions of the same kind of processes.
Just like a machine can only work in a fixed manner, according to how it was made, so the world, for these materialists, worked in a fixed way; nothing new could emerge within it; there could be no development within it. We shall see later how modern materialism (Marxism) has gone beyond this limited conception.
Third, mechanical materialism could never explain the development of man. If human activity and thought was merely a mechanical reflection of the world, the question arose: how do man and thinking actually change? But as Marx was later to show (a question we shall be looking at later) man is not merely a product of the world, but he struggles to change the world, in the course of which he also changes himself.
This failure to understand the relationship between man's activity, his thinking, and nature, meant that mechanical materialism had no theory of knowledge, i.e. of how man proceeds from error to truth, through the conflict between theory and practice. This, as we shall see, is a decisive question for the proletarian revolution.
In considering the limitations of mechanical materialism we should not fall into the trap of thinking they were a product of the philosophers and scientists concerned. For this would be itself an idealist method. No, the limitations of the mechanical view of the world arose from the limited development of science itself, [despite] the fact that the mechanical sciences had made the greatest advances.
Modern (dialectical) materialism could only arise with the further development of science which by the 19th century had begun to investigate more thoroughly the processes of interconnection and change within nature. It was on the basis of these developments that Marxism, a richer form of materialism was to be established.
Chapter 3. Hegel and Dialectics
Now the home of mechanical materialism in the modern world was England. This English materialism was then taken and extended in France during the 18th century where it became the basis for the ideas which inspired the French Revolution.
But the next great development which occurred in philosophy was to take place in Germany at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.
It is this development which we must consider in this article and its relationship to Marxism.
Before doing this, we must however say a little about economic and social conditions in the Germany of that period. Compared with France and England, [and] the other great countries of Europe, Germany remained relatively backward. Commerce and capitalism had failed to develop to anything like the extent they had in either France or Britain.
In particular, the bourgeoisie (capitalists) had not taken power as they already had in the seventeenth-century Cromwellian revolution in Britain or in the revolution which began in France in 1789.
Germany, in short, remained a backward, isolated country, still divided into a series of feudal and semi-feudal states.
It was this economic and social backwardness which left a profound mark on German thinking. The great German thinkers of that period had to look abroad for the inspiration for their philosophies and ideas; to France where the bourgeois revolution was taking place and to Britain where the growth of capitalist industry was proceeding with great speed.
But because material change was so slow in their own country, they inevitably tended to see change merely as change in the realm of ideas.
They tended, that is, to see change in an idealist manner.
(By idealism, we should remember from the first article, we mean the conception that all development starts from the idea; materialist philosophy understands that ideas are a reflection of changes taking place in the material and social world).
As Marx put it, 'In politics the Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical conscience'.
The highest point of this idealist thinking was the work of the great German philosopher, Hegel (1770-1831).
Hegel was an idealist: for him the world started with the Absolute Idea. History, for him, was the working out, the realization of, this Idea. This was clearly an idealist standpoint.
But Hegel's genius lay in his efforts to understand and grasp how this Absolute Idea developed. For Hegel, unlike the mechanical materialists in England and France, nothing was fixed or static.
Deeply influenced by the profound changes then taking place in France, Hegel insisted that nothing is immobile. Everything existing had to be studied not as it was at any moment but as it had come into being, in its process of development and change. Furthermore, Hegel grasped that everything was not merely the result of past changes, it also carries the germ of the future within it.
But how did change occur? We saw that the early mechanical materialists answered this by seeing movement and change as something external to the thing being investigated. The world was like a machine; it had been set in motion by some 'first impulse' (really another name for God).
Hegel understood however that change was not something external to the object, but arose from forces within the object itself. We shall examine this question in some detail in later articles, but at this stage we can only give an example of what we mean.
If we consider ourselves, or indeed any individual, we are a unity of two contradictory forces. For at any one moment in time we are both living and dying. Each moment that passes brings us a moment nearer to death while at the same time extending our life by that same moment.
It is the struggle between these two opposed forces, life and death, which is the source of all the changes taking place continually within us.
And so it is with everything in the universe. Nothing can exist in the material world in a static form. All matter exists in motion. And this motion arises from the struggle of opposites within the material world, including human society.
Hegel grasped that all change took place in this manner. This was his great contribution to philosophy. But as we have already said, Hegel was an idealist; for him these changes occurred within the realm of ideas. The world for him was merely a reflection of these changes. In believing that the world started from the Absolute Idea, Hegel held what was ultimately a religious view of the world. The 'Absolute Idea' was in effect merely another name for God.
It was one of Hegel’s most talented followers, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) who started to consider Hegel’s philosophy from the standpoint of materialism. Feuerbach rejected 'Absolute Idea' or 'Substance' or any of the metaphysical starting-points, and insisted that man as a natural being was the necessary starting-point of all ideas. He said that his philosophy 'generates thought from the opposite of thought, from Matter, from existence from the senses'.
In particular, Feuerbach insisted that all the various conceptions of God, including those of Christianity, were created by man himself. Not God had created man, but rather man had created God, in his own image. According to Feuerbach, a truly 'human' world would only be created once these false, religious, conceptions of the world were swept away.
