A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  In Great Britain, science was nowhere near as boxed in, institutionally speaking. People moved about more freely, in particular in fields that had not yet become accepted specialities. Once again, Darwin is a good example. When he finally ventured to write a book about humanity’s biological origins, The Descent of Man, he was just as fastidiously self-critical as he usually was, as long as he kept to the domains of biology. But it was different when he got into cultural questions! How, for example, could the origins of religion be explained? Darwin did not go deeply into the subject; he was satisfied with a little anecdote. He is sitting in his garden with his dog. A parasol starts spinning around in the wind. His dog growls. Darwin says that the dog must have believed that there was an invisible power present and concludes: this is how religion must also have arisen among people.

  Darwin’s dog travelled further in the literature. Herbert Spencer reproduced the anecdote as if it had some form of authority. But scientifically, it did not. On the other hand, it was an example of how a person who is a specialist in a scientific field can roam about with unconstrained amateurishness in another field where they think they will not find any real authorities. If he had been in Germany, he would either have been more careful, or – like his magniloquent follower there, Ernst Haeckel – risen to the role of philosopher with a view over all fields of knowledge. But it is impossible to imagine that the careful Darwin, like Haeckel, would set about the task of solving all the world’s problems.100

  Scientific specialization is thus not a process that takes place uniformly across all areas of knowledge. Nor does it look the same in all countries and environments. Certain specialities can in addition have higher status than others, especially for those in political power but also for a broader public; high-status specialists then gladly invade the domains of the low-status specialists. But even in scientific cultures with limited specialization, questions of the relationships between the various fields of knowledge arise. There may be similarities and methods and theories, tendencies arise that can be followed over large fields of knowledge, and philosophical consequences occur that can perplex, fascinate, and entice people to audacious syntheses.101

  Many of the great classical philosophers – Thomas Hobbes and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, for example – tried to assemble all knowledge into one system; during the heyday of German idealism, thinkers tried to add to each other by building comprehensive views of knowledge and the world. When their active period came to an end, a new sort of system-builder turned up – more respectful of the fields of the accepted specialists, but audacious in their parallels between various sciences. Their projects, as grandiose as they were frail, resulted in an overall view of existence and the future, perhaps an ethics, or a replacement for a crumbling religion. French philosopher Auguste Comte, the creator of words such as ‘sociology’, ‘positivism’, and ‘altruism’, was the pioneer for this new type of synthesis; English philosopher Herbert Spencer followed in his footsteps. They were both extremely successful and tempted others to try the same risky path. Ernst Haeckel, whom we have already mentioned, was only one of them. Systems ‘have been springing up by the dozen, overnight’, Engels wrote in ill humour – and he himself tried in Anti-Dühring and The Dialectics of Nature to build something that resembled a system.102

  Marx expressed no clear opinion in the face of this activity. He could test the idea of a similarity between chemistry and history, but no more came of it. His focus lay on the task of creating a sustainable critical theory of capital. To be sure, he also wanted to contribute to changing the world with his work. But he also saw himself as a scientist, who at the end of the foreword to his book could defiantly write: ‘Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti’ (Follow your path, and let people talk). He ascribed the quote to Dante, but there is an important difference between what Dante once wrote and what Marx wrote. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Virgil says to Dante: ‘Follow my path…’. But Marx says to himself: ‘Follow your path…’. People may speak ill of his undertaking, but it did not bother him.103 He wanted recognition for his effort, and he also wanted to convince economists and historians. We already know that his successes were extremely limited, despite Engels’s heroic efforts.

  In light of what I have just described, it is easy – entirely apart from the difficulty that reading Capital can offer the unprepared – to understand the problem. Marx wrote his work in German, and in Germany the approved sciences were more and more firmly linked to the universities. Marx was an outsider. Political economy had already been established as an academic subject in Germany, although for a long time in combination with other social scientific specialities. The leading representatives were historically oriented, followers of a historicism in Germany that had long set the tone, according to which the real picture of a phenomenon only emerged if it was observed in its development. The German economists were also heavily involved socially and politically, and saw providing for the poor and the unfortunate as the task of the state. That is why they were often called ‘lecture-hall socialists’, even if politically they were far from the kind of socialism that Marx found himself close to.

  The older lecture-hall socialists were already well established as economists when the first edition of Capital was published. Foremost was Wilhelm Roscher, whose book Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie (Principles of Political Economy) was published in 1854 and soon gained a great reputation in his homeland.104 Marx, with his completely divergent theoretical construction, found it difficult to gain recognition or even attention against such competition.

  Among Marx’s fellow thinkers, and among politically active people in general, Capital – as we have seen – attracted scarce attention in Germany. A small minority – Ludwig Kugelmann, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and a few others – really tried hard to force their way through it, but they all had their own academic backgrounds. For workers in general, Capital was a closed book. The latter was surely not a surprise to Marx.

