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Understanding of Karl Marx
So widespread are the current misinterpretations of historical materialism that a chapter is necessary to show how they arise from a one-sided emphasis upon different phases of the doctrine. Such a discussion will also contribute to making the fundamental concepts of the theory more precise.
I: Technique and Economics: The commonest misinterpretation of historical materialism, and one shared by many who regard themselves as Marxists, is the identification of the social relations of production with the technical forces of production, and the consequent transformation of the materialistic interpretation of history into the technological interpretation of history. According to the technological interpretation of history, all social life depends upon the nature of the tools employed in production and upon the technical organisation of their use in mines, fields and factory. The hoe and the rake, the pick and the shovel, will produce one society; the steam plough and tractor, the pneumatic hammer and the steam derrick another. The difference between the tenth century and the twentieth may be expressed as the difference between the individual hand-tool and the standardised machine-tool. All other cultural differences are derivative from this central fact.
Marx often said that the development of technology could serve as an index of the development of society; but that is an altogether different thing from saying that we must look to the development of technology as the cause or independent variable of social change. [1] For Marx, technique was only one of three generic components of the productive process. The other two were nature and the social activity of man. When he speaks of the economic foundations of society, he means the whole complex of relationships which arise from the specific ways in which these three elements are organised. Machinery as such, he reminds Proudhon, ‘is no more an economic category than is the ox which draws the plough. It is only a productive force.’ [2]
The social relations of production (which are synonymous with the expressions ‘the property relations’, and ‘the economic foundations of culture’) cannot therefore be regarded as the automatic reflection of technology. On the contrary, the development of technology is itself often dependent upon the system of social relationships in which it is found. The direction that technical invention takes is determined by needs which are not themselves narrowly technical but economic or social. Indeed, the important question as to whether any specific invention is to be utilised or scrapped is normally decided not by the inventor or by the logic of his creation but by its compatibility with the underlying rationale of production. Today, for example, the decisive consideration is whether or not it will contribute to diminishing production costs and to increasing profits. This does not mean that whenever a social need exists, some invention will arise to fulfil it. Think of all the many crying needs of industrial and social life which still remain unfulfilled. Nor does it mean that whatever technical invention does arise is always directed towards realising some improvement in production, for thousands of ingenious devices have come from the mind of man which have had no bearing upon production or have been permitted to lie unused. What is asserted is only that the selective application of technical invention is determined by the existing relations of production and not vice versa. The primitive technology of antiquity was in large part due to the character of a slave economy which found it easier to use human beings as machines than to make more efficient their labour. This was indirectly reflected in the attitude which prevailed among the leisured classes, who possessed a monopoly of the science of the day, that it was degrading (slave-like) to apply theoretical knowledge to material and practical subject-matter. Whenever, as under capitalism, the continuous improvement of all technical forces leads ultimately to the paralysis of the productive process, the cause is to be sought not in the forces of production but in the relations of production (the property system) which, by their very nature are compelled to call into being those productive agencies that turn out to be its own nemesis. It is not technology – or what soft and romantic thinkers call the ‘curse of the machine’ – which causes the downfall of capitalism. In a larger sense, capitalism is the source of its own downfall. It comes into the world bearing the seeds of death at its heart. The logic of its growth compels it to develop its productive limbs to a point where it can no longer coordinate its movements. Or more concretely, it is compelled to reinvest capital to produce further means of production without being able to guarantee the consumption of the commodities produced.
Not only does the character of technology and the direction of its development depend upon the social relation of production; it is even more obvious that the social consequences of technological invention can never be deduced from technological considerations alone. Otherwise how account for the fact that mechanical inventions, far from lightening the toil of the masses, freeing them from age-long burdens of drudgery, and opening opportunities for creative leisure, have instead intensified labour and reduced the worker ‘to an appendage of the machine’. The only promise of leisure the progressive mechanisation of industry holds out to the modern wage-worker today is the enforced leisure to starve.
