A history of socialism

by Thomas Kirkup

Fr. Engels sums up the achievement of his friend Marx in the two great discoveries—the materialistic conception of history, and the revelation of the secret of the capitalistic method of production by means of surplus value. Materialism is a very old theory of the world. It is now given up by competent thinkers, and we need not discuss it here. Nor need we say that it is a grave exaggeration to maintain that all social institutions, including philosophy and religion, are to be explained by reference to the economic factors. History is a record of the activity of the human mind in very many directions. Men have had various interests, which have had a substantive, and so far, an independent value, though they must also be regarded as an organic whole. It is absolutely impossible to account for all by reference to any one.

Nevertheless, it is a great merit of Marx that he has so powerfully called attention to the vast importance of the economic side of history. The economic factors in the life of mankind have been sadly neglected, even by philosophic historians. Such neglect has been partly due to the scarcity of material relating to this aspect of their subject, partly owing to false conceptions of the function of the historian, chiefly because their public was a high-bred class, which had no particular wish to read about such unfashionable topics as those connected with the daily toil of the lower orders. In this way the true causation of history has often been overlooked, or totally misconceived, and results have, in thousands of instances, been traced to conventional and imaginary agencies, when the real origin lay deep down in the economic life of the people. We are now beginning to see that large sections of history will need to be rewritten in this new light.

To proceed with our criticism of Marx. It is a feature of his materialistic conception of history that his language respecting the inevitable march of society would sometimes suggest a kind of fatalism. But this is more than counterbalanced by his strong assertion of the revolutionary will. On both sides we see overstatement. The most prominent feature of his teaching, however, in this reference, is the excessive stress which he lays on the virtues and possibilities of the revolutionary method of action. The evolution he contemplates is attended and disturbed by great historic breaks, by cataclysm and catastrophe. These and other features of his teaching, to which objection must be made, were most pronounced in his early writings, especially in the Manifesto of the Communist League, but they continue to be visible throughout his life. According to his latest teaching, a great revolutionary catastrophe is to close the capitalistic era; and this must be regarded as a very bad preparation for the time of social peace which is forthwith to follow. The proletariat, the class which is to accomplish the revolution, he described as oppressed, enslaved, and degenerate. How can such a class be expected to perform so great an historic function well and successfully?

But the main defect of his teaching lies in the arbitrariness and excessive abstractness that characterise his method of investigation and presentation; and this defect particularly attaches to the second great discovery attributed to him by Fr. Engels—his theory of surplus value.

We shall better understand the position of Marx if we recall some of the important circumstances in his life and experience. As we have seen, his family passed from the profession of Judaism to Christianity when he was six years of age, and he thus lost the traditions of the faith of his ancestors without living into the traditions of the new faith. Like many Jews in a similar position the traditions of the past therefore had little influence on Karl Marx, and he was so far well fitted to take a wide and unprejudiced view of human affairs. With his great endowments and vast knowledge he should have been one of the freest heads in Europe. His practical energy was not inferior to the range of his intelligence.

All the more regrettable, therefore, is it that Marx should have adopted such a narrowing system of philosophy as materialism. It is also remarkable that he, the severest of critics, should have adopted, at so early an age and without due scrutiny, the theory of value set forth by Adam Smith and Ricardo, and that he should have applied it without question during the remainder of his life to the building up of a vast system of thought, and to a socialistic propaganda which was meant to revolutionise the world. Another instance of the premature dogmatism which has so often exercised a great and not seldom a mischievous influence on human thought.

In this connection it may not be altogether fanciful to observe that his heredity derived from rabbinical ancestors may account for much that is peculiar in his way of thinking. The excessive acumen, the relentless minuteness with which he pursues his course through details which often seem very unreal, the elaboration which he bestows upon distinctions which are often abstract and artificial, may well be regarded as alien to Western modes of thought. Revolutionary materialism was a strange sphere in which to exercise a logic after the manner of the rabbi.

However this may be, we know that when his mind was being formed the Hegelian philosophy was supreme in Germany; and it can hardly be said that the study of Hegel is a good training for the study of history, according to the freest and purest conception of the subject. The study of history, in the highest sense of the word, requires a modest attitude towards objective fact which is not easily attained in the philosophy of the schools.

Marx was a German, trained in the school of Hegel; and he passed most of his life in laborious seclusion, in exile and revolt against dominant ideas and institutions. Though a materialist, he does not show sufficient respect for facts, for history. In reading his great work we feel that the facts are in chronic rebellion against the formulas to which he seeks to adapt them.

Adam Smith, the founder of Political Economy, was also academic at the outset of his life; but he was a Scotsman of a period when the ablest Scotsmen were trained by French clearness and common sense. And he was not in revolt, like Marx, but in full sympathy with a cause whose time had come, whereas Marx represented a cause which had not yet attained to any considerable degree of clearness. In learning and philosophic power, Marx will compare favourably with Adam Smith; but in historic reasonableness, in respect for fact and reality, Smith is decidedly his superior. In Smith’s great work we see philosophy controlled by fact, by historic knowledge and insight. The work of Marx, in many of its most important sections, is an arbitrary and artificial attempt to force his formulas on the facts of history. Whether the fault lay in the Hegelian philosophy, or in Marx’s use of it, there can be no doubt that its influence has inflicted most serious damage on what might otherwise have been a splendid historical work.