We are therefore obliged to say that the historical work of Marx does not by any means rise to the highest conception of history. It is deficient in the free outlook, in the clear perspective, in the sympathy and impartiality which should characterise the best historical achievements. The historical work of Marx is placed at the service of a powerful and passionate propaganda, and of necessity is disturbed and troubled by the function which it is made to serve.
In dealing with history we must accept facts and men as we find them. The facts are as they are; and the men of history are not ideal men. Like other men Marx had to work under human limitations. The great task of his life was to rouse the proletariat of the world to a sense of its position, its mission, and destiny, to discover the scientific conditions under which a new era in the evolution of the human race could be inaugurated and carried on by the working classes of all lands. It was a mixed task in which science and practice were combined, and in which the purely scientific study of history naturally suffered in the partnership with a very strenuous revolutionary practice.
We need not say that it was not the fault of Marx that he adopted the revolutionary career. He was born at a time and in a country where men of independence and originality of character of necessity became revolutionists. In face of the European reaction Marx never made any concession or compromise. He never bowed himself in the house of Rimmon. Seldom in the history of human thought has there been a man who travelled right ahead in so straightforward a path, however formidable the opposition and however apparently hopeless surrounding circumstances might be. Public opinion had no weight with him; neither idle sentiment nor amiable weaknesses found any place in his strongly-marked individuality.
In view of such a career spent in the unflinching service of what he regarded to be truth, and in the greatest of human causes, it would be mean and disgraceful not to speak of Marx in terms of profound respect. His sincerity, his courage, his self-abnegation, his devotion to his great work through long years of privation and obloquy, were heroic. If he had followed the broad and well-beaten highway of self-interest, Marx, with his exceptional endowments both for thought and action, might easily have risen to a foremost place in the Prussian State. He disdained the flesh-pots of despotism and obscurantism so much sought after by the average sensual man, and spent forty hard and laborious years almost wholly in exile as the scientific champion of the proletariat. Many men are glad to live an hour of glorious life. Few are strong and brave enough to live the life heroic for forty years with the resolution, the courage, and consistency of Karl Marx.
In the combination of learning, philosophic acumen, and literary power, he is second to no economic thinker of the nineteenth century. He seems to have been master of the whole range of economic literature, and wielded it with a logical skill not less masterly. But his great strength lay in his knowledge of the technical and economic development of modern industry, and in his marvellous insight into the tendencies in social evolution determined by the technical and economic factors. Whether his theories in this department are right or wrong, they have suggested questions that will demand the attention of economic thinkers for a long time to come. It is in this department, and not in his theory of surplus value, that Marx’s significance as a scientific economist is to be found.
Notwithstanding all that may justly be said in criticism of Marx, it remains, then, that his main achievement consists in the work he has done as scientific inquirer into the economic movement of modern times, as the philosophic historian of the capitalistic era. It is now admitted by all inquirers worthy of the name that history, including economic history, is a succession of orderly phenomena, that each phase in the line of succession is marked by facts and tendencies more or less peculiar to itself, and that laws and principles which we now condemn had formerly an historical necessity, justification, and validity. In accordance with this fundamental principle of historical evolution, arrangements and institutions which were once necessary, and originally formed a stage in human progress, may gradually develop contradictions and abuses, and thus become more or less antiquated.
The economic, social, and political forms which were the progressive and even adequate expressions of the life of one era, become hindrances and fetters to the life of the succeeding times. This, the school of Karl Marx says, is precisely the condition of the present economic order. The existing arrangements of landlord, capitalist, and wage-labourer under free competition are burdened with contradiction and abuse. The life of society is being strangled by the forms which once promoted it. They maintain that the really vital and powerful tendencies of our time are towards a higher and wider form of social and economic organisation—towards socialism. Here, as we believe, is the central point of the whole question. The place of Marx in history will depend on how far he has made a permanent contribution towards the settlement of it.
During his lifetime the opinions of Marx were destined to find expression in two movements, which have played a considerable part in recent history—the International and the Social Democracy of Germany. Of the International, Marx was the inspiring and controlling head from the beginning; and the German Social Democracy, though originated by Lassalle, before long fell under Marx’s influence. Marx wrote the famous inaugural address of the International and drew up its statutes, maintaining a moderation of tone which contrasted strongly with the outspoken vigour of the communist manifesto of 1847. But it was not long before the revolutionary socialism which underlay the movement gained the upper hand. The International no doubt afforded a splendid opportunity for the propaganda of Marx. The fortunes of the International and of the German Social Democracy will be sketched in subsequent chapters.
| [1] | Franz Mehring, Geschichte der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie, part i. p. 156. |