One of the most interesting claims made for the technological interpretation is that it accounts for the final elimination of chattel slavery from Western Europe in the twelfth century. The reputed causal change in technique was a simple one. Until that time, cattle had been yoked by the neck (traction par la gorge) which winded them easily and made possible an average load of only half a ton even for relatively short distances. Production was necessarily limited, hardly more than enough to feed the families of both master and slave. Someone discovered, however, that yoking cattle by the shoulders (collier d’épaules) increased their pulling strength many times over and did not exhaust them so easily. As a result, productivity increased and man was able to provide his master with sufficient supplies in approximately half the working time that had been previously consumed. He now cultivated the rest of his patch in the remaining time and enjoyed a higher standard of living as a serf than had been possible to him as a slave.
The difficulties with this specific application of the technological theory are typical of all others. First of all feudalism was a full-grown system of production long before the twelfth century. Secondly, there is no assurance that yoking cattle by the shoulders was unknown in slave-holding antiquity and in parts of Asia. Thirdly, and most important, it is hard to see how the whole system of land tenure, with its specific codes of mutual obligations and services, could be derived from the shift from one method of yoking to another. Finally, it is not clear why the enhanced productivity of labour could not have been retained within a slave economy; for there was always the possibility of using slave labour on huge public works as had been done in Egypt and Greece, and of equipping armies for the purpose of conquest and pillage. The decline of slavery must be sought elsewhere than in the gradual improvement of productive technique.
For further evidence that technique of itself does not determine the mode of economic production, one need but point to the use of large-scale machinery in such different economies as prevail today in the USA and the USSR.
A technological interpretation of history which separated technique from antecedent social need in search for a measurable first cause of social change, would have to surrender its materialistic starting point just as soon as the simplified logic of that procedure were pressed against it. For no technical change is made without a leading idea in the mind of the technician or inventor. Even if it be true that no great invention has ever been the sole creation of one mind, nevertheless the machine is projected in thought before it is embodied in stone and steel. The cause then would be some bright idea or happy thought in the mind of one or more persons, and we would be back to a thoroughgoing idealistic philosophy of civilisation.
II: Economic Conditions and Economic Self-Interest: Perhaps the most unjustified of all misinterpretations to which Marx’s doctrine of historical materialism has been subjected is its reduction to a theory of personal motives. According to this conception Marx believed that all human beings are activated by a desire to further their own personal self-interest, and that this self-interest is inevitably expressed in a desire for economic gain. The materialistic interpretation then means that all behaviour is guided by material consideration, that every act has a cash value and every man has his price. Ideal motives – aesthetic, religious, moral – are just rationalisations of economic drives.
The amazing thing about this interpretation is that it cannot support itself by a single text from any chapter of Marx or from the open book of his own life. Yet it is found in high academic places. It arises in part from an ambiguity in the term ‘materialistic’ and from the resultant confusion between ethical materialism and historical materialism. Ethical materialism is egoism; it assumes that the object of every desire is the attainment of pleasure or the avoidance of pain; and that the life of reason is an organisation of natural impulses to secure for oneself the maximum amount of pleasure over pain. Historical materialism, however, is a theory which tries to explain when, where and why egoistic and non-egoistic motives arise. Marx was the first one to denounce the cheap cynicism which denies the sincerity of ideal behaviour whether it be sacrifice for one’s cause, religious piety, patriotic fervour or disinterested attachment to truth and beauty – a cynicism which cloaks itself in the sophisticated doctrine that all the large interests which sway individuals are constructed out of petty interests. Only a petty person generalising from his own case could project such a theory. Already as a young man Marx had maintained that, even if it were true that the object of every desire fulfilled some interest of the self, it by no means followed that the interest was a selfish, no less a pecuniary one:
It is known that a certain psychology explains greatness out of a multitude of small causes in the correct intuition that everything for which man struggles is a matter [Bache] of his interest. But from that it goes on to the mistaken notion that there are only ‘small’ interests, interests only of stereotyped selfishness. It is also well known that this kind of psychology and human science [Menschenkunde] flourishes particularly in cities where, in addition, it is regarded as a sign of subtle intellect to see through the show of the world, and to glimpse behind the cloud of ideas and facts completely petty, envious, intriguing manikins stringing the whole of things on their little threads. But it is well known that when one peers too closely into a mirror one bangs against one’s own head. The knowledge of the world and the knowledge of men of these clever people is primarily a mystifying bang into their own heads. [3]
Marx attacked both Bentham and Stirner precisely because they conceived man on the pattern of an egoistic and self-centred petty-bourgeois shopkeeper who keeps a profit and loss account of his feelings and whose every act is determined by calculation of the possibilities of personal gain. It is not commonly known that Marx answered Max Stirner’s Das Einzige und sein Eigentum – the most extreme gospel of super-sophisticated worldliness ever penned – with a work which was even lengthier than Stirner’s own. In it he shows that the common defect of Stirner’s glorious pseudo-paganism and of the sentimental Christian morality of Feuerbach (and Hess) to which it was opposed, is a disregard of the social and historic context of all ideals. He charges them – one, for his ‘I, me, myself’, the other, for his ‘Love your neighbour, for you are your neighbour and he is you’ – with committing the same religious hypostasis in the field of morality which they had both accused the metaphysicians of committing in the realm of knowledge.