But who was to do the sweeping away? Who was to change the world? It was in answering this question that Feuerbach's weaknesses were most clearly revealed.
For his answer to the question was 'man'. But what was man? A 'man' might be a King, a capitalist, a worker or a peasant. All four have the same organs, the same type of feet, brain, etc. From a biological point of view they are part of the same species. But clearly. there are great differences in their social position and wealth.
These differences arise historically. Feuerbach's materialism did not extend to man's own history; i.e. to the struggle in which man makes himself.
In the same way: if we consider 'man' in primitive times he is quite different from 'man' today. Again we don’t mean in a biological, but in a social sense. Man today lives in quite a different way; he eats different foods, uses quite different tools, and has quite different ideas.
Thus there is no such thing as man in the abstract. Man like everything else, in the universe (of which he is part) is in continual change. This conclusion owed from Hegel’s philosophy.
Feuerbach was a materialist. He saw that man was a product of the material world; all his thoughts, ideas are a reflection of nature.
But man is not merely a passive reflection of nature as Feuerbach thought. Man does not merely react to the world around him - he is in conflict with it. Our ideas of the world, our struggle to understand, arises only in the conflict with it.
Thus, said Marx, change can never be a passive, an easy process. Change arises from struggle. There is no 'abstract man' because man, in his fight to survive in the world constantly changes himself, becomes a different man.
Marx, in other words took Hegel’s dialectical method. He grasped that everything (including man) was in continual change and that this change arises from the struggle of opposites within phenomena. But unlike Hegel, Marx was a materialist. Changes in ideas were not the source of changes in the world, but their outcome. The great task was not to 're-arrange' the world in the head, but to change it in practice.'
But if man 'in the abstract' cannot change the world, which force was to accomplish this change? This is the next question we shall consider. In doing so we shall outline Marx's conception of history, historical materialism; and the role of the working class within capitalist society.
Chapter 4. Historical Materialism
The preceding chapters were intended to discuss two important questions: first the nature of philosophical materialism, second the weaknesses of the 'old' mechanical materialism.
Marx was not however content merely to criticize the old materialist outlook. Above all he wished to apply the dialectical materialist world outlook to a study of society and its history. He saw his task as one of 'bringing the science of society . into harmony with the materialist foundations and reconstructing it thereupon'. (Engels, 'Ludwig Feuerbach.')
In doing so, Marx arrived at what has since become known as the materialist conception of history or historical materialism. This chapter will be concerned with an introduction to this theory. (At this stage everybody should read and study Marx's famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy [1859] in which this theory is outlined.)
What is the basic point in Marx’s approach to the study of history? It is this: that the foundation for man's existence is to be sought in his continual struggle against nature for food, shelter and clothing. The study of history is a study of the conditions under which this struggle was carried out and the changes in consciousness or thinking to which it gives rise.
Here is how Marx’s life-long friend and collaborator, Engels, put the matter when he spoke at Marx’s graveside in Highgate cemetery in 1883:
'Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact . that mankind must first eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art and even the ideas of religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case.”
In other words, the study of history does not start from the ideas which men have held at certain times, nor from their 'motives' or 'intentions' but from the material conditions under which they have lived and worked. To explain changes in ideas we must begin from these real material circumstances.
The next question therefore is this: how does man actually produce these means for his survival? He does so of course, in struggle against nature, of which he is a part. He takes from nature his food, the means for his shelter and so on.
But we could also say that this was true of any other species of animal. A horse feeds on grass, breathes the air etc. So another question must be considered: if all animals, not merely man, are in conflict with nature, what distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world?
It is of course possible to point to many features which distinguish man from the other animals: the size and complexity of his brain; the use of speech; the shape and dexterity of his hand.
But the crucial question for us is this: man actually, in practice, over millions 'of years, separated himself from the rest of the animals through the use of tools. Man is above all a tool-making and tool-using animal. And it was through the use of tools that man as a species was able to subordinate the rest of the animal world to his needs.
From a physical point of view (strength, speed, sense of vision and smell etc.) man is inferior to many other animals. His superiority arises only from his ability to carry his fight against nature to a higher point than any other animal through the use of tools and equipment.
These tools and equipment, and the struggle to improve them (which gives rise to technology and science) Marxists know as the productive forces.
In primitive times these productive forces consisted (apart from labour itself) of the most simple implements: knives, spears, arrows chipped out of stone. Over thousands of years they have developed into the productive forces of today - atomic power stations, automated production processes, etc.
But how does man actually use these productive forces at different stages in history? We can get a clue to the answer by considering the nature of the productive forces in the world today.
Imagine that you are a steelworker, living in Sheffield. You have been trained in all the skills associated with this job. But how can you actually take part in the activity of steel making? How, that is to say, can you take part in the development of the productive forces?
All the equipment and machinery necessary to produce steel is under the control and ownership of one of the small number of firms that dominate the steel industry in that city. Unless you can get access to this plant, machinery and other equipment you will not be able to use your skills or to take part in the development of the productive forces.
