Marxism emerged in a social world in which the sense of an integrated culture made coherent by a sovereign and united Christianity was deteriorating among the educated and well-off, as among the poor and uneducated. It deteriorated increasingly among the educated with the appearance and spread of Malthusianism in 1798 which called into question "the benevolence of both God and man." "God would not provide food for all the mouths but more than enough mouths for all the food." The expectation of a benign, natural harmony superintended by God was thus upset. Similarly, Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) challenged ''the belief in divine interference in nature—in miraculous catastrophic intervention in the course of the history of life and the history of the earth." Thus miracles and scientific law were held to be inconsistent. Soon afterward, Robert Chambers would emphasize that it was inconsistent to apply the concept of uniform natural laws to the history of the earth but not to the history of life; all of nature, he insisted—including man and his mind—were governed by natural law.
Robert Young thus emphasizes that the debate over evolutionism was only an extension of an earlier and broader debate; they "were not merely reports of scientific discoveries. They were concerned with the principles of reasoning, the assumptions of science," from which they concluded "that the interests of both science and theology required that their foundations be considered separately. Each . . . could only suffer from intermingling.''1
There was, then, a growing tension between science and religion based not merely on the different views each had about specific bits of history but on broader issues, including the resultant image of man and perhaps, even more, on their basic conceptions of rationality and the place of rationality in life. This dissonance between science and religion affected the consciousness of the educated and the uneducated, among both of whom it lent support for emerging forms of "free thinking" and even of atheism. With the rise of the new rationality of science, and with its stress upon the self-groundedness of its own thinking, the "hypothesis" of a Supreme Being became superfluous to working scientists. There began the waning of belief in an afterworld and that long "death of god" in which established religion was no longer the single overarching center of European culture.
Western religion's monotheism had been the symbol of the unity of the world—of society and nature alike—and its church had once bridged different levels of existence by affirming their common origins in and continuing governance by a single Supreme Being. The Supreme Being was now, however, promoted to a lofty irrelevance for everyday life; rather than being seen as a continuing presence, deity came increasingly to be regarded as launching the course of the general laws governing the world, which, once set in motion, were not again intruded upon by their remote Author. While the new sciences might be only too glad to surrender everyday life to the church2 in return for acceptance as a part of respectable society and for autonomy in their own intellectual sphere, the church to whom they surrendered was hardly in a position to resume its once central role.
In any event, the tacit terms science offered religion were a new ecumenicism of the double truth. The truth of science and that of religion were to coexist without "intermingling," and each was to be supreme within its own sphere. If the church could reign supreme in the everyday life, it is clear, however, that the new sciences were not about to surrender the ground they had won in high culture. Moreover, the emerging tendencies toward scientific specialization were fast closing off the sciences to one another, making each a sovereign terrain to which those without special credentials were not admitted. Scientific specialization and technical development, then, contributed to cultural dispersion. Science could thus neither revive religion as the keystone to culture, even if it had a mind to do so, nor could it itself reintegrate culture, although it was often tempted to do so under the banner of a common ''method."
Marxism emerges, then, when neither science, religion, nor yet again the still remote state, could reintegrate a society and culture that was reeling under the impact of the eruption of a great new technology and a vast new world market. Marxism was thus invisibly drawn into providing a new cultural unification to fill the vacuum that the fragmented sciences, waning established church, and distant state could not meet, most particularly for the impoverished and marginal working classes. Borrowing visibly from science, Marxism borrowed if less visibly from religion, while at the same time it planned a new empowering of the state, to achieve the effort at cultural reunification into which it had been thrust.
In one part, then, it is clear that the emergence of "scientific" Marxism was simply a part of the development of science, and especially of the culture of science, and most especially of the gradual extension of science and scientific laws to the study of mankind that Chambers in England and Comte in France had insisted was implicit in Lyell's uniformitarian geology. Indeed, as we have seen, Marx himself fully acknowledged that his own work was kin to this development and especially to Darwin's Origin of Species.
While stressing that the development of evolutionisn1 had largely accommodated to a theistic framework, Robert Young also shows that "when the advocates of an evolutionary view did encroach on the domain of theism, they provided an alternative view of man and society which was as sanguine and utopian in its belief in progress as were the views of the afterlife advocated by the most evangelical, antiscientific, scriptural literalist." Young concludes that in "promising inevitable social progress," Marxism was simply one of the more striking examples of an optimistic, Victorian, this-worldly philosophy.3
In effect, the culture of science had introjected theism's optimistic structure of sentiments, quietly offering inevitable social progress as a substitute for a dwindling belief in the soul's afterlife, and thus seeking that integration of the good with the powerful which Christian religion had accomplished through its notion of God. The new culture of science avowed that what happened in the world was not only governed by scientific law and necessity but was, additionally, benign and progressive in its outcome. In short, insofar as Marxism embodied a residue of religion, one reason it did so was precisely because it adhered to the contemporary culture of science which also did so, and because science and religion were not then as radically segregated as some subsequently thought them.
Marxism had emerged out of the occluded relationship between a highly secular intellectual elite alert to science and a raw industrial working class whose religious sentiments had been intensified by their newly uprooted and anxiety-inducing exposure to a mushrooming urbanism. Steven Marcus's probing reexamination of Engels's study of the condition of the English working class accents the industrial revolution's disorganizing impact, its disruptive unemployment and depressions, and the resulting "insecurity" among the working class which, in Engels's words, was 'far more demoralizing than poverty."4 Marcus also cites Asa Brigg's Victorian Cities which observed that "insecurity was at the heart of the industrial and consequently urban system."
The Communist Manifesto itself had similarly noted, as Capital would later, that the new capitalist order did not simply mean poverty and unemployment but also increasing "misery" and Uncertainty: "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitations distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones."5
Marcus notes the special impact of these disruptive conditions on the working class's religious behavior, remarking on "the large-scale loss of active religious faith among the English working class, and the equally large-scale retention of some kind of religious commitment among them, largely in the form of allegiance to some dissenting sect.... the extreme conditions of urban working-class existence were likely either to severely damage the possibility of continued religious belief, or to stimulate an intense and relatively aberrant experience of belief:"6
In some part, the working class's religious faith had been damaged by the visible alliance of the Established Church with the ruling class and ruling order, and by the callous indifference of troth to the squalor and terrible suffering of workers' lives. ''The period 1750 to 1850 is a distinctive one in the history of the Established Church," writes Alan Smith: "It is an age when the Church accepted total identification with the existing social fabric; an age of the most complete Erastianism and of entire subservience to the purposes of government."7 According to a contemporary, William Cowper, greater than the church's parson or clerk was the Squire: the service must not begin "until the Squire has strutted up the aisle to the great pew in the chancel" and it ended when the Squire lurched up from his nap. Reporting on public worship in metropolitan London, the agricultural publicist Arthur Young remarked in 1798 that "it afforded a subject of melancholy reflection to see nearly their whole space occupied by pews to whicl1 the poor have no admittance.... In some churches few or m, benches to sit on and no mats to kneel on. A stranger would think that our churches were built, as indeed they are, only for the rich."8
In 1849, E. Miall wrote in his British Churches in Relations to the British People:
. . . religious profession, and respect for the public means of grace, are far more common amongst, and characteristic of, the middle, than the labouring classes, in Great Britain. The bulk of our manufacturing population stand aloof from our Christian institutions . . . they generally pass through the prime of life, and too frequently reach its appointed term, without being even momentarily attracted, and without being in the slightest degree interested, by what the Churches of Christ are doing in their respective neighborhoods. The Churches are, to all practical purposes, as little known, as little cared for, as little trusted in, by this numerous body, as if they had no existence.9
But if this bears upon the damage to workers' faith, and the rupture between them and the Established Church, the other side of workers' religious conditions—an often desperate intensity of faith—may be seen in the proliferating growth of dissenting sects, in the spread of Methodism and in the lingering pulsations of millenarian movements. Indeed, the millenarian impulse was not confined to the poor and working class; as late as 1832, some as respectable and educated as the headmaster of Rugby might give voice to it: "My sense of the evil of the times, and to what prospects I am bringing Up my children, is overwhelmingly bitter. All the moral and physical world appears so exactly to announce the coming of 'the great day of the Lord'—that is a period of fearful visitation, to terminate the existing state of things—whether to terminate the whole existence of the human race, neither man nor angel knows.''10
Prophet after prophet arose, remarks E. P. Thompson. In 1832 there was the prophecy of John Nicols Thom who appeared as Count Moses Rothschild, "King of the Jews." Earlier, there had been the prophecy of the peasant's daughter, Joanna Southcutt whose movement had two periods of frenzy, the first in 18011804 and a second in 1814. The "emotional disequilibrium of the times is revealed," notes Thompson, "not only in the enthusiasm of the 'Joannas' but also in the corresponding violence of feelings of the mobs.... [Southcuttianism's] apocalyptic fervour was closely akin to the fervours of Methodism—it brought to a point of hysterical intensity the desire for personal salvation. But it was certainly a cult of the poor,"11 which, in Joanna's words, condemned those who "starve the poor in the midst of plenty.''
The Methodists, too, were of the poor, strong in working class communities of miners, weavers, factory workers, seamen, potters, and rural laborers. At the same time—and like other nonconforming sects—Methodism also became the religion of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie. As "a 'religion of the heart' rather than of the intellect, the simplest and least educated might hope to attain towards grace.''12 Methodism provided the inner discipline sought in the emerging labor force to overcome the idleness, profligacy, and improvidence of which the middle class constantly complained. Clearly, however, Methodism also taught workers things that might stand them in good stead and were not only serviceable to the authority of employers and the church. The same dedication and discipline, observes Thompson, ''will be seen in the men who officered trade unions and Hampden Clubs, educated themselves far into the night, and had the responsibility to conduct working-class organizations.''13 Moreover, with its open Chapel doors, Methodism offered the poor and uprooted "some kind of community to replace the older community patterns which were being displaced.''14 Starting in 1789 with a membership of about 60,000, Methodist numbers grew to 90,000 in 1795, to 1()7,000 in 1805, to 154,000 in 1811, and to 237,000 in 1827. And even as orthodox Wesleyanism flourished, all manner of breakaway sects sprang up, Ranters, Jumpers, Tent Methodists, Bible Christians, Independents.
