To-day, now that the fruits of Marx's meditations, be it only as the
result of the work of collaborators, be it only with many gaps and
imperfections, have all been given forth to the reading world, it is at
length possible to take a general view, and to pass a dispassionate
judgment upon the pre-eminent worth of his writings. The most austere
criticism must bow reverently before such gigantic mental attainments as
have few counterparts in the history of scientific thought, garnering
from all branches of knowledge on behalf of the undying cause of
mankind. The most inexorable criticism should recognise in Marx the
supreme merit of having been the first to introduce the evolutionary
concept into the domain of sociology, the first to introduce it in the
only form appropriate to social phenomena and social institutions; not
as the unceasing and gradual upward-movement outlined by Spencer, but as
the succession of agelong cycles rhythmically interrupted by
revolutionary explosions, proceeding in accordance with the manner
sketched by Lyell for geological evolution, and in our own time by de
Vries for biological evolution.
With the aid of this concept, strictly positive and scientific, Marx
triumphantly overthrew, on the one hand classical economic science,
taken prisoner by its own notion of a petrified society, and on the
other the philosophy of law and idealist socialism which were convinced
that it was possible to mould the world in accordance with the arbitrary
conceptions of the thinker. Looked at in this light, the work of Marx
presents a new instrument for the use of the philosophy of history and
for the use of sociology; and it has contributed no less powerfully to
the advance of technological science, thanks to the writer's masterly
investigation into the successive forms of the technical instrument of
productive machinery. In this respect more than in any others Marx may
be compared with Darwin, and may indeed be spoken of as the Darwin of
technology: for no one has ever had a profounder knowledge than Marx of
the structural development of the industrial mechanism, no one else has
followed step by step the formation and upward elaboration of productive
technique; just as Darwin, with invincible mental energy, traced the
evolution of animal technique, the development of the functional
apparatus of organised beings.
This physiology of industry, which is now the least studied and least
appreciated of Marx's scientific labours, nevertheless constitutes his
most considerable and most enduring contribution to science. Noteworthy,
in especial, and destined to form a permanent and integral part of the
economic science of the world, are Marx's analyses of money, credit, the
circulation of capital, poverty, primitive accumulation, not to speak of
the historico-critical investigations into the work of the British
classical economists--for here Marx, without prejudice to the merits of
those who have fought honourably in this difficult arena, will ever
remain the most brilliant and most profound commentator. For these
mighty and noble contributions, his name will be inscribed in
imperishable letters in the history of creative thought.
But if his sociological, historical, and technological investigations,
if his studies of money, the banking system, and industrial statistics,
be so many intellectual jewels of which no praise can be excessive, it
is none the less true that his fundamental economic theory is
essentially vitiated and sophistical, and that he is himself responsible
for reducing it to hopeless absurdity. We arrive, therefore, at this
remarkable result: that Marx, whose primary aim it was to be a theorist
of political economy, and to deal only in subsidiary fashion with the
philosophy of history and technology, secured a triumphant success in
these subordinate fields; whereas in respect of the fundamental object
of his thought, his work was a complete failure.
Nor can we deny that the very design of Marx's work, however marvellous
in the Michelangelesque grandeur of its ensemble, does not satisfy those
who insist upon strictly scientific method, and that in this respect
Marx stands far below the great masters of positive science. For,
however admirable and however great this man who succeeded in subsuming
an entire world within the limits of an extremely simple initial
principle, and whose life was but the development of an equation which
he had formulated at its outset, how far more straightforward and
trustworthy, how far more scientific, was the method of Darwin, who
never formulated any apriorist principles, but, quite free from
preconceptions, accepted phenomena in the order of progressive
complexity in which life itself presented them. Darwin first studied the
natural formation of organised beings, then devoted himself to an
examination of the larger types, and was finally led to infer their
development by evolutionary growth. This method, which follows nature
and reflects it, seems far more worthy of respect, far more honest, far
more strictly scientific, than the other method, which manipulates the
truth, does violence to the truth, in order to accommodate it to hidden
ends.
There is no reason, therefore, to be surprised that such a flood of
criticism should have been directed against this colossus, or that on
the morrow of the completion of Marx's work the skies of the two
hemispheres should have rung with disorderly clamour proclaiming the
crisis, nay the failure, of Marxism. But that which is less easy to
understand, that which discloses the utter immaturity of economic
science as well as of contemporary socialism, is that criticism has not
been directed against the truly vulnerable point of the system, but has
been solely concerned in attacking its better defended and less fragile
parts. In fact the scientific and socialist currents partially or wholly
opposed to Marxism display a strange reverence for his theory of value,
or do not venture to attack it, but concentrate their forces against the
statistical and historical theories which are the deductions and
complements of the Marxist theory of value.
