The particular point at which the theory is most fragile, considered simply as a theory of social growth, is its implied doctrine of population,—implied in the doctrine of a growing reserve of unemployed workmen. The doctrine of the reserve of unemployed labor involves as a postulate that population will increase anyway, without reference to current or prospective means of life. The empirical facts give at least a very persuasive apparent support to the view expressed by Marx, that misery is, or has hitherto been, no hindrance to the propagation of the race; but they afford no conclusive evidence in support of a thesis to the effect that the number of laborers must increase independently of an increase of the means of life. No one since Darwin would have the hardihood to say that the increase of the human species is not conditioned by the means of living.
But all that does not really touch Marx's position. To Marx, the neo-Hegelian, history, including the economic development, is the life-history of the human species; and the main fact in this life-history, particularly in the economic aspect of it, is the growing volume of human life. This, in a manner of speaking, is the base-line of the whole analysis of the process of economic life, including the phase of capitalist production with the rest. The growth of population is the first principle, the most substantial, most material factor in this process of economic life, so long as it is a process of growth, of unfolding, of exfoliation, and not a phase of decrepitude and decay. Had Marx found that his analysis led him to a view adverse to this position, he would logically have held that the capitalist system is the mortal agony of the race and the manner of its taking off. Such a conclusion is precluded by his Hegelian point of departure, according to which the goal of the life-history of the race in a large way controls the course of that life-history in all its phases, including the phase of capitalism. This goal or end, which controls the process of human development, is the complete realisation of life in all its fullness, and the realisation is to be reached by a process analogous to the three-phase dialectic, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, into which scheme the capitalist system, with its overflowing measure of misery and degradation, fits as the last and most dreadful phase of antithesis. Marx, as a Hegelian,—that is to say, a romantic philosopher,—is necessarily an optimist, and the evil (antithetical element) in life is to him a logically necessary evil, as the antithesis is a necessary phase of the dialectic; and it is a means to the consummation, as the antithesis is a means to the synthesis.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The substance of lectures before students in Harvard University in April, 1906. Reprinted by permission from The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XX, Aug., 1906
[2] Cf. Critique of Political Economy, chap. i, "Notes on the History of the Theory of Commodities," pp. 56-73 (English translation, New York, 1904).
[3] See Menger, Right to the Whole Produce of Labor, sections iii-v and viii-ix, and Foxwell's admirable Introduction to Menger.
[4] See Menger and Foxwell, as above, and Schaeffle, Quintessence of Socialism, and The Impossibility of Social Democracy.
[5] See Engels, The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science, especially section ii and the opening paragraphs of section iii; also the preface of Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie.
[6] See Engels, as above, and also his Feuerbach: The Roots of Socialist Philosophy (translation, Chicago, Kerr & Co., 1903).
[7] See e.g., Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, Part I.