For Marx, the motives which guide individual man are quite various. And it is only the rare individual who knows what his motives really are. But Marx is not in the least concerned with the motives of individuals as such except in so far as they typify a class attitude. His problem is to explain why certain ideals prevail at one period rather than at another; and to discover what factors determine the succession of ideals for which men live and die. His hypothesis is that economic conditions (in the wide sense indicated above) determine which ideals are to flourish; and that the locus of all effective ideals is the class struggle. It thus becomes easy to show that economic conditions cannot be identified with economic self-interests, for the prevalence or absence of the latter is explained in terms of the former. In any given society, economic interests, as motives of conduct, will be much weaker among those classes which need pay little attention to economic processes, than among those classes which do not enjoy the same measure of economic security. The careless lavishness of the American captain of industry does not prove that he is inherently more unselfish than his tight-fisted Yankee ancestors. It merely reflects the difference between early commercial capitalism, in which thrift was a virtue because of the part it played in production, and late finance capitalism, in which conspicuous waste has the same function.
III: Is Marxism a Monistic System? The most unfortunate characterisation that historical materialism has received – and this at the hands of its followers – is the ‘monistic conception of history’. Monism is a highly ambiguous term. It may mean that the stuff of history, that is, what must be explained, consists only of actions of one kind. Marxian monism would mean that history is nothing but economic activity – the most monstrous distortion ever fathered upon a critical thinker. Or historical monism may mean that only one kind of explanation is valid and that all historical events can be explained in economic or social terms. Some ‘Marxists’ believe this, but Marx never did. Or finally, it may mean that there is a continuity between the phases of historical life and that no branch of culture, be it ever so abstract, is heaven born; that all the arts and sciences have arisen from the stream of social life and that they bear the marks of their origin irrespective of their subsequent development. But this is a tautology, for it is involved in the very meaning of the historical approach. If anything cannot be historically approached, that is, studied in the light of its continuities, it simply is not part of history. The question whether anything exists in the external or internal world which is not a part of history is a question of metaphysical analysis and is outside the province of the historian. If everything is historical, it is clear that several senses of the term must be distinguished.
Marx’s concrete historical analyses show better than any exegesis possibly can what he conceived his method to be. He introduces the mode of economic production as the fundamental conditioning factor of only the general and most pervasive characters of a culture. He does not overlook what is specific and unique to each country and to each of its historical situations. Tradition, accident of personality, consideration of the formal possibilities of development, all enter as important variations upon the fundamental Grundton of economic production. In the hands of his uncritical ‘monistic’ followers, his method has often led to the attempt to explain specific cultural facts or historical events in terms of general economic conditions whose existence is often just as compatible with the absence of what is to be explained as with its presence. It is obvious that the explanation, for example, of any specific form or expression of contemporary American culture, for example, its contemporary religion, science, law or popular music, cannot be adequate unless it contains more than a treatment of the economic conditioning circumstances. For at any given time the mode of economic production would be invariant for all aspects of culture, and unless other traditional or formal factors were brought into the situation, we could not distinguish between the specific effect which economic organisation has on American religion and the specific effect it has on American law or American science. It should not be overlooked that the difference between American law and American science may be considered as a difference between two aspects of one underlying economy. But that is not the only difference between them. There is a formal difference between jural relationships and scientific propositions which cannot be reduced to anything else but which must be regarded as defining autonomous domains with logical relationships uniquely their own. This is not denying that legal and scientific activities arise out of the social processes and reflect every important change in many other domains – especially in the relation of production. But it calls emphatic attention to the fact that (a) each field reflects such basic social changes in its own characteristic way; (b) each field has a limited independent development of its own which must be explained in terms of its own technique, for example, in law, by the necessity of establishing a logically coherent body of rules; in science, by the necessity of accounting for all known phenomena on the basis of the simplest set of verifiable assumptions; in art, by the necessity of exhibiting some psychological pattern which unifies all details; and finally (c) the autonomous development within these fields under certain circumstances set up important counter-effects in the social process as a whole and in economic life particularly. Illustrations of this last abound on all sides. Herz’s discovery of electro-magnetic waves was the direct consequence of the quest for experimental confirmation of Maxwell’s equations; its profound influence upon cultural life and especially upon economic activity, by making wireless telegraphy and the radio possible, is as incalculable as it is indisputable. In law many rules of procedure adopted to facilitate the disposition of cases, for example, in bankruptcy, have become responsible for the increase of those very practices they had set out to correct.