In this respect the critics of Marxism form two very distinct groups.
The first of these, the reformist or revisionist school, has a high
respect for the master's theory of value, and reiterates it as an
indisputable truth; whereas reformists criticise the theory of
increasing misery, the theory of the concentration of capital, and above
all the catastrophic vision of the proletarian revolution. The writers
of this school affirm, and think that in so doing they are setting up an
antithesis to Marxism, that to await the millennium of the social
revolution is futile utopianism; they contend, that the progressive
reduction in the number of the wealthy, paralleled by the ceaseless
increase in the number of more and more impoverished proletarians, a
development which according to Marx's vision was to provide the
apparatus destined to destroy the contemporary economy, is negatived by
an actual tendency towards a more democratic distribution of
commodities; and they insist, therefore, that socialism should aim at
securing the triumph of its cause by means that are less violent but far
more efficacious, namely by social legislation or by reforms tending to
reduce inequality.
Now, without troubling to repeat what I have already said, that the
Marxist dynamic of the distribution of wealth is far from being as
completely negatived by contemporary facts as these critics are pleased
to insist, I merely propose to point out that this paying of high honour
to reform and social legislation nowise conflicts with the doctrine or
with the work of Marx, who, on the contrary, was the first to throw into
high relief the pre-eminent value of social legislation, devoting
classical chapters to the elucidation of its most memorable
manifestations. In this light, therefore, revisionism or reformism, far
from being a negation or correction of Marxism, is a specific
application or partial realisation of the doctrine, for it brings into
the lime-light one of the numerous sides of that marvellous polyhedron,
and deserves credit for having explained and developed this particular
aspect of Marxism.
But revisionism errs gravely in that it wishes to replace the beautiful
and complex multiplicity of the Marxist system by forcing us to
contemplate this unilateral aspect alone. The reformists err in that
they fail to see that legislative reforms, though desirable and
extremely opportune, are invariably circumscribed by the prepotent
opposition of the privileged classes, and can never do anything more
than mitigate a few of the grosser harshnesses of the present
system--whilst, precisely because they effect this mitigation, reforms
tend to preserve an increasingly unstable economic order from the
imminent disaster of a destructive cataclysm.
If the reformist school mutilates Marxism thus violently, by reducing
the whole of _Capital_ to the paragraphs extolling social legislation,
the syndicalists inflict a yet cruder mutilation on the Marxist system
by tearing a single page out of _Capital_, to make of this page the
alpha and the omega of their revolutionary creed. It is true that Marx,
in the thirty-first chapter of _Capital_, makes an explicit appeal to
force, the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one; but
this appeal is not made until it has been fully demonstrated that the
social revolution can only be effected at the close of a slow and
lengthy evolutionary process which shall have caused complete
disintegration of the existing economic order and shall have paved the
way for its inevitable transformation into a superior order.
Now the syndicalists unhesitatingly sponge all this demonstration from
the slate, and affirm that the proletarian masses can undertake action
at any moment, can violently overthrow the prevailing economic order
whenever it shall please them to do so; and they declare that it is
needless for revolutionists to keep their eyes fixed upon the clock of
history, in order to see if this is about to sound the knell of the
present social order. It would be superfluous to demonstrate the
absurdity of such a thesis, for the very school which proclaims it has
assumed the task of giving it the lie in clamorous accents. For if, as
the new apostles of force contend, the proletarian masses can at any
moment annihilate the prevailing economic order, why do they not rise
against the capitalism they detest, and replace it with the co-operative
commonwealth for which they long? Why is it that after so much noisy
organisation, after so much declamation and delirious excitement, the
utmost they are able to do is to tear up a few yards of railway track or
to smash a street lamp? Do we not find here an irrefragable
demonstration that force is not realisable at any given moment but only
in the historic hour when evolution shall have prepared the inevitable
fall of the dominant economic system?
Thus whatever they can do, it always seems that the infirm will of the
disciples who demand an arbitrary renovation of the social system
(whether by legal measures or by force) breaks vainly against the
fatality of evolution, and that reformism and syndicalism are merely
caricatures, counterfeits, or exaggerations of the many-sided and
well-balanced theory of the master, who proposed a threefold line of
advance: by social legislation; by the activity of the organised
workers; and by revolution. In face of these various forms of
neo-marxism, the outcome of mutilations and of one-sided exclusivism,
Marx redivivus would have excellent reason for repeating his own adage,
so thoughtful and so true, "I am not a Marxist." However striking the
temporary success of these new forms among the crowd or among the
learned, we may confidently predict that neither reformism nor
syndicalism will definitively supplant the Marxist system, which despite
all and against all remains and will remain a supreme and invincible
force at once of theory and of organisation for the proletarian assault
upon the long-enduring fortress of property.
