Hook Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Understanding of Karl Marx
A proper test of the claims of historical materialism could be made only by applying its propositions to the rich detail of politics, law, religion, philosophy, science and art. This would require not a chapter but an encyclopaedia. We must consequently restrict ourselves to a discussion of certain fundamental problems which arise in every field in which historical materialism is applied.
The upshot of the discussion will show that Marx’s historical method is organically connected with his revolutionary purpose and activity, that it does not attempt to explain all aspects of present and past social life but only those that have bearing upon the conditions, direction and technique of action involved in social change, that the explanations he does offer were never projected as final, and that the concept of causation which underlies the theory of historical materialism is practical and not theoretical.
For purposes of convenience the points around which the discussion will centre will be 1) the role of personality in history; 2) the larger question of objective chance and objective necessity which that particular problem suggests; 3) the importance of the admission of reciprocal influences between multiple factors; 4) the Marxian theory of the practical character of social causality which takes the place of a theory of measurement; and 5) the nature of historical intelligibility, that is, what it means to understand human behaviour in its historical aspect.
I: The Role of Personality in History: Because he opposed that ever-fashionable theory that all history is the biography of great men, Marx has been criticised for underestimating the significance of personality in history. His historical analyses, however, are full of brilliant characterisations of individuals, and in view of his constant emphasis upon the creative activity of man in history, it is a little hard to see why this notion should have arisen. Probably this is due to the all too common failure to distinguish between the contradictory of a proposition and its contrary, so that the two statements, ‘It is not the case that all history is the history of great men’, and ‘No history is the history of great men’, have been identified. But the chief reason for the misinterpretation, it seems to me, is that most of Marx’s disciples have actually agreed with his critics – not perhaps in so many words – but as far as the objective intent of their interpretation goes.
In terms of Marx’s philosophy of history it is easy to make short shrift of any conception such as Carlyle’s which sees in the development of civilisation nothing but the deeds of heroes and the thoughts of genius. We may begin with the crushing consideration that the very meaning of ‘greatness’ in social and political matters is not something fixed but is historically conditioned. Each society not only has its own economic organisation, its own law of population and its own art-styles; it has its own criterion of greatness. The saint of one age is the fool of another; the strong man of today may be the criminal of tomorrow. In politics and religion the ‘great man’ is the man who can get himself believed in. To get people to believe in him, he must in some way gratify or fulfil their need. The need and the possibilities of fulfilling it are often so patently present that no special endowment is required to mount from obscurity to renown. In such cases – and this is the stuff of which it is most often made – greatness is thrust upon a man; it is not achieved. A Charlemagne, a Mahomet, a George Washington or a Frederick II boasted the possession of no qualities so unique that other men could not have easily been found to lead the movements whose titular heads they were. Today the same can be said of Hitler or Gandhi. It is no exaggeration to maintain that if they had not been what they were, then, historically speaking, others would have been what they were. Now, if the stature of the great men of history were no higher than that of those enumerated, then we could hold that there would have been little appreciable difference in world history if they had never existed. Of all of them we could say as we can of Columbus: if he had not discovered America, someone else would have. ‘Every society’, writes Marx, ‘needs its great men, and if it does not find them it creates them, as Helvetius said.’ [1] Such men owe their greatness not to pre-eminent capacity but to historical necessity.
The crucial question, however, is whether all the great men of history are of this dimension. Could we say of Pericles, Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, Marx and Lenin what we have said of Mahomet or George Washington? Before we answer this question, let us turn to other fields where the relationship between individual greatness and social needs is a little different – the fields of science and art.