Eric Hobsbawm15 has noted a certain correspondence between religious movements and those of a political character. Thompson, also, sees the relationship between religious and political movements as "intimate" but obscure and somewhat complicated. In part, both religious and political movements of the time may be regarded as different responses to the same soaring insecurity and terrible suffering; in some measure they were functionally alternative responses that workers might make to their grinding condition. But there are also differences that Thompson notes, namely, that there were periods, for example 1819, when there was great political activity but little religious revivalism. The two movements were thus not entirely parallel and not fully interchangeable. Political movements were efforts at practical, this-worldly reform which might be buoyed during periods of hope and optimism, while religious revivalism might be a response both to the suffering of the everyday life and to the failures of practical political efforts. The point, then, is that we must neither overstate the correlation between religious and political movements, nor ignore their frequent concurrence. If both religious and political movements were responses to the same suffering, the former were, additionally, sometimes responding to the failures of practical earthly politics.
Marxism performed both functions: offering or allying itself with short-term political reforms—seeking footholds for an overturn of the entire system—and through the promise of a long-term but inevitable universal revolution, it simultaneously offers hope for a salvific transcendence of the present. Marxism also contains elements both of uniformitarianism and of catastrophism which, in its broader meaning, simply refers to any view that holds that the millennium (or some great social transformation) will be ushered in by an abrupt catastrophe. Marxism was antiuniformitarian in insisting that vulgar political economy was ideological in assuming that the laws of capitalism's political economy were eternal; at the same time, however, Marxism also held that the historical laws of a capitalist economy worked with an inevitable necessity to bring that system down. The latter is incipient with a utopian catastrophism, for the mechanism to surmount the present and h' make the transition to a vastly superior future world is held inherent in the blind laws of the capitalist economy, and these, it is said, will surely bring it to ruin. The Zussamenbruch or crash theory in Marxism, or at least as Marxism was commonly understood by Scientific Marxists, resonates a latent millenarian catastrophism. Indeed, Perry Anderson has suggested that "the very absence of any political theory proper in the late Marx may thus be logically related to a latent catastrophism in his economic theory, which rendered the development of the former redundant; . . . a tacit economic catastrophism thus functioned to dispense socialist militants from the difficult work of developing a political theory of the state structures with which they had to contend in the West.''16
Marxism also exhibited precisely that radical ambiguity, so characteristic of the period, between damaged religious faith and an intense need to believe, to which Marcus refers, all the more so as it developed into Scientific Marxism. On one side, Scientific Marxism expressed a critique of religion from the standpoint of a modernizing culture of science and militant atheism. On the other, however, it also constituted itself as a new certainty that might control the burgeoning insecurities let loose by the industrial revolution. It counterbalanced the ruling class's alliance with the church by implying its own alliance with the newly prestigious science whose allegedly iron laws guaranteed the fulfillment of its earthly hopes.
Christianity and its church had conceived the "soul" and had provided comforting assurances of its continuity in an afterlife, as well as developing a community of believers, all of which—soul, afterlife, and church—provided mechanisms for a meaningful sense of posterity. As these and other identities that transcended the single generation—family, neighborhood, parish, guild— underwent severe disruption, they provided less or no assurance of a future in which workers' present sufferings might be meaningfully compensated.
The pub in which so much of the working class's time came to be spent was not theirs but the publicans, and this only at the pleasure of the licensing authorities. The Established Church largely belonged to the ruling class, and even the Methodist Churches were often under the hegemony of the mill owners and other new men of business. New temperance, adult education, and cooperative groups had little historical perspective and continuity, and were under the hegemony of the upwardly mobile, who left their class behind. The emerging nation-state became one compensating identity for older waning solidarities, but this was at first much more important and real to the middle than to the working classes.
Scientific Marxism was relevant to this development. It not only served as an anxiety-binding prospect of future redemption. no less certain for being this-worldly, but also produced new corporate identities—most notably the proletariat and the Party—to which it gave a newly heightened pathos (as Socrates had assigned a new pathos to the "soul") and which were promised a historical mission and continuity that might help them serve as a substitute for the waning of older cross-generational identities or of a religious faith in the soul. Scientific Marxism's rhetoric of scientific certainty and its emphasis on the inevitable victory of socialism buoyed a sense of posterity, served as a mode of handling the disintegration of cross-generational identities, as a substitute for a faith that was declining and as a counterbalance to a church that was yet intact. Marxism's evolution toward a Scientific Marxism, then, does not simply exhibit the pressures and temptations of the working class's "economism" but also of the working class's spiritual crisis and psychic anguish under the impact of industrialism.
Scientific Marxism is thus a classical "symptom," being a compromise of conflicting tendencies: on the one hand, a tendency to supplant old religion with science (which had, in any event, subterranean links to theism) and, on the other, a tendency to perform functions similar to the religion being abandoned. But that there is a tension here is important, making it difficult for Scientific Marxism fully to satisfy the special requirements either of religion or of science, but at the same time providing a quasi-synthesis of both.
The link between Marxism and religion thus cannot be expressed simply by saying, "It is just another religion." It is not that Marxism cannot be thought a religion because it denies a Supreme Deity—for its belief in the iron laws of history converge on such a sacred being. The more important point is not the formal similarities of Marxism and religion but that religion and Marxism, and especially Scientific Marxism, perform some similar functions. Marxism maintained, and was certainly understood by its nineteenth-century adherents as maintaining—that the future it promised was a certainty, that socialism was not simply a vastly better society than capitalism but an historical necessity that did not depend on the will of any class, let alone on their good will, but was vouchsafed by the inexorable laws of capitalism's development. As Rosa Luxemburg stated, "the secret [sic] of Marx's theory of value. . . is to be found in the transitory character of capitalist economy, the inevitability of its collapse, leading—and this is only another aspect of the same phenomenon—to socialism."17
The point, then, is not that religion is the secret "essence" of Marxism but that it, and especially Scientific Marxism was a response to some of the same forces that then constituted the grounding of religion; to anxieties newly intensified by the disruption of traditional institutions and groups, by industrialism and the world market. Its "hidden essence" is not religion per se but some of the functions that religion performed, its provision of an anxiety-relieving certainty—the same certainty that Comte's "positivism" provided his own "religion of humanity"—partly by establishing new pathos-infused cross-generational identities, and partly by the guarantees its science offered for a better future life. Scientific Marxism's determinism and materialism served as functional substitutes for the shelter and security once offered persons by traditional religion, while its cooptation of science fuctioned as a counterweight to the ruling class's alliance with the Church.
More particularly, Scientific Marxism's definition of the proletariat as the center of modern suffering expresses an elective affinity with that part of Christianity which is a religion of the lowly and the oppressed, the religion of a suffering god, and which embodies the promise of an end to suffering. Here Marxism converges with what Max Weber called ''religions of salvation whose central theme is the restoration of human unity through brotherhood. Scientific Marxism is thus a syncretism, fusing science with Christianity's millennial promise to overcome all suffering and to enact brotherhood. It is thus the great modern synthesis of religion and science.
But Marxism did this in a special, blindfolded way; it produced its cultural synthesis in the dark. Marxism is thus neither religion nor science as conventionally known, but a new hybrid with a special inner archeology: underneath its salient commitment to science was a latent link to religion. What Marxism did was to split off the manifestly theological superstructure of religion from religion's concern with suffering. In then linking itself to suffering, Marxism made contact with and drew upon religion's principal source of power, now making it available for its own development. It is precisely because of Marxism's link to suffering that it, like any religion, cannot be permanently refuted; it always arises from the ashes of criticism insofar as it continues to join its own fate with that of the suffering. Whatever the defects of its intellectual edifice, its human roots go deep.
At the same time, Marxism limits its concern for suffering by inserting "scientific" qualifications: by asserting that certain socioeconomic conditions must have first developed before suffering can be relieved; that one need be concerned only for unnecessary suffering because only it can be relieved; above all, that suffering cannot be alleviated by sheer will alone. Marx was continually admonishing those whom he thought granted the "will" undue power, condemning them as sentimentalists and utopians. He counterposed science and its laws as a humbling and chastening of the will in a manner reminiscent of the Methodists who believed "it would be presumptuous to suppose that a man might save himself by an act of his will. The saving was a prerogative of God and all that a man could do was to prepare himself, by utter abasement, for redemption.''18
Marxism's opposition to voluntarism is kin also to Puritanism's opposition to magic and ritual. Magic involves the assumption that goals can be achieved by will mediated by sacred means, i.e., ritual. Here ritual is an instrument in principle capable of achieving any goal set by will; it is open to any ambition, regardless of earthly conditions. A religious hostility to ritual, such as Puritanism's, requires that there be methodical conformity to ethical principles that set limits on the will, bending it disciplining it, not permitting it just any ambition, and requiring at all times a conscientious conformity to these principles in the everyday life. Marxism's contempt for voluntarism, like Puritanism's opposition to magic and ritual, means that persons must take a stand, must openly commit themselves to a course of action before the witness of a community of believers, and actively discipline their selves to conform to a set of principles, rather than indulge the fantasy that they can achieve whatever they wish whenever they wish, by appeal to supernatural powers. Scientific Marxism's polemic against voluntarism converges with Puritanism's opposition to ritual and magic and with its preference for disciplined work as a way of coping with anxiety. Insofar as Marxism is deliberately aimed at a select group of the lowly and suffering, stressing the redeeming character of their labor as the source of all value and of self-and-world transformation, and offering political struggle conceived as a methodical form of work, Marxism appears as another working class Protestant sect.