There is a formal element in all cultural activity to whose existence Engels in later life felt it necessary to direct the attention of his followers:
Just as soon as the new division of labour makes necessary the creation of professional jurists, another new independent domain is opened which for all its dependence upon production and trade in general still possesses a special capacity to react upon these fields. In a modern state, law must not only correspond to the general economic situation and be its expression; it must also be a coherently unified expression and free from glaring internal inconsistencies. In order to achieve this, the fidelity with which the law directly reflects economic conditions becomes less and less. This is all the truer in those rare cases where the legal code expresses the harsh, unrelieved and naked fact of class rule. [4]
... one point... which Marx and I did not sufficiently stress and in relation to which we are equally to blame. We both placed and had to place the chief weight upon the derivation of political, legal and other ideological notions, as well as the actions they led up to, from fundamental economic facts. In consequence we neglected the formal side, that is, the way in which these ideas arose, for the sake of the content ... It’s the old story. In the beginning the form is always neglected for the content. [5]
In addition to the formal elements of culture, there are traditional elements. In stressing the preponderant influences of the mode of economic production upon the general character of social life, Marx never failed to indicate that in every particular case tradition played an important part in modifying the rate of change in the non-material aspects of culture. ‘The tradition of all dead generations’, he writes in the Eighteenth Brumaire, ‘weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ [6] Sooner or later family relationships, religion, art and philosophy will reflect the new social equilibrium produced by changes in the economic order. But at any given time an analysis of their nature will reveal a lag both in the way they function and in the structure of their organisation. This is another way of saying that no culture is organic through and through. From the vantage point of a long-time perspective, the phenomena of cultural lag may not appear significant; but from the point of view of short-scale political operations, they are of great importance. To disregard, say, the peculiar character of local and sectional religious traditions in the United States may spell disaster even for such enterprises as organising trade unions or successfully conducting a strike.
Tradition, of course, is never of itself a sufficient explanation for the existence or survival of any cultural trait, otherwise we could not explain why some traditional influences and practices have survived while others have not. It may even be granted that any cultural practice or belief which common usage uncritically refers to as traditional, for example, the wearing of marriage rings, or the prevalence of Platonic and Hegelian idealism, has some functional relation to the contemporary process of social life. Nonetheless all cultural traits have their traditional aspect. An adequate social analysis must reveal these features and show how what they are at any moment is the resultant of what they once were and of the changes produced by a changing social environment. For example, the revival of the Platonic and Hegelian philosophies in Western Europe and their contemporary vogue may be partially accounted for by the easy formulæ they supply to cover up the great social problems generated by imperialist expansion and war. The perfect state as one in which all classes collaborate under the rule of the intellectually élite, the perfect society as a Schicksalsgemeinschaft of capital, labour and state officials [7] – what could be more in consonance with the corporative ideology of Fascism by which finance capital denies the existence of a class struggle in order to make its own class rule more secure? Nonetheless, the fact that it was the Hegelian and Platonic philosophies which were revived and not others sufficiently similar in type to serve the same social functions, demands an explanation in the light of academic and religious traditions as well as of certain standing philosophical problems. That these traditions and problems in their original form in some way reflected their contemporary economic and political milieu, does not alter the hopeless logical confusion which results from regarding the original cause of a tradition to be also the cause of the survival of that tradition. This fallacy vitiates the work not only of men, like Eleutheropoulos, who have clung to a simplistic economic approach, but also of their Marxist critics, men like Kautsky and Plekhanov. Plekhanov, we may note in passing, did most to give currency to the phrase, ‘the monistic conception of history’.