The value of Marx's work is, in fact, displayed in the most brilliant
light by the detailed criticism of the theorists and by the contrast
with opposing trends; all the more when we compare the aspect of
economic thought and of proletarian organisation before and after the
publication of _Capital_. For if we study the utterances of thinkers
upon these matters during the middle of the nineteenth century, we find
that nearly all are dominated by the categorical idea that the social
order is of an absolutely immobile character, and that none but a few
utopians entertain the thought of changing that order by means of
precipitate legislation inspired by their individual preconceptions. In
any case, it was an idea common to all, to revolutionists as well as to
conservatives, that the poverty of the masses was a negative and
distressing residue from the economic system, that it was a purely
passive feature of that system which must be accepted with resignation,
for it could not exercise any propulsive influence in the general social
movement. This is substantially the notion which emerges from Victor
Hugo's _Les Misérables_, for poverty is here regarded as an
overwhelming mass of suffering for which it is impossible to assign the
responsibility; it is looked upon as a load pressing with inexorable
cruelty upon suffering humanity, which is unable to respond by anything
more effective than complaints and tears.
But how utterly different is the notion prevailing in our own days upon
this matter. Not only is the conviction now rooted in the mind of every
thinker that the economic order is subject to unceasing change, is
advancing towards predestined destruction; but it is considered certain
that the artificer, the demiurge, the most potent factor of this
destruction, will be the active resistance, the unrest, the rebellion,
of the proletarians in the grasp of the capitalist machine and eager to
destroy it. This conception of the dynamogenic function of poverty is
the most characteristic feature of the social thought of our day, the
feature wherein that thought contrasts most categorically with the ideas
of an earlier age. Just as the Christian sect, represented by Gibbon as
a mere pathological efflorescence growing on the margin of Roman
society, is by the better equipped science of our own time looked upon
as having been the most potent solvent of the imperial complex and as
the ferment generating a new and better life, so the proletarian masses,
regarded by the science and the art of the past as a crushed and pitiful
appendage of the bourgeois economy, now appear to contemporary science
as the most vigorous among the forces tending to disintegrate that
economy, as tending irresistibly to create a higher and better balanced
form of association.
Correlatively with this development, whereas the proletarians of other
days were content to sulk in their hovels as they contemplated the
brilliant gyrations of the capitalist constellation, merely cursing in
secret the sorrows of their lot, to-day the workers of the two worlds
are advancing in serried ranks to the conquest of a new humanity and a
new life. Thus the immobility of our fathers has given place to rapid
movement; their discouragement and resignation, to rebellious demands;
and whereas of old a chasm yawned between the scattered visionaries who
entertained dreams of social rebirth and the inert mass of the
poverty-stricken, we find to-day that the impoverished are themselves
becoming the artificers, the heralds, the pioneers, of the irresistible
ascent of humanity towards a juster and better social order. Now all
this new moral and social world, unknown to our grandparents, the glory
and the plague of science, of society, of contemporary life; all this
gigantic tumult of ideas, facts, claims, of assaults, wounds, innovating
reconstructions; all this marvellous necromancy is the work of one man,
a sage and a martyr. All this we owe to Karl Marx. It measures,
concretes, and materialises for us his colossal worth and the omnipotent
vastness of his achievement. Though science may well and with full
right complain of the gaps in his doctrinal system, though life may
furnish the most definite refutations of his theoretical visions, and
though future history may display forms of which he never dreamed,
nevertheless, no one will ever be able to unseat him from his throne, or
to dispute the sovereignty which accrues to him on account of his
splendid contributions to civil progress. Whether praised and accepted,
or despised and rejected, by practice or by theory, by history or by
reason, he will always remain the emperor in the realm of mind, the
Prometheus foredestined to lead the human race towards the brilliant
goal which awaits it in a future not perhaps immeasurably remote.
For the day is coming. And in that day, when remorseless time shall have
destroyed the statues of the saints and of the warriors, renascent
humanity will raise in honour of the author of this work of destruction,
upon the shores of his native stream, a huge mausoleum representing the
proletarian breaking his chains and entering upon an era of conscious
and glorious freedom. Thither will come the regenerated peoples bearing
garlands of remembrance and of gratitude to lay upon the shrine of the
great thinker, who, amid sufferings, humiliations, and numberless
privations, fought unceasingly for the ransom of mankind. And the
mothers, as they show to their children the suffering and suggestive
figure, will say, their voices trembling with emotion and joy: See from
what darkness our light has come forth; see how many tears have watered
the seeds of our joy; look, and pay reverence to him who struggled, who
suffered, who died for the Supreme Redemption.