Karl Marx

by Achille Loria

An exposition of his outlook and a study of his relationship to Marx will not only be of interest in themselves, but will help readers to surmount certain terminological difficulties in the Karl Marx. All original thinkers write perforce in a language of their own minting. Those of us to whom "surplus value," the "class struggle," the "materialist conception," "economic determinism," have been familiar concepts from childhood upwards, are apt to forget that Marx's contemporaries were repelled by what they regarded as superfluous jargon. The first students of Kant, the first students of Darwin, the first students of all great innovators in philosophy, science, and the arts, have had to master a new vocabulary before they could understand what these writers were driving at; for new ideas must be conveyed in a new speech or by the use of old words refashioned. We cannot understand Loria, we cannot appreciate Loria's criticism of Marx, we cannot grasp the nature of Loria's own affiliation to Marx, unless we realise precisely what the Italian economist means by the speciously familiar terms "income," "subsistence," "unproductive labourers," "recipients of income," and the like. The familiarity of the words makes them all the more misleading to those who do not hold the Lorian clue to guide them through the economic labyrinth. Does this sound alarming? Yet Loria's doctrines, like those of Marx, like those of Darwin, like those of—but we must not say "like those of Kant"—are simplicity itself to anyone who is able to survive the first shock of the encounter, to surmount the first agony of a new idea.

In our own view the difficulty of economics in large part depends upon the fact that it is either a system of apologetics or else a system of attack. There are, in fact, two conflicting sciences: the economic science of the master class, and the economic science of the proletariat. Both are necessarily tendentious, and the conflicting tendencies will remain irreconcilable as long as the class struggle continues. Not until that struggle has been fought to a successful issue, not until the co-operative commonwealth has come into existence, can there be a comparatively dispassionate political economy. As dispassionate as conic sections it can never be, for it is biological, sociological, is by its very nature tinged with human interest, and can therefore never be wholly impartial. But many of the contradictions and perplexities of economics are by no means inherent; they are, we contend, no more than confusing reflexes of the class struggle.

Loria seems to hold a somewhat similar opinion. In Contemporary Social Problems (pp. 99, 100) he writes: "I am inclined to consider political economy and socialism as two intellectual weapons which, for a long time separate and mutually antagonistic owing to the apologetic theories of the one and the subversive utopianism of the other, are drawing closer and closer together as they become more human and the old animosities disappear. Perhaps the day is not far distant when the two forces will unite under one standard." To a casual reader this might suggest that Loria thinks that the class struggle, that the conflict between orthodox economics and socialism, can be overcome within the framework of the bourgeois economy—that the capitalist Old-Man-of-the-Sea can at one and the same time remain seated upon the back of the proletarian Sindbad the Sailor, and walk beside him amicably arm in arm as the two climb the mount of human endeavour. But an attentive student of Loria's Karl Marx will realise that when the Italian speaks of "a day not far distant," he means the morrow of the social revolution, when Marx's promethean work shall have been completed, and when, led by Marx "the emperor in the realm of mind," the human race shall have reached "the brilliant goal which awaits it in a future not perhaps immeasurably remote" (infra [p. 162]).

For Loria, one of the greatest living champions of the doctrine of economic determinism, sees no difficulty in reconciling that doctrine with a firm belief in the magistral efficacy, at the stage which evolution has now reached, of the deliberate human will. "The economic natural force," writes Eduard Bernstein (Evolutionary Socialism, p. 14), "like the physical, changes from the ruler of mankind to its servant, according as its nature is recognised." Herein is embodied the application in the special economic field of the profound general truth that by scientific study man, the child of nature, learns to control nature, and thereby to mould his own being and social environment in accordance with the dictates of his own enlightened will. Similarly Loria is far from the rigid economic determinism which would refuse to admit the existence of "ideal" causation, or the possibility in the sphere of sociology of intelligently adapting means to ends. "Idealism" is a word which has been soiled by such ignoble use that one really hesitates to employ it; but we must distinguish between idealism and sentimentalism, and between idealism and window dressing. The right sort of idealism is realist idealism, and Loria is a realist idealist. He distinguishes clearly between fatalism and quietism, on the one hand, and economic determinism tempered by rationalist guidance, on the other.

In The Economic Foundations of Society (pp. 376 et seq.) he writes: "Can we say that a doctrine leads to fatalism which concedes a fertile field to human activity, and which only seeks to mark out the limits within which such efforts may be applied? Can we give the name of quietism to a theory whose aims lie in the direction of substituting enlightened action, aware of its ends, for blind and ignorant innovation which is powerless to realise its purposes?... Turning to consider the great social transformations which alter the structure of property, our theory does, it is true, deny that such movements can be effected before the necessary change in economic conditions has rendered them inevitable; but far from this conclusion leading to the degradation of human nature, it seems to us to inspire the highest sentiments. If we examine the great spontaneous movements that have sought to modify economic conditions before their time, we shall find that they all lacked definite purpose. There was no clear idea of the new order of things to be substituted for the old; on this account these movements were wanting in discipline; they were anarchic, and hence their lack of effect. Our theory, on the contrary, declares that it is first of all necessary to learn the nature of the future social system, and, after this knowledge has been acquired, to substitute a co-ordination of effort towards this rigorously determined end for the blind and disorganised attempts that have thus far been made in this direction.... Far from leading towards fatalism our theory tends to encourage rational human activity, which alone can prevent, or at least mitigate, the confusion otherwise attendant upon the social metamorphosis.... A wide field is thus opened to human activity, and it is certainly a noble mission for mankind to withdraw social development from the operation of the blind and brutal forces of physical evolution and to submit the process to the kindlier and more civilised action of human reason."

The definitive exposition of Loria's views is to be found in The Economic Synthesis; but since in his theory of social evolution the effects of increasing population play so notable a part, reference must first be made to his examination of Malthus' theory of population. At the outset, however, let us recall Marx's attitude to the Malthusian doctrine.

Marx rejected the idea that, for human beings, population tends to grow in such a manner as necessarily to press on the means of subsistence. Though he accepted Darwinism and had a profound admiration for Darwin, as far as the human species is concerned he rejected Malthusianism (on which Darwinism is based), and wrote of Malthus in terms of bitter personal hostility. The animus we may ignore, but the arguments are worth recapitulating. Pressure of population, he says, is the outcome of capitalism. On p. 645 of Capital Marx writes: "The labouring population ... produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relatively surplus population, and it does this always to an increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone. An abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only in so far as man has not interfered with them." Later in the same chapter he says (in effect) that undue fertility is characteristic of poverty-stricken circumstances, and that with improved conditions the population difficulty tends to settle itself.

We shall see that Loria says much the same thing, and shall consider the assertion presently.

At a later date (1875) Marx writes somewhat more guardedly. In his Criticism of the Gotha Programme the reference to the Malthusian doctrine of population runs as follows: "But if I accept this law [the iron law of wages] as formulated by Lassalle, I must likewise accept its foundation. What is this foundation? As F. A. Lange showed shortly after Lassalle's death, the iron law of wages is founded upon Malthus' theory of population, a theory which Lange himself espoused. Now if the iron law of wages be correct, it is impossible to abrogate it, even if we should do away with wage labour a hundred times over, for not the wage system alone, but every social system, must be governed by the law. Upon this foundation, for fifty years and more, economists have continued to demonstrate that socialism could never suppress poverty, which they regard as resulting from the nature of things. Socialism, they declare, can only generalise poverty, can only diffuse it simultaneously over the whole surface of society!"