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MARX-AND ALL THAT

By E. H. CARR THE first agreeable thing to note about this latest addition to the Home University Library is that it is not a book about what Lenin thought Marx thought, or what Stalin professes to think Marx thought, nor even a Bowdlerised version of Marx for the use of British Fabians, but a book about Marx and Marxism. It is written by a scholar in a tone of complete detachment, and it is written by a philosopher who knows his period and has probed to the bottom of the foundations of Marx's system of thought. It may count as a biography, since the not very important facts of Marx's life are adequately set forth. But its interest centres in Marxism as a system of philosophy. The only serious criticism which might be made against it is that Marx's economics are almost entirely ignored. The contra- dictions of capitalism and the labour theory of value receive rather scant attention in these pages. Mr. Berlin takes the view—for which there is much to be said—that Marx's economic theories are a superstructure designed to justify a social programme which was in fact independent of them.

Temperamentally, Marx belonged to the sceptics and the empiricists. In the eighteenth century he would have been at home with Hume or Diderot. He inherited frcm his father a sincere admiration for the Encyclopaedists. But between Karl Marx and the eighteenth century there had intervened the powerful genius of Hegel. Marx was a German ; and for the young German of the 1830's philsophy meant inevitably the vast metaphysical Hegelian system. When Marx studied at the University of Berlin, conservatives and radicals were beginning to dispute over the true implications of Hegelianism, just as rival Christian sects dispute about the true Christian doctrine, or Stalinists and Trotskyists about teachings of Lenin. But nobody ventured openly to reject the authority of the master. Hegel was in a sense the father of all modern ideologies. Marxism is an ideology. Though Marx revolted in the name of empiricism against the Hegelian metaphysic, and in the name of materialism against the Hegelian Zeitgeist, he never ceased to work and think within a Hegelian frame- work.

This fact is of contemporary importance in that it explains the fundamental relationship between Marxism and the other ideologies which derive directly or indirectly from Hegel. Communism, Fascism and National Socialism, for all their differences, agree in being comprehensive systems which em- brace every sphere of action and thought, and merge the individual in a vast collectivity. They subordinate what Hegel called " civil society " to the power of a State machine which alone can realise and express the aspirations of mankind. Hegel believed that the highest good could be realised only through the State. For the State the National Socialist substituted the Volk, and the Marxist the class. National consciousness for the Nazi, class consciousness for the Marxist, dominate the whole political, psychological and cultural outlook of man. There are no " rights of man " as such. There are only the rights of the nation or the rights of the proletariat.

From this rejection of absolute and universal standards it inevitably follows that right can ultimately be determined only in terms of might. " World history is the world court." In Karl Marx. By I. Berlin. (Home University Library. 2S. 6d.) Hegel's philosophy of history it is force which ultimately decides which nation is destined at any given period to be the representative and leader of world culture. The only wa..

to discover on which nation the Zeitgeist has bestowed his capricious favour is to discover which nation has, in fact.

come out on top. "Everything that is real is rational, every-

thing that is rational is real." You cannot judge history b‘ any standards not rooted in the historical process itself. As Mr. Berlin says, " judgements of fact cannot be sharply dis-

tinguished from those of value." Thus Marx, though he sometimes made concessions to the popular idiom, rejected

every appeal to abstract justice or right. He does not appear

to have argued that the victory of the proletariat was right in any other sense than that it was historically inevitable. Marx

believed in the " historical mission " of the proletariat (one of

his disciples actually uses the phrase) in the same way in which Herr Hitler believes in the historical mission of the German people. In both cases the test of might must ulti- mately be applied. The proletariat affirms the reality of its historical mission by a successful revolution, the German Volk by a successful war.

Two reservations must, however, be made. Marx, like other realists, necessarily admitted a certain inconsistency into system. Like all thinkers who have a programme of action, he was faced with the problem of the relationship between theory and practice. His theory taught him to believe in

" tendencies which work out with an iron necessity towards an inevitable goal." In practice, he preached unceasingly the

need to understand these tendencies and to further them by deliberate action if the " inevitable " goal was to be attained. In spite of his rejection of moral categories, he clearly implied, in some of the most eloquent and famous passages which he ever wrote, that capitalists were wicked as well as blind in seeking to resist the demands of the all-powerful proletariat.

Moreover, he convinced himself that, once the proletariat had

won the victory and the last exploiting class had ceased to exist, the historical process as hitherto known would come to

an end, and the age of true freedom and classless society

would at last dawn. This apocalyptic vision, a heritage from the Utopian Socialists, is so curious an excrescence on the

Marxist system that it is as a rule passed over rather shame-

facedly by Marxist critics. But the strength of Marxism cannot be understood if we ignore this missionary streak so oddly at variance with the general texture of the whole system. For all Marx's contempt for Liberalism, it was a typical liberal Utopia which he took as the coping-stone of his edifice.

This brings us to our second reservation. Marxism differs from Hegelianism and the other post-Hegelian ideologies in

that it does, in spite of itself, provide something in the nature

of a universal ethical appeal. When Herr Hitler asserts the historical mission of the German Volk, he is propounding an ideal which in the nature of things can make no appeal to Englishmen or Frenchmen, to Italians or Japanese. When Marx asserts the historical mission of the proletariat, he is proclaiming an ideal which does possess some measure of

universality, and which has its appeal, as practical experience has shown, to those who are not proletarians. The identifica-

tion of the supreme good with the welfare of so vast a class

does not shock the ordinary man's sense of justice in the same way in which it is shocked by the identification of the supreme

good with the triumph of National Socialism. It is true that the welfare of the proletariat is not a universal good ; and its fatal defect in this respect has provoked the successful revolt of other classes against it, and led the eclipse of Marxism everywhere. But for some two generations Marxism, twisted and Bowdlerised, did provide a universal and quasi-ethical basis for a great deal of sincere and progressive political thinking.

Mr. Berlin's little book is so compact and closely knit that it is difficult to single out anything in it for special com- mendation. But the chapter on Historical Materialism is beyond doubt the best short exposition of Marxist philosophy which has appeared in English ; and the discussion in a later chapter of the paradox that Marxism proved most effective in Russia is particularly worth reading. This is an ideal book, not for those who treat Marxism as a quarry for missiles to be used against political opponents, but for those who wish tc put it in its historical setting and to understand what Marx thought and why he thought it.