Looking at the history of science as a systematic organisation of knowledge (which, we are aware, is an abstraction but which we are justified in making for the purpose of analysis), can we say that if Archimedes, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Clark Maxwell and Einstein had not lived, the history of science would have been substantially the same? He would be a rash man who would unqualifiedly assert it. Take Newton, from whom all the subsequent developments of science branch out. It is granted that he did not begin from the beginning, that many of his problems were common problems of his time, that neither his activity nor his results would have been possible without the existence of the permissive conditions of the society and politics of his day. But for that matter neither would his work have been possible without the permissive conditions of the weather, his own birth, and the existence of the world in general. There is no theoretical limit to the number of necessary conditions which had to be fulfilled before Newton could have achieved what he did. None the less all of these permissive or necessary conditions are irrelevant to the real problem at issue which is whether in the absence of Newton (supposing he had died of croup in childhood) his discoveries, which not only revolutionised theoretical science but profoundly influenced the development of industry and capitalism, would have been made by others. To retort that Leibnitz was the co-discoverer of the calculus and that no great scientific discovery has been made by one man is to reveal a pathetic inability to grasp the issue here. Any man who could have solved Newton’s problems had to be of the same intellectual stature as Newton. Let us grant, contrary to fact, that every one of Newton’s discoveries were independently made by other men. Let us assume that not only did Newton and Leibnitz discover the calculus independently of one another, but, for good measure, that two others did so too. The question at issue is whether if all of these four great men had not existed (a supposition not beyond the pale of probability), the calculus would have been invented anyhow. What possible evidence is available bearing upon this point? Only the fact that attempts had been made to solve certain problems of the circle and the cube from the time of Archimedes down, and that Galileo and Bernouilli puzzled over difficulties which involved functions. Loosely speaking, all we can say is that a scientific problem existed. And we can even grant that this and other problems were set, not only by the immanent development of mathematics and science, but by certain practical problems of warfare, industry and commerce. But by what mystical assurance can one assert that all these problems, no matter how and why they arose, must find solutions? This is not to suggest that any problem is insoluble or unknowable. It simply asserts that there is no logical, scientific or social necessity that every problem finds its solution. [2]
If it is true that the presence of great men has had an irreducibly significant influence upon the development of science, how much truer is it for the development of art and literature. Here, too, the social environment has provided both the opportunity and the materials for creation. In contradistinction, however, to the political illustrations considered above, society has not been able to bestow greatness but only to select it. Lacking a Shakespeare or a Goethe, mankind ‘would have been shorter by a head’. To object by saying that society ‘produced’ Shakespeare in one case, and Newton in another, is to use very confusing language. Unless it could be shown that the actual biological birth of Shakespeare was involved in the literary development of England in the sixteenth century, and the birth of Newton in the scientific development of the seventeenth, we cannot in any sense claim that these men were produced by their environments. But to assume such an organic connection between the realm of biology and the realm of society is on the face of it absurd. What ‘social’ or ‘literary’ necessity guided the union of the sperm and egg out of which the child Shakespeare was born? If Shakespeare hadn’t been born would someone else have been Shakespeare? Mystic connections of this sort can be asserted only by the philosophy of absolute idealism, not by dialectical materialism.
Men of art and science, it will be objected, no matter how great they may be, do not affect history. Very well, then, we return to the role of great personalities in social history and politics. Would the Russian Revolution have taken place in October 1917, if Lenin had died an exile in Switzerland? And if the Russian Revolution had not taken place when it did, would subsequent events in Russia have taken the same course? [3] Would the history of Europe have been different if Napoleon had lost his life in the first Italian campaign? If Cromwell early in his career had carried out his threat to sell his estate and quit the country, would the Roundheads have been victorious anyhow? If Sulla in addition to depriving Julius Caesar of his property and priesthood in 82 BC had not listened to the intercession of the Vestal Virgins and had proceeded with Caesar’s scheduled execution, would Rome have arisen to the heights of world empire? These questions cannot be answered dogmatically in the affirmative. They are ticklish problems and the historical evidence does not give determinate solutions. Instead of leaving those questions open to be decided by elaborate analysis of historical possibilities, most of the disciples of Marx have settled all the difficulties in advance by a rigid and mechanical application of historical materialism. We may begin with Engels:
That a certain particular man, and no other, emerges at a definite time in a given country is naturally pure chance. But even if we eliminate him, there is always a need for a substitute, and the substitute it found tant bien que mal; in the long run he is sure to be found. That Napoleon – this particular Corsican – should have been the military dictator made necessary by the exhausting wars of the French Republic – that was a matter of chance. But in default of a Napoleon, another would have filled his place; that is established by the fact that whenever a man was necessary he has always been found: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell. [4]
Karl Kautsky, who has been called the ‘old war-horse of Marxian orthodoxy’, writes on the same theme:
Had it not been Cromwell or Napoleon, it would have been someone else. Due to the revolutionary origin of the armies which raised Cromwell and Napoleon to power, all the fighting instincts and capacities among the revolutionary sections of the population had been aroused, and at the same time a path was cleared to the highest places for those among the whole nation who were gifted in military matters. Everyone remembers the saying that every soldier of the revolutionary army carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. In this way there was built in the armies of the English and French republic a high-minded and superior corps of officers who would have easily selected another military dictator if Cromwell or Napoleon had not succeeded in coming to the top. [5]
Plekhanov [6], Cunow [7] and Bukharin [8], on this question, play the game of follow your master with amazing fidelity.