If Marxism introjected elements of religion in its effort to make the world coherent in an age of fragmenting sciences, shaken religious faith, and a remote state; if it was responsive to working class anxieties born of the industrial revolution's deterioration of the social fabric, this still does not explain how these religious elements came to be built into it, especially if we remember that it was the doctrine of secularising intellectuals of middle class origin. Can we suppose that these elements were built into Marxism because, sympathizing with working class suffering, its founders gave expression to religious sensibilities excited elsewhere? Actually, to say (as I have) that Marxism was grounded in the suffering of the working class of that time is quite different from holding that Marx, himself, exhibited great personal sympathy with their suffering. I know of little evidence for this. How, then, in the absence of such expressed sympathy, did Marx come to build into his theory elements that resonate religious sensibilities? How do these penetrate Marxism'? To explore this we need to look at some of the religious attitudes of educated intellectuals in general and of the particular subculture among them in which Marx himself was first formed, the Young Hegelians.
Perhaps the first point in orienting ourselves to the Young Hegelians is to remember the difference between ourselves, or intellectuals in our time, and intellectuals of Marx's time. Generally, they were more involved with religion than we are, even if only as militant atheists. Today, however, there are fewer intellectuals, even among radicals, who care enough about religion to be militant atheists. It also needs to be remembered that a larger proportion of those then going to the university received formal training and degrees in religion and theology than we find today among the college educated. Nicholas Lobkowicz sums it up well: "Most of the men about whom we are speaking were originally theologians, and all of them were perfectly familiar with the Bible . . . they view their time in terms of this prophecy, whether they are believing Christians or not.''19
The men Lobkowicz refers to are Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Humboldt, Arndt, the young Hegel, Holderlin, Novalis, Schelling, Eichendorf, and Heine, "to mention only the most important." Lobkowicz observes that far into the nineteenth century a ''distinctly eschatological mentality was a common theme . . . of numerous German poets and thinkers." The expectation was that the "consummation of history was imminent. . . which is often accompanied by overtones unmistakably religious."20
Lobkowicz is at pains to differentiate Hegel's millenarianism from the tradition that preceded him, even as he connects him to it. Hegel's own millenarianism, like that of the utopian socialists including Saint-Simon and his disciples, is this-worldly while the preceding Catholic tradition had been other-worldly. Both the utopian socialists and Hegel, two of the main ingredients out of which Marx formulates Marxism, exhibit the movement from other-worldly to this-worldly millenarianism. Marx's historical perspective (like Hegel's) no longer dwells on the future. although having its culmination in it. Marx's whole theory points to the transformed future but never expatiates on it, having astonishingly little to say about the shape of the new society, primarily emphasizing that it will be based on the expropriation of the expropriators and the nationalization of the economy. Marx thus remains within Hegel's this-worldly millenarian time structure. Normally, this is viewed as an aspect of Marx's worldliness, or his having effected the transition from religion to secular and rational ideology/theory. But this is not quite what one sees in viewing the matter from the perspective that Lobkowicz exhibits. For plainly the shi* to the new "realistic" time perspective ha<1 already been consolidated by Hegel who had developed his philosophy as ''the ultimate expansion and fruit of Christian faith,"21 providing a rational sublimation of the underground current of German millenarianism.
It is in that vein that Lobkowicz accounts for certain peculiarities of Hegel's followers: for example, their conviction that "as far as theory went, everything was essentially achieved." Therefore "they no longer considered themselves as men who had to fathom reality by way of trial and error."22 Lobkowicz cites a letter written by a young student of Hegel which states, "I behold God face to face . . . the other world has become this world."23
When the nineteen-year-old Marx went to the University of Berlin in 1837, to continue his studies at its faculty of law, he was soon taken under the wing of the Doktorsklub, whose members, mostly older than himself, served to interpret and transmit Hegelianism to him. It was largely through their influence that Marx himself, despite an initial unease with Hegel's ''craggy, grotesque melody,'' came to contribute to the development of Young Hegelianism. In particular, it was there that Marx came under the powerful influence of the Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer, with whom, as is well known, he later hoped to teach at Bonn.
Bauer believed that the present period was the great turning point of history, that all history up to then was merely a preparation for a total liberation of mankind that he believed imminent. In 1840, Bauer describes the mood of the Young Hegelians nine years after Hegel's death: "Like the blessed gods, the disciples dwelled with patriarchical peace in the Empire of the Idea which their master had bequeathed them for contemplation. All the dreams of millenarianism concerning the fullness of time seemed to have come true."24
In a letter to Marx, Bauer (who was trained as a theologian) wrote that the final battle against mankind's enemy was looming: the "catastrophe will be frightful, it will of necessity be a great one, and I would almost go as far as to say that it will be greater and more monstrous than that which accompanied Christianity's entrance on the world scene."25 David McLellan observes that "Bauer's influence was. . . not something that Marx passed through and left behind: it was permanently incorporated into his way of thinking."26 McLellan notes the parallel between ''Bauer's 'catastrophic' view of the history of ideas and Marx's catastrophic view of the history of classes. The plot is the same though the characters are very different."27 Again, McLellan observes that as Bauer had described self-consciousness as the "solution of all riddles," Marx had spoken similarly of communism: "Communism is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution."28
McLellan also demonstrates that Moses Hess, who initially won Engels over to communism, had also spoken of the impending "catastrophe" in England, while in 1842 and 1844, Edgar Bauer, Bruno's brother, like Marx himself, also spoke of the imminence of catastrophe: "In the inmost part of the state a chasm will open which, with an earthquake that will shake to ruins our aristocratic framework, will send forth the hordes of the oppressed against law-protected egoism." Again: "criticism does not any longer merely send idea against idea, it sends into the field men against men . . . . It is the propertyless whose vocation it is to put an end to the pride of privilege. We find the practical beginning of the practical force for change in those who have suffered most under the old regime—the propertyless." History would then culminate in communism: "Where everything is to be held in common, where the goods of the spirit are to be divided equally, property must also be in common."29
Edgar Bauer's comments above make plain the imperceptible elision from a religiously resonant catastrophism to the revolutionary politics of the self-emancipation of the propertyless: "It is the propertyless whose vocation it is to put an end to privilege." Moses Hess was thus quite correct in observing that here, at least, "religion and politics stand and fall with each other."30
The millenarian impulse was an intimate part of the social setting within which Marxism emerged, manifesting itself in Marx's closest social circle. The most fully messianic expression of this impulse, however, was not so much among the middle class Young Hegelians but among authentically working class radicals such as Wilhelm Weitling, who were connected with Marx's circle, with whom Marx wanted to maintain contact, but with whom he in time broke. The illegitimate son of a working class girl and a French officer, and himself a tailor, Weitling was an indigenous working class militant and a revolutionary equalitarian who opposed utopian socialism's favoritism toward men of property, had a pronounced Babeuvian suspicion of culture as a mark of class privilege, and was reputedly a ''professor-eater" hostile to men of learning.
As Hans Muhlestein observes, "seeing the forces arrayed against him, he is possessed by a fury of destruction.... In this state he takes himself to be the Messiah, saying once more, 'I am not come to bring peace, but the sword.... I am come to cast a fire on this land, and what more can I seek that it burn?' The religious Messianism is seen in his third book, The Gospel of a Poor Sinner. . . . His Messianism increased during his stay in Switzerland. It reached the point of pure mystical madness—or megalomania—where he believed himself to be the Messiah and wrote a new religious doctrine of salvation."31
My conclusion, then, concerning Marxism's link to religion converges with Alisdair MacIntyre's, that Marx's thought was both "continuous with and successive to the development of the philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach; and one cannot understand these adequately unless one understands them as at least partially secular versions, or attempted secular versions, of the Christian religion. Thus Marxism shares in good measure both the content and the functions of Christianity as an interpretation of human existence. 32
In having noted the religious elements in Marxism, I must repeat what I once said in making a similar analysis of sociological fullctionalism.33 I have always found it odd that people who profess to a respect for religion should act so triumphantly when they find a religious side of Marxism, and that they should brandish this as if it were a conclusive argument against it. It is of course no argument at all against Marxist ideas. Although not "religiously musical," I experience such exercises in righteousness as repellent; I cannot share in the sport of baiting the "false religion" because I have too keen a sense of the close connection between religion, any religion, and human suffering, and thus experience contempt for religion as callousness toward suffering.
It is precisely Marxism's ambiguous grounding, its manifest mooring both in the culture of science and its subterranean ties to millenarianism, that uncovers some of the deepest roots of the differentiation between Scientific and Critical Marxism. Each of these reflects and generates very different conceptions of social change in general and, more particularly, of the transition to socialism. In one, Scientific Marxism, change is seen as organic, a slow growth of the embryo of the new society within the womb of the old, epitomized by the rise of the bourgeoisie within the urban framework of feudal society and subsequently the old regimes. In Frank Parkin's pithy summary:
[This] organic interpretation of change, associated above all with the works of Kautsky, picked out those various and many strands running through Marx's writings which portrayed the demise of capitalism as following inexorably from the social and political ascendancy of the working class. In this view of things, the assumption of state power is not regarded as especially problematic; it is seen as the final act of a lengthy drama whose denouement has been clearly signalled by preceding events in the shape of social and economic victories notched up by the newly emergent class. Political power simply follows from and makes manifest, the power already contained in emergent socio-economic forces. The interpretation of Marxism as an organic theory of change thrived abundantly upon Marx's curious fondness for gynaecological imagery when discussing the process of transition. His frequent allusions to embryos, wombs and midwives did much to bolster the view that societies move through a sequence of phases—from infancy to maturity, and to eventual senility and decline—in which the notion of gradual evolution has far more place than that of sudden and violent alterations of condition.34
This is the more gradualistic imagery of scientific socialism congenial to a Marxism that viewed itself as kin to Darwinian evolutionism. There is, however, another conception of social transformation also to be found in Marxism, which is more characteristic of Critical Marxism, and this is that of the abrupt and violent transformation that cleaves the normal social world like a bolt of lightning, "it is humanity's leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom" (Engels), an abrupt overturn of the old social order whose forces of production had been stifled by the dominant relations of production and property, leaving behind the "prehistory of mankind," and for which nothing less will satisfy than a forcible overthrow leading to universal emancipation where there will be heard the resounding great "crash" with which the old economy will be toppled, an impending struggle in which everything, the entire world, hangs in the balance. The Communist Manifesto remains the inspired source of that heady vision of the revolutionary leap:
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
And in Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right of 1844, he declares: "When all of the intrinsic conditions are fulfilled, the day of German resurrection will be announced by the crowing of the Gallic cock."35
There are thus two views of social change and of the transition to socialism incipient in Marxism. One, characteristic of Scientific Marxism, is uniformitarian, tends toward gradualism and even parliamentarianism, and is, we might say, more secularised. The other, congenial to Critical Marxism, is infused with the more catastrophic imagery of abrupt and violent revolution. If the first is grounded in the emerging science of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the second resonates to the fading tremors of millenarianism.