To put the matter concretely: only if one or other of the steel industry employers is willing to employ you for wages, can you, as an individual, take part in the struggle against nature, at least in the sphere of activity for which you have been trained. Now, as any worker knows, the owner of such a steel mill will only employ you if he calculates that he can make a profit out of you. If there is no profit for him there is no job for you.
So we have arrived at the following conclusion from this simple example: in order to develop the productive forces as a steelworker, you have to enter a definite relationship with the employer such that he extracts profit from the use of your ability to work.
In other words, you have to enter into a set of definite social relationships if you are to take part in the development of the productive forces. And you have no choice! How else can you make steel? It can only be made through utilizing the most advanced means of production which are owned and controlled by the capitalist class.
You cannot make steel in your back garden. And even if you could, it would be so insufficient that you would never be able to compete in selling it with that produced in the most up-to-date factories.
It is clear that the productive forces can only be worked through definite social conditions of production which men have to enter into, which exist, 'independently of their will and consciousness'.
But these social relationships have not always been the same. Like everything else they must be studied not as static ‘things', but as processes changing over time.
Today, in all the big countries of western Europe, America and Japan, we have capitalist social relations, through which production is carried out. The basic relationship is between the owners of capital, the capitalist class, and those who sell their ability to work (their 'labour power' as Marxists call it) as their only means of livelihood. But in the past quite different social relations of production have existed.
Next we shall examine briefly these past forms of society. We shall also consider the problem: why do certain social relations disappear at certain periods of history, often in the most violent fashion, to be replaced by new social relations of production?
Chapter 5. Production Relations
We saw that man's struggle against nature proceeds through the development and productive forces, from the most primitive at the earliest stages of his existence to the modern machinery and technology of today.
We also concluded that these productive forces can be worked or used only through definite social relations of production.
Now if we look at history it becomes immediately apparent that man has actually conducted his continual battle against nature by means of quite different social relations.
There have been five basic types of society, or modes of production, in history. For the greater part of human history, men lived and worked in primitive communes. Here there was no private property and communism in the distribution of goods prevailed.
The second basic mode of Production to appear was slavery the basic characteristic of which was the fact that the majority of the population were actually owned by the ruling class as slaves. They were provided with' the minimum of food and shelter to keep them alive; everything they produced over and above this went to the slave owner.
Third we must consider the Asiatic mode of production. This like slave ('Ancient') society was one of the forms taken by the break up of communal property. While, like primitive communism, there was an absence of private property, what distinguished these societies was the crucial significance of the means of irrigation in areas such as Egypt.
Fourth, Marx analysed the nature of feudalism. Here the main productive force, apart from labour itself, was the land. The feudal ruling class owned the land. Labour took the predominant form of peasant labour; each peasant had a plot of his 'own' land, in return for the use of which he was forced to yield rent to the landowner. The rent might be in kind (goods) or (generally later) in money.
Finally we come to capitalism. Here the predominant feature is the generalized nature of commodity production.
Most activity consists in producing articles for the market, as against production for the immediate needs of the producer which tended to predominate in earlier forms of society. In particular, the ability to work (labour power) itself becomes a commodity.
Under capitalism the great majority of the population live only through their ability to sell their labour power to one or other employer.
These, briefly, are the main modes of production which have existed historically and which Marx lists in the Preface to the 'Critique of Political Economy'. A word of warning should be issued about them however.
We have only been able to give the simplest outlines of their major features; there were, for example, necessarily many differences between the different types of slave or feudal economy which existed in various parts of the world.
Second, we should not see a mechanical relationship between these 'stages' in the way that the Stalinists have always presented the question. Not all societies need necessarily go through all the stages in a 'straight line' way: great 'leaps' can and do take place in historical development. But we cannot at this point examine this question in detail.
The basic point which we must grasp about the various modes of production which have existed is this: they are all identical in that in each of them, 'labour' 'means of production' combine to serve man’s needs. The difference between them is how this combination takes place.
Each of them produced a surplus over and above what was required to meet immediate needs (apart from primitive communism where the productive forces had developed only to the point where these immediate needs alone could be met) but each society extracted this surplus from the producer in a different manner.
Under feudalism, for example, the peasant gives directly to the feudal landowner a certain proportion of his output or time which is fixed by law and custom. Under capitalism the worker is, from a legal standpoint 'free'; he can choose whether to work or not.
Of course from the economic standpoint he has no choice. His only means of livelihood is through the sale of his labour power and he can only work the means of production by selling this ability to work to an owner of capital. And it is through the ownership of this capital that the employer is able to extract a surplus from the working class in the form of surplus value.
Now the question arises: why does one mode of production at certain decisive points of history give way to another, higher form? Is this merely the result of accident? Does it depend on the will or intentions of men? Marxists answer both these. questions with an emphatic 'no'.
The overthrow of one mode of production and its replacement by another takes place under definite material circumstances not determined by men, circumstances which Marxists must study.