With all due respect, this position seems to me to be arrant nonsense. Its most intelligible expression would involve the abandonment of Marx’s naturalistic materialism and a surrender to idealistic mysticism. To argue that if Napoleon had not lived someone else and not he would have been Napoleon (that is, would have performed Napoleon’s work) and then to offer as evidence the fact that whenever a great man was necessary he has always been found, is logically infantile. For how do we know when a great man is needed by society? Surely not after he has arisen! The need for him must be antecedent to his appearance. But, then, did society need great men only at those periods when Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon and others came to the fore? That would be like saying society needed great thinkers only when Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, etc, lived. Would it not be truer to say that society always needs great men? Why then are not great men always at hand? Where was the great man at the time when the Tartar hordes overran Russia and arrested its development? Why did not a great man arise to unify India against foreign imperialism in the nineteenth century, and China in the twentieth? Where was the great leader hiding when Italy was objectively ready for revolution in 1921 and Germany in 1923? Was he not needed then? And granted that there was a need for a Napoleon, a Marx, a Lenin when they arose. What is the source of the assurance that that need had to be fulfilled, if not by these men, then by others fully as great as they? The pious Christian can fall back upon the will of God. But the militant revolutionist who permits the automatic, economic development of society to perform the same logical function in his system as the will of God in the system of the believer, has committed intellectual suicide. When, under pressure of the argument, he throws overboard the notion of the automatic development of society, he is logically compelled to surrender the notion that whenever a great man is necessary he must be found. There are no musts in history; there are only conditional probabilities.
Marx’s own view is more sober and Engels on other occasions was faithful to it. We shall discuss it in conjunction with the larger problem of the role of chance in history.
II: Chance in History: In a previous chapter we have examined and rejected the theory of wholesale chance in history. But to go from the denial that ‘not all history is a chance affair’ to the statement that ‘there are no chance elements in history’ is an altogether different matter. That is precisely what some Marxist historians have done. Pokrovsky, for example, in his History of Russia [9] states that ‘to appeal to chance in history is to exhibit a certificate of poverty’. In this simple way of disposing of the problem, he is at one with most bourgeois historians who have neglected the dialectical approach to the question of law and chance in history.
What is a chance event? This is both a metaphysical question and an historical question. Here we are only concerned with chance events in history. A chance event, first of all, is not merely an event of which we are ignorant. For a great many events of which we are ignorant may turn out to be historically determined. At one time we were ignorant of the causes of the First Crusade and translated that ignorance into the phrase un fait écclesiastique. That did not make the Crusades a chance event; an historian with proper knowledge of the social and economic history of Europe in the latter half of the eleventh century need not have invoked chance or the will of God in his account.