At this point we need to be very careful, however, not to intimate that the first is therefore unambiguously the more advanced, modern, and rational or that the second is linked only to nonrationality and backwardness. Nothing of the sort is intended here. As already indicated, early science had an interface with theism, was anxious to work out an accommodation to it, and was itself ready to sublimate millenarianism into a "secular" utopianism. Moreover, as science became increasingly fused with industrial and military technology—a complaint made, by the way, as early as the utopian socialism of Saint-Simonianism—how could one celebrate science's contribution to human depersonalization and mass destruction as epitomizing a pure rationality?
Further, millenarianism itself is not simply to be viewed as a fantastic form of escapism or as the basis of wild political adventurism. It can be that, but it can also be a way in which people who have been subjected to grinding suffering, multiple catastrophes, and repeated political disappointment hold themselves together as a community and as persons rather than sink into a disoriented apathy and hopeless atomized passivity. Millenarianism's fantasy, like magic's ritual, enables persons to insulate themselves from hopelessness born of the failure of normal, routine solutions. And in any event, nineteenth-century science's uniformitarian rejection of catastrophes was quite probably an overstatement, born of polemic against purveyors of religious miracles, and inspired by more than a reading of the evidence. If it is arguable that abrupt catastrophic changes occur in nature,36 it is certain that they do occur in society and history.
Although observing the continuity between certain aspects of Marxism and millenarianism, my principal emphasis has not been that Marxism was simply an echo of religion but a synthesis of religion and the emerging sciences. In noting this conjunction I am not, however, saying that Marxism improperly bent science to its own purposes, did not understand it properly, or distorted it. If anything, Marx's understanding of science was often more sophisticated than that of some contemporary scientists themselves Yet Marxism, and especially Scientific Marxism, became what it did in important part because it accepted the premises of the new sciences. Thus, for example, Scientific Marxism's insistence that the laws governing capitalism's development were not only independent of the human will but in fact shaped that will and consciousness—this didactic antivoluntarism of Marx's preface to the second edition of Capital—was at one with Robert Chambers's interpretation of Lyell's uniformitarian geology. "Chambers argued that all of nature was under the domain of natural law. He particularly scandalized his readers by saying that man and his mind are governed by natural laws."37 Being lawful, said Chambers, mental action must now be viewed in a natural rather than a metaphysical light, "and the distinction usually taken between physical and moral is annulled." Marxism developed by incorporating this self-understanding of the emerging natural sciences. What it thought a social science was—i.e., what it thought it was—reflected the new sciences' premises that will and consciousness were derivative things. At worst, Marxism stated simply and baldly what the new sciences implied, but sometimes also said outright. Marxism thus involved, first, what was largely an uncritical acceptance of much of the new sciences and, secondly, an uncritical transfer of their premises—which were understood correctly—to the social sciences. Marxism thus entailed an impulse to assimilate and reduce social relations to the natural sciences, an impulse to which Scientific Marxism surrendered. This, of course, meant that the future of Scientific Marxism would be bound up with the paradigm of early natural science it had incorporated. It meant that the science it had incorporated was an historically transient achievement and that when, after the middle of the nineteenth century, the old paradigm of science buckled, Scientific Marxism itself would be under pressure to change.
The basic paradigm of science on which Marx had relied consisted of the following elements:
1. "The basic assumption of the scientists of 1851 was that there was lying before them a world of material objects, moving about in space and time . . . . There was, in fact, a fundamental dichotomy between the material world on the one hand, and on the other, human minds with their hopes and fears, despairs and aspirations, . . . [which] did not exist in the sense in which the material world existed."38 Marx's own philosophical "materialism" is grounded in exactly that view, most especially this is the grounding of its own conception that human consciousness constituted a derivative sphere subordinate to the material. The parallel thus involves both the dichotomous division of the world and the specific hierarchy of the two elements.
2. The fundamental notion of "matter" in Marx's "materialism' was also essentially similar to that of the science of the period. This "implied that any particular piece of matter—say a stone—though it was made evident to us by its qualities—its hardness, colour and so on—was nevertheless not compounded of those qualities but was some underlying entity of which they were merely accidents, . . .'that there is, besides the external characters of things, something of which they are the characters. . . . Behind the appearances we conceive something of which we think.' "39 Marx's materialism like the early scientific paradigm premised an out-there world consisting of a kind of "substance" anterior to any attributes assigned to it.
3. ''The world was . . . regarded as exhibiting with the passage of time, a succession of states, each connected with its predecessor and successor by what were regarded as unbreakable links of absolute necessity."40 This assumption parallels Marxism's determinism.
4. "The scientific quest may be summed up as the search for the universal, inviolable, causal laws that governed the course of events in the real world." In short, uniformitarianism. While Marx rejected the premise that political economy's laws were universal, he focused on the specific laws of capitalism and assumed these were a special case of a more general set of laws governing class exploitative societies.
5. If the world of physical science formulated ''laws of heat, of light, of sound, of magnetism and electricity, . . . all of these had either been reduced, or were believed reducible, to the fundamental mechanical laws."41 In like manner, Marxism held that the evolution and movement of the state or of ideological systems were ''in the last instance" derived from the laws of the system of production.
This was, as mentioned, the perspective of science up to about the middle of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, however, things began to change slowly until Maxwell's field theory, and they came to a radical transition in Einstein's special theory of relativity, published in 1905. Unlike the older views, Maxwell's field theory did not attempt to reduce events to forces acting between material particles. "In Maxwell's field there are no material actors. The mathematical equations of this theory express the laws governing the electromagnetic field . . . they do not connect the happenings here with the conditions there."42 Einstein's theory of relativity added the premise that observations were always made from some frame of reference, from the standpoint of some coordinate system (CS), and what could be observed would vary therefore with the CS chosen as a frame of reference, and thus with the position taken up by the observer. If a moving body moves uniformly, for example, it does so only relative to some chosen CS. The CS, or frame of reference, then, is not imposed by what is observed but depends on a choice of the observer. To say someone is walking three miles per hour, for example, premises that w~ assume that he is walking on an "unmoving" object, but which for other purposes may be taken to be moving, thus changing the aggregate speed. How fast the man is moving, then, depends on the frame of reference; it is relative to the CS from whose standpoint he is observed. Two events can thus be simultaneous for one observer, but not necessarily for another located elsewhere or using a different CS. And not only may the position of an event vary for two observers but so, too, may the time at which it occurs; "as motion is relative and any frame of reference can be used, there seems to be no reason for favoring one CS rather than the other."43 In the special theory of relativity, "mass," which was once the very paradigm of "substance" became interchangeable with energy. Thus with the emergence of the field perspective on the importance attributed to the motion of particles, of relativity's emphasis on the dependence of observations on frame of reference, and of the interchangeability of mass with energy, science was no longer grounded in a metaphysics of' "substance." What was observed was now seen to depend on the location of the observer or the standpoint he chose to adopt, so that any lawful or inevitable sequence of states were true only relative to some limited frame of reference and were thus ''necessary" only within it, but not in others.
The view of science on which Marx's "materialism" had rested was thus radically changed. Observations were no longer seen simply as reflecting an immanently unfolding order but as depending on the frame of reference and this, in turn, was seen as something that might be chosen. It is noteworthy that the culminating development that overthrew the mechanical paradigm of science, Einstein's special theory of relativity, was being developed about the same time as the publication of Lenin's voluntaristic What Is to Be Done? and only slightly later than Sorel's critique of evolutionary Scientific Marxism. At this point, of course, and as science could no longer be a source of certainty, those occupying the ground of Scientific Marxism were beginning to feel the shocks. It is thus in association with developments internal to science—as well as in science's social position—that there begins the movement away from a Scientific toward a Critical Marxism which affirms the importance of the voluntaristic, of choice, consciousness, ideology, the actor's decisions, initiatives, and frame ! reference.
As science came increasingly to be associated with capitalist industry and military technology and with their elites, there were growing tendencies to associate the critique of capitalism with the critique of science. As capitalism, technology, industrialism, the military, and science all became institutionally fused, the critique of capitalism began slowly to incorporate a critique of science and technology themselves.
The growing internal critique of the old paradigm of science also provided one basic source for the resurgence of Romanticism in early nineteenth-century Western Europe. This Romanticism had always had a profound political ambiguity, holding in precarious suspension elements of both a left and a right critique of modernism. Its political ambiguity was epitomized by George Sorel's doctrine, notably its opening toward both socialism and Italian fascism. Romanticism—resurgent and politically ambitious—might now develop in two directions: (i) toward a critique of the Enlightenment, that celebrated irrationality and antiintellectualism and which would ultimately eventuate in Naziism and fascism. Or (ii) as a politically committed doctrine, it could also develop into a Critical Marxism with Lukacsian undertones of "revolutionary messianism." In a more academic key, Critical Marxism evolves into the critique of science and of instrumental rationality made by the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
It is thus clearly not supposed here that it was only developments internal to science, and relevant only to professional scientists, that created the crisis for nineteenth-century science. Science's public prestige was then also being impaired; growing specialization in the sciences meant a growth of narrow technical forms of rationality; each science became increasingly cut off from the other and, also, from the larger society, as each refused responsibility for its impact on society and the public interest. This had the consequence of alienating sectors of older, humanistic intellectuals who were open to the need for new movements of cultural revitalization and who sought a new unifying vision to rebind their cultures.
