Another important indication by one who has full right to speak for Marx is contained in Fr. Engels’ views regarding the State. After the proletariat have seized political power and transformed the means of production into State property, the State will cease to exist. In the old societies the State was an organisation of the exploiting class for the maintenance of the conditions of exploitation that suited it. Officially the representatives of the whole society, the exploiting class only represented itself. But when the State at last becomes the real representative of the whole society it renders itself superfluous. In a society which contains no subject class, from which class rule and the anarchy of production and the collisions and excesses of the struggle for individual existence have been removed, there is nothing to repress, and no need for a repressing force like the State. The first act wherein the State really appears as representative of the entire society—the appropriation of the means of production in the name of society—is also its last independent act as State. In place of the government over persons, there will be an administration of things and the control of productive processes. The State is not abolished; it dies away.[[6]]
In effect, these two indications of opinion point to a condition of society which is not fundamentally different from that contemplated by the anarchist school. Both look forward to a period when men will live in free associations, and when the administration of social affairs will be conducted without the exercise of compulsion.
It will have been seen that what Marx and his school contemplate is an economic revolution brought about in accordance with the natural laws of historic evolution. But in order to understand the full import of this revolution in the mind of Marx, we must remember that he regards the economic order of society as the groundwork of the same, determining all the other forms of social order. The entire legal and political structure, as well as philosophy and religion, are constituted and controlled in accordance with the economic basis. This is in harmony with his method and his conception of the world, which is the Hegelian reversed: ‘For Hegel the thought process, which he transforms into an independent subject under the name idea, is the creator of the real, which forms only its external manifestation. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material transformed and translated in the human brain.’ His conception of the world is a frank and avowed materialism.
And to a world thus understood he applies the dialectic method of investigation. Dialectic is a word current in the Hegelian and other philosophies. It sounds rather out of place in a materialistic view of the world. In the system of Marx it means that the business of inquiry is to trace the connection and concatenation in the links that make up the process of historic evolution, to investigate how one stage succeeds another in the development of society, the facts and forms of human life and history not being stable and stereotyped things, but the ever-changing manifestations of the fluent and unresting real, the course of which it is the duty of science to reveal. Both Marx and Fr. Engels, moreover, are fond of expressing the development of capitalism in the language of the well-known Hegelian threefold process—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Private property resting on a man’s own labour of the former times is the thesis. The property resting on other men’s labour of the capitalistic era is the negation of this individual property. The expropriation of the capitalists by the proletariat is the negation of the negation, or synthesis. But how far this use of the Hegelian terms is merely a form of literary expression, or how far it is a survival in Marx of a real belief in Hegelianism, it is not easy to determine.[[7]]
The whole position of the Marx school may be characterised as evolutionary and revolutionary socialism, based on a materialistic conception of the world and of human history. Socialism is a social revolution determined by the laws of historic evolution—a revolution which, changing the economic groundwork of society, will change the whole structure.
It may now be convenient to sum up the socialism of the Marx school under the following heads:—
(1) Materialistic conception of the world and of history.
(2) Dialectic method of investigation.
(3) The economic order is the basis of all social order; the entire legal and political structures of society, religion, and philosophy are to be explained in accordance with the economic basis.
(4) The historic evolution of capitalism; how, from the fifteenth century onwards, the capitalist class was developed, and how a corresponding proletariat was created.