Nor is a chance event in history one that is uncaused. Whether all events, of whatever nature, have a cause, is a question outside of the province of the historian. His problem is whether all events which have historical effects have themselves historical causes. An earthquake is a natural event which has definite geological causes. It has, however, definite historical effects. An historian treating of the socio-economic development of a country would have to regard the occurrence of the earthquake as a chance event. Why? Because he could not deduce or explain its happenings on the basis of any of the historical and social material available to him. The causes of the earthquake are historically irrelevant; its effects are not, for the social consequences of an earthquake will be different in one economic situation from what it will be in another. A chance event in history is one which although it has historical consequences has no historical causes. The historian could no more predict an earthquake on the basis of historical data than the geologist could predict the social consequences of an earthquake on the basis of his geological laws alone.
Not all events which have historical effects are easily classifiable into those whose causes are purely physical or biological and those whose causes are purely social. The continued dependence of the relations of production upon the supply of natural raw materials, etc, preclude the possibility of drawing hard and fast divisions. But they do not exonerate the historian from trying to evaluate the degree of chance which is operating; and distinguishing chance events, whose effects and causes are historically irrelevant, from those chance events whose causes are historically irrelevant but whose effects are not. Marx, in a famous letter, pointed out the sense in which objective chance was present in history, and what the consequences were of denying it:
World history would indeed be a very easy thing to make were the struggle to be carried on only under conditions of unfailingly favourable chances. Its nature would have to be of a very mystical kind if ‘accidents’ played no role. These accidents naturally fall within the general path of development and are compensated by other accidents. But the acceleration and retardation of events are very largely dependent upon such ‘accidents’ among which must be reckoned the character of the people who stand at the head of the movement. [10]
Marx does not mean to suggest that the character of any leader is uncaused and that a biologist and psychologist could not offer a perfectly satisfactory explanation of its nature. He merely points to the fact that something, which the historian cannot altogether explain, may have a decisive influence upon a great historical event. It is in this way that Marx propounds the solution of the specific problem from which we started. The presence of a great man means the presence of great historical effects. Vide Marx himself. But is the presence of a great man the effect of an historical cause? Only partly. His biological endowment, from the historical point of view, is a matter of chance. The specific cultural expression of it is not. World history is the resultant effect of two relatively independent series of phenomena – the biological (or the physical as the case may be) and the socio-political in which the latter is more decisive because it supplies the content and materials of personal expression.
What does Marx mean by the statement that world history would have to be of a ‘mystical’ character were there no chance events? He means that, once chance were ruled out, all causal connections which were involved in an historical event, whether they were physical or biological, would have to be regarded as organically related in one meaningful historical whole. It would mean that if anything were different in this whole, everything would be different; that the particular conjunctions of series of events, no matter how trivial, are necessary, and could be deduced, if we had sufficient knowledge, before they actually occurred in time. This could only be true if the world were either one absolute totality outside of time, as Hegel conceived it to be, or one great complex machine in which all parts were given at once, as the metaphysical mechanists assumed. Both views are equally fatalistic and share the same theological prepossessions.
III: Historical Reciprocity: Once it is recognised that all historical events have chance aspects, which in most cases may be safely disregarded, the way is cleared for a consideration of the related problem of the reciprocal interaction between social factors. No process can ever be explained in terms of one factor. For all activity whether it be of man or nature presupposes some material to be acted upon. The character of both the activity and the material must be reflected in the resultant effect. Where the activity continues to be the same and the materials differ, differences in the result will be attributed, for all practical purposes, to the causal influence of the material; where the material is the same and the activities are different, differences in the result will be explained by differences in the nature of the activity. Now in a large sense, history in the making, that is, in the rich qualitative immediacy of the present, is a resultant product of one material and of one activity. That material is the whole complex of tradition and institutions which each generation finds at hand; the activity is the pursuit of ideals, conditioned by the traditional civilisation – an activity which results in changing those conditions. Closer analysis, however, shows that neither the material of history nor historical activity is one; the material has many aspects, the activity, many forms. It is the same civilisation which expresses itself in its architecture as in its songs, but a history of song is not a history of architecture, although there may be points of contact; the quest for truth in a laboratory and the quest for empire are both historical activities – but chemistry is not military strategy although they may, of course, be related.