What are these circumstances? Briefly periods when the productive forces developed within the old society come into greater and greater conflict with the existing social relations of that society. At such periods, a revolutionary class are called upon to overthrow these old social relations and replace them with new ones in which the development of the forces of production can once more be continued.
Let us ask a concrete question: why did a revolution take place in England during the seventeenth century. Why was the old feudal ruling class overthrown and replaced by the capitalist (bourgeois) class?
To understand this great period in history we must start from the development of capitalist production relations within the old feudal society.
From as early as the thirteenth century, capitalist forms of production were beginning to emerge within the feudal society, particularly within the towns. But capitalism developed it came increasingly into opposition from the King and the great feudal landowners.
These landowners depended for their wealth and privileges upon agricultural labour. These stood opposed to the transfer of labour from the countryside into the towns. So a struggle developed over the control of this labour supply: was it to be used on the land or in the towns?
This was only one of a series of growing conflicts between the two classes. The monarchy depended heavily, for example, upon the sale of patent and monopoly rights to favoured businessmen. Yet the sale of such rights, while it enhanced the declining revenue of the monarchy and the Court, also restricted activities of many businessmen and merchants who wanted to engage in production and trade.
In the period prior to 1640, this clash grew in intensity. It was only finally resolved with the violent overthrow of the King and a scrapping of the old feudal state and the laws that went with it and their replacement by a new legal code within which capitalism was given every encouragement to develop.
The Civil War of the seventeenth century was the precondition for the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century which saw the rapid development of the productive forces within the framework of capitalism.
The Cromwellian revolution was therefore no accident. It was a revolution made necessary and possible only on the basis of the fundamental crisis of feudal economy and society.
Revolution requires great sacrifice and courage and determination as shown in Cromwell's army; but his courage and determination is only decisive and powerful because of the great material forces operating in such periods.
How does this conception of history (the materialist conception) relate to the struggle for socialism today?
Chapter 6. Scientific Socialism
This question can best be answered by looking at the fundamental difference between Marxism and all pre-Marxist conceptions of socialism.
Many writers before Marx had been deeply moved by the horrific conditions in which the working class had sunk during the industrial revolution. Utopian Socialists* such as Robert Owen contrasted the tremendous potential of the productive forces and machinery which the industrial revolution had produced with the grinding poverty of the tens of thousands who worked in the new textile and factory system of Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and elsewhere.
They came to the conclusion that socialism was the only way in which this contradiction could be overcome. It was only when social conditions were fundamentally altered that men themselves changed.
But the question was: who was to carry out this change? It was here that the weakness of socialist theory before Marx was most clearly evident.
Outstanding thinkers saw that the working class was an oppressed and an exploited class; what they were unable to grasp was the revolutionary nature of the working class.
So they tended to see socialism as arising through a mere appeal to reason. Robert Owen, for example, tried to establish a series of socialist communities in Britain and later in America. Convinced by the clear reasonableness of socialism as against the obvious brutality of the capitalist system, he was shocked when he found that his appeal to the ruling class for funds for such communities fell on deaf ears.
Marx and Engels however, understood that socialism was not merely a good idea. The conditions for a classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of production, had been made possible only on the basis of the productive forces developed by capitalism.
Socialism requires the development of the productive forces to a point where the basic needs of everybody in society can be satis?ed. Only under such conditions does the basis of class and class divisions begin to disappear.
Capitalism, through the rapid expansion of industry had alone made such a society possible. The idea of socialism was therefore a product of a de?nite period of history, the late 18C and early 19C.
But Marx and Engels went further than this. They showed how the fundamental contradictions of capitalism actually prepared the way for socialism.
What were these contradictions? In the first place, capitalism tends enormously to socialize production. It breaks down the narrow, local nature of production, and through the growth of the markets and the division of labour, draws ever increasing numbers into its orbit.
Eventually capitalism creates a world market and a world division of labour. At the same time, in glaring contradiction to this is the increasingly private ownership of the means of the production whereby all the wealth of capitalist society is created, and the private appropriation of the products.
The ownership of all the major industries and financial institutions tends to become ever more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
Second, within each factory or even branch of industry in any one country, production becomes increasingly 'planned'. The most modern techniques - time and motion study, ergonomics, computers, etc. - are employed to increase the rate of exploitation and rationalize production.
Yet, each of these highly planned units, is part of a system of production, capitalism, which is incapable of rational planning. Capitalism is production for pro?t. Each capitalist struggles for the maximum pro?t as against his rivals.
Agreement between them can only be temporary and in any case highly unstable. The struggle for pro?t leads periodically to vicious trade wars in which the weaker capitalists are driven out of business or are taken over by their stronger competitors.
Finally, as we have already said, capitalism brings into being a world market. But in opposition to this world market, stand the nation states. So the planning of resources on a world scale is impossible: each capitalist class starts, inevitably from its own needs and interests, not from the needs of this world economy. The struggle between the capitalist powers leads to trade, financial and eventually military conflict, as it has done in two world wars this century.
But the greatest of all the contradictions which capitalism created was that between the capitalist class itself and the working class. The working class was itself a product of capital; the growth of industry from the time of industrial revolution onwards. Capitalism brought into bits opposite: a class which nothing to sell but its ability to work, with nothing to lose but its chains, as the 'Communist Manifesto' says.
