From Prophecy to Prediction 271

From Prophecy A serialised survey of the movement

to Prediction of ideas, developments in predictive fiction, and first attempts to forecast the future scientifically.

3.1. Demystifjring the historical process : Karl Marx

John Sanderson

ONE need not subscribe to the disciple’s view of Marx as an omniscient being to recognise him as a social theorist of overwhelming intellectual power, cap- able of arousing much more interest and controversy long after his death than during his life. A considerable difficulty in reconstructing and assessing the ideas of the 19th century prophet of class war is caused by the diverse nature of the works which constitute the Marxian cor$~s, ranging as they do from topical contributions to daily newspapers to the more famous and more complicated texts on capital and labour.

What can be said with a degree of certainty about Marx is that he pro- duced an analysis of the European past and present, which forms the basis of his confident prediction that each of the nations of Western Europe would experience a revolution of the working class in the future. And the coming revolution would be but a prelude to the establishment of a classless com- munistic society in which the exploita- tion and coercion characteristic of almost all previous societies would be finished for ever.

Marx’s analysis of past and present

Mr John Sanderson is Lecturer in Politics, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK; author of An Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels (Longmans, 1969), and of a forthcoming essay on the Marxist interpretation of the English Civil War. This is the first part of his contribution on Karl Marx to this series, edited by I. F. Clarke.

exemplified what his life-long colleague Frederick Engels called “the materialist conception of history”. Marx believed that the way in which men go about the task of transforming the natural en- vironment so as to satisfy their material needs is their crucial activity upon which all other activities substantially depend. In his Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx Engels compared Marx to Darwin: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of develop- ment of human history . . . that man- kind must first of all 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 subsis- tence and consequently the degree of economic development attained . . . during a given epoch form the founda- tion upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the ideas on art, and even on religion, of the people concerned, have been evolved . . .”

The materialist conception of history was developed by Marx against the background of, and in opposition to, various non-materialist theories popular among German intellectuals in the 1830s and 1840s. In particular, the maturing Marx found himself bound to oppose the mystification of the historical process which had been wrought by Hegel and his disciples. In Marx’s view Hegel had correctly indicated the constant factor of conflict

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in the historical process-the tension between being and becoming-by the use of the notion of the dialectic; but, as Marx put it in a famous passage, only the “rational” form of the dialectic (as against the mystified Hegelian form) could reveal the essence of that process : “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel . . . the process of thinking, which, under the name of the Idea, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, pheno- menal form of the Idea. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought”. In Marx’s late 20s therefore, we find him greatly con- cerned to combat the supposed hege- mony of intellect to which the latter-day Hegelians were so attached; and much of The German Ideology (1845) and The Holy Family (1846) is directed to this task (“Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts”). Marx held that ideas were of considerable significance but, as indicated by Engels in the passage from his Speech at the Graveside, their impor- tance appeared only in the context of a society’s economic processes.

Marx’s materialist method of analys- ing history yielded the conclusion that successive eras were characterised by the predominance of different “modes of production”; and it followed that capitalist society had emerged from the ruins of feudal society which had itself risen upon the ruins of ancient (slave) society. Moreover, the characteristic of each of these eras was a conflict between the major classes thrown up by the particular mode of production involved. Marx also observed that a dominant economic class tended to have at its disposal the society’s coercive organs through the use of which it could oppress, as well as exploit, the rest of society; and this fact would help to guarantee the integrity of the

particular exploitative social system in question. “Political power”, we read in the Manifesto, “properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another”.

Since this was the essential nature of political power, it was apparent to Marx that the great revolutions of European history occurred as the necessarily violent response of a class which had become predominant in economic activity, but which found itself impeded and oppressed by those methods of social control that were maintained by a once-dominant but now obsolescent class. Thus in studying, for example, the English Civil War, Marx’s theory of revolution enabled him to reach a profounder understand- ing than that achieved contemporane- ously by the French historian Guizot. Marx wrote that the latter had explained the confrontation between Charles I and Parliament in terms of a struggle for “purely political preroga- tives” : “M. Guizot deems it superfluous to mention that the subordination of the kingship to Parliament was its subordination to the rule of a class . . . He has just as little to say about Charles I’s direct interference in free competi- tion, which made England’s trade and industry more and more impossible; or upon his dependence upon Parliament which . . . became the greater the more he sought to defy Parliament.”

Two hundred years later in Germany, Marx believed he was witnessing in 1848 a similar contest between a rising bourgeois class and the political insti- tutions appropriate to a bygone age. The Monarchy and the United Diet represented, in Marx’s view, a “medi- eval mode of production and inter- course”, and therefore “the new bourgeois society, which rests upon entirely different foundations and on a changed mode of production, had to seize political power for itself; it had to snatch this power from the hands of those who represented the interests of the foundering society, and whose

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London -centre of world capitalism-was an object lesson for Karl Marx and a visual image for the French artist, Gustave Dor6. , *

. I . but both these men were also acutely aware of the London of poverty and destitution

From Prophecy to Prediction 275

political power, in its entire organisa- tion, had proceeded from entirely different material relations of society. Hence the revolution.”