The explanation of any specific situation, then, demands some conception of what is relevant and what is irrelevant to it. If all the material aspects of history and all forms of historical activity were related to every situation, then the explanation of one situation would be identically the same with the explanation of any other. Indeed, there would be no way of distinguishing one situation from another. The problem then is to discover what is relevant and what is irrelevant to any cultural phenomena to be explained. Just as it is possible to admit that the whole history of the solar system is involved in the existence of any individual on earth, and yet rule out the internal constitution of the sun as irrelevant in analysing the personality of John Smith (or for that matter even his anatomy), so it is possible to admit that the mode of economic production is involved in every cultural fact, and rule it out as irrelevant in an analysis of a specific work of art. In a total explanation, it would be relevant; but no one is interested in total explanations, and it is questionable whether the phrase has a meaning.
The problem of cultural reciprocity must be recognised by anyone who realises two things. First, that historical activity which includes all forms of social effort, although it arises from the conditioning social environment, reacts upon it in some concrete way. And second, that the different forms of historical activity – scientific, legal, artistic – will often influence one another by reacting upon their common social conditions. For example, a new invention in building materials, adopted as profitable, may give rise to a mass housing project and influence architectural style; the aeroplane made possible commercial airways which, in turn, necessitated new legal developments. The refusal or inability of some Marxists to do justice to cultural phenomena of this kind led hostile critics to maintain that historical materialism suffered from a primitive monism according to which all efficient causes in history were material, never ideal. Before he died, Engels was compelled to take the field against them:
The political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary and artistic development rests upon the economic. But they all react upon one another and upon the economic base. It is not the case that the economic situation is the sole active cause and everything else only a passive effect. There is a reciprocal interaction within a fundamental economic necessity which in the last instance always asserts itself. [11]
According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history. Neither Marx nor I ever maintained more. Now, when someone comes along and distorts this to mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor, he is converting the former proposition into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis. But the various factors of the superstructure – the political forms of the class struggles and their results, that is, constitutions, etc, established by victorious classes after hard-won battles, legal forms, and even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, jural, philosophical theories, religious conceptions which have been developed into systematic dogmas – all these exercise an influence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form. There is a reciprocity between all these factors in which, finally, through the endless array of contingencies (that is, of things and events whose inner connection with one another is so remote, or so incapable of proof, that we may neglect it, regarding it as non-existent) the economic movement asserts itself as necessary. Were this not the case the application of the theory to any given historical period would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. [12]
What all these fellows lack is dialectic. They see only cause here, only effect there. They do not at all see that this method of viewing things results in bare abstractions; that in the real world such metaphysical polar opposites exist only in crucial situations; that the whole great process develops itself in the form of reciprocal action, of very unequal forces to be sure, but in which the economic movement is far and away the strongest, most primary and decisive. They do not see that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. For them, Hegel has never existed. [13]
IV: The Marxian Theory of Social Causation: In all of the foregoing citations the phrase, ‘in the last instance’, is crucial. It is synonymous with the expressions, ‘the real basis of society’ and ‘the most decisive factor’. When it is declared that the mode of economic production is any one of these things, the natural question to ask is: What do these expressions mean and how can we test the truth of what they assert?