It is this struggle between the capitalist class and the working class which provides the basis for the struggle for socialism. The class struggle is objective; it arises not through the intentions of men, good or bad, but from the contradictory position which the two classes have in society as the owners and the non-owners of the means of production.
What Marxism grasped, as against all previous theories of socialism, was that this struggle could only end through the establishment of the rule (dictatorship) of the working class over the rest of society. It was this dictatorship, achieved through the smashing of the capitalist state, which would provide the basis for the building of a socialist society.
We shall return to some of these questions later.
Chapter 7. Past and Present
In this chapter we want to look more closely at the relationship between the past and the present.
The past and the present constitute a unity. This is the case because the present is a continuation, an outgrowth of the past. This is true of each individual: he or she is a product of the whole of their past development. What they are today, is the outcome of everything that has happened to them in the past. The present therefore contains within it the past.
The process of moving from the concrete (the present) into the abstract (the past) is the path taken by all knowledge. All knowledge starts with living perception. This living perception is then posited onto our knowledge derived from the past.
The past and the present therefore constitute a unity and conflict of opposites.
Let us consider the relationship between them a little more closely and consider in particular the question: how do we grasp the relationship between them? This will give us the clue to the answer to a further question: 'why do we bother to study the past if we have said that it is necessarily dead and abstract?
In order to answer both these questions we need to remember the basic point which has run through this series: the fact that materialists understand that existence determines consciousness. We can think only because we exist. Thought did not come before life, but, on the contrary, thinking is a product of life.
Now if we keep this in mind, we can see that when thinking about any event or sequence of events in the past, we can do so only by starting from the present. We cannot first move into the past and then 'work up to' the present, as it were. No; we can think about anything, including the past, only because we exist in the present. We can think of the English Civil War of the seventeenth century only because we are alive today. Our thought about that war therefore moves from 1973 back to 1640.
In other words, while historical development moves forward, from 1640 to 1973, the reflection of this process in thought is always in contradiction to that movement. History moves forward from the past to the present; thought always moves from the present to the past. Again we have here a unity and conflict of opposites. Consciousness and historical development are united in that thought is always a reflection of historical change; but they are also opposites in that the movement of history is always in the opposite direction to that of our thinking.
On one point we must be clear: all thinkers must move from the present into the past. Marxists are by no means unique in this respect. For everybody, idealists or materialists, must move from the living present into the abstract past.
The idealist of course is unaware that his thought must take this path; he imagines that it is possible to move in thought from the past to the present. Marxism is, however, conscious that thought can only develop in this contradictory manner.
Why must the revolutionary party pay great attention to the past? We have already explained that the past and present are a unity of opposites. The past is contained, 'lives on', in this sense in the present. The working class enters a period of great crisis in its relations with the capitalist class and its state, as we do today, with its past history tied firmly to it.
It cannot escape from its past. A period of great crisis 're-activates' this past, brings to the surface many of the historical experiences which may appear to have been forgotten, experiences which have lain dormant over many generations.
As an example, we can take the recent fine on the engineers' union. This represents a return to the famous Taff Vale case at the beginning of this century (1901) in which heavy fines were imposed by the Court against the railwaymen's union, fines which in effect removed the right to strike.
When we study this event, we do so because we know that it was the source of a great political development in the working class. Many workers realized that militancy, by itself, was inadequate to defend the unions; they were forced to take political action and create a new Party, the Labour Party (which was established in 1906) to carry through this defence.
This same, fundamental lesson, is also very much alive today. The attacks on the unions cannot be defeated except under a new political leadership. In fighting to build this new leadership through the Workers' Revolutionary Party, we are fighting very much in line with the historical developments and experiences of the British working class: we can only effectively understand the significance of past historical developments by starting with the present problems and difficulties of the working class. Once again we are obliged to move from the present into the past to find our answers.
Why is it crucial that we train ourselves to understand historical development from this standpoint? Because it is only in this way that the Party can fight to resolve the crisis of leadership in the working class.
To illustrate this point let us take another current example. The great difference between the Workers Revolutionary Party and all revisionist groups is that we have continually insisted that every struggle today involves a political struggle against the Tory government. This the revisionists deny.
For them the struggle consists in building up the 'militancy' of the working class and ignoring entirely the question of leadership within the working class. First, they say, we must build up militant trade unionism, only later should we introduce politics. 'The working class is not ready for revolutionary politics' is their constant cry.
How do these ideas relate to what we have said about the materialist study of history? Firstly, workers do not become 'interested' in political questions from individual choice, as the revisionist thinks. The worker is forced to turn to politics because his basic organization, his union, is under political attack from. the Tory government. He has no choice. Ideas are not the product of the desires or intentions of men, but of the development of the class struggle. This we have already established in earlier articles. Anybody who argues that the working class is not ready for politics today is thus an idealist.