Although economic exploitation and class conflict had been, according to Marx, salient features of European history, he also saw that history is a progressive process. Men had gained (at first gradually, recently in a more dramatic fashion) a mastery over nature, so that with the development of bourgeois society, men were within sight of a materialistic plenitude. While Marx anticipated with great pleasure the demise of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois society, he insisted upon the recognition of the unparalleled achieve- ments of that form of society wherein men were set in motion, directly or indirectly, by the desire to maximise private profit. The Communist Manifesto declares that the bourgeoisie “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive. . . productive forces than have all preceding genera- tions together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground-what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour ?” And being possessed of this unprecedented power, the bourgeoisie of Europe and North America had been able in effect to subject much of the rest of the world’s population to its needs, so that by the second half of the 19th century it had become possible to speak for the first time of “world history”, dominated by bourgeois im- peratives.

The idea that history is in this sense progressive appears strikingly in Marx’s discussion of the impact of the British upon Indian society. Previous con- querors of the Indian subcontinent had invariably been “Hindooised”, but the

British with their railways and their mechanised production, “inundating the very mother country of cotton with cottons”, had destroyed the traditional society along with the debilitating “Oriental despotism” which presided over it. Although these changes caused untold misery, they had the effect of freeing India from the timeless rut in which it had so long languished. Thus Marx argued that while it had not been the intention of the British either to emancipate the Indian population or to improve their material lot, the unquestionable effect of their inter- vention in India had been “to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more ?” Marx asked. “Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and peoples through the blood and through misery and degradation ?”

It followed from Marx’s idea of progress that he was able to identify both past and present movements, tendencies and ideas as either progres- sive or reactionary. For instance, it was clear to him that the bourgeoisie, in violently tearing itself loose in the 1640s and 1789 from the integument of feudalism in England and France respectively, had been progressive and had carried with it the interests of the great majority of the people within the societies concerned, and indeed of mankind as a whole. Consequently he wrote in the .i%ue Rheinische zeitung in December 1848 that the English Civil War and the French Revolution had both seen “the victory of a new order of society, the victory of bourgeois pro- perty over feudal property, of national- ity over provincialism, of competition over the guild . . . of enlightenment over superstition . . . of industry over heroic laziness, of civil law over medi- eval privilege . . . These revolutions expressed still more the needs of the world of that day than of the sections of the world in which they occurred, of England and France.” In comparison the German bourgeoisie was weak and

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timorous, and by 1848 had still to achieve for itself and for German society what the French bourgeoisie had achieved in 1789. The fumbling cowardice of the German bourgeoisie when confronted by what Marx re- garded as its historical mission drew his withering scorn : “The Prussian bourgeoisie [of 18481 was not, as the French of 1789 had been, the class which represented the whole of modern society vi.+&is the representatives of the old society, the monarch and the nobility.” The Prussian bourgeoisie was thus inclined to compromise with “the superannuated society” and lamentably had to be “prodded” into action by the lower classes.

Marx was able to make similar judgements not only about the declared opponents of socialism, but also about the various groups that criticised capi- talist society from a left standpoint. His critique of “True Socialism”in Germany is thus based upon his perception that it was inappropriate and reactionary for the German radicals to expound Socialist ideas imported from Paris before the German bourgeoisie had succeeded in overthrowing feudalism and in making capitalism the order of the day in its own country. Thus, instead of supporting the bourgeoisie, the True Socialists were to be found preposterously “hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois free- dom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality . . . preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by the bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot . . . that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its correspond- ing economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attain- ment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany”.

Equally significant in this context are his remarks upon the contemporary exponents of what he called “Utopian Socialism”. The Utopians, followers of Saint Simon, Owen and Fourier, vividly contrasted contemporary society with an ideal society (in which the lot of the workers would be much improved) and hoped by persuasion and example to engender social action to realise it. Marx granted that the originators of Utopian Socialism, writing at a time of the immaturity of the working class, had reflected “the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society”; but their successors he dismisses as “mere re- actionary sects” who, in attempting to stand above the class struggle and in relying upon the self-evident merit of their ideas, had neglected the develop- ment and startling history-making potential of the proletariat, which appeared in their works as nothing more than the suffering victim of an in- human system. “Historical action [Marx wrote ironically of the Uto- pians] is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to an organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.” In rejecting “all political, and especially all revolutionary, action”, they in effect aligned themselves (Marx complained) “in opposition to the progressive his- torical development of the proletariat.”

Marx, then, had a method of understanding the history of society which enabled him, inter alia, to detect the full significance of major revolutions such as the Civil War in England and 1789 in France. Further, he was able, on the basis of his examination of contemporary history to predict a revolution by comparison with which even these events would seem trivial.

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