Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Similarly, Marx was impressed with Darwin’s theories in their role as scientific proof for the existence of progress. In 1866, he read the work of an obscure French geologist, Pierre Trémaux, Origin and Transformation of Man and Other Beings. It purported to explain human and animal evolution as a result of geological influences. Marx regarded Trémaux’s work “as a very important improvement on Darwin,” above all because “Progress, which in Darwin is purely accidental, is here necessary on the basis of the periods of development of the body of the earth.” Engels’s harsh criticism of Trémaux as someone who did not understand Darwin, and whose “ridiculous items of evidence . . . are based on false or distorted facts,” did not deter his friend’s admiration.14

  When Engels was planning to plant reviews of Capital in the German press, to stir up interest in his friend’s treatise on economics, Marx proposed that Engels describe his work as proving that “current society, economically regarded, is pregnant with a new, higher form,” and that “socially, [it] is the same gradual process of upheaval that Darwin has proven in natural history.” Marx suggested that Engels describe both developments as being encompassed by the “liberal doctrine of ‘progress.’ ” Engels’s review, using Marx’s suggestions, duly appeared in The Observer, a left-wing (Marx would have said bourgeois-democratic) Stuttgart newspaper, in December 1867.15

  Marx’s remarks about Darwin and progress were an astute observation concerning the relationship between the theory of natural selection and the idea of progress. Darwin himself knew that his explanation of how organisms adapt to their changing environment said nothing about progress or improvement, and once noted, sarcastically, that by bees’ criteria they were an improvement on people. Most contemporary Darwinians, though, felt their hero had demonstrated progress in nature and justified the existence of progress in human history and society, a crucial idea for positivists. Marx, if endorsing his own distinct version of the idea of progress, also understood that Darwin’s theories did not in fact justify it. In a bow to positivist conceptions of science, he was attracted to Trémaux’s dubious notions because they provided a justification for progress. Attempting to sell the ideas of his economics to a democratic and liberal public, fervent believers in progress, he suggested that Engels link his work to a popular misunderstanding of Darwin’s theories, centered on the ideas of progress.

  In this regard Marx appears as an ambivalent observer of post-1850 positivism. Unlike Bauer and Ruge, Marx was not waving the Hegelian banner, openly resisting the positivist trend. He paid considerable attention to scientific advances and wanted to appropriate the growing authority of the natural sciences for his political program and economic theories, under the heading of progress. But he was also not willing to renounce Hegel’s insistence on the critique of scientific concepts or the Hegelian notion that truth was not empirically evident, but emerged in a process involving historical development and conceptual reformulation. Exactly how Marx would have combined Hegelian modes of thought with the positivist priority of the sciences is not entirely clear. Likely, such a combination would have involved an emphasis on an atheist and materialist view of the world. Neither atheism nor materialism were necessary features of positivist thought, and they were certainly not part of Hegel’s elaborate philosophy, but they might have provided a vehicle for bringing together Hegel’s dialectics and the positivist embrace of the natural sciences.16 In the afterword to the second edition of Capital, Marx asserted that in Hegel, dialectics was standing on its head and needed to be put on its feet—that is, transformed from idealist to materialist. This assertion, one of the better known of Marx’s theoretical statements, pointed in the direction of such a reconciliation. Marx toyed with the idea of writing a treatise on dialectics, a late version of his 1840s plans to write critiques of different branches of knowledge. This treatise was intended to “shake off” the “mystical form” in Hegel’s version, and might have addressed the question of the compatibility of Hegelian thought with the positivist intellectual priority for the natural sciences. It would be composed, he wrote in 1868 to one of his admirers, a German artisan named Joseph Dietzgen, when he finished his critique of political economy. The latter was never completed, so that the philosophical treatise was never written, and Marx never precisely formulated his mature views on the topic.17

  POSITIVISM WAS AS MUCH a social theory as a philosophical program. Its viewpoints intersected with the social theory Marx had developed during the 1840s. Three major issues emerged from this intersection. Positivists had a picture of human history as a progression through stages, leading from lower to higher forms of civilization, as the French positivist guru Auguste Comte put it, from civilizations characterized by superstitious to religious to scientific forms of thought. (Admittedly, Comte thought the scientific era needed a new form of religion, and he was prepared to be its high priest.) Marx’s view of the conflictual development of human civilization through different modes of production, ultimately emerging in communism, had distinct similarities to such positivist formulations.

  Social action was of considerable interest to positivists, particularly to Herbert Spencer, the prominent nineteenth-century English positivist, and one of the founders of the modern discipline of sociology. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx had sketched out a theory of social action, emphasizing the links between social classes, whose existence was rooted in the mode of production and the division of labor, on the one hand, and political movements and their intellectual expression, on the other. Just exactly how Marx himself envisaged these linkages is an important issue for understanding his social theory.