The source of the monistic fallacy in its refined form is the attempt to explain all specific cultural phenomena in terms of factors which are admitted to be plural but among which one – the economic – is always assumed to be predominant. Let us take some illustrations from Plekhanov’s own writings:
If we want to understand a dance performed by Australian Aborigines, it suffices that we should know what part is played by the women of the tribe in collecting the roots of wild plants. But a knowledge of the economic life of France in the eighteenth century will not explain to us the origin of the minuet. In the latter case we have to do with a dance which is an expression of the psychology of a non-productive class ... We must not forget, however, that the appearance of non-productive classes in a society is itself the outcome of the economic development of that society. This means that the economic factor remains predominant, even when its activity is overlaid by that of other factors. [8]
If you try to give a direct economic explanation of the appearance of the school of David in French painting at the close of the eighteenth century, you will certainly talk nonsense. But if, on the other hand, you regard this school as an ideological reflection of the class struggle which was going on in French society, on the eve of the great revolution, the problem will assume an entirely new aspect. Then certain qualities of David’s art which might have seemed to have no connection with social economy, will become perfectly comprehensible. [9]
Now these highly selected illustrations are obviously quite favourable to the Marxian point of view which Plekhanov is defending. In challenging Plekhanov’s explanation we are not calling Marx’s method into question but Plekhanov’s application of it. How valid are his explanations?
Suppose we begin with the minuet. The minuet as well as the gavotte, generally associated with it, was originally a peasant dance. It antedated not only the court of Louis XV but even of Louis XIV. As a rustic dance it was gay and lively; as a court dance it was stately and artificial. Consequently it is not its origin which can be explained in terms of the psychology of the non-productive class but at best its peculiar development. But now, what necessary connection exists between the psychology of a non-productive class and the mincing gravity of the minuet? The gavotte was a little more animated and was tacked right on to the minuet. Could not a debonair and tripping step convey the psychology of a non-productive class just as well as the minuet? Indeed, cannot one say that wild and licentious dances could just as readily have expressed the psychology of a non-productive class in the eighteenth century? And if these dances had been in vogue, the same formula could easily be invoked to explain their existence. No matter what dances had been performed, it would be easy to attribute their character to the fact that the dancers were not directly concerned with production. The class psychologies of non-productive classes are not all the same. Why was this particular dance associated with this particular non-productive class? And why could not the minuet have expressed the psychology of a productive class? As a matter of fact, there is evidence to show that the minuet was a national dance and not merely a court dance, and that its local variations were just as pronounced as the difference between its original rustic form and later court development. Further, how are we to explain, on Plekhanov’s theory, the rapid spread of the minuet through all of Western Europe among productive and non-productive classes alike? How are we to explain in terms of the psychology of a non-productive class the fact that Beethoven developed the minuet into the scherzo? But Plekhanov’s crowning error is to reason that because the minuet was the outcome of the psychology of a non-productive class, and because the appearance of a non-productive class was itself the result of economic development, therefore the minuet is the result of economic development. The logic would be similar to the argument that since Mr X’s suicide by shooting was made possible only by the existence of fire-arms, and since fire-arms depended upon the application of science to industry, therefore the real cause of Mr X’s death was science and capitalism. In any case, even if it be granted that the minuet had an origin in the economic life of the past, that economic life could by no known canon of logic or scientific method be regarded as a cause of the presence of the minuet in the economic life of a later day.