Whenever anything is characterised as in the last instance determining something else, it must be borne in mind that a certain point of view is involved from which the analysis is projected. The meaning of ‘in the last instance’ (or ‘in the last analysis’) is not something absolutely given and fixed for every point of departure. It depends rather upon the position we want to prove. And where social activity is involved, it depends upon the practical interest which lies at the heart of that position. Real and decisive in this connection are, also, relative to a contemplated programme of activity, and can only be tested in that activity. It is here that the direct connection lies between Marxism as the theory and practice of social revolution in the era of capitalism, and historical materialism as a theory of social change. What justifies Marx and Engels in holding that the mode of economic production is the decisive factor in social life is the revolutionary will of the proletariat which is prepared to act upon that assumption. It is a will strengthened by knowledge of the limiting conditions which affect the success of their effort. But it is the revolutionary act containing both the risk of failure and the promise of success which is essential not only to social advance but, at times, even to the acquisition of social knowledge. It is as necessary as any or all of the other limiting conditions. It is this faith in action which makes of Marxism a critical hypothesis, instead of a dead dogma or a romantic myth. It is only because we want to change the economic structure of society that we look for evidence of the fact that in the past, economic change has had a profound effect upon all social and cultural life. Because we want to change the economic structure of society, we assert that this evidence from the past together with our revolutionary act in the present constitutes a sufficient cause for believing that the general proposition, ‘in the last instance the mode of economic production determines the general character of social life’, will be true in the near future. In other words, the test of the truth of historical judgements about the past is to be sought in the concrete historical activities of the present, and their future results.
The real test of causal connection in the social realm – whatever may be the case for physics – is human activity. It is only in so far as we can produce things, or bring certain situations to pass, that we can conquer the well-known Humean difficulties about causation. What we want to produce, and when we want to produce it, cannot be derived from the general want or desire to action; for they are socially conditioned. But neither can the wanting or desiring be deduced from the actual or possible objects of desire; for human activity is an irreducible constituent of the social process. By its action it does not make or create laws but it helps to realise the conditions under which one of several possible types of causal connection operates.
Engels generalises this practical conception of causality to hold even for the natural world:
The first thing that strikes us when we consider matter in motion is the connection between the individual motions of individual bodies with one another, their mutually conditioned character. However, not only do we find that one motion follows another, but that we can produce a certain motion by establishing the conditions under which it occurs in nature. Indeed, we can even produce movements which do not take place in nature at all (industry), or at least not in the same manner, and we find that these movements can be given a definite direction in advance. In this way, through the activity of man is grounded the idea of causality – the idea that one movement is the cause of another. The regular succession of certain natural phenomena can indeed give rise to the idea of causality: for example, the light and heat associated with the sun. But this succession constitutes no proof and thus far Humean-scepticism is justified in saying that the regularities of post hoc (after this) will never prove propter hoc (because of this). It is only through the activity of man that the test of causality can be made. [14]
It is the practical reliability of causal connection which concerns man and not its rational necessity. Whoever responds that the reliability of causal connection upon which our action depends, and in social situations which our action helps to enforce, is itself conditioned by antecedent necessities in the nature of things, is converting probabilities into unverifiable certainties. This question is involved with the most fundamental problem of metaphysics and logic that one can raise, to wit, what does it mean to understand anything, what is the criterion of an intelligible explanation. The three great canons of intelligibility have been derived from the fields of geometry, psychology and history. Their explanatory categories have been, respectively, logical necessity, psychological plausibility, and successful action. For Marx and for those of his followers who have been faithful to his revolutionary ideal, it is history and action that are the matrix of intelligibility. There are some things that cannot be established as true merely by argument. ‘But before human beings argued’, wrote Engels, ‘they acted. Im Anfang war die That.’ [15]
To understand is to act. To act successfully means to construct.
V: The Nature of Historic Intelligibility: If practice and successful action are criteria of intelligibility, then critical intelligence may be defined as an awareness of the technique, procedures and instruments involved in all directed activity. There is no directed activity outside of the realm of history. All genuine problems become problems of ways and means, and although there is no assurance that they can be solved, the necessary conditions of their solutions are already known. With this approach the whole of life becomes secularised. Only difficulties remain, but no mysteries. For whenever we are confronted with a mystery, we have not yet become conscious of the rationale of our technique, we have not yet realised what we are doing:
All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which cause theories to turn to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the awareness [Begreifen] of this practice. [16]
In so far as science is a part of human activity, Marx’s gloss holds true of all of its many ‘mysteries’ which have so often occasioned flights to theology and superstition. For science, too, is a practical affair. Not in a vulgar commercial sense but in that it involves, at crucial points, a changing and arranging of material things. When one looks for a solution of the many ‘mysteries’ (as distinct from the difficulties) which have multiplied with the contemporary analysis of the structure of the atom, resort must always be to the techniques by which certain empirical effects have been observed, to the apparatus and presuppositions of measurement, and to the methods of interpretation. From this standpoint it becomes forever impossible to bootleg transcendental and religious moonshine à la Eddington, Jeans, Millikan, et al., into the equations of mathematical physics.