  In Great Britain, economics was not yet a profession. The leading economists represented a broad variation of occupations, from bankers to clergymen. So it continued up until the end of the nineteenth century. It was actually only with Alfred Marshall and his generation that British economics was given a natural place in the universities. Marshall even gave the subject a new name: ‘political economy’ became ‘economics’, and his Principles of Economics from 1890 was long the standard work in the Anglo-Saxon world.105

  The first people to take in the ideas from Capital in Great Britain were not economists, but a handful of men, all of whom had a more or less distinguished social position. We have already mentioned Ray Lankester, an academic of the highest rank. Another somewhat more questionable character who also engaged Marx’s thinking was Henry Hyndman, son of a rich businessman and a graduate of Cambridge. He got his hands on Capital, and under its influence wrote England for All, published in 1881, which became a great public success. He failed however to mention where he got his ideas from – something that roused both Marx’s and Engels’s fury. But Hyndman founded his own socialist party, which Eleanor Marx was a member of for a time. The party’s successes were limited, especially as a consequence of Hyndman’s dictatorial leadership style.106

  Among those who quickly left the party one above all deserves to be named – the most significant follower of Marx in the nineteenth century: William Morris. William Morris had the same kind of background as Hyndman: his father was a wealthy businessman, and William studied at Oxford. Early on in his contact with the cultural elite of the time, he developed his ideal of arts and crafts that would counteract the mass production and aesthetic superficiality of industrialism. He only became a socialist in his fifties and even read Capital – a book, however, that according to his own statements cost him a lot of effort and a great deal of confusion. But despite the intellectual obstacles, he became a great admirer of Marx.107

  It can safely be said that early on Marx gained a certain reputation within British culture, w
hile his influence on academic economics long remained minimal. In France, Marx’s early breakthrough was political rather than scientific or cultural. Both his sons-in-law, Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue, were influential in the incipient French workers’ movement. Neither of them had a bent for economic theory, which is why they were not ambassadors for Capital either.

  It was in France that the words ‘Marxist’ and ‘Marxism’ were first used. Lafargue was one of those who claimed the designation, but Jules Guesde was the central figure among the self-identified Marxists in the newly founded Parti Ouvrier (Workers’ Party). Marx was not impressed by the party’s programme, something he made clear to Guesde and Lafargue in a letter addressed to both. He also took up his displeasure in a conversation with Engels. It was then he uttered the words that later became familiar: ‘Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas marxiste’ – (What is certain is that I am not a Marxist).108

  The fundamental ideas in Capital played no decisive role for Parti Ouvrier. It employed more a rather vulgar materialism, something that even the party’s self-characterization as ‘the party of the stomach’ testifies to.109

  Capital gained even less of a foothold in the scholarly world in France. French universities did not have a position that could be compared with German universities. Formally, they were dissolved during large parts of the nineteenth century; it was only the faculties, directly subordinate to the Ministry of Education, that were re-established by Napoleon after the revolution. Economic studies scarcely blossomed there, or at les grandes écoles such as the École normale supérieure or the École polytechnique. It is telling that the dominant French economist of the late nineteenth century, Léon Walras (the greatest economist of all time according to Joseph Schumpeter, the historiographer of economics above all else),110 received his professorship in Lausanne in Switzerland. Walras became one of the pioneers of economic marginalism, maintaining that the price of commodities was determined by supply and demand. He thus was not among the converts of Marx.

  Marx’s cultural influence in France – so great during the twentieth century – was also practically insignificant during the nineteenth, despite the beautiful translation of Capital that he himself to a great extent was responsible for.

  So far, we have theory, in Marx and in the world around him. But how did theory relate to practice? He had written a heavy but epoch-making work in which he interpreted contemporary capitalist development against a broad historical background. How was this work connected with the ambition to also change the world? To get at this question, a certain philosophical exercise is required.

  Capital is a theoretical work. It is thoroughly dominated by statements about reality and its various intricate connections. In just a few sentences, it is established that the capitalist system must tend towards its dissolution. These are not freely evasive theses about a desirable future, but conclusions drawn from a theory that is artfully developed. Formally, apart from the foreword and the postscript, Capital contains no strictures of the ‘Do this or that!’ type – that is, no analogue to the appeal of the Manifesto: ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’

  Nor is there thus any explicit morality. According to Marx, morals are always conditioned by existing social relations, and therefore changeable. The prevailing morals – those that are preached in the schools, the church, and the dominant media – justify the existing relations of power in society. People are raised to see the current order as natural.

  The question of whether or not there is an implicit morality in Capital – just as in Marx’s other works – is an old controversy. When Marx described the situation of the workers, his indignation shone through. It can even be asked whether a certain degree of compassion crept into the description of the compulsion the capitalist experiences.