Second, in coming into this struggle, workers will in no sense first form trade unions, build them up, and eventually turn to politics, as the revisionist pretends. No: the crisis facing the working class today is above all a political crisis; all new layers of workers entering the fight are drawn into it because of this political crisis.
It is in no way a case therefore of such new layers having to go through all the previous stages of development of earlier generations of workers in some sort of gradual, steady, way. Today's great political and economic crisis will force many workers to leap over these previous stages. It is only by starting from the present crisis that we can grasp how and why these leaps are possible and necessary.
Chapter 8. Theory and Practice
We explained that in the study of the past we always start with the present and move backwards into the past.
We further explained that in so doing we were moving from the concrete (the present) into the abstract (the past).
This process is the path taken by all knowledge. All knowledge starts with living perception. This living perception is then posited onto our knowledge derived from the past.
In this way, we struggle to abstract what is new in the situation and take this new knowledge into our practice. It is here; in practice, that the correctness of our abstraction of this new knowledge is actually tested out.
Let, us say, for example, we are studying the development of a strike. In considering this strike, we relate it to the struggle of the unions against the Tory government, understanding that all such struggles are now political in content.
In considering this particular strike we are, therefore, comparing it with our knowledge of the stage reached in the class struggle as a whole; we are seeking all the time to see what is new in this strike.
It might be, for example, the fact that it leads the government to declare a State of Emergency. From this we would learn that the government are now prepared for a showdown with the trade unions.
It is this new knowledge that we would take into practice, warning the working class as a whole of the dangers involved and fighting to recruit as many workers as possible into the movement.
What is involved in this process of thinking, or cognition? It is this: that Marxist theory develops only in the struggle in which in our practice we seek to posit each new living development upon our body of abstract knowledge (this Marxists refer to as a negation).
It is only out of this struggle between living perception and abstract theory that new knowledge (which we call the negation of the negation) is won and once again through struggle, new; living perceptions are posited onto our new extended, richer body of knowledge (which we refer to as the negation of the negation).
What we must stress here is that knowledge cannot be derived merely from the abstract study of books. Of course we are in no sense opposed to the study of books. But we must try always to grasp that knowledge is derived only through struggle.
It is only when we are driven to find answers to the problems which the working class face that our reading of books takes on any vitality and real meaning.
In other words, the best readers are always those who are the best fighters.
This the idealist rejects. He thinks that ideas are the product of the mind. He eliminates the process of continual struggle through which knowledge has been gained by man.
The knowledge.of the individual, is not his 'own' in that it is the product the outcome, of man’s struggle against nature over thousands of years. And this struggle has gone through many phases and stages, some of great advance and progress, some of great difficulty. Knowledge, which reflects this struggle against nature also develops in the same, contradictory manner.
This is a vital question for every Young Socialist in the struggle to develop the movement. Young people will come to Marxism not in a set, preconceived manner.
They will obey no set schema or pattern. On the contrary. Workers and youth are drawn into the struggle against capitalism spontaneously; they do not take up the fight against the Tory government and the employers because Marxists are around to tell them that this is what they must do. The class struggle, we must never forget, is objective, independent of our will and consciousness.
So the starting point for all new layers of youth and workers, is a militant, spontaneous one. What therefore, is the task of the Party in developing this struggle and how does this relate to what we have already said about the path of cognition?
We must continually posit these new, spontaneous, developments in the class struggle (which do not, we repeat, emerge according to plan) onto our body of abstract knowledge, Marxism.
We have to take up the immediate, concrete problems which these new forces have - jobs, housing, increased cost of living etc. - and through our practice, in building the Party, show that these problems can only be resolved in the struggle to take power.
It is in this way that we develop these new forces and take up the fight against the limitations of their spontaneous, immediate, understanding of the struggle. At the same time, this is the only way in which the Party can extend and deepen its knowledge of the changes in the class struggle.
It is, we repeat, only through taking our theory into practice that we can develop Marxism.
Chapter 9. Why a Revolutionary Party?
The first question we must ask ourselves is this: why does the working class need a revolutionary party based on the theory of Marxism to take it to power and establish socialism?
To answer this question we first need to say something more about the nature of the working class. The working class came into being, as we have already seen in earlier articles, as a result of the development of [Sic -text missing Ed.]
Every expansion of capitalist industry in the 18C and 19C brought with it the growth of the working class. At first it was a disorganized force - a 'rabble' as the ruling class contemptuously called it. But it learned in the course of its bitter fight against the employers and the government the need to organize into unions.
It was through the unions that the working class fought for higher wages, improved conditions, shorter hours, etc.
But however militant, trade unionism always operates within the limits of capitalist society. It always accepts, implicitly that capitalism will remain: it is concerned only with the distribution of wealth between the classes within existing society.
In this sense, if workers merely see the need for unions, but do not grasp the necessity to prepare for the overthrow of capitalism, they remain dominated by the ideas of the capitalist class. It was for this reason that Lenin described trade union consciousness as 'bourgeois consciousness'.
What distinguishes the working class as a revolutionary force is that it is without property. The working class has nothing to sell but its ability to work, its labour power. Its situation is quite unlike that of the capitalist class during the period when it was preparing to take power in the 17C revolution.
