Marxism is simply a branch grafted on the Classical trunk. Astonished and indignant as the latter may well seem at the sight of the strange fruit which its teaching has borne, it cannot deny the fact that it has nourished it with its own life-blood. “Das Kapital,” as Labriola notes, “instead of being the prologue to the communal critique, is simply the epilogue of bourgeois economics.”[995]
Not only has Marxism always shown unfailing respect for political economy even when attacking individual economists, who are generally accused of inability to grasp the full significance of their own teaching, but, strangely enough, it betrays an equal affection for capitalism.[996] It has the greatest respect for the task which it has already accomplished, and feels infinitely grateful for the revolutionary part (such are the words used) which it has played in preparing the way for collectivism, which is almost imperceptibly usurping its place.[997]
But the Marxians have one serious quarrel with the older economists. It seemed to them that the earliest writers on political economy never realized the relatively transient nature of the social organism which they were studying. This was possibly because they were conservative by instinct and had the interest of the bourgeois at heart. They always taught, and they fully believed it, that private property and proletarianism were permanent features of the modern world, and that social organisation was for ever destined to remain upon a middle-class foundation. They were at least unwilling to recognize that this also, like the rest, was simply a historical category, and, like them, also was destined to vanish.[998]
(b) The Marxian school also differs from every previous socialist school in the comparative ease with which it has eschewed every consideration of justice and fraternity, which always played such an important rôle in French socialism. It is interested, not in the ideal, but in the actual, not in what ought to be, but in what is likely to be. “The theoretical conclusions of the communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”[999]
To economic facts they attributed an importance altogether transcending their influence in the economic sphere. Their belief was that the several links which unify the many-sided activities of society, whether in politics, literature, art, morality, or religion, are ultimately referable to some economic fact or other. None of them but is based upon a purely economic consideration. Most important of all are the facts relating to production, especially to the mechanical instruments of production and their operation. If we take, for example, the production of bread and the successive stages through which the mechanical operation of grinding has passed from the hand-mill of antiquity to the water-mill of the Middle Ages and the steam-mill of to-day, we have a clue to the parallel development of society from the family to the capitalistic system and from the capitalistic to the trust, with their concomitants slavery, serfdom, and proletarianism. This affords a far better explanation of the facts than any bourgeois cant about “the growth of freedom” or humbug of that nature. These are the real foundations upon which every theory has to be reared. This materialistic conception of history,[1000] implying as it does a complete philosophy of history, is no longer confined to the purely economic domain.
Taken in the vulgar sense, it seems to involve the exclusion of every moral and every humanitarian consideration. As Schäffle put it in that oft-quoted phrase of his, it means reducing the social question to a “mere question of the belly.” The French socialists find the doctrine somewhat difficult to swallow, and they hardly display the same reverence for Marx as is shown in some other countries.[1001]
The orthodox Marxians immediately proceed to point out that such criticism is useless and shows a complete misunderstanding of Marx’s position. Materialism in the Marxian sense (and all his terms have a Marxian as well as the ordinary significance) does not exclude idealism, but it does exclude ideology, which is a different thing. No Marxian has ever advocated leaving mankind at the mercy of its economic environment; on the contrary, the Marxian builds his faith upon evolution, which implies man’s conscious, but not very successful, effort to improve his economic surroundings.[1002] The materialistic conception of history apparently is simply an attempt at a philosophy of human effort.[1003] Criticism of such elusive doctrines is not a very easy task.