As science came to be identified with industry and technology, and technology with unemployment and the callous depersonalization of the everyday life in factories; as science and technology also came to be associated with disruptive social change and gross materialism, there slowly diffused a broader public uneasiness about science that went well beyond the educated humanist. Far from remaining the symbol of a benign universalism as it had earlier been, science in the late nineteenth century became increasingly associated with the power elites of industry and the state. They came to be seen as privileged servants of power (''mere technicians"), or as academically aloof from the rest of society and unwilling to assume responsibility for the social impact of scientific innovations. These forces converged to amplify the crisis within science itself and they generated a more public crisis of confidence concerning the sheer rationality of science, as suggested by the growing critiques of conventional science offered by Jules Henri Poincare and Henri Bergson. The new philosophy of science quickly caught the drift of the new science or perhaps, better still, was itself caught up in the same drift that was also transforming science. It took a romantic turn away from a mirror image epistemology toward a mind-as-lamp epistemology; mechanical models came under attack; the law of entropy inflated the pessimism of the intelligentsia, Bergson was writing a metaphysics in which the old science was condemned for artificially freezing the flow of reality.
Clearly, science and the view of science were undergoing a multi-faceted change and with this the intellectual grounding of Scientific Marxism was undermined. Again, however, we must be careful not to oversimplify. For while the critique of Scientific Marxism was indeed associated with these important changes in science itself, nonetheless, the former was already evident in France and Italy even before publication of Einstein's special theory of relativity in 1905. In point of fact, the emerging critique of Scientific Marxism, the new philosophy (e.g., Bergson), and the internal shift in science's paradigm may all be viewed as interdependent parts of a larger historical shift, rather than as one causing the other. The crisis of science and of Scientific Marxism seem to be different symptoms of a larger shift toward a voluntarism that had a variety of expressions.
The fortunes of Scientific and Critical Marxism, however, w ere by no means linked only to developments within science, to changing public attitudes toward it, or to philosophical developments. There were important economic and political shifts—in the Marxist community and in the larger society—that also contributed to the deteriorating position of Scientific Marxism and to the rise of Critical Marxism.
It is paradoxical that so little has been done to understand Marxism's development in relationship to its environing economy and to economic cycles. Without in the least supposing that Marxism's character can be understood as the reflex of economic conditions, nonetheless it would seem that historical materialists especially should have had some curiosity about the link between their own theory's development and changing economic conditions at the time it was written. Yet the latter are surely one factor, if not ultimately determining "in the last instance." In what follows I shall suggest that there was indeed a connection between changing economic conditions and developments in Marxism, especially for its evolution from Scientific to Critical Marxism. The key period on which attention is centered will be the last half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, where there is the emergence of Bernstein's revisionism and a broader voluntaristic critique of Scientific Marxism. I shall begin with an overview of the economic cycles during that period.
Shepard Clough and Charles Cole's Economic History of Europe is helpful and I quote them at length:
Studies of the business cycle indicate that there was from the depression of 1848 a revival of activity. . . [but] confidence was broken by bank failures (1857), by a drop in stocks, by unemployment and failing prices. A recession and contraction set in over a wide area—in fact this crisis is usually considered to be the first of a purely capitalist creation. . . . The revival was not slow in appearing . . . the failure in 1866 . . . marked a new downward movement of business. By 1868 the revival had set in with business being aided by railway construction. . . . Prices rose by 1873 to a point higher than they had been in fifty years; wages and the standard of living went up; and profits were large. The period of recession and contraction began in 1873. . . . This time revival was slow in asserting itself. . . . There came, however, a revival and a short period of mild expansion that lasted from about 1879 to 1882. . . . These beneficient conditions did not last for long, for prices began to decline in 1882; profits were small . . . the upswing was slow but revival conditions began to be manifested in 1886 and there was some prosperity to 1890. . . . In 1889 . . . a new recession set in that lasted until about 1895. By the latter date new supplies of gold were pushing prices upward. . . . In fact, the future of business looked bright and there was after the long period from 1873 to 1896 another long period of generally increasing prices. Nevertheless a mild depression took place in 1900-1901. . . . Recovery began in 1902 and in the usual fashion led to the crisis of 1907. Signs of revival appeared in 1909 and the swing of the cycle was upward until 1913-1914 when another depression threatened . . . there were those in 1914 who feared that the world was in for another lengthy siege of bad times . . . but the First World war certainly postponed their predicted long depression.44
To recapitulate:
From 1850 to 1873 and again from 1896 to 1914 the long-term trend of prices was upward and cycles tended to have long periods of prosperity (about six years) and short periods of depression (about two years). For this reason some historians have referred to the time span from 1873 to 1896 as the 'long depression'—a term that is not absolutely accurate unless a special meaning is given to it.45
As for real wages of workers: in Germany they declined about 10 percent from 1830 to 1859 but thereupon rose steadily until 1909, going up about 50 percent, but then manifested a sharp decline around 1920. More generally, "real wages in the United Kingdom went up roughly some 20 percent per worker from 1876 to 1914."46 "In spite of hardships, it appears probable that the real wages of workers in Western Europe improved from 1850- 1914, although they did not increase in proportion to the wealth of the capitalist class."47 Between 1880 and 1913 the industrial production index in Europe rose about 270 percent, from 27 to 71.48
Although real wages were increasing, they were not however increasing equally in all occupations and trades, and Jurgen Kucyzinski has argued that the wages of the skilled, "labour aristocracy" in England (and elsewhere) rose much more than the great mass of workers' wages.49 Kucyzinski also demonstrates that there was a fairly steady, although uneven, decline in the number of hours worked from about 1860 onwards, descending for example from (among English engineers) about 57-63 hours per week in 1851 to about 54 in 1879. Thus as the gross real wage was increasing in this period, the rate of increase in the hourly real wage was probably somewhat higher.
It is interesting to relate certain key works by Marx and Engels to the above outline of business cycles. The work of the "early Marx" clearly coincides with the declining wages and pre-1848 depression in Germany. Marx worked on his doctoral dissertation between 1839-1840; began studying the French utopians about October 1842; wrote "On the Jewish Question" and his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in the summer of 1843; from April to August of 1844 he worked on The Economic Philosophical Manuscripts; in 1845 he and Engels published The Holy Family; in the spring of that year he wrote his so-called "Theses on Feuerbach" and in September started working on what will be The German Ideology, which, with Engels, he completed in the summer of 1846. In 1847, Marx worked on The Poverty of Philosophy and lectured on "Wage Labour and Capital." These were published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1849 but greatly rewritten by Engels (in the edition most usually translated) "as Marx would have written it in 1891."50 Marx wrote and published with Engels The Communist Manifesto in 1848. In large measure, this body of work may be regarded as the core of "young Marxism." It is what I shall later call Marxism's period of paradigm coalescence. It is this work that is most clearly infused with catastrophism—the sense of imminent, universal revolution. And it is this work that was written during that period of economic contraction, mass privation, and depression in Germany which contributed to the political coalition of forces that made the revolution of 1848.
After that revolution there was a brief literary hiatus. Until about 1850, Marx published no major intellectual work: he edited the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, he was placed on trial in Cologne, expelled from Germany, and went to Paris and London. In 1850 he published the Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 and in 1851 settled into the British Museum for his studies, working on The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte which was published in 1852. These may be regarded as transitional works, yet of great symptomatic significance.
As Marx and Engels settled in England the depression through which they had lived prior to 1848 came to an end. There then followed the key years of Marx's mature intellectual productivity centered on political economy and which occurred during the long-range economic upturn in Europe from 1850 to 1873. During this period, Marx curbed his catastrophism and evidenced his increasing transition toward the structuralist perspectives of economism with its sense of the massiveness of evolving socioeconomic formations.
"After the defeat of the workers' insurrection in Paris, in July 1850, Marx and Engels advanced the thesis that revolution had become impossible in the immediately foreseeable future, that a rapid return could not be counted upon, and that the tasks of the League of Communists must be reset accordingly to give first priority to the work of education, study, and development of revolutionary theory. It fell like cold water on the flames of exile fantasy. . . the great majority of the exiles stood against them, even the workers. 'I want at most twelve people in our circle, as few as possible,' Marx stated, and under taunts of being counterrevolutionaries, anti-proletarians, and impractical literati . . . Marx and Engels withdrew from organizational and practical political activity; Engels to Manchester to earn a living, Marx to the British Museum to begin his economic studies anew from the beginning "51
In 1857 Marx commenced a preliminary synthesis of these studies in a series of seven notebooks, the so-called Grundrisse the preparation for his Capital. While 1857's first purely capitalist crisis was a year of widespread economic crisis and increased deprivation for the Marx family, it is also true that it came after a period of substantial economic growth, and that following this, as Cole and Clough hold, "the revival was not slow in appearing." On 8 October 1858 Marx wrote Engels from London, speaking of "the favourable turn of world trade at this moment." In that same year Marx began writing his Critique of Political Economy, the first part of which was published the next year, and in 1860 worked on a second part which was never completed. In that year too, Marx read Darwin and in a letter of 19 December wrote Engels: "it is a book that contains the natural-history basis of our philosophy." In 1862, Marx worked on Theories of Surplus Value; in 1865 wrote and lectured on "Wages, Price and Profit" and a year later began preparing volume one of Capital for the publisher which appeared in September of 1867.