For a long period before 1640 it built up its wealth and property in the towns; not only this but it created its own institutions: schools, universities, scientific establishments etc. During the course of this long development it was able to establish its own ideological independence of the capitalist class.
For the working class, this is not possible. Socialism does not emerge steadily within capitalism, as did capitalism within feudalism. The working class is not merely exploited economically but is also dominated ideologically by capitalism.
Revolutionary consciousness does not arise spontaneously and automatically from within the working class. Such consciousness has to be brought from outside the immediate experience of the working class in a struggle by the revolutionary party against the limited militancy of the working class.
It is here that the YS and the Workers Revolutionary Party are in absolute conflict with all brands of rank-and-fileism. These theories worship the spontaneous militancy of the working class but reject completely the need to struggle against the spontaneous consciousness through the building of the Party.
Such theories are absolutely idealist in nature. They glorify the militancy of the working class, but deliberately avoid the great crisis of leadership in the class.
The task of the Party is not simply to tail-end the consciousness of the working class but all stages to develop it this consciousness. The revolutionary party and the working class are united in that the Party's aim is to prepare the working class to take power. And no other social force other than the working class can carry out this task.
But the Party and the class are also in conflict with each other. The Party starts, not from the immediate thinking of workers on any issue, as do the exponents of syndicalist rank-and-fileism; it starts from the relationship of all classes to the state. It takes this understanding into conflict with the immediate consciousness of the working class.
At the same time, because the Party and the working class form a unity and conflict of opposites, the problems and difficulties of the working class, as well as its strengths, find their reflection inside the Party.
It is therefore absolutely necessary that the Party carries out the maximum possible discussion on its programme, its tactics and strategy.
Chapter 10. Democratic Centralism
The Workers Revolutionary Party is based on the principles of democratic centralism.
It was the leader of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, who first grasped the necessity for a Party based on this principle. In the period at the turn of the present century, Russia was experiencing great changes.
Industry was developing rapidly, financed by foreign capital from France and other European countries. The growth of industry brought with it a growth in the working class. It was essential that the relatively small Marxist movement make a turn to this working class.
Until this point, the revolutionary movement had been con?ned to a small 'circle like' existence. It had organized workers into discussion and reading circles in which the basic ideas of Marxism were explained by revolutionary intellectuals such as Plekhanov. But the rapid expansion of the working class demanded great changes
.
Now the revolutionary movement was called upon to carry its ideas into practice amongst this new layer of workers. In order to do this, said Lenin, the Party had to change the form of its organization.
Its abstract theoretical ideas, explained brilliantly by the older generation of Russian Marxists, had now to be developed and enriched through the building of a Party.
In conflict with this older group, Lenin insisted on the need for a disciplined Party in which the duties and responsibilities of each individual member were clearly de?ned.
Why the need for such centralism and discipline? For Lenin, discipline was never merely a thing in itself. The task of the Party was to take 'each new living development' within the struggle between the classes and posit this onto its body of theoretical knowledge.
It was from this process that new knowledge could be won which had then to be taken once more into the practice of the Party.
Only if the Party could in the most centralized manner carry policies into practice could the struggle between theory and practice take place. It has been on this point of, Party organization that the liberal has always clashed with revolutionary Marxism.
For the liberal the 'freedom of the individual' stands above everything else. He rejects 'discipline' as an infringement of his freedom. But as we have already seen, such conceptions of freedom are idealistic.
The individual is a product of the social relations through which the fight against nature can alone proceed. Freedom consists not in imagining that one is separate from these social relations, but of recognizing their necessity.
For Lenin and the leaders of the Bolshevik Party discipline was necessary within the Party if it was to carry its theory into practice. It was from this standpoint that today we fight for the construction of such a Party.
At the same time the Party had to be based upon the widest possible democracy within its ranks. Policy and tactics had to be decided by the membership as a whole. Anybody differing from the leadership on any question had the right to fight for his position within the Party. And the rights of minorities were to be safeguarded through the constitution of the Party.
Again this was not a matter of democracy for the sake of democracy. As we explained last week, the Party and the working class constitute a unity of opposites.
The Party is in continual conflict with the limited, spontaneous militancy of the working class. But at the same time it reflects the working class, its problems and its strength
Therefore all major fundamental differences within the Party are ultimately a reflection of the class struggle. A leadership of the Party cannot therefore suppress such differences in a bureaucratic manner.
On the contrary, all Party differences have to be fought out in the most determined manner possible. Only in this way can it grasp the real nature of developments within the working class movement.
The manner in which the Party is organized is therefore not the result of accident or the mere whim of Lenin. The Party, combines the highest degree of centralism and discipline in action with the widest possible democracy and discussion within its own ranks.
All disagreements and differences must be argued out within the Party, but once a decision is taken, then the minority must loyally carry out the line of the majority in practice while still having the full right to argue for its position and turn the minority into the majority.
In this sense the Party is a unity of these two opposites - democracy and centralism.
It is on this principle that the Workers Revolutionary Party is organized. It is only through such a Party that the struggle to carry theory into practice, the highest point of Marxism, can take place.