  The positivist evocation of the biological sciences as the model for the acquisition of knowledge had produced a new category of social understanding, that of “race,” of biologically distinct divisions in humanity. Marx’s chief category of social understanding was social classes derived from the division of labor. But race was by no means unknown to him and to Engels; the growing interest in race, often inflected by Darwinian or pseudo-Darwinian ideas about natural selection and the “survival of the fittest,” was another challenge for Marx in adapting his theories to a new intellectual age.

  MARX ARTICULATED HIS OPINIONS on the stages of human history in the introduction to On the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859. There, the ideas that Marx and Engels had developed in their writings of the late 1840s, but only articulated in fragmentary and polemical form, were synthesized and presented as a compact doctrinal statement:

  In the social production of their life, people enter into specific, necessary relations of production . . . correspond[ing] to a specific stage of development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production forms the economic structure of society, the factually existing base, on which a juridical and political superstructure is raised. . . . The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual process of life in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, just the opposite, their social being determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or with the relations of property (the latter being just a legal expression of the former). . . . From being forms of development of the forces of production, these relations are transformed into their shackles. An era of social revolution begins . . . one must always differentiate between the material upheaval in the economic determinants of production, which can be observed exactly by means of the natural sciences, and the juridical, political, religious, artistic, or philosophical, in short, ideological forms, in which men become conscious of this conflict and in which they fight it out. . . . In a rough outline, Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production can be described as progressive epochs of economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production . . . but the productiv
e forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society are simultaneously creating the material conditions for the resolution of this antagonism. With this social formation, the pre-history of human society is concluded.18

  This passage contained not just one but many forms of stages of history. The most obvious one, usually attracting interpreters’ attention, was the different modes of production. Marx described them as “progressive epochs”; their succession is a story of the steady improvement in the ability of human beings to produce.

  Marx had devised the “Asiatic” mode of production in his New York Tribune articles on India during the 1850s, but his use of the concept was not geographically specific, nor was it linked to a particular era of human history. He found the Asiatic mode of production among the ancient Germanic tribes, in the highlands of the Hunsrück to the south of Trier in Marx’s youth, and contemporaneously in nineteenth-century India and parts of the czarist empire.19 Different historical stages could co-exist; progress occurred in different parts of the world at different times and at a different pace. Marx, like his contemporaries, saw economic progress—or, as he would have said, the productive forces realized in the bourgeois mode of production—as being most pronounced in Britain, Western European countries, and North America.

  Herbert Spencer characterized two broad stages of human society, the “militant” and the “industrial,” with the former designating the entire pre-industrial, pre-scientific past, and the latter marking a new epoch in the history of the world. Marx also described an emergent new epoch: the end to the prehistory of human society, occurring when the antagonisms of bourgeois society were resolved. Since Marx had noted just a few sentences previously that social antagonisms were resolved by means of social revolution, the concluding sentence of the passage was a not particularly hidden reference to the forthcoming social revolution that would end bourgeois society and bring about a communist regime. Although Marx could have described communism as another stage in the progress of modes of production, he instead designated it as a fundamental break with all past human society, a new epoch for which everything preceding was just a “pre-history.” Spencer, admittedly, was a libertarian, who ranted against almost any form of government action: his new epoch of world history was an idealized version of the pro–free-market policies of Victorian-era capitalism. Marx’s new era of human history would only occur when the social world Spencer so admired was overthrown. Yet for all their very considerable disagreements on when the new stage of human history would appear, and how its society would be shaped, both men agreed that it would be a new scientific era, one fundamentally different from the human past.

  Marx was well acquainted with the works of the positivists, and was less than impressed with them. Not surprisingly, he evaluated Herbert Spencer’s writings as “economic trivia . . . spiced with pseudo-philosophical or pseudo-scientific slang.” He thought a little better of Comte, admitting that the Frenchman was good at synthesis, but calling his synthesis “wretched compared to Hegel,” and denouncing Comte’s philosophical system as “positivist shit.” There were a number of English positivists on the General Council of the IWMA—the “whole Comteist clique,” as Marx called them. Marx got along well with their leader, Edward Spencer Beesley, professor of history at the University of London, praising him as “a capable and daring man,” and greatly admiring his defense of the Paris Commune. Marx also thought that Beesley was at his best when he was not following positivist doctrines.20 Yet for all the distance Marx kept from these doctrines, his own image of progress through distinct stages of historical development and a twofold division of human history into an earlier, irrational era and a later, industrial and scientific one, contained distinctly positivist elements. Today, a visitor to Highgate Cemetery in North London can see the graves of Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer standing face to face—for all the intellectual differences between the two men, not an entirely inappropriate juxtaposition.