The next year he began work on volume two. Eduard Bernstein states that certain of the passages of volume two must also have been written in 1870 and about 1878, while some passages of volume three were written even earlier than that, in 1864 to 1865.52 In short, much and perhaps most of the materials for Capital's several volumes appear to have been written prior to the onset of the "long depression" (that starts in 1873), during the long upturn trend of 1850 to 1873. Indeed, his Civil War in France is published in 1871, about the uprising of the Paris Commune that year, an uprising Marx had energetically opposed. Engels's Anti-Duhring (to which Marx wrote the first part of Chapter Ten) was written in 1877 well after the "long depression" had begun, but there is little doubt that the main environment of this work by Engels was Marx and his last twenty-seven years of economic studies and publications under Marx's guidance.
Only one year after the massacre of the Communards, Marx appeared, in 1872, at the Hague for the First International's last congress during which—in his formal remarks as well as in later press statements—he repeated that:
You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries—such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland—where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.53
The subsequent evolutionary socialism of the Second International, then, is essentially continuous with certain earlier development in Marx himself; following Marx's death in 1883 and Engels's subsequent influence over Bernstein and Kautsky, this evolutionary socialism germinates during the "long depression" of 1873 to 1896. It is during this period that the growing expectation takes hold among German socialists that capitalism is doomed by its own necessary internal contradictions. A few years after the long depression ends, however, in 1898 to 1899, Bernstein takes the offensive against catastrophism:
I have set myself against the notion that we have to expect shortly a collapse of the bourgeois economy, and that social democracy should be induced by the prospect of such an imminent, great, social catastrophe to adapt its tactics to such an assumption .54
Bernstein adds that Engels himself, who had died several years earlier in 1895, was "thoroughly convinced that the tactics based on the presumption of a catastrophe have had their day."55 Bernstein's culminating remarks, developing his theme that it was not socialism but the socialist movement that was everything, were clearly of an antimillenarian cast: "I have at no time had an excessive interest in the future. . . . My thoughts and efforts are concerned with the duties of the present."
In noting that Bernstein's anticatastrophic revisionism appears soon after the end of the great depression, I do not mean to suggest that it represents a sharp break with earlier developments in the German socialist party. From at least 1887 onwards, the net real wages or net money wages of German workers had—despite the long depression—increased until about 1909, while the German gross product and the per capita physical volume of production were Up substantially. At the same time, German socialists' parliamentarian commitments grew as they became a legal political party and acquired an increasing electoral following. Thus by the time of their Erfurt Congress in 1891 a large group of socialists were attracted to parliamentary reform and gradualism.
Bernstein was thus only the most open expression of an earlier development. In particular, Bernstein drew the theoretical conclusions of this economic and political development in his open critique of Marx. Noting that the class struggle had not reached anything like the pitch predicted in The Communist Manifesto, Bernstein forcefully rejected catastrophism with its theory of an automatic economic crash that would usher socialism in. While many socialists agreed with him, he was outvoted largely because they could not then bring themselves to an open rupture with Marx.
The essential point, then, is that socialists all over Europe had by then seen several economic depressions come and go without having produced a general economic collapse. Rather than the increased misery of the working classes, they saw that the latter were experiencing increased real wages and lower working hours as capitalist economy expanded. In short, the economy had not polarized as Marx had predicted. The rich were indeed growing richer and there was a great concentration of wealth, but the working class was not growing poorer but was steadily improving its living conditions. It was against this background that there emerged the sense among many European socialists that, as George Sorel reported, something had gone profoundly wrong with Marxism. It was out of this context, political and economic, in the larger society and in the debates of the Marxist community, that left socialists such as Lukacs began their voluntaristic re-reading of Marxism which saw it as the study of the "totality" and prepared to jettison the priority of the "economic."
After the long depression ended in 1895, largely with the extension of colonialism, the capitalist economy seemed to have taken on new life. The old catastrophe theory then fit everyday life even less than it had during the long depression. As capitalism grew and was stabilized, some Marxists began to wonder whether revolution was now necessary, while others wondered whether it was now possible. The development and stabilization of capitalism evoked a crisis within the Marxist community, the central symptom of which was Bernstein's challenge to scientific socialists' assumption that capitalism's internal economic contradictions would lead inexorably to the proletariat's increasing misery, to the crash of the economy, and to a socialist revolution. Rosa Luxemburg went to the root of the problem Bernstein had created in the Marxist community with her usual incisiveness, noting that he "began his revision of social Democracy by abandoning the theory of capitalist collapse." The trouble was that "the latter. . . is the corner-stone of scientific socialism."56 She amplified:
The greatest conquest of the developing proletarian movement had been the discovery of grounds of support for realisation of socialism in the economic conditions of capitalist society. As a result of this discovery, socialism was changed from an "ideal" dreamt by humanity for thousands of years to a thing of historic necessity . . . the secret of Marx's theory of value . . . is found in the transitory character of capitalist economy, the inevitability of its collapse, leading—and this is only another aspect of the same phenomenon—to socialism.57
Above all, at least according to Luxemburg, what Bernstein had done was to attack the grounds for believing in the inevitability of socialism, particularly as these had been grounded by Marx in a necessity that was economic. Bernstein had asked, "Why represent socialism as the consequence of economic compulsion? Why degrade man's understanding, his feeling for justice, his will?"58 Bernstein's revisionism, then, was grounded in a genteel voluntarism.
As our discussion of Leninism will show (in a later volume), what happened in consequence of the revisionist challenge, and the left's struggle against it, cannot properly be described as a successful defense of the old Scientific Marxism or as its restoration. To have vanquished Bernstein was one thing; to restore the old orthodoxy, quite another. The left only succeeded in the first but not the second.
On the contrary, for under the Scientific Marxism he had salvaged, Lenin inserted a stress on the political initiative of the vanguard party that was no less voluntarist. What happened following Bernstein's challenge to Scientific Marxism, then, was the splitting off of two voluntarisms; the genteel voluntarism of revisionist social democracy and the Promethean voluntarism of revolutionary Leninism. If Bernstein openly said that socialism need not be necessary but may still be chosen because it is better, the Leninists in effect replied, so, too, may revolution be chosen. While rejecting Bernstein's critique of the inevitability of the capitalist crash and the rise of socialism, the Leninists took steps—i.e., organized the Bolshevik Party—to ensure that they need not wait for that crash, being mindful that their own economy was still immature and therefore still a long way from the lethal contradictions of a ripe capitalism.
Lenin, then, was no less a revisionist than Bernstein, and Bernstein no less a voluntarist than Lenin. Indeed, both had taken the turn toward voluntarism for much the same reasons. Bernstein, because he no longer saw capitalism as leading inexorably to "increased misery" for the working class and thus inevitably to revolution; and Lenin, because he did not believe capitalism necessarily led the working class to a socialist consciousness and thus to revolution. Neither any longer saw revolution as grounded in economic necessity. Both shared the assumption—and Critical Marxism with them—that social conditions were not evolving spontaneously toward desired socialist outcomes, in contrast to the optimistic metaphysical pathos of Scientific Marxism that "history is on our side." Suspecting that waiting only made them weaker and their enemies stronger, Critical Marxists would not defer their drive toward socialism until economic conditions had matured—as Scientific Marxism had counseled—and they were thus attractive to radicals in developing areas where industrialism was backward.
Retrospectively then, as Marxism was drawn into the orbit of a powerful and organized working class, its millenarian and utopian elements were blunted. As organizational instruments for achieving the working class's goals were created, Marxism's utopian-millenarian impulses gave way to more economistic concerns with working class melioration within the framework of capitalism, precisely because this was what the working class demanded. The working class's initial attraction to Marxism, then, had been the attraction of the weak for whatever buoys its hopes and promises that its future will be better, and thus, at the beginning, the working class had an affinity for Scientific Marxism with its determinism.
As its own forms of organization develop within an expanding economy, and as these allow it some experience of success in improving its own condition, the working class became less dependent on betterment by impersonal mechanisms outside of itself. They learned to depend on themselves and were then drawn to a theory affirming the importance of their own efforts, to a temperate voluntarism reflecting the modest success of their own efforts and their own growing self-confidence. Such a temperate voluntarism was also congenial to their allies among the intelligentsia who could increasingly pursue public careers in movement journalism, parliamentary politics, and in party and trade union organizations.
When Marxism spread to less developed regions where there was no powerful working class and only a small trade union movement, the millenarian-utopian elements encysted within it were reawakened. The less developed countries were attracted to a different kind of Marxism, one accenting the power and initiative of consciousness and of determined struggle—not merely moral choice—guided by it. This Marxism reflects the voluntaristic ideology to which the intelligentsia is natively disposed, an ideology stressing the power of ideas. This is revitalized where the intelligentsia is limited neither by a mature and organized proletariat, nor by a developed bourgeoisie, nor by a viable land-based elite. In this situation, if the intelligentsia seek to pursue a revolutionary project they must and can come out more fully into the open. Here intellectuals define themselves in Leninist fashion as "professional revolutionaries," as more central to the revolutionary process, as the veritable source of a socialist consciousness, developing a more agonic and authoritarian voluntarism. This stresses the importance of choice based not so much on an overt morality—which as such is open to all—but of cognitive clarity, knowledge, or "theory," achievements primarily available to an intellectual elite.
At the nucleus of Scientific Marxism there had been a tacit and very optimistic analogy between the history of the French Revolution and bourgeoisie, on the one side, and the socialist revolution and the proletariat, on the other. One of the views shared by Sorel, Lukacs, and Lenin is that this analogy was suspect. They all stressed the differences rather than similarities between the two revolutions. As Lukacs remarked, "capitalism already developed within feudalism. . . [but] even the most highly developed capitalist concentration will still be qualitatively different, even economically, from a socialist system."59
Lenin himself had reached much the same conclusion:
One of the basic differences between the bourgeois and the socialist revolutions is that, in the case of the bourgeois revolution, which grows out of feudalism, the new economic organizations are gradually created within the womb of the old order, and by degrees modify all the aspects of feudal society. The bourgeois revolution had but one task to perform . . . to destroy all the fetters of the previous society. . . . But the socialist revolution is in an altogether different position. The more backward the country in which. . . the socialist revolution has to be begun, the more difficult for it is the transition . . . to socialist relations . . . the difference between the socialist revolution and the bourgeois revolution is precisely that, in the latter case, finished forms of capitalist relationships already exist, whereas the Soviet power, the proletarian power, does not get these relationships.