Similarly it can be argued that the style of David was not produced by the ideological struggles of eighteenth-century France, but that during and after the Revolution it was selected by republican France because of the definite political import of its imitation of the rugged virtues of Roman and Greek antiquity. As a matter of fact, definite departures from the rococo style had already been made before David. Independently of the whole movement of neo-classicism in France, the German, Winkelmann, had proclaimed that: ‘The sole means for us to become – if possible – inimitably great, is the imitation of the ancients.’ [10] It must be remembered that David was a member of the Convention and that his studies of the assassinated Lepelletier and Marat were political commissions. His technique in those pictures was no different from the technique he later employed in his Coronation which glorified Napoleon. Nor was it appreciably different from the technique of his greatest pupil, Ingres, who used it to celebrate the voluptuous beauty of nudes in a Turkish Bath.
All this suggests an important distinction between the origin of any cultural fact and its acceptance. In art, for example, all sorts of stylistic variations or mutants appear in any period. The social and political environment acts as a selective agency upon them. The dominant style selected may in turn exercise a social and political influence. When we say that the style which is accepted ‘expresses’ the social interests or political aspirations of a class, we may mean one of two things. We may mean either that the technical elements of a work have grown out of a new social experience or that technical elements already in existence have been fused in a new way or filled with a new content. This is not a hard and fast distinction, but all interpretation of culture demands that it be made. In literature this distinction is hardest to draw, in painting it is less hard and in music easiest of all. But even in literature it is clear that some formal elements, for example, the sonnet form, reportage, the autobiographical novel, may be used indifferently to express disparate political and social interests. In painting, realistic technique may serve revolutionary or non-revolutionary purposes. In music, the same tunes are often the battle songs of Fascists in Germany and of Communists in Russia.
The tentative conclusion we have reached is that although each specific expression of a culture is socially conditioned, its pattern of development may depend upon certain relatively irreducible, technical factors, and that for some purposes, an explanation in terms of these technical factors may be valid. The extent to which the social environment enters as a constitutive element in this pattern is a subject of empirical investigation. Nothing significant can be inferred from the truism that without some form of social organisation the cultural fact in question could not exist. Where the social environment influences a cultural phenomenon it may do so in two distinct ways which must be distinguished in analysis even though they may not be separated in fact. It may provide the technical materials out of which new forms develop. For example, the manufacture of inflated duralumin tubes may make possible new variations in architecture, the discovery of poison gas and aeroplane warfare may revolutionise the art of military science and strategy. The second way in which the social environment may influence a culture trait is by the use to which it is put. Inflated duralumin tubes may be used to construct more profitable skyscrapers or may be used to build more liveable homes for the working population in intelligently planned cities. An army which is knit together by a revolutionary, democratic faith will develop new forms of warfare impossible to an army which is only discipline bound. The use to which materials and techniques are put is in the larger sense of the words, political and moral. It is bound up with the class struggle and with the different objectives and paths of action which flow from it. The class character of any art is unmistakably revealed not so much in its materials and techniques – save derivatively – but in its objectives.
If the foregoing analysis is sound, a genuine Marxian criticism of culture will never be guilty of the monistic reductions which have only too often masqueraded in its name.
1. This fundamental error runs through and vitiates the essential portions of Bukharin’s Historical Materialism. A representative example of his analysis is the statement on page 143 (English translation) that ‘the combinations of the instruments of labour (the social technology) are the deciding factor in the combinations and relations of men, that is, in social economy’ [see here – MIA]. Marx proved in Capital that just the converse of this was true. Bukharin’s position is closer to that of the mechanical materialists of the eighteenth century than it is to dialectical materialism.
2. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. – MIA.
3. Werke, Abteilung I, Band I, pp. 218–19 [Karl Marx, Debatten über Preßfreiheit und Publikation der Landständischen Verhandlungen; On Freedom of the Press – MIA.
4. From his Letter to Schmidt; cf. Appendix [Friedrich Engels to Conrad Schmidt, 27 October 1890. – MIA
5. From his Letter to Mehring; cf. Appendix. [Friedrich Engels to Franz Mehring, 14 July 1893. – MIA]
6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. – MIA
7. For an unwitting confession of the real secret of the Hegel Renaissance in Germany, especially the Hegelian philosophy of law, see J. Binder, Archiv für Rechts-und-Wirtschaftsphilosophie, Band XXII, 1929, p. 313.
8. G.V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (English translation), p. 61, italics mine [available here. – MIA
9. G.V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (English translation), p. 63, italics mine [available at here. – MIA
10. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture) – MIA
Last updated: 20 February 2020