  One person who tries to tackle this question with great energy is the American philosopher Allen W. Wood. In his 2004 book, simply called Karl Marx, he makes an important distinction between what he calls moral and non-moral goods. The former entails that a person should perform certain actions because it is their duty, the latter because these actions satisfy our needs. Marx’s thoroughgoing criticism of the moralism of which he accuses Proudhon and many others applies to moral goods. Capitalism, according to Marx, can be condemned because it withholds a number of non-moral goods from people. It forces them to starve, it enslaves them, and it alienates them.111

  Woods’s distinction is important, but he has no grip on Marx’s understanding of alienation from the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology onwards. As we have already seen, it is no longer a question of alienation from a supra-historical human essence but from the objective possibilities that people have during a certain historical epoch that are denied them through class society. This means that Marx also counts among the non-moral goods a life, satisfactory in all aspects, in which people can realize their potential. That is how we are able to speak about duty or obligation, though in a very fixed sense. It is the duty of people to work for a society in which everyone can realise the opportunities that the level of scientific, technological, and economic development opens for them.

  One important theme for Marx is humanity’s historical changeability. At the same time, he is acutely aware that there is something that is supra-historically human. After his encounter with Darwin’s theory, this insight became particularly salient, and it is discernible in the excerpts from the literature on social anthropology. The very remote social relations up for discussion there still have something important to say to the Europeans of the late nineteenth century.

  So far, the picture is clear. But there is still one question that has not been answered. How do the ideas that question the social order the prevailing ideology naturalizes arise? Must it not be a question of a counter-ideology, in which (to use a metaphor from The German Ideology) the inverted picture in the camera obscura of ideology is turned right side up again? At one point, the bourgeois class debunked the seemingly harmonic ideology of feudalism regarding the natural and timeless mutual relations of the estates. Now the working class was busy doing something similar regarding bourgeois ideology with its theses on liberty, equality, and fraternity. Marx saw himself as having the role that the Enlightenment philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had in the previous upheaval. But the role is only that of an enlightener; the liberation of the working classes is their own work. Marx provides the picture of capitalism and its mechanisms turned right side up. This revelation will provide the workers with tools in their struggle for liberation.

  Marx seems to have had no interest in the question of how the prevailing ideology gains its powerful opponent. The counter-ideology must accommodate the crucial components of the prevailing ideology, thereby providing an image of reality, an understanding of a good society, and norms for a successful struggle against the ruling class.

  Marx did not make his contemporary counter-ideology explicit. But he was entirely clear that a new order cannot be carried through only with the help of Capital. Political activity is also necessary. During the years around 1848, Marx had been intensely politically active. In the 1850s, his activity slackened off considerably. But in the 1860s, just when Capital was taking form, a new period of intense activity began. This is what we will now examine. Before that, a brief recapitulation.

  Conclusion

  Marx and Engels were very different from each other. They were brought together through historical circumstance, and came to be deeply dependent on each other financially, intellectually, and emotionally.

  Engels worked nearly twenty years in the firm that his father had helped start. Marx was thus given the opportunity to devote most of his time to Capital. His ambitions were so enormous that only certain parts of the project could be completed. What he presented to the world was impressive enough. But its impact was limited because he was so poorly situated in a scientific world. His German was an obstacle in England, and in Germany he was handicapped by the fact
that he was not active at a university. Capital appeared in French in his own translation, but it would be a long time before the work roused any greater interest. The self-appointed French Marxists did not meet with his approval.

  For his part, Engels started working on his own projects in which he would bring together his view of society with a conception of the world based in the natural sciences. The project took another direction when he was compelled to defend Capital against Eugen Dühring. A few lines about dialectical laws in Anti-Dühring, the origins of which are found in Capital, had fateful consequences. Engels laboured over diverse laws of this type for a few years, but then abandoned the whole idea. In orthodox Marxism, on the other hand, the laws were given a strong position in the catechism-like accounts that people within the Soviet Bloc were compelled to read during their education.

  Both Engels and Marx had a great interest in what was happening within a number of natural sciences. The energy principle and organic chemistry became important to them, as did biology through Darwin. Darwin’s theory of natural selection would form the foundation in natural history for their own social theory, Marx declared.

  But Marx and Engels approached the natural sciences in different ways. Engels chiefly wanted material for the construction of his conception of the world. Marx composed detailed excerpts from books that in one way or another would be of significance for his own life’s work, constantly in progress. Most likely it was for that purpose that he became interested in the new social anthropologists. From Marx’s notes, Engels later wrote a book in his own spirit.

  Today, it is easy to see Marx (and Engels, to a lesser extent) as a pure theoretician. This was not at all the case. Politics was and remained important – it was necessary in order to change the world. But the transition from theory to practice was not self-evident. When, in the mid-1860s, Marx once again threw himself with all his might into political life, he could not rely on the Manifesto from 1848 to guide him. The world had changed; the political landscape had become different. But his own interpretation of the reality that politics was to influence was also different in many parts. It is easy to ignore this, especially as he allowed new editions and translations of the Manifesto to be spread across the world without the text itself being changed. Nevertheless, it was largely with a new agenda that he got into politics.