  ONE OF THE BEST known aspects of Marx’s social theory are the comments in the introduction to On the Critique of Political Economy about the relationship between an economic base and a political and ideological superstructure. Those comments were a reformulation in more prosaic and positivist terms of a celebrated, poetic passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire, in which Marx explained the differences between the liberal parliamentary supporters of the Orléans dynasty in France and the conservative adherents of the Bourbons:

  Under the Bourbons, large landed property had ruled, with its priests and lackeys, under the Orléans, high finance, big industry, large commerce, i.e., capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and elegant public speakers. . . . What thus kept these two caucuses apart . . . was the material conditions of their existence . . . the rivalry between capital and landed property. That simultaneously old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles tied them to one or the other royal house—who would deny it? Arising from the different forms of property, from the social determinants of existence is an entire superstructure of uniquely shaped sensations, illusions, modes of thought and fundamental views of life. The entire class shapes and forms them from their material foundations and from the social relationships that correspond to them. The isolated individuals, to whom these flow through tradition and upbringing, can imagine that they are the actual motives and starting point of their action.21

  Whether formulated poetically or prosaically, the evocation of base and superstructure was a powerful and effective metaphor, but also one that did not explain the connection between social structures and economic interests on the one hand, and ideas and political movements on the other. Elucidating this connection was a concern of Marx’s followers, beginning with Engels, who explained the passage in 1891 as meaning that, “in the last analysis,” economic structures were dominant in the determination of social and political action.22 Engel’s explanation simply substituted one metaphor for another. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century Marxists and neo-Marxists, living in an age when the superstructure, in the form of political mass movements and mass media, has become complex and labyrinthine, have focused on this issue at great length. The diversity and intellectual wealth of Marxist approaches to the connection between base and superstructure owes a good deal to the fact that Marx himself never made any definitive statements on the topic. But his descriptions of social and political action, in journalism or political polemics, do suggest some ways that he perceived the connection, and cast further light on Marx’s response to the positivist atmosphere of the decades after 1850.

  When Marx himself talked about the connection, he frequently employed the words “secret” or “mystery,” both translations of the German Geheimnis. Secrets were at the root of revolutions. In a speech given in 1856, Marx proclaimed: “the emancipation of the proletarian, that is the secret of the 19th century, and of the revolution of that century.” But secrets were also at the root of opposition to revolution. The working class in England was “divided into two hostile camps,” he wrote to American correspondents in 1870, “English proletarians and Irish proletarians. . . . This antagonism is the secret of the powerlessness of the English working class, in spite of its organization. It is the secret of the preservation of the power of the capitalist class.”23

  In a mordant account of British political life, Marx told the readers of the New York Tribune in 1854 that “the secret of these blue-book dodges is the very secret of the alternate Whig and Tory succession in government, each party having a greater interest to maintain the capability of its opponent for succession, than by ruining their mutual political ‘honor’ to compromise the government of the ruling classes altogether.” Marx used the latest news on the Spanish Revolution of 1854–56 to assert that Europe’s capitalist middle class, formerly an enemy of “military despotism,” had become a supporter of it when the workers began to challenge bourgeois domination. “This,” he continued, “is the secret of
the standing armies of Europe, which otherwise will be incomprehensible to the future historian.”24 Secrets, in all these passages, were at the root of big structures and large-scale trends, but Marx found secrets in individual, smaller-scale events as well, the results of parliamentary elections, for instance, or Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état.25

  The “secret” in each of these instances was the inner logic of the collective self-interest of social classes, and its effects on political and ideological movements. It was not always clear from Marx’s presentation of this inner logic whether the members of the class concerned were aware of it, whether they were in on the secret. Sometimes, they clearly were: Marx thought that the “ruling classes” in England consciously pitted English against Irish workers “through the press, the pulpit, humor publications, in short all the means standing at the disposition of the ruling classes.” On the other hand, in the descriptions of the rise of Bonapartism and military despotic rule, of the social revolutions of the nineteenth century, and especially in the initial formulation of The Eighteenth Brumaire, the inner logic of collective class self-interest was not consciously present among individual members of the class.

  What made the secret something secret? Secrecy, in discussions of politics, often has the connotations of conspiracy, of something consciously hidden from public view. Marx used that meaning in his pamphlet on the Cologne Communist Trial, which was an exposé of a conspiracy to frame the Cologne communists. The German word Enthüllungen in the pamphlet’s title literally means an exposure or unveiling (usually translated, a bit inaccurately, as “revelations”): a making public of the secret conspiracy of the Prussian government. Marx’s 1850s polemics against Lord Palmerston employed that version of “secret” in a long listing of secret treaties, secret actions, and Palmerston’s own ostensible role as being secretly in the pay of the czar.