Above all, what was lacking for the Russian Revolution was that it had not inherited the advanced technology that Scientific Marxism saw as the decisive requisite of socialism. Even the most advanced forms of Russian capitalism (continues Lenin) "embraced only a few peaks of industry and affected agriculture only to a very slight extent. The organization of accounting, the control over large-scale enterprises, the transformation of the whole state economic mechanism into a single great machine, into an economic organism which shall work in such a way that hundreds of millions of people shall be directed by a single plan, such is the tremendous organizational task which lay on our shoulders."60
Starting as a Scientific Marxist, Lenin at first regarded Russian economic underdevelopment as a weakness of Russian socialism; as a weakness that could be overcome only with help from revolutions abroad, or else and at best, coped with temporarily by the most exceptional exertions and desperate measures. Viewing economic underdevelopment from the standpoint of a scientific socialism it necessarily comes to be defined as "backwardness." Faced with the "backward" economic development of Czarist Russia, Scientific Marxism began to be transformed into a Critical Marxism that could protect it from emerging pessimism by stressing that men are not limited by objective conditions.
Gradually, then, Critical Marxism began to redefine economic underdevelopment so that rather than seeing it as a weakness that limits, it slowly redefined "backwardness" as providing opportunities for revolutionaries. This reassessment of backwardness—the transvaluation of it—which had already been begun by Lenin and his contemporaries before the November Revolution was later culminated in Mao and the Cultural Revolutions in China. As Edward Friedman has observed, Mao argued that backwardness meant poverty and poverty meant revolutionary readiness. Mao had remarked:
Lenin said: "The more backward a nation the harder its transition from capitalism to socialism." In fact, the more backward the economy, the easier, not the harder a transition from capitalism to socialism. The poorer people are, the more they want a revolution.61
Lenin began the shift in communist strategy in which increasing reliance was placed on a temporary alliance with the peasantry. The climax of this realignment will occur when Mao places the peasantry at the very center of the Chinese Revolution and in his use of "backward," lumpen (uprooted and declassed) elements in Chinese society as cadres for the Chinese People's Army.
The fundamental dilemma of Marxist revolutionary strategy, then, was this: the stronger and more maturely developed a capitalist society, the more powerful its bourgeoisie, the greater their hegemony over the consciousness of other classes, and the more difficult it is to seize power from them. Correspondingly, the weaker and less developed a capitalist class, the less influence they have over the working and other classes, and the easier they are to overthrow. The more readily any capitalist system can be overthrown, therefore, the less developed are the economic and industrial requisites for the transition to socialism, as these had been conceived by Scientific Marxists: the easier the revolution, the harder the road to socialism.
An immature capitalist society presents revolutionary socialists with a greater political opportunity to seize power, but once power is won it is more difficult to build (a scientific) socialism. This dilemma could be resolved either by opting for the seizure of power at once in a backward economy, risking the consequences of its backwardness, or one could defer power and await the development of the kind of economic infrastructure typically required by Scientific Marxism.
It was this very dilemma that split the Russian Social Democratic Party into two factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks compromised their Scientific Marxism and, spurred by Lenin, leaned toward a more voluntaristic Critical Marxism, opting for revolution-now. The Mensheviks maintained the purity of their Scientific Marxism and deferred their revolution. The Mensheviks were destroyed by the Bolsheviks when the latter seized power, while the Bolsheviks themselves were destroyed by the Stalinist system into which their effort to cope with this dilemma had plunged them. Neither side escaped it.
Suspecting that the maturation of capitalism meant a powerful capitalist class with increasing hegemony over the working class, that this meant trouble rather than opportunities for revolutionaries, premising that the historical drift might not bring them to power, Lenin determined to seize power in Russia despite its backwardness and, indeed, to rely upon the backward peasants in his move toward power, although not believing them a truly reliable ally in the socialist project. The political prospect here is grim and forbidding. The Bolsheviks were caught between Scylla and Charybdis: (i) either they defer the launching of their socialist revolution (as the Mensheviks had wanted) but then risk confronting a greatly strengthened capitalist class, or (ii) pursue it as soon as a target of opportunity presented itself, but without a developed industrial economy and proletariat on which to build. Either course was obviously ominous to Marxists.
It is essentially the surfacing of this dilemma that is a major source of the emerging pessimism that Perry Anderson correctly sees as fundamental to Western Marxism. Anderson, however, offers no explanation of this pessimism and dubiously assumes that the tendency begins with Gramsci. Anderson is correct: "The confidence and optimism of the founders of historical materialism and of their successors, progressively disappeared."62 What he fails to note is that it disappeared well before Gramsci, whom Anderson treats as a demarcation point and first indication of that pessimism (because of the former's expectation that socialism was in for a long war of attrition in the West). This pessimism does not emerge abruptly and unheralded only after 1920, but is of course fully visible in Sorel's veritable celebration of pessimism. It is also visible in Lenin's (as in Eduard Bernstein's) turn toward voluntarism, a turn both made precisely because they were no longer optimistic about the immanent drift of history.
Rosa Luxemburg had differed with Lenin in her suspicion of the elitism of the Bolshevik organization and its usurpation of working class's prerogatives. Yet she herself was scarcely less voluntaristic than he, insisting on the importance of both objective conditions and ideological commitment for socialism, although placing greater reliance on the ability of the former to generate the latter. She was particularly voluntaristic, however, in her insistence that Bernstein was wrong in warning against a premature lunge toward socialism: "there can be no time when the proletariat, placed in power by the force of events, is not in the condition, or is not morally obliged, to take certain measures in the direction of socialism."63 However, in insisting that "the conquest of political power by the working class cannot materialize too 'early'," Luxemburg had essentially concurred in Lenin's ambition to seize power in Russia, despite its backwardness, with all the fateful consequences that would subsequently materialize in Stalinism.
After the successful capture of power in Russia by the October Revolution and the failure of the revolutions in central Europe, the dilemmas of Scientific Marxism sharpened. It now faced a double anomaly: (i) the failure of the revolutions that had been predicted for industrially advanced capitalisms, and (ii) their victory in societies that had not been predicted by Scientific Marxism.
The advent of Critical Marxism represents a specific conjunction: the pursuit of revolutionary socialism in industrially backward societies led by a very culturally advanced elite. Theirs was a specific generation of Marxists: those to whom it had become increasingly clear that something had gone wrong in the old paradigm of scientific socialism. The more culturally secure and self-confident—those in the West—openly concluded that it was Marxism itself that was misguided—e.g., Bernstein. Left Marxists in the East, however, concluded that it was only the social democratic reading of Marxism that had gone wrong. The Leninist effort to reformulate Marxism thus understood itself as an effort to rescue true Marxism from distortion and simply to adapt it to a new era in history. The Leninist reformulation of Marxism thus proceeded with a dimmed self-consciousness. Emphasizing the importance of an intellectual elite operating through a centralized and disciplined organization, they stressed the importance of their own initiatives and the danger of waiting for economic conditions spontaneously to produce a socialist consciousness. If they no longer relied on the automatic economic crash, they also tacitly relied on the random catastrophism of war. They thus offered a reformulation of Marxism appealing to those in industrially backward areas by stressing ideological initiatives that compensated for economic backwardness, and allowing an escape from the passivity into which Scientific Marxism would have thrust local radical elites.
The subsequent era of embourgeoisement of the working class in the most industrially advanced nations, and its accommodation to capitalist society as material standards of living improved, still further undermined the claims of scientific socialism. For the latter had supposed that it would be the economic contradictions of advanced capitalism that would make their societies vulnerable to socialism. When it was the proletariat's militancy rather than capitalist hegemony that succumbed, Scientific Marxism came into continuous dissonance with the experience of everyday life in Western capitalism, no less than in developing countries. This was all the more sharpened as some of the most manifestly militant groups, such as college students, were far from impoverished.
The experience of everyday life was now read as supporting the importance that Critical Marxists attributed to consciousness and to the flawed quality of everyday life in modern society. In moving from a Scientific to a Critical Marxism, the socialist critique of modern society moved from the condemnation of capitalism's economic exploitation to a denunciation of its sociological dehumanization, i.e., of alienation and reification. The resurgent emphasis on alienation and reification in Marxism—found principally in the industrially advanced West—was rooted in capitalism's growing control over the economic cycle, its growing welfare system for the poor, and its improving living standard for the working class. The movement toward a Critical Marxism in the sixties and seventies resulted in part from an effort to reformulate Marxism so that it would be consistent with experience under late capitalism.
In partial summary: Marxism's catastrophism was formed prior to 1848, influenced by the mass suffering of that period's economic depression, by the revitalization of a waning this-worldly millenarianism—among the working and the "educated" classes—as well as by the gathering of political forces discharged in the 1848 revolution. So powerful is Marxism's early catastrophism that, in some expressions, it is conceived as a total, universal revolution.
This expectation of imminent revolution waned as Marx settled into London and as Marxism was exposed to the basic upturn of 1850-1873. Marx's subsequent studies of political economy must now accomodate his earlier catastrophism with the new economic growth and prosperity, for the latter are dissonant with the expectation of imminent revolution. The new sense of capitalism's growing strength is reflected in Das Kapital's structuralism, and the pathos it conveys of the power of economic formations. At the same time, Das Kapital also provides a new "scientific" grounding for the earlier catastrophism. Thus, if the prosperity of 1850-1873 was bad news for revolutionaries, Das Kapital can be read as comforting them, helping to ward off apathy:
This prosperity, says Das Kapital in effect, need not overwhelm revolutionaries because it is only temporary. Revolutionaries need not lose hope in their revolution, but must bide their time and prepare for it, because the basic economic structures of capitalism and their contradictions ensure a new and great crash. Prosperity has thus derailed the revolution only temporarily. The true essence of capitalism's structural contradictions will lead inevitably to the increased misery of the working class and to the suffocation of the forces of production by capitalism's relations of production. The stability of the moment, then, is the stability of a volcano only momentarily dormant.