In social and political life, it is more obvious that what is declared to be ‘inexplicable’ or ‘mysterious’, such as the source of moral and political obligation, or the origin of profit, is to be explained in terms of the actual way in which human beings behave. The task of the revolutionary philosopher is to bring social classes to an awareness of what it is they are doing and of the historical conditions of their activity. When a class attains consciousness of what it is doing, of the role it plays in production, it discovers the secret of the whole society of which it is a part. It can now understand itself and not wait for some future historian to distinguish between the real meaning of its acts and the fancied meanings which were the pretexts or excuses for action. Its ideology becomes a realistic philosophy. Because it understands itself, it is free. But full understanding and social freedom can come only after classes have been abolished. For only then will the fundamental dualism between social ideas and social conduct disappear:
The life process of society, which is based upon the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as a production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. [17]
It is dangerous to close on the paradox that the history of class society can never be fully understood except in retrospect, and that only the history of classless society, because it is freely made, can receive complete rational explanation. It is dangerous because it suggests that the human freedom of the future will not be bound or conditioned at all. The truth is, however, that the very possibility of human history, and the range within which human history can be made, will always be conditioned by natural necessities in whose existence man can have but a minor part. Man’s freedom will lie in the conscious choice of one of the many possible careers set for him. That choice will be a unique and irreducible expression of his own nature. Marx, himself, puts this in a passage in Capital as follows:
The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but the fact that socialised man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their human control, instead of being ruled by it as some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. [18]
1. Klassenkämpfe im Frankreich, p. 69 [Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850. – MIA
2. If it be claimed that a problem clearly stated is a problem implicitly solved, then what the above means is that there is no cosmic or social necessity that the problem be explicitly solved.
3. Compare Trotsky’s interesting discussion of this problem and his ambiguous answer: History of the Russian Revolution (English translation, Volume 1, pp. 329–30) [L.D. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Chapter XVI – MIA
4. From his Letter to Bloch, cf. Appendix, italics mine. [Friedrich Engels to J. Bloch, 21 September 1890. – MIA
5. Karl Kautsky, Die Materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, Volume 2 (Berlin 1929), p. 703.
6. G.V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (New York 1925), pp. 68ff. [available at here. – MIA
7. H. Cunow, Die Marxche Geschichts-Gesellschafts-und-Staats-Theorie: Grundzüge der Marxschen Soziologie, Band II (Berlin 1923), p. 220.
8. N.I. Bukharin, Historical Materialism (New York 1925), p. 97. ‐ MIA
9. Mikhail Pokrovsky, A Brief History of Russia, Volume 1 (New York 1933).
10. To Ludwig Kugelmann on the Paris Commune, 12 April 1871 [Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, actual date 17 April 1871. – MIA
11. From Letter to Hans Starkenberg, cf. Appendix [actually Friedrich Engels to W. Borgius, 25 January 1894. – MIA
12. From his Letter to Bloch, cf. Appendix. [Friedrich Engels to J. Bloch, 21 September 1890. – MIA]
13. From Letter to Schmidt. [Friedrich Engels to Conrad Schmidt, 27 October 1890. – MIA
14. Dialektik und Natur, Marx-Engels Archiv, Band II, p. 164. [Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature. – MIA
15. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. – MIA
16. Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band V, p. 535 [Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach. – MIA
17. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (English translation, all references are to the Kerr edition), p. 92 [available here. – MIA
18. Marx, Capital, Volume 3 (English translation), p. 954 [available here. – MIA
Last updated: 26 February 2020