Chapter 11. Marxism and Religion
AT THE end of this series we want to reply to a number of points which have been raised in letters about the series. Many of these letters have touched directly or indirectly on the question of religion. So this final chapter will deal with the basis of the Marxist attitude to religion.
The essence of all religion, whatever its particular form is that it believes that there is some force outside the material or natural world. The world,according to religion, develops in accordance with the 'will', 'intention' or 'design' of this super-natural force.
The religious conception of the world is therefore directly opposed to the materialist world outlook. Materialism starts from the understanding that there is nothing existing outside the material world.
It rejects completely all 'explanations' of this world which derive or start from any notion of 'spirit' or 'God'.
But the question now arises: where does the idea of God or religion itself come from? What is its basis? Here it is very important that we adopt a materialist outlook in answering this question.
It would be very wrong merely to dismiss religion as being based on stupidity. For this would not enable us to understand why it has been such a powerful force in history.
To grasp the nature of religion we must, as in all problems, start from man’s struggle against nature. Religion is above all an expression of man’s ignorance in the face of his struggle to overcome nature. Not understanding the laws which governed the development of nature, man was forced to invent, in fantastic form, 'explanations' for these laws. The forces which he could not understand were transferred to a being outside the world, God.
In other words, religion is rooted in ignorance. Science and religion have always, throughout their history been in conflict against each other.
For the aim of science is always to discover the real nature of the universe and the laws which govern its operation. Implicitly it stands opposed to any religious conception of the universe.
But religion must also be understood from another standpoint. In all societies except those based on the primitive commune, the fight against nature takes the form of the struggle between classes.
Man does not confront nature collectively, in a unified manner, but in a society divided into classes. Religion is one of the means through which the ruling class, at each period of history, has sought to oppress the exploited class or classes.
It is for this reason that Marxists start uncompromisingly from the standpoint of aetheism [Sic]. The Revolutionary Party has the duty to educate all the Party members as materialists and to fight idealism in all its forms. There can be no compromise with religion within the Revolutionary Party.
At the same time, however, we must also see that religion cannot be destroyed as a social force merely in the realm of argument or propaganda.
To think so would itself bean idealist attitude to religion. This is the mistake which all rationalists make. They believe that religion is 'unreasonable' and can be defeated merely if enough correct arguments are marshalled against it.
What such a position ignores is that religion has a definite social basis. It cannot be overthrown merely 'in the head'. Religion will only finally disappear when social and economic conditions are created will make it superfluous or unnecessary.
Such conditions will achieved only within a socialist society. Because man's struggle against nature will become increasingly conscious and because the class divisions which presently dominate society will gradually be eliminated and the basis for religion will also disappear.
Once the working class take power, religion will become a private matter. All state support for religion - which under capitalism is considerable - will be immediately withdrawn as will all religious teaching in schools. But religion cannot be destroyed merely by force or persecution.
That is why the attitude of the Stalinists towards religion within the Soviet Union is basically wrong and reactionary. The fact that religious feeling still survives and thrives testifies above all to the fact that economically and culturally Russia has not been raised to anything approaching the level of socialism as the advocates of 'socialism in one country' falsely claim.
The struggle to break the youth from religion is a vital part of the work of the Young Socialists and we recommend all those who followed this series should read Lenin 'On Religion', Marx and Engels 'On Religion' and Trotsky 'Young People Study Politics' (New Park Publications).
Appendix
WITH each of the articles in the series a question was posed. The answer will not be found directly from the chapter but a study of the section and the reading which goes with it should enable all readers to attempt an answer. The questions relate to Chapters 1 to 10.
1. In what way do all religious views of the world necessarily imply an idealist standpoint?
2. 'The Materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore, changed men are produced by changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that circumstances are changed precisely by men and that the educator must himself be educated.' What does Marx mean by this statement (from the 'Theses on Fuerbach') and how does it relate to the weakness of mechanical materialism?
3. 'In making history man makes himself.' What did Marx mean by this statement?
4. 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.' What does Marx mean by this statement (from the preface to 'The Critique of Political Economy')? Why does it contain the basic point in the materialist conception of history?
5. Do revolutions ever occur by accident? What do you understand by this statement: 'Revolutions only occur on a definite material basis'?
6. Why is the struggle for socialism based on the contradictions of capitalism? How does this conception of socialism relate to the materialist theory of knowledge discussed earlier?
7. What do you think Marx meant when he said that we must enter history backwards?
8. How does new knowledge develop? How do we test the correctness of our ideas?
9. Why can the working class take power only under the leadership of the revolutionary party?
10. What do we mean by democratic centralism? Why is the revolutionary party organized in this way?
Reading List:
Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels.
Ludwig Fuerbach. Engels.
Preface to 'The Critique of Political Economy'. Marx.
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Engels. (This pamphlet is part of 'Anti-Duhring'.)
The German Ideology. Marx and Engels.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Lenin ( Vol. 14 Collected Works.)
Vol. 38 Lenin's Collected Works. Philosophical Notebooks.