Scientific Marxism, then, was this: it was an effort to overcome the threat to revolutionary morale that had been born of the defeat of the revolution of 1848 and which was intensified by the prosperity of 1850-1873. It did this by offering a rational basis for believing that stabilization of the economy was only temporary and that the inexorable drift of things favored revolution. In this new framework, however, the catastrophe began to be deferred to an indefinite future. By emphasizing the inevitability of the coming crash Das Kapital's dramaturgy diverted attention from the fact that it was no longer imminent. This is the familiar adaptive mechanism of a millenarianism whose predictions about the "coming" have failed to materialize. In short, while Scientific Marxism embodies catastrophism, it also gelds it.
Scientific Marxism's emasculation of catastrophism was continued on the political level by German social democracy. Giving lip service to the theory of the automatic crash, it no longer expected this was imminent, and began accommodating to opportunities within the framework of the status quo. While the long depression might temporarily revitalize the hope of revolution, it thoroughly undermined catastrophism when it became plain that this was not to happen, finally dashing catastrophism on the rocks of revisionism. After the long depression had ended without revolution in sight, the revisionists could renounce catastrophism openly while other socialists, still loyal to Marx, would think the same thing to themselves.
During the long depression, the western working classes had learned to organize trade unions and political parties and to mobilize electoral followings. Such working classes no longer needed millenarian hopes but could now rely on their own practical efforts. The automatic crash and scientific Marxism's determinism could thus give way to a surge of genteel voluntarism in middle Europe. In Eastern Europe, however, Scientific Marxism had long been a source of apathy rather than an antidote to it. Lenin's version of voluntarism, his revolutionary vanguardism, premising that the working class would not develop a socialist consciousness of its own, comes to embody a new opening to catastrophism.
In this less developed area, however, catastrophism is no longer deemed inevitable due to the contradictions of capitalism's economic structures, but now comes to be grounded in the leverage exerted by political and military organization. Lenin thus exults when World War I erupts. Mao subsequently announces that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, and Castro organizes his military column. War now becomes the functional equivalent of crises grounded in capitalism's economic structures and serves as a new basis of Critical Marxism's catastrophism.
1. Robert M. Young, ''The Impact of Darwin on Conventional Thought," in The Victorian Crisis in Faith, ed. Anthony Symondson (London: S.P.C.K., 1970), p. 25.1 have drawn from this excellent study at various points in this paragraph, and all quotations in it are from Young.
2. Robert Young has argued that even the debate about evolution "produced an adjustment within a basically theistic view of nature rather than a rejection of theism." Ibid., p. 27. In that vein, Young notes that Herbert Spencer's version of evolution never allowed that the great problems of philosophy were solved. "Only such as know not the scope and limits of science can fall into so grave an error," observed Spencer, piously adding, "The ultimate mystery of things remains just as it was." Ibid., p. 28.
3. Ibid. p. 31.
4. Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 202.
5. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authorized English edition of 1888, supervised by Engels, published by Charles H. Kerr, Chicago, p. 16.
6. Ibid., pp. 203-204.
7. Alan Smith, The Established Church and Popular Religion, 1750-1850 (Bristol: Longmans, 1971), p. 3.
8. Document published ibid., p. 101.
9. John Briggs and Ian Sellers, eds., Victorian Nonconformity: Documents of Modern History (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), cited on pp. 79-80.
10. Smith, Established Church, p. 106.
11. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 385-86.
12. Ibid., p. 363.
13. Ibid., p. 380.
14. Ibid., p. 379.
15. E. J. Hobsbawm, "Methodism and the Threat of Revolution," History Today 7 (1957).
16. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 116 - 17.
17. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (New York: Three Arrows Press, 1932), p. 34. Italics added.
18. Thompson, English Working Class, p. 364.
19. Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), p. 163.
20. Ibid., pp. 161, 162.
21. Ibid., p. 177.
22. Ibid., p. 185.
23. Ibid.
24. Cited by Lobkowicz, ibid., p. 187.
25. David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1969), p. 66.
26. Ibid., p. 80.
27. Ibid., pp. 80-81.
28. Karl Marx, Fruhe Schriften (Stuttgart, 1962), vol. 1, p. 599.
29. The quotations here are cited in McLellan, The Young Hegelians, pp. 83-84.
30. Ibid., p. 148.
31. Hans Muhlestein, "Marx and the Utopian Wilhelm Weitling," Science and Society, Winter 1948, p. 118. For the most part this is a doctrinaire apologia for Marx's rough treatment of Weitling. Weitling's hostility toward culture and men of learning (pointedly directed against Marx and Engels), his radical egalitarianism, his impulse to gather up tile "lumpen proletariat" for militant action, are an interesting (if urban) anticipation of Maoism. It brought a furious break with Marx who finally condemned him for his lack of scientific theory, while Weitling, for his part, suggested that Marx's influence in their social circles rested in part on his support by rich men who gave Marx access to the communication media. See also the discussion of Weitling in Saul K. Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1978), pp. 227ff. Padover notes that when Weitling was jailed in 1843 in Switzerland, the charge was blasphemy, because "he hinted at a resemblance between himself and Jesus Christ—and for preaching communism" (p. 227)
32. Alisdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 6. Compare Richard Bernstein's remark that "the more one penetrates to the quintessence of Marx's thought, the more one can see the presence of themes (in a secularized form) that have preoccupied religious thinkers throughout the ages—the severity of human alienation, the apocalyptic sense of the imminence of the coming revolution, and the messianic aspiration that infuses much of Marx's thinking. Even the temperament and outlook of Marx are in the direct vein of the Biblical prophets." Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), p. 77. On Marx's biblical character compare Edmund Wilson: "Marx is of the tradition of the Old Testament, not of that of the New." Cited in his To the Finland Station (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1940), p. 308.
33. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 264.
34. Frank Parkin, "The Transition to Socialism" (unpublished manuscript).
35. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, ed. Joseph O'Malley (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 142.
36. See Robert McAulay, "Velikovsky and the Infrastructure of Science," Theory and Society, November 1978, for further discussion.
37. Young, "Impact of Darwin," p. 16.
38. Herbert Dingle, "The Scientific Outlook in 1851 and 1951," in European Intellectual History Since Darwin and Marx, ed. W. Warren Wagar (New York: Harper & Row Pubs., 1966) pp. 161-62.
39. Ibid., p. 162. Here Dingle cites Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences.
40. Ibid., p. 165.
41. Ibid.
42. Albert Einstein and Leopold Infield, The Evolution of Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951), p.152. All other formulations in this paragraph are either quotations or paraphrasings from this volume.
43. Ibid., p. 223.
44. Shepard Bancroft Clough and Charles Wesley Cole, Economic History of Europe (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1952) pp. 663ff.
45. Ibid., p. 665.
46. S. B. Clough, Economic Development of Western Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1959), p. 375.
47. Clough and Cole, Economic History, p. 677.
48. Clough, Economic Development, p. 420.
49. Jurgen Kucyzinski, Labor Conditions in Great Britain, 1750 to the Present (New York: International Publishers, 1946), p. 69. See also Kucyzinski, Labour Conditions in Western Europe, 1820 to 1935 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937).
50. In other words, the original lecture was a work of transition to economic studies and analysis; but the Engels version of 1891 is a later work and a "joint product."
51. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 19,3), from the foreword by Martin Nicolaus, pp. 8-9. Compare Engels's account of that period: "When, after the defeat of the Revolution of 1848, a period began in which it became more and more impossible to influence Germany from without, our party surrendered the field of emigrational quarrels—for they remained the only possible activity—to vulgar democracy. While the latter indulged in intrigues to its heart's content, and squabbled today in order to make up the day after, and the day after that again washed all its dirty linen in view of everyone—while vulgar democracy went begging through the whole of America in order immediately afterwards to stage new scandals over the division of the few pence secured—our party was glad once again to have some leisure for study. It had the great advantage of having a new scientific outlook as its theoretical basis, the working out of which kept it fully occupied." Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941), p. 74.
52. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), pp. 75 - 76. .
53. From Karl Marx, On Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972), vol. 1, p. 239 in the galleys. This two-volume work is a splendid effort to establish what Marx really wrote and when, and much of the preceding chronology is taken from it.
54. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, p. xxiv.
55. Ibid., p. xxviii.
56. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, p. 48.
57. Ibid., pp. 29, 34. Luxemburg's italics.
58. Vorwaerts, 26 March 1899. Cited in Luxemburg, p. 38.
59. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 243, 282, 283.
60. V. I. Lenin, Report on War and Peace to the Seventh Congress of the R. C. P. (B.), Mar. 6-8, 1918.
61. Mao Tse-tung, Mao Tse-tung ssu-hsiang wah sui (Hong Kong: Po Wen Book Co., 1969), pp. 333-34. Cited by Edward Friedman, Mao Tse-tung, Backwardness and Revolution (unpublished manuscript, June 1978).
62. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, p. 89.
63. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, p. 47. Luxemburg had tacitly assumed, however, that there would be a lengthy contest for power, under the conditions of an advanced industrialism such as that in Germany, during which the workers would educate themselves for power. In short, she had assumed a ''definite degree of maturity of economic and political relations "
From Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980, Chapter 5, "Social Origins of the Two Marxisms" pp. 108-150.
Back to Chapter 4, "Social Structure and the Voluntarism of Suffering"
Forward to Chapter 5 - Appendix - "Mannheim, Coser and Lasswell on the Origins of Critical Marxism"
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